More black men need to bring their cell-phones to these police interactions. The rest of us have to see this shit with our own eyes before we’ll begin to understand the rage that simmers beneath the headlines:
Oakland County Undersheriff Michael McCabe said Sunday that the deputy acted properly, and took exception to bloggers and social media commenters who he said took the video out of context, and didn’t bother checking to get the rest of the story.
“The store that called about the man has been robbed multiple times in the last year,” McCabe said. “In addition, employees have been robbed while making deliveries. According to the caller, this man was walking back and forth in front of the store five or six times.
A reader starts the debate over a big post you might have missed over Thanksgiving:
I make no claim of expertise on this topic, but your mention of the GI bill caught my attention. You seem to see it as a great equalizer, and I do not wish to challenge the fact that the GI bill created tremendous educational opportunities. However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the policies of the GI bill disproportionately benefitted whites. So, a policy that you portray as an equalizer arguably helped ossify and perhaps expand the racial gap in educational opportunities. Just like so many of the social and housing policies of that era, the GI bill seems to have helped cement not ameliorate racial disparities. Ira Katznelson has covered this topic well in his scholarly work, as well as in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. In particular, he engages in a compelling dialogue with Suzanne Mettler, who argues that the GI bill was “relatively inclusive”.
Another expands on that reader’s point:
You claimed that the G.I. Bill “was a huge step forward for meritocracy in America.” You should be very careful with your history here.
As pointed out by Ira Katznelson in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, Jim Crow laws and practices were baked into the G.I. Bill. The congressional “Dixiecrats” at the time ensured that the administration of G.I. Bill benefits (and Federal Housing Administration loan insurance and WPA jobs) was left up to each state individually. This meant that Black soldiers in the South returning from WWII were often denied government benefits from these so-called meritocratic programs. Black veterans in the North were barred from buying houses in white neighborhoods and couldn’t obtain loans in Black neighborhoods due to housing shortages and the practice of redlining. From the NY Times book review (which is easier to copy-paste than my copy of Katznelson’s book):
The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, ”fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites.”
Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.
I challenge you to do dig deeper into this history before opining that government assistance programs represent anything approaching a meritocracy. In fact, citing the G.I. Bill provides a powerful refutal to that notion. White men were able to attain government-backed housing loans and government-subsidized post-graduate education via the G.I Bill. This allowed them to accumulate wealth in the decades since, while Black people were actively excluded from that process. It’s almost like action was taken to affirm the place of white men in this country!
Many more of your emails to come regarding the debate over affirmative action itself.
William H. Frey marks the slow, steady decline of segregation:
The average white resident, for example, lives in a far less diverse neighborhood—one that is more than three-quarters white—than residents of any other group. Nonetheless, the average white person today lives in a neighborhood that includes more minorities than was the case in 1980, when such neighborhoods were nearly 90 percent white. Moreover, the average member of each of the nation’s major minority groups lives in a neighborhood that is at least one-third white, and in the case of Asians, nearly one-half white.
He expects the continuation of these trends:
Population shifts that are bringing Hispanics and Asians to previously whiter New Sun Belt and Heartland regions will most certainly continue to alter the neighborhood experiences of these groups by bringing them into more contact with whites. The nation’s blacks are moving onto a path that more closely follows that of other racial minorities and immigrant groups as more blacks move to more suburban and integrated communities. The broader migration patterns are moving in the direction of greater neighborhood racial integration, even if segregation is far from being eliminated.
And then it seems to me you have to factor in the increasing number of interracial marriages:
What Chris Rock was referring to with respect to his young daughters is the impact of this big generation of non-white babies. They’ll form yet another new minority – alongside Hispanics and Asians – until all such non-white minorities become a majority in 2050. At some point, it is conceivable that “race” will become so alloyed and meaningless a term it could become irrelevant, or that racism will become more nuanced and diffuse, revealing new variously-hued racial coalitions and identities. Or that at some point, the whole fixation with race will begin to dissipate and disappear in the face of our experience of our common humanity.
Yes, I can hope. And after Ferguson, it feels important to do so.
