The toxic culture in US police departments

Video of the brutal death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers following a traffic stop has been released. I have not seen it and will not watch it because it is reportedly horrific and I have no stomach for such things. This article describes in detail what happened.

Before the release, his mother RowVaughn Wells said that she will not watch the video. This is hardly surprising. If I, who have no connection to the victim, think it would be too painful to watch, imagine what it would be like for a mother to see her son beaten and kicked to death. She and the rest of the family appealed for calm and urged people not to riot in the wake of the release. People seemed to have heeded their call and the protests have been peaceful. That is a relief because if the protests had turned violent, media attention would have shifted from the murder of Nichols to the violence. Wells seems like a remarkable woman. She has even said that she feels sorry for her son’s killers.
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Greedy, selfish, rich jerks

Evan Osnos exposes the many ways in which the ultra-wealthy shield their income from taxes even when they die, using loopholes that are not available to ordinary people. They do this while claiming to be philanthropists by putting their names on things, which are also forms of tax avoidance. But one the main ways they avoid taxes is by means of creating elaborate trusts that ensure that their children and their children pay little or no taxes on their inheritances when they die. These trust fund babies continue their tax avoidance schemes. The consequences are apparent.

And yet, in recent times, the fortunes of many prominent American clans have soared…. In 1978, the top 0.1 per cent of Americans owned about seven per cent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns eighteen per cent.

A century ago, American law handled the rare pleasure of a giant inheritance with suspicion. Instead of allowing money to cascade through generations, like a champagne tower, we siphoned off some of the flow through taxes on estates, gifts, and capital gains. As the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1927, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” But, since the late seventies, American politics has taken a more accommodating approach to dynastic fortunes—slashing rates, widening exemptions, and permitting a vast range of esoteric loopholes for wealthy taxpayers. According to Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, the average tax rate on the top 0.01 per cent has fallen by more than half, to about thirty per cent, while rates for the bottom ninety per cent have climbed slightly, to an average of twenty-five per cent.

That lucrative maneuvering is the realm of specialized attorneys, accountants, and money managers, many of whom work for family offices: in-house financial teams that typically include a dozen or so full-time attendants… They tend to have no public presence—Gordon Getty’s family office is known, inconspicuously, as Vallejo Investments—but by some estimates they control about six trillion dollars in assets, a larger sum than is managed by all the world’s hedge funds.

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Football kills and you cannot make it safer

The recent incident in an (American) football game where Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after getting hit hard in the chest during a tackle has once again highlighted how dangerous this sport is. Football authorities and fans tend to quickly label these as isolated events and any actions they have taken in the wake of them have focused on extra protective gear or changing the rules to reduce some dangerous practices.

But Irvin Muchnick writes that those remedies merely skirt the fundamental issue and that is that this sport kills.

One month and a day before Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin came frighteningly close to becoming the second in-game fatality in NFL history, he was ejected from the Amazon Prime Thursday night game for an illegal hit on New England Patriots wide receiver Jakobi Meyers. See it for yourself on YouTube. Hamlin, a defensive safety, blasted Meyers helmet-to-helmet, preventing a touchdown catch in the end zone. As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, on the aborted Jan. 2 edition of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” Hamlin made a clean tackle against a Cincinnati Bengals receiver, and then collapsed seconds later, likely from commotio cordis, or percussion-induced cardiac arrest.
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Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Elaine Chao

Elaine Chao was the secretary of transportation during almost the entirety of the Trump administration, only resigning after the events of January 6th 2021, just two weeks before its end. She held the position of labor secretary during the administration of George W. Bush. She is married to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. She is also the child of Chinese immigrants and came to the US as a child. Her family also founded a massive shipping company. This latter feature opened her up to charges of using her official government position to benefit the family shipping business but this kind of influence-peddling is now routine. The idea that one should go to great lengths to prevent even the appearance of any impropriety is now seen as some kind of quaint old-world fantasy.
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What the Speaker holdouts achieved

In order to get the votes to become Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy had to agree to a lot of the demands made by the most extreme members of the so-called Freedom Caucus.

Some of those concern committee assignments. Legislation must pass through the various and committees and subcommittees before they reach the floor for a vote. Draft legislation (the initial versions of which are often prepared behind closed doors with the help of lobbyists who tilt them to favor their bosses) are supposed to get hearings in these subcommittees with public input. Members of Congress desire seats on those committees that are of prime concern to wealthy constituents because then those constituents’ lobbyists will pour money into their campaigns in order to get their vote. Since these committees are much sought after, many of those seats are assigned by seniority, meaning that the longer one has been in Congress, the better your chances of being placed on the desired committees or, even better, chairing them. But some of the Freedom Caucus members have demanded seats ahead of senior members and you can be sure that McCarthy is going to face some anger if he shoves aside senior members to appease the extremists.
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Here we go again with the debt ceiling dance

Once again, we are being told that there is a danger that the US may default if Congress does not raise the limit on the debt ceiling that allows the Treasury to borrow money to meet its obligations. The debt ceiling was formally reached last week but the Treasury is shifting money around in order to cover the shortfall. That room for financial maneuverings runs out around June.

