Can we please have more partisan debate moderators?

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Ampersand

I think Zeke Miller is correct that the GOP’s fuss about CNN and NBC broadcasting GOP primary debates is more about protecting the frontrunners, and attempting to keep Tea Party candidates in their proper (that is, secondary) place, than about fear of the questions CNN’s moderators might ask.

Reforming the primary debate process has been a central component of the RNC’s 2012 autopsy, with party officials trying to restrict the number of debates and screen out unfriendly debate moderators. But the effort to cut back on the number of debates has run into headwinds from Republican state parties in early states, who in many instances see revenue from co-hosting the debates and associated events. The autopsy recommends changing the RNC rules to include penalties for Republican state parties or candidates if they participate in debates unsanctioned by the RNC. […]

Priebus has previously proposed a more modest 10 to 12 debates, in part to protect better-funded candidates from insurgents who capitalize on their time before the cameras.

But it would be nice if one outcome of this is more ideological debate moderators – and not just because I, as a liberal, would find it entertaining to see the Republican nominees being grilled by Rush. The purpose of the Republican primary is to allow Republican voters to pick their candidate. Wouldn’t conservative moderators do a better job of asking the questions that Republicans actually care about?

Plus, when a Republican does terribly in a debate, they’d have to make up a new excuse, instead of always claiming that they were incapable of speaking coherently because the moderators were biased liberals.

I’d love to see the same thing done with the Democrats. Let them be questioned by Katha Pollit, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Ezra Klein. Maybe the questions will be substantive instead of inane (“I want to know if you believe in the American flag”) for once.

But it won’t happen, because the last thing the presumptive front-runners in either party want is a debate that could force them to make commitments to their own base – commitments than might interfere with their general campaign strategies. For the candidate with a serious shot at the Presidency, it’s much better to be asked vapid questions by idiotic “centrist” journalists; they may be mindless drones, but they’re safe mindless drones.

Posted in Elections and politics | 4 Comments

Someone breaks into my house while I watch TV

Posted on August 18, 2013 by Ampersand

So last night, my friends Bean and Dan were over, watching TV with myself and the girls (Sydney and Maddox) when Roy, one of the neighbors from the 4-apartment unit next door, came up to a TV room window and told us that he had just seen someone enter the house via one of the back windows!

Being the ultra-brave person I am, I stayed in the TV room and called 911, over the objection of Sydney (who was playing a game on my phone and didn’t fully understand why I was taking the phone away from her). While I was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, Roy yelled something at the intruder, we heard a “thunk,” and Roy told us the person had just left through the same window. We then went into Sarah and Charles’ bedroom and found the window open and the screen window lying on the ground outside.

The cops, who were extremely nice and professional, arrived a couple of minutes later. They knew (because I was still on the phone with 911) that the intruder wasn’t in our house anymore, so they cased the neighborhood and talked to Roy before coming over to talk to us. After talking to the cops, went over to Roy’s place to introduce myself and thank him.

The way our house is laid out, someone could walk through the whole back of the house, looking in windows, and not see either the group in the TV room, Matt in the basement apartment, or (unless they happened to look at just the right angle), Sarah in her office. So probably the person thought the house was empty.

The person was wearing a hoodie, and Roy couldn’t say if it was a woman or a man. Maddox took it in stride, but Sydney was terrified and hid behind the couch for a while, until we coached her out.

Although we’ve been successfully cooling the house all summer with open windows at night and big window fans, we decided to go with air conditioning and closed, locked windows last night. Sarah, surprisingly, slept quite well.

One of those times I’m happy to live with a large group of housemates – it would have felt very creepy if I was the only one here!

