Archive for the ‘America’ Tag
The Amazing Democrats – Editor’s comment: God Bless America – Everyone got it wrong and to a point, so did we. Leave a comment
Hillary? Can You Say Something on this Please? Obama Won’t. Business as usual in the Old USA. Leave a comment
(From the BBC)
The lawyer for the family of a 25-year-old black man who died after being arrested has told Newsbeat “it would be hard to argue that race is not an element here”.
Freddie Gray died on Sunday at a hospital in the US city of Baltimore.
He was rushed there on 12 April, 30 minutes after police restrained him on the ground and put him in a van.
Lawyer Billy Murphy says when Freddie Gray got to hospital 80% of his spinal cord had been severed near his neck.
“Our information is that he would have been a quadriplegic if he’d survived,” he says.
He believes Mr Gray was in police custody for longer than officers claim and says he asked the police department for video footage on Thursday.
“There was a police camera right above the point where he was stopped, and mysteriously those tapes have not been released to the public.
“There is no reason for the police not to release them immediately – the tapes don’t lie.
Mr Murphy says he has “no confidence” in the police investigation and “nor should any reasonable citizen have confidence in an agency under fire like this which is investigating itself – only mischief can come from that. It’s like the wolf investigating the fox.
“Like other human beings, the police have a tendency to cover up their wrong doing – they call it ‘the blue shield of silence'”.
He says he has much more confidence in a separate investigation being carried out by the state prosecutor.
Police say Freddie Gray was running away from officers when he was restrained.
Mr Murphy says: “What right did the police have to chase a running man without knowing why he was running, without having any information that he had committed a crime of any kind? They saw him running and then they chased.”
“It’s impossible to look at inner city policing without there being a race element attached because there’s been so much historical police brutality.”
He says the Gray family are “very, very, very upset.”
He added: “Shocked is an understatement. Upset is a mild term. They are outraged.”
Mr Gray’s death has sparked protests by activists campaigning against police brutality.
For two days more than 100 protesters have gathered outside a local police station, demanding more information about the death.
The campaign group Justice League NYC held a march on Sunday afternoon with signs reading `Black Lives Matter’, and `Unarmed!! One Man.’
Police and city officials have promised a transparent and thorough criminal investigation.
At a press conference on Sunday, Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said: “I will ensure we will hold the right people accountable.”
Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said: “I can say with certainty that we have no physical, video or any other evidence of an altercation that would have resulted in this – so the question is how, and why.”
He said some officers and other witnesses had been interviewed, but that the officers who are subjects of the criminal investigation had a right not to potentially incriminate themselves.
They’ve been placed on administrative leave while the investigation is carried out.
According to the Baltimore Sun newspaper, the US Department of Justice is carrying out a review of complaints about Baltimore’s Police Department.
It follows the paper’s investigation that claimed taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 to settle more than 100 lawsuits alleging police brutality and other misconduct.
Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August, a series of police killings of unarmed black men has prompted protests and led to accusations of racism.
It’s less than three weeks since a white police officer in South Carolina was charged with murder for fatally shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott.
Derrick Janx, a blogger and author from North Carolina, was surprised when this tweet went viral.
He told the BBC: “When I posted the image I didn’t expect it to get the traction it did.”
“When it went viral, [there were] hundreds of thousands of comments that a lot of parents are having that conversation with their children just out of fear and wanting them to come home alive.
“This is a conversation that every black family is having,” he said.
When We Do Nothing For The Civil Rights Agenda, We Didn’t Win, We Lost. Leave a comment
By PETER BAKER (New York Times)
WASHINGTON — Two days before joining other presidents in Texas to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, President Obama tackled enduring inequality himself on Tuesday, in this case economic disparity based on gender.
For better or worse, Johnson represented the high-water mark for American presidents pushing through sweeping legislation — not just the Civil Rights Act, but the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the Fair Housing Act and major measures on immigration, education, gun control and clean air and water. No president since has approached that level of legislative success, although there are people who argue that is a good thing because government should not be so intrusive.
But Mr. Obama and many Democrats are not among them. At this stage of his presidency, Mr. Obama has become a symbol of liberal frustration over his inability to use government to bring about change. Republicans publicly, and some Democrats privately, blame Mr. Obama for not doing more to work across the aisle. The White House and many Democrats scoff at that, laying stalemate at the feet of what they call an obstructionist Republican Party.
