Author: hankkalet

I should have posted this the other day, but better late than never. With three states granting marriage equality at the ballot box and a fourth refusing to enshrine discimination in its constitution, New Jersey marriage-equality supporters have their hopes up. Read my piece in NJ Spotlight.

Every 10 years, stats are required to redraw its congressional districts to account for shifts in population.

In New Jersey, it is done by a bipartisan panel that was created to avoid the kind of gerrymandering seen in other states, where the majority political party uses redistricting to entrench their own incumbents and limit the ability of their opponents to win seats.

And while this approach has been successful, as far as politics is concerned, no one can say that gerrymandering does not occur and that the process has not been created with specific outcomes in mind. In New Jersey, redistricting has become a bipartisan incumbent protection racket.

On Tuesday, voters — many of whom consistently tell pollsters they desire real change — sent 11 men back to Washington. The only incumbent who will not be in office come January when the new House of Representatives is sworn in is Steve Rothman, who got caught in the new electoral math — the state lost a seat in the House because of the shifting population nationally. Eleven of the remaining 12 served the last two years — at least — as members of the House of Representatives, a body that nationally has an approval rating down in the teens. (The 12th, Donald Payne Jr., is the son of the longtime Congressman from Newark, who died in March.)

And it’s not just that every New Jersey House incumbent won. They won big. The closest race — between first-term incumbent Jon Runyon and Democrat Shelly Adler — was not even all that close. Runyon won by 9 percentage points (53.8 percent to 44.8 percent). Six incumbents won more than two thirds of the vote and a seventh, Frank Pallone, nearly crossed that threshold. The others — all Republicans — won between 55 and 59 percent in their districts.

To me, this proves the redistricting process a failure. Many of the state’s Congressional representatives do a good job, but a healthy political system demands a legitimate competition among candidates and not the farce we have created that allows incumbents to hold their seats indefinitely with only token opposition every two years.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&contentId=us/2011/11/03/nats-occupy-oakland-violence.ktvuThe 2012 presidential election is going to be remembered for a lot of things. It is the first election in our history that did not feature a white Protestant on the ballot. It is likely to be one of the closest in history. And it is occuring at a precipitous moment in our economic history.

And yet, with all of the attention and expectations surrounding tomorrow’s vote, a key issue remains off our radar: The militarization of American society.

A piece in today’s New York Times raises this — reminding readers of President Eisenhower’s warning as he left office that the military-industrial complex was perhaps the greatest threat to the American way of life, though it seems to me it understates just how pervasive the influence has become.

Aaron B. O’Connell, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, says the damage is primarily spiritual, saying the impact that the military has on the economy has not been as great as expected:

The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from 14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such cuts would entail.

Nor has the private sector infected foreign policy in the way that Eisenhower warned. Foreign policy has become increasingly reliant on military solutions since World War II, but we are a long way from the Marines’ repeated occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century, when commercial interests influenced military action. Of all the criticisms of the 2003 Iraq war, the idea that it was done to somehow magically decrease the cost of oil is the least credible. Though it’s true that mercenaries and contractors have exploited the wars of the past decade, hard decisions about the use of military force are made today much as they were in Eisenhower’s day: by the president, advised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, and then more or less rubber-stamped by Congress. Corporations do not get a vote, at least not yet.

That’s not exactly true. Corporations do not get a vote, but they do have a lot of money and have been influencing elections for decades with a commensurate influence on policy. Oil and other natural resources drive our policy in the Middle East and parts of Africa — including which leaders we back and where we send our troops.

But this seems obvious. Less obvious are the “spiritual ways” in which the military has infected the culture:

From lawmakers’ constant use of “support our troops” to justify defense spending, to TV programs and video games like “NCIS,” “Homeland” and “Call of Duty,” to NBC’s shameful and unreal reality show “Stars Earn Stripes,” Americans are subjected to a daily diet of stories that valorize the military while the storytellers pursue their own opportunistic political and commercial agendas.

Again, this may understate things. The militarization of our culture goes beyond even teh most subtle impacts that the military has and includes the shift in policing. Every police department in the country, it seems, has a massive tactical unit — a SWAT team on steroids, if you will — that has turned out streets into war zones. We can argue what the trigger is — whether the drug trade or the police started this ugly cycle — but the language, equipment and focus has moved from police to police state, to a sense that law enforcement is just a local version of the military.

Radley Balko, writing in The Huffington Post last year, described the genesis of the new domestic military:

The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America’s drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.

A bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George Bush enacted a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the military and domestic police to cooperate in the government’s ongoing campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, “The detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the Department of Defense.”

The result is a dangerous shift in the way police do their jobs and in how they deal with the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting.

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

This shift can be seen in the way police describe their mission and use of these new military toys. As The Daily Beast reported last year,

Law enforcement officials say the armored vehicles, assault weapons, and combat uniforms used by their officers provide a public safety benefit beyond their advertised capabilities, creating a sort of “shock and awe” experience they hope will encourage suspects to surrender more quickly.