P.S. Despite the break-in, I feel absolutely no inclination to go buy a gun. :-p

Posted in About the Bloggers | 17 Comments

Trying To Be an Ally: Thinking About Hejab, Muslim Invisibility, and the Casual Hatred that is Cultural Appropriation (1)

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

In 2008, when my family and I traveled to Iran for my brother-in-law’s wedding, the day after we left Tehran to visit my sister-in-law and her family in Isfahan, the Iranian morality police drove a paddy wagon into Tajrish, a part of Iran’s capital where we’d been shopping in the bazaar the day before, and started rounding up women whose clothing did not appropriately conceal their bodies from public view. A few days earlier, while sitting with my brother-in-law and his wife in an outdoor cafe, I had watched my wife nervously sit up straight and carefully adjust her hejab when a member of the morality police walked in. My brother-in-law’s wife, on the other hand, sat calmly and did nothing to adjust hers. Later, my wife explained the difference in their reactions. Hers was a reflex from growing up in Iran during the years after the 1979 revolution, when even the slightest deviation from what was considered appropriate dress could earn a woman severe beating, arrest, and even worst. My brother-in-law’s wife, on the other hand, had not only grown up in an Iran that had seen periods of relative freedom when it came to women’s clothing, but she herself was part of a generation that has been increasingly defiant when it comes to the government telling women how they should dress. She simply did not fear the officer in the same way that my wife had been conditioned to do.

That women’s bodies and sexualities are contested territory in Iran, as they are in male dominant cultures all over the world, is no surprise, nor should it be a surprise that the constraints placed on women’s dress in Iran is the form of government oppression there ((Just to be clear, I am not saying that Islam oppresses women by requiring them to cover themselves; whether or not that is the case is a debate for Muslims to have within their own communities and on their own terms. Rather, I am saying that the imposition of this dress code by Iran’s government on all women in Iran, under threat of punishment, is a form of oppression.)) most easily latched onto by the popular imagination in the West. Not only does the fact that it’s women whose lives are limited in this way play into western fantasies of rescuing the exotic woman-in-distress from her primitive and despotic, male-dominated family/country/culture, but also, given the high value we place on individual expression and freedom of choice, the limiting of something we see as so fundamentally personal as the decision of what to wear on any given day can seem to us to strike at the very heart of what it means to be alive. That the women of Iran might not see it this way is something too few of us take into consideration.

In the west, or certainly in the United States, one dominant image of the struggle for women’s rights in Iran is something like this one, in which a young woman is being arrested for not properly covering her hair.

The problem with this image, though, is not that it is inaccurate; the problem is that it is incomplete. Not only does it leave out all the other concerns that women’s rights advocates in Iran attempt to address, but it also elides the full complexity of Iranian women’s response, on their own terms and within the context of their own culture, to the dress code that their government has given the force of law. In September of this year, Azadeh Moaveni published an article on IranWire called The Metamorphosis of a Cloak that illustrates what I am talking about. The focus of Moaveni’s article is the spring manteau collection by designer Farnaz Abdoli. The manteau–from French, meaning a loose coat, cloak, or robe–is one of the two choices available to Iranian women when it comes to outerwear, the other one being the chador, which is what the woman on the right is wearing in the picture above. Like the hejab, which has in Iran a far more complex political and cultural/religious history than one might expect, the manteau is not without political significance. As Moaveni writes:

If clothes are a marker of how a society experiences change, then the rise of the manteau reflects just how dramatically Iranian society and values have been transformed in the past forty years. Until the 1970s, women in Iran dressed with great variation and mainly according to social background: rural women and those in smaller cities favoured chador chit or floral chador, less religious urban middle-to-upper class women wore Westernized clothing, while the black chador was mainly worn in big cities by traditional and ultra-orthodox religious women.

The manteau only emerged in the 1970s as a political statement by young, educated women, many devoted to leftist or modern Islamist ideals. But after 1979, when the revolutionary government sought to impose black chador on all Iranian women, the meaning of both chador and manteau were transformed. In the early 1980s, a spectrum of women who might have looked nothing like each other on a pre-1979 street began to embrace the manteau as a compromise.

Even for religious women, says the scholar Ziba Mir-Hosseini, the chador declined as the superior form of hejab…as society began to equate black chador with extremist-political-state Islam…. “The chador’s message became hezbollahi [associated with the government], and the manteau’s message became modern, reformist Islam.”

Here are a few examples of Abdoli’s designs; the photo at the top of this post is another one. (All the pictures are from Moaveni’s article.) Click on the images to see them at full size:

I’d wager that all of the women in these pictures would have been arrested on that day in Tajrish in 2008, something that Abdoli herself acknowledges when she says, “These aren’t clothes for going to the supermarket or the vegetable seller or taking a walk in Park Mellat.” In other words, or at least this is how I understand it, even though Abdoli’s designs are, as Moaveni puts it, “technically compatible with state dress codes, [being] long and flowing with proper sleeves,” they are not modest enough to be acceptable in public.

