Friday, June 29, 2012
New Blog url
Due to technical difficulties, watching the watchers has moved to eyeofwintermute.blogspot.com. Update your bookmarks.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
What Lauryn Hill told the Vatican
source:The London Mirror, via SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests)
Soul singer Lauryn Hill stunned Vatican officials at a Christmas concert by launching an attack on paedophile priests.
Former Fugees star Hill, 28, said she accepted her invitation only so she could protest at child sex scandals in the United States.
She told the 7,000 crowd: "I am sorry if I am about to offend some of you. I did not accept my invitation to celebrate with you the birth of Christ. Instead I ask you why you are not in mourning for him in this place? I want to ask you, what have you got to say about the lives you have broken? What about the families who were expecting God and instead were cheated by the Devil? Who feels sorry for them, the men, women and children damaged psychologically, emotionally and mentally by the sexual perversions and abuse carried out by the people they believed in? Holy God is a witness to the corruption of your leadership, of the exploitation and abuses which are the minimum that can be said for the clergy. There is no acceptable excuse to defend the church."
There was silence for several minutes from the audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican...After her performance her comments were translated for Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of the Italian Bishops Conference, who was sitting in the front row - and he walked out in protest.
No one at the Vatican would comment yesterday on Hill's outburst.
Soul singer Lauryn Hill stunned Vatican officials at a Christmas concert by launching an attack on paedophile priests.
Former Fugees star Hill, 28, said she accepted her invitation only so she could protest at child sex scandals in the United States.
She told the 7,000 crowd: "I am sorry if I am about to offend some of you. I did not accept my invitation to celebrate with you the birth of Christ. Instead I ask you why you are not in mourning for him in this place? I want to ask you, what have you got to say about the lives you have broken? What about the families who were expecting God and instead were cheated by the Devil? Who feels sorry for them, the men, women and children damaged psychologically, emotionally and mentally by the sexual perversions and abuse carried out by the people they believed in? Holy God is a witness to the corruption of your leadership, of the exploitation and abuses which are the minimum that can be said for the clergy. There is no acceptable excuse to defend the church."
There was silence for several minutes from the audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican...After her performance her comments were translated for Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of the Italian Bishops Conference, who was sitting in the front row - and he walked out in protest.
No one at the Vatican would comment yesterday on Hill's outburst.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
WHY ARPAIO'S GOTTA' GO
Here are just a few examples of assaults, medical neglect and outright murder committed by officers in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's gulags, compounded by tolerance and encouragement of violence between inmates.
via: Arpaio.com
Their Blood, Our Money
In 1996 a young man named Jeremy Flanders was beaten nearly to death by fellow inmates in Tent City. He was put on life support and during that time his head had swollen so badly that it nearly swallowed his ear on one side. Flanders, who was well behaved and a favorite of the guards, sustained permanent brain damage as a result of his injuries. The weapon used to beat Flanders was a rebar tent stake. These rebar tent stakes which were easily removed from the ground were often used as weapons, a problem easily remedied by cementing the stakes into the ground. In his stinging 26 page opinion Judge Jefferson L. Lankford stated that “The sheriff and his deputies had actual knowledge that prisoners used rebar tent stakes and tent poles as weapons and did nothing to prevent it.” He went on to say, “The sheriff admitted knowing about, and in fact intentionally designing, some conditions at Tent City that created a substantial risk of inmate violence: i.e., the lack of individual security and inmate control inherent in a tent facility; the small number of guards; a mixed inmate population subject to overcrowding, extreme heat, and lack of amenities. The history of violence, the abundance of weaponry, the lack of supervision, and the absence of necessary security measures supports the jury’s finding of deliberate indifference to inmate safety.” The appeals court awarded 635,000 dollars to Flanders. Arpaio was held personally liable for thirty-five percent of the judgment.
That same year, Scott Norberg died of positional asphyxia after being beaten and forced into a restraint chair by guards. Norberg was tased more than twenty times although he was fully subdued and posed no threat to the officers. Research by the (ABC) 20/20 investigative staff indicates that the officers involved knowingly ignored signs that they were killing Norberg.
Although many healthy men and women have exited Arpaio’s jails in a gurney, it seems that the infirm and disabled are at particularly high risk in Maricopa County’s gulags. In fact, in some cases, it seems that they are singled out for abuse.
Deborah Braillard was a diabetic inmate who was denied her insulin for over two days. When her constant moaning became too much for her cellmates to bear, the guards moved her to an empty cell where she could writhe in pain alone. She died in the hospital.
Mentally handicapped Charles Agster, who weighed only a hundred and thirty-two pounds, was arrested on loitering charges after refusing to leave a convenience store. He was taken into the prison hogtied and wrenched so tightly into a restraint chair that he died within minutes. Although Arpaio admits no wrongdoing, he refuses to let the family of Charles Agster see the surveillance footage of their son being put into the restraint chair.
