Sunday, February 28, 2016

Donald Trump is the candidate the Republicans deserve


By Laurence Lewis  Daily Koss

The face and little fingers of the Republican Party
Republican insiders are so desperate to stop Donald Trump from winning their presidential nomination that they’re coalescing around Marco Rubio. Think about that. A guy who rarely shows up for work, has an agenda that’s almost as extreme as Trump’s, and who even the most expensive image-makers in the world will never make fit for prime time, is their last best hope. A guy who hasn’t yet come close to winning anything, and is polling far behind everywhere, is somehow supposed to win everything.

For decades the Republican establishment has played the faith-based voters for fools, but now it is they who are looking increasingly foolish in their desperate search for faith. They have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, they have played to racism, misogyny, bigotry, and thuggishness, and having loosed the American id, it’s now theirs to live with, untamed, unfettered, and out in the open where they never wanted it to be. It’s a monster of their own making. As Mitt Romney might say: They built that.

It’s been written about before and bears repeating, again and again: This is the inevitable end of a process that has been evolving for decades. Republicans like to pretend they are the Party of Lincoln, but that was not just more than 150 years ago—it was an entirely different political universe. The Republican Party was founded to oppose slavery, but now 20 percent of the supporters of its leading presidential candidate think freeing the enslaved was a bad idea. Trump himself openly laughs at the extremism his followers openly embrace. And all of it is the fault of the Republican Party establishment.

If not for his long, bombastic personal history proving that he means every bit of it, one almost might wonder if Trump is just trolling the Republicans, making them see what they have become. But the history is there. Trump is what he is. His followers are what they are. And the Republican establishment did what it did.

Some may not remember, but for generations Southern bigots remained Democrats because they wanted nothing to do with the Party of Lincoln. Those grand Democratic majorities supposedly enjoyed by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson included many racist conservatives who remained Democrats precisely because they remained racist, and still couldn't forgive even the increasingly conservative Republican Party for what they deemed to have been the sins of its past—sins such as having won the Civil War. The moderate Republican of the recent past was met and perhaps surpassed by the truly conservative Democrat of that recent past.

The change began in earnest at the 1948 Democratic Convention. A platform plank calling for passage of a Civil Rights Act tore the party apart. The turning point, both for the plank and the party, was an electrifying speech by Minneapolis mayor and Senate candidate Hubert Humphrey.

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.
After the plank was passed, some Southern delegates walked out. They were led by South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. A lot of people don’t remember that Thurmond once was a Democrat. But in 1948, he helped create the Dixiecrat Party, and became its presidential standard bearer. In that famously volatile election year, Thurmond won the states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. But the realignment of the parties was only beginning. A lot of Southern conservatives still hated the Republicans that much. Thurmond himself found his way back to the Democratic Party, and served as a Democratic senator until 1964. When President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he told aides that they had lost the South for a generation. Thurmond was among the first to leave. But the realignment still took time. A lot of Southern conservatives still hated the Republicans that much. But times were changing.

Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign’s Southern Strategy was designed to capitalize on the evolving loyalties of racists, and segregationist Democrat George Wallace ran under the banner of the American Independent Party and won five southern states. Still, changes in party affiliation continued to lag. In 1980, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan cynically and despicably launched his general election campaign by invoking "states' rights" in racist fire zone Philadelphia, Mississippi. The people he wanted to impress were duly impressed. In 1988, the kinder, gentler George H.W. Bush nakedly race baited his way to victory. The Bill Clinton presidency completed the realignment. Some may not remember, but modern Republican stalwarts Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby first went to Washington as Democrats. They long had belonged in the modern Republican Party, but until the Clinton era they had remained holdouts. No longer.

The increasing polarization of the political parties has been a long time developing. In some ways, it has been a natural realignment along ideological grounds that was forestalled only by the bitter vindictiveness of Southern racists, including those who like to pretend that their bitter vindictiveness isn't about racism. But it is. And the now obviously racist undercurrent of so much modern Republican politics and right-wing media should not be a surprise. Racism is not incidental to the modern conservative movement. It has been one of its defining characteristics. Donald Trump is nothing new, but for his being open about it.

Conservatives have courted the ugliest instincts in the American psyche, and now they own them. Misogyny. Islamophobia. Support for torture. Racist nativism. None of it is new to the Republican Party. None of it is unique to one presidential candidate. It is what the Republican Party has become. All of it. It is how the modern Republican Party courted and catered to its modern base of voters. All of them. And now Republicans leaders are terrified of Donald Trump? The simple truth is that he personifies everything the modern Republican Party has become. Perhaps they thought they could keep it hidden. Perhaps they thought the major media would continue to help them pretend. But they can’t keep it hidden anymore, and they can’t pretend. Donald Trump has torn off the modern Republican Party’s mask. It is neither accident nor fluke that he is becoming their leader. Donald Trump is the modern Republican Party. They own it, and he owns them.

"Путин - это Гитлер, но гораздо опаснее", - Александр Сотник

26.02.2016 20:09
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"Путин - это Гитлер, но гораздо опаснее", - Александр Сотник
О поклонниках Путина за рубежом пишет в своем Facebook Александр Сотник, российский независимый журналист. Новость передает Час Пик.
О "любителях Путина" за рубежом я писал несколько раз. Понятно: можно вывезти человека из "совка", а вот вывести "совок" из человека получается не всегда. Лично для меня "совок" - синоним фашизма. И я склонен полагать, что Путин - это Гитлер сегодня. У того "сукина сына" тоже была "поддержка" по всему миру, все отбросы заходились в истерике, слушая речи фюрера и вскидывая руки над пустыми головами. Зиговали и в Британии, и во Франции, и в США, и в Латинской Америке. Где только ни зиговали.
Теперь из уст "колбасных эмигрантов", так и не излечившихся от бациллы "совка", приходится слышать: "Путин - молодец, мужик с яйцами, вот бы нам такого президента!.."
Нет-нет, возвращаться в Россию, стремительно погружающуюся в чекистский "совковый" фашизм, они не собираются. Они насаждают и пропагандируют его там: в Нью-Йорке и Чикаго, Барселоне и Дрездене, Париже и Лондоне. Распространяют заразу, подпитываясь пропагандой лубянских телеканалов.
Что должно произойти, чтобы наступило прозрение? Ядерная война России с НАТО - со всеми "прелестями" бомбардировок? У Гитлера не было "оружия возмездия": парень просто не дожил. А этому Ельцин принес на блюдечке в обмен на безопасность семьи...
Не на нашу безопасность, заметьте. О нашей они не думали ни вчера, ни - тем более - сегодня.
Да, для меня Путин - Гитлер. Но гораздо опаснее. Во-первых, потому что - жив, а во-вторых - потому что с ядерной кнопкой.
А наличие отмороженных поклонников по всему миру только добавляют им природного сходства.

