Month: March 2015

I hope that you don’t spend your time listening to right-wing radio. I know that I don’t spend my time that way, although I do sometimes indulge on the rare occasions that I take a road trip during the work week. Let’s take a look at one example of what is being broadcast into the heartland.

“We’ve got somebody in the White House who effectively, peace be upon him, acts like a Muslim and a Marxist the same time,” [Cliff] Kincaid told host Rick Wiles, before calling Secretary of State John Kerry “an agent of Hanoi” who is just one of many “people in positions of power who are working actively for the enemies of the United States.”

Wiles laid out a scenario where Obama refuses to leave office after his second term: “This guy is so wacked-out, if he could create a crisis, I think he would stay in the White House.”

Kincaid said that while he doesn’t know if the president would attempt to stay in office, he believes Obama is “working actively for the enemies of the United States, and Iran is just one of them. I would include in that China, I would include in that Russia, global Islam; it’s going to be tough to survive these last two years. We need the help of God here.”

“This is guy is mentally unstable,” Wiles said of Obama. “He’s not incompetent, he knows exactly what he was doing. Hitler was wacked-out and Hitler was very competent in carrying out his agenda but he was mentally insane. I don’t think Barack Obama is a mentally stable person. I think he is an extremely dangerous man.”

I see progressives criticize the president on a daily basis, including some very uncharitable estimations of his true intentions. I certainly can remember some zany left-wing theories about the presidency of George W. Bush, too. But there really wasn’t anything on this level being broadcast on radio.

Let’s take a look at Cliff Kincaid’s next theory:

I think he’s wacked-out in the sense that I think if we go back to his history, especially in Hawaii when he came under the influence of the Communist Frank Marshall Davis who was himself a dope-smoker and an alcoholic, Obama we know was a member of the ‘Choom Gang.’ He was a heavy marijuana user. That had to have an effect on him. Maybe it’s clouded him some way, it enabled Davis to brainwash him. Of course we know he was raised partly as a Muslim. These are the ingredients that went into the combustible material that we see in the White House today, and the whole thing is threatening to explode.

By the way, Cliff Kincaid runs an organization called Accuracy in Media.

On Sunday the Boston Globe printed an opinion column from MoveOn’s Anna Galland in which she urged Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president:

Our country will be better off if she does. She would be a strong candidate — one who injects valuable ideas into the conversation and ensures the kind of debate our country needs. And she could win.  Put simply, this moment was made for Elizabeth Warren.

The Globe also published a piece by Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green in which he began by wistfully observing, “Although she took her time doing it, Elizabeth Warren seems to have finally convinced the panting obsessives of the Washington press corps that she isn’t going to run for president next year. Her decision is a big loss for Democrats…“, before (somewhat oddly) proceeding to list all the reasons he thought Warren should run anyway.

And the Globe published an essay from The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner in which he predicted that if Sen. Warren ran for president, “she would take the party rank-and-file by storm“.  This after his opening assertion, “I take Elizabeth Warren at her word that she doesn’t want to run for president in 2016 and is unlikely to become a candidate any time soon“.

To top it off (actually, to lead it off—the Globe printed this editorial above the fold and on the front page of its “Ideas” section, when its customary practice is to keep editorials inside, at the end of the section), the Globe ran an editorial calling on, nay, beseeching Sen. Warren to reconsider her decision not to run for president, concluding (somewhat weakly) that “Warren could enrich the political process for years to come” if she did change her mind.

Other people have made this point more quickly and more articulately than I, but this is bad advice to Warren that comes off as an embarrassing combination of hometown boosterism and out-of-touch liberal Massachusetts arrogance.

Sen. Warren—remarkably for a freshman senator—effectively controls Democratic appointments to high-ranking banking and finance positions (e.g., the Federal Reserve and Dept. of Treasury) in the Obama administration.  On the issues she cares about, she not only can get media attention any time she speaks, she also has the power to bend almost any piece of legislation towards the ends she supports.  It makes no sense for her to give up that power for a quixotic campaign against a hugely (unprecedentedly) popular party leader.

