RSN: Robert Reich | The Real Threats to American Law and Order Are Trump's Craven Enablers

 

 

01 September 20

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Robert Reich | The Real Threats to American Law and Order Are Trump's Craven Enablers

Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "To be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control."

The president railed against ‘violent anarchists, agitators and criminals’ but he surrounds himself with lawless lackeys

ne week ago, Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police department, fired at least seven shots at the back of a Black man named Jacob Blake as he opened his car door, leaving the 29-year-old father of five probably paralyzed from the waist down.

After protests erupted, self-appointed armed militia or vigilante-type individuals rushed to Kenosha, including Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who traveled there and then, appearing on the streets with an AR-15 assault rifle, allegedly killed two people and wounded a third.

This is pure gold for a president without a plan, a party without a platform, and a cult without a purpose other than the abject worship of Donald J Trump.

To be re-elected Trump knows he has to distract the nation from the coronavirus pandemic that he has flagrantly failed to control – leaving more than 180,000 Americans dead, tens of millions jobless and at least 30 million reportedly hungry.

So he’s counting on the reliable Republican dog-whistle. “Your vote,” Trump said in his speech closing the Republican convention Thursday night, “will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans, or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists, agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.”

“We will have law and order on the streets of this country,” Vice-President Mike Pence declared the previous evening, warning “you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Neither Trump nor Pence mentioned the real threats to law and order in America today, such as gun-toting agitators like Rittenhouse, who, perhaps not coincidentally, occupied a front-row seat at a Trump rally in Des Moines in January.

Pence lamented the death of federal officer Dave Patrick Underwood, “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California”, earlier this year, implying he was killed by protesters. In fact, Underwood was shot and killed by an adherent of the boogaloo boys, an online extremist movement that’s trying to ignite a race war.

Such groups have found encouragement in a president who sees “very fine people” supporting white supremacy.

The threat also comes from conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the recently nominated Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th congressional district and promoter of QAnon, whose adherents believe Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. Trump has praised Greene as a “future Republican star” and claimed that QAnon followers “love our country”.

And from people like Mary Ann Mendoza, a member of Trump’s campaign advisory board, who was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention until she retweeted an antisemitic rant about a supposed Jewish plan to enslave the world’s peoples and steal their land.

Clearly the threat also comes from hotheaded, often racist police officers who fire bullets into the backs of Black men and women or kneel on their necks so they can’t breathe. Needless to say, there was little mention at the Republican convention of Jacob Blake, and none of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.

And the threat comes from Trump’s own lackeys who have brazenly broken laws to help him attain and keep power. Since Trump promised he would only hire “the best people”, 14 Trump aides, donors and advisers have been indicted or imprisoned.

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W Giuliani – who ranted at the Republican convention about rioting and looting in cities with Democratic mayors – has repeatedly met with the pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach, whom American intelligence has determined is “spreading claims about corruption … to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party”.

In addition, federal prosecutors are investigating Giuliani’s business dealings in Ukraine with two men arrested in an alleged campaign finance scheme.

Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who had been a major Trump campaign donor before taking over the post office, is being sued by six states and the District of Columbia for allegedly seeking to “undermine” the postal service as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail during the pandemic.

Not to forget the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who spoke to the Republican convention while on an official trip to the Middle East, in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits officials of the executive branch other than the president and vice-president from engaging in partisan politics.

You want the real threat to American law and order? It’s found in these Trump enablers and bottom-dwellers. They are the inevitable excrescence of Trump’s above-the-law, race-baiting, me-first presidency. It is from the likes of them that the rest of America is in serious need of protection.

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'After midnight Monday night, more than 100 protesters marched to the Sheriff's station on Imperial Highway.' (photo: Robert Gauthier/LA Times)

Fatal Shooting of Black Man by LA Sheriff's Deputies Sparks Protests, Questions
Matthew Ormseth, Los Angeles Times
Ormseth writes: "Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies on Monday shot and killed a Black man in an incident that is sparking concern and outrage in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Westmont."