Фото: www.ipnews.in.ua

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

By ALEXANDER BURNS, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN MARTIN
NY TIMES Report

The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.

Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.

At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics.
In public, there were calls for the party to unite behind a single candidate. In dozens of interviews, elected officials, political strategists and donors described a frantic, last-ditch campaign to block Mr. Trump — and the agonizing reasons that many of them have become convinced it will fail. Behind the scenes, a desperate mission to save the party sputtered and stalled at every turn.

Efforts to unite warring candidates behind one failed spectacularly: An overture from Senator Marco Rubio to Mr. Christie angered and insulted the governor. An unsubtle appeal from Mitt Romney to John Kasich, about the party’s need to consolidate behind one rival to Mr. Trump, fell on deaf ears. At least two campaigns have drafted plans to overtake Mr. Trump in a brokered convention, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has laid out a plan that would have lawmakers break with Mr. Trump explicitly in a general election.

Despite all the forces arrayed against Mr. Trump, the interviews show, the party has been gripped by a nearly incapacitating leadership vacuum and a paralytic sense of indecision and despair, as he has won smashing victories in South Carolina and Nevada. Donors have dreaded the consequences of clashing with Mr. Trump directly. Elected officials have balked at attacking him out of concern that they might unintentionally fuel his populist revolt. And Republicans have lacked someone from outside the presidential race who could help set the terms of debate from afar.

The endorsement by Mr. Christie, a not unblemished but still highly regarded figure within the party’s elite — he is a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association — landed Friday with crippling force. It was by far the most important defection to Mr. Trump’s insurgency: Mr. Christie may give cover to other Republicans tempted to join Mr. Trump rather than trying to beat him. Not just the Stop Trump forces seemed in peril, but also the traditional party establishment itself.

Should Mr. Trump clinch the presidential nomination, it would represent a rout of historic proportions for the institutional Republican Party, and could set off an internal rift unseen in either party for a half-century, since white Southerners abandoned the Democratic Party en masse during the civil rights movement.

Former Gov. Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, a top adviser to Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said the party was unable to come up with a united front to quash Mr. Trump’s campaign.

“There is no mechanism,” Mr. Leavitt said. “There is no smoke-filled room. If there is, I’ve never seen it, nor do I know anyone who has. This is going to play out in the way that it will.”

Republicans have ruefully acknowledged that they came to this dire pass in no small part because of their own passivity. There were ample opportunities to battle Mr. Trump earlier; more than one plan was drawn up only to be rejected. Rivals who attacked him early, like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, the former governors of Texas and Louisiana, received little backup and quickly faded.
His path to the Republican presidential nomination appears wider than ever, but here's how he could still stumble.

Late last fall, the strategists Alex Castellanos and Gail Gitcho, both presidential campaign veterans, reached out to dozens of the party’s leading donors, including the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, with a plan to create a “super PAC” that would take down Mr. Trump. In a confidential memo, the strategists laid out the mission of a group they called “ProtectUS.”
“We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips,” they wrote in the previously unreported memo. Mr. Castellanos even produced ads portraying Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency, according to people who saw them and who, along with many of those interviewed, insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The two strategists, who declined to comment, proposed to attack Mr. Trump in New Hampshire over his business failures and past liberal positions, and emphasized the extreme urgency of their project. A Trump nomination would not only cause Republicans to lose the presidency, they wrote, “but we also lose the Senate, competitive gubernatorial elections and moderate House Republicans.”

No major donors committed to the project, and it was abandoned. No other sustained Stop Trump effort sprang up in its place.

Resistance to Mr. Trump still runs deep. The party’s biggest benefactors remain totally opposed to him. At a recent presentation hosted by the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch, the country’s most prolific conservative donors, their political advisers characterized Mr. Trump’s record as utterly unacceptable, and highlighted his support for government-funded business subsidies and government-backed health care, according to people who attended.

But the Kochs, like Mr. Adelson, have shown no appetite to intervene directly in the primary with decisive force.

The American Future Fund, a conservative group that does not disclose its donors, announced plans on Friday to run ads blasting Mr. Trump for his role in an educational company that is alleged to have defrauded students. But there is only limited time for the commercials to sink in before some of the country’s biggest states award their delegates in early March.

Instead, Mr. Trump’s challengers are staking their hopes on a set of guerrilla tactics and long-shot possibilities, racing to line up mainstream voters and interest groups against his increasingly formidable campaign. Donors and elected leaders have begun to rouse themselves for the fight, but perhaps too late.
Two of Mr. Trump’s opponents have openly acknowledged that they may have to wrest the Republican nomination from him in a deadlocked convention.

Speaking to political donors in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Mr. Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, noted that most delegates are bound to a candidate only on the first ballot. Many of them, moreover, are likely to be party regulars who may not support Mr. Trump over multiple rounds of balloting, he added, according to a person present for Mr. Sullivan’s presentation, which was first reported by CNN.

Advisers to Mr. Kasich, the Ohio governor, have told potential supporters that his strategy boils down to a convention battle. Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who had endorsed Jeb Bush, said Mr. Kasich’s emissaries had sketched an outcome in which Mr. Kasich “probably ends up with the second-highest delegate count going into the convention” and digs in there to compete with Mr. Trump.