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

Centuries in the making, Western racism came to “a hideous fruition” in the 20th century:

“Its two most persistent and malignant manifestations—the color-coded or white supremacist variety and antisemitism in its naturalistic or secular form—both reached their logical extremes.  White supremacy attained its fullest ideological and institutional development in the southern United States between the 1890s and the 1950s, and in South Africa between the 1910s and the 1980s, but especially after 1948.  Antisemitism of course reached its horrendous climax in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.” (p. 99)

Fredrickson defines these three historical examples as “overtly racist regimes” and distinguishes them from “the general run of ethnically pluralistic societies in which racial prejudice contributes significantly to social stratification“. (p. 100-101)  “Overtly racist regimes”, according to Fredrickson, have the following characteristics:

   
1. “There is an official ideology that is explicitly racist.“

   

2. “This sense of radical difference and alienation is most clearly and dramatically expressed in laws forbidding interracial marriage.“

   

3. “Social segregation is mandated by law and not merely the product of custom or private act of discrimination that are tolerated by the state.“

   

4. “To the extent that the polity is formally democratic, outgroup members are excluded from holding public office or even exercising the franchise.“

   

5. “The access that they have to resources and economic opportunities is so limited that most of those in the stigmatized category are either kept in poverty or deliberately impoverished.” (p. 101)

Fredrickson treats this definition with the rigor of a mathematical proof, articulating how it does and does not apply to various historical regimes:

“This ideal type of an ‘overtly racist regime’ applies quite well to the American South in the heyday of Jim Crow, to South Africa under apartheid, and to Nazi Germany.  Nowhere else were the political and legal potentialities of racism so fully realized.”

He then take a survey through time and space—French and Portuguese colonial possessions, Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American societies with significant black or Indian populations, the northern United States after Reconstruction and through the 20th century, Austria, Poland and other central and eastern European nations where antisemitism was endemic throughout the 1900s, Czarist Russia—to prove that other national regimes do not meet all of the conditions required to “qualify” as an overtly racist regime.

So the question then arises (and will be discussed further in the next post):  why these three countries at those particular times, and not any others?

Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com

Yes, it’s true. Some people are afraid that too much “diversity” on our TV programming over the last year is hurting the chances of white actors to find work. No, really, they are.

This has been a breakthrough year for diversity in television. Fox’s Empire became a ratings marvel. ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder vaulted into the same stratosphere of success as its Shondaland sibling Scandal. Comedies like Black-ish, Jane the Virgin, and Fresh off the Boat found their footing and solid ratings. […]

But not everyone sees this as progress. On Tuesday night, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva made it abundantly clear with a strange piece titled “Pilots 2015: The Year Of Ethnic Castings — About Time Or Too Much Of Good Thing?”

Yes, those awful blacks and browns are ruining the beautiful job opportunities of white people, once again.

Instead of opening the field for actors of any race to compete for any role in a color-blind manner, there has been a significant number of parts designated as ethnic this year, making them off-limits for Caucasian actors, some agents signal. Many pilot characters this year were listed as open to all ethnicities, but when reps would call to inquire about an actor submission, they frequently have been told that only non-Caucasian actors would be considered. “Basically 50% of the roles in a pilot have to be ethnic, and the mandate goes all the way down to guest parts,” one talent representative said.

I feel awful. Hollywood’s oppression of the white race is simply too much to bear – or is it? I mean, c’mon, people, white men dominate the big and small screen and the statistics prove it:

Why Hollywood is frozen in the 1950s: White men are still king of the silver screen with lead roles going to just 26% of women and 11% of minorities

Hollywood Diversity Report paints picture of industry ‘woefully out of touch’
Minorities 36 percent of U.S. population, but feature much less in film and TV
Films and TV with diverse casts and crew do better commercially

The 2014 Hollywood Diversity Report released this week examines the gender and race of actors, directors and writers of film and television.

It reveals an industry that is still dominated by white men, with women and minorities dramatically underrepresented both on and off screen. […]

The study found that minorities and women were leads, directors, writers and creators in films and television programs far less often than would be expected given they make up more than 36 percent and slightly more than 50 percent of the overall U.S. population respectively.

