America should belong to her cities

I've certainly posted about it before, but I still doubt most people recognize how big a deal urbanization is, economically and politically, around the world but also in the U.S.

For instance, consider the complexity and difficulty of being the Governor of Nevada (pop. 3 million), Kansas (2.9 million), New Mexico (2 million), Nebraska (1.9 million), Idaho (1.7 million), North and South Dakota (1.7 million, combined), Wyoming (586,000), versus the job of being Mayor of New York City (8.6 million - 24 million in the metro area), Los Angeles (4 million - 18.7 million in the metro area), Chicago (2.7 million - 9.4 million in the metro area), Houston, (2.3 million - 6.5 million in the metro area), Philadelphia (1.6 million - 6 million metro), Phoenix (1.6 million - 4.2 million metro), San Antonio (1.5 million - 2.2 metro), or San Diego (1.4 million - 3.1 million metro).

So any one of these cities is larger than a handful of U.S. states.

The annual GDP of the New York and Los Angeles metro areas is about $1 trillion each! Compare that to VP Mike Pence's home state of Indiana, with a GDP in 2016 of $3.5 billion. There's really no comparison.

On top of that, consider that as many as 800 languages are spoken in New York City. Over 200 languages in Los Angeles.

Consider all the diverse people packed together in cities who have to find a way to get along with one another. Tolerance of multiculturalism in these cities isn't a liberal fetish -- it's a matter of survival, a fact of life.

Moreover, every major U.S. city votes Democratic in national elections. We don't have a Red/Blue state divide; we have an urban/rural divide. Even in the Red state of Texas, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio voted overwhelmingly for Hillary in 2016. It wasn't even close.

The U.S. is becoming two different countries: urban and rural. This is not what our Founding Fathers or the Federalist Papers anticipated. Even in rural/Red states, we have urban centers who vote solidly Democratic. That matters in Presidential and governors races, but not in state or federal congressional races.

Hence, the people representing the fewest and most rural have outsized, un-representative influence over our politics at the state and federal level.

I predict that liberals and Democrats will become the new Federalists, preaching the government closest to the people should have the most power, because cities are where all the people are, and the most diverse, well-educated, innovative and liberal people are. Also the wealthiest. The math and demographics are unassailable. America belongs to her cities. Or ought to.

Taibbi: NYPD protests by making arrests 'only when they have to'?!

Before you jump with a knee-jerk reaction in defense of the NYPD because they saved the universe on 9/11, you should keep in mind that "... the protesting [NYC] police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds)."

Yeah, think about that. Isn't that how we want police to do their job all the time?

The NYPD's 'Work Stoppage' Is Surreal

By Matt Taibbi

December 31, 2014 | Rolling Stone

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-nypds-work-stoppage-is-surreal-20141231

Report: Reducing U.S. prison population reduces crime

Here's yet another conservative myth busted [emphasis mine]:

The [Sentencing Project's] report points to New York, New Jersey and California as examples of how moving toward more lenient punishments for non-violent offenders is linked to lower rates of both violent crime and property crime. While the nation's state prison population shot up by 10 percent from 1999 to 2012 with violent and property crime dropping by 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively, New York and New Jersey each slashed their prison populations by 26 percent and saw crime drop a respective 31 percent and 30 percent during the same period.

"At least in three states we now know that the prison population can be reduced by about 25% with little or no adverse effect on public safety," The Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer and Nazgol Ghandnoosh wrote in their report. "Individual circumstances vary by state, but policymakers should explore the reforms in New York, New Jersey, and California as a guide for other states."

Locking Up Fewer People Doesn't Lead To Increased Crime, Report Says

By Lydia O'Connor

July 24, 2014 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/1AhblxG

Sandy relief vote shows the New GOP's true colors

You can criticize 67 "No" votes in the House of Representatives -- all Republicans -- against the Superstorm Sandy relief bill that passed unanimously in the Senate on a few grounds. Take your pick:

Man-made global warming. Total free-market fail: we're consuming too much, using too many fossil fuels, and Sandy is the blowback (pun intended). How are free enterprise and hands-off government supposed to deal with this? Republicans' reply: they're not. Learn to swim. That goes for your house and belongings, too.

If, "You made your bed [by consuming too much], now swim in it," was their answer, I might give them some points for scientific principle, but that's not their point of view. In their world, free markets are supposed to fix everything.

Not MMGW. Ditto the above. Although we didn't do anything wrong and burning everything we can dig out of the ground has no effect on our climate, nevertheless, the climate inextricably smacked us down and it's beyond the power of rugged individualists or "free markets" to fix the damage in a time frame and a cost that's allocable and acceptable. So then what?  [Crickets chirping.]

Government exists to keep us safe. So... a super storm that knocks out basic services in the Center of the Universe, New York City, doesn't meet that standard?  So WTF is government for then? To dole out radio spectrum frequencies to Clear Channel?

