Bharat Rakshak

UlanBatori wrote:Preet Bharara would fit right in there too. What was the name of the Prosecutor in The Count of Monte Cristo?

Nirantar wrote:sorry if I am stirring hornet's nest here. We have to be cautious before getting carried away in brown black bhai bhai emotions. Though it was brute force by police but somewhere I see their viewpoint. With so much widespread gun culture, a disoriented and armed brotha or whita is a menace. Makes police not to take chances and set examples for the whole society. Every now and then we hear many poor desi kids working night shifts to arrange for tution fees, get killed by such fellas. Does that not count at all? Offcourse the root cause is gun drugs and loose family structure

UlanBatori wrote:Preet Bharara would fit right in there too. What was the name of the Prosecutor in The Count of Monte Cristo?

UlanBatori wrote:Preet Bharara would fit right in there too. What was the name of the Prosecutor in The Count of Monte Cristo?

Why have the residents of Ferguson, Missouri reacted with such anger to the still-unexplained shooting of Michael Brown? It is a mystery.

As darkness fell on Canfield Drive on August 9, a makeshift memorial sprang up in the middle of the street where Michael Brown's body had been sprawled in plain view for more than four hours. Flowers and candles were scattered over the bloodstains on the pavement. [...]

Soon, police vehicles reappeared, including from the St. Louis County Police Department, which had taken control of the investigation. Several officers emerged with dogs. What happened next, according to several sources, was emblematic of what has inflamed the city of Ferguson, Missouri, ever since the unarmed 18-year-old was gunned down: An officer on the street let the dog he was controlling urinate on the memorial site.

Just weeks after being appointed United States Attorney General in January 2009, Eric Holder, the first black man to hold the highest law enforcement office, said Americans were cowards when it came to confronting the plague of racism.

“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder said. He also said, “One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation.” His words take on more meaning as events in Ferguson, Missouri unfold following the death of a young black man at the hands of a white policeman Aug. 9.

Are We Cowards?

Holder might as well have been talking to minorities like Indian-Americans – a minority that has mostly thrived admittedly through dint of hard work – as business-owners, doctors, high-achieving students, engineers, you name it, and yet had a mercurial if not antagonistic relationship with blacks. It is also a minority that suffered on the sidelines in Ferguson when several convenience stores owned by some Indians were looted and vandalized. So that even as the nation yet again confronts the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, Indian-Americans are diverted by the image in the video which shows Ferguson Market and Liquor Store being robbed by a 6 foot 4 inch, 300 pound black teen, Michael Brown, who pushes and shoves a small Indian clerk trying to prevent him from stealing some sweet cigars. Minutes later Brown is dead and the store’s owners are trying hard to convince the largely black community they did not provide the police with the video and that the robbery had nothing to do with the subsequent killing.

Even if it is a random set of incidents, Ferguson also calls upon Indian-Americans to question how much they may or may not know or understand the history of black America. Indians who own or run convenience stores could be anywhere from Gujarat in India, or from Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda in Africa. But most of all, they are recent immigrants and relatives of immigrants, manning the stores for relatives, on the upwardly mobile path to becoming business owners themselves.

Nevertheless, do Indian-Americans, not just those who own convenience stores in black-dominated neighborhoods like Ferguson, have a racial bias against blacks? Do they confront their own biases? Do they feel absolved from a conversation on the black-white divide or from confronting their bias because slavery was not on their watch? Should they confront their race bias, or should they join the cowards as Holder contended. In all fairness, these “cowards” include other minorities and the majority communities.

Dangerous Job

It is a dangerous job running a convenience store according to the non-profit research think tank Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP Center). It says FBI data show convenience store employees are 2nd after taxicab drivers to suffer high rates of homicide. Just this Aug. 7, Rajinder Kumar, 49, a convenience store clerk at an Exxon gas station in Hanover, Maryland, was shot in cold blood by a masked man who looked to be dark complexioned (presumably black). On Aug. 18, Anne Arundel police put out a $27,000 reward for information on the killer who they said was probably living with his friends and family and may have recently changed his appearance. There have been several incidents over the years where Indian students taking up overnight jobs at gas stations to earn a little extra, have suffered a terrible fate.

A Middle-Eastern convenience store owner in Novi, Michigan told News India Times “Only black people do that (rob).” “No, I don’t get any white or Hispanics customers robbing,” he insisted categorically. Store owners in Jackson Heights, Queens, say when a black person enters warning bells go off among staff. “If you see a black customer come in, sometimes their appearance is not presentable, our staff at the store gets scared and more alert,” says a member of the Jackson Heights Merchants Association.