Several senior Republicans, including Mr. Romney, have made direct appeals to Mr. Kasich to gauge his willingness to stand down and allow the party to unify behind another candidate. But Mr. Kasich has told at least one person that his plan is to win the Ohio primary on March 15 and gather the party behind his campaign if Mr. Rubio loses in Florida, his home state, on the same day.

In Washington, Mr. Kasich’s persistence in the race has become a source of frustration. At Senate luncheons on Wednesday and Thursday, Republican lawmakers vented about Mr. Kasich’s intransigence, calling it selfishness.

One senior Republican senator, noting that Mr. Kasich has truly contested only one of the first four states, complained: “He’s just flailing his arms around and having a wonderful time going around the country, and it just drives me up the wall.”

Mr. McConnell was especially vocal, describing Mr. Kasich’s persistence as irrational because he has no plausible path to the nomination, several senators said.

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton, according to senators at the lunches.

He has reminded colleagues of his own 1996 re-election campaign, when he won comfortably amid President Bill Clinton’s easy re-election. Of Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

There is still hope that Mr. Rubio might be able to unite much of the party and slow Mr. Trump’s advance in a series of big-state primaries in March, and a host of top elected officials endorsed him over the last week. But Mr. Rubio has struggled to sideline Mr. Kasich and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who is running a dogged campaign on the right. He has also been unable to win over several of his former rivals who might help consolidate the Republican establishment more squarely behind him.

Mr. Rubio showed a lack of finesse in dealing with his fallen rivals’ injured egos.

Mr. Christie had attacked Mr. Rubio contemptuously in New Hampshire, calling him shallow and scripted, and humiliating him in a debate. Nevertheless, Mr. Rubio made a tentative overture to Mr. Christie after his withdrawal from the presidential race. He left the governor a voice mail message, seeking Mr. Christie’s support and assuring him that he had a bright future in public service, according to people who have heard Mr. Christie’s characterization of the message.

Mr. Christie, 53, took the message as deeply disrespectful and patronizing, questioning why “a 44-year-old” was telling him about his future, said people who described his reaction on the condition of anonymity. Further efforts to connect the two never yielded a direct conversation.

Mr. Trump, by contrast, made frequent calls to Mr. Christie once he dropped out, a person close to the governor said. After the two met at Trump Tower on Thursday with their wives, Mr. Christie flew to Texas and emerged on Friday to back Mr. Trump and mock Mr. Rubio as a desperate candidate near the end of a losing campaign.

Efforts to reconcile Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush, a former governor of Florida, have been scarcely more successful, dating to before the South Carolina primary, when Mr. Rove reached out to their aides to broker a cease-fire, according to Republicans familiar briefed on the conversations. It did not last.

Mr. Bush has been nearly silent since quitting the race Feb. 20, playing golf with his son Jeb Jr. in Miami and turning to the task of thank-you notes. In a Wednesday conference call with supporters, he did not express a preference among the remaining contenders. When Mr. Rubio called him on Monday, their conversation did not last long, two people briefed on it said, and Mr. Rubio did not ask for his endorsement.
“There’s this desire, verging on panic, to consolidate the field,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina,  a former supporter of Mr. Bush. “But I don’t see any movement at all.”

Mr. Rubio’s advisers were also thwarted in their efforts to secure an endorsement from Mr. Romney, whom they lobbied strenuously after the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary.

Mr. Romney had been eager to tilt the race, and even called Mr. Christie after he ended his campaign to vent about Mr. Trump and say he must be stopped. On the night of the primary, Mr. Romney was close to endorsing Mr. Rubio himself, people familiar with his deliberations said.

Yet Mr. Romney pulled back, instead telling advisers that he would take on Mr. Trump directly.

After a Tuesday night dinner with former campaign aides, during which he expressed a sense of horror at the Republican race, Mr. Romney made a blunt demand Wednesday on Fox News: Mr. Trump must release his tax returns to prove he was not concealing a “bombshell” political vulnerability.

Mr. Trump responded only with casual derision, dismissing Mr. Romney on Twitter as “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”

Mr. Romney is expected to withhold his support before the voting this week on the so-called Super Tuesday, but some of his allies have urged him to endorse Mr. Rubio before Michigan and Idaho vote March 8. Mr. Romney grew up in Michigan, and many Idahoans are fellow Mormons.

But already, a handful of senior party leaders have struck a conciliatory tone toward Mr. Trump. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on television that he believed he could work with him as president. Many in the party acknowledged a growing mood of resignation.

Fred Malek, the finance chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said the party’s mainstream had simply run up against the limits of its influence.

“There’s no single leader and no single institution that can bring a diverse group called the Republican Party together, behind a single candidate,” Mr. Malek said. “It just doesn’t exist.”

On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”

That governor was Paul LePage.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016


ESSAYS AEON

Return of the mercenaries

Two centuries ago, public armies replaced private ones as the dominant tool of warfare. Now, private armies are back

by Sean McFate AEON



It is a familiar story. A superpower goes to war and faces a stronger-than-expected insurgency in distant lands, yet has insufficient forces to counter it because of political and military constraints. The superpower decides to hire contractors, some of whom are armed, to support its war effort. The armed contractors prove to be both a blessing and a curse, providing vital security services to the campaign, yet at times killing innocent civilians, causing strategic setbacks, and damaging the superpower’s legitimacy. Without these contractors, the superpower could not wage the war. With them, it is more difficult to win.

The armed contractors in question are not in Iraq or Afghanistan but in northern Italy, and the year is not 2007 but 1377. The superpower is not the United States but the papacy under Pope Gregory XI, fighting the antipapal league led by the duchy of Milan. The tragic killing of civilians by armed contractors did not occur in Baghdad but in Cesena, 630 years earlier. The military companies employed were not DynCorp International, Triple Canopy or Blackwater, but the Company of the Star, the Company of the Hat and the White Company. Known as free companies, these for-profit warriors were organised as corporations, with a well-articulated hierarchy of subcommanders and administrative machinery that oversaw the fair distribution of loot according to employees’ contracts. CEO-like captains led these medieval military corporations.

