Biased Jury Selection and the Unjust Justice System

After the past year of Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests, one of the early cases of police brutality finally makes its way into trial. Check out this article about the jury selection in the prosecution of the “former Minneapolis police officer who faces second-degree murder and manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd.” Did you notice the makeup of the jury? “The seven jurors consist of three white men, one white woman, one Black man, a Hispanic man and a multiracial woman.” That one sentence says a lot about what we might expect, but one should pay attention to the other details given. The piece is fairly decent reporting, although even greater detail would’ve been preferable, as what goes unstated speaks loudly.

In case one has been living in a cave and is unfamiliar with this incident of police brutality, it should be noted that the victim was a black male and the defendant is a white male, the latter being a person intentionally left unnamed here as he deserves to be forgotten beyond his status as an anonymous figure of an unjust system of racial and class oppression. One might add, to be fair, that there have been plenty of non-white women and poor whites who also have been targeted by police (in fact, combined they form the majority of such incidents), if they don’t receive the same attention in the corporate media and political discourse, unfortunately but as expected.

Right from the start, there is a bias in what is reported in the ‘mainstream’ news and what is ignored. For various reasons, the “black male” has been chosen as the stereotypical stock character for the controlled narrative agreed upon by the media and political elite. Rather than the authoritarian system being on trial, it becomes a debate within the white patriarchy about which male bodies are of value and which can be sacrificed (the bodies of women and poor whites being less directly relevant to the system of power as defined). The tricky part is that the white patriarchy, in order to maintain its rule, must present itself as if it doesn’t exist. So, the real debate is whether this guardian of the white patriarchy overstepped the respectable bounds of allowable oppression in making violence too blatant to be rationalized away according to the ruling rhetoric of perception management.

Anyway, the jury consists of five men and two women. And that includes at least four whites, one non-white, and two others who might or might not identify as white to some extent. Even the one black is an upper middle class professional. None of these people appear to be either poor minorities or to otherwise be typical victims of systemic prejudice and violent oppression. There is no evidence that any of these jurors have had personal experience or direct witnessing of police profiling, police brutality, etc. There is no evidence that any of these jurors lives in an impoverished and segregated neighborhood that has been treated as a war zone with militarized policing, along with racial profiling, school-to-prison pipelines, mass incarceration, etc. Their perception of these issues is, therefore, likely to be mediated secondhand through the ruling narratives of corporate media and so would carry predictable biases.

Basically, it’s mostly a jury of men and whites, and probably mostly middle class. Yet there is no place in the entire country where the majority of the population consists of middle class white males. Since this officer is a middle class white male, does a jury of peers mean everyone else also should get a jury of their peers as defined by their own demographics of identity politics? If that were true, then why don’t most female defendants, most non-white defendents, and most poor defendants get juries consisting mostly of women, non-whites, and the poor? Heck, maybe more than the defendant it is the victim, as a silenced and opressed minority, who needs and deserves a jury of peers or, failing that, a jury representing the fuller spectrum of the American population — assuming this legal system is a justice system.

With that in mind, it’s telling that there was not a single juror who didn’t have some pro-police sympathy, even among the few that nominally agreed that black lives matter. What really stood out was that apparently not a single juror agreed with the BLM message that police departments are systematically racist and need to be reformed, even though that specific BLM message is supported by the majority opinion of Americans in diverse polling, even from Fox News. This seems like a case where the moral majority and demographic majority was pre-selected to be excluded from the jury, whether consciously and intentionally or simply through in-built biases. As the American public, we really need to publicly understand why this happens, but that would require the possibility of actual public debate, the one thing that the ruling order can never allow.

Here is the problem, in practical terms. Even if this unrepresentative jury comes to a guilty verdict, as it might, it’s unlikely to be the strongest verdict they could come to, as it’s clear they are going into this with a probable tendency to side with the police in at the very least offering the benefit of the doubt, as based on the normative assumption that the official authority of police violence is to be assumed justified until proven unjustified (a normative assumption not shared by many other Western countries where police violence is less accepted as a normalized fatalistic inevitability). The officer is likely to get a slap on the hand or some extremely minimal sentence. This jury, like the elite that helped select them, appears to be to the right of the general public. They may not be far right and so might have less imbalance than in other cases. But why does the elite system always somehow manages to define the ‘center’, the ‘moderate’, the ‘reasonable’, and the ‘normal’ as being on the right?

Biased jury selection and the scripting of trials, as part of narratized social reality, is a great example of how perception management as propagandistic mind control (and hence social control) is enacted in practice. It’s similar to how the corporate media and corporatist parties get to select which candidates are allowed to participate and which excluded (as silenced into disenfranchised non-existence within public perception) in televized political debates during presidential campaigns. This kind of process is so subtle as the public only sees the end product, but not how the sausage is made. The establishment system of the status quo operates invisibly, as a default mechanism of how the system is designed. The results, within a narrow range, are largely predetermined or constrained. It’s yet another way that democratic self-governance is made impossible, not only in socipolitical reality but also in public imagination.

Doing a web search on jury selection bias, a massive amount of results come up, not limited to articles but also academic papers and scientific research. It’s been a heavily studied area, as one would expect. It’s the type of thing that could be used as a topic for a lengthy analysis in exemplfying a larger system of corruption and injustice; but the motivation to do so is lacking and, instead, we’ll keep it as a more casual commentary. Still, one could support all of the claims made here with endless evidence, not that it would make any difference and not that any new insight could be added to the vast literature already written over the decades. Anyone here visiting this blog is likely part of the silenced majority who was not invited to the table of power. This post is not going to shape the debate and decisions at the elite level. Still, we should continue to speak truth to power, if only screaming into the void or preaching out in the wilderness, as we never know what might finally break through the silencing.

This topic makes one think of a lot of things about our society. We know about problems of racism, inequality, corporatism, corruption, climate change, etc. Most Americans, typically a large majority, understand these problems and agree we should do something about them. Also, the scholarship in these fields often shows a consensus among the experts. Yet, the ruling elite ensures that nothing ever changes. And the corporate media never allows much public debate about it. It feels so disorienting. It creates a schizoid experience of reality, what one knows in one’s experience and in relating to other Americans versus what one is told is true in the dominant media and politics. Another trial about injustice can feel like yet more spectacle to distract us with no repurcussions for the system of injustice, no matter the outcome of the trial itself. At best, this individual police officer could be prosecuted and, at worst, he could be made into a scapegoat. This could be taken as further proof of our powerlessness, if we let it stand without challenge and without voicing protest.

“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
~Sally Kempton, from Ben Price’s None Dare Call It Propaganda

“Power is the ability to rule the imagination.”
~Jacques Necker, from Guillaume de Sardes’ Against the hegemony of American art

Divide and conquer begins in the psyche, the soul. Before authoritarianism is a system of power, it is a memetic virus that slips into the public mind where it grows and spreads. That is how we have come to find ourselves in this moment of a conflict we don’t understand because the first divide is within awareness. Such is our schizoid identity. As with any protest movement, there are criticisms and complaints, often unfair and dismissive. Those people are destroying their own communities, burning down their own neighborhoods. These are nothing but violent and destructive riots. They are bringing police violence down on themselves; they’re asking for trouble and get what they deserve. The protests are infiltrated or taken over by ‘antifa’ who are a terrorist group. On and on goes the idiocy, quite demoralizing but also quite effective.

First off, most of the protesters and protests are nonviolent. Few Americans, protesters and police alike, want to commit violence against their fellow Americans, against their own neighbors. Amidst the violence and destruction, there are many involved, including some police attacking those peaceful crowds often times for no apparent reason. There is sad irony when some authoritarian-minded police use brutality to punish supposedly free citizens in a democracy who dare to protest police brutality. But it’s the nature of the narratives we get caught up in that tell us conflict and confrontation can only end in violence. And for anyone drawn to that narrative, it’s easy to find someone on the other side who will join you in playing it out to its inevitable conclusion. This narrative pull of conflict and division overpowers any natural empathy that might otherwise inspire the better angels of our nature.

