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Police brutality is in the news, thanks to the widespread availability of amateur video and the omnipresence of security cameras.

We’ve seen scene after scene of police beating the crap out of, and even shooting and killing unarmed or minimally dangrous students, women, old men and crazy people, many of them after they have been handcuffed and checked for weapons.

The police brass, and leading politicians who oversee the departments involved, nearly always have the same answer: This is not the norm, these are isolated incidents, police violence is not on the rise. Rarely is an abusive or murderous officer punished or even administratively disciplined for documented crimes.

The thing is, of course, it is on the rise. Just as the exonerations of supposed murders and rapists are only those where there was DNA available to prove their innocence, while many more are also clearly wrongly facing death or long prison sentences, the scenes of brutality we’re seeing on the videos are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg too. What is different is that we’re seeing these things at all. It used to be that getting videos of police brutality was very rare — like the taping of the notorious police assault on the prone body of Rodney King by Los Angeles cops during a traffic stop. It just happened that someone with a video camera was at the scene when it occurred. Nowadays everyone with a cellphone is a potential videographer, so we’re seeing more of what really goes on when police make their arrests.

Just check out the latest video of LAPD officers body slamming a 5’4″ nurse (two times!) who had the audacity to get out of her car when they stopped her for talking on her cell phone while driving (this particular video was taken by a surveillance camera at a store focussed on the parking lot where police had followed the woman’s car). Note that one of the burly cops slamming this small handcuffed woman to the ground and later fist-bumping to celebrate with his younger partner holds the rank of commander — he’s a 20-year veteran of the LAPD.

Milton Hall, a homeless man killed July 1 by 46 bullets fired by six Saginaw cops, none of whom has been charged with wrongdoing.

 
The patient, by the name of Israel, walks into the room and instantly bursts into a tirade of arguments conclusively proving his credentials, and says that he is better than everyone else.
 

The opening line of Israel On The Couch: The Psychology of the Peace Process
-By Ofer Grosbard, a clinical psychologist born in Israel, who practices in the US
 
 
Americans have an Israel problem.

Recently I responded to an email propaganda piece on Israel sent out by a friend that listed all the magnificent things Israelis have done in technology and agriculture. The clear implication was that Arabs and Palestinians can’t hold a candle to Israelis when it comes to making the desert bloom. Israelis are clearly superior and, thus, deserve to own what was once called Palestine.

I told the list of people (many of them American Jews) that everything on the list was likely true but that it was a case of making an economic and technological argument in response to a moral question. That is, pointing out how smart and savvy in western ways Israelis are does not address the festering military occupation of Palestinian land and the effective imprisonment of Palestinians.

One member of the list went back-and-forth with me — until a handful of others on the list began to cry out “enough!” Naturally, one person pointed out there were many anti-semites in the world, the suggestion being I must be one of them.

Jerusalem

The problem Americans have with Israel is that the region it exists in is in the midst of a major political sea change, while Israel is frozen in time and holding on to its militarist, right-wing policies of extending settlements in the West Bank. It’s a policy that harks back to the ideas of the British-trained militarist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, which is based on the idea a live-and-let-live policy between Jews and Arabs is impossible and, thus, Jews must militarily control and repress Palestinians. Here’s Jabotinsky:

“Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.”

This frame of mind is at the root of the current psychology that keeps Israel frozen in time. By extension, it’s a potentially grave problem for Americans.

The perplexing predicament confronting Daryl Brooks could confound writers Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, two authors acclaimed for their works about individuals subjected to surreal forms of injustice.

Brooks, a community activist in Trenton, New Jersey, is facing a Kafkaesque return to prison because some NJ state parole personnel charged him with committing a parole violation that top NJ Parole Board officials contend is not actually a violation.

Top New Jersey State Parole Board officials acknowledge that ‘admission of guilt’ by a person is not a condition for either a person’s release from prison on parole or for a person remaining on parole once released from prison.

