The New Jim Crow – Bankrupcy Courts

It is fairly easy for low income folks to fall behind in their ability to pay their debts. It really only take one major expense whether medical or something as simple, but sometimes drastic as a car breakdown to put folks on limited income below the line financially. Unlike the white-wing Republican whine, this has nothing to do with buying color televisions, drinking champagne, or spending lavishly on luxuries – this is a real condition of America’s economy. In some communities like those in Ferguson, Missouri – such financial crisis can be caused by policies set up to “punish” the black community through judicial and court fines. The victims of this Jim Crow Justice System are often left with ony three bad choices – pay the fine and lose your apartment, don’t pay the fine and go to jail, or go to jail and lose your job.

Not only are black folks victim of this, the elderly and poor white folks have the same problem.

The difference (as is symptomatic of our Jim Crow Justice System) is, how the legal system treats people of color.

Debtor’s Prison

Caught in the Bankruptcy Feedback Loop

Black Americans are far less likely than their white peers to successfully erase their debts in court—and a network of attorneys profits as a result.

Novasha Miller pushed through the revolving doors of the black glass tower on Jefferson Avenue last December and felt a rush of déjà vu. The building, conspicuous in Memphis’ modest skyline along the Mississippi River, looms over its neighbors. Then she remembered: Years ago, as a teenager, she’d accompanied her mother inside.

Now she was 32, herself the mother of a teenager, and she was entering the same door, taking the same elevator. Like her mother before her, Miller was filing for bankruptcy.

She’d cried when she made the decision, but with three boys and one uneven paycheck, every month was a narrow escape. A debt collector had recently won a court judgment against her and, along with that, the ability to seize a chunk of her pay. Soon, she would be forced to decide between groceries or electricity.

Bankruptcy, she figured, despite its stink of shame and failure, would stop all that. She could begin anew: older, wiser, and with a job at a catering company that paid $10.50 an hour, a good bump from her last one. She could keep dreaming of a life where she had money left over at the end of each month, a chance of one day owning a home.

What Miller didn’t know when she swallowed her pride and called a local bankruptcy attorney is that she would probably end up right back where she started, with the same debts, in the same crisis. For the black debtors who, for generations, have made Memphis the bankruptcy capital of the U.S., the system delivers neither forgiveness nor renewal.

Up on the sixth floor of that tower where I met Miller last February, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Tennessee appeared to be a well-functioning machine. Debtors, nearly all black like her, crowded the wedge-shaped waiting area as lawyers, paralegals, and court staff, almost all white, milled about in front. Hundreds of cases are filed here every week, and those who oversee and administer the process all proudly note the court’s marvelous efficiency. Millions of dollars flow smoothly to creditors, to the court, to bankruptcy attorneys.

But the machine hides a harsh reality. When ProPublica analyzed consumer bankruptcy filings nationwide, the district stood out, both for the stunning number of cases in which debtors were unable to get relief, and for the reasons why. In Memphis, an entrenched legal culture has made bankruptcy a boon for attorneys while miring clients like Miller in a cycle of futility.

Under federal bankruptcy law, people overwhelmed by debt have a choice: They can either file under Chapter 7, which wipes out debts and, since most filers lack significant assets, allows them to keep what little they have. Or they can choose Chapter 13, which usually requires five years of payments to creditors before any debts are eliminated, but blocks foreclosures and car repossessions as long as debtors can keep up. In most of the country, Chapter 7 is the overwhelming choice. Only in the South, in a band of states stretching from North Carolina to Texas, is Chapter 13 predominant.

The responsibility of knowing which path to pick falls to those seeking relief. In Memphis, about three-quarters of filings are under Chapter 13. That’s how Miller filed. She thought the two chapters were “the same,” she told me.

Initially, they are. Upon filing, debtors are shielded from garnishments and debt collectors. But whereas under Chapter 7 those protections are generally made permanent after a few months, under Chapter 13 they last only as long as payments are made. Most Chapter 13 filers in Memphis don’t last a year, let alone five.

As efficiently as cases are opened, they are closed—usually because debtors fail to keep up with payments, according to a ProPublica analysis of court data. In 2015, over 9,000 cases in the district were dismissed—more cases than were filed in 22 other states that year. Less than a third of Chapter 13 cases in the district result in a discharge of debts. And when their cases are dismissed, debtors are often in worse straits, because as they struggled to make payments, the interest on their unpaid debts continued to mount. Once the refuge of bankruptcy is gone, the debt floods back larger than ever. They’ve borne the costs of bankruptcy—attorney and filing fees, a seven-year flag on their credit reports—without receiving its primary benefit. A system that is supposed to eliminate debt instead serves to magnify it.

Driving this tremendous churn of filings is a handful of bankruptcy attorneys with what sounds like an easy pitch: immediate relief, for free. In Memphis, it typically costs around $1,000 to hire an attorney to file a Chapter 7, but most attorneys will file a Chapter 13 for no money down. Ultimately, the fees for Chapter 13 filings are higher—upwards of $3,000—but the payments are stretched over time. For many people, this is the only option they can afford: debt relief on credit. For attorneys, they gain clients—and a regular flow of fees—they might not otherwise get, even if few of their clients get lasting relief.

For black filers in Memphis, relief is particularly rare. They are more likely than their white peers to file under Chapter 13 and less likely to complete a Chapter 13 plan. Because failure is so frequent in Memphis, many people file again and again. In 2015, about half of the black debtors who filed under Chapter 13 in the district had done so at least once before in the previous five years. Some had filed as many as 20 times over their lifetimes. Here, bankruptcy is often not the one-time rescue it was envisioned to be, but rather a way for the poor to hold on to basic necessities like electricity for a couple months.