My own immediate, emotional, very Western, very American response to these pictures and the politics they represent is that Abdoli’s designs are, at best, an accommodation with tyranny, that they perpetuate tyranny by giving it a beautiful, and even sexy, veneer, and that if Iranian women really want freedom, then the only valid approach is to put an end to that tyranny. There are, no doubt, Iranian women, and also men, who agree with me at least in principle, especially with the part about ending tyranny (and I am thinking here of people who live in Iran, not Iranians who live elsewhere). Nonetheless, my response fails to account for the fact that neither the manteau nor the hejab–nor, for that matter, the entire concept of women covering themselves in this way for the sake of a spiritually motivated modesty–are part of my cultural, historical, spiritual, or political vocabulary. Implicit in my response, in other words, is the assumption, the expectation, that my triply vicarious understanding of this issue–I am neither Muslim, nor Iranian, nor a woman–has a validity that is equal to, if not greater than, the understanding of the Iranians themselves. That assumption, that expectation, no matter how nobly motivated, is no less arrogant in its presumptuousness than those who choose to see Iran only through the very narrow lens of images like the one of the woman being arrested above.

I’m not suggesting that the only appropriate stance for someone like me to take is one of pure, live-and-let-live cultural relativism. I think it is unambiguously wrong for the government of Iran to impose a religious dress code–and sanctions for violating that code–on its people, many of whom do not share the government’s understanding of their religion; and I think it’s important to focus on the ways that code impacts women far more than men, who are also enjoined to dress modestly, though the Iranian government seems to focus more on men’s haircuts than anything else. As well, I think it’s important for people in the west not to be silent about issues like this. It’s just that I think it is more important for us first to listen to what the people who live this issue on a daily basis have to say, and not just those whose ideas–at least on the surface–agree most strongly with ours, but also those with whom we disagree or who have perspectives that are new to us. Having listened like that, we can begin to claim an informed perspective, and that perspective (hopefully) will teach us the humility of knowing that we are not now and will never be any kind of ultimate authority on this subject. The arrogance of assuming that we can be is what I will discuss in Part 2.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Gender and the Body, Iran | 28 Comments

The Book of Tea: Cultural Tradition, Philosophy, and Anti-Racist Politics

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I recently made a promise to myself that I would not buy any new books–excepting those that I might be required to buy for professional purposes–until I had read through at least one of the bookshelves on the wall in my office. A little bit less than a third of the way through the first bookshelf, I picked up Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea. Written in 1906, the book is a meditation on the significance of tea and the tea ceremony in Japanese culture. I bought my copy for $3 I-have-no-idea-where-or-how-long-ago because I thought it would be interesting to learn something about the history and cultural import of a beverage that I drink a lot; and when I read the foreword, written by Soshitsu Sen XV (for whose bio you will need to scroll down the page a bit), I was ready to immerse myself in an exploration of tea and the tea ceremony as metaphor:

Chado–literally the way of tea–or chanoyu–widely known as the “tea ceremony”–holds an aura of mystery for many people, but its governing impulse is simple: a small number of friends come together to spend several hours in partaking of a meal, drinking tea, and enjoying a brief respite from the busyness of daily concerns. The guests, passing through a small garden of trees and shrubbery, enter the quiet, intimate space of the tea room, which is shaded from any glaring light….In this tranquility, suggesting the atmosphere of an isolated hut, host and guests recollect themselves, and while carrying on the most ordinary activities of human life, seek to relate to each other and to all the elements of their environment with directness, immediacy, and profound appreciation. (11-12)

I was not prepared, however, for the very political and explicitly anti-racist framing that Okakura provides in his first chapter, which is all I have read so far:

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. The average Westerner, in his sleek complacency, will see in the tea-ceremony, but another instance of the thousand and one oddities which constitute the quaintness and childishness of the East to him. He was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilised since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefields. Much comment has been given lately to the Code of the Samurai–the Art of Death which makes our solders exult in self-sacrifice; but scarcely any attention has been drawn to Teaism [Okakura’s neologism], which represents so much of our Art of Life. (31-32)

I am struck here by Okakura’s anger, which he continues to exhibit in the following paragraph:

We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of our nervous organisation. (32)

Okakura goes on, however, to point out that this kind of thinking goes both ways. “Our [Japanese] writers in the past–the wise men who knew–informed us that you had bushy tails somewhere hidden in your garments, and often dined off a fricassee of newborn babies! (32-33)” Still, he goes on, “such misconceptions are fast vanishing amongst us. Commerce has forced the European tongues on many an Eastern port. Asiatic youths are flocking to Western colleges, [and while our] insight does not penetrate your culture deeply…at least we are willing to learn,” a quality that stands in stark contrast to “the Western attitude [which is unfortunately] unfavourable to the understanding of the East.”

