NYPD Should Remember They Work for the Taxpayers

You should have cut the NYPD some slack when the two police were killed in the line of duty. Here is what the Wrongologist said on 12/22:

The harsh reaction that blamed Mayor de Blasio and the Eric Garner and Ferguson demonstrators should be viewed through a lens of that tragedy. The statements made by the PBA, and Commissioner Bratton were over the top, but under the circumstances, we can let go of them.

Fast forward to this week, when a large number of New York’s Finest Most Entitled once again turned their backs on Mayor de Blasio at the funeral service for Officer Wenjian Liu. From the Atlantic: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

The show of disrespect came outside the funeral…[of a man] remembered as an incarnation of the American dream: a man who had immigrated at age 12 and devoted himself to helping others in his adopted country. The gesture, among officers watching the mayor’s speech on a screen, added to tensions between the mayor and rank-and-file police…

This came after Commissioner William Bratton asked them not to stage a repeat of their actions at Officer Rafael Ramos’s funeral. His request:

I issue no mandates, and I make no threats of discipline, but I remind you that when you don the uniform of this department, you are bound by the tradition, honor and decency that go with it.

Finally, the New York Times reported that ticket issuance by police in this city of 8.4 million was down by 90% last week:

Most precincts’ weekly tallies for criminal infractions — typically about 4,000 a week citywide — were close to zero.

And, New York continued to function normally, with people going about their business, seemingly secure on sidewalk, street, public transit and in their homes. So, let’s see:

• The NYPD disrespects the mayor.
• They do so for a second time even after a request not to do so by their Police Commissioner.
• They engage in a job action that, in some parts of the city, meant that no tickets were issued.

It’s now time for the NYPD to give some slack to the rest of us. Aren’t the police supposed to answer to someone? It appears that the more vocal among them think they answer only to themselves. And don’t say anything critical of the police, or anything bad that happens is our fault.

We know that they have a tough job, and that they have worked without a contract for more than a year, but they are quickly losing public support, given their current attitude.

When people can’t criticize the police, you have a police state.

And this isn’t the first time the NYPD has had issues with a NYC Mayor. In the early 1970s, Mayor John Lindsay had similar issues with the NY police unions. The NYT, in an editorial reviewed what de Blasio has done wrong:

1. He campaigned on ending the unconstitutional use of “stop-and-frisk” tactics, which victimized hundreds of thousands of innocent young Black and Latino men.
2. He called for creating an inspector general for the department and ending racial profiling.
3. After Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island, he convened a meeting with the police commissioner, William Bratton, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. He gave Sharpton greater prominence than the NYPD thought he should have.
4. He said after the Garner killing that he had told his biracial son, Dante, to “take special care” in encounters with the police.
5. He generally condoned the peaceful protests for police reform — while condemning those who incited or committed violence — and cited a tagline of the movement: “Black lives matter.”

Mayor de Blasio was elected by a wide margin (he got 74% of the vote) by, among other things, promising to reform the policing excesses that had been found unconstitutional by a federal court. He hired Mr. Bratton, who had achieved with the Los Angeles Police Department what now needs doing in New York.

The NYPD can’t stand behind the bad behavior on the part of some of their fellow officers. The “blood on his hands” rhetoric against Mayor de Blasio sounds like something the NYPD union leaders have learned from watching the Republican Party: Predict that a politician will fail, then do everything in your power to make it happen.

The NYPD has a unique responsibility. They don’t work for a private company, they work for the residents of New York City; NOT for their union, or their fraternity. If they fail to provide that service, they cheat the taxpayers. New Yorkers pay the NYPD salaries. They pay them to ensure the security of all New Yorkers.

But, the NYPD didn’t just pull the slowdown on the Mayor, they pulled it on the taxpayers. Could it be that the city has been wasting a significant amount of the nearly $5 billion it spends annually on its over 34,000 uniformed cops?

In the words of the NYT, what New Yorkers have a right to expect of the NY Police Department is simple:

1. Do your jobs.
2. Don’t violate the Constitution.
3. Don’t kill unarmed people.

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Money Changes Everything

The WaPo reported that the world’s 400 richest people added $92 billion to their collective wealth in 2014. Drilling down on the US political implications of that headline, Bloomberg reports: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Here’s a bit of perspective on the ever-rising cost of elections and the big-money donors who finance them: Three of the country’s wealthiest political contributors each saw their net worth grow in 2014 by more than $3.7 billion, the entire cost of the midterm elections.