On Saturday, an Egyptian judge dismissed murder charges against former president Hosni Mubarak over the killing of hundreds of protesters during the 2011 uprising:
The Cairo court erupted in cheers when the judge said Mubarak should not have been a defendant in the case as the charges against him were added late. Charges against seven senior ex-officials were also dropped. The decision could be appealed. Victims’ relatives waiting outside expressed dismay and frustration. And later police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of about 2,000 people who gathered near Tahrir Square to voice their opposition to the decision. …
As well as the murder charge, Mubarak was also cleared of a corruption charge involving gas exports to Israel. His sons Gamal and Alaa were also cleared of separate corruption charges by the same court on Saturday.
Mubarak remains in prison on a separate, three-year sentence for embezzlement but could walk free soon, as his pretrial detention for the murder charges will now count as time served. Hossam Bahgat explains the technicality that could set the ex-dictator free:
Following Mubarak’s abdication of power in February 2011, Public Prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud decided to investigate the killing of protesters during the 18 days of revolt that ended Mubarak’s tenure. On March 23, 2011, Mahmoud, who had served under Mubarak and remained in office until late 2012, indicted Mubarak’s Interior Minister Habib al-Adly and his senior assistants, but not Mubarak himself, for having ordered or otherwise abetted the killing of protesters throughout the country. Two months later, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, which had succeeded Mubarak in power, faced pressure from street demonstrations demanding accountability for Mubarak too. On May 24, 2011, the public prosecutor added Mubarak as a co-defendant in the case.
The fact that Mubarak was only added as a defendant two months after the case had been referred to trial is the technicality the judge used today to dismiss the charge against him. By not indicting Mubarak from the beginning, the judge reasoned, the prosecution had made “an implied decision that there were no grounds for criminal proceedings” against him. This “no-grounds” decision can be formally reversed by the public prosecutor within a window of three months. Mubarak’s defense lawyers argued, and today the court agreed, that the prosecution reversed the implied no-grounds designation of Mubarak without following proper procedures. For that technical error, the judge ruled the charge against Mubarak for the killing of protesters as inadmissible and dismissed that charge without considering it or ruling on its merits.
Though not unexpected, the ruling serves as a depressing coda to Egypt’s failed revolution and subsequent regression into military dictatorship. That the ruling seemed to follow the public mood, which has soured on revolution over the past three years, is part of the problem, Tamara Cofman Wittes adds:
[T]he trial’s outcome is symbolic of a broken, enfeebled justice system where outcomes often seem arbitrary and where prosecutors and judges often seem to follow public sentiment — first heeding calls for blood by charging the former president on hastily constructed evidence, then dismissing the charges after three years of chaos made Mubarak’s thirty years of dictatorship look rosy in retrospect. The biased workings of this system are also evident in the fact that this judge properly dismissed Mubarak’s charges on technical grounds, whereas preposterously flimsy and/or irrelevant evidence and testimony were allowed to stand in the conviction of three journalists this year and the convictions of 43 NGO workers in 2013. In some ways, this broken system is just one small example of the broken Egyptian state that is the legacy of Mubarak’s long rule.
The only silver lining of the current situation is that the old Mubarak political and financial elite, the fulul or left-overs, are being reincorporated into public life. Those who committed criminal acts should not be rehabilitated, of course. But South Africa dealt with former regime elements by having them confess in detail to their crimes, after which they were released. What’s wrong here is that Mubarak and his gang are still unwilling to confess. For left-overs who had not been guilty of committing any obvious crimes, it is probably healthier to have them come back into public life than be excluded and sullen (the wealthy are in a position to make a lot of trouble).
One big difference between so far relatively stable Tunisia and unstable Libya is that after the first two years, members of the party of former Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali were allowed to come back into politics in 2014. In Libya, as in Iraq, the old elite was excluded and stigmatized, and instability ensued. In Egypt there is the wrinkle that the secondary elite, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been more thoroughly excluded from public life than the fulul ever were.