The POP Center estimates there are more than 135,000 convenience stores in the country and growing; On any given day around 100 million Americans visit a convenience store and more than 80 percent of Americans prefer these stores over supermarkets, contrary to popular perception; a convenience store may serve hundreds or even thousands of customers daily. The POP Center quotes FBI statistics which say 6 percent of all robberies are at convenience stores and guns were used in 44 percent of convenience store robberies in 2008.

What could convenience store owners of Indian origin do to improve their relationship with the ethnically and racially different community surrounding them so that while the rest of America is discussing the justice or injustice of the killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer, Indian-Americans are not consumed by the events in the store?

Ferguson: An Opportunity

Joining the national conversation on racism has for Indian-Americans been a double-edged sword. While on the one hand, some members of the community detect racism directed against them in every field, some others fight against Affirmative Action on grounds it favors blacks and other minorities. Neither extreme serves the interests of the community. Besides, Indians and South Asians have borne the brunt of post-9/11 profiling and stereotyping.

Meanwhile, the community must tackle the black perception that Indians are equally culpable as whites in profiling them racially. Admittedly, black angst and anger about being profiled is also directed at other minorities such as Koreans, Chinese or Hispanics, apart from whites or Indians, and not without cause. However, Indian-American ownership may be the fastest-growing ethnic business spreading tentacles to every corner of the nation. Add to that the post 9/11 backlash in stereotyping, profiling, and you have an opportunity to join the national debate on racism because the community is so much a part of the cauldron that is melting the pot of American races. Just diminishing the influence of racism (there’s very little chance of ending it) may take generations more, yet, not joining the national conversation in a visible way will have long-term consequences. In fact, Ferguson presents an opportunity rather than a problem, for the community to address its own racism in the effort

Ferguson Dilemma

Ferguson Market and Liquor Store owned by Andy Patel has been looted twice since Brown’s death according to news reports. That has prompted the South Asian Bar Association of North America to offer free legal help to shopkeepers in Ferguson. It has also prompted activists like Deepa Iyer, former executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Americans Leading Together, to note that minorities around the country, not just blacks, are discriminated and should form a united front to make their case. Conversations in Indian-American homes today are dominated not by Brown’s killing but by the convenience store robbery.

Convenience store owners admit they pay more attention when black or Hispanic customers come into the store. But things are different in Little India in Queens, N.Y., where 80 percent of the customers are of South Asian origin.

One figure being quoted loosely in Indian media claims 50 percent of convenience stores around the country are now owned by Indians. According to the attorney for the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store, Jan Kanzler, half the convenience stores in St. Louis and Ferguson as well as in Illinois, are owned by Indians, and the other half by Middle Easterners. More than half of Kanzler’s clients are Indian-American business owners around the country.

Shiv Dass, president of Jackson Heights Merchants Association, in New York City, says Indian convenience store owners tend to close early all over the South because they fear being robbed. “What happens is ‘these’ people walk in, pick up a cigarette packet or candy and walk off. I would say, ‘get lost, go away,’ but some (owners) don’t.”

Indian-Black Divide?

Kanzler also has some horror stories to relate in the last 20 years that he has represented Indian clients. Yet he strongly holds against it being a racial divide. One black-on-Indian crime, he cannot forget happened 5 years ago, in greater Ferguson. He represented an Indian-American who owned a rock-bottom wholesale business. “Three men walked in and killed my friend, wounded a clerk who was a woman, and wounded the pregnant daughter-in-law of my friend.”

Today, Kanzler represents 4 Indian-owned businesses along the Ferguson street where protests are ongoing and where the riots erupted twice since Brown’s death. “Most of the time they (stores) get along with people and are even on a first-name basis,” he contends. “I do not think Indians hold a negative perception of blacks. I am not being naive.” According to him, Indians hold negative perceptions “of a few stupid people” in a bad neighborhood. “If it was a white neighborhood they would hold negative perceptions of the few bad white people,” he asserted.

In Ferguson, the convenience stores were right there, at ground zero. “These are neighborhoods where a few bad people do very bad things. But the large percentage of blacks are friends of the store owners. They are the ones who protected them the 2nd night of looting,” according to Kanzler.

Changing Times

Things are very different today from 45 years ago when Dass, who owns 3 stores, came to the United States. “When I came here newspapers used to be stacked outside and people would come by, pick up one and leave the money.” That was when 99 percent of the convenience stores were white-owned, he recalls. That’s no longer the case.” Now, at night in Jamaica Ave. or at Roosevelt Ave. 74th Street, in New York City at night, convenience stores keep only a window open. That applies to both gas stations and small stores.

