Tag Archives: United States

China has some thoughts on the US Torture Report

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International reactions to the US Senate Intelligence Committee’s summary of the Torture Report continue to roll out, including China:

China urged the United States on Wednesday to “correct its ways” in the wake of the U.S. Senate report.

“China has consistently opposed torture. We believe that the U.S. side should reflect on this, correct its ways and earnestly respect and follow the rules of related international conventions,” China foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei told a daily briefing.

China is frequently accused by rights groups of using torture. The government has in the past said it has been used and vowed to stamp it out, following a series of cases of wrongful convictions after confessions were extracted under torture.

China and the United States often spar about each other’s human rights records. China has even begun issuing its own annual report on the U.S. rights record, criticising the United States for issues ranging from racism to gun crime and homelessness.

 
Ouch.

America loves its sidewalk executions

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Excerpt from a comparison of US police use of deadly force to other countries (and the racial influences in those differences):

Worse, police in the U.S. expect to be shown special deference by members of the public at large. Noble sounding as that idea is in the abstract, in practical terms it has devastating results. Given that doctrine of “respect,” any hint of disrespect or disobedience during a routine encounter – even completely imagined – can escalate into a sidewalk execution.

Combined with an ongoing legacy of historically charged, extraordinary demands of respect from racial minorities by law enforcement, such situations become exceptionally dangerous for non-White citizens.

Since a policeman can expect total deference, all it takes to legitimize a shoot to kill action is feeling threatened. The doors to playing God and/or cowboy are wide open. This legal derivation, perverted as is sounds, is no accident. It is a full reflection of American culture and mythology. Today’s shooting practices and incidents allow the police to tap into the imagery of the Lone-Ranger sheriff establishing justice in a lawless landscape.
[…]
In an international context of other civilized countries, though, U.S. practices are clearly outside the bounds of what is seen as legally permissible.

 
Eric Garner was street-executed by the NYPD on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes. They were filmed on a bystander’s camera. There won’t be a trial.

 
An initial version of this post was corrected for factual accuracy.

How the South Really Operates | The Globalist

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This piece is a research essay, co-authored by Carl Bindenagel and Bill. for The Globalist. It is Part II of The Globalist’s American Mezzogiorno series. Part I, by Stephan Richter and Carl Bindenagel, is The American Mezzogiorno: A Thanksgiving Reflection. Part III (“Take the Money and Run”) can be found here.

The American South’s political power manifests itself in the following four dimensions:

1. Congressional Power
2. Agricultural handouts
3. Defense spending as a welcome stimulus
4. Antiquated thinking

Exhibit 1: Congressional Power

Prior to the 2014 mid-term elections, representatives from the American South chaired or represented a majority of members on important permanent committees and subcommittees in the U.S. House of Representatives. At the state level, Republican governors led unified government in 26 states.

American Mezzogiorno

Part I: A Thanksgiving Reflection

Part II: How The South Really Operates

Part III: Take the Money and Run (Friday)

How have these lawmakers used influential policy-positions to affect the welfare and livelihoods of their constituents? Mainly they enriched themselves, protected the powerful, and deliberately harmed the vulnerable in their jurisdictions and states.

They directed federal funding to themselves and to contractors with powerful lobbies and fought against programs to assist the poor, the abused and common citizens. Often, this included children, who are among the impoverished in America and who lack resources, including access to education.

Lawmakers’ self-serving behavior at the expense of their constituents can most clearly be seen on the defense-spending related committees in the U.S. Congress.

Southerners account for 53% of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and 55% of the House Appropriations Committee on Homeland Security (compared to nationwide population share of 38%).

Most tellingly, the membership of the House Subcommittee on Military Construction/Veterans Affairs is now 63% southern. The Chair of the full House Appropriations Committee is a southern Republican as well.

All of this matters greatly: Under the U.S. Constitution, all spending bills must originate in the House and ultimately from its Appropriations Committee. The Republican-dominated House (and the Southern-dominated House Majority) therefore has great control over how and where federal money will be spent.

Exhibit 2: Agricultural handouts

In addition to the defense sector, in rural communities, farmers are frequently subsidized – even in the event of crop-failure or natural disasters (such as floods or droughts).

Historically, this was crucial to prevent small-family farms from collapsing. But today, with the rise of consolidated agribusiness, the picture looks very different.

Many Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House support this type of subsidy, not only for their constituents, but also to enrich themselves.

In September 2013, several of the same House members who voted to cut almost $40 billion out of food stamps over the next decade personally received hundreds of thousands or even millions of federal dollars in farm subsidies.

Take the case of Rep. Stephen Fincher. He cited a passage from the Bible as justification for his vote against providing food stamps, presuming that a needy person was just lazy.