The country has been through this before, usually when a Democrat is president and the House or the Senate is controlled by Republicans who like to use this issue to create difficulties for the president. When Trump was president, the ceiling was raised with little fuss. Of course, Trump is now urging his followers to use the debt ceiling as hostage.

On Monday, Trump, whose influence over the party was shaken somewhat by poor midterm election results for his endorsed candidates but who remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, called on House Republicans to leverage power “by simply playing tough in the upcoming debt ceiling negotiations”.

Posting on the social media network he set up, Truth Social, Trump pressed all wings of the Republican party, including those rebels who initially voted against McCarthy, to join the negotiations: “It will be a beautiful and joyous thing for the people of our country to watch.”

The debt ceiling issue is one that seems made to be exploited by grandstanding politicians. To understand it, one must realize that what is called the ‘power of the purse’ is given to the House of Representatives. What that means is that all spending bills must originate in the House. It then goes to the Senate that can make changes which then have to be reconciled with the House and the reconciled bill is then sent to the president for their signature.
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Are we living in an Age of Unreason?

I have been thinking about how future historians will characterize the period through which we are living and the label ‘The Age of Unreason’ popped into my mind as a suitable one (at least for the US). The reason is that I marvel at the kinds of things that people currently believe and are doing that seem so detached from reality and untethered to reason. Here is a short list of things that immediately came to mind and I am sure that there are others.

Anti-vax: Vaccines are some of the greatest inventions in medicine, saving countless lives all over the world. The rapid development of the vaccines for covid-19 was a stupendous achievement. And yet, we have people refusing to take it because they think that Covid-19 was an intentionally planned outbreak and part of some plot and are willing to trust completely untested and sometimes dangerous alternatives. Some of these people are even giving up on Trump because he does not buy in to all their claims.
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Ted Baxter is the archetype for TV personalities who pretend to be journalists

Many of the people whom one sees on cable TV ‘news’ shows are not really journalists but people selected for their looks and attitudes. Some old timers may remember the Mary Tyler Moore TV comedy series in which she plays an assistant producer on a local TV new station. Much of the humor in that show comes from their TV news anchor Ted Baxter (played by Ted Knight) who was pompous and ignorant but had the look and the voice of a TV anchor, at least by the standards of that time when they were pretty much all middle-aged white men.

Chris Kaltenbach writes that in the film Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Will Ferrell models his character on Baxter.

Burgundy’s is a character profile that fans of television’s “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” know well. For seven seasons, pompous blowhard Ted Baxter anchored the news on Minneapolis’ WJM-TV, mangling the English language, acting as his own biggest fan, placing more importance on the color of his blazer than on his understanding of the news. He was an insufferable buffoon who rarely did anything right, who believed the world existed for him and him alone.

Fans of the show loved him. Critics loved him. His peers loved him, awarding actor Ted Knight a pair of Emmys for his portrayal. Who knew that Knight and the show’s writers were creating an archetype that would still be going strong three decades later?
…

[Show co-creator Allan] Burns, who would go on to win a pair of writing Emmys for the show, says he and Brooks patterned Baxter after a pair of news anchors popular in Los Angeles at the time the show debuted in 1970.

“[Moore’s] aunt was the assistant to the president of the local CBS affiliate here in L.A., and so Jim and I spent a lot of time hanging around that newsroom just to try and get the flavor of it,” he says. “There was an anchorman there, Jerry Dunphy — Jerry was one of those stentorian, firm-jawed, gray-haired guys who looked right on camera, but who was not a newsman, like so many of the anchors are not. They’re really newsreaders more than anything else.

Baxter would constantly mangle the script written for him to read, to the chagrin of the writers. In this clip, Baxter reads the script oblivious that the visuals accompanying it are wrong.

Heather Hendershot makes the case that the fictional Baxter, for all his faults, is better than the current crop of media news pundits.

The skills of a cult leader

When we think of cult leaders, we tend to think of those with large followings. But that same kind of phenomenon can occur with smaller numbers, even within households, because the kinds of skills used by a cult leader to control others can be seen in abusive relationships where the abused person seems unable to escape from the clutches of the abusers, even though on the surface they seem to have the ability to walk away. The abuser seems to know exactly what buttons to push with each captive, which combination of threats and affection work to keep them from leaving.

I was struck by the case of Larry Ray who has just been sentenced to 60 years in prison for trafficking. It starts with his daughter Talia asking her seven dorm roommates at Sarah Lawrence College if her father, who had just been released from prison, could stay in their dorm for a short while and they agreed.
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