Paraplegic, wheelchair-bound Richard Post was arrested for being disruptive in a bar. After some time in a cell he complained to the guards that his catheter was full. He flushed the toilet several times in order to get their attention. Instead of giving him medical care the guards strapped him into the restraint chair so tightly that they broke his neck. He is now a quadriplegic.
A blind inmate, Brian Crenshaw, who refused to show his identification card in a lunch line, was savagely beaten by guards and left in his cell for six days without medical treatment. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Arpaio insists Crenshaw suffered ruptured intestines, a broken neck, several broken toes, and extensive internal bleeding from “falling off a bunk” a little over four feet high.
And although the counterproductive barbarism of Arpaio’s reign should be the paramount issue it seems that money is the only thing that will pique the interest of Phoenician reporters. The attitude of our local press is best represented by the closing comment in an Arizona Republic article by Ed Montini -- “The Rising Cost of Indifference in Arpaio’s Jails.” When referring to the county supervisor's apathy to the horror stories leaking from the walls of Arpaio’s prisons and jails he said that their indifference “…would be fine only if all of this wasn't paid for with our money.” But now that the cost of Arpaio’s incompetence is mounting even the Arizona Republic is regularly printing anti-Arpaio articles.
Even though it seems cold to transcribe these tragedies into the language of dollars and cents it is unfortunately necessary to do so because their blood and our money are irreversibly intertwined. When inmates die or suffer permanent injury so needlessly, they or their families seek damages. The lawsuits resulting from the inhumane treatment of prisoners in Arpaio’s dungeons represent the largest portion of the mountainous debt that will be paid in the decades after Arpaio’s irresponsible reign. The appeals court awarded 635,000 dollars to Flanders, 30% of which Arpaio had to pay personally. The Norberg family received an 8.5 million dollar settlement on their son’s behalf. Michael Manning, the attorney for the Norberg family, is suing on behalf of Braillard’s son and father for 20 million dollars. The family of Charles Agster is seeking 25 million. Maricopa County paid Post 850,000 dollars for his injuries and the Crenshaw family is suing as well.
via: Arpaio.com
Their Blood, Our Money
In 1996 a young man named Jeremy Flanders was beaten nearly to death by fellow inmates in Tent City. He was put on life support and during that time his head had swollen so badly that it nearly swallowed his ear on one side. Flanders, who was well behaved and a favorite of the guards, sustained permanent brain damage as a result of his injuries. The weapon used to beat Flanders was a rebar tent stake. These rebar tent stakes which were easily removed from the ground were often used as weapons, a problem easily remedied by cementing the stakes into the ground. In his stinging 26 page opinion Judge Jefferson L. Lankford stated that “The sheriff and his deputies had actual knowledge that prisoners used rebar tent stakes and tent poles as weapons and did nothing to prevent it.” He went on to say, “The sheriff admitted knowing about, and in fact intentionally designing, some conditions at Tent City that created a substantial risk of inmate violence: i.e., the lack of individual security and inmate control inherent in a tent facility; the small number of guards; a mixed inmate population subject to overcrowding, extreme heat, and lack of amenities. The history of violence, the abundance of weaponry, the lack of supervision, and the absence of necessary security measures supports the jury’s finding of deliberate indifference to inmate safety.” The appeals court awarded 635,000 dollars to Flanders. Arpaio was held personally liable for thirty-five percent of the judgment.
That same year, Scott Norberg died of positional asphyxia after being beaten and forced into a restraint chair by guards. Norberg was tased more than twenty times although he was fully subdued and posed no threat to the officers. Research by the (ABC) 20/20 investigative staff indicates that the officers involved knowingly ignored signs that they were killing Norberg.
Although many healthy men and women have exited Arpaio’s jails in a gurney, it seems that the infirm and disabled are at particularly high risk in Maricopa County’s gulags. In fact, in some cases, it seems that they are singled out for abuse.
Deborah Braillard was a diabetic inmate who was denied her insulin for over two days. When her constant moaning became too much for her cellmates to bear, the guards moved her to an empty cell where she could writhe in pain alone. She died in the hospital.
Mentally handicapped Charles Agster, who weighed only a hundred and thirty-two pounds, was arrested on loitering charges after refusing to leave a convenience store. He was taken into the prison hogtied and wrenched so tightly into a restraint chair that he died within minutes. Although Arpaio admits no wrongdoing, he refuses to let the family of Charles Agster see the surveillance footage of their son being put into the restraint chair.
Paraplegic, wheelchair-bound Richard Post was arrested for being disruptive in a bar. After some time in a cell he complained to the guards that his catheter was full. He flushed the toilet several times in order to get their attention. Instead of giving him medical care the guards strapped him into the restraint chair so tightly that they broke his neck. He is now a quadriplegic.
A blind inmate, Brian Crenshaw, who refused to show his identification card in a lunch line, was savagely beaten by guards and left in his cell for six days without medical treatment. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Arpaio insists Crenshaw suffered ruptured intestines, a broken neck, several broken toes, and extensive internal bleeding from “falling off a bunk” a little over four feet high.