“The way we have it set up, our culture, has a lot of unintended consequences,” said Judge Jennie Latta, one of five bankruptcy judges in the Western District of Tennessee. Since 1997, when she took the bench, the racial disparities in Memphis have been evident, she said. “It was troubling to me then, and it’s still troubling to me.”

When I asked judges, trustees (who administer the cases), and debtor attorneys what could be done to reduce racial disparities and improve outcomes, I was mostly met with resignation. I heard a lot about the poverty in Memphis and a legal culture with deeply rooted traditions. But ProPublica’s analysis identified bankruptcy attorneys in Memphis who had much more success in getting their black clients out of debt. These attorneys had a different approach, preferring Chapter 7 to Chapter 13, and, crucially, allowing more flexibility in what clients paid up front in fees.

Scrutiny of Memphis is important, because the racial differences there are present across the country. Nationally, the odds of black debtors choosing Chapter 13 instead of Chapter 7 were more than twice as high as for white debtors with a similar financial profile. And once they chose Chapter 13, ProPublica found, the odds of their cases ending in dismissal—with no relief from their debts—were about 50 percent higher.

Meanwhile, the $0-down style of bankruptcy practiced in Memphis, long common across the South, is quietly growing in popularity elsewhere. Chicago in particular has seen an explosion of Chapter 13 filings in recent years. A recent study found that the “no money down” model is becoming more prevalent, prompting concerns that it is snaring increasing numbers of unsuspecting debtors and ultimately keeping them in debt….

The New Jim Crow, very much like The Old Jim Crow…Just sneakier

 

St Louis At The Precipice

In the span of a week this summer, juries opted against convicting three police officers charged in high-profile shootings that were captured on video. In each of those cases, the video and the case prompted protests and unrest. In each of those cases, prosecutors filed charges and decried what had happened. Each case ended with an acquittal, showing what law enforcement officials and experts say are the limitations of video evidence.

Remember, Missouri is the only state since the Civil Rights Era to be issued a “Travel Warning” by the NAACP for persons of color travelling through the State.With the reinstitution of Jim Crow by other means in the State, the Republican politician have created conditions where – you best go armed, and be ready to use it in my view.

Further street violence in Saint Louis is probable as people protest yet another murder by cop, even though we hope this doesn’t get into full scale rioting. What happened in LA in ’92 after the Rodney King verdict riot was a period of nearly 5 years of low-level warfare between the Police and community.So we have ample precedent for the path the white-right in Missouri is pursuing. When the government reacts to complaints by the citizens by exacerbating or increasing the reasons for the complaints…

At some point theng get really bad.

Welcome to Watts.

Police and protesters clash in St. Louis after former officer who shot black driver acquitted on murder charges

Demonstrators clashed with police officers Friday night in St. Louis after the acquittal of a white former police officer who was charged with murder last year for fatally shooting a black driver after a car chase.

In a video tweeted after midnight on Saturday, St. Louis police chief Lawrence O’Toole said at least 23 people had been arrested as of 6 p.m., and 10 police officers had suffered injuries including a broken jaw and a dislocated shoulder.

“Many of the demonstrators were peaceful. However, after dark, many agitators began to destroy property and assault police officers,” O’Toole said in a joint video statement with Mayor Lyda Krewson.

O’Toole said the protesters assaulted police with bricks and bottles, and officers responded by using tear gas and firing pepper-spray balls as a “less lethal option.”

Roughly 1,000 protesters descended on the mayor’s home, throwing rocks and breaking windows, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They were met by about 200 police in riot gear who tried to disperse them with tear gas. The mayor did not appear to be home.

The night of violence began with peaceful demonstrations earlier in the day after a judge acquitted former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley for killing Anthony Lamar Smith in December 2011.

In a court document submitted by the St. Louis circuit attorney, the investigator on the case said Stockley and another officer had been chasing Smith at speeds up to 80 m.p.h. when Stockley said he was “going to kill this motherf‑‑‑er, don’t you know it” and told the officer to drive into Smith’s slowing car.

The document said Stockley then approached Smith’s window and fired five times into the car, hitting Smith “with each shot” and killing him. In addition, prosecutors accused the officer of planting a gun on the victim: There was a gun found in Smith’s car, but it was later determined to have DNA only from Stockley.

Judge Timothy Wilson, the circuit judge who heard the case in a bench trial, acquitted Stockley on the murder charge as well as a charge of armed criminal action in a 30-page order released Friday morning.

Wilson wrote that he was “simply not firmly convinced” of Stockley’s guilt, saying that “agonizingly,” he went over the case’s evidence repeatedly. Ultimately, Wilson said, he was not convinced that the state proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Stockley “did not act in self-defense.”

Following the verdict, Smith’s mother, Annie, said the judge made the wrong decision.

“Justice wasn’t served. I can never be at peace,” she told Fox2Now.

In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Stockley, 36, who relocated to Houston, acknowledged the hurt Smith’s family is feeling. “I know everyone wants someone to blame,” he told the newspaper, “but I’m just not the guy.”

When asked why he agreed to address the case, tears filled his eyes. “Because I did nothing wrong,” he said. “If you’re telling the truth and you’ve been wrongly accused, you should shout it from the rooftops.”

A West Point graduate who served with the Army in Iraq, Stockley said that his job as a St. Louis cop grew so dangerous, he began carrying unauthorized weapons with extra rounds.

“I accept full responsibility for violating the rules,” he said. “But it’s not a moral crime. It’s a rule violation.”

Local and state officials said they were prepared for potential unrest following the acquittal. Some schools in the St. Louis area were shuttered and events in the region were postponed as the verdict loomed.

In the afternoon, police used pepper spray on protesters blocking their path, while demonstrators smashed the front windshield of a police SUV, the Post-Dispatch reported.

