LAPD, doing the best that it can, kills another homeless man

On Monday, the LAPD's Deon Joseph took to the preferred platform of cops and developers, the Los Angeles Downtown News, to attribute blame for the humanitarian crisis on Skid Row to everyone but those in law enforcement:

When it comes to policing Skid Row, it seems as if my fellow officers and I are keeping our fingers in the cracks of a dam to prevent it from breaking. Though many people may not realize it, we are in the throes of a mental health state of emergency.

An extremely marginalized class of the Central City East community today is vulnerable to the criminal element that operates in Skid Row. That segment of the community is the mentally ill.

"We have done the best that we can," Joseph wrote. "It is not the LAPD that has failed the mentally ill or the public. It is our society that has failed them."
There is of course a good deal of truth to that -- American society has failed the poor and mentally ill -- but it's a self-serving truth that glosses over the fact that it is the LAPD which everyday harasses the homeless residents of downtown Los Angeles, keeping them from sitting or lying on the street during the day; it is men and women with badges who put the mentally ill in jail. The police are not a benign force on Skid Row, but an active participant in the efforts to clear the homeless out of sight in order to clear the way for developers and upper-middle class gentrifiers.
Indeed, 2 days after Joseph's Op-Ed, "Skid Row residents met . . . with Los Angeles police to protest the death of a mentally ill homeless man who fell off a rooftop after officers shocked him with a Taser as he attempted to avoid arrest," according to The Los Angeles Times:

[Carlos] Ocana, known to his friends as Amado Ocania, was one of a group of Cuban emigres who spend their days at the skid row intersection.

Roberto, a member of the group who would give only his first name, said in an interview that Ocana had scrambled up the billboard after a security guard discovered him sleeping on top of the one-story building, which houses a mini-market, and called police.

Roberto, speaking through an interpreter, said Ocana had taken off his shirt and was waving it in an obvious signal of surrender when he came down the ladder. He also said Ocana had longstanding mental health issues that were well-known to the officers, and that police refused to let his friends try to talk him down.

"He was scared. SWAT came with big guns -- real, real guns," Roberto said.

Go ahead and blame "society" for willfully neglecting its poor and disenfranchised -- society deserves it -- but don't forget that the police and their big guns are the armed wing of those among us who care the least: the rich.

'Democracy Now! internships are paid'

Progressive newscast Democracy Now! has updated the language it uses to describe its internship program, reflecting an apparent decision to start paying its interns.

As I reported last year in a piece for Vice, the show, hosted by Amy Goodman, used to pay interns $15 a day, but then made it so interns had to work at least two months unpaid, in New York City, before being eligible for that stipend; at the same time, Goodman doubled her salary and the program moved to an expensive new studio in Manhattan.

The new language suggests things have changed for the better:

Democracy Now! internships are paid, 20 hour per week, temporary work placements to help students, people early in their careers and career changers to gain entry-level skills and experience in the fields of outreach, social media, education, fundraising, translation and archiving in a non-profit setting.

I asked Democracy Now! what exactly they are paying these temporary workers in a non-profit setting; I’ll let you know if I hear back. Assuming, though, that “internships are paid” means something other than “$15 a day after two months,” Democracy Now! would be the third news organization now to have altered its internship program since my article was published last December.

The first to change was Mother Jones, which announced on the day my article ran that it was going to give its “fellows” a $500 a month raise, though its spokesperson claimed it was planning to do so all along and it wasn’t at all shamed into doing it – nuh-uh, no way. A couple months later, The American Prospect quietly changed its own program so that interns who receive college credit would no longer be denied the $200 a week stipend available to other interns, a fact I discovered after reading a strikingly familiar piece in the Prospect on how unpaid internships act as a socio-economic filter favoring the white middle class at the expense of those too poor to work for free.

It should nonetheless be noted that neither Mother Jones nor The American Prospect pay the legal minimum wage, while Democracy Now!’s ambiguous language and lack of interest in responding to inquiries makes me doubt that they do either, so while things have changed, that’s not to say things are now good.And that’s a shame because all these organizations have the money to do better, and espouse politics that might make you think they’d try harder to do so, but choose instead to mirror the society they critique and generously reimburse those at the top while exploiting those on the bottom.