Yet, some parole personnel are pushing hard to put Brooks back in prison for his failure to admit guilt, despite top Parole Broad officials having said such an admission is not required for released parolees.

A top Parole Board executive, when responding to a news media inquiry in late June, responded “No” to a question about guilt admission being a condition for parole release or parole continuance. The Board’s executive director recently affirmed that response.

Brooks is not alone in enduring such Kafkaesque predicaments from parole authorities.

Daryl Brooks, railroaded into jail, and then barred from parole for refusing to admit guilt

Sometimes a journalist just has to go with the story, even if it’s going all wrong.

I had set out to stand up for the rights of hitchhikers everywhere, and against abusive policing, when I left the house yesterday afternoon and walked up the road to an intersection where I could stand on the grass and stick out my thumb and try to snag a ride to the supermarket four miles off.

The location and the time — 6 pm — were both important. Three days before, I had tried the same thing at the same spot, same time. Every so often I like to do a local hitchhike, just to test the national zeitgeist and the level of empathy of my fellow Americans. Last winter I tried it, and after over a hundred cars had left me standing in a brutal cold wind, finally got a ride from an immigrant Indian couple and their teenage son. (My fellow Americans didn’t come off so well in that story.)

But three days ago, after nearly 60 cars had passed me — most often one or two men in a car who would look away from me in what appeared to be a kind of embarrassment — a black police SUV from the town of Horsham started pulling towards me through the parking lot of the local bank, on whose lawn I was standing. The cop in the vehicle was shaking his head at me with a stern, disapproving expression. He pulled to a stop, rolled down his window, and as I walked up to his car, said, “You can’t hitchhike. It’s illegal.”

“Illegal?” I said, “Where? I’m not standing on the road.”

The officer said, “It’s illegal in town, in the county, and all over Pennsylvania, on the road or not. If you hitchhike, I’ll have to lock you up.”

“Lock me up? For hitchhiking?” Now I was shocked. I have hitchhiked since I was 15, all over the US, up to Alaska when I was 16, several times across the country and back, and down to Florida, and while I had been ordered off of highway onramps, yelled at, and even taken for rides and dumped far away from the highway by cops who didn’t like long-haired hippie types back in the ‘60s, I had never been arrested. Hitchhiking is not a criminal offense as far as I know.

Hitchhiking, a remnant of freer times, is under attack in some states

There she goes,
Little more than skin and bones
Heading up the drive again.
Twenty years old, kidneys failing. . .
Her body language calls back,
“See you!”
The road is calling.
Crickets are chirping,

 

Dragonflies zigzagging in the field,
The sun is glinting through the tops of the pines
Like a spun-glass bulls-eye
And little vortices of gnats
Are involved in crazy reunions
In patches of sunlight
Over unmown lawn.
Every morning lately, it’s the same:
She heads off into this ecstatic unknown
More than ready to leave everything behind
For that one final act of disappearance
That old country cats are known for.
And I won’t let her go.
But I will watch her make her way
Right up to the bend
Around which I would never see her again.
Only then will I go after her,
Scoop her up,
Keenly aware of the amazing coherence of her bones,
Cooing admonishments. . .
And thus begins our day.
And thus continues my training
For when I try to leave
And the world keeps calling me back.
See if I don’t purr.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the internationally recognized American political prisoner, thwarted a Philadelphia judge’s secretive court order that could have eliminated his future appeal rights when he filed a last- minute motion on August 23rd challenging that order sentencing him to life-without-parole.

Most supporters and detractors of Abu-Jamal had been expecting the formal conversion of his controversial death sentence to life-without-parole in the wake of a federal appeals court’s second and final rejection of requests from Philadelphia prosecutors to keep Abu-Jamal on death row back in April 2011.