And although the counterproductive barbarism of Arpaio’s reign should be the paramount issue it seems that money is the only thing that will pique the interest of Phoenician reporters. The attitude of our local press is best represented by the closing comment in an Arizona Republic article by Ed Montini -- “The Rising Cost of Indifference in Arpaio’s Jails.” When referring to the county supervisor's apathy to the horror stories leaking from the walls of Arpaio’s prisons and jails he said that their indifference “…would be fine only if all of this wasn't paid for with our money.” But now that the cost of Arpaio’s incompetence is mounting even the Arizona Republic is regularly printing anti-Arpaio articles.
Even though it seems cold to transcribe these tragedies into the language of dollars and cents it is unfortunately necessary to do so because their blood and our money are irreversibly intertwined. When inmates die or suffer permanent injury so needlessly, they or their families seek damages. The lawsuits resulting from the inhumane treatment of prisoners in Arpaio’s dungeons represent the largest portion of the mountainous debt that will be paid in the decades after Arpaio’s irresponsible reign. The appeals court awarded 635,000 dollars to Flanders, 30% of which Arpaio had to pay personally. The Norberg family received an 8.5 million dollar settlement on their son’s behalf. Michael Manning, the attorney for the Norberg family, is suing on behalf of Braillard’s son and father for 20 million dollars. The family of Charles Agster is seeking 25 million. Maricopa County paid Post 850,000 dollars for his injuries and the Crenshaw family is suing as well.
Neighborhood watch meetings
A few years ago I had some trouble with a local homeless guy, Cy, who I had done occasional favors for. To summarize a convoluted story, he became upset after discovering that I asked neighbors about his criminal background, had a hysterical fit and then threw a metal pipe at my head. Up until this point he had been very friendly, although I had begun hearing rumors about how he routinely engaged in violent robberies. Immediately before this incident, my roommate had rushed out of the house without locking the door, unbeknownst to me, so when I heard the sound of the fence clanging loudly I had no idea that it was Cy, eagerly looking forward to whatever he could pilfer from our apparently abandoned house. He was surprised to see me run into the yard and came up with a feeble excuse about "checking up on my safety". So I had to make it very clear to him that he was no longer welcome on my property. A number of people then began telling me about crimes they had witnessed him doing around the neighborhood: one guy said he saw Cy go into a place of business during broad daylight and assault someone right in front of the employees, a homeless couple said they had seen him rob a man in a wheelchair, and a middle-aged woman said he had knocked her unconscious for a piece of fried chicken and a crack pipe. Another older woman, also a drug addict, said he had tried to rob her but then she took a knife out of her pocket and sliced his arm open. He left her alone after that.
The picture that emerged was someone who preys on the vulnerable: older women, the disabled, and men significantly smaller than himself. Cy had told me he was on probation because of a murder charge, and I assumed the only reason he didn't go after me like he did the rest of them was because I don't have any problems with hard drugs that would make me afraid to go to the police. So when he began showing up at the abandoned house next door, where a homeless couple I'm friendly with were staying, even after I had told him he was no longer welcome on my property, I took my dog over there with the intention of keeping him away from that property as well. I made a big scene by articulating all the threats he had made, including talk about raping my roommate, in order so that he knew I would present myself in a highly professional manner when interfacing with law enforcement, who I promised to call if he continued to make himself a problem. Cy just sat there the whole time, not saying a word. He tried to come sweet talk me a few days later but I wouldn't talk to him. Later that summer the same homeless couple told me that Cy had gotten picked up by a helicopter after there had been announcements for everyone to go in their house and lock their doors and windows on account of a violent suspected felon on the loose.
About 6 months later he was out of prison again, how I do not know, although I suspect it's because Cy is the typical persuasive sociopath who knows to kiss the asses of those in power, saying the right thing at the right time to get what he needs. Still, when he got out he still avoided both me and the property next door. Last month, the house across the street went up for foreclosure and the former residents were forced to move. Within a few days the property became a crack house and Cy had moved in, becoming so brazen that he would stand outside screaming at top volume, making no attempt to conceal the illegal occupation of the house. A few days later a neighbor told me that she had witnessed him robbing one of the heroin addicts who lives down the street, yet again, in broad daylight and on the man's front yard.
Just recently, even before Cy started coming around again, I had been having unsettling dreams about someone, or something, trying to get inside my house through the windows. Always it was through the windows. I started sleeping with a heavy bike lock by my hand in case my dreams came true and I had to smash someone's face in the middle of the night after they busted through my window. When Cy came back I got really angry, not only because of our previous interactions but also because he is the type of person that makes good people not want to help those who need it the most. Contrary to popular opinion, your average homeless person is not a raving psychopath, but all it takes is one fly in the ointment to convey that impression and create unreasonable phobias in the minds of the masses. Not only that, but I am very attached to my current property, more than any place I've ever lived including my grandmother's old house which had been my primary sanctuary, mostly in the dreamworld, up until I moved here 5 years ago. For that reason, I want to preserve the surrounding neighborhood and do whatever possible to keep the truly dangerous people, who are a distinct minority, as far away as possible.
