Ferguson

[Chugach001]

What a stunning cluster of idiot on all sides. The Caucasian brownshirt cops, looting ****heads, impotent leaders on all sides and the press reporting live from the scene.

[RobRoyMeans]

Social Justice may get back in the news, but the weapons dealers will just kick up another fracas overseas and poof, the slightest of opportunities to discuss the domestic economics of justice will be obscured.

[riser3]

F the MIC.

[Baaahb]

Cluster indeed. The media hype (as well as they hype from everyone with an agenda to push) is such that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion of the situation. So let's turn to this:

[RobRoyMeans]

It's not impossible to discuss difficult matters in trying times....but it is very, very difficult

[Baaahb]

I don't think the Ferguson incident is that significant nationally, and didn't think so about Rodney King either. Almost always these involve very local issues with regard to local government competence or even just the competence of specific individuals. In terms of national affairs, they're just focus points for people to vent. Racist policemen and police departments continue to exist but I don't see a general backsliding in civil rights. Voting rights issues are far more important in terms of ending racism. Indeed, the racist angle can be played up excessively...IMO, general fear in the public (among all races) is a bigger factor than racism in getting this sort of Silence-them-with-excessive-force police reaction.

[RobRoyMeans]

Race is a handle, it's more about economic justice than the press cares to get involved with. That's also a wide area, one ripe for all the side stepping of core issues that create and maintain said injustice.



Why should this generation be more afraid than ours was after Kent State or Washington Square or Chicago?

[Baaahb]

Kent State and Chicago '68 were emblematic of a government failing to accept the reality of Vietnam and its own wrongdoing. IMO Ferguson is not emblematic of much if anything nationally. Some folks think it is emblematic of a growing police state but, IMO, that's not true in a meaningful way. It's more emblematic of the kind of tough law and order policy that many voters (of all races) want and there lies the problem. It may be symptomatic of economic injustice, but there are far more widespread and larger scale issues emblematic of economic injustice.

[RobRoyMeans]

Fear is fear, whether being caused by the the authorities mercilessly clubbing civilians, unconstitutionaly detaining civilians, or gunning down people they are supposed to protect, it is still the case no matter emblematical distinctions. There is a disparate matter bewteen Kent State and Fergeson: Kent State was college students (ie success tracking people) and Fergeson was a kid from the neighborhood (ie not success tracking).

The unconstitutionality of the one case cannot yet be held in comparison against the case in Fergeson. We shall have to wait a bit for that to get clear. It certainly smacks of it at this point.

When a nutter gets into a tower and starts shooting people we have justifiable fear, but it passes when the incident is over. What happens when the justifiable fear of police violence does not abate as quickly? Albuquerque, Fergeson and 5 more in between, even average intelligence sees that as a pattern.

What will that do?
Why is there any possibility of seeing a pattern?
Is it a selected and deliberately applied technique of control?
Does a pattern like that happen sporadically because of other factors, without any intent?

[Chugach001]

As a refresher lesson, Chris Rock...

[Baaahb]

There may be a pattern, but to someone familiar with history, the pattern does not indicate an increasing police state. Perhaps it indicates increasing sensitivity to a police state, or a renewed definition of what is a police state.

[Sugarloafer]

Although most of what he posted is his usual incoherent drival, Rob did identify the economy as an issue. From today's WSJ:


Ferguson, USA

50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Ferguson doesn't need to happen.

By DANIEL HENNINGER
CONNECT

Email
Print
160 Comments
Facebook








Twitter

Google+
LinkedIn

• smaller
• Larger

Aug. 20, 2014 7:08 p.m. ET
It has been 50 years since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Across that half century, the condition of inner-city black life in America has consumed immeasurable amounts of the nation's public and private spending, litigation, academic study, cultural output and opinion. And yet everything about Ferguson is familiar.
A poor neighborhood has erupted over a police killing, protesters are in the streets, civil-rights leaders are everywhere, local businesses have been looted and cameramen are recording the most familiar image of all—young black men in a state of rage. Eventually Ferguson will subside as a daily news story, and then life in this small town in the middle of the country will return to being what it was.