That study of the 172 largest grossing US produced films of 2011 and “1061 television shows from the 2011-2012 season from broadcast and cable networks, including dramas, comedies, and reality television: is supported by this year’s diversity study which looked at the 2013 season. Guess what? Things stayed pretty much the same – whites, especially white men, ruled. Just look at these charts:

Here’s the chart of broadcast scripted shows on Cable for 2013 (Figure 33, on page 23 of 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report).

Seventy-seven percent of all roles went to white actors on cable that year, but the percentage was even higher on network shows – 81% of all roles went to whites in 2013:

So why are a few anonymous agents claiming that a their clients are being discriminated against merely because there were a small number of racially diverse hit shows in 2014? Apparently they feel deeply threatened by the “blackening” of Hollywood if you believe this tripe from Deadline’s Ms. Andreeva.

But there were more broadcast drama pilots than ever whose leads had been designated as black this year. That includes Fox medical drama Rosewood, toplined by Morris Chestnut, and CBS civil rights crime drama For Justice, starring Anika Noni Rose. Uncle Buck was rebooted by ABC specifically as a black family sitcom, with Mike Epps in the title role originated by John Candy. NBC opted to make the lead couple in its drama about diverse couples Love Is A Four Letter Word black in picking up the pilot. (It had been originally conceived as Caucasian.) After a post-table read recasting of the female role, the two leads went to Cynthia McWilliams and Rockmond Dunbar.

Oh the horror, the horror.

Do these people really believe the bullpuckey they are putting out that, in effect, white actors are now magically – in one year’s time – the victims of ‘reverse racism?’ That the dominance of white actors on America’s airwaves has suddenly disappeared? I highly doubt it. This smacks of institutional racism at it’s worst, only this time the institution is the American Entertainment Industry, supposedly a bastion of liberalism. Well to Nellie Andreeva, and her sources, i.e., those agents and any white actors whining (anonymously) about discrimination caused by the casting of a few more non-whites on cable and network shows, let me just say this: “Go break a leg!”

Is anyone else really disappointed to see another 5-4 Supreme Court decision on a contentious issue? The conservatives on the Court just won’t relent on any front. They always want to send the message that they’re willing to overturn every precedent if only they can get one more judge. But there’s value in having the Court act as uniformly as possible, if only so people will respect their decisions as something more than just a reflection of raw partisan power.

Jonathan Chait is uncomfortable with the tone of progressive mockery.

"You signed up for your employer-sponsored health insurance" is a pretty weak gotcha to throw at Ted Cruz.

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) March 24, 2015

It seems like everyone on the left is making fun of Senator Ted Cruz for signing up for ObamaCare. But, is it really ObamaCare if Cruz is only accepting his employer-provided (or -sponsored) health insurance? Even if it is technically ObamaCare, is this really an analogous situation to someone who loses employer-provided health care and must seek insurance on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges?

Are we lefties being a little too clever in calling Ted Cruz a hypocrite?

The answer is ‘no,’ not really. The mockery of Ted Cruz is basically fair.

If he wants insurance through his employer, which is his right, he has to get it through the exchanges, but his experience is still the same as anyone else whose spouse loses the family’s health coverage. You go see what is available on the exchanges and what, if any, subsidies will be available to you and your family. If Cruz doesn’t want any benefit from being a member of Congress or any kind of subsidy, nothing is stopping him or his wife from calling up an insurance company directly and getting insurance outside of the exchanges.

It’s obligatory for me to mention that the reason that Ted Cruz had to get his congressional health care benefit through the exchanges is because Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment to the Affordable Care Act compelling members of Congress to use the exchanges. He thought the Democrats would vote his amendment down, but they happily accepted it. The price for that is that, now, whenever a Republican member of Congress uses their health benefit we get to point at them, laugh, and call them hypocrites.

But it is more than just a game of Gotcha!