I complained about these problems to a friend, Tia, and she decided that what we needed to do was a protection spell on the property, combined with a banishment spell directed at Cy. Awhile back, I put myself on probation regarding spell work, and have avoided it for the past 6 years. In this particular circumstance, however, I felt justified, confident that my intentions were in the best interest of the neighborhood. So I dug up an old drawing I had done of Cy while he was sleeping on the couch, and she got some supplies together. This was the first time Tia had been to my house, and when she first came in and sat down my dog seemed to adore her, laying her head on Tia's feet right away. Typically, Ari is much more excitable around new people so this was notable. The first item of business was to bless the house with a sage stick and draw protective runes on the sides the doors and windows, in locations that would not be visible barring meticulous scrutiny. I mentioned to her that Ari usually sleeps alongside the bed with her nose pointed towards the edge of the window. Tia said that this might be a protective measure, considering all my dreams about window intrusions, and it would be interesting to see if she starts sleeping in a new area of the room.
We then went in the backyard, bound the drawing of Cy up with twine and set it on fire while Tia recited a passage from Psalms about banishing evildoers. I should also mention that I specified that the intention of spell the was not to bring about physical harm, since that feels like inappropriate use. During the first part of the recitation, Ari stood perfectly upright, watching Tia standing with her Bible open. It is very unusual to see her standing because that position is painful for her due to arthritis. When we were done Ari ran over to the yard and started chewing on grass, so I worried that she might be feeling unwell since grass is not something she considers to be edible. Tia said that it's not unusual to have some physical discomfort after a banishment because it can be a sign of spirits leaving the body. I had also been violently sneezing as the sage burned. A day later Ari got sick and so did the cat, a day after that. Usually each of them throws up only about once a year.
The banishment was performed a little over a week ago and since then the house across the street has been empty again. Ari began sleeping in the center of the room, for the first time ever since we've been living in this house. I didn't felt the need to sleep with the bike lock again until last night, when I had a dream of another building where Cy tried to crawl through a window. Ari then leaped up and bit him in the face, knocking him backwards and onto the ground outside. When I woke up in the morning, she was sleeping right beneath the window, again for the first time ever. I guess we'll see how effective the banishment was over the next couple months, but so far it seems the results have been positive. I feel confident that any future unwanted intruders will be repelled.
The picture that emerged was someone who preys on the vulnerable: older women, the disabled, and men significantly smaller than himself. Cy had told me he was on probation because of a murder charge, and I assumed the only reason he didn't go after me like he did the rest of them was because I don't have any problems with hard drugs that would make me afraid to go to the police. So when he began showing up at the abandoned house next door, where a homeless couple I'm friendly with were staying, even after I had told him he was no longer welcome on my property, I took my dog over there with the intention of keeping him away from that property as well. I made a big scene by articulating all the threats he had made, including talk about raping my roommate, in order so that he knew I would present myself in a highly professional manner when interfacing with law enforcement, who I promised to call if he continued to make himself a problem. Cy just sat there the whole time, not saying a word. He tried to come sweet talk me a few days later but I wouldn't talk to him. Later that summer the same homeless couple told me that Cy had gotten picked up by a helicopter after there had been announcements for everyone to go in their house and lock their doors and windows on account of a violent suspected felon on the loose.
About 6 months later he was out of prison again, how I do not know, although I suspect it's because Cy is the typical persuasive sociopath who knows to kiss the asses of those in power, saying the right thing at the right time to get what he needs. Still, when he got out he still avoided both me and the property next door. Last month, the house across the street went up for foreclosure and the former residents were forced to move. Within a few days the property became a crack house and Cy had moved in, becoming so brazen that he would stand outside screaming at top volume, making no attempt to conceal the illegal occupation of the house. A few days later a neighbor told me that she had witnessed him robbing one of the heroin addicts who lives down the street, yet again, in broad daylight and on the man's front yard.
Just recently, even before Cy started coming around again, I had been having unsettling dreams about someone, or something, trying to get inside my house through the windows. Always it was through the windows. I started sleeping with a heavy bike lock by my hand in case my dreams came true and I had to smash someone's face in the middle of the night after they busted through my window. When Cy came back I got really angry, not only because of our previous interactions but also because he is the type of person that makes good people not want to help those who need it the most. Contrary to popular opinion, your average homeless person is not a raving psychopath, but all it takes is one fly in the ointment to convey that impression and create unreasonable phobias in the minds of the masses. Not only that, but I am very attached to my current property, more than any place I've ever lived including my grandmother's old house which had been my primary sanctuary, mostly in the dreamworld, up until I moved here 5 years ago. For that reason, I want to preserve the surrounding neighborhood and do whatever possible to keep the truly dangerous people, who are a distinct minority, as far away as possible.