On Friday night, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who had put the state’s National Guard on standby ahead of the verdict and potential protests, chastised those who engaged in violence, saying it “is not going to be tolerated here in the state of Missouri.”

Before the verdict was announced, Greitens stood with Christina Wilson, Smith’s fiancee, to deliver a joint message asking people to protest peacefully.

“If you feel like you want to speak out, speak how you feel,” Wilson said at the news briefing. “And whatever comes to you, just do it in a peaceful way.”

Greitens, speaking after Wilson, urged people who felt pain after the verdict not to “turn that pain into violence.”

“One life has been lost in this case, and we don’t need more bloodshed,” he said.

The problem Ms Wilson, is it isn’t just “one life” – there have been four trials of Police Officers in the area in 4 months…All of which have resulted in acquittals. It is now a Public and personal safety issue, created by a racist and corrupt government at every level. I am not advocating killing Cops or violence, no will I support that in anything but self defense…But if you must go there because you feel there is no other solution – then aim a little higher in the food chain. The Cops cannot commit crimes unless here are criminals supporting their actions. You can expect no support form a Jeff Sessions DOJ at the Federal level, because they are now in cahoots with local government racists and oppressors.

 

Jesse Jackson’s Relevant Moment

Been a long time since Jesse Jackson had relevance. Yesterday, he hit the nail on the head.

The Chumph, once again – showed his true colors. The idea the a Jefferson Davis Sessions led FBI “investigating” racists is a joke.

The Chumph and Sessions are the people who have diverted the FBI from going after white supremacist terrorist groups in the US. White supremacists and neo-Nazi groups have been ecstatic.

KKK Jeff’s reopening of the white right’s search for the non-existent unicorn of discrimination against whites, and renewal of the racist attack on Affirmative Action further fuels the fire of white racists.

Renewal of the “Drug War” and mass Minority incarceration of Minorities as a method of social control.

It ain’t really about what these racist POSs say, it is what they do.

 

NAACP Issues Travel Warning for Missouri

Welcome to the new Chumph confederacy…

NAACP Warns Minorities, Women Heading To Missouri: ‘They May Not Be Safe’

The organization wants people to know their civil rights may be violated in the Show Me State.

NAACP delegates have approved a travel advisory warning marginalized groups that “they may not be safe” if they go to Missouri because their civil rights are likely to be violated.

The delegates voted Wednesday to nationally adopt the advisory, which was put in place statewide in June, according to the Springfield News-Leader. The advisory ― directed at people of color, women, people who identify as LGBTQ and those with disabilities ― cites recent legislation signed by Gov. Eric Greitens (R) that makes it even more difficult to sue for housing or employment discrimination.

NAACP Springfield chapter President Cheryl Clay and other chapter members emphasized that this is not a boycott, but a warning and a response to the legislation.

“Our ongoing issues of racial profiling, discrimination, harassment and excess violence towards people of color have been further exacerbated by the passage and signing of [Senate Bill] 43,” Clay said in a statement to the News-Leader.

“Not all the communities have the desire or the will to do the right thing for people in their community,” Clay added. “Thus, this is why Missouri has earned the travel advisory for the whole state.”

In addition to the bill, the advisory condemns the state for a number of issues dating back to the Missouri Compromise of 1819. Those include “racial and ethnic disparities in education, health, economic empowerment and criminal justice,” a “long history” of racial violence and harassment, and recent data that shows black drivers were 75 percent more likely to be pulled over by cops than white drivers in 2016.

It also cites the racism that led to protests against University of Missouri in 2015 and a lawmaker’s comments on the House floor claiming that there’s a “distinction between homosexuality and just being a human being.”

Just days before the national delegation voted, Missouri NAACP President Rod Chapel told The Associated Press that he thinks “everybody’s civil rights are now in jeopardy.”

After the delegates approved the travel advisory, Chapel told the AP that he hopes the move will boost awareness. He said that the advisory will be up for ratification by the national board in October.

 

Jordan Edwards Murderer Indicted

As we all know, a white policeman who has murdered a black man or child being indicted doesn’t mean much. No matter how damning the evidence or egregious the crime.

 

Multiple Investigations Into Chumph Obstruction Of Justice

There are now multiple investigations in the Chump’s obstruction of justice relative to the Chumph-Russia collusion. One is headed by the Senate, and was kicked off by both the Republican and Democrat Chairs.

The other, and more interesting is the one kicked off by Special Prosecutor Mueller looking into a range of Chumph criminality at the FBI. The Special Counsel is looking into “Obstruction of Justice” in addition to Russia-Trump collusion, in addition to financial irregularities and money laundering, in addition to financial fraud, in addition to…

So many crimes, so little time…Indeed.

Special counsel is investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, officials say

The special counsel overseeing the investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election is interviewing senior intelligence officials as part of a widening probe that now includes an examination of whether President Trump attempted to obstruct justice, officials said.

The move by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to investigate Trump’s conduct marks a major turning point in the nearly year-old FBI investigation, which until recently focused on Russian meddling during the presidential campaign and on whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Investigators have also been looking for any evidence of possible financial crimes among Trump associates, officials said.

Trump had received private assurances from then-FBI Director James B. Comey starting in January that he was not personally under investigation. Officials say that changed shortly after Comey’s firing.

Five people briefed on the interview requests, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Daniel Coats, the current director of national intelligence, Mike Rogers, head of the National Security Agency, and Rogers’s recently departed deputy, Richard Ledgett, agreed to be interviewed by Mueller’s investigators as early as this week. The investigation has been cloaked in secrecy, and it is unclear how many others have been questioned by the FBI….More…

 

Even Republicans Are Tired of North Carolina Legislature Fascism

There come a time in everyone’s life when you see something, and recognize “This ain’t right”…

And respond to it.