(OpenSecrets.org reported that the tab for the 2014 House and Senate elections came to $3.7 billion.)

Bloomberg’s records show that Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs) each earned enough in 2014 to have covered all of that campaign expense with the just the growth in their individual wealth.

So, the 2014 return on investment for political donations seems to be very, very good. And with investment returns like that, Citizens United will remain in place forever.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that 11 of the political donors that Bloomberg tracks added a combined $33 billion to their wealth in 2014. The implication is that, as the 2016 presidential election season approaches, almost all of those donors will have even more cash to burn contribute.

Their wealth, combined with loosening campaign-finance restrictions and the growing comfort of the wealthy flexing their financial muscles in politics will jump-start 2016 primary campaigns in the next few months. And Congress gave an additional gift to wealthy donors by voting in the CRomnibus to raise the limits on how much individuals can give to political parties: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Previously individual donors could give the national party committees up to $32,400 per year. The new law allows donors to add gifts of up to $97,200 to each of three causes: presidential nominating conventions, building funds, and legal proceedings, such as recounts.

That’s a grand total of $324,000 per year, ten times the prior level.

This points to a reality: A wealthy donor can now almost singlehandedly bankroll a candidate, as Sheldon Adelson did for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in 2012. These buckets of ducats raise questions about whether their political contributions create policy. Bloomberg quotes Craig Holman of Public Citizen:

Our democracy just isn’t going to survive in this type of atmosphere…The US, throughout history, has worked on a very delicate balance between capitalism in the economic sphere and democracy in the political sphere. We no longer have that balance. The economic sphere is going to smother and overwhelm the political sphere.

The sheer amount of money some donors made on paper in 2014 rewrites the context of “big” money in politics. For a state-wide political race, a $1 million cash infusion could change the outcome. For America’s big-money clique, it’s a fraction of what some billionaires can make or lose in a single day.

The NYT’s Binyamin Appelbaum contends in “Who Wants to Buy a Politician?” that there is an upper limit to the political expenditures by the wealthy. He makes the point that during the 2014 midterms, television stations in several contested markets reported that they had sold all of their available slots and that one station in New Hampshire actually issued refunds after selling more ads than it could air.

He says that the real return on political investment is in lobbying, which seems to be more valuable than campaign contributions. Appelbaum quotes Michael Munger, of Duke University:

Incumbents and large corporations can basically spend as much as it would take to defeat some change that would harm them…They spend around 10 times as much on lobbying, suggesting that it’s less effective to influence the selection of policy makers than to influence the policy-making process itself.

Also, the lobbyists threaten legislators that there will be fewer campaign donations next time unless the legislator votes correctly.

Either way, the wealthy have the money to buy the change they need, or you do not.

 

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Democrats Have Lost America

Members of Congress will formally take their oaths of office on their respective chamber floors when the 114th Congress convenes at noon today.

But even as the new Congress gets sworn in, and Democrats dutifully take up their positions in the minority, It is important to realize that Democrats have taken their collective eye off the ball in the states for the past 6 years: Not only do Republicans control Congress, they control an overwhelming majority of state legislatures as well, including 100% control (legislative and executive) of 24 states.

Despite the Democrats’ obsessive focus on holding the Senate and winning the presidency, DC was not the only battlefield; there was a huge battle for control of the states. The WaPo reported this week that the battle is over. Republicans now control 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers.

Before Election Day 2014, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers (most states have two chambers, some only one) across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record, set twice after special elections in 2011 and 2012.

Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to 7.