That isn’t to say there aren’t people committing crimes that the police are well within the the purview of their official mandate and public duty to pursue in enforcing the law. But the police can arrest those few people without wantonly attacking large crowds of innocent protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets and batons, sometimes with real bullets as well, including innocent bystanders such as a businessman who was shot to death by police while standing in front of his business (Aída Chávez, Louisville Police Left the Body of David McAtee on the Street for 12 Hours) and the medical staff beat up by roving gangs of police (Olivia Messer, Medical Workers Fighting COVID Say Cops Are Attacking Them). The police showing up to peaceful protests in riot gear ready to rumble, now that is asking for trouble. The police, in being drawn into a narrative of fighting mob violence, end up acting like a violent mob and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are other ways of dealing with crowd control in maintaining peace and by directing police force only against serious lawbreakers, not the general public who are practicing their democratic rights. Some of the government officials have stated that most of the lawbreakers arrested were from outside the cities and states in which they were protesting. No doubt there are plenty of outsiders of one kind or another. Protests attract a diversity of individuals and groups and no one knows who they all are. Of course, there are the opportunistic looters, arsonists, criminals, gangsters, and troublemakers who join in and cause havoc without any greater purpose. Also, throw in some people who simply have serious psychiatric disorders, including some of the police as far as that goes.

Then there are the agitators and provocateurs of various sorts, specifically those who oppose the ideals and message of the protest movement, from white nationalists to undercover cops and maybe some FBI agents. This latter set of people, in some cases, would even be seeking to incite violence and destruction, looting and rioting, while hoping for police backlash and authoritarian measures. This is a much more difficult problem to deal with in our society. In some of the cities, the police have welcomed and cooperated with white thugs walking around with bats and other weapons to take care of the protesters which has led to violent altercations. This same kind of police-thug alliance has happened in past protest movements as well.

Some of these dangerous individuals and groups have clear agendas, often an attempt to alter the media narrative and public perception in order to undermine support for the protest movement and to isolate protesters. Think of COINTELPRO agent provocateurs of the past and the more recent entrapment practices during the War On Terror. Protesters have noticed older white guys dressed all in black with faces covered who were working alone or in teams to cause damage, such as the now infamous umbrella man. Most of these covert actors and malcontented troublemakers remain unidentified.

There are many games going on. Even outside of the protests themselves, social media has been a hotbed of influences. One Twitter account was portrayed as ‘antifa’ and was promoting violence, until those behind it were outed as white nationalists and the account was shut down. Imagine all of the state and non-state actors, including foreign actors, who might want to not only influence the protest movement but meddle in American society and politics, maybe simply to promote strife and conflict before the election. I could imagine fake accounts and trolls even infiltrating and targeting police in online groups to further rile them up.

There are many competing narratives out there. And those pushing those narratives in many cases aren’t doing so for ideological reasons. One doesn’t have to believe a narrative to want to use it to promote whatever one does believe in, from authoritarianism to chaos. The sad truth is that the average person never gives much thought to the narratives that are fed to them and that infect their minds. Many of these narratives are carefully crafted to get past our defenses, to tell us what we want to hear, confirm our biases and prejudices, fit into our stereotyped interpretations of others.

One of these narratives has fallen into the category of white identity politics. Many otherwise libertarian-minded whites who would criticize abusive authority find themselves pulled into a racialized narrative promoting the rationalization of authoritarian oppression toward those ‘others’. They are allowing themselves to be cynically manipulated because these narratives make them feel good about themselves while so many others suffer. But the reality is poor whites also suffer police abuse and so, even if only for selfish reasons of believing all lives matter, they should be joining these protesters demanding police reform and justice.

Even though blacks are disproportionately harmed, the fact of the matter is most police brutality as with most imprisonment falls upon whites, mostly poor whites, for the simple reason that whites remain the majority on both sides of the authoritarian equation. The racialized narrative of oppressive authoritarianism gives these poor whites a sense of pride in that, no matter how bad their lives are, at least they can think of themselves as being better than those poor blacks. Why do whites so mindlessly accept this false narrative that harms themselves personally, harms their families and neighbors, harms their entire communities? Why can’t they see they are being used as tools of authoritarian power? Why can’t they muster basic human empathy for others who are oppressed in this same system of injustice?

How would conservative and right-wing whites respond if during Barack Obama’s administration black police officers were wantonly killing poor whites, typically without legal repercussion or sometimes even losing their jobs, and then when Tea Party activists formed a mostly peaceful protest movement, they met with further police violence intended to silence them? Now imagine that this followed centuries of continued personal, systemic, and institutionalized racism against whites that kept them trapped in impoverished neighborhoods where there children were literally being poisoned from urban pollution and heavy metal toxins and targeted by a school-to-prison pipeline.

The response by most on the political right to this radical thought experiment would be typical. The narrative of white identity politics says this would never happen to whites because somehow whites, even the poorest whites, aren’t of lowly character like blacks. But this is total bullshit, if we are to define character by the conditions of oppression. Some of the most desperately impoverished and criminal-ridden places in the United State are these poor white communities such as in Appalachia where such racist rhetoric most strongly takes hold (Are White Appalachians A Special Case?). This racialized story comforts the traumatized, rather than resolving the trauma that continues generation after generation.

None of this is necessary. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he was in the middle of organizing a poor people’s movement. He was hoping to join poor whites and poor blacks in a fight against the oppression of a caste system of a permanent underclass. It was understood even long before MLK that class war was used to oppress not only blacks but also poor whites. This argument was made by Peter H. Clark (1829-1925), the first black socialist in the United States. There was also the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, that in the early 1900s organized across racial and ethnic lines in reaching out to minorities and immigrants; and, as always, they too were persecuted. Even many racist whites prior to the Civil War understood that the emerging industrial capitalism was being built on class war that kept lower class whites in a state of desperation and disenfranchisement. One doesn’t even have to be an anti-racist supporting black freedom and civil rights to understand this basic truth of capitalist class oppression and disenfranchisement.

Following MLK’s assassination, others tried to carry forward a multiracial (and multicultural) fight against class oppression, including the popular Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton who united with diverse other groups in a Rainbow Coalition, including the Young Patriots consisting of Southern whites living in poor Chicago neighborhoods (Poverty In Black And White; Michael McCanne, The Panthers and the Patriots). Guess what happened to Fred Hampton? He also was assassinated. And who was behind the assassination? The FBI and police. This was the era of COINTELPRO where the government sought to infiltrate, co-opt, and manipulate groups considered to be a threat to statist power and interests. For example, earlier on, the FBI sent MLK a letter threatening to expose his extramarital affairs in order to blackmail him to commit suicide. Please understand, these were some truly evil people in our government and evil people like them are still in positions of power and influence.

The point is that this was never only about blacks and other minorities. Poor and working class whites were also harmed and disempowered when those black civil rights leaders, MLK and Hampton, were assassinated. I’d go so far as to argue that even middle class whites were worse off for having lost these voices that, if they had lived longer, might have alerted them to the forces that were also attacking the middle class. Now there is a narrative for you. It’s not only a story for it is actual history, much of it based on government documents that were released or leaked along with some great investigative news reporting from the past. But how many Americans, particularly poor whites and conservatives, know their own American history? Very few. The propaganda of corporate media, corporatist education, and corporatocratic politics has suppressed and silenced these facts that are inconvenient to the capitalist class and ruling elite. More importantly, it isn’t only a class war being hidden behind racist agendas of social control. As the likes of MLK and Hampton understood, all of this is inseparable from violent and oppressive imperialism, a class war against the entire world’s population of the poor.