It may be something as small as standing up for someone, or some idea being unfairly treated.

Sometimes its a big thing, putting your person in physical or legal danger.

The difference between American Patriots and the white-wing scum who have taken over the Republican Party is simply this…

Patriots believe in putting the values andd laws of our country over their Party.

Republican North Carolina judge resigns — and slams the GOP on the way out

In a dramatic response to a power-grab by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature, a Republican judge resigned today to circumvent efforts to strip power from the Democratic governor.

The Charlotte Observer reports that following today’s surprise resignation by Republican Judge J. Douglas McCullough, Democrat John Arrowood was sworn in. Judge McCullough worked as a staffer for Senator Harrison Schmitt (R-NM) before being appointed by President Ronald Reagan as United States Attorney in the eastern district of North Carolina.

Since Democrat Roy Cooper was elected Governor of North Carolina last fall, the Republican Legislature has gone to great lengths to strip his office of power. Yet with a three-sentence resignation letter this morning, Judge McCullough has proven that not all Republicans are willing to go along with shenanigans by legislative Republicans.

North Carolina has a mandatory retirement age for judges. To prevent the Democratic Party governor from appointing replacements for Court of Appeals judges nearing forced retirement, the Republican Legislature passed a bill to shrink the size of the court from 15 to 12 judges — thereby denying the Democrat of three scheduled appointments.

The legislation was vetoed on Friday, but a successful veto override was expected later tonight.

However, before the legislature could vote to override Governor Cooper’s veto of House Bill 239, Judge McCullough resigned 36 days prior to his forced retirement. This allowed the appointment of Judge Arrowood at 9:45 a.m. this morning.

“I did not want my legacy to be the elimination of a seat and the impairment of a court that I have served on,” Judge McCullough explained.

Newly sworn-in Judge John Arrowood is the first openly gay member of the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

 

Republican Racist Redistricting Ruled Illegal in Texas

Same old racist Republican shit in Texas – Overthrown…For now.

Jim Crow gets a pass under the Chumph.

 

 

 

 

The Chumph Twit Wiretap Claims

The Chumph was at it again last night on Twitter, claiming President Obama has his Campaign Headquarters in Chumph Hovel wiretapped during the election.

Couple of problems with that. First off, the President can’t just order wiretaps of American citizens. A wiretap has to be done though a FISA Court, based on existing evidence that a person has, or is in the process of committing a crime. The process is specifically  outlined in two laws,  CALEA and the Patriot Act. Ergo, the DOJ has to have evidence to present to the court that there is a crime being committed. The reason for the wiretap typically is to identify all the criminals in the criminal enterprise, including those who the DOJ does not have evidence yet to convict. This is how the FBI typically goes after the Mafia. They have enough evidence to charge and likely convict a mobster, but want to gather evidence to charge those further up the line. Getting not only the guy who committed the murder, but the guy(s) who ordered it.

A FISA Court denied the FBI’s request for a warrant to monitor four members of the Trump campaign team over the summer, according to The Guardian. That means the FBI suspected criminal activity, but didn’t quite have enough evidence to convince the Judge at that time. That the Chumph campaign staff was involved in a conspiracy, isn’t at question. When you have now 5 high level people caught communicating frequently with the Russian “KGB”, it’s difficult to ‘splain how all of this “just happened” with no direction or collusion.

The president typically does not order surveillance, and there is no evidence that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump’s phones. The FBI, which is part of the Department of Justice, must request a warrant for a wiretap, and the DOJ prides itself on operating independently from the White House. The president ordering surveillance on an American would be a huge violation of that independence.

We don’t know at this point if any subsequent requests to the FISA Court were granted based on incontrovertible evidence.

The NSA and CIA aren’t subject to FISA, because they only can deal with offshore connections. Ergo, they can only look at and act on communications which reach outside our borders. If you are a Foreign Diplomat, or non-citizen communicating with the spy agencies of a foreign government – you are not a citizen, and have no FISA protections. So, if Flynn called the Chumph, the FBI would have had to get a Court Order to tap that (the NSA and CIA could not, under law listen in), If Flynn called the Russian Ambassador or someone in the “KGB”, the NSA was fully within legal rights to tap and record those conversations. The NSA can operate under the “warrentless wiretapping” provision of the Patriot Act – but there are limitations to that as defined by the Supreme Court. There is another agency which can conduct international surveillance which you’ve never heard of – but for this exercise, keep it simple.

So…It wan’t Obama who wiretapped the Chumph. If he did so outside the government through private resources, it would be inadmissible both in Court, as well as in regards to the Intelligence Agencies.

The ONLY way the Chumph’s campaign hovel could have been wiretapped is that the FBI had discovered criminal activity, and applied through a FISA Court for permission to wiretap by providing significant evidence of that criminal activity.

And that means there was provable, and chargeable criminal activity going on in the Chumph campaign.

So…The Chumph saying Obama tapped his phones…Is an admission of guilt.

‘You’re in deep sh*t’: Lawmaker alerts Trump if phones were ‘tapped’ a judge found ‘probable cause of crime’

A California Congressman took to Twitter on Saturday morning to warn President Donald Trump that — if he is correct that his Trump Tower phones were tapped — he is “in deep sh*t.”

Early Saturday morning, Trump set the political world ablaze by accusing former President Barack Obama of having his phones tapped prior to the 2016 election.

Also see: ‘Outright personality breakdown in public view’: Internet blasts Trump for ‘tapped phones’ Twitter meltdown

“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Trump tweeted  before adding, “Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!”

