SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
NPR reports:
On Wednesday morning, the United States Department of Justice announced the result of a yearlong investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, which found that BPD habitually violates the civil rights of its residents. These violations, the Justice Department found, have an outsized effect on the city's black population.
[...] The report's findings were far-reaching. Between 2010 and 2015, BPD recorded over 300,000 pedestrian stops (a number the DOJ believes vastly underrepresents actual stops.) Those stops often lacked reasonable suspicion, and were mostly confined to black neighborhoods — 44 percent occurred in two low-income black neighborhoods that make up 11 percent of Baltimore's population.
In the same time period, the report found that BPD made "warrantless arrests without probable cause," stopped black residents three times as often as white, and arrested black folks on drug charges at five times the rate of white folks, despite comparable levels of possession. They were also found to have used unreasonable force against juveniles and people who presented "little or no threat to officers or others."
According to the investigation, the BPD has also failed to respond adequately to reports of sexual assault, resulting "in part, from underlying gender bias." It reported BPD detectives asked questions like, "Why are you messing that guy's life up?" when interviewing women who reported sexual assault.
The World Socialist Web Site reports:
The report finds that despite making up 63 percent of the city's population, African-Americans account for over 83 percent of all criminal charges and are regularly over-represented in arrest reports in comparison to their percentage of the population.
The DoJ found that the percentage of people arrested in a five-year period on the petty and highly subjective charges of "failure to obey" or "disorderly conduct" was 91 and 84 percent African-American respectively. Even starker, African-Americans made up over 83 percent of the area's traffic stops, despite being less than 30 percent of the entire metropolitan region's total driving population.
[...] The DoJ found that over a five-year period, BPD officers made over 11,000 arrests that were subsequently thrown out at central booking for being groundless. [...] Investigators found "BPD uses overly aggressive tactics that unnecessarily escalate encounters, increase tensions, and lead to unnecessary force".
[...] Then there is the first African-American president, who has handed out military grade weaponry to local police departments across the country--at the same time his Justice Department has routinely rejected calls for killer cops to be prosecuted under federal civil rights laws and invariably opposed every attempt to bring police violence cases before the Supreme Court.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 14 2016, @06:26PM
No, I'm not redefining terms.
The problem here is your ignorance, based on Cold War bullshit .
Your stubborn refusal to become enlightened adds to the problem.
Private ownership of the means of production is NOT exclusive to Capitalism.
Slave economies had that.
Feudalism had that.
The worker-owners of Mondragon (and the co-ops of Italy) also have that.
A situation that does -not- have private ownership is the State Capitalism system under which USSR, North Korea (DPRK), and their ilk have operated.
That you still think that that condition is "socialism" or "communism" simply shows your continuing ignorance and unwillingness to become educated and your acceptance of propaganda via improperly-named things .
Additionally, a municipality "collectively" owning its water system or broadband network is NOT "socialism"; at best, that is Liberal Democracy AKA Social Democracy AKA Christian Democracy.
Until a place has Democracy In The Workplace, that place does NOT have a Socialist system.
Socialism is Democracy EVERYWHERE.
Where the Socialist model differs from the exploitive Capitalism|Oligarchy model is this concept:
EVERYONE affected by a decision gets a voice in that decision.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 15 2016, @07:02AM
Private ownership of the means of production is NOT exclusive to Capitalism.
Slave economies had that.
I didn't say it was. I said private ownership of the means of production, accompanied by some infrastructure of legal protection and trade of said capital, is the definition of capitalism.
Socialism is Democracy EVERYWHERE.
Which is patently false. You even gave counterexamples such as the USSR. You can define words however you want. But until the dictionaries agree with you, you're wasting everyone's time. Here's the Oxford definiton:
A political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
I don't see democracy in there though obviously it is a way to make those decisions. They explicitly mention "Soviet state communism" so democracy isn't even implied. This is the source of my concern about your redefining of terms. You're just doublethinking here. Some stuff is goodthink. Some stuff is ungoodthink. And these supposed definitions have nothing to do with the actual terms or the actual activities labeled by those terms.
And of course, you completely fail to discuss the main point which is that capitalism works and is an instrumental part of any advanced society of today. All your talk to this point ignores that we are seeing the largest improvement in the well-being of humanity ever, the most rapid and productive advancement in technology and building of infrastructure and wealth ever, the greatest accumulation of knowledge ever, etc. You need more than unicorns here. Now that we have working prototypes, let's see them work on a larger scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 15 2016, @07:28PM
you completely fail to discuss the main point which is that capitalism works
...to increase inequality and to concentrate wealth in a small number of hands.