So by Republicans' logic and ours, opposing relief for victims of Sandy makes no sense. So what is their logic, if any? It's simple: government shouldn't do jack, ever, except fight the Nazis and maybe some bearded baddies who live in caves 5,000 miles away. Er, uh... just like the Founding Fathers wanted.

Even the next GOP Presidential nominee unloaded on Speaker Boehner and the House GOP for its failure to act.

This is an object lesson, folks. The GOP is being taken over by a "devil-take-the-hindmost" philosophy, otherwise known as libertarianism. (But with the 2 P's -- pot and prostitution -- to make it make this jagged pill more palatable to youths and corporate hotshots.)  Don't be fooled!

Why does America lock so many people up?

This is really a must-read article, a real revelation for those on the "left" and "right" sides of the crime & prison debate. But it's long so I'll quote excerpts. Let's start with the shocking, shameful stats:

"More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

"The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education."

Think about that. I regard the Soviet Union with horror; it was a giant murder mill and prisoner factory spanning a dozen time zones. And yet, according to Gopnik, today's America is in an important way even worse. How is that possible in the country that defeated Communism? How have we let ourselves get so bad?

And then there is prison rape. We all know about it. We joke about it, or fear it, or try to ignore it, or sometimes say (cruelly) that it is just punishment. Here's what Gopnik has to say:

"Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized."

There are two theories for how the modern U.S. prison system came into being (and let's remember it's a fairly new institution, compared to what we had before): a result of Northern efficiency and procedural justice without room for judges to make commonsense, common law rulings; or a continuation of the Southern slave plantation by other means. Regarding that latter theory, writes Gopnik:

"'American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.' White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. 'The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,' the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of 'formal control' (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of 'invisible control.' Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander's grim conclusion: 'If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.'"

And then there is the more recent phenomenon of for-profit U.S. prisons, run as corporations, whose only source of growth, perversely, is more and more inmates:

"It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

"'Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.'"

Gopnik goes on to describe how falling crime rates -- about a 40 percent decline in crime throughout the Western world in the 1990s -- cannot be explained by increased incarceration; the numbers so far defy easy explanation. But New York City is a different story: its crime rate decreased 80 percent. Why? Not for the reasons often cited. New York is not richer or whiter than it was, in fact, it is twice as black and Hispanic today compared to 1961. Nor did "broken-window" policing do it:

"In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened— 'hot-spot policing.' The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of 'stop and frisk'— 'designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,' as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what's called pejoratively 'profiling.' This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, [researcher Franklin E.] Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. 'The poor pay more and get more' is Zimring's way of putting it."

"Zimring said, in a recent interview, 'Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There's no minimum wage in violent crime.' In a sense, he argues, it's recreational, part of a life style: 'Crime is a routine behavior; it's a thing people do when they get used to doing it.' And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of 'cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.' Conservatives don't like this view because it shows that being tough doesn't help; liberals don't like it because apparently being nice doesn't help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry."

And what about NYC's rate of incarceration?

"'New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,' Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison."

And these facts lead Gopnik to the inevitable but "radical" conclusion that:

"...since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two."

Gopnik admits this goes against our current "common sense" and even a lot of "liberal" studies on crime prevention:

"To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we'd have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime."

This should give us all hope. And it should serve as an example that systemic change does not necessarily result from "changing the whole system," but rather from small, high-leverage interventions which turn self-reinforcing vicious cycles backwards, turning them into virtuous ones.

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

By Adam Gopnik

January 30, 2012 | New Yorker

URL: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1mLBdX85S

NYC-union 'snowjob' hoax a salvo in conservative class war

On Friday I heard a Wall Street guy from NYC cite the now debunked union-"silent strike" story as fact for all us non-New Yorkers in the room.

Man, lying really works well!

As Alterman points out, if enough Americans believe that public employees are all lazy, cheating slobs, then it won't be hard for conservative politicians to cut their wages, and do things like allow states to declare bankruptcy in order to cancel their pension obligations to public employees.

The Conservative Class War, Continued

By Eric Alterman

February 3, 2011 | The Nation

URL: http://www.truth-out.org/the-conservative-class-war-continued67498

Um, yeah, about that union-snowplow thing I said, well, um....

Well, well, well. Looks like the teabagging NYC City Councilman who said five city workers came to him and revealed a union-orchestrated plot to stop plowing the snow made it all up.

Two of his alleged "snitches" deny it; and he refuses to name the other three, invoking bogus attorney-client privilege.

In other words, this evil nutjob made the whole thing up. The truth has finally put on its shoes, but his lie has already run around the world, and will probably remain lodged in many people's reptilian brains as indelible "fact."

Evidence Is Elusive on Charge of a Blizzard Slowdown

By Russ Buettner and William K. Rashbaum

January 25, 2011 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/nyregion/26snowman.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all