“The only time I hear the complaint of ‘God, you guys look scary’ is if the incident turns out to be nothing,” says West Hartford, Conn., Police Lt. Jeremy Clark, who organizes an annual SWAT competition.

This argument, of course, mirrors the one always used when civil liberties are being breached –“If you haven’t done anything wrong….”

The impact, of course, was most obvious in the response to the Occupy protests, as Ruben Navarrette pointed out in November 2011.

There is an online petition calling on California Gov. Jerry Brown to send the National Guard to protect Occupy Oakland protesters from the city’s police department.

In recent weeks, hundreds of protesters in Oakland have clashed with police officers in riot gear. In one tragic incident, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran named Scott Olsen was critically injured when he was hit in the head by a teargas canister at close range.

Even compared to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and other protests around the country, what’s happening in Oakland shocks the senses. Judging from video and firsthand accounts, the police in that city have been especially brutal in dealing with the protesters.

It was the kind of scenes we had witnessed coming from Tunisia, Egypt and other crumbling dictatorships, places where there is no distinction between the police and the military and where guns are used to protect those in power.

As Navarrette says,

The siege in Oakland, where police have repeatedly clashed with protesters, reminds us that there’s one other thing that police officers shouldn’t do: impersonate soldiers.

The point is, police should not be engaged in shock and awe. They should not be waging war on our city streets. We should not be spending millions to equip them with drones and tanks and other military vehicles. We should use these tools only when necessary and would probably be better off if we were to replace this hardware spending with money for more police officers, increased patrols and community policing initiatives that make officers a part of the communities they are supposed to protect.

“Police officers,” Navarrette said,

have the power to either make their job simpler or more difficult. If they treat people well and build relations, people will cooperate. They’ll have leads, witnesses and informants. But if they see the people they’re supposed to “protect and serve” the way an occupying army sees the native population, they’re going to encounter resistance, suspicion, defiance and other things that make their job harder. That’s a recipe for chaos.

But this is not something we have been hearing from either of the major party candidates, both of whom lend their tacit support to this militarization. It is too late for this election season, but it is not too late overall. We need to make it clear that we want our police to be police, to protect and serve and not to be domestic soldiers doing battle with our fellow citizens.

From The Tent City Project blog, a link to The Asbury Park Press story on how the tent encampment made out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Andrew Cuomo is right. Speaking on Rachel Maddow last night, the New York governor said the recent spate of extreme weather not only proves the existence of climate change, but demands action.

We now have 100-year floods every two years. So, there’s the explanations of “this is a fluke” and “it’s gone and that’s it.” I don’t believe it. There’s a frequency in these extreme weather conditions. It’s getting worse. It’s getting worse all over the globe. It’s getting worse in this country. and I think we have to accept the reality.

There will be significant costs — both in money (billions of dollars) and in human life, he said. The design of the city was based on weather patterns that existed at an earlier time.

When this city was designed, we did not anticipate this problem because we didn’t have this problem when this city was designed. And now you take our greatest strength, which is New York’s coastal environment — that’s what made New York New York, right? New York Harbor, Hudson River, to the Erie Canal, and you were out west. That was New York. What made Manhattan Manhattan was the underground infrastructure, that engineering marvel. Once you now say, well, that can flood, and you can’t even find a way to pump out the water, you take the greatest asset and you make it a liability, and it’s a frightening premise to deal with, you know? I think that’s one of the reasons why denial is so much easier, because once you say, yes, extreme weather is here to say, we have to redesign this environment, well that’s a big undertaking and it’s threatening to many.

Cuomo believes global warming has been driven by human action, but he is willing to put that part of the discussion on the backburner because dealing with the fallout is too great a need to be derailed by a debate that should not even be happening.

The death toll is increasing (in the United States and in the Carribean), the Jersey Shore is devastated (Long Beach Island has been shut down and is being patrolled by the National Guard), Staten Island is under water. And, yes, this particular storm cannot be attributed specifically to climate change but, as Cuomo said, it was part of a larger pattern.

We can pretend that nothing is happening. We can whine about rising gas prices and electric prices and demand the right to drive as often and as far as we like in cars that suck down fuel. We can build on and pave over the remaining open land, leaving storm waters with nowhere to go. And so on.

Or we can pull back, redesign our economy with a focus on local, redesign our communities to lessen the need to drive. We can opt for extensive conservation efforts and expand our use of alternative energies (wind, solar, etc.), moving away from fossil fuel and extractive energy sources.

Will any of this happen? Not as long as the coal and oil industries control our energy policy and the economy remains the plaything of multinational corporations.

At the very least, we are going to have to accept that rising sea levels, high energy prices and the growing prevalence of extreme weather events have become the new normal.