Tag: Reform

So You Want Police Reform

The big debate these days is that of police reform….especially since the conviction of Chauvin….and yet since then at least three African-Americans have been needlessly killed.

You say that you are disgusted by all the police violence and deaths and you want change…..then get off your ass and work to that end.

American police culture apparently teaches how kill and not how to ‘protect and serve’…..and that needs some serious attention if it is ever to get solved.

If that is your aim then YOU need to force the change that the authorities seem unwilling to provide……don’t give it lip service time to stand or sit down and STFU.

I have made my thoughts known on this and what could be done on many occasions…..

8 Point Plan To End Police Brutality

“De-Fund The Police”

Is It Police Reform….Or Defund….Or Abolition?

Read those three post of mine….and then let me point out a few more things that could be done…..

1) Employ more oversight

2) Improve data collection

3) Address racial bias

4) End qualified immunity

5) Change use-of-force policies

6) Demilitarize the police

7) Defund the police

8) Abolish the police

9) Initiate broad systemic reforms

I am not advocating some of the these policies….but before you decide for yourself please read the article in Vox….they explain each and every part……https://www.vox.com/22396400/defunding-abolishing-police-among-ideas-derek-chauvin-verdict

I hear that recruiting practices are to blame….not the training…..I disagree….apparently the training teaches to go to the gun before anything…..that is training….recruitment needs to be tighter….but training is the real problem….if a cop cannot disarm a person with a knife without killing them then the training lacks substance beyond the gun.

If you think that real change will come with the leaders then you are in a delusional state.  Reality contradicts that belief.

YOU can make the changes society needs but not if you sit by and let the powers that be make the decisions on this……if you do sit by then nothing will change.

A change in the police culture can only be achieved by the local population.

Local, state, and federal governments in the United States should move beyond superficial changes and fundamentally rethink public safety by reducing the scope of policing, investing in community services, and ensuring abusive officers are held accountable, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. A detailed description of the pervasive problems with policing is included in the report, along with “14 Recommendations for Police Reform.”

The 29-page report, “A Roadmap for Reimagining Public Safety in the United States: 14 Recommendations on Policing, Community Investment, and Accountability,” proposes shifting investments from policing to social services, affordable housing, schools, community-based healthcare systems – especially mental health and voluntary drug treatment – and local economic development. Redirecting resources from policing to services that effectively address underlying societal problems, along with establishing effective, independent oversight of police, would limit harms by police and improve public safety.

You most let your voice be heard at all levels, city, state and national…..go to city council meetings and force the agenda you want…..go to the county supervisors meetings and do the same…..work on the state and national level with your representatives….force the issue.

You say you want change….then by god make that change….you and only you can make these social changes….

If the politicians will not change or listen then….TAKE IT TO THE STREETS!

Get Involved!

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Biden And Police Reform

Yet more shootings and deaths of black people it is a never ending story for the media.

First of all he (Biden) promised to limit the amount of military grade stuff….and yet Instead, police are on track to get more military hardware under Biden than they did under Trump…

Did you read that?

MORE military hardware than under Trump…..that promise went down the toilet.

There is an attempt to reign in the runaway police incidents…..

The George Floyd Act……HR120…the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act……

This bill addresses a wide range of policies and issues regarding policing practices and law enforcement accountability. It includes measures to increase accountability for law enforcement misconduct, to enhance transparency and data collection, and to eliminate discriminatory policing practices.

The bill facilitates federal enforcement of constitutional violations (e.g., excessive use of force) by state and local law enforcement. Among other things, it does the following:

  • lowers the criminal intent standard—from willful to knowing or reckless—to convict a law enforcement officer for misconduct in a federal prosecution,
  • limits qualified immunity as a defense to liability in a private civil action against a law enforcement officer or state correctional officer, and
  • authorizes the Department of Justice to issue subpoenas in investigations of police departments for a pattern or practice of discrimination.

The bill also creates a national registry—the National Police Misconduct Registry—to compile data on complaints and records of police misconduct.

It establishes a framework to prohibit racial profiling at the federal, state, and local levels.

The bill establishes new requirements for law enforcement officers and agencies, including to report data on use-of-force incidents, to obtain training on implicit bias and racial profiling, and to wear body cameras.

