Month: October 2014

Waiting Years For A Trial

Arrested at sixteen, Kalief Browder was imprisoned at Rikers Island for three years without ever being convicted of a crime. His case was eventually dismissed. From Jennifer Gonnerman’s excellent coverage of the injustice:

In order for a trial to start, both the defense attorney and the prosecutor have to declare that they are ready; the court clerk then searches for a trial judge who is free and transfers the case, and jury selection can begin. Not long after Browder was indicted, an assistant district attorney sent the court a “Notice of Readiness,” stating that “the People are ready for trial.” The case was put on the calendar for possible trial on December 10th, but it did not start that day. On January 28, 2011, Browder’s two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth day in jail, he was brought back to the courthouse once again. This time, the prosecutor said, “The People are not ready. We are requesting one week.” The next court date set by the judge—March 9th—was not one week away but six. As it happened, Browder didn’t go to trial anytime that year. An index card in the court file explains:

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.

August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.

November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor on trial, request 2 weeks.

December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request January 3rd.

The Bronx courts are so clogged that when a lawyer asks for a one-week adjournment the next court date usually doesn’t happen for six weeks or more. As long as a prosecutor has filed a Notice of Readiness, however, delays caused by court congestion don’t count toward the number of days that are officially held to have elapsed. Every time a prosecutor stood before a judge in Browder’s case, requested a one-week adjournment, and got six weeks instead, this counted as only one week against the six-month deadline. Meanwhile, Browder remained on Rikers, where six weeks still felt like six weeks—and often much longer.

In an additional post, Gonnerman highlights Rikers’ use of solitary confinement on teens – a practice the jail has promised to phase out:

Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary. In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”

Jon Walker connects Browder’s case to the war on drugs:

A very big reason the justice system is overwhelmed and conditions at our prisons are so terrible is due to overcrowding from the drug war. According to the FBI’s nationwide statistics, “The highest number of arrests were for drug abuse violations.” … This doesn’t just hurt people caught up in the drug war and their families. It harms everyone who needs to use the justice system including the victims and those accused of all other crimes. The drug war has so overwhelmed our system of justice that it is has effectively destroyed the constitutional right to a speedy trial.

ISIS And Israel

Yishai Schwartz argues that the Islamic State has killed off chances for an Israeli-Palestinian peace:

Israel sees a region in flames and a proliferation of terrorist groups. As governments fall and brutal militants seize territory all around them, the guarantee of a paper treaty seems scant protection. Who knows what government will even be there tomorrow? What good is a treaty when terrorists with rocket launchers control territory mere miles from your cities?

In his speech at the United Nations just a few days ago, this was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s central theme:

“States are disintegrating. Militant Islamists are filling the void. Israel cannot have territories from which it withdraws taken over by Islamic militants yet again, as happened in Gaza and Lebanon. That would place the likes of ISIS within mortar range – a few miles – or 80 percent of our population.”

These are not the words of a man prepared for imminent and far-reaching territorial concessions. Netanyahu has long had something of a pre-Egyptian treaty strategic mindset. Now, with al-Nusra and Hezbollah sitting on Israel’s northern border, Hamas in Gaza and most frighteningly, an unstable Jordan threatened by ISIS to the East, who really can blame him?

But Nathan J. Brown disputes the Israeli PM’s facile views on ISIS, particularly his “Hamas=ISIS” propaganda:

The rise of ISIS and its rivalry with other groups does pose a challenge but in a less direct way than Netanyahu suggests. In a visit earlier this month to Jordan, I found Da’ash (as ISIS is known according to its Arabic acronym) on everybody’s lips regardless of an individual’s political affiliation. Those of an Islamist bent regarded the upstart as a challenge and a rival, not an ally. …

But that places the leadership of some of the groups Netanyahu identifies in a very awkward position. On the one hand, they reject Da’ash’s ideas, methods, textual interpretations and agenda. On the other hand, they note that Da’ash defiance strikes some chords among the youth and that its actions grab agenda-setting attention. Their response is therefore somewhat guarded — to criticize Da’ash’s deeds and doctrines but in tones that fall far short of the horrified revulsion expressed elsewhere. The result sounds cagey and calculated — because it is.

A Kick In The Assets For The Middle Class

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Why doesn’t the recovery feel like a recovery for so many Americans? Matt O’Brien offers the above chart as one answer:

This is a story about stocks and houses. The middle class doesn’t have much of the former, which has rebounded sharply, but has lots of the latter, which hasn’t. Indeed, only 9.2 percent of the middle 20 percent of households owns stocks, versus almost half of the top 20 percent. So the middle class has not only missed out on getting a raise, but also on the big bull market the past five years.