In fact, Indian convenience store owners (and possibly all convenience store owners) accept an annual loss of around 5 percent. “Two percent (of the loss) is employees and 3 percent is customers,” Dass says about stolen goods over a year. “We get a tax break on the loss.”

When asked what he thought of the robbery of sweet cigars at Ferguson Market and Liquor Store, Dass says with conviction, “That man had stolen (from that store) before as well.”

Saving the Store

On Aug. 16, the Washington Post reported that the Ferguson Market and Liquor Store manager who refused to be identified indicated he was afraid of being targeted. “It’s very dangerous. They kill us if they think we are responsible. People don’t understand that,” he said about the videos that police released of the store robbery.

Kanzler told News India Times he held a press conference at the behest of the owners. His clients, he said have been dragged into the affair “unfortunately because of the video.” The police used a search warrant to come into the store and take the surveillance video away. At his press conference, Kanzler tried distancing the store owners from Michael Brown’s killing. “I had to give the press conference because there’s a kind of street-code – about not being a snitch.” More than half of Kanzler’s clients are Indian store owners around the country, including in Ferguson.

He says, ironically, it was a black woman with her child, who was at the Ferguson Market when it was robbed, who called 911. “The press is trying to make this into a racial issue. But my clients have a good relationship with the community here. These businesses just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were right there on ground zero,” said Kanzler who has spent every day since the 2nd looting Aug. 15, with his clients. On the night of Aug. 15, he along with the Ferguson Market owners stood stalwartly before the convenience store to protect it from another looting. And they were joined by several blacks, Kanzler says. The situation has gotten much better now because the police are arresting the “bad elements,” he said.

Body Language

Kanzler insists Indian store owners do not see blacks in a negative light. While he is white, he says he is not being naïve about it. Having represented Indian businesses around the country ranging from $25 to $30 million deals downt o small gas station properties and Mom-and-Pop stores for the last 20 years or more, Kanzler’s experience has been anything but negative. “Once you are their lawyer, you become their friend, counselor, family member. I have attended so many Indian weddings; and accompanied people to their immigration hearings even though that is not my job. I wouldn’t change a thing. I love it.”

Yet there’s no gainsaying the fact that animosity may exist when a new immigrant minority begins to dominate a particular trade or business in an area dominated by another ethnicity. It’s the history of several communities worldwide, including Jews in Europe or Indians in various African countries. A May 2010 discussion in the U.S. conducted on the site “Topix” is very revealing about biases. Entitled “Boycott Indian Convenience Stores,” discussants who were mostly from towns in Georgia, vented about Indians taking over the industry. Their complaint went something like this – “- u know americans are now the minority in our own country. mexicans have taken over the jobs, all conversations and merchandise are translated to spanish, and indians own the motels and convenience stores and are doctors. we have allowed our country to be taken away from us (sic) before long we will be part of mexico.”

Responses came in fast and furious the same day – “Please think about your country and give it some love and STAY OUT of Indian-owned convenience stores,” one said, adding, “The people who own them look down their noses at us as a culture but love taking our hard earned money. Just don’t support them.”

Numerous Incidents

While it’s not clear which racial group made these comments, this Topix conversation also shows it may have something to do with the body language or attitude a convenience store owner or manager may convey to his or her customers, despite Kanzler’s protestations to the contrary. The incidents of attacks on Indian owned and operated stores appears to have risen as this community expands its reach in this sector of the economy, particularly in urban areas that are generally economically depressed.

This Feb. 24, a group of armed men walked into a grocery store in Cordele, GA, owned by an Indian, and shot two employees as they were getting ready to close the store at night. Houston police charged teenager Anthony Shannon Jamerson, this June in the shooting death June 1, of Satishkumar Patel, a late-night manager at the Phillips 66 Truck Stop located in Humble, Texas. On Aug. 25, 2013, three men walked into a gas station store in Woodbury, New Jersey, and shot to death attendant Surinder Singh, 40. His relative Satinder Singh told News India Times no further incident had occurred after that tragedy. A young woman, an aspiring black model, was arrested by Atlanta police suspected in the March 9 murder of an Indian-American store clerk in Dalton, GA, 80 miles northwest of Atlanta. On June 27 night, the Kwik Stop on Liberty Road in Guildford, North Carolina, the store who who lived above the store was shot when two armed men entered the store in a botched robbery attempt.

How Indian-American and South Asian convenience store owners are sometimes the pulse of a local community is borne out in the tragic shooting death of Shamsuddin “Sam” Sadruddin this March 24, in Cleveland, Texas. The neighborhood appears largely white going by the customers who came to honor Sadruddin and built a ad hoc shrine outside the door of his store. “Even if you didn’t have money, he would like let it slide or ‘You can pay me tomorrow,’” Patty Banks, a customer, is quoted saying in an ABC news report. “Sam always stepped up, so he made himself a part of this community and we all loved him,” customer Janice Watkins is quoted saying. In April, Joseph Guiterrez, 19, and a 13-year old were charged with the murder.