If you would like to familiarize yourself with the scope of this bill….then I can help with that….

https://www.congress.gov/116/crpt/hrpt434/CRPT-116hrpt434.pdf

This bill passed the House and now it has to contend with the gutless, spineless cowards in the US Senate….and we know just how that will go now don’t we?

Biden also talked about a Police Oversight Commission……establishment of a police oversight commission in his first 100 days was one of President Biden’s campaign promises, the administration now says that such a commission would be unnecessary given the amount of existing research on police practices.

  • Instead, the White House wants to focus its energy on passing police reform legislation.

What they’re saying: “Based on close, respectful consultation with partners in the civil rights community, the administration made the considered judgment that a police commission, at this time, would not be the most effective way to deliver on our top priority in this area, which is to sign the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act into law,” Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, told Politico.

  • “This matter is much too urgent for delay, and Congress is by far the more appropriate venue to consider changes in law regarding police accountability,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
  • Civil rights groups had also expressed concerns that an ongoing research project by a White House commission could be used as an excuse to defer passing legislation by lawmakers reluctant to support police reform, per Politico.

Well they have decide to throw this idea down the toilet…..and focus on reform…..

Focus all you want….the Senate will prevent any and all reform from ever seeing the light of success.

So we will continue to have the police doing what they always do…..they choose the gun over rational thought…..more people will die and the cycle of deaths, protests, and more deaths will continue.

Turn The Page!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

SCOTUS: A Future Battle

All the noise around the newest attempt to pack the court with conservs to lead the fight on rights looks certain to move forward……(but the GOP is not packing the courts)…..

Then there has been noise about a Biden attempt to make the Supreme Court more in-line with typical America (whatever that is)……

Biden has said what Dems always say…..he will appoint a commission to study reform…..that means that they will drag their feet and accomplish NOTHING….as usual.

In an interview airing Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Biden told O’Donnell that if elected he would put together a bipartisan group to provide recommendations within 180 days on how his administration should work to reform the U.S. court system.

“If elected, what I will do is I’ll put together a national commission of, a bipartisan commission of scholars, constitutional scholars, Democrats, Republicans, liberal, conservative. And I will … ask them to over 180 days come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack … the way in which it’s being handled,”

(thehill.com)

The House Dems have offered up a bill that I covered recently…..https://lobotero.com/2020/09/28/to-make-scotus-better/

Looks like law experts have jumped on the Dems bandwagon…..

Over two dozen constitutional law experts on Friday endorsed legislation recently introduced by a trio of House Democrats that would establish 18-year term limits for U.S. Supreme Court justices.

The endorsement letter (pdf) signed by professors and scholars across the country, along with a former U.S. senator and a former chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court, comes as the Senate GOP is trying to confirm right-wing Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s third nominee to the high court, before the November general election.

The ongoing political battle over the Supreme Court vacancy that resulted from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has elevated discussions and proposals to reform the high court. The term limits bill (pdf) was unveiled last month by Reps. Khanna (D-Calif.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.).

“We can’t face a national crisis every time a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court,” Khanna said while announcing the Supreme Court Term Limits and Regular Appointments Act (H.R. 8424), which would allow presidents to nominate two new appointees per four-year term.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/10/23/constitutional-law-experts-endorse-democrats-bill-create-18-year-term-limits-supreme

I like this proposal.

I do not think that partisan agents like Federalist Society should be consulted on judge nominations……NO political partisan group should have anything to say on nominations other than op-eds in support or opposition.

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read I Write You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

America’s First Black President

I remember when that was said about Bill Clinton….and today it sounds as moronic as it did back in the late 20th century.

I never understood why so many Black people think so highly of Clinton (that would be Bill not Hill)…..of all Americans he screwed them far more than any of the others.

His determination to make his Wall Street donors happy he helped remove Glass-Steagall which lead to the crash in 2008…but the on that I think was his worse path was for welfare reform….

This is a piece from 1997…..

I HATE welfare. To be more precise, I hate the welfare system we had until last August, when Bill Clinton signed a historic bill ending “welfare as we know it.” It was a system that contributed to chronic dependency among large numbers of people who would be the first to say they would rather have a job than collect a welfare check every month—and its benefits were never enough to lift people out of poverty. In April of 1967 I helped Robert Kennedy with a speech in which he called the welfare system bankrupt and said it was hated universally, by payers and recipients alike. Criticism of welfare for not helping people to become self-supporting is nothing new.