Some relatively comfortable and privileged Americans get upset because a few people died in the recent protests, along with some property damage. They take this as indicating the protest movement has gone too far. Yet many of these same people supported the Iraq War based on a lie, a war of aggression and invasion that ended up destroying an entire country while dislocating, injuring, killing, and orphaning millions upon millions of innocent people. For what purpose? So that the United States could set an example for what happens to anyone who doesn’t bow down to American hegemony. And so that American corporations could maintain control of Middle Eastern trade routes and access to Middle Eastern oil and other natural resources. Talk about looting and on mass scale, not to mention the vast wealth and resources that corporations steal from the American public every year (Trillions Upon Trillions of Dollars).

It’s far from limited to Iraq. American imperialism has led to aggressive wars, overthrowing of democracies, support of terrorist/paramilitary groups, and much else all over the world. Of course, those are mostly poor black and brown people suffering and being killed and they are far away in other places. American policing around the world is far more brutal than the policing at home, but the two are simply expressions of the same fundamental brutality. This is made more apparent with the overt militarization of the American police, not to mention the deployment of military in U.S. cities. The counterinsurgency tactics used to suppress populist movements in other countries are brought home to be used on the American people, of all races and ethnicities.

This protest movement is not only about blacks and other minorities, is not only about police brutality. Most importantly, it is a fight over narrative, a fight to speak truth to power. If whites don’t stand up with blacks now, then later on upper working class whites won’t stand with poor whites, middle class whites won’t stand with any of them, and eventually the ruling class will turn on us all. We are divided up into groups and each group is isolated and attacked and neutralized, until there is not enough people left to stand up against the authoritarianism that began creeping into power over many generations. Authoritarian oppression against any of us, in the end, is authoritarian oppression against all of us. Violence is violence.

All of this was made possible through narratized propaganda that too many of us blindly or cynically accepted because it was easier to do so. Maybe it’s time to change that, time to wake up to reality, time to unite in solidarity. There are more of us than of them. As was understood when America was founded, supposedly in the words of Benjamin Franklin to the Continental Congress in signing the Declaration of Independence, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” But at the same time, we have to take responsibility for being complicit in a society where we’ve projected our authoritarian impulses onto an ‘other’, the police and military, instead of healing this disease within. If we hang separately, it may very well be on a scaffolding we helped build with the thought that we were building it to deal with another set of ‘others’, the poor and minorities.

We need new narratives and so do those authority figures who stand in as representatives of our social order. The police are in an impossible position. They are being commanded to serve too many masters, serve too many purposes. With increasing militarized power and aggressive methods, they are supposed to, implicitly or overtly, represent the enforcement of authoritarian statism, capitalist interests, systemic racism, and class war while somehow also “basically being tasked with addressing every social problem that we have”, far beyond mere enforcement of basic laws (NPR CODE SW!TCH interview with Alex S. Vitale, How Much Do We Need The Police?). While being the ultimate symbol and representative of hierarchical power and privilege, they are supposed to monitor traffic infractions, protect communities, uphold individual rights, deal with troubled teens, handle disorderly conduct, help the mentally ill, provide services to the homeless, mediate spousal conflicts, stop child abuse, intervene in alcoholism and addiction, monitor sex workers, act as guards in schools, enforce order in classrooms, and on and on.

The main tool we give the police to deal with this overwhelming and ever growing set of tasks is violence and threat of violence with a gun always at hand — stop the bad guys by any means necessary, in a narrative where all social problems are turned into black-and-white morality judgments. The police are often both the first to be called and the last resort to enact punishment when all else fails. The police are put into an impossible situation. They are asked to carry the entire load of our schizoid society, simultaneously serving authoritarianism and (hyper-)individualism, two sides of the same dysfunctional society of ideological extremism and dogmatic absolutism. It makes no sense. It defies all possibility of sense. So, we end up scapegoating the police when they fail to do the impossible, no different than we also scapegoat the poor and minorities in being victims of the same moral rot that grows like a cancer within our collective humanity.

Such vast areas of modern life have been criminalized. This has placed a large part of the population under the control of militarized policing that must enforce law and order. As communities have disintegrated and culture of trust has weakened, the police are suppose to replace what has been hollowed out, what once made society functional. It’s fucking insane! This is how we end up with more police than social workers, more police than teachers, more police than librarians and coaches and ministers. The police have become the sole pillar that must hold up the entire social order or it will collapse into total chaos and that will be the end of civilization as we know it; or so the story is told in a tone of the fear-mongering. Well, that is asking a lot of police. No wonder they feel stressed out and so often break under the pressure in turning to brutal violence and abuse, not only of citizens but also as seen in the high rates of spousal abuse among police officers.

The police are incapable of even policing themselves, much less reforming themselves. That is because they are forced to try to do what is beyond their capacity. They are violence workers with the mandated power to stop and arrest criminals with the protected right to kill whenever they deem it necessary. “And while we’re not using police to manage slavery or colonialism today,” Alex S. Vitale spoke, “we are using police to manage the problems that our very unequal system has produced. We’re invested in this kind of austerity politics that says the government can’t afford to really do anything to lift people up. We have to put all our resources into subsidizing the already most successful parts of the economy. But those parts of the economy are producing this huge group of people who are homeless, unemployed, have untreated mental health and substance abuse problems. And then we ask the police to put a lid on those problems — to manage them so they don’t interfere with the “order” that we’re supposedly all benefiting from.”

It’s not surprising that the police act dysfunctionally and oppressively in acting on behalf of a dysfunctional and oppressive system. It could not be otherwise. And so we should not be surprised that, when turning police against protesters who are protesting police abuse, it will not turn out well — as Vitale explained: “What we’re seeing is really an immediate escalation to very high levels of force, a high degree of confrontation. And I think part of it is driven by deep frustration within policing, which is that police feel under assault, and they have no answer. They trotted out all the possible solutions: police-community dialogue sessions, implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras. And it just didn’t work. It didn’t make any difference. And so they ran out of excuses. So the protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.”

Policing has not only become our answer to everything but, worse still, our explanatory narrative of everything. And to try to resolve this conflict, we’ve made our problems worse by militarizing the police which ends up conflating military and police, as our society further takes on the characteristics of a fascist police state and hence a banana republic. With each new wave of policing failure, we throw even more policing measures to deal with it. But this is not a problem for the police to take care of. Turning to the police in the first place is the problem. The police are an extreme measure and should only be called upon when all other measures have been tried and failed. Only in immediate situations of violence should the police be the initial course of action. Militarizing the police in treating them as the solution to everything is not only anti-democratic and anti-libertarian but also simply unfair to the police officers themselves who shouldn’t be forced into that position of authoritarian oppressors. All of us as citizens and community members need to take responsibility for having apathetically succumbed to authoritarian realism, of having failed to radically imagine another way.

It shouldn’t be hard for us to imagine non-violent methods and services to replace present violent policing. Even within the limits of the present legal system, if given a choice, most Americans would rather have rehabilitation than harsh punishments and mass imprisonment (Reckoning With Violence; & The Court of Public Opinion: Part 1 & Part 2). We Americans aren’t a punitive people. Rather our imaginations have been intentionally constrained by a punitive ideology enmeshed in social Darwinism and capitalist realism, a system maintained through the narratives pushed on us by polticians funded and MSM owned by big money interests, largely transnational corporations seeking to uphold the fascist police state and military empire.