Update: The New Republic now pays some of its interns (however, "Part-time internships used for course credit are not paid."). Previously, when I asked the magazine -- owned by a Facebook millionaire -- why it didn't pay, its response was to edit its internship description to remove the word "unpaid." When I asked if that reflected  a change in policy, they said no. I like this last change better.

Non-American had rights, court finds

A US court has ruled that a Mexican teenager who was shot dead, in Mexico, by a US Border Patrol agent had the same rights as an American-born human being, reports the Associated Press:

U.S. District Judge David Briones found in 2011 that the family could not sue because the shooting's effects were "felt in Mexico." But the appeals court said that "territorial approach" would allow agents to establish "zones of lawlessness."

It "would establish a perverse rule that would treat differently two individuals subject to the same conduct merely because one managed to cross into our territory," the appeals court ruling says.

####

Extending that right to people injured across the border by U.S. agents standing on U.S. soil, would inform the officials that they are not allowed to arbitrarily inflict harm . . . ."

I like this ruling almost as much as I like the AP's headline, "Court: Teen in Mexico shot by US agent had rights." Given the fetishiziation of the "founding fathers," it's sort of amazing that this ruling would be controversial, particularly among the "patriot" set," given that the likes of Thomas Jefferson wrote -- if didn't actually believe -- that all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable rights by "their Creator," not by governments which grant said rights based on which side of an arbitrary political border one's mother gave birth.

More interesting, though, is how the court picked up on the fact that not acknowledging that Mexicans have rights would allow US border agents to act with impunity, knowing that their actions against a certain group of people -- those on that side of a line on a map -- could never be challenged in a court of law. That would be a real problem, wouldn't it? Of course, we need not imagine what would happen if that were the case; we need only look to Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan or Yemen to see what happens with Americans with weapons are given license to do whatever they please without consequence (for them). If they're far enough away, not even American citizens have rights; the family of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen killed by US bombs in Yemen, doesn't even have standing to challenge his killing. He was unilaterally declared a threat by the executive branch and there's nothing anyone can do about it now.

"But international law!" shouts some pipsqueak in the bleachers. Well, listen here, nerd: International law is for losers, not the imperial powers which draft and enforce it. It's for war criminals in Africa, not the war criminals in Europe and America. The only law that one needs to know is that if the United States does something, that means it's legal. How many divisions does the president of Amnesty International got?

While Mexicans along the US border may have just been granted rights -- let's wait to see how the appeal turns out before celebrating -- the rest of world is one big zone of lawlessness for those killing on behalf of the US government.

Dead foreigners don't tell jokes

How seriously do serious American journalists take the fact that the 1990 Gulf War, ensuing sanctions regime and the 2003 invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people – men, women and children with hopes and fears who were just as real as your or me? Choose from the following options:

– NOT VERY SERIOUSLY.

With Iraq once again the precipice of national disintegration after Islamic insurgents swept through and captured much of the country's territory in the north from the central government in Baghdad, President Barack Obama announced he was dispatching hundreds of troops and military advisers to protect US interests in Baghdad. Drones are being deployed and air strikes are in the offing, which leads to the obvious question: Why don't we have a funny name for this half-assed intervention? And because we Americans are generally terrible and lack the ability to perceive the victims of imperial aggression outside our borders as real live human beings -- as Westerners -- a contest was thus born.

“Operation Shiite Storm,” is what one anonymous reader -- let's call him "John Stuart" -- came up with, which two employees of The Washington Post thought was so god damn funny – “genius,” actually, and “so inspired” – that they asked the rest of their readers to weigh in on what funny name they would give this latest military operation. A heads up: none of them are remotely clever or funny because no one who works for The Washington Post is clever or funny and no one who thinks a Post employee or their stupid naming contests are funny or clever can themselves be funny or clever.
I mean, look: “Operation Baracking Bad." That's what someone came up with and some other people decided to publish, the humor derived from the fact that there was a show called “Breaking Bad” that aired for 5 seasons on AMC that had nice cinematography and which many people liked very much. A quick Internet search finds at least 4,500 other instances of this joke.