The parallels between medieval and contemporary private military companies (PMCs) are strong. Today, the US and many others hire contractors to fulfil security-related contracts in the world’s most dangerous places. In the late Middle Ages, such men were called condottieri – literally, ‘contractors’ – who agreed to perform security services described in written contracts, or condotte. Both modern and medieval contractors were organised as companies, their services available to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit. Both filled their ranks with professional men of arms drawn from different countries and loyal primarily to the paycheck. Both have functioned as private armies, usually offering land-based combat skills rather than naval (or aerial) capabilities and deploying force in a military manner rather than as law enforcement or police.

Mercenaries are back. Once brandished as villainous outlaws, they are emerging from the shadows to once again become a mainstream instrument of world politics. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has hired hundreds of Latin-American mercenaries to fight the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen. After years of struggling against Boko Haram, Nigeria finally employed mercenaries to do the job, and they did. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has sent mercs to ‘liberate’ eastern Ukraine, a conflict that still simmers. Mercs are reportedly working in parts of Iraq.

States are not the only consumers in the market for force. The extractive industry and humanitarian organisations hire mercs to protect their people and their assets in the world’s most dangerous places. Arsenal ships full of armed contractors act as privateers in the Gulf of Oman and other pirate-infested waters. Mercenaries stalk cyberspace as ‘hack-back companies’: cybermercs who will hack those who hack their clients, deterring hackers in the first place. In 2008, the actress Mia Farrow considered hiring Blackwater to stage a humanitarian intervention in Darfur to end the genocide there. Some, such as Malcolm Hugh in Privatising Peace (2009), think that mercenaries should augment thinning United Nations peacekeeping forces, an argument with some merit. Others have suggested that the international community use them to defeat Daesh/ISIS, and the super-rich have toyed with the possibility of using mercenaries for their own purposes.
Mercenaries fight primarily for profit rather than politics or patriotism. The word ‘mercenary’ comes from the Latin merces (‘wages’ or ‘pay’); today, it connotes vileness, treachery and murder. But it was not always so. For much of history, being a mercenary was considered an honest albeit bloody trade, and employing mercenaries to fight wars was routine: there was King Shulgi of Ur’s army (2094-2047 BC); Xenophon’s army of Greek mercenaries known as the Ten Thousand (401-399 BC); and Carthage’s mercenary armies in the Punic Wars against Rome (264-146 BC), including Hannibal’s 60,000-strong army, which marched elephants over the Alps to attack Rome from the north. When Alexander invaded Asia in 334 BC, his army included 5,000 foreign mercenaries, and the Persian army that faced him contained 10,000 Greeks.

Rome relied on mercenaries throughout its 1,000-year reign, and Julius Caesar was saved at Alesia by mounted German mercenaries in his war against Vercingetorix in Gaul. Nearly half of William the Conqueror’s army in the 11th century was made up of mercenaries, as he could not afford a large standing army, and there were not enough nobles and knights to accomplish the Norman conquest of England. In Egypt and Syria, the Mamluk sultanate (1250-1517) was a regime of mercenary slaves who had been converted to Islam. From the late 10th to the early 15th centuries, Byzantine emperors surrounded themselves with Norse mercenaries, the Varangian Guard, who were known for their fierce loyalty, prowess with the battle axe, and ability to swill copious amounts of alcohol. In Europe, the Italian condottieri, the German landsknechts, as well as Swiss companies, Bretons, Gascons, Picards and other mercenaries dominated warfare from the 13th to the 16th centuries. For at least 3,000 years, private military force has been a feature – often the major feature – of warfare.

War began to change in the 16th century, transforming private warfare with it. European battles became increasingly violent as armies grew larger, weapons more destructive, and consequences more grave. During the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), for example, major engagements typically involved 50,000 combatants, as evidenced by the battles of White Mountain (1620), Breitenfeld (1631), Lützen (1632), Nördlingen (1634), Wittstock (1636), and Rocroi (1643). Armies were an amalgamation of mercenaries with a minority of national troops. Patriotism was unconnected to military service.

To meet the rising demand for troops, a new breed of conflict entrepreneur emerged – ‘military enterprisers’ – who outfitted regiments and leased them to those in need of martial services. Distinct from mercenaries, military enterprisers raised entire armies. These ‘rental regiments’ or contractor armies allowed rulers to wage war on a grand scale without undue administrative or fiscal reform, effectively lowering the barrier to entry in war and encouraging ever-larger battles. Examples of the greatest military enterprisers include Count Ernst von Mansfeld, who raised an entire army for the Elector Palatine; the Amsterdam businessman Louis de Geer, who sourced a navy for Sweden; the Genovese Marquis of Spinola, who managed the King of Spain’s military affairs in the Netherlands; and Bernard von Weimar, who produced armies for Sweden and then France. Most famously, Count Albrecht von Wallenstein generated a massive army for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, and became the richest man in Europe. By the end of the war, the market had moved beyond oligarchs such as Wallenstein to smaller actors, such as mercenary colonels and merchant financiers, empowered by credit and supply networks based in Amsterdam, Hamburg and Genoa.

When business was slow, mercenaries pillaged the countryside until they were hired by a client or paid to go away. A free market for force incentivises war

Military enterprisers were a hybrid of both. Like mercenaries, they are private-sector actors involved in armed conflict and motivated chiefly by profit. Unlike mercenaries, they typically worked in monogamous public-private partnerships with a government client to build armies rather than command them. Enterprisers are military public-private partnerships, blending the profit motive of mercenaries with the loyalty of national armies.