It could be added that neither are we a divided people, not fundamentally, certainly not in terms of what we support according to diverse public polling over decades (US Demographics & Increasing Progressivism; American People Keep Going Further Left; Sea Change of Public Opinion: Libertarianism, Progressivism & Socialism; Warmongering Politicians & Progressive Public; Gun Violence & Regulation (Data, Analysis, Rhetoric); Claims of US Becoming Pro-Life; Public Opinion on Tax Cuts for the Rich; Most Oppose Cutting Social Security (data); Non-Identifying Environmentalists And Liberals; Environmentalist Majority; Public Opinion On Government & Tea Party; Vietnam War Myths: Memory, Narrative, Rhetoric & Lies; Who Supported the Vietnam War?; & Most Americans Know What is True), although the ruling elite have gone to great efforts to divide us but in reality it’s the ruling elite who are disconnected from the silenced majority (Political Elites Disconnected From General Public; Wirthlin Effect & Symbolic Conservatism; Sacrifice of Liberal Pawns; Polarizing Effect of Perceived Polarization; Inequality Means No Center to Moderate Toward; Racial Polarization of Partisans; Poll Answers, Stated Beliefs, Ideological Labels; & Get on board or get out of the way!).

In imagining another way, consider some possibilities from Ktown for All. These aren’t necessarily perfect suggestions, but they give us the basic sense of how other solutions could operate, specifically at the community level. This is how we need to start thinking. After we get past the idea phase, it will take years and decades of local experimentation, if centralized government will get out of our way. In some ways, this is simply a return to local community systems that used to operate in the United States — consider the non-criminal courts in the mid-20th century that offered community solutions for juvenile problems which is a far better system than our present school-to-prison pipeline. When naysayers tell us that change is impossible, there are precedents we can look to. Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, to take one inspiring example, was a nonviolent removal of a police state that allowed democratic reform, specifically to how policing was done. The Portuguese demilitarized the police, eliminated mass incarceration, ended their war on drugs that was a war on the people, decriminalized drug use, turned funding to programs for intervention and rehabilitation, and as a result saw a decline of drug addiction.

Maybe reforms are unlikely to be successful anytime soon, as the forces resisting them are powerful. Maybe or maybe not. Either way, it’s always nice to dream. We have to start somewhere and there is nowhere better to start than with radical imagination. If an era of ever worsening crises is heading our way, that is all the more reason to get our minds in the right space. We need to have new ideas and narratives in place ready for when we finally get to the point where change is inevitable. Let us prepare for a better tomorrow so that the next generations will have a fighting chance to build a free society, the dream that has inspired Americans for centuries.

“We continue to make this about the police — the how of it. How can they police? Is it about sensitivity and de-escalation training and community policing? All that can make for a less-egregious relationship between the police and people of color. But the how isn’t as important as the why, which we never address. The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. We have that so that the rest of us don’t have to deal with it. Then that situation erupts, and we express our shock and indignation. But if we don’t address the anguish of a people, the pain of being a people who built this country through forced labor — people say, ‘‘I’m tired of everything being about race.’’ Well, imagine how [expletive] exhausting it is to live that.

“Police brutality is an organic offshoot of the dehumanization of those power structures. There are always going to be consequences of authority. When you give someone a badge and a gun, that’s going to create its own issues, and there’s no question that those issues can be addressed with greater accountability. It can be true that you can value and admire the contribution and sacrifice that it takes to be a law-enforcement officer or an emergency medical worker in this country and yet still feel that there should be standards and accountability. Both can be true. But I still believe that the root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.”

~ Jon Stewart, NYT interview by David Marchese (June 15, 2020)

“Our democracy hangs in the balance. This is not an overstatement.

“As protests, riots, and police violence roiled the nation last week, the president vowed to send the military to quell persistent rebellions and looting, whether governors wanted a military occupation or not. John Allen, a retired four-star Marine general, wrote that we may be witnessing the “beginning of the end of the American experiment” because of President Trump’s catastrophic failures.

“Trump’s leadership has been disastrous. But it would be a mistake to place the blame on him alone. In part, we find ourselves here for the same reasons a civil war tore our nation apart more than 100 years ago: Too many citizens prefer to cling to brutal and unjust systems than to give up political power, the perceived benefits of white supremacy and an exploitative economic system. If we do not learn the lessons of history and choose a radically different path forward, we may lose our last chance at creating a truly inclusive, egalitarian democracy.

“The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously said that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Today, the same can be said of our criminal injustice system, which is a mirror reflecting back to us who we really are, as opposed to what we tell ourselves.”

~ Michelle Alexander, America, This Is Your Chance

“If we are serious about ending racism and fundamentally changing the United States, we must begin with a real and serious assessment of the problems. We diminish the task by continuing to call upon the agents and actors who fuelled the crisis when they had opportunities to help solve it. But, more importantly, the quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police alone. It must conquer the logic that finances police and jails at the expense of public schools and hospitals. Police should not be armed with expensive artillery intended to maim and murder civilians while nurses tie garbage sacks around their bodies and reuse masks in a futile effort to keep the coronavirus at bay.

“We have the resources to remake the United States, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers, and therein lies the three-hundred-year-old conundrum: America’s professed values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, continually undone by the reality of debt, despair, and the human degradation of racism and inequality.”

~ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How Do We Change America?

“For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Quaeda.”

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari

• “Poverty certainly causes many other health problems, and malnutrition shortens life expectancy even in the richest countries on earth. In France, for example, 6 million people (about 10 percent of the population) suffer from nutritional insecurity. They wake up in the morning not knowing whether they will have anything to eat for lunch: they often go to sleep hungry; and the nutrition they do obtain is unbalanced and unhealthy — lots of starches, sugar and salt, and not enough protein and vitamins. Yet nutritional insecurity isn’t famine, and France of the early twenty-first century isn’t France of 1694. Even in the worst slums around Beauvais or Paris, people don’t die because they have not eaten for weeks on end.”
• “Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine. In the eighteenth century Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead. Today, the poor are following this advice to the letter. Whereas the rich residents of Beverly Hills eat lettuce salad and steamed tofu with quinoa, in the slums and ghettos the poor gorge on Twinkie cakes, Cheetos, hamburgers and pizza. In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.”
• “During the second half of the twentieth century this Law of the Jungle has finally been broken, if not rescinded. In most areas wars became rarer than ever. Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 per cent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it is responsible for about 1 per cent of global mortality. In 2012, 620,000 people died in the world due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”
• “What about terrorism, then? Even if central governments and powerful states have learned restraint, terrorists might have no such qualms about using new and destructive weapons. That is certainly a worrying possibility. However, terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. At least in the past, terrorism worked by spreading fear rather than by causing significant material damage. Terrorists usually don’t have the strength to defeat an army, occupy a country or destroy entire cities. In 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Quaeda.”

Harari’s basic argument is compelling. The kinds of violence and death we experience now is far different. The whole reason I wrote this post is because of a few key points that stood out to me: “Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.” And: “For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Quaeda.” As those quotes make clear, our first world problems are of a different magnitude. But I would push back against his argument, as for much of the rest of the world, in his making the same mistake as Steven Pinker by ignoring slow violence (so pervasive and systemic as to go unnoticed and uncounted, unacknowledged and unreported, often intentionally hidden). Parts of the United States also are in third world conditions. So, it isn’t simply a problem of nutritional excess from a wealthy economy. That wealth isn’t spread evenly, much less the nutrient-dense healthy foods or the healthcare. Likewise, the violence oppression falls harder upon some than others. Those like Harari and Pinker can go through their entire lives seeing very little of it.

Since World War Two, there have been thousands of acts of mass violence: wars and proxy wars, invasions and occupations, bombings and drone strikes; covert operations in promoting toppled governments, paramilitaries, and terrorists; civil wars, revolutions, famines, droughts, refugee crises, and genocides; et cetera. Most of these events of mass violence were directly or indirectly caused by the global superpowers, besides through military aggression and such, in their destabilizing regions, exploiting third world countries, stealing wealth and resources, enforcing sanctions on food and medicine, economic manipulations, debt entrapment, artificially creating poverty, and being the main contributors to environmental destruction and climate change. One way or another, these institutionalized and globalized forms of injustice and oppression might be the combined largest cause of death, possibly a larger number than in any society seen before. Yet they are rationalized away as ‘natural’ deaths, just people dying.