The Christian missionary goes to impart, but not to receive. Your information is based on the meagre translations of our immense literature, if no on the unreliable anecdotes of passing travelers. It is rarely that the chivalrous pen of Lafcadio Hearn or that of the author of “The Web of Indian Life” enlivens the Oriental darkness with the torch of our own sentiments.”

Okakura framed The Book of Tea, in other words, as an explicit response to and partial remedy for the West’s, and particularly the English-speaking West’s, ignorance and racism when it came to the peoples and cultures of Asia. That his book is considered a minor classic is evidence that it succeeded, at least in part.

I am looking forward to reading the rest of this volume, but Okakura’s first chapter also reminds me that the attitudes he was confronting have not gone away, not so much because there is still anti-Asian racism–though that is obviously quite significant–but because the patterns of ignorance that he identified are like a template that gets transferred from one hatred to another. Today, in the United States, at least for me, the hatred that most resembles the one Okakura was confronting is that of Muslims, their cultures, histories, and religion. We may not “biologize” this hatred the way people did in the early 1900s, but just about every other aspect of the racism Okakura identifies against his own people is present in the hatred of Islam and Muslims that is all too common not just in our popular culture, but in our political and even intellectual discourse as well. I am in the middle of writing a post about this that will go up within the next week.

Cross-posted.

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 32 Comments

How Building The Border Wall Increased Immigration From Mexico

Posted on August 12, 2013 by Ampersand

Ezra Klein interviews immigration expert Doug Massey:

According to Massey, the rise of America’s large undocumented population is a direct result of the militarization of the border. While undocumented workers once traveled back and forth from Mexico with relative ease, after the border was garrisoned, immigrants from Mexico crossed the border and stayed.

“Migrants quite rationally responded to the increased costs and risks by minimizing the number of times they crossed the border,” Massey wrote in his 2007 paper “Understanding America’s Immigration ‘Crisis.'” “But they achieved this goal not by remaining in Mexico and abandoning their intention to migrate to the U.S., but by hunkering down and staying once they had run the gauntlet at the border and made it to their final destination.”

The data support Massey’s thesis: In 1980, 46 percent of undocumented Mexican migrants returned to Mexico within 12 months. By 2007, that was down to 7 percent. As a result, the permanent undocumented population exploded.

The militarization also had another unintended consequence: It dispersed the undocumented population. Prior to 1986, about 85 percent of Mexicans who entered the U.S. settled in California, Texas or Illinois, and more than two-thirds entered through either the San Diego-Tijuana entry point or the El Paso-Juarez entry point. As the U.S. blockaded those areas, undocumented migrants found new ways in — and new places to settle. By 2002, two-thirds of undocumented migrants were entering at a non-San Diego/El Paso entry point and settling in a “nontraditional” state.

In recent years, the net inflow of new undocumented immigrants arriving from Mexico has fallen to zero. Some of the decline is due to the U.S. recession and a falloff in construction, which employed a lot of migrant workers. But some is due to an improving economy in Mexico, where unemployment is 5 percent and wages have been rising. “I personally think the huge boom in Mexican immigration is over,” Massey said.

Yet the political debate over immigration is stuck in 1985. Congress is focused above all on how to further militarize an already militarized border — despite the fact that doubling the size of the border patrol since 2004 and installing hundreds of miles of barriers and surveillance equipment appears to have been counterproductive.