What was unexpected by Abu-Jamal supporters were the procedures surrounding the secretive court order, which appears to have violated a number of Pennsylvania Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Abu-Jamal’s Pro Se Motion for Post Sentence Relief and Reconsideration of Sentence referenced Rule 720 of Pennsylvania’s Criminal Procedure which states in part that defendants shall “have the right” to make post-sentence motion but that motion must be filed “no later than 10 days after imposition of sentence.”

That secretly issued resentencing order occurred on August 13, 2012, exactly ten days before Abu-Jamal filed his motion.

If that ten-day filing period had expired, undiscovered due to secrecy-shrouded issuance of the resentencing order about which no public notice or notice was provided to Abu-Jamal and his legal team, his legal ability to challenge his continued confinement would have been damaged, including his probable loss of future appeal rights.

Mumia, off death row but fighting to escape life in prison, with attorney Rachel Wolkenstein and his wife Wadiya Jamal

GOP presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as noted in ThisCantBeHappening! yesterday, is probably stonewalling demands that he release his 2009 and earlier IRS filings because they could expose to the public that he availed himself of a 2009 IRS amnesty for those who admitted to earlier felonious hiding of income in Swiss and other foreign tax havens. Some 30,000 wealthy taxpayers did just that after a whistleblower broke the news that thousands of clients of Swiss Bank UBS were illegally hiding income at the bank, and the IRS sued for the names, while also offering the get-out-of-jail amnesty pass option.

But a reader, Phil Birkhahn, points out in his own blog called Romney the Tax Cheat that the slippery Harvard Law grad Romney may also have fraudulently ducked paying taxes in later — and earlier — years. Either that or he has to man-up and accept managerial responsibility for the obnoxious anti-worker and anti-America policies of his Bain Capital company during the 1999-2002 years, and in later years, during times when he asserting that he played none any but a passive investor role in the venture capital firm.

The problem for Romney is that the IRS taxes income significantly differently and allows far fewer deductions, especially for losses, for people who say they were only passive investors in a company than for those who say they were active in management.

Although Romney, whose whole basic argument to voters is that they should elect him because he is a great businessman who will run America “like a business,” also bizarrely at the same time claims that on “Feb. 1999 I left Bain Capital and all management responsibility,” and says “I had no ongoing activity or involvement,” meaning he was a passive investor in the firm, which he still owned 100% from that date until 2002, He is also listed as late as 2002 as one of the two managing members of Bain Capital in its annual report, and the company’s SEC filings list him as CEO, President and managing director as well as sole owner in 2000 and 2001. That would make him an active investor.

Mitt's got to level to Americans: Did he lie to the IRS or to them about whether he was actively running Bain?

If you want to know how moribund the Democratic Party is, how completely owned by Wall Street the president is, and how sick our national politics have become, just consider Social Security.

The president, earlier in his term, convened a “blue ribbon” panel, supposedly composed of a “broad spectrum” of opinions from liberal to conservative,” to come up with a plan to “reform” the system.

At issue: It is known that because of the huge number of Baby Boomers — people born between 1946 and 1964 — just starting to hit retirement age, and the general aging of the population, the Trust Fund composed of revenues paid into the system by working people will be depleted by about 2033. That would leave current worker taxes covering just 78% of the benefits promised to be paid out the same year, unless something is done sooner to increase revenues or decrease the rate of payouts of those benefits.

The commission, which proved to be a bust, was headed by co-chairs named by the president. For the Republicans, who since its inception have wanted to destroy this last vestige of the New Deal, it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, a cadaverous wretch of a man who promptly called the program a “milk cow with 300 million tits.” ‘Nuff said there. Nice pick Barack.

As for his Democratic co-chair, the president named Erskine Bowles. If you wanted to know the views of this former congressman and Clinton advisor on Social Security, you need only learn that in 2011 at a public event, he praised Rep. Paul Ryan, now Mitt Romney’s choice for VP, who has said he wants to privatize Social Security, and condemned the president’s last budget proposal as a joke. Barack sure knows how to pick ‘em. Bowles was clearly a Democratic mole for cutting benefits, raising taxes and raising the retirement age on that commission.