Over the past three-quarters of a century, probably billions of people in world have been killed, maimed, imprisoned, tortured, starved, orphaned, and had their lives cut short. Some of this was blatant violent actions and the rest was slow violence. But it was all intentional, as part of the wealthy and powerful seeking to maintain their wealth and power and gain even more. There is little justification for all this violence. Even the War on Terror involved cynical plans for attacking countries like Iraq that had preceded the terrorist attacks themselves. The Bush cronies, long before the 2000 presidential election, had it written down on paper that they were looking for an excuse to take Saddam Hussein out of power. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq killed millions of people, around 5% or so of the population (the equivalent would be if a foreign power killed a bit less than 20 million Americans). The used uranium weapons spread across the landscape will add millions of more deaths over the decades — slow, torturous, and horrific deaths, many of them children. Multiply that by the hundreds of other similar US actions, and then multiply that by the number of other countries that have committed similar crimes against humanity.

Have we really become less violent? Or has violence simply taken new forms? Maybe we should wait until after the coming World War Three before declaring a new era of peace, love, and understanding. Numerous other historical periods had a few generations without war and such. That is not all that impressive. The last two world wars are still in living memory and hence living trauma. Let’s give it some time before we start singing the praises and glory of our wonderful advancement as a civilization guided by our techno-utopian fantasies of Whiggish liberalism. But let’s also not so easily dismiss the tremendous suffering and costs from the diseases of civilization that worsen with each generation; not only obesity, diabetes, heart disease but also autoimmune conditions, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, mood disorders, ADHD, autism, and on and on — besides diet and nutrition, much of it caused by chemical exposure from factory pollution, oil spills, ocean dumping, industrial farming, food additives, packaging, and environmental toxins. And we must not forget the role that governments have played in pushing harmful dietary recommendations of low-fat and high-carb that, in being spread worldwide by the wealth and power and influence of the United States, has surely harmed at least hundreds of millions over the past several generations.

The fact that sugar is more dangerous than gun powder, Coca-Cola more dangerous than al-Queda… This is not a reason to stop worrying about mass violence and direct violence. Rather than as a percentage, the total number of violent deaths is still going up, just as there are more slaves now than at the height of slavery prior to the American Civil War. Talking about percentages of certain deaths while excluding other deaths is sleight of hand rhetoric. That misses an even bigger point. The corporate plutocracy that now rules our neo-fascist society of inverted totalitarianism poses the greatest threat of our age. That is not an exaggeration. It is simply what the data shows us to be true, as Harari unintentionally reveals. Privatized profit comes at a public price, a price we can’t afford. Even ignoring the greater externalized costs of environmental harm from corporations (and the general degradation of society from worsening inequality), the increasing costs of healthcare because of diseases caused by highly-profitable and highly-processed foods that are scientifically-designed to be palatable and addictive (along with the systematic dismantling of traditional food systems) could bankrupt many countries in the near future and cripple their populations in the process. World War Three might turn out to be the least of our worries. Just because most of the costs have been externalized on the poor and delayed to future generations doesn’t mean they aren’t real. It will take a while to get the full death count.

 

Reckoning With Violence

The crime debate is another example of how the ruling elite is disconnected from the American majority. Most Americans support rehabilitation, rather than punishment. This support is even stronger among victims of crimes because they understand how tough-on-crime policies have destroyed their communities and harmed the people they care about.

But the ruling elite make massive profits from the privatized prisons and, if nothing else, it is highly effective social control in keeping the population in a permanent state of anxiety and fear. The purpose was never to make the world a better place or to help the average American, much less those struggling near the bottom.

The system works perfectly for its intended purpose. The problem is its intended purpose is psychopathic and evil. And I might add, the ruling elite promoting it is bipartisan. It’s time that we the American people demand justice for our families and communities and refuse anything less from those who attempt to get in our way. Let’s save our righteous wrath for those most deserving of it.

* * *

Reckoning With Violence
by Michelle Alexander

As Ms. [Danielle] Sered explains in her book [Until We Reckon], drawing on her experience working with hundreds of survivors and perpetrators of violence in Brooklyn and the Bronx, imprisonment isn’t just an inadequate tool; it’s often enormously counterproductive — leaving survivors and their communities worse off.

Survivors themselves know this. That’s why fully 90 percent of survivors in New York City, when given the chance to choose whether they want the person who harmed them incarcerated or in a restorative justice process — one that offers support to survivors while empowering them to help decide how perpetrators of violence can repair the damage they’ve done — choose the latter and opt to use the services of Ms. Sered’s nonprofit organization, Common Justice. […]

Ninety percent is a stunning figure considering everything we’ve been led to believe that survivors actually want. For years, we’ve been told that victims of violence want nothing more than for the people who hurt them to be locked up and treated harshly. It is true that some survivors do want revenge or retribution, especially in the immediate aftermath of the crime. Ms. Sered is emphatic that rage is not pathological and a desire for revenge is not blameworthy; both are normal and can be important to the healing process, much as denial and anger are normal stages of grief.

But she also stresses that the number of people who are interested only in revenge or punishment is greatly exaggerated. After all, survivors are almost never offered real choices. Usually when we ask victims “Do you want incarceration?” what we’re really asking is “Do you want something or nothing?” And when any of us are hurt, and when our families and communities are hurting, we want something rather than nothing. In many oppressed communities, drug treatment, good schools, economic investment, job training, trauma and grief support are not available options. Restorative justice is not an option. The only thing on offer is prisons, prosecutors and police.

But what happens, Ms. Sered wondered, if instead of asking, “Do you want something or nothing?” we started asking “Do you want this intervention or that prison?” It turns out, when given a real choice, very few survivors choose prison as their preferred response.

This is not because survivors, as a group, are especially merciful. To the contrary, they’re pragmatic. They know the criminal justice system will almost certainly fail to deliver what they want and need most to overcome their pain and trauma. More than 95 percent of cases end in plea bargains negotiated by lawyers behind the scenes. Given the system’s design, survivors know the system cannot be trusted to validate their suffering, give them answers or even a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Nor can it be trusted to keep them or others safe.

In fact, many victims find that incarceration actually makes them feel less safe. They worry that others will be angry with them for reporting the crime and retaliate, or fear what will happen when the person eventually returns home. Many believe, for good reason, that incarceration will likely make the person worse, not better — a frightening prospect when they’re likely to encounter the person again when they’re back in the neighborhood. […]

A growing body of research strongly supports the anecdotal evidence that restorative justice programs increase the odds of safety, reduce recidivism and alleviate trauma. “Until We Reckon” cites studies showing that survivors report 80 to 90 percent rates of satisfaction with restorative processes, as compared to 30 percent for traditional court systems.

Common Justice’s success rate is high: Only 7 percent of responsible parties have been terminated from the program for a new crime. And it’s not alone in successfully applying restorative justice principles. Numerous organizations — such as Community Justice for Youth Institute and Project NIA in Chicago; the Insight Prison Project in San Quentin; the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore; and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth — are doing so in communities, schools, and criminal justice settings from coast-to-coast.

In 2016, the Alliance for Safety and Justice conducted the first national poll of crime survivors and the results are consistent with the emerging trend toward restorative justice. The majority said they “believe that time in prison makes people more likely to commit another crime rather than less likely.” Sixty-nine percent preferred holding people accountable through options beyond prison, such as mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation, community supervision and public service. Survivors’ support for alternatives to incarceration was even higher than among the general public.

Survivors are right to question incarceration as a strategy for violence reduction. Violence is driven by shame, exposure to violence, isolation and an inability to meet one’s economic needs — all of which are core features of imprisonment. Perhaps most importantly, according to Ms. Sered, “Nearly everyone who has committed violence first survived it,” and studies indicate that experiencing violence is the greater predictor of committing it. Caging and isolating a person who’s already been damaged by violence is hardly a recipe for positive transformation.