And Bruce Riedel identifies one group of people who are perfectly happy with the ruling, namely the Saudi monarchy:
The Kingdom supported the 2013 coup immediately, with the King publicly endorsing the putsch minutes after it took place. Riyadh has organized the Gulf states to bankroll the generals’ regime since — at a cost of billions. Getting Mubarak out of prison has been a Saudi priority ever since the coup. The coup reversed the momentum of the Arab Spring and extinguished the most important experiment in Arab democracy ever, two key Saudi goals. The defeat of the Muslim Brotherhood was another major objective for Riyadh. The Saudis believe the coup substantially reduced the danger of unrest inside the Kingdom by terminating a dangerous role model.
Today SCOTUS is hearing oral arguments for Elonis v. United States. Amy Howe provides background:
In the fall of 2010, [Anthony] Elonis’s Facebook posts included several that discussed harming his ex-wife. One post was a take-off on a comedy routine available on YouTube: Elonis asked his Facebook friends whether they knew that it was illegal for him to say that he wanted to kill his ex-wife, and he added that it would be “incredibly illegal” to suggest that someone could kill his ex-wife by firing a mortar launcher from the cornfield behind her house. A day later, Elonis put up a post about shooting a kindergarten class.
These posts earned Elonis a visit from an FBI agent. After the visit, he posted about that encounter too, suggesting in rap lyrics that he had strapped a bomb to his body and would have detonated it if he had been arrested. This post was apparently the last straw for the FBI: a few weeks later, Elonis was arrested and charged with violating 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), which makes it a crime to communicate threats in interstate commerce – for example, over the Internet.
“I’m just an aspiring rapper,” Elonis declared several times on Facebook, likening his bloody odes to the work of bestselling rapper Eminem, whose hit song “97 Bonnie and Clyde” also featured the murder of an estranged wife.
In fact, in his main brief to the Supreme Court, Elonis and his lawyers characterize his Facebook writings as part of a long, colorful tradition in American music, one where artists as different as Bob Dylan, Guns N’ Roses, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Body Count all detail “first-person revenge fantasies” via song. “However hateful or offensive,” the Elonis brief argues, “those songs are entitled to full First Amendment protection. The same protections extend to the efforts of amateurs writing on comparable themes, moved by similar experiences.”
The federal government, however, is not buying it. Elonis’ assertion “that his own speech was indistinguishable from the speech of the various commercial artists he claims to have imitated wholly disregards the very different contexts in which his own statements were made,” the government argues in its reply brief. For one thing, the government points out, after Elonis’ wife sought and received a restraining order against him in response to one set of graphic Facebook posts, he promptly returned to the social networking site to ask whether her restraining order is “thick enough to stop a bullet?”
More of what Elonis wrote can be read here. How Garrett Epps understands the case:
The Facebook posts have attracted a lot of attention—many commentators see this as a case about rap lyrics and Internet speech—but really, it’s only relevant as part of a general question about context. If Elonis had sent the threats to the targets by mail, there would be little doubt of his intent. If he had written them in a diary that was discovered by accident, there’d be little doubt that they were protected. Where do Facebook postings fall?
Lyle Denniston thinks SCOTUS has two choices – “to look at the issue of intent from a subjective perspective, focusing on the speaker, or to look at it from an objective view, focusing on both the speaker and on a hypothetical ‘reasonable person’ exposed to the message”:
Anthony Elonis and his supporters argue that his postings on Facebook were not “true threats” because he actually had no “subjective intent to threaten another person.” If that is the test, a jury would have to make its own assessment of what an Internet user like Elonis did have in mind, examining the specific words used and their context.
The federal government and its supporters, however, argue that Elonis’s statements were judged — and should have been judged — by two measures: first, did he make his statements intentionally (without regard to what he was thinking), and, second, would “a reasonable person” read the words used and their context as conveying to the target of the message that they would be injured or killed?
Eric Goldman also contemplates the subjective vs objective standard:
If the legal test is subjective, social media posters can freely discuss violence towards others and then claim (possibly retrospectively) they didn’t intend to make a threat. Thus, we’d anticipate many defendants will say they are just emulating rappers like Eminem, no matter how vicious or threatening their posts sound. In light of the obvious problems that would create for criminal enforcement, I would be surprised if the Supreme Court adopted the subjective test.