The only thing they haven’t missed out on was the housing bust: 63 percent of that middle quintile own their homes, which are more likely to be a financial albatross than asset. And it doesn’t help that, with student loans hitting $1.2 trillion, people have to take out more and more debt just to try to stay in, or join, the middle class. It’s no surprise, then, that people are still so gloomy about the economy.

Uber: Great For Riders, Not Drivers

Justin Wolfers calls attention to a survey of leading economists, all of whom agree that ride-share services are a boon to consumers:

When asked whether “letting car services such as Uber or Lyft compete with taxi firms on equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements, but without restrictions on prices or routes, raises consumer welfare,” the responses varied only in the intensity with which they agreed. Of the 40 economists who responded, 60 percent “strongly agree,” 40 percent “agree,” and none chose “uncertain,” “disagree” and “strongly disagree.” On this issue at least, it’s time to retire the caricature of the two-handed economist.

But as Dylan Matthews notes, not all of them are gung-ho:

Chicago’s Michael Greenstone noted that “part of the gain in consumer welfare … comes from undermining property rights of taxi medallion owners.”

Chicago’s Richard Thaler argued that Uber “needs to be careful about surge pricing in emergencies” as “people care about fairness as much as efficiency.” Larry Samuelson at Yale wrote that Uber and Lyft “will not be a Pareto improvement for consumers” — that is, they will not benefit or leave the same all consumers; some will be left worse off. Samuelson’s reply didn’t get into why he thinks this will be the case.

It’s also worth remembering that the phrasing of the question elides the issue of whether Uber and Lyft really are on “equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements” with taxi companies. Taxi firms would argue that car-sharing services are, in practice, subject to laxer requirements in those areas.

Katie Benner also observes that the sharing economy has a big downside in terms of wages and labor protections:

Startups that connect service workers and customers have raised lots of venture capital based on the idea that low prices will democratize and popularize services that were once reserved for the rich. The viability of these enterprises is tied to scale. Once they are popular and ubiquitous enough, the argument goes, they’ll transform massive swaths of the service economy including transportation, retail and the workforce itself.

To become ubiquitous, these companies need lots and lots of cheap contract laborers to serve customers who want them to be available at the push of a smartphone button. But there’s a big vulnerability in all of these business models: They wouldn’t work if they had to offer full-time jobs with substantial benefits, and the reliance on contract workers to sustain this burgeoning market has become controversial. Kevin Roose recently noted in New York magazine that an emerging “1099 economy” explains how it’s “possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers.”

Avi Asher-Schapiro explores this problem in more depth:

From the very beginning, Uber attracted drivers with a bait-and-switch. Take the company’s launch in LA: In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile (with an additional 60¢ per minute under eleven mph). Drivers got to keep 80 percent of the fare. Working full time, drivers could make a living wage: between 15 and $20 an hour.

Drivers rushed to sign up, and thousands leased and bought cars just to work for Uber — especially immigrants and low-income people desperate for a well-paying job in a terrible economy. But over the last year, the company has faced stiff competition from its arch-rival, Lyft. To raise demand and push Lyft out of the LA market, Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute.

Uber drivers have no say in the pricing, yet they must carry their own insurance and foot the bill for gas and repairs — a cost of 56¢ per mile, according to IRS estimates. With Uber’s new pricing model, drivers are forced to work under razor-thin margins.

A Poem For Friday

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Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

This Saturday, October 4th, at 4 PM, the award-winning poet Chase Twichell will be at The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, one of New York’s most magical places and, at 250 acres, America’s largest urban garden.

Twichell, a practicing Buddhist, will be celebrating the garden’s fall exhibition, Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden. She has curated a poetry walk featuring tanka and haiku by two of Japan’s renowned female poets whose work she explores on an acoustiguide tour to accompany the walk. The first is Rengetsu (known in English as Lotus Moon), who lived in the nineteenth century and was a Buddhist nun as well as a potter, expert calligrapher, and martial artist and the second Mitsu Suzuki, who was born in Japan in 1914 and moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to help her husband establish the San Francisco Zen Center.

Twichell will read their poems and poems of her own from Horses Where the Answers Should have Been: New and Selected Poems. I like thinking about how her spiritual practice is inflected in her poetry the way I long ago enjoyed pondering how Doris Lessing’s Sufism affected her fiction. We’ll post poems by Twichell this weekend.

“Paint” by Chase Twichell:

Lotions and scents, ripe figs,
raw silk, the cat’s striped pelt . . .
Fat marbles the universe.