Sadruddin’s relationship with the surrounding community is what Kanzler implies exists in Ferguson, even if it does not appear believable at this juncture with the rising tensions over Brown’s killing.

What the politics and religion of the Lone Star State say about modern America

TEXANS miss few opportunities to boast of their history. The capsule version, peddled by politicians and populists, is as follows. Inspired by the deaths of a small band of fighters at the Alamo in 1836, Texans wrested their land from Mexican rule. Texas duly became an independent republic for nearly ten years, before joining the United States in 1845. This independence, brief as it was, left a legacy of freedom-loving self-reliance that is the stuff of today’s endless mythologising.

Reality, of course, is muddier, as Robert Wuthnow shows in his commanding sociological history of this fast-growing state. He begins his tale with the “strange and desperate men” (in the words of a mid-19th-century traveller) who settled in the remote flatlands of Texas. “Rough Country” marches methodically through every major historical event, from the civil war and Reconstruction to the turbulent 1960s and the rise of the Tea Party, examining how they shaped the state’s approach to race, political power and religion. A non-Texan professor from Princeton, Mr Wuthnow offers a clear-eyed view of the lingering legacies of slavery and segregation, matters that many Texans today prefer to pass over in favour of Alamo heroics.

Mr Wuthnow’s particular interest is religion, and he sets out to trace the emergence of Texas as “America’s most powerful Bible-Belt state”. It has twice as many Southern Baptists, a powerful conservative bloc, as any other state—which is perhaps unsurprising given its size—and politicians like Rick Perry, the governor, do not hesitate to call for prayer to fix drought or other ills. Dallas is sometimes known as the “buckle of the Bible Belt”, though there is competition for the honour. So large and powerful did the city’s First Baptist Church become that by 1976 one writer had dubbed it the “big old ruby” in the Bible Belt’s buckle. The church’s preachers have long railed against abortion, homosexuality and America’s moral decline—though by 1968 one legendary pastor of yore, W.A. Criswell, had at least recanted his opposition to forced racial integration.

Texan churches did not always wield such political heft. A century and more ago, Protestant pastors largely stayed out of politics. They were wary of church-state entanglements, so tended instead to their flocks’ basic needs. It was Prohibition, for which many clergy campaigned before the first world war, that galvanised the church’s involvement in politics, Mr Wuthnow argues. By the 1960s, as federal officials forced racial integration onto a state that had once sanctioned whites-only primaries, some Texan pastors began inveighing against government interference. Few white clergy in Texas spoke out against lynchings, Mr Wuthnow writes, and one estimate from 1922 suggested that half the state’s clergy backed the Ku Klux Klan. During the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, churches were neither “leader” nor “laggard”, Mr Wuthnow says, though Methodists were quicker than Baptists to embrace desegregation. Mr Wuthnow raps today’s religious leaders for paying limited attention to inequality and poverty in this Tea Party age. He quotes one west Texas pastor who says, “I think that there are Christians who get more riled up about higher taxes than they do about abortion.”

“Rough Country” is not a ripping page-turner. Mr Wuthnow proceeds with an academic’s careful deliberation through historical episodes large and small, national and local. But his research, much of it culled from the archives of Texan publications, is exhaustive, and his command of data impressive, from the changing number of clergy in Texas to the growth of livestock handling in the Fort Worth stockyards more than a century ago. There are nuggets on every page, for historians, journalists, clergy and policymakers.

Nor is this book simply of interest to Texans. The state’s story, Mr Wuthnow writes, closely parallels that of America itself. Yes, Texas is growing faster than much of America, and it has a more powerful set of religious conservatives prone to clashes with moderates and Catholics. But the currents and cross-currents that have roiled Texas have swept across other states, too. Those who want to understand America’s peculiarities, from its legacy of slavery to its powerful megachurches and its battles over the content of school textbooks, will find a welcome resource here.

Texas has a very sordid history that is NOT taught to Texas school children and it is nothing to proud of.

Texians (correct spelling) were granted permission to settle in Mexico on condition that they obeyed Mexican laws, did not own slaves, and would convert to Catholicism. They kept none of these promises.

The war started over the refusal of the Texians to return a canon which was loaned to them to combat Comanche raids - in other words, Texians stole Mexican government property and fired on the soldiers who came to get it back which started a war.

At the time of the outbreak of hostilities there were 30,000 Texians with 5,000 slaves compared to 7,800 Tejanos (Mexican born). Mexico had already abolished slavery.