Members of Congress have great health benefits, and they get their insurance off exchanges used by ordinary citizens. Ted Cruz will be perfectly satisfied with his coverage but, by his own rhetoric, his whole family should be in the gravest peril.

When people lose their jobs, they can now get good insurance because of ObamaCare. That’s what Ted Cruz will be doing, and it’s what he doesn’t want tens of millions of Americans to be able to do.

Cruz deserves this mockery. It is making the points it is supposed to make, both about the politician and the health care law.

This actually hurt my brain:

In an interview on Tuesday with the Texas Tribune, the newly-minted presidential candidate [Senator Ted Cruz] compared himself to the Galileo when discussing, of all things, whether climate change was actually occurring.

“Today the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-Earthers,” Cruz said. “You know it used to be it is accepted scientific wisdom the Earth is flat, and this heretic named Galileo was branded a denier.”

I had to read that a few times, but then I realized that reading it was actually killing my brain cells and I had to stop.

I know that I enjoy the unique advantage of having a degree in philosophy, but I really don’t expect presidential candidates to engage in the The Myth of the Flat Earth. I’m discouraged that I need to introduce you to this concept:

The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical.

During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among the educated was almost nonexistent…

The dispute between the papacy and Galileo was about whether the Sun orbited the Earth or the Earth orbited the Sun. It had absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the Earth.

So, that’s error number one in Cruz’s retelling of history. Error number two is that he can talk about “accepted scientific wisdom” in the context of the 16th and early 17th-Century. When we talk about “science,” we are talking about a method of inquiry that wasn’t really understood until the 19th Century. Galileo wasn’t arguing with “scientists” or any kind of scientific consensus. He was arguing with theologians and priests. A fairer way of looking at it is that most people assumed that the Sun and stars orbited the Earth, and that view was supported by respected authorities like Aristotle and Ptolemy.

The third error is to consider Galileo to be the equivalent of a modern-day climate science denier. What distinguished Galileo from his Catholic (and Protestant) detractors was his willingness to go where the empirical evidence led him, even if it contradicted common wisdom and a few passages of scripture. He was using the scientific method at a time when the scientific method wasn’t yet a “thing.” The modern-day equivalent to Galileo is a scientist, not an unscrupulous senator from a carbon-rich state.

What Cruz was attempting to say is that common wisdom can be wrong, and most people used to believe that the Earth was the center of the Solar System and the Universe. If most people could be wrong in the past, then most scientists can be wrong today.

That’s true.

Why he couldn’t just say that instead of torturing the shit out of history and damaging my head?

It should be remembered, however, that Galileo, the one using the scientific method, turned out to be correct. The theologians, the ones relying on scripture and common sense, turned out to be wrong. So, while it’s certainly true that there can be a consensus among learned people that is incorrect, you’ll do better putting your money on the scientists than on people going with their gut.

And if one side is simply denying that the scientists know better how to interpret the evidence? And if that side has a financial stake in people not believing the science?

This isn’t really that hard to figure out.

(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)

How is it, Fredrickson asks, that “pre-Darwinian scientific racism flowered in France and the United States” (p. 68)—nation-states that were heirs to revolutions based on the notion of equal rights for all citizens—much more so than in a constitutional monarchy like England?

His answer is that it is partly because of this emerging civic nationalist ideology that Western racism continues to rise throughout the nineteenth century.

“The one exclusionary principle that could be readily accepted by civic nationalists was biological unfitness for full citizenship.  The precedent of excluding women, children, and the insane from the electorate and denying them equality under the law could be applied to racial groups deemed by science to be incompetent to exercise the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship.  In France, the question was theoretical because there were no significant racial minorities.  But in the United States a true ‘Herrenvolk democracy’ emerged during the Jacksonian period, when the right to vote was extended to all white males and denied to virtually all blacks, including some who had previously voted under a franchise restricted to property holders.” (p. 68-69)

Germany in the 1800s was, for Fredrickson’s purposes, largely defined by its reaction against Enlightenment universalism and the new civic nationalism of the French—not surprisingly, given what Napoleon’s armies did to the Germans.