I want to be a faint pencil line
under the important words,
the ones that tell the truth.

Delicious, the animal trace
of the brush in the paint,
crushed caviar of molecules.

A shadow comes to me and says,
When you go, please leave
the leafless branch unlocked.

I paint the goat’s yellow eye,
and the latch on truth’s door.
Open, eye and door.

(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Robert Benson of some of the thousands of meticulously trained chrysanthemums in both modern and ancient styles currently on display at The New York Botanical Garden)

Abubakar Shekau: Back From The Dead?

The elusive Boko Haram leader, whom Nigeria had claimed was dead, appeared in a video on Thursday to taunt his enemies:

So much for the Nigerian government’s insistence that it killed him two weeks ago. In the video, Shekau, who claims for the second time to have declared an Islamic caliphate in northeastern Nigeria, is seen standing in an unidentified location, wielding a large gun, and wearing camouflage and a traditional scarf. Speaking in Hausa, a common language in the region, he states that no one but Allah can decide when he will die. “Here I am, alive,” he said. “I will only die the day Allah takes my breath.”

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), the only news agency to obtain a full version of the 36-minute video, the footage shows gruesome acts of violence carried out by the extremist group, including amputations and deaths by stoning and beheading. In some shots, groups of people, including children, are gathered around to watch to the violence.

Adam Taylor adds:

Shekau’s “death” and reappearance show just how difficult a figure he is to understand.

As my colleague Terrence McCoy has noted, Shekau may lead one of the world’s most notorious extremist groups and have a $7 million bounty on his head, but basic facts about his life (for example, his age) are hard to ascertain. Stranger still, analysts believe that there may be more than one person posing as “Abubakar Shekau.” In one analysis, the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium looked at different videos released by Boko Haram and found significant inconsistencies in “Shekau.”

That seems to be the story the Nigerian military is running with, as it maintains that Shekau really is dead:

In a statement, the Nigerian Defense Headquarters insisted the man in the video, who it says it actually a militant named Mohammed Bashir, was killed last month during a battle in the town of Kondunga. Last week, the military released photos showing a strong resemblance between the bearded man in the video with a corpse found after the battle. Thursday’s statement said the new video, released by French news agency AFP, had no indication of when it was recorded and did not make any reference to events that have happened since the death of what the military called “the impostor.”

Our Allies Have Their Own Ideas

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Mohammed Ghanem urges the US to coordinate more closely with Syrian rebels in the fight against ISIS, arguing that doing so would help defeat the group in Iraq as well:

Airstrikes alone will not defeat the Islamic State. Despite nearly two months of strikes in Iraq, Islamic State fighters attacked Iraqi army checkpoints close to Baghdad last weekend, and reports this week indicate a strong Islamic State presence just a mile west of the city. Although Obama administration officials are correct that the anti-Islamic State campaign will take time, they need to accelerate and significantly modify the effort to prevent further advances toward Baghdad. Close coordination with Syrian rebels would accomplish this. By enabling rebels to escalate ground attacks on the Islamic State’s western front, coordination would force the group to divert resources from Baghdad. And unlike the Iraqi army, moderate Syrian rebels have a proven record of rolling back Islamic State forces. But no coordination of any significance is occurring.

But Shane Harris questions Ghanem’s premise that Baghdad is at risk:

But if Baghdad were to fall, it would effectively put the Islamic State in control of Iraq and spell political disaster for the White House. That the Syrian rebels are connecting the fate of Iraq with their fight next door underscores how desperately they want help from the United States, and how unsuccessful they’ve been in securing it.

Dettmer attributes the Free Syrian Army’s growing disillusionment with the US to a clash of priorities:

While the Kurds see the American intervention as one that can be parlayed into their independence, the Sunni Muslims of northern Syria express deep anger towards America. They see themselves being set up as a sacrifice for a U.S. policy meant to prop up Iraq. They are furious with what they view as the cynical U.S. decision to enter this war not with President Bashar Assad as the target—not to help topple a dictator whose refusal to permit reforms triggered a conflict that has left nearly 200,000 dead—but to focus instead on ISIS alone. Across the dizzying, fragmented spectrum of rebel factions—from moderates to Islamists—commanders insist that since the start of the U.S.-led coalition’s air offensive on September 23 Assad has increased the tempo of his own airstrikes on rebel positions, reassured that he is not the butt of American rage and is now free to let the U.S. deal with ISIS.

