As fellow law professor sent me this video of Oakland police shooting a photographer. The video raises serious questions of the unjustified use of force.
In the video, the police appear to be standing without challenge when, around the 33 second mark, an officer suddenly shoot a photographer who is a good distance from the police line.
I cannot imagine the claim of justification in this case when the use of rubber bullets present significant potential harm to citizens, as shown below.
Kudos: Professor Alberto Bernabe (John Marshall Law School)
Source: Lowering Bar
Bdaman, I read a lot of medical blogs and web sites. I have not found any that engage in the kind of hand wringing you have done here.
and what does this mean exactly and which medical blogs are you referring to. What do they say ?
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
by Matt Taibbi
2/16/2011
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
Excerpt:
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
I put down my notebook. “Just that?”
“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve the firms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice. “If the allegations in these settlements are true,” says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, “it’s management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims.”
To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. “You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”
But that hasn’t happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.
Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? – Democracy NOW!
Matt Taibbi talks to Amy Goodman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YwA8q6ZTmo
Matt Taibbi: ‘Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?’ (Complete Interview–2/22/11)
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/2/22/matt_taibbi_why_isnt_wall_street_in_jail
Bdaman, I read a lot of medical blogs and web sites. I have not found any that engage in the kind of hand wringing you have done here. Wonder why that is? I have heard this kind of disinformation before. Now where did I hear it. Oh yes, now it comes to me. When I was a kid, there was a not of news similar to that about the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Those nasty Jews were really unclean and anyone going into their area of Warsaw might catch horrible diseases. So the best thing for Warsaw was to rout them out and ship them off to a camp where they could get free showers.
Reckon the banksters and politicians would like to give the OWS protesters free showers? Way things are going, it certainly sounds like it.
No stay granted in St. Louis:
http://stltoday.mycapture.com/mycapture/enlarge.asp?image=38824093&event=1360850&CategoryID=38578&picnum=26&move=F&Slideshow=Stop#Image
—–
http://stlactivisthub.blogspot.com/
A Petri Dish of Activism, and Germs
The chorus began quietly at a recent strategy session inside Zuccotti Park, with a single cough from a security team member, a muffled hack between puffs on his cigarette. Then a colleague followed. Then another.
“It’s called Zuccotti lung,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/nyregion/for-occupy-wall-street-health-is-a-growing-concern.html?_r=3
OWS, winning?
A Philadelphia correspondent emails of our item just now:
WTF – my office is across the street from Occupy Philadelphia, and I can’t tell you how much we are all starting to really appreciate the stench, trash, and carefree idleness of the protesters. To write they are “winning” because a nexis search indicates a more common usage of the phrase “income equality” is akin to writing the pro-child molester crowd is “winning” b/c a nexis search turns up more stories this week about child molestation. C’mon. Politico should send you folks around to the different sites (assuming you’ve been inoculated beforehand for malaria, etc), and you can get a first hand feel for just how much the surrounding communities are really taking to the “occupiers.”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1111/OWS_winning.html#
Try a google search using the words
Occupy growing in size
Occupy growing in numbers
Occupy expanding
Occupy spreading
Most articles point back to the Huffington post link who use Facebook as proof. The articles that don’t are dated the first week of October when it was growing. Recent polls show a sharp decline in support. You can google that too.
OS re: the Postal service: I saw a segment on one of the nightly news shows that the USPS delivers 30% of the packages from UPS and FedX because they aren’t set up to serve many areas.
This move by Congress, brought about by Congress strangling the USPS economically, is just a way to privatize the USPS totally. It is disgraceful.
The permit for OWS St. Louis was up at 10:00pm cst but the 10:00pm news said that the order to have the police evict the protesters was on hold while OWSSL attempted to secure a stay of the order. Keeping my fingers crossed that nothing bad happens and a stay can be secured.
And here is Matt Taibi on OWS.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock insisted that his city’s occupation name a leader in order “to deal with City and State officials.” And he got his wish! Occupy Denver has elected Shelby, a border collie, as its leader. Long live Shelby!
Shelby….was elected in a “landslide vote” on Sunday night. One of Occupy Denver’s organizers, Al Nesby, was inspired to nominate Shelby to the position after the director Michael Moore showed up one day and rubbed him the wrong way by refusing to follow general assembly rules; with Shelby, who’s three and a half, the occupation should have no such problems. Her bodyguard and closest confidante is a filmmaker named Peter John Jentsch.
Protesters have already made an official request for Shelby to meet with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper.
http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2011/11/occupy_denver_leader_dog.php
http://gawker.com/5857715/pressured-to-name-leader-occupy-denver-elects-dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0HNr2Y7B5c&feature=player_embedded Veterans OWS Phoenix:
OS,
Sad story. He deserves better!
shano, no surprise there. Few groups have gotten the shaft as much as veterans. There is a lot of high-sounding rhetoric, but precious little material support. I read somewhere today that one of the fastest growing demographics for homeless is veterans.
I interviewed a veteran a few weeks ago. He was USAF with a discharge rank of E-9. The highest enlisted rank in the Air Force. They would have called him “Chief” instead of “Sergeant.”
He is living in a tent on the property of an acquaintance. The friend lets him come to the house to shower or use the phone. Seems his wife cleaned him out in the divorce. He has PTSD really bad and did not have the psychological stamina to fight her and her attorney. So he ended up losing his car, his home, his property and all his personal belongings other than his clothes. He has to give her most of his pension in child support and alimony. And being in poverty has made his PTSD worse. Happy Veteran’s Day. Indeed.
OS,
The Republicans want to gut the government and make the economy even worse. One writer called their intentional efforts to kill the economy akin to treason.
There are a lot of veterans at my OWS event today. Big supporters.
On Veterans Day today, lawmakers will make a lot of speeches honoring the service of the nation’s military veterans. However, many of these same lawmakers are backing legislation that could cost the jobs of 26,000 veterans who work for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
The bill (H.R. 2309), sponsored by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Dennis Ross (R-Fla.), was approved by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Oct. 13. It would force the Postal Service to lay off as many as 120,000 workers, including veterans who served our nation.