The Court of Public Opinion: Part 1

This is about public opinion and public perception as it relates to public policy (see previous posts). I also include some analyses of the opinions of politicians as it relates to public opinion or rather their perception of what they think or want to believe about the public (for background, see here and here).

I’ll begin with a problematic example of a poll. Here is an article that someone offered as proving the public supports tough-on-crime policies:

There were stunning findings in a new poll released Monday on crime in New York City. Keeping crime down is way more important to voters than reforming the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk program…

a new Quinnipiac University poll…reveals that public safety is uppermost on the minds of voters…

Asked which was more important, keeping crime rates down or reforming stop and frisk, 62 percent said keeping crime rates low and 30 percent said reforming stop and frisk.

The article itself isn’t important. There are thousands like it, but I wanted to use it for the polling data it was using.

I don’t know of any bias from Quinnipiac, beyond a basic mainstream bias, and so maybe the wording of the question was simply intellectual laziness. It was phrased as a forced choice question that implied choosing one negated the possibility of the other and it implied those were the only choices for public policy.

I looked further into data related to stop and frisk. It isn’t as simple as the forced choice presents it. For one, a number of studies don’t show that stop and frisk actually keeps crime rates low, as the question assumes. Secondly, when given more information and more options, Americans tend to support funding programs that either help prevent crime or help rehabilitate criminals.

The general public will favor punishment, when no other good choices are offered them. Still, that doesn’t say much about the fundamental values of most Americans. I’m not just interested in the answers given, but also the questions asked, how they are framed and how they are worded.

The Court of Public Opinion: Part 2

I’ll highlight one issue. It is a chicken or the egg scenario.

The political elites are fairly clueless about the views of the general public, including their own constituents. At the same time, the average American is clueless about what those in government are actually doing. This disconnection is what one expects from a society built on a class-based hierarchy with growing extremes of inequality. In countries that have lower inequality, there is far less disconnection between political elites and the citizenry.

It isn’t clear who is leading who. How could politicians simply be doing what the public wants when they don’t know what the public wants? So, what impact does public opinion even have? There is strong evidence that public opinion might simply be following elite opinion and reacting to the rhetoric heard on the MSM.

Populations are easily manipulated by propaganda, as history shows. That seems to be the case with the United States as well.

As such, it isn’t clear how punitive most Americans actually are. When given more and better information, when given more and better options, most Americans tend to focus away from straightforward punitive policies. Imagine what the public might support if we ever had an open and honest debate based on the facts.

Inequality in the Anthropocene

This post was inspired by an article on the possibility of increasing suicides because of climate change. What occurred to me is that all the social and psychological problems seen with climate change are also seen with inequality (as shown in decades of research), and to a lesser extent as seen with extreme poverty — although high poverty with low inequality isn’t necessarily problematic at all (e.g., the physically and psychologically healthy hunter-gatherers who are poor in terms of material wealth and private property).

Related to this, I noticed in one article that a study was mentioned about the chances of war increasing when detrimental weather events are combined with ethnic diversity. And that reminded me of the research that showed diversity only leads to lowered trust when combined with segregation. A major problem with climate-related refugee crises is that it increases segregation, such as refugee camps and immigrant ghettoization. That segregation will lead to further conflict and destruction of the social fabric, which in turn will promote further segregation — a vicious cycle that will be hard to pull out before the crash, especially as the environmental conditions lead to droughts, famines, and plagues.

As economic and environmental conditions worsen, there are some symptoms that will become increasingly apparent and problematic. Based on the inequality and climatology research, we should expect increased stress, anxiety, fear, xenophobia, bigotry, suicide, homicide, aggressive behavior, short-term thinking, reactionary politics, and generally crazy and bizarre behavior. This will likely result in civil unrest, violent conflict, race wars, genocides, terrorism, militarization, civil wars, revolutions, international conflict, resource-based wars, world wars, authoritarianism, ethno-nationalism, right-wing populism, etc.

The only defense against this will be a strong, courageous left-wing response. That would require eliminating not only the derangement of the GOP but also the corruption of the DNC by replacing both with a genuinely democratic and socialist movement. Otherwise, our society will descend into collective madness and our entire civilization will be under existential threat. There is no other option.

* * *

The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene
by Rob Nixon

Most Anthropocene scholars date the new epoch to the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of industrialization. But there is a second phase to the Anthropocene, the so-called great acceleration, beginning circa 1950: an exponential increase in human-induced changes to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle and in ocean acidification, global trade, and consumerism, as well as the rise of international forms of governance like the World Bank and the IMF.

However, most accounts of the great acceleration fail to position it in relation to neoliberalism’s recent ascent, although most of the great acceleration has occurred during the neoliberal era. One marker of neoliberalism has been a widening chasm of inequality between the superrich and the ultrapoor: since the late 1970s, we have been living through what Timothy Noah calls “the great divergence.” Noah’s subject is the economic fracturing of America, the new American gilded age, but the great divergence has scarred most societies, from China and India to Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Australia, and Bangladesh.

My central problem with the dominant mode of Anthropocene storytelling is its failure to articulate the great acceleration to the great divergence. We need to acknowledge that the grand species narrative of the Anthropocene—this geomorphic “age of the human”—is gaining credence at a time when, in society after society, the idea of the human is breaking apart economically, as the distance between affluence and abandonment is increasing. It is time to remold the Anthropocene as a shared story about unshared resources. When we examine the geology of the human, let us also pay attention to the geopolitics of the new stratigraphy’s layered assumptions.

Neoliberalism loves watery metaphors: the trickle-down effect, global flows, how a rising tide lifts all boats. But talk of a rising tide raises other specters: the coastal poor, who will never get storm-surge barriers; Pacific Islanders in the front lines of inundation; Arctic peoples, whose livelihoods are melting away—all of them exposed to the fallout from Anthropocene histories of carbon extraction and consumption in which they played virtually no part.

We are not all in this together
by Ian Angus

So the 21st century is being defined by a combination of record-breaking inequality with record-breaking climate change. That combination is already having disastrous impacts on the majority of the world’s people. The line is not only between rich and poor, or comfort and poverty: it is a line between survival and death.

Climate change and extreme weather events are not devastating a random selection of human beings from all walks of life. There are no billionaires among the dead, no corporate executives living in shelters, no stockbrokers watching their children die of malnutrition. Overwhelmingly, the victims are poor and disadvantaged. Globally, 99 percent of weather disaster casualties are in developing countries, and 75 percent of them are women.

The pattern repeats at every scale. Globally, the South suffers far more than the North. Within the South, the very poorest countries, mostly in Africa south of the Sahara, are hit hardest. Within each country, the poorest people—women, children, and the elderly—are most likely to lose their homes and livelihoods from climate change, and most likely to die.

The same pattern occurs in the North. Despite the rich countries’ overall wealth, when hurricanes and heatwaves hit, the poorest neighborhoods are hit hardest, and within those neighborhoods the primary victims are the poorest people.

Chronic hunger, already a severe problem in much of the world, will be made worse by climate change. As Oxfam reports: “The world’s most food-insecure regions will be hit hardest of all.”

Unchecked climate change will lock the world’s poorest people in a downward spiral, leaving hundreds of millions facing malnutrition, water scarcity, ecological threats, and loss of livelihood. Children will be among the primary victims, and the effects will last for lifetimes: studies in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Niger show that being born in a drought year increases a child’s chances of being irreversibly stunted by 41 to 72 percent.

Environmental racism has left black Americans three times more likely to die from pollution
By Bartees Cox

Without a touch of irony, the EPA celebrated Black History Month by publishing a report that finds black communities face dangerously high levels of pollution. African Americans are more likely to live near landfills and industrial plants that pollute water and air and erode quality of life. Because of this, more than half of the 9 million people living near hazardous waste sites are people of color, and black Americans are three times more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts.