Posted in Immigration, Migrant Rights, etc | 24 Comments

Sketchbook page and open thread, grumpy tongue edition

Posted on August 11, 2013 by Ampersand

Post what you like and when you like, with whom you like, wearing whatever clothing you like. Self-linking is likable and, it follows, much liked.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Link farms | 16 Comments

The Many Faces Of Brad Wilcox: Instigator, Administrator, Paid Consultant, And Peer Reviewer Of The Same Study

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Ampersand

Incredibly, it appears that one of the anonymous peer reviewers of the Regnerus study, was Professor Brad Wilcox, who was involved in the study at every level.

I’m amazed I haven’t seen more people talking about this revelation in Inside Higher Ed – although, to be fair, they buried it pretty deep in the story:

In an e-mail, Wright said he has never publicly disclosed who reviewed the articles and doesn’t plan to. But he said that both “Amato and Wilcox mentioned their prior involvement with the Regnerus study in response to my initial reviewing request. I asked, as I always do, whether this involvement precluded their writing an objective review. Both said no and so both were asked to proceed.”

That’s James Wright, editor of Social Science Review, identifying Paul Amato and Brad Wilcox as two of the three anonymous peer reviewers who vetted the scientific methodology of the Regnerus study. (The Regnerus study is the discredited “study” of gay parenting designed to smear gay parents, as you’ll recall.) (( For those interested in reading up on the matter, I recommend this post and the comments at Scatterplot, and also following the links in this post at Family Inequality. For a peer-reviewed response to Regnerus, see here. ))

Paul Amato had a minor role as a paid consultant on the study, and has said “In retrospect, I understand that providing a review was not a good idea, because one should avoid even the hint of impropriety in matters like this.”

Amato’s duel role doesn’t seem like a big deal. Wilcox’s role is far more unethical.

Philip Cohen provides a useful timeline of events. Wilcox was involved with the Regnerus study before Regnerus himself ever heard of it. Here is the 2010 portion of Cohen’s timeline:

  • September 3, 2010: Witherspoon’s Luis Tellez writes to a research company, “At the request of Brad Wilcox, I am sending you a description of ‘The New Family Structure Study.’” Later that month he writes to Regnerus, “It would be great to have this before major decisions of the Supreme Court.”
  • September 21, 2010: Regnerus writes to Wilcox to nail down administrative details with Witherspoon, “And per your instruction, I should think of this as a planning grant, with somewhere on par of $30-$40k if needed” (Wilcox approves).
  • October 2010: Regnerus’s $55,000 planning grant from Witherspoon begins.
  • October – December, 2010: Regnerus attempts to recruit consultants. (“Why am I running this project, you may wonder. Good question. Pragmatically, probably because Brad Wilcox is swamped…”)

    • So Wilcox got the ball rolling on the study, arranged the financing with the right-wing Witherspoon foundation, and according to Regnerus, might have personally run the study if he had more time. Wilcox was also the one to suggest Social Science Review as a home for the study, and was paid $2000 as a consultant on the study.

    Wilcox is obviously not an objective reviewer. To use Wilcox as a reviewer of a study that he himself all but created makes a mockery of the peer review system. Wright never should have asked Wilcox to be a peer reviewer, and Wilcox, once asked, should have had the integrity to refuse.

    In October of 2012, in answer to an email I sent him, Wilcox downplayed his involvement with both Witherspoon and the Regnerus study. At the time – based on years of infrequent-but-friendly contacts with Brad Wilcox, and on Brad’s assurances that he was only peripherally involved – I defended Wilcox both in private emails and in public, writing that there was “nothing unethical” about Wilcox’s involvement.

    I cannot hold that opinion today. It is plain that Brad Wilcox has abused his position of trust (both as an academic and a peer reviewer), and has deliberately deceived me and the public about his actions and his involvement with the Regnerus study. I’m sorry to say, I can’t imagine ever trusting Brad Wilcox again.

    Posted in Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 36 Comments

    Florida Cops Arrest Man For Having Stroke While Driving; Man Dies After Lying Untreated On Jail Floor For 36 Hours

    Posted on August 9, 2013 by Ampersand

    Allen Daniel Hicks Sr., 51, was found stopped in his car on the side of Interstate 275 by a sheriff’s deputy and a Florida Highway Patrol trooper the morning of May 11, 2012. Passers-by had called 911 after they saw Hicks’ Chevy Cavalier swerving west into a guardrail, records of the incident show.