While pundits everywhere are talking about what is going to happen in Washington in 2015, we should spend a little time preparing for a new wave of conservative state laws. Republicans plan to launch fresh assault on:

• Common Core education standards, the national standards adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. Opposition on the right has led three states — Indiana, Oklahoma and South Carolina — to drop out of the program. Some states will attempt to join those three in leaving the program altogether. Others will try to change testing requirements or prevent the sharing of education data with federal officials.
• Abortion regulations: Measures to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy will advance in Wisconsin, South Carolina, West Virginia and Missouri.
• Corporate and personal income taxes: Arkansas, Arizona, North Carolina, and North Dakota will prioritize cutting personal or corporate income tax rates.
• The power of labor unions: Republicans in nine states are planning to use their power to pass “right to work” legislation, which would allow employees to opt out of joining a labor union. 24 states already have such laws on the books, and new measures have been or will be proposed in Wisconsin, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Missouri.
• Environmental Protection Agency: A dozen states have challenged proposed EPA regulations on power plants in federal court.
• Challenges to State Pension Programs: Many states will try to deal with underfunded pension plans, which threaten to swamp state budgets over the long term. In Illinois, where the state pension is funded at less than 40%, Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner (R) made pension reform a cornerstone of his 2014 campaign, while fights are brewing in Kentucky and in New Jersey.

All of the above is partly the result of a sustained campaign by Republicans to reduce voting. It is also partly the result of Democrats deciding that Congressional and state political campaigns can be won even without addressing the real issues or the real record of the two parties.

Democrats are facing a long, brutal slog in the states and in the Congress. Mr. Obama gets elected twice, and by a greater margin the second time, yet his party loses control of almost everything else, now politically controlling just 7 states.

What does this say about 2016? Will Hillary have enough coattails to move some legislatures or Senate seats, or will she be the second coming (politically) of Mr. Obama?

Finally, the next time some moron tells you that both parties are the same, remind that person what is about to happen in the states, specifically, the undoing of the social contract that is about to take place. The next time somebody tells you one vote doesn’t count, tell them it doesn’t count unless you cast one.

Maybe Democrats need to get off their duffs and do something about this.

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Monday Wake Up Call – January 5, 2015

Let’s start the first Monday of the New Year with this photo of a hermaphrodite Northern Cardinal:

Cardinal

The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal is caused by its sex chromosomes not segregating properly after fertilization, so the bird is half-male, half-female. You can read more in New Scientist magazine here.

Last night, Wrongo watched Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz, which documents the last concert by the roots-rock group, The Band. Late in the movie, Robbie Robertson recounts jamming with the great harmonica player, Sonny Boy Williamson in the early 1960s, and making (never-realized) plans to work together. Obviously, Robertson, Helm, et al. went on to be the band that backed Bob Dylan in the 1970s.

Here is your Monday musical wake-up: Sonny Boy Williamson playing and singing “99”, in which he can’t come up with that last dollar to make the $100 his girlfriend wants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP668KiaY7E

Here are links that you may have missed:

Drone etiquette is one of several issues covered in the WSJ’s “21 Tech Do’s and Don’ts for 2015.” Really, drone etiquette is gonna be a thing in 2015?

Dynamic scoring is not about succeeding in the bar scene, it’s a new Republican way of using the Congressional Budget Office to make tax cuts look good. The Wrongologist wrote about this in December.

Georgia police chief shoots wife (twice) while “moving” his Glock pistol in their bed. Yea, well, more for the “good guy with a gun” file. BTW, Glocks don’t accidentally fire, they have a unique safety mechanism, so you have to pull the trigger to fire it.

California colleges see surge in efforts to unionize adjunct faculty. At nearly a dozen private colleges in California, adjunct professors are holding first-time contract negotiations, or are campaigning to win the right to do so.

Almost one-fifth of the nation’s enclosed malls have vacancy rates considered troubling by real estate experts (10% or greater). Over 3% of malls are considered to be dying, with 40% vacancies or higher. That is up from less than 1% in 2006. Another impact of income inequality: High-end malls are thriving, while malls with anchor stores like Sears, Kmart and J. C. Penney falter.

Don’t try this at home: In 2015, the European Union is increasing taxes on purchases of digital content like e-books and smartphone applications. The taxes are part of a continuing push to tax the region’s digital economy more heavily. It will raise over $1 billion.

The latest ISIS offensive in Iraq’s Anbar Province may have reversed weeks of progress by Iraq’s government forces. And it only took a few hours. No airstrikes were launched by US coalition forces in time to support the ground troops.