Authorities said the shooting occurred at the end of a pursuit and after the man allegedly struck one of the deputies. 

Hours after the shooting, a crowd gathered at the scene and demanded answers. There were chants of “Say his name,” “No justice, no peace” and “Black lives matter.” Some said they didn’t think the shooting was justified. After midnight Monday night, more than 100 protesters marched to the Sheriff’s station on Imperial Highway, where the demonstration continued.

The incident comes two months after the controversial shooting of 18-year-old Andres Guardado in Gardena, which has sparked weeks of demonstrations.

Sheriff’s Lt. Brandon Dean said Monday evening that two deputies from the South Los Angeles station were driving on Budlong Avenue when they spotted a man riding his bicycle in violation of vehicle codes. Dean said he didn’t know which vehicle codes the man allegedly broke.

When the deputies attempted to contact the man, he dropped the bicycle and ran north on Budlong for one block with deputies in pursuit, Dean said. In the 1200 block of West 109th Place, deputies again tried to make contact with the man, and he punched one of them in the face, Dean said.

In doing so, the man dropped a bundle of clothing he had been carrying. The deputies spotted a black handgun in the bundle, Dean said, and both opened fire, killing the man. 

He didn’t identify the man and described him only as a Black man in his 30s.

Dean said he did not know how many times the man was shot, but called reports he had been hit more than 20 times inaccurate. 

Gerardo De La Torre, 18, was playing video games in his bedroom on West 109th place when he heard 10 gunshots, followed by screams. He went outside and saw a group of people confronting sheriff’s deputies. Within five minutes, he said, 12 squad cars pulled up to the intersection, sirens screaming, where a man lay dead.

De La Torre was reminded of a shooting just three months earlier: A Latino man had come down his street, a gun in his hand, and was standing in front of his family’s home when sheriff’s deputies shot him, he said. The Sheriff’s Department said at the time that the man had pointed the handgun at officers.

There are still two bullet holes in the wooden fence outside his home. 

“I don’t really like what’s been going on here,” he said. He plans to move in two weeks to join his brother in San Francisco.

When Arlander Givens, 68, saw the cruisers streaming by his home on West 109th Place, he knew by the number of cars that someone had been shot by law enforcement. 

Givens has watched with alarm as Black men have died at the hands of the police in Minnesota, Wisconsin — and now, on his block. 

“It’s like it’s open season,” he said.

Givens questioned why the deputies opened fire, if as a sheriff’s official has said, the man wasn’t holding a weapon. 

“If he reached down to grab it, that’s different,” Givens said. “But if it’s on the ground, why shoot? That means he was unarmed.”

When his wife goes to the store, Givens tells her to be careful. 

“We aren’t talking about some gang member,” he said. “We’re talking about the police. And that’s bad. I’ve got nothing to hide, I’ve got no reason to run, but when I see the police over my shoulder, I worry.”

A video taken in the neighborhood showed two deputies running after a man appearing to be carrying a bundle of clothes. Later, the deputies are shown with their guns drawn, apparently after they shot the man.

Investigators have yet to interview the deputies and the many other witnesses, Dean said. They have not reviewed surveillance footage or cellphone videos that may have captured the shooting.

“Give us time to conduct our investigation,” he said. “We will get all of the facts of this case and eventually present them.”

No deputies were injured.