Texas was founded to support slavery, a protestant religion by the state, robbery of government property, and an unjust war against a weak Mexican government. A captured Mexican general, Santa Anna, was simply offered the choice of his life or signing a non-negotiable treaty (which he had not power to do and was rejected by the Mexican Congress.) Even though Texas never had a legitimate peace treaty signed by the Mexican government, they simply stole the land up to the Rio Neches, and later they took more land up to the Rio Grande. Mexico, at the time, was too weak to do anything about this.

Because of this, sensible politicians in the United States would not admit Texas as a state. Most US politicians at the time did not want another slave state and felt that Mexico was right when it still claimed that the territory belonged to Mexico because no peace treaty was every signed. So Texas simply declared itself a country.

However, 9 years later new politicians in the USA passed the Missouri Compromise which accepted a slave state (Texas) and a non-slave territory called the "Louisiana Territory". This was mainly Kansas and Nebraska which later also became slave states too.

Texas continues to demand that it be treated as if it were still a sovereign state.

The United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has recently concluded its 85th Session during which time it considered seven state reports, including one on the United States.

The report praised many progressive steps the U.S. has taken to ensure equality, including the termination of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the adoption of the Fair Sentencing Act and the adoption of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

However, the number of issues the report raises is pretty abominable. CERD expressed concern over the following problems:

Lack of a national human rights institution
Persistent racial profiling and illegal surveillance
Prevalence and under-reporting of racist hate speech and hate crimes
Disparate impact of environmental pollution in low income and minority communities
Restrictive voter identification laws leading to unequal right to vote
Criminalization of homelessness when homeless people are disproportionately minorities
Discrimination and segregation in housing
De facto racial segregation in education
Unequal right to health and access to health care
High number of gun-related deaths and “Stand Your Ground” laws, which disproportionately affect members of racial and ethnic minorities
Excessive use of force by law enforcement officials
Increasingly militarized approach to immigration law enforcement
Violence against women occurs disproportionately more frequently for women from racial/ethnic minorities
Criminal justice system disproportionately arrests, incarcerates and subjects to harsher sentences people from racial/ethnic minorities
Youth from racial/ethnic minorities are disproportionately prosecuted as adults, incarcerated in adult prisons, and sentenced to life without parole
Non-citizens are arbitrarily detained in Guantanamo Bay without equal access to the criminal justice system, while at risk of being subjected to torture
Unequal access to legal aid
Lacking rights of indigenous peoples (the report lists numerous different concerns)
Absence of a National Action Plan to combat racial discrimination

In a press conference convened Friday, CERD committee vice chairman Noureddine Amir highlighted the death of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown: “The excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities is an ongoing issue of concern and particularly in light of the shooting of Michael Brown. This is not an isolated event and illustrates a bigger problem in the United States, such as racial bias among law enforcement officials, the lack of proper implementation of rules and regulations governing the use of force, and the inadequacy of training and law enforcement officials.”

In response to the UN’s report, Jamil Dakwar of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, “When it comes to human rights, the United States must practice at home what it preaches abroad.”

I WILL ***KING KILL YOU!

From Russia to Syria to Iraq to al Qaeda, President Obama and his aides have underestimated the motives and capabilities of U.S. adversaries.With regard to some, the Obama team initially characterized bad actors as U.S. partners, such as in the cases of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar Assad.In other instances, Mr. Obama ridiculed as a “JV team” the rampaging Islamic State terrorist group, said al Qaeda was “on the run” and declared Iraq secure as he pulled out all troops against the military’s advice.“I think, unfortunately, that the Obama administration has put a higher priority on improving relations with U.S. adversaries — Russia, Iran and Syria before the Arab Spring protests broke out — than in advancing U.S. national interests and those of our allies,” said James Phillips, a foreign policy scholar at the Heritage Foundation. “As a result, many allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have lost confidence in the administration’s leadership. The president’s admission that he has ‘no strategy’ for countering [the Islamic State] is not likely to instill confidence in his leadership.”Arguably, with Russia, China and Iran, he’s shown a healthy respect for their capabilities,” Mr. O'Hanlon said. “In fact, part of why he doesn’t get easily into new wars is his view that they tend to be harder than first advertised.“I’d say that even the intelligence community and other national security leaders probably underestimated [the Islamic State]. If they’d seen it coming, they might not have favored giving even limited support to the Syrian opposition, and might have preferred Assad as the lesser of two evils,” he said. “Alternatively, they might have fought harder against the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq.”Of the Islamic State, Mr. O'Hanlon said “a lot of others got it wrong too. Few foresaw how rapidly [it] could metastasize, grow and expand militarily.”I.After the U.S. exit, it took just weeks for foreign al Qaeda fighters to start pouring back into Iraq to attack the new government. Under Iraqi cleric leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the network of militants expanded in Syria and invaded Iraq as a terrorist army. It announced itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — now the Islamic State, and known by the initials ISIS and ISIL.

ramana wrote:So what was Gen Petraeus doing in Iraq? Just kabuki?

matrimc wrote:There are Christians in India with kuruvilla family name as well.

