A St. Patrick's Day tradition
From
The Sopranos, after Christopher Moltisanti is shot...
Chris: I'm going to hell, T.
Tony: You're not going anywheres but home.
Chris: I crossed over to the other side.
Tony: You what?
Chris: I saw the tunnel. And the white light. I saw my father in hell.
Paulie: Get the f*** outta here!
Chris: And the bouncer said that I'd be here too, when my time comes.
Paulie: What bouncer?
Chris: The Emerald Piper. That's our hell. It's an Irish bar where it's St. Patrick's Day every day forever.
Shameless Desperate Housewives in a Full House
Ah, the children of the wealthy.
Sorry, I should open the lament this way instead: ah, the wealthy.. and their children…
In one of the biggest and the most peculiar story of March 12, 2019, Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among the fifty or so “who’s who” that have been charged by federal authorities with racketeering and conspiracy in an alleged bribery scam involving college admissions. A rep for Huffman confirmed that the
Desperate Housewives star has been arrested.
Prosecutors explained in a news conference today that some of the children of those charged had received letters from therapists explaining that they had learning disabilities and needed additional time granted in order to complete standardized college entrance exams. For others, there were paid observers that would correct the student’s testing errors. According to reports, Loughlin and her husband agreed to pay bribes totaling half a million dollars in order to get their daughters designated as recruits to the University of Southern California crew team, even though the two girls did not participate in sports. The two actresses are just the biggest names in the prosecutorial haul, but those charged also include CEOs, real estate and security investors, a co-chairman of a global law firm, and Loughlin’s husband, Mossimo Giannulli, a famous fashion designer.
One of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes does not come from one of his books, but through the publication of some of his personal correspondence. I’ve quoted it before. I wrote it down after I first read it. The marvelously talented writer is corresponding with a colleague from IUPUI-- which is Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis. He expresses support for that institution "whose diplomas are not famous for being tickets to establishments of the ruling class... Your students are miles ahead of the Ivy League," he writes, "since they feel no obligation to pretend that America is something it obviously isn't."
The ancient schools of the Ivy League, most explicitly, come from the proud European traditions of elevating and accentuating economic status. Huffman and Loughlin, at least, among those charged, do not come from “old money.” Theirs is new, but they recognize-- and value-- what their money can get for them. Take note of the fact that, even with plenty of money in their pockets to put their kids through college, it was important to these presumably bright people to have their kids reside inside the enormous structural advantage of an elite institution.
Eagle-eyed online browsers have uncovered an old tweet from Huffman that reads ironically now, “What are your best ‘hacks’ for the back-to-school season?” Donald Trump, Jr., the son of the President of the United States, had some fun trolling with that today by re-tweeting it and responding to her: “I’m learning some new ones as we speak. Stay tuned.” Don Jr. is proud of his privileged upbringing. So much so he named his fledgling chain of hotels “Scion” in order to commemorate his good fortune as a descendant of a wealthy, aristocratic, and influential family. His father is believed to have donated at least $1.5 million to the University of Pennsylvania prior to Junior’s enrollment there, and Junior-- before that and now long after-- has no notable working experience in his life other than at his father’s knee.
Conservatives have never had any trouble criticizing the work ethic of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. We’re told by them that the welfare state breeds generations of fixed entitlement, but their definition of “welfare” always seems to be only the economic safety net underneath the disenfranchised. Never the corporate welfare that keep an enormous company like, say, Burger King from paying even a cent of annual tax on the company profit. Very rarely do we hear cultural criticism of the idle rich and their lack of work experience and failure of effort. In fact, cuts in social programs for the poor pay to give them greater cuts in their tax rate. The Trump administration has moved to implement work requirements for programs such as housing assistance and medical assistance, and not only is that a double standard for our nation’s financial handouts, but
pressuring the poor to work, through formal policy, arrogantly implies that they are not
already working.
These spoiled scions of the wealthy are the ones bleeding us dry as a society, and when we try to recoup our nation’s resource upon the deaths of their sometimes-vulgarly-rich parents, legislators chop us down, working at their employ. It’s hard to think of anything good that can result from the children of the wealthy living off that trust-fund wealth they did nothing to earn, and doing so for generation upon generation, frequently resorting only to the (phrase-once-coined) “WASP rot” of drug addiction and dropout. Our government-- yours and mine-- feels the prerogative to tax estates at a lower rate (4% approximately) than it taxes the money people earn from working (about 17%). Correcting that discrepancy is a solution to the problem. The Russian Revolution offered another one.