The rebels aren’t the only ones quibbling with our choice of targets. In Sinan Ülgen’s view, Turkey’s hesitation in joining the anti-ISIS coalition owes partly to a belief that Syria’s problems can’t be solved without getting rid of Assad:

Turkey’s leaders believe that the international community’s response to the Islamic State should be far more ambitious, seeking to redress the underlying causes of the current disorder. Such a strategy would have to include efforts to compel Iraq’s new government to break with the sectarianism of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while supporting the new leadership’s efforts to provide basic health, educational, and municipal services to all of Iraq’s citizens. As for Syria, the only plausible route to normalcy begins with forcing President Bashar al-Assad to cede power. To this end, the US and its allies should consider striking Assad’s strongholds in Syria, while establishing safe havens for the moderate opposition under the protective cloak of a no-fly zone.

Juan Cole sees Ankara’s recent moves in a similar light:

Turkey has gotten enormous pressure from President Obama, French president Francois Hollande and UK PM David Cameron to join. For their part, they need the region’s largest Sunni Arab country on their side to avoid having the campaign against ISIL look like a Christian-Shiite Jihad against Sunnis. Turkey values its NATO membership and will want to fulfill obligations to other NATO members. President Tayyip Erdogan also very much wants Turkey to be accepted into the European Union, and may figure that proving Turkey’s worth in fighting a Muslim extremism that seems threatening to Europe may gain him some good will in the EU. Also, Turkey fears that if the West does manage to inflict attrition on ISIL, the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad might benefit, but Turkey wants to see it overthrown. Being in the coalition allows Turkey to demand that pressure be kept on al-Assad to step down.

Discussing the potential pitfalls of military coalitions, Micah Zenko identifies such conflicting agendas as a major concern and concludes with an important question:

In the months after 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often pointed out how 90 countries were participating in “the largest coalition in human history” in the global war on terrorism. That initial level of commitment dissipated as time passed and as the United States pursued its war on terrorism in a manner that many former coalition members fundamentally opposed. Rumsfeld also liked to say, “The mission determines the coalition; the coalition must not determine the mission.”

An easy prediction is that at some point, some members of this coalition will want to redirect their airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. When that becomes the mission, what becomes of the coalition?

(Photo: Fighters loyal to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) pose with their weapons in a location on the outskirts of Idlib in northwestern Syria on June 18, 2012. By D. Leal Olivas/AFP/Getty Images)

A New Eugenics? Ctd

Drum dismisses Dougherty’s argument:

These women were lying. The reason they had abortions is because raising a Down syndrome child is a tremendous amount of work and, for many people, not very rewarding. But that sounds shallow and selfish, so they resorted instead to an excuse that sounds a little more caring. Far from being afraid of eye-rolling neighbors who disapprove of carrying the baby to term because it might lead to higher tax rates, they’re explicitly trying to avoid the ostracism of neighbors who would think poorly of them for aborting a child just because it’s a lot of work to raise.

This has nothing to do with eugenic thought one way or the other.

One woman from the in-tray admits as much:

I don’t think it’s because of eugenics, stigma, or fear of being judged by the other mommies. It’s about fewer and fewer couples feeling like they could meet the challenges of a Down syndrome child in a way that’s fair to them.

So, I’m pregnant right now.

I hope I don’t have a Down baby, and I am sure I would consider abortion if it were screened. Why? Because I am a working future-mother and pretty-much sole breadwinner. It requires a lot of privilege and stability to feel comfortable raising a child with such serious disabilities. I doubt I have the extra time it would take to be an adequate parents to a Down child while also making enough money to support that child financially, and I certainly don’t have the extra money to get specialized care, which goes beyond both the medical and beyond what insurance will pay. It’s not about not wanting the “burden,” but knowing that in today’s society, I don’t have the resources to be the kind of parent a child with so many extra needs deserves to have. If I were a millionaire, it would be one thing. As someone who makes mid-five figures, it’s a very different decision.

Another reader:

The legacy of eugenics has always been troubling, and Gattica paints a picture of a slippery slope that we should guard against. But I rebel against the idea that we should resign ourselves to the fate of natural law and evolution. We can and do surpass unguided natural processes and medicine is no different.

It may sound harsh to say it, but Downs syndrome is not like having an odd hair color or even blindness. It is a condition that places substantial burdens on family members and society for the life of the person. It is a condition that usually makes the person unable to engage in society as we know it, let alone become a productive member in any normal use of that word.

I have a cousin with Downs syndrome and I respect him as a person. But I wouldn’t wish that condition on anyone. Surely there is some middle way between Gattica and mindless acceptance of the evolutionary roulette wheel.