It has been speculated that Trump’s wild accusations followed the president being alerted to aBreitbart article accusing Obama of orchestrating a “silent coup” against the administration. The article asserts that the Justice Department made two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) requests in 2016 requesting Trump communications and data on a computer server in Trump Tower be monitored for connections to Russian banks or contacts.

Although Trump provided no information that he may have been monitored, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) stated that the president may want to lawyer up.

“Mr. President: If there was a wiretap at Trump Tower, that means a fed judge found probable cause of crime which means you are in deep shit,” Lieu wrote. After providing a link to a Washington Post article on Trump’s tweets and the fallout, Lieu took it a step further.

“Either @realDonaldTrump is paranoid like Nixon, or judge found probable cause of crime for #wiretap. Either way our President is in trouble,” he wrote.

 

 

Private Prison Industry Gets Payback from the Chumph As Republicans Pass Laws Criminalizing Dissent

Slouching towards a Nazi state, Republican Lawmakers in ten states have proposed laws criminalizing civil protest.

While at the same time, the Chumph readies private prisons to handle the masses of prisoners.

The Chumph and Republicans making America a fascist state.

 

Justice Department reverses directive to phase out private prisons

Trumpminister Sessions prepares for the Reich

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Thursday the Justice Department would “rescind” the department’s previous directive to scale back the use of private prisons.

“I hereby rescind the memorandum dated August 18, 2016, sent to you by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates, entitled ‘Reducing our Use of Private Prisons.’” Sessions wrote in a directive sent to the acting Federal Bureau of Prisons Director Thomas Kane.

“The memorandum changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system,” Sessions added.

The new directive withdraws Yates’ memo, which had asked the prisons bureau to “substantially reduce” its use of private prisons “in a manner consistent with law and the overall decline of the Bureau’s inmate population.”

“Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities,” Yates wrote in her memo.

She highlighted that private prisons no longer “provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources.”

“They do not save substantially on costs, and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” she added.

A Justice Department spokesman explained Sessions’ action by saying the new instructions would give the prisons bureau greater “flexibility.”

“This will restore BOP’s flexibility to manage the federal prison inmate population based on capacity needs,” the spokesman said in a statement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Homeland Security made a similar move to wind down the use of private detention facilities. The actions adversely affected the stock prices of leading companies in the private prison industry.

 

Uber No More – Nationwide Boycott of Chumph Supporting Companies is Growing Fast

Rage against the Chump is rising very fast. The next major March Against Trump is planned for April. Here is hoping they put at least 3 million people in DC. At the rate things are going, if there is a march in June, it may draw 10 million. Breaking down the doors of the White House and Capitol buildings and hauling the right-wing miscreants to hang from the light poles going down Constitution Avenue…

About the only thing that is certain is that if the Republican scum in Congress continues to bloc investigations in to the Chumph’s dirty dealings and Treason (as in Charge Him, Try Him, Convict Him, and Hang Him) – the shit is going to hit the fan. Consider it a re-education as to whom politicians really are supposed to  work for.

#DeleteUber’s Creator: Resist Trump or ‘Pay a Price’

Silicon Valley companies like Uber don’t want to take a stand on Trump, but users won’t let them stay neutral. Now, protesters and even some forward-looking CEOs are saying the same thing: Resist or face deletion.

On Saturday night, as protesters swamped airports nationwide demanding foreigners be released from indefinite detention due to Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, Dan O’Sullivan inadvertently created a playbook for getting corporations to stop playing nice with Donald Trump.

O’Sullivan was the first to tweet the hashtag #DeleteUber, although he insists he didn’t invent the idea for an Uber boycott and doesn’t take credit for the phenomenon the hashtag became. His initial string of #DeleteUber tweets, all replies to Uber’s surge pricing announcement, have over 7,000 retweets.

“Let this be a warning: if you are a corporation who thinks you will ride out Trump, and quietly make money at his side, you will be made to pay a price,” O’Sullivan told The Daily Beast.

#DeleteUber wound up becoming the No. 1 trend in the country on Saturday night after the company turned off surge pricing to and from JFK International Airport, where thousands were protesting the Muslim ban. Earlier in the night, the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance announced its members would partially strike in solidarity with the refugees and affected immigrants by not offering services to or from the airport.

Protesters on Twitter alleged that Uber was promoting scab work, highlighting Uber’s stance that drivers aren’t considered employees to begin with, but only independent contractors. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had also been announced as part of Trump’s business advisory board in December.

Kalanick and Uber released several statements attempting to quell the furor, repeatedly insisting they disagree with Trump’s executive order and that they would pay out to drivers stuck in other countries due to the hastily implemented order, but it was too late.

Thousands were already tweeting the hashtag #DeleteUber along with screenshots of the account deletion page.

Direct competitor Lyft capitalized, handing out a $1 million donation to the ACLU, whose lawsuit granted a temporary stay to visa holders held in unlawful detention by Customs and Border Patrol.

“Deleting an Uber account, or tweeting a bunch about it, is quite literally the least anyone can do to register how disgusted one is by Uber’s exploitative labor practices and collaboration with Trump,” said O’Sullivan.

O’Sullivan wants Kalanick to resign from Trump’s board, and predicts this kind of boycott will keep happening to companies who don’t actively defy Trump’s policies that exploit and target their employees.

“The popularity of #deleteUber only exists because decent people around the country and world—including the unionized cab drivers Uber hates and targets—took to the streets, occupying airports in defense of refugees, immigrants, and Muslims,” said O’Sullivan.

“Trump is losing and is going to keep losing. Anyone who sticks with him will lose, too.”

Other tech CEOs had had enough, and finally used their apps to deliver calls to action. Dots CEO Paul Murphy was furiously texting with the co-creator of his big name mobile gaming company.