“During the course of the nineteenth century, the Germans, more than any other western Europeans, repudiated the civic nationalist ideal inspired by the Enlightenment and the eighteenth-century revolutions in favor of a concept of national membership based predominantly on ethnic origins rather than human rights.  Defining themselves culturally and linguistically rather than in terms of territorially based rights of citizenship originally served as compensation for the failure of the German-speaking peoples to unify politically and become a single nation-state.” (p. 69)

In looking at the development over time of racism as an ideology, Fredrickson observes that “racism is always nationally specific” and then narrows his focus to “…the United States and Germany in the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth…” when the political projects that “…brought racism to ideological fruition and gave it the independent capacity to shape the societies and polities of the United States and Germany…” arose as “…organized efforts to reverse or limit the emancipation of blacks in the former country and of Jews in the latter.” (p. 75)

After tracing the outlines of the (ultimately failed, or at best, limited) attempts at emancipation in each country, Fredrickson looks at the similarities and differences between the two cases.  First, the similarities:

   
• “In both cases…federalism served as an obstacle to equal citizenship.” (p. 82)

   

• “(R)apid industrialization and economic growth gave rise to situations where members of the majority were in competition or at least potential competition with members of the outgroup for jobs or other economic opportunities—something that would have been inconceivable in the era of the ghetto and the slave plantation.” (p. 82)

   

• “(T)he success of emancipation depended on the fortunes of a liberal-to-radical political movement.” (p. 83)

   

• As those liberal movements waned, both countries experienced “the rise of parties and factions committed to exploiting Negrophobia or antisemitism.” (p. 84)

   

• Finally, “although it is more accidental or contingent than the other similarities, both German Jews and American blacks were impeded in their struggles for equality by the international economic downturn that began in 1873.” (p. 84-85)

And then the differences, which Fredrickson argues, “are even more significant” (p. 86):

   
• “(T)he economic and social competition set off by emancipation involved different classes or strata of society.”  (Freed slaves in the US competing mainly with poor and working-class whites, German Jews competing with middle-class and professional gentiles.)

   

• “In Germany, volkisch nationalism was explicitly promoted as antithetical to liberalism and the heritage of the Enlightenment…. (meanwhile) American white supremacist ideology was based on an interpretation (or distortion) of the Enlightenment philosophy on which the nation was founded.  Science was expected to determine a group’s unfitness for full citizenship before it could be excluded.  German antisemitism, on the other hand, was based on a rejection of rationalism, universalism, and the political values that went with them.” (p. 91-92)

In comparing the two nations, Fredrickson concludes that in a national snapshot taken in 1900 CE, “there is no question that the American color line was much more rigid than the barriers between Jews and gentiles in Germany” and then suggests, with a touch of foreshadowing, that the “logical outcome of the blood-based folk nationalism increasingly embraced by the Germans was the total exclusion or elimination of the Jews” whereas “the American conception of citizenship had to include blacks once their full humanity was acknowledged“. (p. 93-94)

He hastens to add that 20th century developments—Germany’s “Final Solution” and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the United States—were not inevitable.  “Historical preconditions do not usually become determinants unless there are some intervening circumstances or contingencies“. (p. 94)

 

Crossposted at: MassCommons.wordpress.com

Now this story I’m about to unfold took place back in the early nineties–just about the time of our conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis. I only mention it ’cause sometimes there’s a man–I won’t say a hero, ’cause what’s a hero?–but sometimes there’s a man……and I’m talkin’ about Richard Cohen here– sometimes there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place, he fits right in there–and that’s Richard Cohen, in Washington DC…Richard Cohen was certainly that–quite possibly the laziest journalist in the District of Columbia…which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide–but sometimes there’s a man…sometimes there’s a man.

Lost my train of thought here. But —-aw hell, I done introduced him enough.

…when President George H.W. Bush sabotaged Lawrence Walsh’s probe by issuing six Iran-Contra pardons on Christmas Eve 1992, prominent journalists praised Bush’s actions. They brushed aside Walsh’s complaint that the move was the final act in a long-running cover-up that protected a secret history of criminal behavior and Bush’s personal role.

“Liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many of his colleagues when he defended Bush’s fatal blow against the Iran-Contra investigation. Cohen especially liked Bush’s pardon of former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who had been indicted for obstruction of justice but was popular around Washington.

In a Dec. 30, 1992, column, Cohen said his view was colored by how impressed he was when he would see Weinberger in the Georgetown Safeway store, pushing his own shopping cart.

“Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense – which is the way much of official Washington saw him,” Cohen wrote. “Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me.”

Because nothing says “candid” like lying “under oath to Congress and congressional investigators three times in 1987” about your “advance knowledge of a secret arms shipment to Iran and secret Saudi funding for the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels.”

Not if you squeeze eggplants at the same Safeway as Richard Cohen, anyway.

As a lawyer you quickly learn that the terms “justice” and the “American legal system” are not synonymous. Far from it. In far too many respects, our so-called “Justice System” deals primarily with power and authority and privilege. When justice manages to wedge its foot in the door it’s rare and unusual event, especially for those with the wrong color skin and the least financial resources.

The emotional core of this rant deals with three people and the result of their interactions with our criminal injustice system: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Ethan Couch. What’s that you say? Those first two names I’m sure you recognize. But Ethan who? Well, I will get to him.

But first let me make the case that our legal system is broken and any chance we have of ameliorating the damage it is doing to our nation’s citizens is the collective responsibility of all of us. Not just those who have traditionally fought for civil rights and against the burden of inequality under the law, but those of us who have for far too long sat on the sidelines.

(cont.)
Opening Statement

In America, we call the myriad array of law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, Courts and penal Institutions responsible for arresting, indicting, convicting and punishing people for violations of our criminal laws, our “Justice System.” Why do we call it that? Because in theory, the laws are applied equally, and at every step pf the process from investigations to arrests to trial to convictions and to sentences, every person is treated equally under the law. It makes the claim, and promotes the ideal, that our laws are applied such that no group of people, regardless of their “race, color or creed” (to use an expression from our past) is the subject of harassment, scapegoating or active discrimination by those involved in the system under which charges against them are adjudicated. In theory, every person is viewed as innocent until proven guilty, bias is weeded out, and in the end justice is served.

In fact, that term “Justice System” is at best a euphemism, and at worst a lie, one which seeks to mask the reality of what occurs every day on the street and in countless courts at the federal, state, county and local level. I am far from the first person to note the inequality in outcomes our “Justice System” dispenses depending on wealth and race, nor will I be the last.

But Shaun’s diary stirred within me, as I hope it did within you a great sensation of anger. Anger not only of the betrayal of the ideals by our institutions responsible for meting out justice in our society, anger not only at those who actively participate in perpetuating the inequality in outcomes between rich and poor, white and black, but also anger at our collective failure to address this travesty we call our justice system and its inherent racism, classism, sexism and so forth which makes a mockery of the claim we live in a just and fair society.

While there are many biases that infect our legislative, executive and judicial institutions with respect to the enforcement of laws, I intend to focus on those that specifically deal with the treatment of individuals who at some point in their lives come across an officer of the law, with an emphasis on the inherent racism embedded in our law enforcement agencies and our court, and the corrupting influence of wealth and privilege on who faces “justice” for their crimes and who does not.

Argument

It’s not a surprise that money buys “justice” (i.e., the more money you have the more likely charges against you will be dismissed, or reduced and any penalties for your crimes limited to fines and probation at the most. Indeed the greatest advantage of wealth is the power to intimidate or cause law enforcement to refuse to charge you with any crimes at all. Just look at the number of Wall Street bankers who have been jailed for crimes that include outright fraud, conspiracy, theft, and money laundering for organized crime such as the Mexican drug cartels. Hordes of executives have violated US laws regarding dealings with nations such as Iran, but have any of them been personally indicted. What you say you haven’t heard of any? What a shock.