Source: The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done – The Atlantic

To this day he is still held in high regards by Blacks and I still cannot see it.  He did nothing to make the poor less so….he did grease the palms of his high price donors at the expense of the nation’s poor.

He will never be high on my list of presidents.

Education Reform?

As always, there is a plan to reform the educational system in the US…there always a plan….and as of yet there has been limited success…..it all looks good on paper but the students are the ones the suffer later in life…..I know, how can that be?

If Obama and the so called experts are right then education is the key to a better life for Americans….and is the answer to stopping the slide of our industrial base…..that is if they are correct….but how will they guarantee a better educational system?

President Barack Obama pledged early on to make improving America’s schools a priority, and changes he is proposing this week signal a much-needed overhaul of the nearly decade-old No Child Left Behind Act. Rather than doling out federal education aid based on the poverty level in a school district, as has been the practice for years, the Obama administration intends to distribute aid based on school systems’ willingness to reform.

Nick Anderson of the WaPo writes;

As legions of schools nationwide fall short of academic targets, the Obama administration proposed Monday to toss out the pass-fail measure that for 15 years has been the bedrock of the school accountability system and replace it with an index that would reward educators who prepare students for college and careers.

The shift, if approved by Congress, would force a wholesale rethinking of school testing standards eight years after enactment of the No Child Left Behind law put a spotlight on disparities in achievement among groups of students.

The changes would reach far into the classroom, potentially affecting how teachers prepare for annual state tests, which students get extra help and what subjects are taught.

Mr. Obama wants to preserve the overall goals of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, especially the idea that all students, regardless of their race or background or where they go to school, should be expected to succeed. But he also recognizes that the way some elements of the law have been implemented – such as the requirement to make “adequate yearly progress” – has diverted education policy toward a numbers game that is overly reliant on test scores, which may or may not provide an accurate measure of how well students are learning.

Under the current system, bad schools can escape with few sanctions, while those that are forced to reconstitute themselves often get very little support to do so. And the lack of nuance in the testing system can make a chronically failing school appear nearly indistinguishable from a high-achieving school that simply is having a bad year.

Okay with all that said I want to voice a concern of mine…….for years of lecturing and talking with students I have seen an amazing thing happening…..what, Professor?……students as a whole are dumber than a rotten turnip……recently students did not know who the first prez of the US was….or just where Afghanistan was located on a map…….or the Law of Diminishing returns…..or even how the US budget process was approached….my point is something is sadly missing in the education of American kids….

The problem as I see it….the kids retain info longer enough to take a test and then it is forgotten……we have a comprehension problem….students do not comprehend the subjects they are taught….they retain it to take tests and make the grade so school can get its pat on the back and its Fed funds…..sorry that is NOT teaching kids….that is programming them!

As always, they will blame the teachers for any problems that reforms face……it is always the teachers fault…..that is because there are so many “bad” teachers  (this is sarcasm)……..it is more like another attempt to break the hold of teacher’s unions….the kids suffer from really poor education just to break a union……

The whole test score thing is just bullsh*t……a way to educate kids needs to be found….they have had enough programming……absurdity has long been the reaction to education……all plans as they are now have been a failure at educating the kids….but they keep using the same failed process over and over…it is like they do not want the kids to have adequate knowledge

Health Prognosis: Sinking Fast!

I fully intended to go for as long as possible without posting on the health care debate but as usual I could not resist the temptation…but will it be my last temptation?

Yesterday the public option met its match…..cowards in Dem clothing.

thinkprogress.com reported on the voting today in the Senate:

The Senate Finance Committee just voted 15-8 against an amendment offered by Sen. John Rockefeller (D-WV), which would have established a self-financing robust public health insurance option. Democratic Sens. Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Blanche Lincoln, Bill Nelson, and Tom Carper voted with the Republicans to defeat the provision.

And then the Schumer thing:

A public option amendment offered by Sen. Chuck Schumer, which would have allowed for negotiated reimbursement rates, failed by a 13-10 vote in the Senate Finance Committee moments ago. Sens. Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, and Blanche Lincoln voted with the Republicans to defeat the amendment. Today’s votes on the Schumer and Rockefeller amendments mean it is unlikely the Senate Finance version of the health care bill will contain a public option. The Senate HELP Committee and the House versions all include a public option, however.