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.

The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.

“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”

To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

Civil forfeiture cash seizures

Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use.

Source: A Washington Post analysis of Department of Justice data.

The Post found:

There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.

Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.

Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.

Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.

State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.

Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Post’s overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are “adopted” for inclusion in the program.

“Adoptions of state and local seizures — when a state and local law enforcement agency requests a federal seizing agency to adopt a state and local seizure for federal forfeiture — represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007,” Carr said.

The Justice Department data released to The Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. But in 400 federal court cases examined by The Post where people who challenged seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority.

Jarita wrote:Preet Bharara goes after yet another Desi origin guy while letting the Wall Street top dogs go

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/ ... blogs&_r=0

What happened here is Cohen made a bunch of his underlings "wear the risk" al a Enron, for which they were paid handsomely. Unlike Andy Fastow however, these underlings - Martoma most significantly - were too dense to understand when the game was up, and time for the fat gentleman to sing.

If Martoma had sung a song, he woulda been a free man today, or at worst done proforma time, and probably got to keep a big chunk of his loot. The prosecutor absolutely needed him for a big clincher. He was in a strong position if only he coulda crooned.

But either he thought he was too smart or was badly advised. Who knows maybe his lawyer forged his transcripts, wasn't truly qualified, and didn't really know what he was doing. Something to look into in his spare time.

Once again, the low guy on the totem pole goes to jail, and the big guy who benefited most from his misconduct continues to live in the same luxury after paying a fine that has no impact on his standard of living. Is there something wrong with this picture? I think so.

f the point is to discourage young men (they are all men) from working for or with Mr. Cohen or some other hedge fund winner, then it is a misguided sentence. Martoma is not innocent but he shouldn't be Mr. Cohen's whipping boy.

Interesting how Mr. Cohen gets away with only a possible civil action while his employees go to jail. Are we to honestly believe he didn't know what was going on in his own company? That they were not operating with his consent and approval?

So, at the very worst, he's barred from further activity at age 58 and free to walk away with a few billion while his employees rot in jail. What a country!

I think unfortunately he has a good chance on appeal. The sentence is appropriate because he had many chances to turn in Cohen and get a light sentence but he didn't do it thinking either he would prevail or Cohen would take care of him - neither of which will happen unless he prevails on appeal. Unfortunately the real criminal Cohen got away.

Why is Martoma going to jail and Cohen still trading??

So Steve Cohen personally oversaw the trading for Mr. Martoma's account, but didn't know anything about any insider information... and has escaped any prosecution, and walked away with Billions. You just have to love how ju$tice works in America!

..and Steven Cohen is still free. There is something wrong with this picture.

Given the volume of insider trading and the very small number of people charged with violations, it's hard to escape the conclusion that this guy must not be very bright.

So Cohen gets a fine, and Martoma gets time AND a fine. I'm assuming the glaring travesty of justice here is not mine alone to see? With these outcomes, how can we claim the Rule of Law informs the United States of America. With this sentence, that concept is totally laughable. The two-tiered injustice system at work!

Considering Cohen hasn't been charged, what does this teach you? If you insider trade, do it big so you have enough money to pay your way out. It's ridiculous the employees get charged while Cohen, I read, continues with $10B in personal assets.

I work in the Hedge Fund Industry (compliance) and what puzzles me is the attitude of Bharara, who seems to go after the small fry and not the head. I full well know that these illegal trades come directly from the top, never from middle level managers citing what I see, so I am quite convinced that the latter must have been duly pressured to not go after the fat. Quite disgusted frankly and will just give a green light to those who will expect a slap on the wrist when doing their masters bidding. Martoma, I must say, though an unattractive character, commands my honest respect in one detail; he didn't rat on his boss and maintained his composure. But I hope to never hear his name ever again.

YA thinks Martoma didn't cop a plea and testify against Cohen because of honor among thieves (and is impressed!). Or did Martoma--disgraced, unemployable, and likely to forfeit most of his booty--calculate that a few years in jail were worth an 8- or 9-figure payoff down the road (see Barry Bonds's trainer). How much would someone with $10 billion pay to stay out of jail (Cohen surely has accounts around the world to make the payments discretely)? Does Martoma regret that he may serve double the time he anticipated? Perhaps, but less so if Cohen's deal set an annual rate, not a flat fee.