Still, the objective test has its own problems. First, to determine if a social media post communicated a threat to a reasonable person, we have to understand the post. The post may contain internal signals–an emoticon, an LOL, a Rickroll–that tell readers about the author’s true intent…but only if the readers recognize those signals, and sometimes signals are sufficiently obscure. Second, we have to contextualize the post by reviewing posts before or after the one in question. Even if a post in isolation might sound threatening, the surrounding posts may cause the post in question to take on a new meaning. Third, we have to know more about the likely readers of the post. People in niche communities develop their own norms and language that outsiders may not understand. For example, if all of the readers are quite familiar with Eminem, they may understand a threatening-sounding lyric quotation in a way that anyone unfamiliar with those lyrics would miss.
Geoffrey R. Stone wants SCOTUS to “hold that Elonis is entitled to a new trial at which, in order to convict him, the jury must find, not just that a reasonable person would be frightened by his words, but that he intended his words to instill fear”:
Any other decision would run the risk of vastly expanding the concept of “threat” to the point where frightening speech more generally might be thought to be outside the protection of the First Amendment. That would be a disaster.
Of course, this does not mean that Elonis will be acquitted. On a re-trial, the jury might well find, not only that a reasonable person would interpret his words as a threat, but that he in fact intended them as a threat, despite his protestations to the contrary. But without that finding, Elonis’s conviction should be held to violate the First Amendment.
If the court rules for Elonis, those who are harassed and threatened online every day – women, people of color, rape victims and young bullied teens – will have even less protection than they do now. Which is to say: not damn much.
But Jack Linshi wonders what will happen if the conviction is upheld:
Several experts agree that such a decision could stifle freedom of speech online and offline, particularly among artists. If the court rules against Elonis, artists could be more hesitant to share anything that could be perceived as threatening — a slippery slope. On the other hand, such a ruling could increase the number of online harassment cases aggressively pursued by law enforcement. And there could also be a censorship effect on social media companies like Facebook.
“You have the potential for creating a chilling effect both on the part of speakers, but possibly even more on the part of entities that host potentially threatening speech,” said Paul Levy, an attorney at the Public Citizen Litigation Group. “If intent [to threat] isn’t needed [to prosecute], then it seems that the Facebooks of the world have to worry that they, too, can be prosecuted. It could have a serious censoring effect.”
I haven’t come across any new, dispositive facts to change my mind about the complicated specifics in the Michael Brown tragedy. But there is one dispositive fact that is hard to miss and that keeps impressing itself upon me every time I read about Ferguson and its meaning. There is a near-universal consensus among African-American men that there is a crisis about their role in American society, and particularly about their interaction with the police. You can cavil, or criticize or feign shock or refer back to the specifics of the Ferguson case. But it’s there and it’s real and any crisis between any segment of the population with respect to law enforcement is a crisis for the entire society.
Here’s what strikes me – the range of black voices telling us that this is a moment for despair. The rhetoric has gone to eleven. TNC:
Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. But black people, the community to which both Michael Brown and Barack Obama belong, have the distinct fortune of having survived in significant numbers. For a creedal country like America, this poses a problem—in nearly every major American city one can find a population of people whose very existence, whose very history, whose very traditions, are an assault upon this country’s nationalist instincts. Black people are the chastener of their own country. Their experience says to America, “You wear the mask.”
Here’s Colbert King, one of the sharpest columnists at the Washington Post, with long credentials in the civil rights movement:
We are in a bad place. My 20-year-old grandson, Will, the most gentle and respectful young man you would ever want to meet, posted this on his Facebook page:
“Regarding the recent events in Ferguson: I’ve always wanted to believe my country was free. But today’s grand jury decision tells me this cannot be the case. No country that refuses to hold the police, those so-called ‘defenders of the law,’ accountable for its unjust brutality — and yes, it is often very brutal — can be free. When the grand jury declined to charge Darren Wilson for his actions, what kind of a message does that send? . . . It doesn’t seem fair that police can commit brutal acts against innocent people and get away with it.”
It’s not, Will. Not today. Not in your great-grandmother’s day when that Mississippi grand jury let that white farmer get away with murder. Not ever.
John McWhorter shares my view of the murkiness of the actual incident, but is emphatic nonetheless about the broader problem:
The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?
These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt. What America owes communities like Ferguson — and black America in general — is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”
This is true. It is most of what makes so many black people of all classes sense racism as a key element of black life, and even identity.