    Speaking incoherently and unable to move his left arm, Hicks was arrested on a charge of obstructing a law enforcement officer when he did not respond to commands to exit his car. Just after noon, he was booked into the Orient Road Jail.

    Hicks did not receive a medical screening, but was put in a cell where he lay facedown on the floor or tried to crawl using the one working side of his body. On the night of May 12, soaked in his own urine, his brain choked of blood, he was at last taken to Tampa General Hospital and diagnosed with an ischemic stroke. He slipped into a coma and died within three months.

    Apparently paramedics did examine Hicks at the scene, but did not identify any physical problems, although they did recommend he be taken to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. He was instead taken to jail. The two paramedics “were verbally counseled on how to better handle similar incidents in the future.”

    Apparently everyone at the scene assumed that “drunk/drugged and crazy” was the best available explanation for why a middle-aged man crashed his car, was confused, had slurred speech, and was completely weak on one side of his body, and the possibility that he had a stroke wasn’t even considered. (Honestly, I feel a little bit of sympathy for the cops at the scene, who may have felt that they had to defer to the paramedics on a medical call. Which doesn’t excuse all the other cops at the jail, let alone the nurses at the jail.)

    Hicks’ family sued and won a million-dollar settlement, mostly from the company that employes the jail’s medical personnel, on the condition that they never speak publicly about the case. (A separate lawsuit is going on against the paramedic company.) However, “the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office did not formally discipline any of its employees.”

    Is anyone surprised to hear that Hicks was Black?

    Posted in Prisons and Justice and Police, Race, racism and related issues | 6 Comments

    Civil Forfeiture Laws, Freedom, Profiling, and Discrimination

    Posted on August 8, 2013 by Ampersand

    I strongly recommend reading this Sarah Stillman article about government abuse of civil forfeiture laws in The New Yorker. But prepare to be pissed off.

    When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.

    He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

    No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

    Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

    The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

    The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

    So what is civil forfeiture? It’s a way of allowing the police to steal our possessions while dodging the Fourth Amendment. That Amendment says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

    But with civil forfeiture, the cops commit “seizure” without a Warrant or any but the most dubious probable cause, and are permitted to do fishing expeditions for anything of value they can grab, rather than knowing what they’re looking for.

    In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.

    One result is the rise of improbable case names such as United States v. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins. (Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson’s forfeiture was slugged State of Texas v. $6,037.) “The protections our Constitution usually affords are out the window,” Louis Rulli, a clinical law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading forfeiture expert, observes. A piece of property does not share the rights of a person. There’s no right to an attorney and, in most states, no presumption of innocence. Owners who wish to contest often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods. Washington, D.C., charges up to twenty-five hundred dollars simply for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, which can take months or even years to resolve.

    Civil forfeiture laws are a side effect of the war on drugs, and also of post-9/11 anti-terrorism hysteria. People lose not only cash and cars, but in some cases their homes (for instance, if you have a grandson who lives in your house, and without your knowledge that grandson has sold a little pot, the government can take your home away from you, without a trial).

    And, unsurprisingly, these tactics are applied disproportionately against Black and Hispanic people:

    The public records I reviewed support Rulli’s assertion that homes in Philadelphia are routinely seized for unproved minor drug crimes, often involving children or grandchildren who don’t own the home. “For real-estate forfeitures, it’s overwhelmingly African-Americans and Hispanics,” Rulli told me. […]

    Patterns began to emerge. Nearly all the targets had been pulled over for routine traffic stops. Many drove rental cars and came from out of state. None appeared to have been issued tickets. And the targets were disproportionately black or Latino.

    A few thoughts:

    1 ) This sort of thing – everyday police and prosecutor abuse of ordinary citizens – is a much larger threat to Americans’ freedom than what the NSA is doing.

    It should be shocking that prosecutors and cops are running extortion rings, threatening to take away our children unless we fork over cash. Ordinary citizens and network news anchors should be demanding to know why a vicious extortionist like Shelby County DA Lynda K. Russell isn’t behind bars. At the very least, it should be easy for both parties to agree on revoking or severely restricting civil forfeiture laws in every state.

    But the truth is, most Americans don’t seem to care about freedom at all, at least not when it comes down to cops shaking down so-called “drug dealers” for money and taking away people’s homes. After all, if the cops weren’t doing that, we’d either have to reduce the police forces or pay more in taxes.