 Murphy had a user base of millions of people he could deploy to fund efforts to stop Trump’s discriminatory immigration ban, and he was a little fed up with leaders in his industry who refused to stand up for their employees—immigrant or otherwise.

“I’m still a little bit underwhelmed from the larger tech companies’ responses,” he told The Daily Beast. “I suggested we take over the game—to use that—since we have this big audience.”

So when users opened any of Dots’ mobile games on Saturday night or Sunday morning, they saw this message: “We believe America should be a welcoming place, particularly for those most in need, wherever they come from and whatever their religion.” It then linked out to an ACLU donation page.

When Murphy talked to The Daily Beast on Sunday, he said 4 million people had already seen the message.

“In my mind it’d be much more powerful for these platforms to be proactive—to interrupt people consuming services and remind them that these are products that are built from Americans, but also immigrants or people from outside the country,” said Murphy.

For some tech companies like Uber, however, being proactive in resisting the administration’s more racist and discriminatory policies isn’t just a “powerful” move. It’s a necessary move, if they don’t want a boycott that could directly impact their bottom line literally overnight.

 

 

The American Gestapo

Most law enforcement organizations, at last in first world countries cling tightly to their non-political, non-partisan, and neural image. As well as that of being even-haded and fair. The reason being quite simply – trust.. As we have seen in some of the cases of Murder-by-Cop of black men – It doesn’t always work out that way No system is perfect.

The FBI massively violated that rule in supporting Trump during the election.

The release of information relative to Hillary Clinton’s emails was not only false

The FBI Is About To Get The Power To Hack Millions Of Computers

Congress had six months to debate granting President-elect Donald Trump’s FBI new legal powers to hack millions of computers, and Republican leaders objected to doing so on Wednesday.

That means that starting Thursday, a Department of Justice official will be able to go to a single judge, assert that a computer crime may involve millions of networked devices, and get a warrant that lets the FBI hack all of those devices.

According to three senators who tried to put the brakes on that new authority Wednesday so Congress could at least discuss it, there are no concrete assurances from law enforcement officials that privacy won’t be violated or that devices won’t be damaged. Nor was there any explanation of how authorities will hack Americans’ wired equipment.

“At midnight tonight, this Senate will make one of the biggest mistakes in surveillance policy in years and years,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who tried with Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) to offer three measures to delay or rein in the new FBI powers. “Without a single congressional hearing, without a shred of meaningful public input, without any opportunity for senators to ask their questions in a public forum, one judge with one warrant would be able to authorize the hacking of thousands, possibly
millions of devices, cell phones and tablets.”

In fact, very few Americans have any idea that the scope of online search warrants is about to get much broader. The push for the expansion stems from a case in Texas in which investigators were denied a warrant because they could not show that the computer they wanted to hack was in the federal district where the warrant was sought.

That prompted a long review by court officials of what’s known as Rule 41, a part of federal criminal procedure that defines search and seizure rules. They ultimately sent a proposal to the Supreme Court to expand the scope of the surveillance powers. The high court approved the expansion, and by law, Congress had six months to review and approve the change. The six months expire Dec. 1.

When Wyden and the two other senators asked for unanimous consent to bring up various measures to modify the new rules or just delay them for six more months, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected.

He said the changes were common-sense steps designed to allow law enforcement officials the ability to pursue new threats in the rapidly changing online world.

“There is a challenge when cybercriminals use the internet and social media to prey on innocent children, to traffic in human beings, to buy and sell drugs,” Cornyn said. “There has to be a way for law enforcement, for the federal government, to get a search warrant approved by a judge based on a showing of probable cause to be able to get that evidence so that the law can be enforced and these cybercriminals can be prosecuted.”

Wyden and the others do not dispute that criminals exploit all sorts of online devices ― from cameras to computers and connected appliances ― to commit crimes in ever-evolving ways.

But Wyden argued that the new powers are far too vague, and there are inadequate protections for innocent Americans whose property could be hacked legally by the feds if officials assert it is “damaged” by malware of some sort that may have been used in a crime.

He raised the specter of a mass FBI hack going wrong, and perhaps further damaging victims of a criminal hack, or even knocking vital systems offline, such as hospital computer networks.

“Legislators and the public know next to nothing about how the government
conducts the searches,” Wyden said. “The government itself is planning to use software that has not been properly vetted by outside security experts.”

The Oregon senator and a couple of dozen others have written to the Department of Justice about those and other concerns, but did not find the answers persuasive. (Read the exchanges here.)

Wyden predicted that when something inevitably goes wrong, the anger will be aimed a lawmakers who couldn’t be bothered to add checks on the new powers.

“I think when Americans find out that the Congress allowed the Justice Department to just wave its arms in the air and grant itself new powers under the Fourth Amendment without the Senate even being part of a single hearing, I think law-abiding Americans are going to ask, ‘So what were you people in the Senate thinking?’” Wyden said. “What were you thinking about when the FBI starts hacking the victims of a hack, or when a mass hack goes awry and breaks their device, or an entire hospital system in effect has great damage done?”

 

Stuck on Stupid – Gun Nuts and Clinton

The NRA has trolled gun nuts into believing if Clinton wins she will take away their metal manhood. After all, it’s the only scintilla of manhood many of them have left.

A situation which makes things a win-win for the gun sellers.

If Clinton wins, all the old white guys buy guns to form Militias to protect their god given right to mass murder, and supposedly protect themselves against the big bad Gub’ment..

If Trump wins, Minorities buy guns to protect themselves from domestic terrorist and KKK white guys with guns – and the Trump dictatorship.