Criminal proceedings were brought against Wachovia, though not against any individual, but the case never came to court. In March 2010, Wachovia settled the biggest action brought under the US bank secrecy act, through the US district court in Miami. Now that the year’s “deferred prosecution” has expired, the bank is in effect in the clear. It paid federal authorities $110m in forfeiture, for allowing transactions later proved to be connected to drug smuggling, and incurred a $50m fine for failing to monitor cash used to ship 22 tons of cocaine.

More shocking, and more important, the bank was sanctioned for failing to apply the proper anti-laundering strictures to the transfer of $378.4bn – a sum equivalent to one-third of Mexico’s gross national product – into dollar accounts from so-called casas de cambio (CDCs) in Mexico, currency exchange houses with which the bank did business.

Ah, the privileges of being too big to fail (and the privilege of committing crimes for the benefit of such corporations and one’s own yearly bonus check). Poverty, on the other hand results in convictions or plea deals, in which by selling pot to your friends or shoplifting, you may end up serving a lengthy prison sentence, time after time.

Race? That simply adds two strikes against you right off the bat as the recent Department of Justice report regarding the ginned up arrests of African Americans in Ferguson, MO demonstrates. Now if you have enough money, maybe you can avoid conviction, even if you are black or brown. Maybe. But you will always be a pariah.

And of course, in many cases, African Americans never get a chance to deal with the justice system, because they are killed outright by white by white men with guns. You can start out the victim, but if your melanin content is too high, well, you get labeled a criminal even if you are shot down like a dog in the street. On the other hand, if you are white and wealthy – well, let’s just say you can get away with murder.

Which brings us to the three people I mentioned at the beginning of this diatribe …

Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and The Affluenza Guy

There’s not a lot I need to say about the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases that hasn’t already been said. Suffice it to say two black teenage unarmed youth were shot and killed by older white men, white men who initiated the confrontations that ended in senseless tragedy. In Michael Brown’s case, his killer never had to face a jury of his peers. In what many consider one of the the most biased and racist grand jury proceedings in American history, Michael Browns killer, Darren Wilson, the supposed target of the District Attorney Robert McCulloch’s Grand Jury investigation, was presented as the victim of a monstrous, beastly attack by an unarmed Michael Brown, rather than a potential defendant in a murder case.

Trayvon Martin died at the hands of a wannabe cop, George Zimmerman, but only after massive public pressure did the Florida State Attorney’s office indict him for the vigilante killing of a young man who was relentlessly smeared in the media for the sin of wearing a hoodie. That trial also played out both tragedy and farce. Arguably, it was either the most incompetent case put on by a prosecutor of a nut job who shot an unarmed boy through the heart with his gun after stalking him, or a deliberate attempt to lose the case and let Zimmerman walk.

Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman have become symbols of the racism inherent in our criminal “justice” system, but they are hardly the only ones. Which bring s me to that rich kid from Texas, Ethan Couch, a case where wealth and the defendant’s white skin allowed a person who committed murder to escape any real punishment for his crimes.

Ethan Couch, with a blood alcohol content three time the legal limit drove his truck off the road and into a stalled car, its passengers and two women (mother and daughter) who had come out of their nearby home to aid the people in that stalled car. The end result: four people ended up dead, another one ended up with a traumatic brain injury and another had serious injuries. At trial his attorneys literally argued that his spoiled childhood should justify leniency on the part of the judge for these crimes. From the testimony of the expert psychiatrist who testified that Couch should not be held liable because of poor parenting and the burden of growing up rich:

He said Couch got whatever he wanted. As an example, Miller said Couch’s parents gave no punishment after police ticketed the then-15-year-old when he was found in a parked pickup with a passed out, undressed 14-year-old girl.

Miller also pointed out that Couch was allowed to drive at 13. He said the teen was emotionally flat and needed years of therapy. At the time of the fatal wreck, Couch had a blood alcohol content of .24, said Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson. It is illegal for a minor to drive with any amount of alcohol in his or her system.