The statistics provide evidence for what advocates call “environmental racism.” Communities of color aren’t suffering by chance, they say. Rather, these conditions are the result of decades of indifference from people in power.

Environmental racism is dangerous. Trump’s EPA doesn’t seem to care.
by P.R. Lockhart

Studies have shown that black and Hispanic children are more likely to develop asthma than their white peers, as are poor children, with research suggesting that higher levels of smog and air pollution in communities of color being a factor. A 2014 study found that people of color live in communities that have more nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that exacerbates asthma.

The EPA’s own research further supported this. Earlier this year, a paper from the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment found that when it comes to air pollutants that contribute to issues like heart and lung disease, black people are exposed to 1.5 times more of the pollutant than white people, while Hispanic people were exposed to about 1.2 times the amount of non-Hispanic whites. People in poverty had 1.3 times the exposure of those not in poverty.

Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real
by Vann R. Newkirk II

Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.”

The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and manmade microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it’s been named by the EPA as a contributor to several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severity, low birth weights, and high blood pressure.

As the study details, previous works have also linked disproportionate exposure to particulate matter and America’s racial geography. A 2016 study in Environment International found that long-term exposure to the pollutant is associated with racial segregation, with more highly segregated areas suffering higher levels of exposure. A 2012 article in Environmental Health Perspectives found that overall levels of particulate matter exposure for people of color were higher than those for white people. That article also provided a breakdown of just what kinds of particulate matter counts in the exposures. It found that while differences in overall particulate matter by race were significant, differences for some key particles were immense. For example, Hispanics faced rates of chlorine exposure that are more than double those of whites. Chronic chlorine inhalation is known for degrading cardiac function.

The conclusions from scientists at the National Center for Environmental Assessment not only confirm that body of research, but advance it in a top-rate public-health journal. They find that black people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter than white people, and that Hispanics had about 1.2 times the exposure of non-Hispanic whites. The study found that people in poverty had about 1.3 times more exposure than people above poverty. Interestingly, it also finds that for black people, the proportion of exposure is only partly explained by the disproportionate geographic burden of polluting facilities, meaning the magnitude of emissions from individual factories appears to be higher in minority neighborhoods.

These findings join an ever-growing body of literature that has found that both polluters and pollution are often disproportionately located in communities of color. In some places, hydraulic-fracturing oil wells are more likely to be sited in those neighborhoods. Researchers have found the presence of benzene and other dangerous aromatic chemicals to be linked to race. Strong racial disparities are suspected in the prevalence of lead poisoning.

It seems that almost anywhere researchers look, there is more evidence of deep racial disparities in exposure to environmental hazards. In fact, the idea of environmental justice—or the degree to which people are treated equally and meaningfully involved in the creation of the human environment—was crystallized in the 1980s with the aid of a landmark study illustrating wide disparities in the siting of facilities for the disposal of hazardous waste. Leaders in the environmental-justice movement have posited—in places as prestigious and rigorous as United Nations publications and numerous peer-reviewed journals—that environmental racism exists as the inverse of environmental justice, when environmental risks are allocated disproportionately along the lines of race, often without the input of the affected communities of color.

The idea of environmental racism is, like all mentions of racism in America, controversial. Even in the age of climate change, many people still view the environment mostly as a set of forces of nature, one that cannot favor or disfavor one group or another. And even those who recognize that the human sphere of influence shapes almost every molecule of the places in which humans live, from the climate to the weather to the air they breathe, are often loathe to concede that racism is a factor. To many people, racism often connotes purposeful decisions by a master hand, and many see existing segregation as a self-sorting or poverty problem. Couldn’t the presence of landfills and factories in disproportionately black neighborhoods have more to do with the fact that black people tend to be disproportionately poor and thus live in less desirable neighborhoods?

But last week’s study throws more water on that increasingly tenuous line of thinking. While it lacks the kind of complex multivariate design that can really disentangle the exact effects of poverty and race, the finding that race has a stronger effect on exposure to pollutants than poverty indicates that something beyond just the concentration of poverty among black people and Latinos is at play. As the study’s authors write: “A focus on poverty to the exclusion of race may be insufficient to meet the needs of all burdened populations.” Their finding that the magnitude of pollution seems to be higher in communities of color than the number of polluters suggests, indicates that regulations and business decisions are strongly dependent on whether people of color are around. In other words, they might be discriminatory.

This is a remarkable finding, and not only because it could provide one more policy linkage to any number of health disparities, from heart disease to asthma rates in black children that are double those of white children. But the study also stands as an implicit rebuke to the very administration that allowed its release.

Violence: Categories & Data, Causes & Demographics

Most violent crime correlates to social problems in general. Most social problems in general correlate to economic factors such as poverty but even moreso inequality. And in a country like the US, most economic factors correlate to social disadvantage and racial oppression, from economic segregation (redlining, sundown towns, etc) to environmental racism (ghettos located in polluted urban areas, high toxicity rates among minorities, etc) — consider how areas of historically high rates of slavery at present have higher levels of poverty and inequality, impacting not just blacks but also whites living in those communities.

Socialized Medicine & Externalized Costs

About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.

Percentages of Suffering and Death

Even accepting the data that Pinker uses, it must be noted that he isn’t including all violent deaths. Consider economic sanctions and neoliberal exploitation, vast poverty and inequality forcing people to work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, covert operations to overthrow governments and destabilize regions, anthropogenic climate change with its disasters, environmental destruction and ecosystem collapse, loss of arable land and food sources, pollution and toxic dumps, etc. All of this would involve food scarcity, malnutrition, starvation, droughts, rampant disease, refugee crises, diseases related to toxicity and stress, etc; along with all kinds of other consequences to people living in desperation and squalor.

This has all been intentionally caused through governments, corporations, and other organizations seeking power and profit while externalizing costs and harm. In my lifetime, the fatalities to this large scale often slow violence and intergenerational trauma could add up to hundreds of millions or maybe billions of lives cut short. Plus, as neoliberal globalization worsens inequality, there is a direct link to higher rates of homicides, suicides, and stress-related diseases for the most impacted populations. Yet none of these deaths would be counted as violent, no matter how horrific it was for the victims. And those like Pinker adding up the numbers would never have to acknowledge this overwhelming reality of suffering. It can’t be seen in the official data on violence, as the causes are disconnected from the effects. But why should only a small part of the harm and suffering get counted as violence?

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization
by Roy Scranton
Kindle Locations 860-888 (see here)

Consider: Once among the most modern, Westernized nations in the Middle East, with a robust, highly educated middle class, Iraq has been blighted for decades by imperialist aggression, criminal gangs, interference in its domestic politics, economic liberalization, and sectarian feuding. Today it is being torn apart between a corrupt petrocracy, a breakaway Kurdish enclave, and a self-declared Islamic fundamentalist caliphate, while a civil war in neighboring Syria spills across its borders. These conflicts have likely been caused in part and exacerbated by the worst drought the Middle East has seen in modern history. Since 2006, Syria has been suffering crippling water shortages that have, in some areas, caused 75 percent crop failure and wiped out 85 percent of livestock, left more than 800,000 Syrians without a livelihood, and sent hundreds of thousands of impoverished young men streaming into Syria’s cities. 90 This drought is part of long-term warming and drying trends that are transforming the Middle East. 91 Not just water but oil, too, is elemental to these conflicts. Iraq sits on the fifth-largest proven oil reserves in the world. Meanwhile, the Islamic State has been able to survive only because it has taken control of most of Syria’s oil and gas production. We tend to think of climate change and violent religious fundamentalism as isolated phenomena, but as Retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley argues, “you can draw a very credible climate connection to this disaster we call ISIS right now.” 92