    2 ) I hope that everyone here reads Radley Balko’s blog The Agitator, far and away the best blog on police abuse issues.

    3 ) The cop who led the extortion ring in Tenaha, Texas, Barry Washington, is Black. Just because he’s Black doesn’t mean that he didn’t commit racial profiling. Many of the corrupt incentives which encourage cops to profile – in this case, money (Washington got tens of thousands of bonuses added to his salary for his efforts) – apply without regard to the cop’s race. That doesn’t make it any less racist.

    4 ) DA Lynda Russell, on the other hand, seems to be a more traditional racist, forwarding emails that say “Be proud to be white! It’s not a crime YET . . . but getting very close!” and joke about shooting President Obama. (Russell has resigned from being DA because of the scandal).

    5 ) As vile as individuals like Russell and Washington are, this isn’t an individual problem. As long as the legal system is set up to reward local governments for civil forfeitures with virtually no oversight or limits, and protects corrupt officials from legal consequences, this is going to continue being a problem, and people just like Russell and Washington will inevitably rise. Fixing the problem requires fixing the system.

    6 ) One thing that makes fixing the system harder, as the report Policing for Profit points out, is “Equatable Sharing” laws, a Reagan-era innovation. Equitable Sharing is a Federal law that pays local police for enforcement of Federal civil forfeiture laws by letting the locals keep up to 80% of what they seize. So in states where voters or legislatures succeed in passing laws reforming civil forfeiture, police respond – and subvert democracy – by increasing their use of equatable sharing.

    7 ) It really bothers me that the right is better than the left when it comes to focusing on and publicizing this issue – especially since right-wing sources typically ignore the racial profiling involved. So it’s good to see The New Yorker covering it prominently, as well as the ACLU. More of this, please.

    8 ) The anti-drug warriors genuinely want the US to be a police state. I’ll close with this quote from Stillman’s article, in which she describes Marshal Washington’s deposition:

    [Washington] explained his interdiction strategy, which relied on pulling over out-of-state cars for minor traffic violations, then looking for indicators of drug trafficking.

    “And what are these indicators?” Garrigan asked.

    “Well, there could be several things,” Washington explained. “The No. 1 thing is you may have two guys stopped, and these two guys are from New York. They’re two Puerto Ricans. They’re driving a car that has a Baptist Church symbol on the back, says ‘First Baptist Church of New York.’ They’re travelling during the week, when most people are working and children are in school. They’ve borrowed this car from their aunt, and their aunt is back in New York.” Profile factors like these, Washington explained, could help justify the conclusion that the two men’s money was likely tainted by crime. But also, he said, “we go on smells, odors, fresh paint.” In many cases, he said he smelled pot. In other cases, things smelled too fresh and clean, perhaps because of the suspicious deployment of air fresheners.

    Later, the discussion turned to specific traffic stops. Garrigan asked about Dale Agostini, the Guyanese restaurateur who wanted to kiss his infant son goodbye before being taken to jail for money laundering. Why did Washington think he was entitled to seize the Agostini family’s cash?

    “It’s no more theirs than a man on the moon,” Washington said. “It belongs to an organization of people that are narcotics traffickers.”

    “Do you have any evidence, any rational basis to tell us that this money belonged to an organization of narcotics traffickers?” Garrigan asked. “Or is that more speculation?”

    “I don’t have any evidence today,” Washington said. […]

    “Is there any limit?”

    “No. President Reagan says there’s no limit. It’s time to get serious about this thing. And I think that’s how some of our laws are the way they are, is because it’s time to fight the war on drugs and say, ‘Let’s fight them,’ instead of just saying we’re going to do it.” […]

    “Do you, for some reason, think people driving up and down 59 owe you an explanation for why they might have money?”

    “Sure they do.”

    Posted in Prisons and Justice and Police, Race, racism and related issues | 31 Comments

    Open thread and link farm: Fish edition

    Posted on August 3, 2013 by Ampersand

    I’m very busy working on Hereville 3 right now, hence the lack of posts lately, and the lack of links in this link farm. Have a page from my sketchbook instead, and please feel free to post anything in this thread. Self-linking is both delicious and nutritious, and your doctor wants you to do it at least three times a week.

    Posted in Link farms | 25 Comments