We will not be airing a new episode on December 24th due to the holidays, and we might also skip next week (New Year’s Eve). We will definitely return by January 7th. In the meantime, there will continue to be new posts each day on this website. Happy holidays, everyone!
Reuters: NYPD targets even its own Black officers
A Reuters investigation finds NYPD is even attacking its own Black officers when they’re out of uniform. Here’s just a small excerpt from their interviews with two dozen current and retired Black, male NYPD officers:
The officers said this included being pulled over for no reason, having their heads slammed against their cars, getting guns brandished in their faces, being thrown into prison vans and experiencing stop and frisks while shopping. The majority of the officers said they had been pulled over multiple times while driving. Five had had guns pulled on them.
Beyond anecdotes, Black officers are also more likely to be killed in friendly fire incidents:
John Jay professor Delores Jones-Brown cited a 2010 New York State Task Force report on police-on-police shootings – the first such inquiry of its kind – that found that in the previous 15 years, officers of color had suffered the highest fatalities in encounters with police officers who mistook them for criminals.
State Attorneys General are ruining the Earth. Literally.
Sigh. It seems that despite the overwhelming voice of Americans insisting the government take steps to reduce the effects of climate change, there are still those (read: gas and oil companies) that insist on blocking the effort. The New York Times’ Eric Lipton wrote a riveting piece on the collaboration of Republican state Attorneys General and corporations’ to push to dismantle the E.P.A and Obama administration’s regulations. He notes:
Democrats for more than a decade have teamed up with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to use the court system to impose stricter regulation. But never before have attorneys general joined on this scale with corporate interests to challenge Washington and file lawsuits in federal court.
I’ll skip over the obvious in this statement (Democrats were trying to protect the air we breathe), and move onto the fact that this is incredibly dangerous and unprecedented business. David B. Frohnmayer, a former Republican Attorney General from Oregon noted that these Attorneys General are shamelessly using a public office to support corporate interests and their financial interests.
While these gas and oil companies are reveling in the success of these shared efforts, Republican Attorneys General — who represent half the states right now — are reaping the benefits of raised national profiles and a club that acts like a national law firm. The club has systematically filed lawsuits against major federal policy, including the Affordable Care Act, securities regulation, and recently Obama’s action on immigration.
Lipton focuses on one Attorney General in particular, Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma, a particularly proud collaborator with the industry. Mr. Pruitt’s office moved a couple words around in a three-page letter from Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma’s largest oil and gas companies, and sent it off to Washington on official state letterhead. One of Mr. Pruitt’s closest partners has been Harold M. Hamm, the Chief Executive of Continental Resources. Mr. Pruitt hangs out with Andrew P. Miller, a former Virginia Attorney General, who in turn has clients like TransCanada (aka the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline).
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China will send its first armed peacekeepers to South Sudan
Almost exactly a year after I published an op-ed calling on China to break tradition and contribute combat-ready peacekeeping infantry — something they’ve never done before — to the UN mission in South Sudan, they have announced they will be doing just that.
700 troops will be arriving in January and March — along with drones, armored vehicles, mortars, anti-tank weapons, light arms, and body armor. China’s military and government stressed that the troops will only be armed to protect themselves from attack. (Although this seems like it might be overkill, at least two UN peacekeepers were killed in December 2013 while trying to defend a UN military base and refugee haven from being overrun by two thousand rebel child soldiers, who began massacring civilians once inside the base.)
It is China’s first UN peacekeeping mission that doesn’t just involve sending medics, engineers, guards, and other non-combat troops (of which they have sent thousands to UN-monitored conflicts all over the world).
China is very likely the only country with relatively good ties to just about everyone in South Sudan’s crisis, due to its role as the primary buyer and developer of South Sudanese oil. Although they lean somewhat toward supporting the incumbent government, they also need the rebels to cooperate (to restore the oil production levels) and the rebels need China (to buy the oil from their areas and give them revenue). This gives China an unusual opportunity to be the force in the middle. But it is also a sign that China is stepping up its role and responsibilities in world affairs to a level proportionate with its size and power.
The Battle for Xinjiang (and its energy riches)
One of areas of China bordering central Asia (including a small border with northern Afghanistan, which became important by accident during the U.S. invasion of that country in 2001) is China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Over the past year, there have been a rising number of terrorist attacks on civilian targets in this region, and in other areas of China, performed by separatists from that Xinjiang Region.
Xinjiang, or the “New Frontier” from eastern China’s perspective sometimes, is formerly known as Chinese or East Turkestan in most maps from the Western World. It is China’s largest administrative area and is located in northwest China, north of the Tibet region. Very strategically, it shares borders with several former Soviet Republics, plus Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
Map of the de facto territory of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China. (Credit: TUBS – Wikimedia)
Xinjiang is nearly evenly split between China’s overall majority ethnic group the Han and the ethnic minority Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) — who are the largest ethnicity in the Xinjian region, a situation which is highly unusual for Chinese minority ethnic groups nationwide and which has fueled a lot of tension.