I complained about these problems to a friend, Tia, and she decided that what we needed to do was a protection spell on the property, combined with a banishment spell directed at Cy. Awhile back, I put myself on probation regarding spell work, and have avoided it for the past 6 years. In this particular circumstance, however, I felt justified, confident that my intentions were in the best interest of the neighborhood. So I dug up an old drawing I had done of Cy while he was sleeping on the couch, and she got some supplies together. This was the first time Tia had been to my house, and when she first came in and sat down my dog seemed to adore her, laying her head on Tia's feet right away. Typically, Ari is much more excitable around new people so this was notable. The first item of business was to bless the house with a sage stick and draw protective runes on the sides the doors and windows, in locations that would not be visible barring meticulous scrutiny. I mentioned to her that Ari usually sleeps alongside the bed with her nose pointed towards the edge of the window. Tia said that this might be a protective measure, considering all my dreams about window intrusions, and it would be interesting to see if she starts sleeping in a new area of the room.
We then went in the backyard, bound the drawing of Cy up with twine and set it on fire while Tia recited a passage from Psalms about banishing evildoers. I should also mention that I specified that the intention of spell the was not to bring about physical harm, since that feels like inappropriate use. During the first part of the recitation, Ari stood perfectly upright, watching Tia standing with her Bible open. It is very unusual to see her standing because that position is painful for her due to arthritis. When we were done Ari ran over to the yard and started chewing on grass, so I worried that she might be feeling unwell since grass is not something she considers to be edible. Tia said that it's not unusual to have some physical discomfort after a banishment because it can be a sign of spirits leaving the body. I had also been violently sneezing as the sage burned. A day later Ari got sick and so did the cat, a day after that. Usually each of them throws up only about once a year.
The banishment was performed a little over a week ago and since then the house across the street has been empty again. Ari began sleeping in the center of the room, for the first time ever since we've been living in this house. I didn't felt the need to sleep with the bike lock again until last night, when I had a dream of another building where Cy tried to crawl through a window. Ari then leaped up and bit him in the face, knocking him backwards and onto the ground outside. When I woke up in the morning, she was sleeping right beneath the window, again for the first time ever. I guess we'll see how effective the banishment was over the next couple months, but so far it seems the results have been positive. I feel confident that any future unwanted intruders will be repelled.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Sheriff Joe Arpaio birthday party caption contest!
via Phoenix New Times
Sheriff Joe served cake iced with pureed green baloney by inmates. "The putrefied meat is still no match for the fetid rot of my soul which I belch up daily," says Apraio. "But, nice try," he added.
note: The reference to green baloney is based on actual complaints of Maricopa County inmates, who have reportedly been served the item in Arpaio's tent city jail camps.
Sheriff Joe served cake iced with pureed green baloney by inmates. "The putrefied meat is still no match for the fetid rot of my soul which I belch up daily," says Apraio. "But, nice try," he added.
note: The reference to green baloney is based on actual complaints of Maricopa County inmates, who have reportedly been served the item in Arpaio's tent city jail camps.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Concentration camps in America
via The New Yorker
Bolded emphasis is my own commentary.
Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona...is known as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”...the voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of Army-surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded by barbed wire, in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. “I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste-disposal plant,” he told me. Phoenix is an open-air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty-five degrees. Still, the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents, until Tent City jail held twenty-five hundred inmates, and he stuck a neon “VACANCY” sign on a tall guard tower. It was visible for miles. His popularity grew.
...Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal.
“It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me [This article does not include details of the lawsuit pursued by the ACLU, which alleges that prisoners are routinely fed "moldy bread, rotten fruit and other contaminated food"]. ..He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-SPAN, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”...Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody—whom the Sheriff calls, with persuasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime—kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outfits was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventually, juvenile chain gangs. The chain gangs’ tasks include burying the indigent at the county cemetery, but mainly they serve as spectacles in Arpaio’s theatre of cruelty.
...Opinion polls found that Sheriff Joe, as he was called, was the most popular politician in Arizona. The Democrats didn’t even bother running a candidate against him in 1996...He got a tank from the Army, had the howitzer muzzle painted with flames, and “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” emblazoned on the sides, and rode in it, with Ava, in the Fiesta Bowl Parade....His deputies, particularly his jail guards, seem to have less sense of how far they can go. Thousands of lawsuits and legal claims alleging abuse have been filed against Arpaio’s department by inmates—or, in the case of deaths in detention, by their families. A federal investigation found that deputies had used stun guns on prisoners already strapped into a “restraint chair.” The family of one man who died after being forced into the restraint chair was awarded more than six million dollars as the result of a suit filed in federal court. The family of another man killed in the restraint chair got $8.25 million in a pre-trial settlement. (This deal was reached after the discovery of a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoner, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.) To date, lawsuits brought against Arpaio’s office have cost Maricopa County taxpayers forty-three million dollars, according to some estimates. But the Sheriff has never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his jails, never apologized to victims or their families. In fact, many of the officers involved have been promoted.