We've seen these pictures before: the urban in riot in Detroit, 1967. AP




What we are seeing in Ferguson occurred on a larger scale in Detroit and Newark in 1967, in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, and in a neighborhood called Hough on the east side of Cleveland in 1966. Some argue that Detroit and Newark never recovered.
We will leave it to others to plumb the riddles of whether racism and injustice create the Fergusons of America. A question more open to the possibility of an answer is: Why don't more young guys in places like Ferguson have a job to occupy their days?
The short answer is, they don't work because there is no work. And anyway, who would hire them? President Barack Obama explained all this in February when he announced the "My Brother's Keeper" Initiative.
"As a black student," Mr. Obama said, "you are far less likely than a white student to be able to read proficiently by the time you are in fourth grade. By the time you reach high school, you're far more likely to have been suspended or expelled." And the future? "Fewer young black and Latino men participate in the labor force compared to young white men. And all of this translates into higher unemployment rates and poverty rates as adults." All indisputable.
The goal of "My Brother's Keeper," Mr. Obama said, is to find out "what works," and then build on what works.
But we know what works. The build-out is simply waiting for a head contractor to get the job done.
When the president announced this initiative in February, the progressive website Think Progress produced an article that includes one eye-popping chart. Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it shows the unemployment rate for black youth from 2007-2012. In November 2009 it hit 49.1%. It has declined to about 35%, but remains twice the rate for young whites.
The article also noted the massive shortfall in educational preparedness: "Just 5% of African-American students meet the ACT's college readiness benchmark in all four subject areas: English, reading, math and science."
Connect the dots: What younger black men need is a decent job and the education necessary to get and hold that job. Absent that, normal life is impossible, for them or for their neighborhoods.
More dots: Last August, the Pew Research Center published a report, also documenting that the "black unemployment rate is consistently twice that of whites." Gaze, however, at Pew's chart of unemployment by race based on seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1954 to 2013. It reveals what works.
Peak unemployment for all blacks hit 19.5% in 1983, after a deep recession. Then it plummeted, to about 11%. These were the boom years of the Reagan presidency, when economic growth hit 7% in 1984 and averaged 3.6%. Following a recession in the early 1990s, that strong-growth trend continued during Bill Clinton's presidency, and black unemployment fell further, below 10%.
The postrecession growth rate for the first five years of the Obama presidency was below 2%, and joblessness for young black men is unprecedented. Something, obviously, isn't working.
Good growth is half of what works. Without a functional education, holding a job, or improving on the one you've got, is nearly impossible. Ferguson's school system, the Washington Post's visiting reporters noted Tuesday, "is crumbling."
The decline of inner-city public schools is the greatest, most bitterly ironic social tragedy in the 50 years since passage of the liberating civil-rights acts. But what works here is no longer an unsolvable mystery. It is the alternatives that emerged to the defunct public system—charters schools and voucher-supported parochial schools. Over the past 20 years, these options, born in desperation, have forced their way into the schools mix. Freed of politicized, sludge-like central bureaucracies, they've proven they can teach kids and send them into the workforce.
Economic growth is nonpartisan. But inner-city public education is totally partisan. Democratic politicians made a Faustian bargain with the teachers unions, and the souls carried away have been the black children in those doomed schools.
What America's Fergusons need—from L.A. to Detroit to New York—is a president, and a party, obsessed with growth and messianic about giving a kid what he needs to hold the job that growth provides. Maybe by the 100th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
Write to [email protected]


Email
Print
160 Comments
Order Reprints
Facebook

[Baaahb]

"What we are seeing in Ferguson occurred on a larger scale in Detroit and Newark in 1967, in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, and in a neighborhood called Hough on the east side of Cleveland in 1966."

It has also occured several times since 1967. but what we now see are isolated local incidents rather than a national revolt. Do not discount the progress that has been made; further solutions at economic equality will need to be more complex than enforcing civil rights under the Constitution.

[RobRoyMeans]

It rather depends on which side one's pov is regarding the "isolated local incidents". If you happen to be one of the class of citizens typically oppressed, thinks look very different.

Marge Piercy nailed the video reality in a 1970 novel, now cop reality shows detail the "get their man" message and the "isolated incidents" raise the ante. Poverty handles the razor edge.

Land of the free? Home of the brave?

[Chugach001]

Typically oppressed?!? By who?

This...

Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it shows the unemployment rate for black youth from 2007-2012. In November 2009 it hit 49.1%. It has declined to about 35%, but remains twice the rate for young whites.
The article also noted the massive shortfall in educational preparedness: "Just 5% of African-American students meet the ACT's college readiness benchmark in all four subject areas: English, reading, math and science."

It's a bloody crime that blacks under achieve at such stunning rates. People should be up in arms but no one does anything about it. In many big cities the cops, mayor, council, school board, teachers and every other city official and worker is black. And now we have a black president 6 years in office. But the people of Atlanta, New Orleans, Detroit, Birmingham, etc, etc - they are still oppressed by ??? (who, someone other than their oppressor brothers?). Someone other than the POTUS, cops, mayor, council, school board who are forcing a **** sandwich down the throat of American black men every day? It's an obvious failure and an unpunished crime.