The prosecutors in the Couch case wanted a sentence of twenty years in prison. The judge gave poor little Ethan only ten years – of probation (oh and rehab) – for the deaths of four people, and serious life-threatening and life altering injuries to two others. Stop and think about that for a moment. Probation and rehab at this place:

Now imagine what sentence Ethan Couch would have received if he were black, wealthy or not. Imagine the outrage from the right, white conservatives over a black “thug” (Couch had a prior arrest for possession of alcohol by a minor for which he received probation and “community service”). Couch’s parents had their own run-ins with the law, including Fred Couch, the father, for impersonating a police officer, criminal mischief, assault and theft by check. The howl over this family’s “thug lifestyle” would have made Couch and his parents household names if they had been African-Americans rather than rich, white people.

Yet, today bring up the name “Ethan Couch” in a random conversation and people will give you blank stares. Bring up the name Trayvon Martin and far too many white people will call him a “dangerous gang-banger” who “had it coming.” I know. I have had those conversations with people. Even those who think Zimmerman is a “little shady” still come down on the side that Trayvon was the person ultimately responsible for his own death. It’s sick and it’s disgusting, but it is our reality as a nation.

Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown will forever be seen by many people as thugs and monsters. Ethan Couch? Who’s that?

Trayvon and Michael Brown killed no one. Both were unarmed. Ethan Couch killed four people. Yet, who do we remember. Who suffered the further insult of smear campaigns for months after their deaths? Who got away with murder and who will forever be seen by many in this country as cheap-ass punks and low-life criminals who brought their deaths upon themselves?

Ethan Couch, is alive and well, just like our infamous vigilante Zimmerman, though both are responsible for the deaths of others. Trayvon and Michael had everything taken away from them – their lives and their reputations. Zimmerman is still milking his “fifteen minutes” for all it is worth, and Ethan Couch is safely out of the spotlight living in luxury somewhere. Anyone fail to see what is wrong with this picture?

Conclusion: We are All Responsible for Changing Our Injustice System

Let me repeat myself: this racist, corrupt criminal legal system is sick and disgusting. And it isn’t going to change unless people of all races stand up against it and actively seek to bring about change. Most white people (with a few notable exceptions) have allowed our fellow African American citizens to bear the burden of our racist past and our racist present for too long. We have applauded their efforts, or ignored them, but we have done too little to aid them in their fight.

One does not have to actively participate in racism and oppression to bear a share of the responsibility for the state of our country. Those who fail to act, i.e., commit sins of omission, instances where one remains silent in the presence of the evil deeds of others, are also to blame and also must now stand up to confront our “peculiar” and “exceptional” American problem of race.

Many don’t like the claim that everyone bears responsibility for society’s injustices because they view it as the assignment of “collective guilt” or “collective blame” for things they did not personally do, so let me make myself clear. I am not saying those who are not actively engaged in perpetuating racism bear the blame for those who do. I am simply saying that if we see evil – and make no mistake, our criminal justice system is evil in so many ways – it is up to all of us who see that evil to bear the responsibility for challenging it, and seeking ways to effect change.

After all, isn’t that what people always claim the Founders of this nation intended: an engaged and informed citizenry? Well, people, that means more than merely voting or canvassing for the candidate of your choice every two to four years. And while we are a nation of many competing interests, it seems to me that everyone of us has a stake in a just and fair legal system. So, no, this isn’t about collective blame for the sins of slave owners or crooked cops or lynch mobs. This is about a wrong that we can all see, and which may at some point entrap any one of us, regardless of race.

I am not particularly religious, but I was raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran, and many of the sayings of Jesus reported in the Gospels have stuck with me. None moreso than the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In it three person come upon a man beaten on the side of a road by bandits and left for dead. The first two pass him by, leaving him to suffer whatever fate may bring. The third man, however, a member of a group known as Samaritans, considered heretics by religious Jews, stopped, treated the man’s wounds and took him to an inn where the Samaritan paid for his care until the hurt man was healthy again.

I’ve always liked the message of that parable, that we are all responsible for those with whom we share this life. For who knows when we will need that help from others ourselves?

End of Sermon/rant/argument

Go in peace.