“From 07:00 until 11:00, we lost territory that had taken us two weeks to gain. In a few hours, it was gone,” said a senior officer from the Iraqi Army’s 7th Division.

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 4, 2015

RIP Mario Cuomo:

Cuomo Koch

(Columbus Day Parade, October 11, 1982. Mayor Edward Koch, Gov. Mario Cuomo and Westchester County Executive Alfred DelBello march down New York’s Fifth Avenue) Credit: Associated Press

You have to wonder how different the country would be if Mario Cuomo had agreed to become a Supreme Court Justice in 1993 when Bill Clinton offered to nominate him to replace Byron R. White. George Stephanopoulos has written that Clinton came within 15 minutes of nominating Cuomo, until the latter rejected the job in a phone call with Stephanopoulos.

The Wrongologist never drops bold-face names in the blog, but today is an exception. In 1988, he (and Ms. Oh So Right) were backstage speaking with Frank Zappa, who was playing in Boston. Wrongo asked who Zappa would support for president the next time around, since the Dukakis debacle had just happened. He said: “only Mario”.  At the time, the Wrongologist agreed. But Mario would never run, and Zappa died in 1993.

On Christmas, Neil deGrasse Tyson sent this Tweet:

It caused the usual spewing by the “war on Christmas” crowd, who claimed that Tyson was deliberately provoking them. Tyson replied:

Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.

Speaking of truth, here is the whole objective truth:

COW The Truth2015 will be totally different, except:

COW New Boss

 

We just ceased combat operations in Afghanistan. What did we learn?

COW Lessons Learned

Republican leader Scalise attends Klan meeting. What did the GOP learn?

COW Scalise

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Transforming America, Part I

For the past few months, this blog has featured this quote:

He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time, comprehend –Hubert Selby Jr.

Let’s start this year with a meditation about one transformative idea. Not something that is peddled by the DC think tanks, but an idea that lurks just below the surface.

All of us have wondered, like the characters in Selby’s “Requiem for a Dream” (and maybe, with increasing frequency) “hey, something is wrong here”. Maybe you accept mainstream logic, but now you’ve come to realize that things are getting out of control, despite the constant messaging from your ideological god of choice that tries to pull you back to conventional thinking.

Here is the transformative idea for today: The free market isn’t a beautiful self-correcting machine. Instead, it is consuming our society and our environment for the benefit of a very few.

And it isn’t an orderly process; the trajectory is more like a slow free-fall in which the market system moves downward devouring everything, unless it is met by real opposition. In fact, the globalized version of the free market makes life horrible for lots of people, creating a constant need for intervention.

For a couple of examples, you don’t get the Russian Revolution(s) without the Czar trying to play ‘catch up’ with the West. You don’t get the Cuban Revolution without the crimes of the Batista regime.

When there is a backlash against corporatism, especially on the periphery, capitalists come up with a solution. Anyone is better than a bunch of reformers who want society to pay attention to people’s well-being rather than to profits.

With globalization, local thugs became very useful. Folks like Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, Mubarak in Egypt, Suharto in Indonesia, and Hussein in Iraq. Most of the time, these folks did the job big business wanted done (even if it was messy). And the American government protected US corporate assets in-country, and propped up the compliant local politicians. The profits got privatized, and the losses socialized, since our taxes paid for the military aid to the dictators, while the corporates skimmed the profits. And much of those profits remained offshore, out of reach of our taxing authorities.

Today, the useful thugs working on behalf of the American Empire are in Washington DC. They have made our political system a self-replicating support system for free market capitalism. We have retained only a veneer of our democracy, while moving rapidly in the direction of an authoritarian business-state combine, an improved version of Mussolini-style corporatism.

Oswald Spengler, who’s “Decline of the West” argued in the 1920’s that the urban culture of Northern Europe was a “Faustian” world, (his term for one of 8 global cultures) characterized by bigness and rationality, eventually to be dominated by the soldier, the engineer, and the businessman.

Doesn’t that seem particularly relevant to today’s America? Spengler thought that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and that the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. Importantly, he said:

The ‘tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers’ is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective.

So here we are. One day, it was 2014, the next day, 2015. What has changed? Nothing. What will change? Nothing, unless you begin a process of thinking about one transformative idea:

The free market doesn’t self-correct. Therefore, it is an ideology that must be changed.