...Other jails get sued, of course. The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court. Last year, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care withdrew the health accreditation of Maricopa County’s jails for failing to meet its standards, and a federal judge refused to lift a long-standing consent decree on the jails, finding that conditions remained unconstitutional for pre-trial detainees...
Remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county board of supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the sheriff’s office. Local journalists who perturb Arpaio have also been targeted. The Phoenix New Times ran an investigation of Arpaio’s real-estate dealings that included Arpaio’s home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena, demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its Web site in the previous two and a half years, sheriff’s deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men for, they said, violating grand-jury secrecy. (The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.)
...Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public-comment period at a board of supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct—for clapping. Their cases are pending. ..His deputies conduct extensive raids in Latino towns and neighborhoods. They say they have investigated and arrested more than thirty thousand undocumented aliens. This campaign has landed Arpaio on Lou Dobbs’s show, on CNN, where he is treated as a conquering hero, and has drawn support from ultra-right and racist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan...
In the world according to Sheriff Joe, almost every problem in America these days can somehow be traced back to “illegals.” That was presumably why Arpaio seemed so excited to hear the early news about swine flu: it was coming from Mexico. “We gotta get something out!” he said. He meant a press release. The Sheriff gathered eight or nine aides around a big table in his office. “Illegal Immigration Breeds Crime, Disease,” Arpaio suggested. “Can we get masks for the deputies at the tents? ICE”—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—“has masks, don’t they? We should close the border.” The press-release team included Lisa Allen and other members of the media-relations unit; a jail administrator; a public-health specialist; and two deputies from the Sheriff’s human-smuggling unit, who had brought with them a map of Mexico....The public-health specialist said gently, “Surgical masks do nothing to combat this virus.” Arpaio erupted. “This is my press release! I’m the sheriff! I have some knowledge! I’m not just some little old sheriff!”.
...His department’s executive offices are situated, strangely, on two high floors of a bank tower in downtown Phoenix. They command a tremendous view of suburban sprawl in all directions. Outside, it was hot and hazy; inside, it was icy. The Sheriff’s office is the size of a midrange convenience store, its dark wood-panelled walls crowded with memorabilia, including an illustration celebrating the 2001 World Series victory of the Arizona Diamondbacks, with Arpaio’s face drawn bigger than even Randy Johnson’s, as if the Sheriff had been the Series M.V.P. ...The Sheriff took me to the tents the next day...They were all Latinos. They came from Mexico, Honduras, California, Arizona. Some had been in the tents for nearly a year. Their families were afraid to visit them, because they didn’t have papers. They were all facing deportation. The jail food was very bad, they said, and they were always hungry. A slender eighteen-year-old named José Aguilar said that he had lost fifty pounds since being locked up. He showed me a photograph of himself, taken when he was arrested, which had been laminated on a plastic I.D. bracelet, and he had certainly lost weight since then. Aguilar said that he had been in Phoenix since he was a baby, and knew no one in Mexico; his first language was English. I asked if Arpaio had any nicknames in the tents. “Hitler.”
...George Gascón, the chief of police in Mesa—the man whom, Arpaio had bitterly remarked, the mayor was “never going to fire”—has stoutly opposed Arpaio. Mesa is a big town, east of Phoenix, with a population of half a million—larger than that of Cleveland. Gascón, who was an assistant police chief in Los Angeles before taking the Mesa job, three years ago, has had great success in crime reduction in Mesa, using the CompStat crime-mapping model, developed by William Bratton in New York and Los Angeles. But his first challenge in Mesa, he told me, had been to gain the trust of minority communities, particularly Latinos. “They need to believe that you’re ethical and honest, that you’re not the enemy,” he said. In Los Angeles, he had seen what happened when that trust was broken by corrupt officers. No one would talk to the cops, “gang members filled the power void,” and crime flourished. With victims and witnesses, or with people stopped for civil violations, Gascón’s officers do not inquire about immigration status. “We focus on people who are committing predatory crimes.”
...Gascón, a Cuban-American, is tall, silver-haired, soft-spoken. He is a member of the California bar. He declined to discuss Arpaio. He did say, however, “I’m not an open-borders man. I believe we have a problem with illegal immigration. But I want to make sure we don’t throw away the Constitution in the process of solving it.” Gascón made it clear from the start that Arpaio’s military-style immigration sweeps were not welcome in Mesa...Two reporters at the East Valley Tribune, a Maricopa County paper, did a five-part study last year of the operations of the sheriff’s office. They found that, with the diversion of resources to pursuing undocumented immigrants, response times on emergency calls to the sheriff’s office had increased significantly, arrest rates had dropped, and dozens of violent crimes were never investigated. The series won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. Arpaio rejected its findings and, four months after it was published, won reëlection. more...