People. Aren't they the worst?

Of course, it's best not to think too much about these things -- why is that even funny, tell me, tell me why -- lest you become a dour, humorless leftist who gets all upset because a major publication deems it acceptable to recycle a 2003 joke comparing hundreds of millions of Shiites to fecal matter. You might become such a buzzkill that you'd point out that -- actually! -- the current "storm" in question, the one which the United Stages is deploying troops to Iraq in response, is largely the result of Sunni insurgents who hate Shiites.

Before the last of my faith in the Washington press corps was destroyed by my working in the Washington press corps, I would have said that Post reporters should quit the comedy contests and stick to their day jobs, but then this is sort of their job, or at least their function: to make light of the evil so that the public may remain ignorant of the unrelenting horror that is American foreign policy. Turn a war crime into a series of .gifs from "Saved by the Bell" and you just might have a future in Bezos-backed journalism; "speak truth to power" by speaking the truth about what the United States has done to the Sunnis and Shias of Iraq -- and a million dead Iraqis is no joke -- and, well, gosh: you're no fun. But maybe pitch it to Counterpunch?

90 days, 90,000 deportations

March 14, 2014:

US President Barack Obama has directed officials to review how to enforce immigration laws "more humanely."

April 6, 2014:

After ordering the review, Mr. Obama called the [immigration] advocates together again. While the White House hoped to intensify pressure on Republicans for comprehensive reform, the advocates had all but given up hope, and have instead directed much of their attention — and outrage — at the administration.

Mr. Obama asked them to skip the stories of pain and suffering, not because he did not care, but because he felt it more productive to discuss strategy for winning permanent relief, people who attended the meeting said.

The odds were not good, Mr. Obama acknowledged. But he asked the advocates to stick with him another 90 days, and press hard on Congress. If those efforts failed to lead to reform, Mr. Obama said he would work with them on administrative relief.

May 28, 2014:

President Barack Obama has asked his Homeland Security chief to hold off on completing a review of U.S. deportation policies until the end of the summer.

June 20, 2014:

White House officials . . . on Friday announced plans to detain more [immigrants] and to accelerate their court cases so as to deport them more quickly.

This is about how many days it has been since Obama told immigrant rights activists to stick with him for 90 more days (it's been more than 90).

Hating on Bernie and kicking out the homeless

Over at VICE, I report on how the influx of rich white people in downtown Los Angeles is impacting the poor homeless people who live there.
Meanwhile, at Salon I argue that, no, Bernie Sanders shouldn't run a pointless campaign for president that ends with him endorsing Hillary Clinton.

http://www.vice.com/read/gentrification-comes-to-las-skid-row-and-the-homeless-get-the-shaft

Amid record poverty, Jerry Brown pays down the debt

California Governor Jerry Brown said on Tuesday that he had some some “good news” for his state: tax revenue for the year was going to be way up, meaning he was revising his budget plan and announcing $2.4 billion in additional spending. But a day later, a couple dozen community activists braved 99-degree heat in downtown Los Angeles to say they were outraged by what he was spending that money on: while half of it will cover the cost of higher than expected enrollment in the state's health insurance program, the liberal governor said he mostly wants to just to bolster state pensions and pay off debt.

The $107.8 billion budget plan that Brown revealed on May 13 sees the state increasing its commitment to paying off its liabilities and “saving for a rainy day,” with millions of dollars set aside for a fund to be tapped in years there are budget deficits. While some Democrats in the legislature have pressed for things like universal preschool, Brown said now is not the time to being investing in social programs.

"We've done a lot already, and we haven't paid for what we've already done,” Brown explained at a press conference. That won praise from Senate Republican Leader Bob Huff, who said he was “glad to see the governor is continuing to prioritize fiscal responsibility.”

Outside the Ronald Reagan State Building in LA, community activists said Brown should have used the surplus to refund social programs that were slashed after the 2008 financial crisis. The state has 8.7 million people living under the official poverty line, 2 million of them children – people who have not shared in the modest economic recovery.