Uighurs argue (probably correctly) that they are an oppressed minority in China. The Communist Party, in return, doesn’t trust them, both because they are dissimilar from the rest of the country and because they actively waged an Islamic insurgency during the 1950s against the People’s Republic of China. This rebellion was nominally in support of their Nationalist allies, who had fled to Taiwan after the end of the Chinese Civil War at the end of the 1940s, but was of course largely motivated by a desire for self-rule after many generations of outside domination.
In fact, Uighur support for the Nationalists was a rare exception to their historic trend of generally resisting all outsiders, including a Soviet invasion in 1934, the Russian Empire in the 19th century, and various Chinese dynasties that attempted to assert control over the area throughout history.
They are, essentially, another of the many small and diverse warrior cultures of Central Asia, which we’ve seen in action in Afghanistan and Pakistan throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the past decade — except that they (now) happen to fall within China, on the map, as opposed to one of the “Stans.” And indeed they are more closely related to the ethnic groups in those areas than to the rest of China, which is one of the exacerbating sources of conflict.
The population, as is true of much of the Western half of China (outside of Tibet), is heavily Muslim. As a result — and due to its borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan — they have been somewhat accidentally caught up in the Global War on Terror.
But beyond the War on Terror, according to a report in The New York Times, there is also an almost mind-blowingly huge potential for energy production and distribution, which is being developed as fast as possible now. And that potential is probably the real reason the People’s Republic of China has been so determined since the 1950s — when the first very major oil field was definitively identified — to hold onto and dominate the Xinjiang region, especially now that the rest of China has such a large need for fuel and power.
At this point, Xinjiang’s strategic energy value is so high to the rest of China and the national government, that probably no amount of separatist unrest will shake them or slow down their energy economy development of the area. Here, from the Times report, is what they are working with …
Oil and gas production:
The foundation of Xinjiang’s energy economy is oil. Xinjiang has an estimated 21 billion tons of oil reserves, a fifth of China’s total, and major new deposits are still being found. This month, a state-owned oil company announced its greatest discovery of the year here, a deposit estimated to have more than one billion tons of oil on the northwestern edge of the Dzungarian Basin, not far from Karamay’s fields. Xinjiang is expected to produce 35 million tons of crude oil by 2020, a 23 percent increase over 2012, according to the Ministry of Land Resources.
Coal mining:
Xinjiang also has the country’s largest coal reserves, an estimated 40 percent of the national total, and the largest natural gas reserves. Those three components form an energy hat trick that China is capitalizing on to power its cities and industries.
Electricity exports:
The main state-owned electric utility, the State Grid Corporation of China, is investing $2.3 billion over the next year to build high-voltage lines, according to People’s Daily, the main party newspaper. Xinjiang will export electricity to more populated parts of China and perhaps to Central Asia.
Energy transit infrastructure:
“Xinjiang is where all the growth in oil, gas and coal is going to be coming from,” said Lin Boqiang, an energy scholar at Xiamen University and adviser at PetroChina, China’s biggest oil producer. “Second, all the imported resources from Central Asia, oil and gas, go through Xinjiang and then get distributed from there.”
Xinjiang produced 25 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2012, and it aims to increase that to 44 billion cubic meters next year.
Pipelines already transport natural gas from Central Asia and Xinjiang to central and eastern China. A new pipeline from Western Siberia is expected to transport 30 billion cubic meters of gas per year through the Altai Mountains to central Xinjiang, where it would connect with domestic east-west pipelines.
In that light, probably the best the Uighurs of Xinjiang can hope for is additional autonomy (including religious and cultural identity autonomy, as well as freedom from ethnic and religious discrimination in government policy) and more importantly a new revenue-sharing deal to give them more of the export profits and a higher standard of living. Independence or maintaining a Uighur plurality in the region’s demographic breakdown (i.e. keeping out more Han Chinese residents and workers) are just probably not on the table anymore.
Carolina guvs, past and present, aim for McDonnell-level corruption
They should ironically name Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina the “Ethics Coast” — like the Space Coast but for launching massive corruption into the highest levels of state government:
In the months after receiving his $171,071 payout of stock from Tree.com, [N.C. Gov. Pat] McCrory appointed the state’s banking director and a majority of the banking commissioners who regulate mortgage brokers.
[…]
That Jan. 30, the board voted to accelerate the vesting of McCrory’s 10,063 restricted shares of Tree.com stock, valued on that date at $171,071, even though thousands of the shares were not due to vest for another 16 months.
