REDEYE 5/18/16

KKKourts just as blatantly racist as kkkops
NYT, 4/15 — …a report by a panel commissioned by Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago found racism in the city’s Police Department is rampant: Blacks are disproportionately subject to traffic stops, Tasers and street stops…account for an appalling 74 percent of the 404 people shot by the Chicago police between 2008 and 2015.
What the report does not say…is that the rottenness is not confined to the Police Department. Racist practices extend far into the criminal courts. Indeed they are the very foundation of the cases that enter into the court system. The hands of …judges and prosecutors are just as dirty as the bigots in blue….
…police officers who were scheduled to testify….would sit in the jury box, next to the judge…and would dutifully teach…how black men really were “dogs”….
Prosecutors and judges often participated in this culture. They spoke in overtly racist ways in court….In their eyes, defendants were to blame for their poverty, an ideology that justified a host of abuses of defendants, victims, witnesses or anyone with black or brown skin who found themselves in court….
…Attorneys….knew that to blow the whistle or in any way resist this culture could cost you your reputation, your job or even your safety….
The judge laughed at the fabrication of police reports, as if it were a novelty, rather than an abuse of power….
…Judges and prosecutors…willingly admitted that police perjury was part of the culture of the court system in Cook County….
…The police have a hand in controlling the types of prosecutors who get promoted, and the types of justice defendants receive in our courts.
U.S. guilty for Mid-East chaos
GW, 4/15 [letter] — …Much of the chaos and anger in the Middle East arose from U.S. intervention in the region.
To mention just a few: the CIA-backed overthrow of the elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and U.S. support of the Shah; support for Israel and its annexation of Palestinian territory; support for the military coup in Egypt…; U.S. support for Saudi Arabia and its bombing in Yemen; and most egregiously, the invasion of Iraq that led to the emergence of Isis….
…The flood of refugees from the Middle East and the recent terrorist attacks…are in large part the result of…U.S. intervention.
It is the height of arrogance for Obama to suggest that it is now a European obligation to sort out the chaos that the U.S. has created.
Slaves built Georgetown University
NYT, 4/23 — Bankers, merchants and manufacturers all profited from the slave trade, as did companies that insured slaving ships and their cargo. And more than a dozen universities have acknowledged ties to slavery. Even so, some…paper over the role that slavery played in their founding and early history.
Such denials are impossible in the harrowing history of slavery at Georgetown University….In 1838, the Jesuits running the college…sold 272 African-American men, women and children into a hellish life on sugar plantations in the South to finance the college’s continued operation….
The sale…stands out for its sheer size and the directness of its relationship to the existence and fortunes of one of the country’s top Catholic universities….one of history’s worst crimes against humanity….
…The Jesuits were among the largest slaveholders in the nation….Historian Craig Wilder notes…the Catholic Church was fully involved in with slavery in the colonial period….Income from slave plantations….allowed the church to survive…and underwrote the church’s expansion….
…Wilder writes, “Rather than retreating from slaveholding, the bishops built their church by tracking the westward expansion of plantation slavery”….
At Georgetown, slavery and scholarship were inextricably linked. The college relied on its plantation to help pay for its operations….The sale of the African-American men, women and children staved off its ruin.
No overtime pay, profits double
NYT, 4/21 — Half a century ago, overtime pay was the norm, with more than 60 percent of salaried employees qualifying….Only about 8 percent qualify today. If you feel…you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents did, it’s…because you are.
Today, if you…earn more than $23,600…a year, you don’t automatically qualify for overtime: That means every extra hour you work, you work free….
Everybody knows Americans are overworked….Americans now report working an average of 47 hours a week — not the supposed standard 40 — while 18 percent report working more than 60 hours….
…The longer and harder we work for the same wage, the fewer jobs there are for others, the higher unemployment goes….That helps explain why over the last 30 years, corporate profits have doubled from about 6 percent of gross domestic product to about 12 percent, while wages have fallen by almost the exact same amount. The erosion of overtime…is one of the main factors leading to worsening inequality.
U.S. corporations hide trillions in tax havens
GW, 4/22 — U.S. corporate giants such as Apple, Walmart and General Electric have stashed $1.4 trillion in tax havens, despite receiving trillions of dollars in taxpayer support….
The sum, larger than the economic output of Russia, South Korea and Spain, is held in an “opaque and secret network” of 1,608 subsidiaries based offshore, said Oxfam. The charities analysis of the financial affairs of the 50 biggest U.S. corporations comes amid scrutiny of tax havens following the Panama Papers leak….
Apple… [has] some $181 billion held offshore in three subsidiaries. Boston-based conglomerate General Electric, which…has had $28 billion in taxpayer backing… [has] $119 billion stored in 118 tax haven subsidiaries. Microsoft was third with $108 billion….