Hopefully, the people back home are watching the vote and will take that into consideration at next election….but they have a long while for their memories to fail….which is what will most likely happen.

And the Dems put on a happy face and took their optimism pill….but in reality, they crapped in their chamber and the conservs, both Repub and Dem, rubbed their noses in it before being showed the door.

I have been saying that reform does not look good for the health industry and the public option is waiting for the paddles to get its heart beating again, but I do not know if it will resuscitate the patient.

The health industry and insurance biggies have spent their health budget wisely….and why would I say that?  That is very simple, if you have cared enough to keep up with the whole debate…if you have been an occassional observe then you will have NO idea what I am talking about.

The following are excerpts from an article written by Ken Hoover of Business Times:

Americans: 54 percent of U.S. adults don’t think Congress will pass health care reform this year, according to a survey conducted this month by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions.

Many lobbyists for small businesses and other employers blame Congress for overreaching. They said Congress should have focused on insurance market reforms aimed at lowering premiums and ending the ability of insurers to deny or modify price coverage because of health status.

Instead, Congress embarked on a complete overhaul of the health care system that would give the federal government too much power and cost hundreds of billions dollars more than was necessary, they contend.

Health insurers said they will support insurance market reforms, such as guaranteeing coverage for pre-existing conditions, as long as all individuals are required to buy insurance. Without an individual mandate, some people would wait until they are sick to buy coverage, which would result in higher premiums for everyone else, he said.

Business lobbyists said they would continue to work for insurance market reforms at the state and federal levels if Congress doesn’t pass a comprehensive bill. Employers, labor unions, insurers and health care providers also would continue their work on reforms that don’t need legislation, such as quality standards for hospitals, the chamber’s Gelfand said.

And there you are!  We have just heard what the outcome that will most likely be your reform.  The markets, both insurance and health, will get “reformed” and the rest of America will continue to be screwed four til Tuesday.  Costs will continue the upward spiral,  patients will die because of existing conditions and others will be denied just because….the only thing that remotely sounds like it would be patient friendly is the co-op proposal, but it only sounds friendly…it will just take the insurance giants a little more time before they control those also…but maybe that is the idea all along…after all they have bought a bunch of our legislators.

Also keep in mind that the US Congress has a public option and they are using it without thought….but somehow it is not for the common man or woman….why is that?  Or maybe they just do not want us peons in their health plan.

If and when health care reform is defeated, especially the public option, then all those assisting in the defeat will BE guilty of murder, because of their complacency.

I leave my reader with a joke….”a government of the people, by the people and for the people” gets NO funnier than that.

Sleep well you soul-less SOBs!!!!!!!!!!!

How About Greenhouse Gases?

Jake Tapper reports on the discovery of an internal EPA memo that admits what everyone knows about cap-and-trade systems and regulation of CO2.  The memo advises the White House that any attempt to regulate output of CO2 in energy production will likely have “serious economic consequences.

This memo destroys the argument made by Obama often over the last two years that cap-and-trade would wind up being an economic boon.  Obama had argued that a renewed emphasis on green energy production would be akin to landing on the moon, a big government program that boosted employment in pursuit of an ambitious goal.  The difference between the two is that the space program didn’t impose massive burdens on the airline industry to pay for it, or on the auto industry, or Amtrak.

Since the discovery of the memo there has been movement in the Congress.House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D., Calif.) has been negotiating with a group of Southern and Midwestern Democrats on his committee who have withheld support for his bill because they feared it would hurt the economies in their states.

Mr. Waxman’s bill calls for capping emissions of greenhouse gases, and requiring companies to hold permits in order to emit such gases. But the original version of the proposal was silent on the degree to which companies would have to pay for those permits, versus being given them free. Utilities dependent on coal and other carbon-intensive industries such as steel plants or oil refineries have been lobbying Congress to give them the permits for free, at least initially.

Republicans and other interest groups were already turning up the heat on Democrats and the Obama administration ahead of Tuesday’s deal. Earlier in the day, Republicans pounced on a White House document that says regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act “is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said the OMB memo “suggests that a political decision was made to put special interests ahead of middle-class families and small businesses struggling in this recession.”