Military enterprisers changed the business of war, transforming it from a free to a mediated market for force. In a free market, conflict is commoditised: consumers and suppliers of warfare seek each other out, negotiate a price, and wage war. Both sides of the bargain were generally unconstrained, and the marketplace was laissez-faire in nature. For example, mercenaries such as the condottieri often worked for the highest bidder, changed sides when it suited their purses, sought wars out, and occasionally started them. When business was slow, they often pillaged the countryside until they were hired by a client or paid to go away. A free market for force incentivises war.

This contrasts with a mediated market with military enterprisers, which imbued a modicum of restraint into force providers and their patrons. Long-term and exclusive public-private partnerships aligned the interests of both parties, making it harder for either side to defect, and infusing stability into the marketplace. For example, Wallenstein had no incentive to betray Ferdinand II. On the contrary, the ruler was his main source of revenue. Nor was Ferdinand II motivated to break his contract with Wallenstein, as the enterpriser was his primary supplier of armed forces during a war of survival. In other words, they were codependent in ways that medieval mercenaries and their clientele were not. Such relationships had existed in the past, but by Wallenstein’s time, they were dominant. The presence of shared, long-term interests restrained corrupt behaviours and therefore mediated the market for force.

The transition from private to public armies was gradual, spanning centuries, as states consolidated their power in European politics. By 1650, it was clear that on-demand military services were no longer economical to rulers, given the destruction that mercenaries wrought upon the countryside and the threat they posed to their employers. What was needed was a public army of systematically trained and disciplined professionals, maintained in peace and war, winter and summer, with a regular means of obtaining supplies and replacements. Critically, this military force would be paid by, and loyal to, the state.

For example, following the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), France formed a standing army by absorbing most of Louis XIV’s officers into the gendarmerie and establishing six standing infantry units. These regiments enabled the Sun King to mobilise his armies swiftly in the War of Devolution (1667-1668) and overrun the Habsburg-controlled Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté region of eastern France. Louis XIV in turn created an even larger standing army at the end of the war. At the same time, in England, with his New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell was creating a prototype standing army. After the Restoration of 1660, Charles II was permitted to retain five regiments from this force, totalling about 3,000 men. These relatively small specialty forces were the beginning of the large national militaries that would develop over the following centuries.

‘Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country’

In the three subsequent centuries, states continued to squeeze out mercenaries. Gunpowder hurt them too, as it devalued the mercenaries’ skill, allowing peasants to defeat them. Growing state bureaucracies made it possible to administer large standing militaries and to collect the taxes to maintain them. Enlightenment ideas and their accompanying political revolutions also spurred the demise of private armies by strengthening the bond between soldier and state. The ‘social contract’, levée en masse, the Napoleonic reforms, the rise of nationalism and other ideas encouraged military ‘service’ as a core patriotic duty. This norm pervades public armies today. By the end of the 18th century, national armies were so large that Minister Friedrich von Schrötter remarked: ‘Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.’

Over time, the state became the principal market actor for force and outlawed the competition, such as mercenaries. The only exception to this was for states that wished to ‘rent’ their armies to other states for a profit. During the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain doubled its army by hiring nearly 30,000 soldiers from German states, mostly from Hesse-Kassel, to quell the colonial revolt. The American rebels called these German soldiers Hessians.

Similarly, although piracy was illegal and, if caught, pirates faced the gallows, states hired private warships, or privateers, by issuing a letter of marque to attack enemy ships. Privateers were allowed to pilfer as part of the prize. The line between piracy and privateering was thin. Acts of piracy were deemed illegal because, as a 19th-century jurist explained, they were ‘done under conditions which render it impossible or unfair to hold any state responsible for their commission’. By 1856, with nationalism on the rise, the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law abolished privateering.

States also delegated military affairs to quasi-state-run trading companies such as the Dutch or British East India Companies, which commanded their own armed forces. But the last time a state raised an army of foreigners was during the Crimean War in 1854, when Great Britain hired 16,500 mercenaries.

In the 20th century, state power rose to its zenith and pushed the free market for force underground. The period’s great conflicts – the First and Second world wars, the Cold War – were waged between ‘great power’ nations using huge public militaries. The presumption that only states can legitimately wage war is taken for granted in international relations theory and codified in the ‘laws of war’, which regulate only interstate warfare, ignoring armed non-state actors. In Humanity in Warfare (1980), the historian and legal scholar Geoffrey Best describes the period from 1856 to 1909 as the ‘epoch of highest repute’ for war etiquette, but only by ignoring the sometimes genocidal ‘small wars’ in the colonies and frontier lands.

The Congo Crisis attracted hundreds of mercenaries, some known as ‘The Frightfuls’, and included the Irishman ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare

Despite the move toward delegitimising mercenaries, state-sponsored mercenarism continued into the 20th century. The French Foreign Legion recruits globally but remains a part of the French military: it takes orders exclusively from Paris, follows French military doctrine, and is led by French officers. The Flying Tigers, which flew combat missions against Japanese forces occupying China in 1940-41, was staffed by former US military personnel and was a way for the US to combat Japan before war was formally declared. The British private military company WatchGuard International, founded in 1965 and the first of several British private military companies, is staffed almost entirely by Special Air Services (SAS) veterans. They specialised in fighting messy ‘brush wars’, and worked only contracts favourable to British national interest, offering policymakers plausible deniability in case a covert operation went awry. But these state-sponsored mercenaries are the exception flouting the norm of the 20th century.

Most mercenaries during this period led illicit lives, operating as private warriors in the shadows rather than as for-profit companies in the open market. Individual soldiers of fortune bounced between geopolitical hot spots in China, Latin America and especially Africa. Their employers included rebel groups, weak governments, multinational firms operating in precarious regions, and former colonial powers that desired clandestine influence in the affairs of their past colonies. The decolonisation that followed the Second World War offered particularly rich opportunities for these private warriors. The Katanga secession and Congo Crisis of 1960-1968 attracted hundreds of mercenaries, some known as Les Affreux (‘The Frightfuls’), and included the Irishman ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare and the Frenchman Bob Denard. Their exploits informed the influential films The Wild Geese (1978), for which Hoare was a technical adviser, and The Dogs of War (1980), based on a Frederick Forsyth novel inspired by the life of Denard.