What we’re talking about here is not prejudice exhibited by other members of civil society – the kind of prejudice you can argue should be ignored or proven wrong. It is prejudice exhibited by the representatives of the entire system – the police – and its expression is too often violence, even fatal violence. At first, I simply wondered how so many people I respect see no progress at all since the 1930s or earlier. But it is perfectly possible, it now seems clear, for there to be considerable social progress and integration even as police forces – especially in poor, urban areas – come to associate criminality with black men, and treat them as a different class of people – guilty until proven innocent, violent unless proven peaceful.
I can see why this happens, can’t you? Cops are not superhuman. High rates of violence and crime in neighborhoods with large numbers of young black men make a certain kind of prejudice almost impossible to avoid for a fallible human cop – but that makes training to counteract these impulses all the more important to enforce. A cop like Wilson, with clearly minimal finesse in these matters, come across as afraid, unprofessional, and reckless. Ditto this jumpy fool in a much clearer case:
I cannot imagine that happening to a white man. Period. The officer in that case has been fired and charged with assault. But what are the odds that would have happened without a dash-cam video?
The truth is: there are too many eerie parallels between today’s world and yesterday’s.
Although the formal structures are immeasurably better than in the darkest days of slavery and formal segregation, the informal patterns of mind created by history can stay the same. And I sense it is this unchanging attitude – and what it says about the core moral imagination of many non-blacks – that drives reasonable men to sputtering rage and frustration. We are not what we once were – but we remain deeply formed by what we once were. How hard is that nuance to understand?
Grown people, people over 30, they’re not changing. But you’ve got kids growing up … I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: Did anything happen today? Did anybody say anything? They look at me like I am crazy … It’s partly generational, but it’s also my kids grew up not only with a black president but with a black secretary of State, a black joint chief of staff, a black attorney general. My children are going to be the first black children in the history of America to actually have the benefit of the doubt of just being moral, intelligent people.
But that may be too sunny a view – and for too many right now a distant prospect. Which is why I favor body cams for cops in these neighborhoods; aggressive attempts to improve schooling in poor black neighborhoods; the end of stop-and-frisk and of the revenue-creating abuses that Radley Balko highlighted. More to the point: I don’t think this should be viewed as some kind of attack on the police. Body cams can protect them from false charges as well as provide an incentive for more civil interactions with black men; and the dragnet criminalization of black men for possessing a joint is a bizarre waste of cops’ time. Their impulses are often understandable – if a huge proportion of criminals in your neighborhood are young black men, you can slide very easily into stereotypes that fatally undermine the rule of law. But that cannot excuse a set of different standards of justice for different types of people.
That’s not a minor bug in a democratic system. It’s a fatal illness. And we need to start treating it like one.
Update from a reader, who rightly keeps our attention on the outrageous killing of a 12-year-old black kid in Cleveland:
We learn more and more horrific details every day (I just saw a story about how the officers who killed him didn’t give CPR for nearly four minutes, essentially killing him once more). While the Ferguson incident was obviously complicated and demands at least some nuance in our response, the Tamir Rice killing, it seems to me, demands communal, shared outrage and pain and anger, the kind that can perhaps genuinely contribute to a meaningful response and to change.
At the very least, it seems to me to be as extreme and grotesque and worth extended attention as any story that has received multi-post, follow-up and conversation kinds of attention on the Dish. And since the Dish is the kind of space that can genuinely push the national conversation forward, I think doing so could help with those broader effects and impacts as well. So I wanted to see if it might not be able to get more of that kind of coverage. Tamir deserves it, and I’d say we all need it.
If you haven’t seen the disturbing footage already, showing the cops giving the kid who made a dumb decision no real time to surrender before shooting him dead, it pretty much says it all:
Over the weekend, news broke that his suspension from the NFL had been overturned. Caroline Bankoff explains the sequence of events:
Along with the NFL Players Association, Rice appealed his suspension. In a double-jeopardy-type defense, Rice said he told [Roger] Goodell exactly what happened in the elevator during a meeting held after the first video was released, which meant that the release of the more graphic footage should not have resulted in a second penalty.
