Roaming Chg's 03-Feb-23, cops, Santos pin, Chagall quote, Hannah Arendt library card, etc.

+ There have been at least 52 people killed by police in the US since the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols on January 7th.

+ In 2021, there were 1055 people killed by police in the US. In the same year, 31 people were killed by police in all of Europe (Italy, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Malta, Netherlands, UK, Ireland, Poland, Denmark, and Norway) combined.

+ Most of the people killed by police in 2022 were killed by officers responding to mental health calls, traffic violations, disturbances, other *non-violent* issues and situations where no crime was alleged. Only 1 in 3 killings began with an alleged violent crime.

+ Joe Frasure, a 28-year-old black man, was shot four times and killed by police after cleaning out his late grandmother’s house near Cincinnati. Police say they mistook him for a burglary suspect.

+ New research shows that being stopped by police makes people less likely to vote, thus reducing the turnout among communities most frequently targeted and abused by the cops. The study, published in the December edition of the American Political Science Review, documented how traffic stops by police stops in Hillsborough County, Florida reduced voter turnout in 2014, 2016, and 2018 federal elections.

+ In 2018, Jerod Draper overdosed and was then arrested and taken to a jail in Harrison County, Indiana. Instead of giving Draper, medical treatment, the cops Tasered on him seven times in 15 minutes. He died a few minutes later.

+ In 2018, New York City settled 1,579 lawsuits over police misconduct for $76,492,742. Last year, it resolved 939 lawsuits for $121,376,712, according to the Legal Aid Society.

+ After years of steady decline, including every year of the Trump presidency, the federal prison population under Biden has been rising. To Biden’s credit, he has issued a few thousand pardons. None of them, however, freed anyone who was actually doing time.

+ The Alabama Department of Corrections has had two years to notify victims for the more than 400 people that were supposed to get out of prison this. As of last Friday, they had notified fewer than 20 victims, and hundreds in prison will be held past their release date until they notify them.

+ A study in the American Economic Journal documents that judges in juvenile courts sentence kids more harshly after their preferred football team loses. The sentences are harsher for *about a week* after the loss and, typically, are mostly harsher against Black kids.

+ The wife of SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts has been paid millions of dollars in commissions for placing lawyers at firms. Partners at leading law firms in Washington on average make well over $1 million a year, and at the high end, they can be paid over $7 million. Recruiting firms take a large cut from those placements, often equivalent to a quarter of the new hires’ first-year salaries.  Some of Jane Robert’s clients have business before the Supreme Court,

+ These disclosures came a week after we found out that the Roberts Court has maintained secret  financial ties with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the same man the Court turned to to validate the results of an internal inquiry into the leaking of the Dobbs decision, where the members of the court were not put under oath or made to give recorded depositions. In the past couple of years, the Court has paid the Chertoff Group at least $1 million for security assessments. Supreme Court contracts are exempt from federal public disclosure rules.

+ Earl Warren, the great “liberal” chief justice of the Supreme Court (and a leading agitator for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW 2), was a member of the whites-only Native Sons of the Golden West “club.”

+ As FDR was considering whether to approve a plan to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and place them in concentration camps (his term), he consulted with an anthropologist friend named Alex Hrdlicka, then director of the Smithsonian Institution. Hrdlicka was a phrenologist, who believed that intelligence, morality and criminal proclivity could be determined by the shape of people’s skulls and other racial characteristics. FDR offered his opinion that as a race the Japanese were “devious and treacherous.” Hrdlicka confirmed FDR’s bigotry and explained that this racial deficiency was because of the shape of Japanese heads, which were “two thousand years behind Caucasians.” FDR asked Hrdlicka if this was something that “could be dealt with surgically?”

+ It’s clear that FDR was an ardent eugenicist. Toward the end of WW II, FDR suggested during a cabinet meeting that as many as 50,000 German men, political, business and military leaders, should be sterilized. He later explained to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” (See: Infamy: Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment During World War II by Richard Reeves.)

+ The scamster Anna Sorokin will be speaking to students at the Harvard Business School. Sorokin’s different from the rest of the faculty at the Harvard Business School, how exactly?

+ Republicans in congress have replaced their American flag pins with AR-15s.

Photo of Santos and a Repub woman, Edwards:

https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Fn8Eb80akAAodw0-680x365.jpeg

+ In 1976, 72 percent of the American public said they trusted the news media. Now the figure is down to 34 percent. For Republicans, it’s only 14 percent, which means, of course, that most Republicans don’t even trust what they’re hearing on FoxNews.

+ Will there be an update on the Jewish Space Lasers or the elementary school that get $5.1 billion in Covid money to teach kids CRT (which she described as a “a racist curriculum used to teach children that somehow their white skin aren’t equal to Black skin”), Glenn Greenwald?

+ Fighting climate change, Biden-style: Biden’s Interior Department just approved the largest single oil drilling plan anywhere in the US, Conoco’s Willow Project in Alaska. It would bring 219 wells, 267 miles of pipelines, and 35 miles of roads to Alaska, while emitting over 280 million metric tons of climate pollution over 30 years. Because of the melting permafrost, Conoco’s own engineers say they “where necessary we will  use cooling devices to chill the ground” drilling.


https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/03/roaming-charges-80/

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