It was these wars of African decolonisation that prompted the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions to ban mercenaries. The most widely accepted legal definition of a mercenary is in Article 47 of Protocol I. Its language is so restrictive and imprecise, however, that almost no one falls into the category. As Best remarks: ‘Any mercenary who cannot exclude himself from this definition deserves to be shot – and his lawyer with him!’ More importantly, definitions are not the primary problem; it is difficult for international law to regulate mercenaries because they can overpower law enforcement.

Shortly after the Cold War, the world witnessed the resurgence of private military force. The first real mercenary firm emerged in Africa. With the fall of the South African apartheid regime, unemployed soldiers from special forces units such as the 32nd Battalion and the Koevoet (‘crowbar’ in Afrikaans) special police formed the first modern private military company, appropriately named Executive Outcomes. Unlike WatchGuard, Executive Outcomes was not a military enterpriser but a true mercenary firm, waging war for the highest bidder. It operated in Angola, Mozambique, Uganda and Kenya. It offered to help stop the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, but Kofi Annan – then head of UN peacekeeping – refused, claiming ‘the world may not be ready to privatise peace’. Annan’s was an expensive ideology, given the fact that 800,000 people died. By 1998, the company closed its doors, but the mercenary market for force surged.

Members of Executive Outcomes helped to start Sandline International, a London-based firm managed by the former British Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, the ex-SAS officer Simon Mann, and the retired US Army Special Forces Colonel Bernard McCabe. In 1997, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Julius Chan contracted Sandline to recapture copper mines held by separatists on Bougainville Island for $36 million. Sandline was rebuffed by the Papua New Guinea army, which arrested and deported these mercenaries without shots fired. Chan was forced to resign, and the entire spectacle made world news as the ‘Sandline Affair’. Similarly, the ousted Sierra Leone President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah contracted Sandline to train and equip 40,000 militia and peacekeepers from the Kamajor people to overthrow the military junta and secure diamond areas. Sandline was also contracted to support a coup from neighbouring Guinea. This, too, ended in failure, resulting in the arms-to-Africa scandal in the United Kingdom.

Later, the private warriors found themselves working for different sides. In 2004, Mann led a group of mercenaries with alleged financial backing from Mark Thatcher, son of the former UK prime minister, in an attempted overthrow of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, also known as the Wonga Coup. It failed, and Mann was sent to prison. McCabe left Sandline to become the head of security for the Marathon Oil Corporation in Texas, which invested heavily in Equatorial Guinea. As for Spicer, shortly after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, he founded a new firm called Aegis Defence Services in London, and won a lucrative security contract worth $293 million by the US government in Iraq. Executive Outcomes’ progeny lives on today.

Contracting makes sense for a rich country that wants to project force abroad but whose citizens do not wish to bleed

It was the US and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that truly restored the market for force. US policymakers, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, expected the wars would ‘last weeks, not months’. Of course, that was more than a decade ago. The all-volunteer US military quickly discovered it could not recruit enough Americans into its ranks to sustain these efforts, leaving policymakers some ugly options. First, they could withdraw and concede defeat. Second, they could institute a draft to fill the ranks. Third, they could hope that allies and the UN would rescue the US from its wars. Lastly, they could keep the war alive with contractors. The first three options were either political suicide or unrealistic, so they defaulted to contractors, a policy continued by President Barack Obama.

Contracting might be the new American way of war. It’s a way that makes sense for a rich country that wants to project force abroad but whose citizens do not wish to bleed. Contractors made up 50 per cent of the US force structure in Iraq, and 55 per cent in Afghanistan. This is a remarkable increase from the Second World War, when only 10 per cent of the force was contracted. Some wonder whether the US will outsource 80-90 per cent of its force in future conflicts.

Contractors are also accounting for 25 per cent of all US fatalities since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. In 2003, contractor deaths represented only 4 per cent of all fatalities. By 2010, more contractors were killed than military personnel, marking the first time in history that corporate casualties outweighed military losses on US battlefields. Moreover, these are conservative estimates since the US does not track this data and companies underreport their wounded and dead, as it is bad for business.

Most contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan were harmless, providing unarmed logistical support. Only 12-15 per cent of contractors were lethal or trained others to kill. But the failures of armed contractors have an outsized strategic impact, as evidenced by events at Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007, when a handful of Blackwater personnel killed 17 civilians at a traffic circle, marking one of the nadirs of the war.

The US investment in the private military industry has also made war even bigger business. The market’s value remains unknown; experts’ estimates range wildly from $20 billion to $100 billion annually. More certainly, from 1999 to 2008, the US Department of Defense contract obligations increased from $165 billion to $414 billion. In 2010, the US military obligated $366 billion to contracts, worth six times the UK’s entire defence budget. Moreover, this entails only military contracts and does not include those made by other government agencies such as the State Department or USAID, through its ‘implementing partners’. The actual amount the US paid for purely security contracts remains unknown.

The US reliance on contractors is such that the superpower is strategically dependent on the private sector to wage wars. The US has also de facto legitimised the private military industry, encouraging Nigeria, UAE and Russia, for example, to hire mercenaries. Even oil companies and shipping lines employ them now. These events garner little public outrage (or even attention), marking their increased acceptance in international relations. In short, mercenaries are back.

And they are unlikely to go away. Private warfare has been the norm rather than the exception in history, with the past 400 years as anomalous. The implications of this return are significant. Offering the means of war to anyone who can afford it will change warfare, why we fight and the future of war. If money can buy firepower, then large corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals could become a new kind of superpower. New mercenaries will emerge to meet this demand, offering more lethal services unhindered by laws of war.