“He completely ignored the people in California, the children, who are living in poverty and suffering in poverty now,” said Nancy Gomez of the advocacy group Health Access California. Between 2011 and 2013, for instance, the number of people living on the streets of Los Angeles, increased by an estimated 67 percent. “Those people can't wait for a rainy-day fund. For them, it's already raining.”

Others said that if austerity is going to be justified in a year of surplus on the basis that California needs to first pay off its debt, then it shouldn't be spending half-a-billion dollars to build new prisons and jails.

Diana Zuniga, an organizer with Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), said that as the child of an incarcerated person she was “appalled” that the governor wants to spend $500 million on jail construction and an addition $11 million on new prisons.

“I am tired of the governor prioritizing prison and jail spending,” said Zuniga. “There's a small amount of money that is going to reentry programs” – $49 million – “but we know we don't need more jail cells, more prisons, to be constructed in our communities.” Overall, the proposed state corrections budget is $9.8 billion, an increase of 2.9 percent over last year.

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that conditions in California's prisons were so bad it constituted cruel and unusual punishment, maintaining that the only solution in the light of the state's failure to address the problems was to simply let people go. A lower court had previously ruled that California must release 33,000 people from its prisons, noting as an “uncontested fact” that, because of their limited access to health care, “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days.”

Brown has been doing everything he can to not comply, recently winning a two-year extension of the court-imposed deadline for reducing California's prison population to 137.5 percent of capacity – down from nearly 200 percent – and he has proposed spending California's “emergency fund” on shipping some of its inmates to private prisons out of state. In January, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation admitted that the prison population is actually headed in the wrong direction, with it projected to grow by 10,000 over the next five years to over 140,000 people behind bars (compared to 60,000 in 1986).
Rather than simply release, for example, nonviolent drug offenders who have served the majority of their sentences, Brown and state lawmakers have opted instead to send most inmates to count lockups, which are themselves overcrowded. Men's Central Jail in Los Angeles, the largest in the state, is so overcrowded that an official with the ACLU described it as “the most nightmarish place I've seen,” with thousands of men suffering from mental illness “packed liked sardines in dungeon-like barracks.”

Los Angeles County has responded to the influx of inmates by proposing to spend $2 billion on new jails. At the rally on Wednesday, activists with the No More Jails L.A. Coalition passed out a statement noting that half of those in county jail are awaiting trial – people who are innocent until proven guilty – while 60 percent of those who have been convicted were convicted of non-violent offenses. With tax revenues up, local and state politicians have proposed building more human cages, with Democrats like Republicans demanding “no early release,” though the state has at last, begrudgingly, begun an elderly parole program.

“Why is California still building jails and prisons while our communities are suffering?” asked Zuniga. “Why do we not have health care? Why do we not have housing? Why do we have people suffering in our streets without the proper resources? We need to continue asking the governor.”

She might have asked another question, too: Where are all the journalists? The Associated Press listed Wednesday's rally in its roundup of news events in Los Angeles, used by reporters to determine what they are covering that day, but no members of the press were there.

Cowardly journalists and the Sunset Strip

Over at VICE, I said journalists are mostly a bunch of old white cowards.

I also wrote a feature on how the Sunset Strip came to embrace "billboard culture" by destroying the youth culture that was once there.

Interview with Jose Antonio Vargas

Jose Antonio Vargas has a new documentary in theatres regarding his decision to come out as an undocumented immigrant. I spoke to him about the film and Barack Obama's deportation of 2 million people like him, the results of which can be found on Salon.

Ice cream and military recruiters

Local governments around the United States are fingerprinting people who drive ice cream trucks for no good reason (they think they're perverts), which I wrote about for VICE.

Military recruiters are also dishonest creeps who have data on millions of Americans, which I also wrote about for VICE.

Connecticut Democrats kill student privacy bill

Last month, a measure that would have barred schools in Connecticut from sharing student test results with military recruiters easily passed the state Education Committee. Today, that legislation died.

In an email, Rep. Jack Hennessy, a Democrat, told me that “the Veterans’ Affairs Committee met this morning and killed the bill.” Hennessy is the chairman of that committee. He did not say why.

