Tuesday, January 02, 2018
U.S. Police Kill Over 1,000 In 2017 (68 Of The Unarmed)
The following is from Celisa Calacal at Alternet:
News headlines in 2017 were primarily dominated by coverage of President Donald Trump’s administration and tense party politics. But while most the attention was focused on the president’s antics, officers in police departments around the country killed over 1,000 civilians.
According to the database Mapping Police Violence, police have killed 1,129 people this year in the U.S., which was similar to the number of killings in previous years. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting tracker, officers fatally shot 976 people this year. In 2016, police shot and killed 963 people, and in 2015, officers fatally shot 995 people. Black people were disproportionately affected, as they made up 25 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population. Sixty-eight of those killed by police this year were unarmed.
This is inexcusable, and it doesn't happen in any other developed nation. I am especially appalled at the 68 unarmed individuals killed by police. I can't believe there wasn't a non-lethal way to deal with those individuals. But even if all of the individuals killed by police were armed, it's still too many. Why are so many people being killed by the police in our society?
The main reason is the easy access to guns in our society, but that's not the only reason. Other factors are racism and bigotry in our criminal justice institutions, poor leadership and oversight of too many departments, and misguided training that teaches police to shoot too quickly, and a justice system that doesn't punish police for shooting unarmed citizens unnecessarily.
This is a serious problem -- and it needs to be fixed, not excused.
Trump's "Fake News" Technique Is Being Copied Worldwide
The following article at Axios was written by Mike Allen, Sara Fischer, and Jim Vandehei:
His techniques — especially claiming bad or unwanted news is "fake news" — are getting copied worldwide, just as evil actors like Russia are getting better at spreading misinformation. Here's a snapshot:
- Despots use fake news as a weapon: Leaders or state media in at least 15 countries have used the term "fake news" to try to quell dissent or defuse questions about human rights violations.
- In the U.S.: Within seconds of any major attack or shooting, fake news (real fake news: news that is actually false) starts circulating about the suspect and victims, forcing tech platforms to apologize for surfacing news from faulty sources — think Vegas shooting, Times Square subway bombing, etc.
- Elsewhere in the West: In Spain, Russian state-backed news organizations and bots "promoted digital misinformation and outright fake news" about the politically charged vote in Catalonia, according to the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. That's in addition to fake news campaigns to meddle with elections this year in the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.
- In the East: In India, the Washington Post reported, false information spread through Facebook-owned WhatsApp has become "a part of everyday life," leading to violence, as well as religious and caste tensions. Similar fake news problems are happening on WhatsApp in Myanmar.
- Fake news via messaging (especially Facebook-owned Messenger) has become a major global problem. More people use messaging apps globally than social media apps, and Facebook has hardly addressed the messaging fake news epidemic.
- It's gotten so bad that fake news will be the Pope's theme for his annual World Communications Day, coming in May.
- Regulators around the world are beginning to take the problem seriously. Communications enforcers in the U.S., U.K., South Africa and elsewhere are all looking at ways to crack down on the problem, without inhibiting free speech.
- Regimes like those in China and Russia turn to censorship, with government-run media spewing propaganda — another form of actual fake news.
Be smart: We can't say it too often: The real problem with fake news is that people don't believe real news. That's terrible for society and democracy, making good decisions less likely.
Monday, January 01, 2018
Happy New Year
Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope it is a prosperous and wonderful year for you -- the best ever!
Public Wants Congress To Act On Gun Violence In 2018
As we end 2017, this country has suffered another year with too much gun violence and deaths. Mass shootings in Nevada and Texas made the headlines, but they were far from the only incidents. The nation averaged about one mass shooting (a shooting with 4 or more victims) for every day of the year.
The U.S. has an average of 93 people killed with a gun every day -- and for every death there are two people injured. About 12,000 homicides by gun occur every year (25 times the average of other high income countries) -- and the number of accidents/suicides is even higher. It is simply ridiculous to claim the U.S. doesn't have a serious problem of gun violence.
This is no secret. These numbers are available to anyone, and Congress is aware of them. The question is -- why has Congress not acted to address the issue? They have done nothing, and the public is not happy about that. In the chart above, we can see that by a 42 point margin (25% to 67%) the public thinks Congress has not done enough, and should do more to curb gun violence.
Americans want stricter gun laws by a 23 point margin (59% to 36%). And 95% of all Americans want it to be required that anyone trying to purchase a gun must have a background check. It has been suggested that politicians are afraid to pass stricter gun laws, because they think they might be punished by the voters for doing so. That's ridiculous, especially when it comes to background checks, where over 90% of every group wants that to happen.