Bolded emphasis is my own commentary.
Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona...is known as “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”...the voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of Army-surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded by barbed wire, in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. “I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste-disposal plant,” he told me. Phoenix is an open-air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty-five degrees. Still, the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents, until Tent City jail held twenty-five hundred inmates, and he stuck a neon “VACANCY” sign on a tall guard tower. It was visible for miles. His popularity grew.
...Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal.
“It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates,” he told me [This article does not include details of the lawsuit pursued by the ACLU, which alleges that prisoners are routinely fed "moldy bread, rotten fruit and other contaminated food"]. ..He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-SPAN, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. “They hated him,” he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked. “So these morons will know how hot it’s going to be while they are working on my chain gangs.”...Arpaio wasn’t kidding about chain gangs. Foreign television reporters couldn’t get enough footage of his inmates shuffling through the desert. New ideas for the humiliation of people in custody—whom the Sheriff calls, with persuasive disgust, “criminals,” although most are actually awaiting trial, not convicted of any crime—kept occurring to him. He put his inmates in black-and-white striped uniforms. The shock value of these retro prisoner outfits was powerful and complex. There was comedy, nostalgia, dehumanization, even a whiff of something annihilationist. He created female chain gangs, “the first in the history of the world,” and, eventually, juvenile chain gangs. The chain gangs’ tasks include burying the indigent at the county cemetery, but mainly they serve as spectacles in Arpaio’s theatre of cruelty.
...Opinion polls found that Sheriff Joe, as he was called, was the most popular politician in Arizona. The Democrats didn’t even bother running a candidate against him in 1996...He got a tank from the Army, had the howitzer muzzle painted with flames, and “Sheriff Arpaio’s War on Drugs” emblazoned on the sides, and rode in it, with Ava, in the Fiesta Bowl Parade....His deputies, particularly his jail guards, seem to have less sense of how far they can go. Thousands of lawsuits and legal claims alleging abuse have been filed against Arpaio’s department by inmates—or, in the case of deaths in detention, by their families. A federal investigation found that deputies had used stun guns on prisoners already strapped into a “restraint chair.” The family of one man who died after being forced into the restraint chair was awarded more than six million dollars as the result of a suit filed in federal court. The family of another man killed in the restraint chair got $8.25 million in a pre-trial settlement. (This deal was reached after the discovery of a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoner, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.) To date, lawsuits brought against Arpaio’s office have cost Maricopa County taxpayers forty-three million dollars, according to some estimates. But the Sheriff has never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his jails, never apologized to victims or their families. In fact, many of the officers involved have been promoted.
...Other jails get sued, of course. The Phoenix New Times found that, between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, which together house more than six times as many inmates as Maricopa, were sued a total of forty-three times. During the same period, Arpaio’s department was sued over jail conditions almost twenty-two hundred times in federal district court. Last year, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care withdrew the health accreditation of Maricopa County’s jails for failing to meet its standards, and a federal judge refused to lift a long-standing consent decree on the jails, finding that conditions remained unconstitutional for pre-trial detainees...
Remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county board of supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the sheriff’s office. Local journalists who perturb Arpaio have also been targeted. The Phoenix New Times ran an investigation of Arpaio’s real-estate dealings that included Arpaio’s home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena, demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its Web site in the previous two and a half years, sheriff’s deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men for, they said, violating grand-jury secrecy. (The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.)
...Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public-comment period at a board of supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct—for clapping. Their cases are pending. ..His deputies conduct extensive raids in Latino towns and neighborhoods. They say they have investigated and arrested more than thirty thousand undocumented aliens. This campaign has landed Arpaio on Lou Dobbs’s show, on CNN, where he is treated as a conquering hero, and has drawn support from ultra-right and racist groups, including neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan...
In the world according to Sheriff Joe, almost every problem in America these days can somehow be traced back to “illegals.” That was presumably why Arpaio seemed so excited to hear the early news about swine flu: it was coming from Mexico. “We gotta get something out!” he said. He meant a press release. The Sheriff gathered eight or nine aides around a big table in his office. “Illegal Immigration Breeds Crime, Disease,” Arpaio suggested. “Can we get masks for the deputies at the tents? ICE”—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—“has masks, don’t they? We should close the border.” The press-release team included Lisa Allen and other members of the media-relations unit; a jail administrator; a public-health specialist; and two deputies from the Sheriff’s human-smuggling unit, who had brought with them a map of Mexico....The public-health specialist said gently, “Surgical masks do nothing to combat this virus.” Arpaio erupted. “This is my press release! I’m the sheriff! I have some knowledge! I’m not just some little old sheriff!”.