Meanwhile, Goodell maintained that the second video showed a “starkly different sequence of events” than those described to him by Rice. (Among other things, Goodell claimed that Rice told him that he had merely slapped Janay and that she subsequently fell into a railing and knocked herself unconscious, but that story didn’t appear anywhere in the records of the meeting.) In the end, former federal judge Barbara S. Jones sided with Rice.
Yes, if the NFL had a competently designed system of punishment, knocking a woman unconscious would not merit a significantly lower suspension than using recreational drugs. Nonetheless, the NFL did not have such a system when Rice committed the offense (and, for that matter, doesn’t now, but anyway.) The idea that Rice should retroactively receive a greater punishment than Goodell thinks a domestic offender should get in a standard announced after the fact because he “lied to Goodell” is absurd on its face. And the absurdity is compounded by the fact that it’s vastly more likely that Goodell is lying than Rice is.
Ray Rice committed a crime. We have a system for dealing with crimes: the criminal justice system. Employers are not good candidates to be extrajudicial arms for punishing criminal offenders, and I would be very, very careful about thinking that they should be.
The ruling in no way exonerates Rice. It is not an excuse for his actions or a sign that his brutal beating of his wife was not deserving of stiff punishment. It’s not a commentary that domestic violence discipline is out of the NFL’s purview. It’s not even an explicit acknowledgement that Ray Rice deserves a second chance to play professional football.
Rather, this ruling is purely an indictment of the entire NFL disciplinary process.
Rice will play again, even if it’s next year and on a team that doesn’t care about bad publicity. That would make the Oakland Raiders and the Washington Redskins the two most likely options for Rice, the latter of which got bad PR just for tweeting out a Happy Thanksgiving message yesterday. If that’s all it takes for the social-justice warriors to come unglued, having Rice in the backfield won’t make matters any worse than they already are.
Make no mistake: if a team signs Rice, then every time the anti-domestic violence ad runs during an NFL game, people will scream about the hypocrisy the team that signs him is demonstrating. And the critics won’t be entirely wrong, either.
Roger and the NFL will now have to face the severe consequences of their incompetence or indifference toward the crime of domestic abuse: A few days of embarrassing publicity.
That’s it. That’s all that’s going to happen. Nothing more.
How come? Because the National Football League is a cultural and economic powerhouse. It dominates Sunday in America. And Monday night. And Thursday night too. It is a cash cow, handed billions by TV networks and rewarding its sponsors with huge ratings and ever growing revenues. It has enough clout to force presidents to change their schedule to speak to the nation about minor topics like the economy or war and enough arrogance to ignore for years the physical damage the game has done to its former players.
The price of oil was down more than 9.9 percent Friday afternoon after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decided it would not cut back production significantly in the months ahead. In other words, even amid a sluggish global economy and a boom in oil production in the United States, oil-producing countries from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria to Venezuela are going to keep pumping rather than pull back on output in hopes of pumping prices back up.
Apparently, OPEC is “playing a long-term game in which it tries to obliterate some of its American competition by letting prices fall in the hope that some American producers go bankrupt.” Brad Plumer provides more details on that front:
The catch is that no one quite knows how low prices need to go to curb the US shale boom. According to the International Energy Agency, about 4 percent of US shale projects need a price higher than $80 per barrel to stay afloat. But many projects in North Dakota’s Bakken formation are profitable so long as prices are above $42 per barrel. We’re about to find out how this all shakes out — and which numbers are correct.
Michael Levi criticizes reporting on OPEC’s actions:
Part of the problem here is that media and analyst commentary has juxtaposed the refusal of OPEC countries to slash production now with an imagined world in which OPEC regularly tweaks output to stabilize the market while avoiding large price swings entirely. Seen through that lens, last week’s inaction looks like a radical departure. But, as Bob McNally and Iargued in 2011 (and revisited a few weeks ago), OPEC has been out of the fine-tuning game since at least the mid-2000s, and even Saudi Arabia has been a lot less active at it than before. Our view wasn’t particularly unusual. (See, for example, “The OPEC Oil Cartel Is Irrelevant”, July 2008.) What happened last week is a useful reminder that OPEC no longer stabilizes markets the way it may once have. But it is not yet a revelation of a new era.