Certainly, Mr. Obama can point to landmark actions from his first term, most notably his health care program, the most significant expansion of the social safety net since the Johnson era. He also pushed through an economic stimulus intended to pull the country back from the abyss and Wall Street regulations devised to avert another crisis. But those actions were accomplished in his first two years, back when he had a Democratic Congress and before sky-high deficits brought on an age of austerity.
Mr. Obama now confronts the likelihood that he may not come close to anything like those first 24 months in his final six years in office. Day in and day out, the president with the grand aspirations finds himself signing orders and memos that barely move the needle toward the goals he outlined for himself.
“I’m going to do my small part,” he said on Tuesday as he signed the executive measures.
Jeffrey A. Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said Mr. Obama’s health program might ultimately be seen as similar to the lasting legacies of the Great Society or the New Deal.
But the reality of the modern presidency, he said, is that big things are best done right away before second terms devolve into an exercise in aggravation. “It’s more difficult to achieve massive change after that initial mandate because money and media and constant pinpricks can very effectively take the wind out of any president’s sails very quickly,” Mr. Engel said.
When domestic prospects recede, presidents often turn to foreign policy, where they have fewer constraints and Congress is a bit player. Mr. Obama inherited an empowered national security presidency from George W. Bush and has used it to wage a vigorous drone war and preside over an expansive surveillance program in the pursuit of terrorists.
But he has also had a difficult time dealing with Russia, Syria and the Middle East peace process, and has projected a more restrained American role in the world. If anything, Mr. Obama seems intent on being the anti-Johnson by withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan rather than letting an overseas quagmire like Vietnam come to dominate his presidency and overshadow any domestic accomplishments.
Washington has changed in many ways since the Great Society. Johnson enjoyed such large Democratic majorities that even when his party lost 47 House seats in the 1966 midterm elections, Democrats still held 61 more than Republicans. The country faced crises both parties felt compelled to address. And political deal making then was different with pork projects called earmarks that are now banned — seedier, perhaps, but also effective.
Since the Johnson era, the country has grown more skeptical about government. Even Mr. Obama’s biggest legislative project, the health care program, was based on helping uninsured Americans buy coverage in the private market, rather than setting up a government-run system like Medicare. But it still stirred widespread opposition.
And the political parties, both ideologically diverse in the 1960s, have grown more homogeneous.
“The nature of politics has changed,” said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. “The electorate is more polarized. I think often members of Congress are more concerned with how the voter on the more enthusiastic side of their party is going to react than they would have 50 years ago. That’s a real change.”
Still, few things irritate Mr. Obama and his team more than the comparison to Johnson, which they consider facile and unfair. The notion that Mr. Obama should exert more energy in cajoling, bargaining and even pressuring lawmakers is a common assessment on both sides of the aisle, but it remains unpersuasive in the Oval Office, despite Johnson’s successes.
“When he lost that historic majority, and the glow of that landslide victory faded, he had the same problems with Congress that most presidents at one point or another have,” Mr. Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick last year. “I say that not to suggest that I’m a master wheeler-dealer, but rather to suggest that there are some structural institutional realities to our political system that don’t have much to do with schmoozing.”
Not everyone accepts that. Marvin Watson, who was Johnson’s chief of staff, said he made no judgment about Mr. Obama or any other president but rejected the notion that Johnson lost sway over time.
“There’s not much difference,” he said. “They talk about that because they’re trying to find an excuse why it was done at one time and why it’s not been done since.”
Mr. Watson agreed that Johnson had a powerful majority but noted that he made a point of negotiating with Republicans anyway. “We just had a feeling that all positions should be represented,” he said.
Mark K. Updegrove, director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum and the organizer of this week’s conference celebrating the Civil Rights Act, said comparisons were hard to make.
“Washington was fundamentally different when L.B.J. was king of the jungle,” he said. “There are many factors there, but one is that I don’t think lawmakers know each other as well as they did in L.B.J.’s day. One of the ways he was able to get things done is he read the motivations of his colleagues so well. And that was because he knew them so well.”
After Mr. Obama experienced a year of scant legislative progress — he failed to push through even a modest gun control bill in 2013 after the schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn. — the president has turned to a strategy of enacting smaller executive actions and using his bully pulpit to persuade states and companies to pick up the cause of, say, raising the minimum wage. And he still has the power to make major changes unilaterally, as he plans to do through environmental regulations of greenhouse gas emissions.
“He would prefer that Congress pick up this legislation and pass it,” Ms. Palmieri said after Tuesday’s event on pay equity. “It irks him sometimes. But he’s also a pragmatic guy.”
She added: “Washington’s not the end-all, be-all. It’s the United States of America, and he’s the leader of it.”