The struggle between market forces and societal needs has always existed. In the 20th Century, we evolved a series of social democracies that kept the rights of the people balanced against the rights of the corporations, with some of the pushback actually coming from businesses themselves.

But today, well-funded efforts to roll back New Deal and New Society social welfare programs are well advanced. And there are only so many times that this blog and others can point out that many Americans have been unemployed since 2008.

The political question is what happens to this great new underclass in America? An underclass that has grown large because of the past 7+ years of economic disparity. Since the free market system that is grinding up our society is a utopian fantasy, we should be able to turn to our democratic system to help solve the real failures of our economic system.

But, our democratic system has been co-opted by the free marketers. So, who can ordinary people turn to for help AGAINST the market?

The corporatists and their captured politicians have a term, “there is no alternative” or TINA. It has come to mean that “there is no alternative” to free markets, free trade, and globalization, if our society is to prosper. They stress TINA to keep ordinary people from seeing that we need to constrain the worst of free market excesses.

The unbridled free market has to die.

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Where are We Going in 2015?

2015 got off to an early start here at the Global Headquarters of Wrong, when the smoke alarm system went off at 5:45 am. Naturally, our guest revelers were still tucked in their beds, trying to sleep off too much Vueve Clicot and caviar, and there was no smoke. It fell to Wrongo to disarm the system, change a smoke detector battery, and subsequently explain to the human who called from the central alarm call center that indeed, there was no fire.

So, despite Wrongo’s plan to avoid posts until his company leaves, here, for your amusement is a quote that describes a point in the past, and that might yet be prophetic for 2015:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

The opening paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens. The two cities referred to were London and Paris during the French Revolution that lasted 10 years, from 1789 to 1799. The book was written in 1859, seventy years after the start of the revolution.

Today, the two cities could be Washington DC and any one (or more) of the following: Teheran, Beijing, Moscow, Mumbai, or Riyadh.

But the domestic problems and burgeoning turmoil in the US today is loosely analogous to what France was going through in the 18th Century.

What are the chances that the outcome will be similar?

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Happy New Year!

Today is the Wrongologist’s birthday. That’s right, nearly everyone in the civilized world tries to have a drink with Wrongo on New Year’s Eve. It makes New Year’s Eve among his favorite holidays.

Christmas, not so much. The double bind that Christmas has become is summed up by those annual Lexus commercials. They promise that if you’re nice enough to Santa, or if your spouse truly loves you, there could be a $50,000 luxury car outside, wrapped in a bow.

Really? Tell that to the average American (whose wages haven’t gone up, even though much of their daily living costs have increased) that the reason they don’t have a Lexus waiting for them is that their spouse or significant other just doesn’t love them enough.

It is easy to hate what Christmas has become here at the end stage of the Empire.

But New Year’s is different. Here is Johnny Swim, the Wrongologist’s favorite new musical group of 2014, singing a song written by Frank Loesser in 1947, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”:

Happy New Year, and thanks to all of those who read this blog.

No need for a long list of resolutions that we would all just break in January. Let’s settle for a wish that 2015 brings each of us a better economy, better health, and fewer global crises to worry about.

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

“The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.“ – George Carlin

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.” – Shirley Temple

“What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.” – Phyllis Diller

The Wrongologist blog is now officially on a holiday schedule. There may or may not be posts between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We hope that those of you who had to travel arrived safely and will return safely, and we wish you a good holiday break!

Here’s to a better 2015, when we return hopefully refreshed, ready, willing and able to deal with all of the world’s crap problems as they come at us. Wishing you the absolute best for 2015! Your parting gif includes a few more Christmas tunes.

Here is “Silent Night, a Montage” by The Temptations, recorded in 1980 by Berry Gordy. Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin had left the group by the time this was recorded. It’s still great:

Here is “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey:

Let’s close with John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” It was recorded in October 1971, with Phil Spector. The children singing in the background were from the Harlem Community Choir:

And, so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong
And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let’s stop all the fight

When you open your gifts today and then when you eat your dinner, think of those who are struggling. Think of those displaced by war. Think about what we can do to change all that. Let those thoughts guide you through 2015 and beyond.

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