But then, that was the point. In classic Obama fashion, before the debate even began on what to do to fix Social Security’s coming fund shortfall, due in a bit over two decades, he telegraphed to the commission that he wanted “all options” on the table. If that sounds like how he talks about Iran, it’s because he was telling everyone he was ready for the nuclear option — cutting benefits, and perhaps even partial privatization.

President Roosevelt signes the Social Security Act into law in 1935. Republicans are still trying to kill it.

A lot of theories have been put forward to try and explain why Romney has allowed his campaign to become bedeviled by charges of tax dodging, but what if what he is hiding is felonious tax fraud?

Okay, so he’s taken the legal option of delaying filing his 2011 taxes, which every taxpayer is entitled to do without penalty and without having to give any explanation until October 15 this year (I agree it’s a little weird when a super-rich guy who pays accountants by the dozen does this, but hey). The nagging question though is why he hasn’t just responded to the demand that he release two years of tax returns like John McCain did in 2008 by simply releasing his 2009 tax filing, along with the 2010 return he already released?

The answer may well be that 2009 was the year that the Treasury Department decided to offer an amnesty from prosecution for tax fraud to any of the tens of thousands of millionaires who were known or suspected to have illegally hidden income abroad in the Cayman Islands or in Swiss banks — a felony, but one that people thought they’d never be caught at.

That year alone, some nearly 30,000 people, many of them no doubt prominent in society, politics and business, and customers of the finest accounting firms, reportedly voluntarily came forward to the IRS to admit that they had hidden some of the estimated $100 billion in income that crooked rich Americans have for years been secreting away in banks overseas. Under the terms of the program, they were able to just report their fraud, pay the taxes, penalties and interest on the money and then walk away scott free, with no charges and with their returns kept confidential by the agency.

That is, unless they decided to run for national office, where the expectation is that they have to release their income tax returns to the media for inspection.

Did Romney use a 2009 IRS tax amnesty to escape being caught in a giant multi-year tax fraud? The 2009 tax return he won’t release has the answer.

 
When we talk about
settling the world’s problems,
we’re barking up the wrong tree.

The world is perfect. It’s a mess.
It has always been a mess.

We are not going to change it.

Our job is to straighten out
our own lives.

– Joseph Campbell
 

I just returned from visiting friends in Maine, a place famous as an August getaway for refugees from the east coast rat-race. Historically, those who got away to Maine were called “rusticators,” since they went to Maine to experience fresh air and the rustic life.

The Institute for Economics & Peace lists Maine number one in its United States Peace Index. They say Maine is the safest state in the union, and they suggest “peacefulness” is good for all economies and would save us hundreds of billions of dollars.

My friends live on the finger of a hand that extends into the sea. Their tidy house is surrounded by forest, and they are a short drive to several picturesque villages with lobster boats moored in their small harbors. While I was there my cell phone didn’t work, I didn’t check my emails and I didn’t read or watch any news for five days.

A Maine village

Then we drove home to our Philadelphia suburb and five days worth of New York Times, plus emails from several hundred people anguishing over one horror or another. Here’s just a partial list of the mess:

After making an effort to cut our addiction, the US is now relying on Saudi Arabian oil more than ever; the Egyptian president fired his armed forces chief and replaced him with a guy who publicly called for the removal of US military power from the Middle East and who said al Qaeda was an “international insurgency movement” motivated by grievances with US policy; young American Jews are flocking to join the Israeli Defense Force as right-wing Israeli leaders threaten to attack Iran before the US election; Syria is in flat-out civil war now spreading into Lebanon with both the US and al Qaeda supporting the same insurgent elements; in Afghanistan, 40 US soldiers are killed when two helicopters fall out of the sky (the Taliban say they shot the copters down, while the Pentagon tells us it was “mechanical difficulties.”)