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Portland police and Oregon State Patrol officers work together to arrest a protester on the 75th day of protests against racial injustice and police brutality, Aug. 11, 2020, in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Portland: Appeals Court Suspends Protections for Journalists, Legal Observers Covering Protests
Rebecca Ellis, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Ellis writes: "A split panel of judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily suspended restrictions on federal officers interactions with legal observers and journalists documenting nightly protests against police brutality and for racial justice in Portland."
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Yusef Salaam becomes emotional as he speaks in Los Angeles. (photo: Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

Yusef Salaam: 'Trump Would Have Had Me Hanging From a Tree in Central Park'
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Wrongly jailed for gang rape - a case which inspired Trump to call for the death penalty - Salaam has poured his experiences into a novel about hope, justice and race."

f Donald Trump had got his way I wouldn’t be speaking to Yusef Salaam right now. “Had his ad taken full effect we would have been hanging from trees in Central Park,” Salaam says matter-of-factly. “People wanted our blood running in the streets.”

You’ve probably seen the ad in question: it’s infamous. In 1989, a white investment banker was raped and left for dead in Central Park. Five black and brown teenagers, including 15-year-old Salaam, were charged with her rape. Two weeks after the attack, before any of the kids had faced trial, Trump took out a full-page advert in multiple New York papers calling for the death penalty. His inflammatory stunt is credited with prejudicing public opinion and contributing to the Central Park Five – now known as the Exonerated Five – going to prison for something they didn’t do. The boys’ story was retold last year in the Emmy-winning Netflix drama When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay.

Salaam spent almost seven years behind bars; he had his youth ripped away from him. However there is no bitterness in the slim, softly spoken, 46-year-old man I’m talking to: you can come out of prison better, not bitter, he likes to say. Salaam, who is speaking to me from his home in Georgia, completed a college degree in prison and, when he got out, dedicated his life to educating others about what he calls the “criminal system of injustice”. He has 10 children (“It’s a blended family”), a successful career as a public speaker, a record of policy reform, and a lifetime achievement award from Barack Obama. Now he and the Haitian-American author Ibi Zoboi, a National Book award finalist, have teamed up on a young adult book partly inspired by his experience. Punching the Air, a novel-in-verse, explores institutional racism and the school-to-prison pipeline through the eyes of Amal Shahid, a 16-year-old black Muslim boy who is wrongfully incarcerated after a fight in a park leaves a white kid in a coma.

Punching the Air has been a long time in the making. Salaam first met Zoboi, who has joined our video call from her New Jersey home, in 1999; they were both taking classes at Manhattan’s Hunter College. Salaam had been out of prison for two years and was grappling with how to get back into the world: “I would tell anybody and everybody about what happened to me and how Trump rushed to judge us.”

Zoboi spoke to Salaam at length; she was the editor of the college paper and wanted to report on how Trump had had a hand in his conviction. “To this day, that was the longest conversation I’ve ever had about Trump,” she says with an unamused smile. “I refuse to engage now.”

Zoboi didn’t end up writing that story. Salaam was still wary of the media; still wary that people would rush to judge him. “Part of the hesitation in telling my story in full back then was a fear of who would vilify me,” he explains. Salaam may have been out of jail but he was still officially labelled a sex offender; he wouldn’t be fully exonerated until 2002, when a prisoner called Matias Reyes confessed to the Central Park rape. “My mother had this experience where she was coming home from work at Parsons University when the case was going on — she’s a professor there, teaching fashion. She’s walking to the train station and a cop car goes past with the megaphones blaring: ‘That’s her! That’s the mother of that dog Yusef Salaam.’ So I’m knowing about things like this. And now here I am free again — but I’m free in body and mind without the truth having come out yet.”

Two decades later Zoboi and Salaam reconnected at a literary festival, where Salaam was promoting a self-published book of poems. Zoboi pitched him the idea of telling his story in the form of a young adult book and Punching the Air was born. The decision to tell his truth via fiction wasn’t about “a desire to tell it from a safe space”, Salaam says, but to universalise it. “The system wants you to think that what happened to me was an anomaly. A mistake. But I’m not the only one, there are countless others. We wanted to tell the story of how this is not an anomaly. We wanted to tell ‘the story of the two Americas’; what it’s like to live in a world where you may not make it home because of racism and systemic oppression.”