The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport. Some is used for heating or cooling, as in Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, but that practice is relatively rare. US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies.
Does the slump continue, or is it possible we’ve already overshot and are due for a reversal in oil prices? We can’t be sure, but there are some reasons to think a bounceback could be possible, especially if there’s a European economic recovery. And in the long term, overall fuel consumption is definitely projected to increase, not decline, out towards 2040 — driven largely by demand in developing nations.
Keli Goff confronts the “sad truth is that we as a society don’t expect, nor do we encourage, our best and our brightest to become police officers”:
According to a 2006 report by USA Today, “In an analysis of disciplinary cases against Florida cops from 1997 to 2002, the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that officers with only high school educations were the subjects of 75% of all disciplinary actions. Officers with four-year degrees accounted for 11% of such actions.”
Police Chief Magazine similarly published findings that indicate that officers with bachelor of arts degrees performed on par with officers who had 10 years’ additional experience. And yet police departments have struggled to toughen up their educational requirements in part because recruiters are concerned that the relatively low pay offered by most entry-level law enforcement jobs would not be enough to attract college graduates. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary of those on the police force nationwide is $56,980, but that number includes the highest paid detectives.) Of course this is another part of the problem.
We want men and women in law enforcement who treat their jobs as police officers, as what they are: some of the most important jobs in our country that carry a great responsibility. Yet we pay them on par with postal workers.
Update from a reader:
I can’t say it’s all that surprising though. Substitute the word “teacher” for “police officer” and you can find the exact same issues being discussed. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, and it’s not a stretch to say that this is all because of the decades-long campaign against organized labor, especially public employee unions. Labor has been dominated (defeated?) in other areas of the market and this is one of the last sectors to hold out. Cops and firefighters aren’t targeted as explicitly as teachers – it’s not as easy to pull that off politically – but it shouldn’t be surprising that people want the best quality in the their teachers, police, and firefighters, but they don’t want to pay for it. They have been trained to be suspicious and resentful of anyone who “takes” their tax dollars.
I know that unions and some union members give the rest a bad name, but this will get worse before it gets better as we continually and systematically demonize public spending and investment, especially in these areas.
Another reader doesn’t think higher pay is necessarily the answer:
Problem is, even in high-pay departments, you get serious problems. The pay for Seattle recruits is $4602/month. The base pay – not counting overtime – for officers from the day they are sworn in is $69k/year. Halfway through their third year this is up to $80k, and at five years it’s already $90k. Link here. And let us not forget the amazing benefits and job protection, or the fact it’s safer than ever to be a cop.
And yet, Seattle’s police recently got a scathing review by the DoJ, and the most recent mayoral race featured the issue of what to do with the department. The new mayor moved quickly. This leads me to believe that increasing pay isn’t a magic bullet, or even that it’s going to seriously solve the problem.
So I’m not the only one who sees the super-uptight era of “privilege-checking” and “micro-aggressions” as inherently deadly to comedy and to democratic debate. Chris Rock notices exactly the same thing in a terrific interview with Frank Rich:
What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?
Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.
In their political views?
Not in their political views—not like they’re voting Republican—but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.
When did you start to notice this?
About eight years ago. Probably a couple of tours ago. It was just like, This is not as much fun as it used to be. I remember talking to George Carlin before he died and him saying the exact same thing.
Meanwhile, a reader insists we provide more of a balanced perspective:
As you despair of PC on the left, you completely ignore the PC of the right and what, to their minds, cannot be criticized and is almost beyond discussion. An incomplete list: Reagan, any action taken by the police, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, any action taken in relation to 9-11, CEOs, business in general, torture by Americans, God, the Bible, Judeo-Christian religion, middle-American culture, the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, guns, getting tough on crime, Manifest Destiny, creationism and the denial of global warming or its man-made causes. If you’re going to call out what you call PC, please consider the identity politics of the right as well, with your normal even-handedness.
Happy to – and I do my bit to chip away at these rigid certitudes when I can. And humor is a great way to cut right through these things. What are the subjects right-wingers cannot take a joke about? Ditto the lefties. Get the answer to that right and you’ve figured out what’s really going on.
The Dish 