In my area, the NRA is flooding the airwaves with pro-Trump ads. This is a rural area, and gun ownership is normal. The majority of the households here own a hunting rifle or shotgun. Your small caliber AR-15 is pretty useless for hunting game, although there are nutcases out there who will try it with some limited success.

Apocalypse now: Gun buyers stockpiling firearms ahead of Election Day

The nation’s largest gun manufacturer prepares for a post-election surge in demand in the event of a Clinton win

With just days left before American voters decide who will replace President Barack Obama, many in the nation’s gun-owning public seem to be preparing for a dystopian future of jack-booted liberal government thugs prying guns — as thepopular slogan goes — from their cold dead hands.

On Wednesday, executives at the country’s top firearms manufacturer said they’re adequately prepared to meet demand from a post-election gun-buying surge if Democrats make significant gains in Congress and Hillary Clinton wins the White House.

“If you look back at what happened eight years ago [Obama’s first election victory] there was, in my opinion, a surprising number of people who were actually surprised by the outcome [of the election] at the last minute and then scrambled, you know, through November to try to get any product,” Michael Fifer, CEO of Sturm, Ruger & Co., said in a conference call about his company’s strong third-quarter earnings. “We have done extensive contingency planning for any combination of who wins the White House, who wins the Senate, who wins the House.”

The Connecticut-based company reported a 66 percent increase in profit, to $20 million, on a 33 percent jump in sales, to $161 million, in the three months ending Oct. 1, compared to the same period last year. Sturm Ruger firearms production rose 20 percent in the first nine months of the year while the company has upped internal and wholesale distributor inventories of its weapons by about 74,000 units in the third quarter in anticipation of a post-election surge.

“Inventory growth of certain products at distributors may have been amplified in anticipation of a possible post-election surge in demand,” Sturm Ruger’s Chief Operating Officer Christopher Killoy said in the call. These “certain products” include the company’s Ruger AR-556, a “modern sporting rifle” (AKA an assault-style semiautomatic rifle), and its Ruger LC9s compact pistol, popular among gun owners with concealed-carry permits. What isn’t in heavy demand right now, according to Killoy: Ruger’s basic bolt-action rifle commonly used by hunters and sport shooters.

Regardless of who wins on Tuesday, America is well on its way to a record year in gun sales.

According to the latest report released Monday by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, October background checks leaped 18 percent to 2.33 million compared to October 2015. These checks have jumped 26 percent this year, to 22.21 million.

With two months left and a lot of seasonal holiday gun buying yet to go, this year will shoot past last year’s all-time high. The number of federal criminal background checks act as a reliable proxy measure of the pace of gun sales, but they do not reflect the actual number of guns sold.

“It’s really unprecedented what we’ve seen,” Andrew Patrick, spokesman for the D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told Salon. “Usually NICS checks dip in the summer months and then pick up again starting in October and rise to the holidays and then come back down.”

Part of this growth came in the wake of the June 12 Orlando nightclub massacre and the July 7 sniper-style murders of Dallas police officers. Some Americans typically rush buy guns in the wake of multiple-homicide shootings out of fear of the government’s response to these tragedies. But the NICS data show the jump in demand this year began well before the shootings, a strong signal that gun owners are buying out of concern over the results of the election.

The National Rifle Association has been on the defensive, too. Even as Trump has struggled to raise campaign funds, the NRA has broken its record on political campaign spending to try to get Trump elected. The pro-gun group also has spent on state races, including nearly $2 million to keep incumbent Republican Sen. Senator Richard Burr in office in a tight North Carolina race. Burr plunged himself into hot water this week by joking that a photo of Hillary Clinton should have a bullseye on it, an echo to a similar remark made by Trump in August that allude to acts of violence against a presidential candidate.

While guns sales are skyrocketing, a small number of Americans are likely playing an outsize role in gun sales. A Harvard-Northeastern University survey released last month suggests that almost half of the country’s civilian gun stockpile is brandished by only 3 percent of the population. So what’s going on with these collectors?

“It’s stockpiling,” Patrick said. “Some people probably think they’re going to have to rise up against the government. I don’t know, but that language and that rhetoric are out there.”

 

 

Eye in the Sky Spying By Baltimore Police

Those of you involved in technology have probably figured it out, but a lot of the fancy gizmos and technology you see on the various”tech oriented” TV shows…

Doesn’t exist.

Technology, and the use of technology has been a moral issue for inventors and technologists since the days of the development of the Atomic Bomb. Not that the inventors of a lot of this stuff are ethicists but – it is a conversation at least some of us have.

After 9-11 and Katrina, my company was developing technology which would be capable to restoring communications over a disaster area in a matter of hours. The concept was based on putting a new type of radio communications system which could reconfigure itself by software command in either a tethered to the ground, or a geo-stationary blimp. Now, I am sure everyone is familiar with the Zeppelins of the 1930’s and the Hindenburg.

One of the big Gub’ment agencies caught on to what we were doing, and approached us to help one of BIG Gub’ment contractors on building their “Eye in the Sky” project. The idea was to mount a very high resolution video camera in a geostationary blimp over New Orleans, and tie it to behavioral analysis software. “Behaviorial” software was just being developed at that point. What it does is identify possible criminal activity by the actions of the people the camera sees. The technical problem in this case being getting the video feed  back down to the ground, and the equipment to make that happen not being too heavy to be lifted by the blimp. My partners and I figured out it was technically doable, but involved creating a bit of technology that didn’t exist yet.

First meeting, the Gub’ment guys stands up and explains what they want to do. Which was essentially put the entire city under surveillance and use the pattern recognition software to identify “bad guys” and people up to nefarious deeds. The problem being the system would spy on each and every citizen in the entire city constantly. The guy from the company developing the camera stands up and starts describing the new camera, which includes and ability to look through buildings (yes that exists).