While Punching the Air is not an autobiography, Amal is very much based on Salaam. Zoboi and Salaam would spend hours talking and Zoboi turned those conversations into poetry. “We needed to capture the raw emotion of this boy,” Zoboi explains of the decision to use free verse. “Sometimes with prose you get muddled in all the other details that don’t matter in that moment. But when you pare down the language to make a list poem or put words in a certain shape to convey a certain mood, it’s much more powerful. Poetry gets to the heart of the matter and we needed to capture the heart of this boy. Because it’s not just a story about race, or about a crime. It is, first and foremost, a story about a human being; about a child, about a boy.”

It’s also a story about who gets to be a boy; who gets to make mistakes. Research shows that African American students are nearly four times as likely to be suspended from school as their white counterparts for exactly the same behaviour. “What we want the readers to take away from the book is that some people get away with mistakes and some people get punished severely for those mistakes,” Zoboi says.

Amal is a gifted artist who gets into a good school, but there is no room for error for a kid like him: “I’m thinking it should’ve been called / Zero Tolerance Academy, or / No Second Chances Charter School / or Prison Prep.” His white art teacher, Miss Rinaldi, doesn’t see the real Amal, just the stereotype of an angry black boy. “I failed the class / She failed me,” says Amal. Miss Rinaldi serves as a character witness for Amal in his trial and it is her mischaracterisation of him that ends up sending him to prison. She is, Zoboi explains, what young people these days call a “Karen”.

There will be a lot of Miss Rinaldis reading this book, Zoboi notes. “Librarians and teachers: those industries are dominated by white women. And I find that so ironic given the crime that Yusef was accused of committing. I don’t think Yusef could have imagined, back in 1999, it’d be like, you know what? We’re gonna write a book and a lot of white women are gonna read it. And that guy who was responsible for convicting you? He’s going to be president.”

“It’s important,” says Zoboi, “that we have some sort of reconciliation between white women and black men. Right now there’s a lot of guilt. There’s a lot of coddling in the classroom – it’s a dynamic founded on guilt and not empathy. Reading this book out of guilt is not our hope, right? You know: ‘Poor thing, you’ve experienced such injustice. I’m so angry. I want to cry.’ That is not how we want readers to read the book. We want them to ask: how did I fail the young black people in my life? In what way was I a Miss Rinaldi in my students’ lives? It’s not about guilt, it’s about being accountable for being part of a system.”

With issues like defunding the police becoming mainstream talking points and the Black Lives Matter movement going global, Punching the Air feels particularly timely. However, as Zoboi notes, it has always been painfully relevant. They could have written the book in 2012 when Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was killed. They could have written the book in 1999 when Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was fatally shot by four New York City police officers, who were all found not guilty. It may feel like we’re on the brink of change at the moment, but history warns us not to expect too much. “We have lived long enough to see change not happen in a big way,” Zoboi says. “Because Salaam and I are parents, we have to be hopeful for our children. At the same time, change is going to be incremental not monumental. Small steps. And this book serves as one small step.”

How has social media changed things? Salaam was convicted before there were hashtags, before viral videos shone a light on police brutality. “The worst part about social media is that we hoped that, as we told our stories, the oppression would stop,” Salaam says. But it hasn’t. “Social media has allowed us to be more aware but it doesn’t seem that awareness alone makes anything change,” Zoboi adds. “It seems like the more awareness we have, the more pushback there is. It seems like white supremacists have doubled down because of our awareness.”

This isn’t to say that we should give up hope. Amal means hope in Arabic. And while rage and frustration simmer through Punching the Air it is, ultimately, a hopeful book. If there is one thing Salaam wants readers to take out of the story it is “to never give up hope on themselves. To understand that you were born free and that you were born mattering.” But what about Salaam himself? As the 2020 election, and the possibility of another four years of Trump looms, is Salaam hopeful? He is quiet for a moment, thoughtful. “My experience has taught me to prepare for the worst,” he says, “but to hope for the best.”