More mercenaries means more war, as they are incentivised to start and expand wars for profit, and turn to criminality between contracts. A new type of warfare will also emerge – contract warfare – that responds to the logic of the market place, such as bribery, buy-outs and deception. An active market for force has the power to alter international relations. World order will increasingly look like the European Middle Ages, when mercenaries were how wars were fought, and the wealthy could wage war for any reason they wanted. Such a world order is best described as ‘durable disorder’: global governance that contains rather than solves problems. Such a world is already upon us.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

San Francisco’s Police Problem

The City by the Bay is known for its gentle vibe—except when it comes to the cops.
By Rebecca Gordon

In the photo, five of Beyoncé’s leather-clad, black-bereted dancers raise their fists in a Black Power salute. The woman in the middle holds a hand-lettered sign up for the camera, bearing three words and a number: “Justice 4 Mario Woods.” Behind them, the crowd at Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, is getting ready for the second half of Super Bowl 50, but the game’s real fireworks are already over.

The women in the photo had just finished backing Beyoncé’s homage to the Black Panthers and Malcolm X during her incandescent halftime appearance, when two San Francisco Bay Area Black Lives Matter activists managed to grab a few words with them. Rheema Emy Calloway and Ronnisha Johnson asked if they’d make a quick video demanding justice for Mario Woods. “From the look on the faces of the dancers, they’d already heard about the case,” Calloway told The Guardian.

Who was Mario Woods and why did Calloway and Johnson want the world to know that his life mattered? The answer: on December 2, 2015, Mario Woods was executed in broad daylight by officers of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) and the event was filmed.

Woods was a 26-year-old African American, born and raised in San Francisco’s Bayview district, one of the city’s few remaining largely black neighborhoods. (In 1980, right before I moved to San Francisco, African Americans made up almost 13 percent of the city’s population. Today, the figure is around 6 percent and shrinking.) Woods died when police attempted to arrest him because they believed that, earlier in the day, he had stabbed another man in the arm. Like many victims of police violence, Woods had mental health problems. Indeed, his autopsy’s toxicology report showed that, when he died, his system contained a powerful mix of medications (both prescribed and self-administered) including anti-depressants, speed, and marijuana.

But it was the way he died that brought Mario Woods a brief bit of posthumous notoreity. His death was, like Beyoncé’s dancers, captured on video. A crowd of people watched as what CNN described as “a sea of police officers” surrounded Woods and shot him dead. At least two people recorded cell-phone videos of what looks eerily like an execution by firing squad.

Woods, his back to a wall, one leg injured from earlier rounds of non-lethal projectiles, attempts to limp past the half-circle of police. Arms at his sides, he sidles along, until an officer blocks his way and opens fire. Three seconds and at least 20 shots later, he lies in a heap on the sidewalk. Police said he was carrying a knife, although this is not at all clear from the video. One thing is clear, however: Woods was not threatening anyone when he was gunned down.

FROM HIPPIES TO HIPSTERS—POLICING THE CITY OF LOVE
San Francisco is known around the world for its gentle vibe, its Left Coast politics, its live-and-let-live approach to other people’s lifestyles—except when it comes to the police. For many of them, “live and let live” does not seem to apply to everyone, especially not to communities of color, and in the not-too-distant past to LGBT folk either. I remember, for instance, the infamous October 6, 1989, “Castro Sweep,” when police responded to a nonviolent Act Up demonstration for AIDS funding by occupying an entire gay neighborhood called “the Castro” (for its main commercial street). They ran into bars and restaurants, dragging patrons out to the sidewalks and beating them with truncheons.

I was working some blocks away at the headquarters of the “Yes on S” campaign, supporting what now seems like a quaint ballot measure (which failed) aimed at creating domestic partnerships in the City of Love. A bleeding man came stumbling into our office shouting that the police were rioting in the Castro. For once, the SFPD had gone too far and the city ended up paying out $250,000 (a pittance even then) to settle a class action suit by the victims. A couple of police captains were finally disciplined, but Chief of Police Frank Jordan was not penalized at all and went on to serve as mayor from 1992 to 1996. The Castro Sweep might hold a bigger place in the city’s memory and history, had the Loma Prieta earthquake not shaken San Francisco 11 days later.

Once a mostly white department—at whom demonstrators used to chant, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, SFPD go away!”—the city’s police force is now significantly more diverse. Today, women, people of color, and open LGBT folk all wear the blue, but a hard core of the old guard remains. With them remains a still-dominant culture of sexism, homophobia, racism, and impunity. In 2015, a series of text messages involving at least 10 different SFPD members came to light during a corruption case against one of them, Ian Fruminger. Sent between 2010 and 2012, these messages revealed just how ugly the attitudes of that hard core are—and how entitled they seem to feel to end the lives of people they believe deserve it.

Here’s a sample: Fruminger texted a friend who was an SFPD officer, “I hate to tell you this but my wife [sic] friend is over with their kids and her husband is black! If [sic] is an Attorney but should I be worried?”

He wrote back: “Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down.”
NOT THE FIRST TIME
Mario Woods was hardly the first man shot by the police in my adopted hometown. In fact, in the last couple of years two such killings happened in my neighborhood.
Alejandro “Alex” Nieto died on Bernal Heights. It’s a hilltop near my house where people go to run, often with their dogs, and take in glorious views of the city that San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen used to call “Baghdad by the Bay” to emphasize its exotic character, long before Iraq became part of the Axis of Evil. Alex Nieto, a community college student who made his living working as a security guard, came from the largely Latino and immigrant-populated Mission District.

On the night of March 21, 2014, Nieto sat on a bench on Bernal Heights to eat a burrito before going to work. On his hip was the taser he carried on the job. An anonymous call to 911 reported a man sitting in the park with a gun on his hip and the SFPD responded.