The truth is that we have too many politicians that have been bought off by the NRA and gun manufacturers -- and they are willing to watch thousands of people die unnecessarily each year to keep the gun money flowing into their campaigns. That is inexcusable, and so is the inaction of the U.S. Congress.
These charts were made using numbers in a recent Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between December 13th and 18th of a random national sample of 1,230 voters, with a 3.3 point margin of error.
Trump's New Year Resolution
Majority Of Public Is Opposed To Drilling In The ANWR
One of the things slipped into the new tax law passed by the Republican Congress (and signed by Trump) is a provision that allows drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska. But like the tax law as a whole, a majority of Americans don't like this provision that will allow oil companies to desecrate our public land.
Only 35% think it's OK to drill for oil in the ANWR, while 53% say it's the wrong thing to do. Once again, the Republicans have done something the American people don't want. They claim it's to stop the dependence on foreign oil, but the public would rather see that accomplished by increasing the use of clean and renewable resources.
The chart above uses numbers from a recent Rasmussen Poll -- done on December 26th of a random national sample of 1,000 likely voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
Jobs Leaving The U.S. INCREASED Under Trump In 2017
One of the campaign promises Donald Trump made was to stop the flow of American jobs to other countries. It was just another lie. In 2017, the number of jobs leaving the country actually increased. And it's going to get worse. He tells us that the new tax plan will bring jobs back to this country. The truth is that it will have the opposite effect. Companies will be taxed less on overseas money than the money they make in the United States -- giving them more incentive to ship jobs overseas (where they can not only take advantage of abusively low wages, but also lower taxes).
Here's how Tim Fernholz describes it at Quartz Media:
“We’re just shipping company after company after company is leaving this country and leaving jobs behind,” president Donald Trump said on the campaign trail last year. “And I’m going to get it stopped.”
So far, not so good. A group that advocates for federal workers says government records show (pdf) more than 10,000 jobs at federal contractors have been sent over overseas since Trump was elected. That’s more than double the average annual amount during Barack Obama’s presidency. The organization, Good Jobs Nation, funded by unions and faith groups, wants the White House to hold these contractors accountable.
All told, in the year since Trump was elected, more than 93,000 jobs have been certified by the Department of Labor as lost to outsourcing or trade competition, slightly higher than the average of about 87,000 in the preceding five years. But federal contractors made up 10% of that number, rather than the previous average of 4%. That suggests companies that work for the government like General Motors, Boeing and United Technologies aren’t worried about political repercussions from the man in the White House.
Consider United Technologies, which is the parent company of Carrier, a maker of air conditions and heating equipment. Carrier became famous shortly after the election when Trump loudly and personally intervened to “prevent” the company from outsourcing jobs to Mexico by offering it tax breaks. Since the spotlight has shifted along with Trump’s limited attention span, Carrier announced more layoffs, including 215 after the holidays. Local labor leaders say they feel betrayed.
The reality is that the president has little leeway in federal contracting law to prevent companies, even those hired by the government, from shifting jobs overseas.
To actually protect good jobs in the United States, major fixes are needed to US trade and tax laws that make it profitable for companies to shift production and earnings overseas, as well as more investment in training workers for jobs that add more value. While the US currently enjoys low unemployment and (slowly) rising wages, low-skill workers still struggle to find jobs that can support a family or afford the education for work that does. It’s not clear, however, that the Trump agenda is going to bring them much relief.
Consider the tax bill being debated on the floor of the senate today. While the focus of the debate is on how much debt the bill will add, one consequence of the law will be making it easier for companies to shift jobs overseas. The bill would stop taxation on US companies’ routine foreign earnings, but experts say it is has not put in sufficient guardrails to prevent jobs from moving overseas.
Companies must pay 20% on their earnings at home, and a 10% minimum tax on any earnings that exceed the firm’s “routine” earnings abroad from investments in factories and equipment abroad. While this is designed to target companies shifting intellectual property overseas to shell corporations, tax expert Steven Rosenthal says it creates a “perverse incentive” to invest more in “routine” foreign production to lower its effective tax rate on foreign earnings. “To put it another way, the firm would pay $1 million in tax on $20 million in foreign profits but $4 million on the same amount of earnings from a factory in the US,” Rosenthal writes.
Faced with those incentives, it’s not hard to imagine what major multinationals will do. American workers, however, will face a tougher adjustment to the new rules Trump and Congressional Republicans are writing.
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