“He who does not work will not eat,” said Fincher. But from 1999 to 2012, the gentleman himself (not his state) received more than $3.4 million in federal farm subsidies.

Fincher’s is not the only case of faulting needy working people while claiming personal privilege from the government:
Read more

Transatlantic regulators lay fines for foreign exchange cheats

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Big fines Wednesday morning on five big investment banks from US and UK financial regulators for transatlantic currency trading collusion:

It’s another dark day for the banking sector, with several of the world’s biggest financial institutions being fined for their role in rigging the global foreign exchange market.

…regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have announced fines totalling around £2bn, or $3.1bn, against HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS, JP Morgan and Citigroup.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority [FCA] has imposed fines totalling £1.1bn, and America’s [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] CFTC has imposed fines of an additional $1.4bn, (£900m).

All five banks have been penalised because their staff colluded to fix the official rates at which currencies were trading against each other in the international markets.

 
I’m sure they still probably made a lot more money off the collusion and manipulations than they’re being fined, but at least there’s a bit of justice.

But the real takeaway? Good lord, even Britain’s financial regulators at the FCA produce better videos (watch below) than Americans do. It’s like a dry BBC comedy but for white collar crime. Somehow they manage to make an incredibly dull description of illegal transaction activities into a gripping and funny set of infographics and deadpan reading of curse-filled chat transcripts by bankers.


 
30_St_Mary_Axe,_Gherkin-london

Poverty Point becomes 1001st UNESCO World Heritage Site

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Poverty Point National Monument, an early pre-Columbian indigenous earthworks near the Mississippi River in far northern Louisiana, has just been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It’s the first place in Louisiana — and only the 22nd in the United States — to earn World Heritage Site status. There are 1,001 World Heritage sites around the globe.

“Welcome to the cradle of Louisiana civilization,” said Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, whose office nurtured the eight-year Poverty Point application process. “It all started here 3,400 years ago.

 
It wasn’t the first such site but is famous for its massive scale, and it likely inspired other subsequent earthworks projects by other native societies in what is now the American South.

The Poverty Point complex comprises five mounds, six concentric semi-elliptical ridges and a central plaza. It was created and used for residential and ceremonial purposes by a society of hunter fisher-gatherers between 3,700 and 3,100 B.C.

Its population’s achievement in earthen construction in North America wasn’t surpassed for at least 2,000 years.

 
It’s particularly impressive because it was built and enhanced over six centuries by a non-agrarian society — unlike Stonehenge or the Pyramids at Giza — which means they had to keep returning to the site to work on it for hundreds of years, no matter how the local food supply was doing.

The site is, unfortunately, currently at serious risk of erosion damage.

(You can get more info on the Poverty Point peoples at Wikipedia.)

A wide view of the Poverty Point site. (Credit: US Government via Wikimedia.)

A wide view of the Poverty Point site. (Credit: US Government via Wikimedia.)

The iron fist of the American prosecutor

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The Economist has published a very comprehensive article on “How prosecutors came to dominate the criminal-justice system” in the United States. It’s absolutely worth reading. It looks at mandatory minimums, plea bargaining under threat of insanely huge sentences, “cooperating witnesses” (who have a strong self-interest incentive to lie in court to help prosecutors), threatening to indict witnesses who help the defense, prosecutors seeking celebrity and elected office, illegal withholding of evidence to the defense, excessive caseloads in the court system discouraging trials in favor of pressuring pleas, and more.

Selected highlights (lowlights?) from the new Pew religion poll

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The new huge Pew Form report on politics and religion in America is out now. It’s one of the most discouraging I can remember in the past 5 years. The proportion of people who think there should be more religion in politics is up, the proportion who support same-sex marriage has leveled or dropped, the proportion who think being gay is a sin is up, and the Christian right is still agitating for being allowed more direct political involvement by their churches. The more things don’t go their way, the more they dig in.

That’s the tip of the iceberg, but there’s a lot more in the report. The only good sign I’ve picked out of the report so far is that most Democratic voters polled said the party was representing their social views well. While it wasn’t necessarily overwhelmingly true on specific issues, it seems to be more true than before.

I suspect that’s a result of a combination of some non-aligned (i.e. socially conservative) Democratic voters dropping out of the party finally and the expulsion or reduced visibility of a number of anti-gay and anti-abortion Democratic candidates and elected officials in recent years — an important trend that I looked at in a recent post. Meanwhile, the more socially liberal or socially centrist Democrats in office have begun speaking more loudly and confidently in favor of gay rights and reproductive freedom. This whole process is ongoing, but it’s helping socially liberal base Democrats not feel alienated by loud and offensive conservative Democratic officeholders and underrepresented by those who agree with them.