The legislation, which would have stopped schools from sharing with recruiters data collected as part of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) — advertised to high school students as a career aptitude exam — was opposed by the Pentagon, which I suppose is all the explanation we need.
Democrats control 120 out of 187 seats in the state legislature, as well as the governor’s office.

UPDATE: I wrote about the bill's failure for VICE.

Money for war, but can't feed the poor

Liberals and conservatives are both wrong about taxes, I argue in a piece for VICE which notes that when some people learn the truth about what the IRS does with their money, they never pay their taxes again.

You say you want a revolution

My latest piece for VICE tells the tale of how one FBI agent infiltrated a left-wing activist group and tried to get a bunch of people thrown behind bars for talking about revolution. Read and share with your lovers and/or loved ones.

Don't be a dick

I wrote about the concept of "microaggression" for VICE, where I now have an archive and where I never read the comments.

Stuff I forgot to post here

I wrote three articles since I last updated this blog, so now I am going to link to them with the expectation that you will read them. And you will read them. I have your IP address.

-- I wrote about how the for-profit South by Southwest is breaking the law by relying on unpaid labor. Read it.
-- I wrote about how white immigrants from Germany get special treatment compared to brown Latinos. Read it.
-- I interviewed a guy who thinks we should abolish prison. Read it.
Until next time!

Update!

I’m a few weeks late pointing this out here because, frankly, writing more than 140 characters is passé, but in case you missed it — and why would you? — my last article for VICE (all caps) had to do with a recent government study finding that reports of rape behind bars are on the rise. Go read the piece but, as always, not the comments.

The week in me

– VICE published my latest piece on unpaid labor, concerning the use of armed volunteers by police departments across the United States.

– Salon published my interview with The Nation’s Eric Alterman regarding his opposition to diversity in the debate over Israel-Palestine.

– And finally, Salon published my piece arguing that if California Governor Jerry Brown really cares about “public safety,” he should spend the state’s emergency fund on preparation for the next earthquake, not to transfer non-violent drug offenders to private prisons.

The year in review

This year, 2013, wasn't a bad year for me, all told, but it was a weird wooden roller coaster of a 12-month period with highs that were high and lows which are better left for my LiveJournal. In this weirdest of years, I wrote some things, some of which got traction and some of which even I've already forgotten. Among the pieces I remember writing which you should get busy reading, in no particular order:

"Sharing Science is a Crime," Al Jazeera English -- If you discover the cure for cancer while working for a corporation or school, you better keep it a secret.

"Steal This Article," The New Inquiry -- It may not always be practical, but it's almost always moral to take what you need from someone who has plenty (and doesn't deserve it).

"The Exploited Laborers of the Liberal Media," VICE -- The liberal magazine Mother Jones gave its interns/"fellows" a $500 a month raise after this piece was published, meaning they will now be paid almost the bare minimum legally allowed in San Francisco (almost).

"Libertarians Are Very Confused about Capitalism," Salon -- Libertarians like to point out that America does not enjoy a "free market," but if that's true: why are they always so busy defending America's wealthy?

"US Hedge Funds Paint Argentina as Ally of Iran (& part two)," Inter Press Service -- Wall Street is trying to extract tens of billions of dollars from Argentina and it's using warmongers in Washington to try and get it.

LA considers IDs for inmates

Every year in Los Angeles County, thousands of people are released from jail without any way to prove who they are, which makes it that much harder to find a job and a place to live -- to stay out of jail, in other words. In my latest for VICE, I report on an effort to change that.

Sorry, those are the rules

Barack Obama may not have pulled the trigger that led 15 members of a wedding party in Yemen to lose their lives — to be murdered by an anonymous killer remotely piloting an American drone — but according to the US president’s own administration, he bears responsibility for their deaths just as much as if he had carried out the killings with his own two hands.

“The commander-in-chief of any military is ultimately responsible for decisions made under their leadership,” said the US State Department four months ago, “even if command and control – he’s not the one that pushes the button or said, ‘Go,’ on this.”

Since the United States is a country where the rule of law is respected and political leaders are judged by the same standards they impose on others, Obama’s trial for murder should begin any day now, which raises the obvious question: How will this impact the race for the White House in 2016?