I look at my partner, he looks at me…And I say I’m not doing this. This gives the government the ability to peer into anyone’s home, bedroom, or office without their permission, or even so much as a warrant based on criminal activity. This is unconstitutional.

We walked out and refused to do the work. It was the end of us ever doing work for these people…But that was fine.

Now I see in Baltimore some scumbag has reconstituted some of tat work, and come up with a “Poor man’s” version to spy and violate the constitutional rights of innocent citizens.

 

Eye in the sky: the billionaires funding a surveillance project above Baltimore

An experimental police surveillance program funded by Texas philanthropists John and Laura Arnold worries observers of private influence in the public sphere

Thousands of runners will sweat their way past the scenic highlights of central Baltimore in the city’s marathon on Saturday, but the action will not only be at ground level. An aircraft equipped with advanced cameras is set to circle high above their heads, as part of a secretive surveillance programme funded by Texan billionaires.

Last year, Radiolab, a public radio show, featured a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which specialises in wide-area eye-in-the-sky technology. It flies a small plane for hours above urban areas, taking thousands of photographs that are sent to analysts who then track movements at street level.

After the radio segment aired, the philanthropist John Arnold got in touch with the owner of Persistent, Ross McNutt. Arnold and his wife, Laura, were intrigued by the technology’s crime-fighting potential and agreed to fund a trial somewhere. With $360,000 from the Arnolds, McNutt struck a deal with Baltimore.

From January to August this year, Baltimore police said at a news conference last week, the plane flew over the city for 314 hours, taking more than a million images. The police added that the plane would operate as an anti-terrorism measure during Fleet Week, which started on Monday, and the marathon.

This spurt of transparency was more than a little tardy. Until Bloomberg Businessweek ran a story in August, virtually no one knew about the surveillance programme, not even the mayor. Yet the technology raises obvious civil liberties questions, as does the way the plan was funded: by unaccountable private citizens in Houston whose wealth silently enabled a blanket tracking tool in a large city with notoriously strained relations between police and residents.

“[John Arnold] called me, and he just heard it on the Radiolab piece and asked what he could do to help, and he thought we could run a test with the system and I said we would love to and we appreciate his help,” said McNutt. “They’re fantastic people, they really are, and they’re doing great things and trying to help out as much as they can.”

The Arnolds are not universally loved. Two years ago, a Bloomberg profile of John Arnold was headlined: Giving Back Has Made This 41-year-old Retired Billionaire Less Popular.

The Dallas-born Arnold was a millionaire Enron trader who became a billionaire hedge fund manager. He quit at 38, having amassed a reported $4bn fortune, and started the Laura and John Arnold Foundation with his wife, a former attorney. They have committed to giving the bulk of their wealth to philanthropic causes and have an appetite for forensic examination of complex and often divisive issues.

According to the Foundation, it has awarded more than $617m in grant money since 2011, in line with its aim of seeking “transformational change” through “strategic investments in criminal justice, education, evidence-based policy and innovation, public accountability, and research integrity”….

A sceptic might argue that society cannot understand something it does not know about. David Rocah, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, said his organisation was concerned by the nature of the surveillance and the opaque way it was adopted.

“What the secret funding from the Arnolds meant,” he said, “is that it didn’t even have to be disclosed to the city’s purchasing folks and the mayor didn’t know, the city council didn’t know … nobody knew.

“The fact is that surveillance technologies are acquired by police departments all over the country all the time with zero public input, even where the Arnolds aren’t secretly funding it. This case is just an extraordinary, an extreme, example of a larger problem.”

Most of the money was passed to Baltimore through the Police Foundation, a not-for-profit research body in Washington that previously worked with the Arnold Foundation on a study of eyewitness identification procedure. As soon as next week, the Police Foundation intends to release a report that will examine the potential value of McNutt’s surveillance technology.

 

 

Justice Department to Track Police Brutality

This one is badly needed, A centralized database clearing up the fog around Police actions…

Justice Department Will Track Police Killings And Use Of Force

Promising information that is more standardized and complete than has previously been available, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Department of Justice will collect data on the police use of deadly force in the line of duty.

Lynch’s announcement amplifies a statement by FBI Director James Comey at the end of September, when he told a congressional panel that the bureau is in the process of setting up a database that can track police killings and other use of force during interactions with the public.

The Justice Department plans to have a pilot program collecting data in early 2017.

“Accurate and comprehensive data on the use of force by law enforcement is essential to an informed and productive discussion about community-police relations,” Lynch said today. “The initiatives we are announcing today are vital efforts toward increasing transparency and building trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve.”

In addition to collecting data, the FBI’s pilot program will study the methodology used to collect that information. The agency’s announcement of the pilot program also calls for public comment — “from all interested parties, including local, state, tribal and federal law enforcement, civil rights organizations and other community stakeholders.”

A lack of a national database became a sticking point in recent years, particularly after a string of high-profile cases in which unarmed black men died at the hands of police. Attempts to fill that void have included the website Fatal Encounters, as well as aWashington Post database that tracks how many people are shot and killed by police. So far in 2016, the Post reports that law enforcement officers have killed 754 people.

According to the FBI, “The pilot study participants are expected to include the largest law enforcement agencies, as well as the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals Service.”

The push for collecting such data has also brought legislative action. From the Justice Department announcement:

“In 2014, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act (DCRA), which required states and federal law enforcement agencies to submit data to the department about civilians who died during interactions with law enforcement or in their custody (whether resulting from use of force or some other manner of death, such as suicide or natural causes) and authorized the Attorney General to impose a financial penalty on non-compliant states.”

Noting that the law doesn’t require the collection of nonlethal force, the Justice Department says it will also work to amass that data.