Victor is too sanguine about Cohen's fate. The only point of managing others' money is to get more for yourself, which he hardly needs at this point. Like all traders, he created nothing. He merely reallocated investment returns from others to himself. To do that legally is extremely difficult and worthy of the same respect accorded other difficult but insignificant skills. His legacy, like most of Wall Street's, is money, of which he will still have more than all but about 100 Americans. He surely wishes that it were not now plain to all that he obtained most, if not all, of it illegally, but it wouldn't take him long to choose between having a sterling reputation and the single-digit millions of a typical successful professional or his tarnished reputation and $10 billion. And he won't be turned away from charity galas or Christie's.

The threat produced by a super volcano's eruption is via toxic gas, volcanic ash and oxygen deprivation. Ten million years ago, volcanic ash choked to death herds of rhinos. Death occurred by Marie's disease, a term used by the veterinarians. The sharp ash caused a "pneumonia" where the lungs filled with blood. The microscopic shards of ash lacerated the lung tissue and causing bleeding. One can imagine these animals stumbling around the thick ash, spitting up blood and gradually dying in a most miserable way.

Notice that the larger 2.1 million-year ago eruption's dust field did not reach the California coast while the smaller 0.63 million-year ago eruption extended over to the Pacific ocean. The 2.1 million-year ago eruption occurred during the Pliocene when temperatures and wind conditions were much like today. During glacial periods, the large ice sheet on North American resulted in a high-pressure cell over the continent. It deflected the jet stream to the south and caused the summer North Pacific High to be weaker and move to the south and west of its modern position. The 0.63 million-year ago eruption occurred during the coldest part of the Ice Age. Unlike the 2.1 million-year ago eruption, the high-pressure cell then over the continent caused a clockwise rotation of winds. They would have blown the volcanic ash in a westward direction. Furthermore, the jet stream may have been further to the south and its winds were less able to move the volcanic ash eastward. Thus, the 2.1 million-year ago ash pattern is noticeably more eastward when compared to the 0.63 million-year ago pattern.

Winds powerfully affect the oceans and are an important force in creating currents. From global circulation of entire oceans to microscopic patterns of turbulence, winds move water and its resident animals and plants in complex and interesting patterns. When the wind blows parallel to the coastline, an intriguing and biologically important event occurs. Governed by the rotation of the earth, winds can move water at right angles to the direction the wind is blowing, by a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect. Along a coastline oriented North-South, like much of the west coast of the U.S., winds that blow from the south tend to pull ocean surface currents to the right thus pushing warmer surface waters from offshore to the coast. Even when a transition from glacial to interglacial conditions occur, circumstances favor a mitigation of the weather along the coast of central and northern California. Generally, temperatures found along the California coast drops only drop slightly during an Ice Age as the warmer (current limited waters) off Hawaii are drawn coastward. Studies have shown not only was there a collapse of the California Current during the last Ice Age, but that it also occurred in a mode nearly identical to that found in previous glacial maxima. The California Current normally carries northerly waters southward along the coast. Consequently, the California coast normally drops only a degree (centigrade) or so during an Ice Ages.a

Yellowstone will erupt again, and when it does, it could be a disaster for the United States and eventually, for the whole world. Volcanologists believe it would begin with the magma chamber becoming unstable. Observations of larger earthquakes and greater uplifting of the caldera will occur as magma intrudes closer to the surface. An earthquake could rupture the brittle surface layer and it would be similar to breaking the lid off a pressure cooker. This would generate sheets of magma, which will perhaps rise 30 to 50 kilometers, sending gigantic amounts of debris into the atmosphere. Pyroclastic flows would cover a widespread region, killing tens of thousands of people in the surrounding area.

The ash, carried in the atmosphere and deposited over vast areas of the United States, would have devastating effects. The plume of material ejected high into the atmosphere from the eruption would produce global climatic effects. It would soon spread worldwide and have a cooling effect that would almost certainly destroy Earth's growing seasons on a global scale.

The eruption would throw out hundreds to thousands of cubic kilometers of rock, ash, dust, sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. There, it would reflect incoming solar radiation, reducing temperatures on the Earth's surface. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear winter - or worse. Much of the air might not even be fit to breath. The effects would last for four or five years causing crop failures as well as a breakdown of the whole ecosystem.

These imply that comet/meteorite impacts correlates with Yellowstone eruptions 2.1 and 1.3 million years ago. The impact causing the Yellowstone hot spot probably occurred 17.5 Million years ago.