The Huffman/Macy children and the Loughlin/Giannulli children could work harder instead to get what they want and have not earned. It’s called a meritocracy, and when I type it in simple language, I realize I’m going to be singing to the choir. It’s only in the mud of the details that this concept ever gets lost to anyone. According to documents, most of the students connected to this grift did not know their admission was the result of a bribe-- so in addition to facing indictments, these parents may have an awkward apology ahead of them in having now publicly embarrassed their children. I’m sure most are even shocked that such a thing would ever be investigated by law enforcement. I admit I’m pleasantly shocked. This bizarre scandal reveals that the perpetrators are not as cultured or savvy as they believe themselves to be. Let’s all take a lesson, regardless of our bank balance: membership has its limitations.
Ma Joad gets the last word. In the film version of
The Grapes of Wrath (1940), John Ford’s characterization of Ma is heard to say, in her penultimate moment, “Rich fellas… their kids ain’t no good and die out, but we keep a-comin’… We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.”
Friday news dump: No charges in Sacramento
Tonight, we begin a new feature on the blog-- the Friday News Dump.
As part of their ongoing attempt to control the power of the news media, public relations personnel in and outside of government long ago learned the value of releasing required but unpopular or unflattering information late in the day on Fridays or early on Saturdays. The logic is that people have by and large moved on from their news week by noon on Friday. And by Monday morning, the media has lost interest in news from the previous week.
And what better role for a news blog to play than to attempt to rescue some of these unreported stories.
For our first week, we offer up the press conference from the police in Sacramento, California early Saturday announcing that charges would not be filed against the two officers that fired at a 22-year-old unarmed man named Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard as many as twenty times, hit him eight times, including six times in the back, with several shots coming after he had fallen to the ground. The victim’s family has waited for almost a year for this investigation of the police
by the police to conclude, and when it does conclude, it’s released… surprise… on a Saturday.
To almost no one’s surprise, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who gets her pay from the same window as the police, and gets political contributions from the police union, wrote in her seven-page summary in a 60-plus page report that “(t)he evidence in this case demonstrates that both officers had an honest and reasonable belief that they were in imminent danger of death or great bodily injury.” Her decision is formally based on the findings of a police review released in October.
This is the Catch 22 that young black people live with, particularly black males. They are pre-perceived to be a physical threat to public peace and police officers have a license to kill because that threat perception then permits police to act with legal impunity. Officers simply need to state that they felt threatened by someone and it is safe to use deadly force. A hypothetical admission by a police officer something akin to: “I am a coward and I get easily scared” would be a legal justification for one of these extrajudicial shootings.
In this case, police were working on a report that there had been someone breaking out car windows in the neighborhood. Clark was carrying an iPhone-- which police said they thought was a gun. So um, yeah. Even a suspect with his back turned is judged over and over again in these types of cases to have been a threat. And in this case, the person they believe they are pursuing is accused-- by whomever called it in-- of only a property crime, not a violent one.
During her news conference, Schubert released private information from Clark's cellphone suggesting he had been considering suicide in the days leading up to his death, and this disclosure helps to make the public case that Clark was possibly attempting a “suicide by cop.” This concept has become another convenient out for police-- in each instance, containing at least a substantial amount of speculation about the victim’s motivations. If anything, Clark's private correspondence indicates that he needed mental health treatment, not death, but the slippery concept of “suicide by cop” serves to get us to stop asking difficult questions of those that are charged with protecting us when their actions work to bring about the opposite of protecting lives. The claim has quickly become popular among apologists of police misconduct, though there is-- after nearly four decades since the term was coined-- still almost no concrete data available about it. Shockingly, we’re so far yet removed from scientific research on “suicide by cop,” we don’t even have concrete data about how many Americans are shot by police in a given year.
Those that suffer from mental illness should be less likely to be shot by police, not more. The unsubstantiated language “suicide by cop” does the police no favors either. It gives citizens the false impression that police will always shoot you if they have a reason to. Such a notion could encourage truly suicidal people to place themselves in these risky situations.
Since police are trained only to make demands of the people they are policing and to expect compliance, it should come as no surprise that usually the missing training ingredient is that which involves de-escalation and conflict resolution. Two Sacramento cops don’t
need to try to reason with a depressed, or mentally unstable person, when they’re enabled by the law to simply murder him. When police chiefs respond to incidents such as this with comments like, “the officers were reacting according to the training they’ve received,” the follow-up question
eventually needs to be “why are we training this?”
In California, there is a piece of legislation-- Assembly Bill 392-- that would limit the circumstances under which police can use deadly force. There is no evidence that even Democrats can be relied upon to support it. Kamala Harris, the former state attorney general, now senator and “progressive” candidate for U.S. president has still failed to take a position on this bill. A former prosecutor herself, Harris seems intent on adding to her reputation as a progressive only when it matters the least. While we wait, another black soul, unarmed, is lost, and with no repercussions for his killers or the system that creates and backs them.