When the MAJORITY of the population is hanging on by their fingernails, that is NOT success, fool.
Evidence [from 2014] that Half of America is Broke [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
Most Americans on Brink of Financial Disaster [January 2015] [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
...and I have since seen an item with the numbers for 2015.
That takes the numbers of The Precariat up to 60 percent.
Your ridiculous Reactionary opinions are not backed by the facts.
The actual facts rebut your decades-old nonsense.
As you consume Faux Noose, more and more stupid, unsupported, useless shit goes into your head.
and is an instrumental part of any advanced society of today
My examples have already demonstrated that the opposite is true.
Capitalism, like systems before it, is one more phase through which humanity is passing on its way to something better.
You are simply an uneducated, poorly-informed denialist and are unworthy of further attention.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 16 2016, @12:25AM
...to increase inequality and to concentrate wealth in a small number of hands.
Which is not true presently let us note. You are using a developed world viewpoint from a rather flawed economy under stress rather than a global one. Sure, in countries like the US, there is some concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In the world as a whole, however, there is a massive rise towards a developed world standard of living. For example, two thirds of everyone on Earth has seen a 30% or greater [voxeu.org] rise in their income, adjusted for inflation, during the period 1988-2008. And most of the third who didn't see rises of that size had developed world income. So there was a massive decrease in income inequality over a recent twenty year period (despite the very rich getting richer!).
I also note that focusing on income inequality is disingenuous. People are still better off in the developed world than they were despite the richer getting richer relative to the general population. Envy is a poor substitute for greed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:22AM
1988-2008
...after which, Capitalism completely fell on its face--as it does repeatedly.
Folks who were due to retire in 2009 found their pensions gone.
Thanks, Capitalism.
For Joe Average, not only has has the Capitalist economy NOT recovered, it's gotten WORSE.
(You previously asked for links and I have provided them, yet you are still in denial.)
disingenuous
You don't seem to understand the word, so let me explain it to you:
1) I give examples of successful Socialism.
2) You ignore the examples.
3) You instead compare USA's Capitalist system to some other CAPITALIST system that isn't doing as well for its 1 Percent.
...and you don't seem to be aware of the concept of "The 1 Percent" (the only folks who are doing better since the crash of 2008).
You truly are a nitwit who has drunk the kool-aid.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:56AM
...after which, Capitalism completely fell on its face--as it does repeatedly.
Yet somehow there's always more face for capitalism to fall on. One can't have periodic downturns without some sort of progress between. And there have been several such downturns in the period of time I mentioned. Yet somehow most people in the world ended up considerably better after all that. I bet most people in the world are already better off now than they were in 2007 despite the latest mess.
Folks who were due to retire in 2009 found their pensions gone.
Your apathy about your future is not my problem. The false promises you bought in your youth are not my problem. It amazes me how apathetic would-be retirees are about their pensions and the mess that those pensions have become. For a recent example, CalPERS (the California Public Employees' Retirement System), one of the largest public pension funds in the world has been squandering their funds for quite some time now. They have an ancient history of corruption, incompetence, and costly showboating going back decades [city-journal.org]. But where's the mass protests? I guess most members just think California or perhaps the US government will step in and pay. Sure they will.
Pensions are just another easy way to promise something far in the future that you don't have to deliver. Those promises would have disappeared anyway, whether there were a market crash in 2007 or not.
And I see you're still obsessing over the definition thing. I don't know what you mean by "Capitalism" or "Socialism" since you have yet to submit a rigorous definition rather than breezy platitudes. But I do know what Oxford dictionary means by those terms and I'm going with that. So no, socialism is not democracy everywhere. "State capitalism" is not capitalism (very Orwellian that). "Liberal democracy" != "Social democracy" != "Christian democracy". Capitalism is not "a separate Ownership Class which exploits The Working Class".
While looking back at these babblespeak assertions, I came across this gem:
That you still think that that condition is "socialism" or "communism" simply shows your continuing ignorance and unwillingness to become educated and your acceptance of propaganda via improperly-named things .
This is one of the worst examples of psychological projection I've seen on any community discussion forum. All you've done to this point is improperly name and define things. That's the core of your reasoning here and sorry, I'm not having any of it. Educate yourself Einstein. I suggest a quick perusal of a dictionary and following its advice concerning these terms would clear up a lot of your problems right away.