In January 2016, his parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto, would finally file a wrongful death suit against Chief of Police Greg Suhr, up to 25 as-yet-unidentified police officers, and the city and county of San Francisco. The suit alleges that as their son, having finished his burrito, was “casually” walking down a jogging path towards the park entrance, the police arrived. Two officers took cover behind a patrol car, while several others, carrying what witnesses said looked like rifles, took up positions behind Nieto. One of the officers behind the police car, yelled, “Stop.” Here, in the words of the suit, is what happened next:

Within seconds a quick volley of bullets were fired at Mr. Nieto. No additional orders or any other verbal communication was heard between the first Officer yelling “stop” and the initial volley of gunfire that rang out. Mr. Nieto fell to the ground. After a brief pause of just a second or two, a second barrage of shots were fired. The Officers’ bullets struck Mr. Nieto in his forehead and at least nine other places leaving his body grossly disfigured and mortally wounded.

The police claimed that Nieto pointed his taser at them and they had to kill him. But eyewitnesses say that he never threatened anyone. Instead, as Sergeant Furminger might have expressed it, those police officers evidently decided to “put him down” like a dangerous animal. The SFPD has never even released the names of those involved in Nieto’s death. (In the civil suit, they are referred to as John Doe 1 through 25.) As far as anyone knows, none of them have ever been disciplined in any way. Alex Nieto’s parents continue to tend a little shrine on Bernal Heights where he died.

THE DEATH OF AMILCAR PEREZ LOPEZ
On February 26, 2015, a few blocks from my house, two undercover police officers shot Amilcar Perez Lopez, a 20-year-old Guatemalan man, six times in the back. The Mission District Episcopal church I belong to helped raise money for his family. As the members of my church community would come to understand from them, he was working in the United States without documents, the sole support for his parents and younger siblings back home in Guatemala. Through his efforts, he’d sent them enough money to bring electricity and running water to their thatched roof adobe house.

On the day he died, he was involved in some kind of altercation with a man who may have accused him of stealing his bicycle. After that ended, according to the civil suit his parents brought against the city, he was walking home along Folsom Street when accosted by those undercover police officers, named in the suit as Craig Tiffe and Eric Riboli. The two “surreptitiously rushed at Amilcar from behind.” One of them got him in a “bear hug.” Amilcar spoke very little English. It’s likely he had no idea that they were police officers. In any case, he managed to get free and started running down the sidewalk. That’s when they shot him.

The official police story was that he lunged at them with a knife and the officers had to shoot him to save their own lives. And that story might have stuck, had the family’s attorney not commissioned a private autopsy, which was performed by Dr. A.J. Chapman, a forensic pathologist in Santa Rosa, California. The city had already done its own autopsy when Dr. Chapman received Amilcar’s body, but had issued no report. Chapman found that Amilcar had taken six shots in the back, five to the torso and right arm, and one to the back of his head. If he was shot while attacking the two officers, why did the bullets strike him from behind?

It took the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office five months to release its autopsy, which ultimately concluded the same thing. What might that report have said if activists had not arranged for a private, unbiased report? There’s no way to know.

PUBLIC SERVANTS OR OCCUPYING ARMY?
In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, many white people woke up to a reality that was hardly news in most communities of color, where death-by-police is all too common. What’s new is that the rest of us are suddenly hearing about the Eric Garners, Freddie Grays, and Sandra Blands who die literally every day in this country.

The rest of the United States is beginning to understand what the police already represent to so many communities from Ferguson to Baltimore to Waller County, Texas, to—yes—San Francisco. Far from seeing the police as a source of help and protection, many Americans feel the same way about them as people living under corrupt authoritarian regimes feel about their police or armies. They see them as an occupying force, not there to protect and serve but to frighten and extort.

Many Americans are not used to thinking of our police as agents of extortion, but a recent Justice Department (DOJ) report on the police and the municipal courts of Ferguson, for instance, tells a different story. The department found that “City officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity. Ferguson generates a significant and increasing amount of revenue from the enforcement of code provisions.” The Harvard Law Review reported that in 2013, Ferguson issued more arrest warrants than the city has residents—one and a half for every citizen. The report adds:

In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail.

After the Justice Department released the report, the city spent six months negotiating with the DOJ on a complete overhaul of its police and courts. But when Ferguson’s own negotiators brought this proposed “consent decree” to the city council, the council members rejected it. So now the Justice Department has announced that it will sue Ferguson to force it to make changes that the city insists will cost too much. “There is no cost for constitutional policing,” says Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She’s right. What she didn’t say, because she shouldn’t have to, is that the costs of unconstitutional policing include ravaged communities and a divided nation.

In many places it’s hard to get information about what goes on inside police forces because a thicket of laws protects them. In California, a 1978 law, signed by Jerry Brown in his first go-round as governor, makes it almost impossible to learn anything about the individual police officers involved in the deaths of Alex Nieto and Amilcar Perez Lopez, or whether their records reflect significant prior complaints or charges. The Modesto Bee reports that under this law:

“peace officer personnel records are confidential, including personal data, promotion, appraisal and discipline records, and ‘any other information the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ Only a judge can order their release as part of a criminal case or lawsuit.”

This makes it difficult, for example, to know whether a particular officer has a record of brutality complaints, or indeed whether a whole police department has such a record. Civil rights attorney and former justice of the California Supreme Court Cruz Reynoso told the Bee that citizens seeking information about police killings face “a wall of silence.”

Here in San Francisco, we might finally shake some of that information loose. In January, the Board of Supervisors responded to organized grassroots pressure by voting unanimously to request a Department of Justice review of the police department. We can only hope that when the DOJ releases its report on San Francisco’s police, my city will respond better than Ferguson did. We need more than a thorough housecleaning at the SFPD, starting at the top with Police Chief Greg Suhr. The whole community, indeed the whole country, would do well to rethink why we have police and what we really want them to do. Not shooting so many people might be a good place to start.

Maybe Herb Caen was more prescient than he knew when he called San Francisco Baghdad by the Bay. Maybe we should not be surprised when police forces claim impunity for crimes they commit against the communities of color they “serve.” They’re only doing on a small scale what the United States does on the international stage—when it claims the right to bomb, invade, and occupy foreign countries, without accepting any responsibility for the human misery that results.

Rosewood