...His department’s executive offices are situated, strangely, on two high floors of a bank tower in downtown Phoenix. They command a tremendous view of suburban sprawl in all directions. Outside, it was hot and hazy; inside, it was icy. The Sheriff’s office is the size of a midrange convenience store, its dark wood-panelled walls crowded with memorabilia, including an illustration celebrating the 2001 World Series victory of the Arizona Diamondbacks, with Arpaio’s face drawn bigger than even Randy Johnson’s, as if the Sheriff had been the Series M.V.P. ...The Sheriff took me to the tents the next day...They were all Latinos. They came from Mexico, Honduras, California, Arizona. Some had been in the tents for nearly a year. Their families were afraid to visit them, because they didn’t have papers. They were all facing deportation. The jail food was very bad, they said, and they were always hungry. A slender eighteen-year-old named José Aguilar said that he had lost fifty pounds since being locked up. He showed me a photograph of himself, taken when he was arrested, which had been laminated on a plastic I.D. bracelet, and he had certainly lost weight since then. Aguilar said that he had been in Phoenix since he was a baby, and knew no one in Mexico; his first language was English. I asked if Arpaio had any nicknames in the tents. “Hitler.”
...George Gascón, the chief of police in Mesa—the man whom, Arpaio had bitterly remarked, the mayor was “never going to fire”—has stoutly opposed Arpaio. Mesa is a big town, east of Phoenix, with a population of half a million—larger than that of Cleveland. Gascón, who was an assistant police chief in Los Angeles before taking the Mesa job, three years ago, has had great success in crime reduction in Mesa, using the CompStat crime-mapping model, developed by William Bratton in New York and Los Angeles. But his first challenge in Mesa, he told me, had been to gain the trust of minority communities, particularly Latinos. “They need to believe that you’re ethical and honest, that you’re not the enemy,” he said. In Los Angeles, he had seen what happened when that trust was broken by corrupt officers. No one would talk to the cops, “gang members filled the power void,” and crime flourished. With victims and witnesses, or with people stopped for civil violations, Gascón’s officers do not inquire about immigration status. “We focus on people who are committing predatory crimes.”
...Gascón, a Cuban-American, is tall, silver-haired, soft-spoken. He is a member of the California bar. He declined to discuss Arpaio. He did say, however, “I’m not an open-borders man. I believe we have a problem with illegal immigration. But I want to make sure we don’t throw away the Constitution in the process of solving it.” Gascón made it clear from the start that Arpaio’s military-style immigration sweeps were not welcome in Mesa...Two reporters at the East Valley Tribune, a Maricopa County paper, did a five-part study last year of the operations of the sheriff’s office. They found that, with the diversion of resources to pursuing undocumented immigrants, response times on emergency calls to the sheriff’s office had increased significantly, arrest rates had dropped, and dozens of violent crimes were never investigated. The series won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. Arpaio rejected its findings and, four months after it was published, won reëlection. more...
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The imperial underbelly of futurology: updated with fixed link 6/22/12
The following essay is one of the most thoughtful critiques of techno-futurology I've found coming from a scientific perspective, although I would add to the list of troublesome applications the imminent possibility for privileged elites to irrevocably alter human consciousness through virtual reality constructs, a project that has already gained traction through military mind control experiments, particularly in the areas of microchipping, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Additionally, the end of the essay reveals the author's own faith in what might be described as utopian technocracy, a woefully incomplete vision that must be integrated with greater consideration for the natural world.
I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies -- often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks -- a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization...the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms...there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex...Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism)...a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place.more...
I have proposed that the "accelerating change" crowed about for the last two decades by futurologists in pop religious cadences and by more mainstream and academic New Media commentators in pop psychology and pop sociology cadences has never had any substantial reference apart from the increasing precarity produced by neoliberal looting and destabilization of domestic welfare and global economies -- often facilitated, it is true, by the exploitation of digital trading, marketing, and surveillance networks -- a precarity usually seen and experienced from the vantage of privileged people who either benefit from neoliberal destabilization or who (rightly or wrongly) identify with the beneficiaries of that destabilization...the more assertively "techno-transcendental" varieties of futurological discourse (like the transhumanists, the singularitarians, the techno-immortalists, the nano-cornucopians, the digital-utopians) are simply extreme and hyperbolic variations of mainstream neoliberal global developmental policy discourse and mainstream marketing, advertising, and PR forms...there is an unmistakably faith-mobilizing pseudo-transcendentalizing strain to be discerned in this very PR marketing imaginary, deranging us from our present distress into a yearning toward consumer techno-futures bathed in pastels and robots and cars and DNA helices and chocolate and glossy hair and youthful skin and golden sex...Advertizing and online profiling practices are the opiate of the masses in the age of digitally-networked corporate-militarism (the present stage of capitalism)...a mass mediated Opium War (and often literal war) distracts the masses from awareness that we have already long since arrived at the techno-scientific level to provide security and equity and hence universal emancipation for all, distracting us endlessly instead into internecine struggles over pseudo-needs and pseudo-strivings that leave the obsolete bloodsoaked hierarchies enjoyed by elite incumbents in place.more...
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