Without the board’s action, the shares would have expired, making them worthless. Tree.com founder and Chief Executive Officer Doug Lebda told the AP in an interview that the decision to accelerate the vesting of the shares for retiring board members is standard practice at the company.
McCrory’s total take of $185,509 from Tree.com in 2013 far exceeded the $139,590 salary he earned as governor that year.
(Which is why Pat McCrory is a compassionate governor with a true sense of the plight of the non-plutocrat and the poor. Ok, now back to Tree.com…)
[U.S. Rep. from South Carolina Mark] Sanford joined the Tree.com board in April 2012 after finishing his term as South Carolina governor in a cloud of ethics questions. He had been forced to pay $74,000 to settle 37 state ethics charges, including using taxpayer funds to pay for flights to Argentina to visit his mistress.
[…]
All told, Sanford cleared $239,159 in stock, director’s fees and special dividends in his 13 months with Tree.com, records show. Since then, Sanford has voted on financial regulations in Congress, where rank-and-file members are paid an annual salary of $174,000.
And I didn’t even bring up S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley, who has her own special brand of ethics too.
Utah’s homicide by police epidemic
Utah seems like a pretty safe state in general. The murder rate in 2013 was 1.7 per 100,000 people, compared to a national average of 4.7 per 100,000 — or 3.9 in Kansas and 5.4 in Arkansas, the states directly below and above Utah respectively in terms of population size.
However, of the relatively small number of murders that do happen in Utah, a heck of a lot of them occur at the hands of law enforcement officers, according to the Salt Lake Tribune:
In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members. Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.
Through October [2014], 45 people had been killed by law enforcement officers in Utah since 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all homicides during that period.
A Salt Lake Tribune review of nearly 300 homicides, using media reports, state crime statistics, medical-examiner records and court records, shows that use of force by police is the second-most common circumstance under which Utahns kill each other, surpassed only by intimate partner violence.
[…]
Nearly all of the fatal shootings by police have been deemed by county prosecutors to be justified. Only one — the 2012 shooting of Danielle Willard by West Valley City police — was deemed unjustified, and the subsequent criminal charge was thrown out last month by a judge.
For comparison on the other side of the equation — risk to officers — I looked through the FBI statistics that are available so far for 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. In that period, just 3 Utah law enforcement officers were killed feloniously in the line of duty (i.e. not in an accident). Again, the overall situation in Utah is much safer than many places. Nationally, in the same span, 203 officers (including the 3 from Utah) were killed feloniously in the line of duty.
Now it may be that in some or even many of the Utah deaths by police, it was in fact a dangerous situation and the use of deadly force was the right call. Maybe there were a lot of near-misses that could have killed the officers and did not. But 15% of all homicides in the state in a five year span being caused by police seems pretty darn high.
Additionally, recent cases indicate there are at least some pretty serious questions that need to be asked. For example:
Prosecutors in Utah have determined that two police officers were justified in the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Darrien Hunt.
The Saratoga Springs police officers — Cpl. Matt Schauerhamer and Officer Nicholas Judson – shot Hunt six times Sept. 10 after responding to two 911 calls about a man walking with a samurai-style sword along a commercial boulevard.
An autopsy revealed that Hunt, who was carrying a katana sword his family said was used for cosplay, had his back turned to the officers when all six shots were fired.
An attorney for Hunt’s family said they still don’t know how many shots were fired and in which direction, reported The Salt Lake Tribune, but he noted that Schauerhamer paused to reload his weapon during the shooting.
Darrien Hunt was 22, Black, and carrying a pretend katana for cosplay. That’s probably not a common sight in 93% white Saratoga Springs, Utah, but it certainly doesn’t seem to suggest justifiable homicide. (Side bar: I would also point people toward the town’s nearly eighteen-fold growth the decade following the year 2000, which was accompanied by a 2% drop in the White share of the population, as a possible additional troubling factor for why the officers might have reacted so aggressively in that case.)
Despite such incidents — along with the state’s oddly higher than proportional figures compared to the national occurrences — calling into question the high number of officer-involved shooting deaths, Utah police don’t seem to see the issue. In response to the statewide Salt Lake Tribune investigation, this was the official explanation given to the paper:
“Police are trained and expected to react to deadly threats. As many deadly threats emerge is the exact amount of times police will respond,” wrote Ian Adams, a West Jordan police officer and spokesman for the Utah Fraternal Order of Police. “The onus is on the person being arrested to stop trying to assault and kill police officers and the innocent public. … Why do some in society continue to insist the problem lies with police officers?”
Let’s temporarily side-step the absurd premise that every single case involved a deadly threat with not one single mistaken threat assessment. Let’s just focus on everything else he said, for now.
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