So the compromises have begun and most of the pie in the sky bills that have been promised will become a watered down pale reflection of any real change.  People!  The planet is dying, now is NOT the time for lame ass compromises!

Is Immigration Reform A Wise Move?

The Obama Adimn has decide to tackle yet another controversial issue in its first 100 days, but is it a wise move?  He has the political capital and he already has much on his plate, but this move could be a bit premature.

Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.

Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.

Administration officials said that Mr. Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working here. Despite the deep recession, there is no evidence of any wholesale exodus of illegal immigrant workers, independent studies of census data show.

The Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the status of new employees.

In my opinion, this subject should be approached very carefully, this could become a hot button issue, the one that the Repubs have been waiting for.  I realize that the Hispanic community feels betrayed by the President for the lack of Latinos in his cabinet and he wants to try and settle them down before the next election cycle.  But this could be a shot in the foot.  The GOP is  RUDDERLESS….do not help them find their way.

Health Care: Hot Button Issue

The health care “reform” proposals being developed by the Obama administration, like every element of its policy, are entirely subordinated to the interests of the corporate and financial elite. For this reason, they are not only inadequate, they are reactionary and will serve only to deepen the health care crisis in the United States.

As of yet, the administration’s health care proposals have been described only in the vaguest terms. This is for definite reasons. Obama is seeking a procedure for ditching even his limited campaign pledges regarding health care. At the same time, he wants to make clear that business interests will have the final say on how any new program is structured.

It is already clear that a number of the proposals on which Obama campaigned only a few months ago—including a limited government-operated insurance program and a measure that would force employers to pay more for health care—will be ditched. Other more far-reaching proposals, such as the establishment of a single-payer universal health insurance program, have been excluded from the discussion entirely.

Unlike many industrialized countries, the United States never implemented a state-run universal system of health insurance or health care. Some 50 million Americans are completely uninsured, while tens of millions more are inadequately insured. Most workers who are able to get insurance do so through their employers or from Medicare or Medicaid, the federal entitlement programs for the elderly and the poor. Others are forced to purchase high-cost private insurance.

In the midst of a growing economic crisis, employers are anxious to cut costs by reducing health care payments or eliminating company insurance programs completely. The program developed by the Obama administration will likely establish as a substitute the partial subsidization of private insurance. This will be a boondoggle for the insurance companies and allow companies to cut back or eliminate health coverage for their employees, while forcing workers to pay more for less-comprehensive care.

There is more to the story……

The Obama administration is signaling that it’s open to taxing employee health benefits, a position that President Barack Obama criticized U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for holding during last fall’s campaign.

The potential tax would finance an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, according to reports. However, it may prove to be politically troublesome for Mr. Obama, who decried the idea, accusing Mr. McCain of ruining the health-care system for the middle class.

Currently, health-care benefits provided by employers are tax-free, regardless of the details of the plan or the salary of the employee. Although any change in the current system would be opposed by union leaders and some employers, the New York Times reported while the president will not propose changing the tax-free status of employee health benefits himself, he would not oppose the same measure if proposed by Congress.

Is it just me or are things not changing for the better?

Union Backed Health Care Reform Plan

Kip Sullivan wrote about this plan in Labor Notes.

If Barack Obama wins the fall election, he will be under more pressure to establish universal health insurance than any president in U.S. history. This will be due not only to public disgust with the current health care system, but to the hard work of organizations dedicated to universal health insurance.

But the most powerful of these groups, including the AFL-CIO and Service Employees (the major Change to Win health care union) are promoting a solution that won’t fix the problem.

Their plan would fatten the insurance industry and make it an even more formidable opponent of true reform than it already is.

If SEIU and the AFL-CIO get their way, the day that all Americans have affordable insurance will be pushed into the unforeseeable future.

The labor-backed plan, which they call “guaranteed affordable choice,” would create a public program like Medicare that would allegedly compete with the nation’s 1,500 insurance companies. Americans would get tax-financed subsidies to purchase insurance from either a private insurance company or the public plan. Competition, which has never worked in the health insurance industry, would magically come to life.

By leaving the bloated insurance industry smack in the middle of our health care system, “guaranteed affordable choice” would have taxpayers and premium-payers continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary administrative costs.