Big Splash: Scientists Describe Asteroid's Ancient Ocean Plunge
New seismic and deep-sea surveys conducted in 1995 by the German research ship Polarstern enabled the scientists to accurately date the blast to the late Pliocene period, 2.15 million-years ago, and to gauge its effects. Eltanin, the only asteroid ever known to have hit water, triggered waves 20 to 40 meters (65 to 130 feet) high, "devastating mega-tsunamis" that swamped the coasts of South America and Antarctica. The researchers estimate the asteroid was at least 1 kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) and possibly up to 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) in diameter.

Mentally ill inmates at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional facility were starved, denied water, hog-tied while naked for hours, tased and left to lie in their own feces, according to a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan.

One inmate reported that she pleaded with a guard to help a mentally ill prisoner who, while naked, had her hands and feet cuffed together behind her back. The guard reportedly said that the prisoner would remain in that position for at least two hours because she hadn’t yet learned how to “behave.”

The ACLU also objected to the use of solitary confinement for mentally ill prisoners, after learning that an average of 44 prisoners with either serious mental illness or developmental disorders were being held in solitary cells.

The violations described in the letter are grotesque even as a set of isolated incidents. Unfortunately, prisons across the country have come up short regarding the treatment of mentally ill inmates.

Permanent war is official US policy. Obama is the latest in a long line of rogue warrior presidents.

He's waged multiple direct and proxy wars. He's done so throughout his tenure.

He has lots more death and destruction in mind. More on this below.

America's culture is violent. It's always been this way. It glorifies wars in the name of peace.

It has the highest homicide among Western nations by far.

Civilian gun ownership is out-of-control.

Proliferation leaves everyone vulnerable. Many inner city communities are virtual war zones. It's unsafe to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

About 100,000 Americans are annual gun violence victims. Each fatality leaves two others wounded.

Countless others are irreparably harmed. Militarized cops make their own rules. They operate extrajudicially.

They brutalize and kill with impunity. Blacks, Latinos and ethnic minorities are targets of choice.

Nothing whatever is done to curb things. The right to bear arms assures using them irresponsibly.

It's commonplace throughout America. It's mostly because Washington claims a divine right to advance its imperium.

Michael Parenti calls imperialism "the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, labor, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that other country."

America claims might justifies right to do it. To carve up whole continents for profit.

Destroying countries to save them. Raping and pillaging them. Stealing their resources. Exploiting their people.

Claiming exceptionalism and moral superiority. Forcing its ways on others.

Proliferating violence and instability. Doing it globally. Spreading the Big Lie about America the beautiful.

Benefitting monied interests over populist ones. Waging permanent wars in the name of peace.

"Pav(ing) The Road To War With (Big) Lies," says Paul Craig Roberts.

Seeking world dominance. Replacing independent governments with pro-Western stooge regimes.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to condemn President Barack Obama for failing to give Congress a 30-day notice before exchanging prisoner of war Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban who were being held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bergdahl's release in May was initially greeted by euphoria, given he had spent five years as a Taliban captive after walking away from his outpost in Afghanistan. But the deal evoked anger among lawmakers, who criticized the president for not notifying Congress about the swap before it was done.

Guantanamo is a factor in the divide between Obama, who has vowed to close the prison camp, and many congressional Republicans, who consider it essential in the fight against international terrorism because it allows prisoners to be detained outside the United States.

sudarshan wrote:The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons invaded the British isles, displacing the original Welsh inhabitants. The Saxons were originally from the areas of Jutland and Saxony in present day Germany (and Denmark?) Their language was a dialect of German - platt Deutsch, or low German. Hoch Deutsch, or high German, evolved into the current German. Platt Deutsch became English. "Anglo-Saxon" comes from the names of these two tribes - Angles and Saxons. "Anglo" eventually became "English." So Indians, when we refer to the British as "Angrez" (or "Aangileyargal" in Tamil) hark back to the original name "Angles."

The Normans then invaded England, displacing the Saxons. William of Normandy triumphed over the original invaders, the Saxons, in the battle of Hastings. So the British isles have been through successive layers of massacring the original natives and take-over by hostile outsiders and invaders. This memory of conquest manifests itself in weird ways. Think "Aryan invasion." Their theory of how India was originally an aboriginal abode, which was invaded by the Dravidians (who themselves are not the original inhabitants, according to the theory) and then the Dravidians were massacred by the invading Aryans - all this is really the history of the British isles, which they transplanted onto India for their own reasons.

It's pretty funny. The isles become "Great" Britain, but their language evolves from "Low" German. They're basically a Germanic tribe, originally looked down upon, who found a new land (after massacring the natives) and then developed delusions of grandeur. When you look at it this way, you will see that the USA is basically British history repeating itself on a larger scale.