When will we stop being surprised when another young black man is dispatched by the police? By “we” I mean, we white people? Freddie Gray is just the latest victim of the New Jim Crow (basically the same as the old one, except a little less rhetorically overt). My initial impression at news of this fresh outrage was, if this had been a lynching in 1951, would any of us doubt who was responsible? This is freaking ridiculous. Sure, I know – investigation of any crime and prosecution of perpetrators is complex and time-consuming, for Christ on a bike – it isn’t like they found the guy on the street with a broken neck. He died in police custody. How many interviews does that take?
Monday night Baltimore was burning, in places. Tuesday morning, we heard all the usual stuff. Why are they burning their own neighborhoods down? What’s the matter with these people? Hey … they looted a liquor store? Same crap every time this happens. These, incidentally, are not the questions asked after every sports-related victory (or defeat) riot that happens in major American cities. Of course, those “thugs” tend to be mostly white people. They tend to belong to a more privileged class. Nothing to see here.
How are the police behaving in the wake of this popular anger? Here again, same story. Show of massive force, check. Leaking selected details from the investigation, check. Police union head saying astoundingly idiotic and tone-deaf shit, check. The story began circulating on Thursday, corroborated by multiple sources from within the public safety establishment in Baltimore, no doubt, that Freddie Gray was, in some measure, responsible for his own death. Just like Michael Brown, who “charged” officer Wilson, “bulking up” in a Hulk-like effort to withstand the hail of bullets, so we were told. Just like Trayvon Martin, who tried to grab Zimmerman’s gun before the wannabe cop used it on him, so we were told. They try to rule the narrative, just as they try to rule the streets.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has spared a few words for the injustice of it all. This seems to be a new development in her character. Indeed, the two most frequently mentioned Democratic presidential candidates – Clinton and Martin O’Malley – both bear the stain of extremist policing.
A day later, charges have been brought against the officers. Unusual, but of course, superficial in that it’s the street cops – not the policymakers – who get the ax. Plenty of blame to go around here, folks.
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What brought this policy about? Perhaps it’s the experience of, again, Reagan and the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal. The official line at that time was, “we will not negotiate with terrorists”, but the effort towards back-channel negotiations became clear as the story unfolded. Of course, context is important, it seems to me. Back in the eighties, we were deeply involved in the Lebanese civil war, both directly and through Israel’s invasion – that was the proximate cause of the capture of westerners in Lebanon. We were also supporting Iraq’s murderous war against Iran, which no doubt accounts for Iran’s interest in negotiating for arms with American representatives. And then there’s the Contra side of the ledger. Against that bloody backdrop, negotiating for captives seems pretty minor.
What about policy? It doesn’t look good, frankly, and it’s kind of depressing. Hillary Clinton is mouthing platitudes about inequality and being a “champion” for ordinary people, but that seems pretty clearly an effort to close off demand in her own party for a progressive alternative, like Elizabeth Warren. If she makes the right noises for a few months, it will be too late to mount any meaningful opposition. She is, of course, a mainstream interventionist on foreign policy, a supporter of the neoliberal order on economic policy, and generally a middle-of-the-road Democrat (or what was formerly known as a moderate Republican). Looking for a white knight – say, a Jim Webb? Don’t even. I just heard him obsessing over Iran this evening, like pretty much all of his fellow mainstream Dems. Warren and Sanders would have to abandon their political distinctiveness – i.e. their hostility towards bankers and lobbyists – to seriously compete in this money-heavy game, thereby abandoning any reason for supporting them.
Of course, the North Charleston Police Department would likely have stuck to the police officer’s original story if the video hadn’t surfaced; that Scott had grabbed the officer’s taser, that he had posed a threat to the officer’s life, that the cops had administered CPR in some kind of timely fashion. Feidin Santana’s video put the lie to all of that, and in so doing, threw into question every official claim of following proper police procedures. Those initial reports sounded like what we heard after Michael Brown’s shooting. But then, so did the web cam video that captured the police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Has anyone gone to jail over that? Not yet.
Iran Pact. A framework agreement on Iranian nuclear development was arrived at on Thursday. This will be the subject of a great deal of hand-wringing, even garment rending, and some full throated protests from the usual folks. There is a strong impetus in the United States towards war with Iran. It is not a popular option amongst the American people at large, but pundits and politicians appear to savor the idea. None of them would suffer in the event of a war, of course, so their clamoring comes at a very low potential cost.
No matter – this wasn’t worthy of comment, except on 
What’s ugly about this is that the man who ordered the killing of more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza last year, including many children, and destroyed much of what was left of Gaza’s already distressed infrastructure, that man has been rewarded by the voters in Israel. A government whose Foreign Minister has advocated beheading Israeli Arabs, expelling them, etc. – that government appears to be sailing back into power, triumphant. It’s hard to argue that Israelis, in general, are not fully in favor of what was done last summer – terror bombing UN schools, destroying neighborhoods, hitting hospitals with high explosives, and so on. That’s pretty ugly, and disappointing, as the few Israelis I know are not supporters of blowing people up at random.
The mainstream media portray this as a kind of battle royale between the President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans, extreme left and extreme right. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the one-party state we call politics, there is a remarkable consensus on the topic of Iran. Both factions – Democrats and Republicans – consider Iran an outlaw state, both insist that it can have no nuclear technology, both blame it for the abysmal state of relations between our countries, both condemn it as a supporter of international terrorism, both repeat the mantra that “all options are on the table” with respect to Iran (a thinly veiled threat that is in itself a violation of the U.N. charter), etc., etc. What separates the two sides is nothing more than nuance.
Now, technical issues like this have historically been corrected by an act of Congress. This was the case with many major pieces of legislation, such as Medicare. But because our Congress is ideologically driven and dysfunctional in the extreme, this is not even a remote possibility. So it is left to the courts, thanks to the determination of many on the right to hobble and destroy the ACA, as well as many thousands of families who depend upon it. It’s manifestly obvious that disallowing subsidized coverage through the federal exchange will dramatically drive up the cost of health insurance in the affected States, crashing the system and throwing 9 million subscribers into chaos. Just as bad, it will initiate a death spiral of rising rates and canceled policies that will affect many millions more.
So, once again, we are on the verge of creating another catastrophe in Iraq, the predictable consequences of which will be a further radicalization of the Sunni community, just as our 2003 invasion gave rise to Al Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor of ISIS. Same story, over and over again, and we somehow expect a different ending. Our imperial foreign policy is an enemy manufacturing machine, as the past sixty years have amply demonstrated. Quite an efficient system; one generation is caught up with fighting the jihadists spawned by the one that preceded it.