A few hundred miles away, Israeli soldiers spent the summer of 2014 killing Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has also been suffering drought, while Gaza has been in the midst of a critical water crisis exacerbated by Israel’s military aggression. The International Committee for the Red Cross reported that during summer 2014, Israeli bombers targeted Palestinian wells and water infrastructure. 93 It’s not water and oil this time, but water and gas: some observers argue that Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” was intended to establish firmer control over the massive Leviathan natural gas field, discovered off the coast of Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean in 2010.94

Meanwhile, thousands of miles to the north, Russian-backed separatists fought fascist paramilitary forces defending the elected government of Ukraine, which was also suffering drought. 95 Russia’s role as an oil and gas exporter in the region and the natural gas pipelines running through Ukraine from Russia to Europe cannot but be key issues in the conflict. Elsewhere, droughts in 2014 sent refugees from Guatemala and Honduras north to the US border, devastated crops in California and Australia, and threatened millions of lives in Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, India, Morocco, Pakistan, and parts of China. Across the world, massive protests and riots have swept Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand, while conflicts rage on in Colombia, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Nigeria, Yemen, and India. And while the world burns, the United States has been playing chicken with Russia over control of Eastern Europe and the melting Arctic, and with China over control of Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, threatening global war on a scale not seen in seventy years. This is our present and future: droughts and hurricanes, refugees and border guards, war for oil, water, gas, and food.

Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene
by Robinson Meyer

First, climate change could easily worsen the inequality that has already hollowed out the Western middle class. A recent analysis in Nature projected that the effects of climate change will reduce the average person’s income by 23 percent by the end of the century. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency predicts that unmitigated global warming could cost the American economy $200 billion this century. (Some climate researchers think the EPA undercounts these estimates.)

Future consumers will not register these costs so cleanly, though—there will not be a single climate-change debit exacted on everyone’s budgets at year’s end. Instead, the costs will seep in through many sources: storm damage, higher power rates, real-estate depreciation, unreliable and expensive food. Climate change could get laundered, in other words, becoming just one more symptom of a stagnant and unequal economy. As quality of life declines, and insurance premiums rise, people could feel that they’re being robbed by an aloof elite.

They won’t even be wrong. It’s just that due to the chemistry of climate change, many members of that elite will have died 30 or 50 years prior. […]

Malin Mobjörk, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, recently described a “growing consensus” in the literature that climate change can raise the risk of violence. And the U.S. Department of Defense already considers global warming a “threat multiplier” for national security. It expects hotter temperatures and acidified oceans to destabilize governments and worsen infectious pandemics.

Indeed, climate change may already be driving mass migrations. Last year, the Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley was mocked for suggesting that a climate-change-intensified drought in the Levant—the worst drought in 900 years—helped incite the Syrian Civil War, thus kickstarting the Islamic State. The evidence tentatively supports him. Since the outbreak of the conflict, some scholars have recognized that this drought pushed once-prosperous farmers into Syria’s cities. Many became unemployed and destitute, aggravating internal divisions in the run-up to the war. […]

They were not disappointed. Heatwaves, droughts, and other climate-related exogenous shocks do correlate to conflict outbreak—but only in countries primed for conflict by ethnic division. In the 30-year period, nearly a quarter of all ethnic-fueled armed conflict coincided with a climate-related calamity. By contrast, in the set of all countries, war only correlated to climatic disaster about 9 percent of the time.

“We cannot find any evidence for a generalizable trigger relationship, but we do find evidence for some risk enhancement,” Schleussner told me. In other words,  climate disaster will not cause a war, but it can influence whether one begins.

Why climate change is very bad for your health
by Geordan Dickinson Shannon

Ecosystems

We don’t live in isolation from other ecosystems. From large-scale weather events, through to the food we eat daily, right down to the minute organisms colonising our skin and digestive systems, we live and breath in co-dependency with our environment.

A change in the delicate balance of micro-organisms has the potential to lead to disastrous effects. For example, microbial proliferation – which is predicted in warmer temperatures driven by climate change – may lead to more enteric infections (caused by viruses and bacteria that enter the body through the gastrointestinal tract), such as salmonella food poisoning and increased cholera outbreaks related to flooding and warmer coastal and estuarine water.

Changes in temperature, humidity, rainfall, soil moisture and sea-level rise, caused by climate change is also affecting the transmission of dangerous insect-borne infectious diseases. These include malaria, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, chikungunya and West Nile virus, lymphatic filariasis, plague, tick-borne encephalitis, Lyme disease, rickettsioses, and schistosomiasis.

Through climate change, the pattern of human interaction will likely change and so will our interactions with disease-spreading insects, especially mosquitoes. The World Health Organisation has also stressed the impact of climate change on the reproductive, survival and bite rates of insects, as well as their geographic spread.

Climate refugees

Perhaps the most disastrous effect of climate change on human health is the emergence of large-scale forced migration from the loss of local livelihoods and weather events – something that is recognised by the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. Sea-level rise, decreased crop yield, and extreme weather events will force many people from their lands and livelihoods, while refugees in vulnerable areas also face amplified conditions such as fewer food supplies and more insect-borne diseases. And those who are displaced put a significant health and economic burden on surrounding communities.

The International Red Cross estimates that there are more environmental refugees than political. Around 36m people were displaced by natural disasters in 2009; a figure that is predicted to rise to more than 50m by 2050. In one worst-case scenario, as many as 200m people could become environmental refugees.

Not a level playing field

Climate change has emerged as a major driver of global health inequalities. As J. Timmons Roberts, professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at Brown University, put it:

Global warming is all about inequality, both in who will suffer most its effects and in who created the problem in the first place.

Global climate change further polarises the haves and the have-nots. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that climate change will hit poor countries hardest. For example, the loss of healthy life years in low-income African countries is predicted to be 500 times that in Europe. The number of people in the poorest countries most vulnerable to hunger is predicted by Oxfam International to increase by 20% in 2050. And many of the major killers affecting developing countries, such as malaria, diarrhoeal illnesses, malnutrition and dengue, are highly sensitive to climate change, which would place a further disproportionate burden on poorer nations.

Most disturbingly, countries with weaker health infrastructure – generally situated in the developing world – will be the least able to copewith the effects of climate change. The world’s poorest regions don’t yet have the technical, economic, or scientific capacity to prepare or adapt.

Predictably, those most vulnerable to climate change are not those who contribute most to it. China, the US, and the European Union combined have contributed more than half the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions in the last few centuries. By contrast, and unfairly, countries that contributed the least carbon emissions (measured in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide) include many African nations and small Pacific islands – exactly those countries which will be least prepared and most affected by climate change.

Here’s Why Climate Change Will Increase Deaths by Suicide
by Francis Vergunst, Helen Louise Berry & Massimiliano Orri

Suicide is already among the leading causes of death worldwide. For people aged 15-55 years, it is among the top five causes of death. Worldwide nearly one million people die by suicide each year — more than all deaths from war and murder combined.

Using historical temperature records from the United States and Mexico, the researchers showed that suicide rates increased by 0.7 per cent in the U.S. and by 2.1 per cent in Mexico when the average monthly temperatures rose by 1 C.

The researchers calculated that if global temperatures continue to rise at these rates, between now and 2050 there could be 9,000 to 40,000 additional suicides in the U.S. and Mexico alone. This is roughly equivalent to the number of additional suicides that follow an economic recession.

Spikes during heat waves

It has been known for a long time that suicide rates spike during heat waves. Hotter weather has been linked with higher rates of hospital admissions for self-harm, suicide and violent suicides, as well as increases in population-level psychological distress, particularly in combination with high humidity.

Another recent study, which combined the results of previous research on heat and suicide, concluded there is “a significant and positive association between temperature rises and incidence of suicide.”

Why this is remains unclear. There is a well-documented link between rising temperatures and interpersonal violence and suicide could be understood as an act of violence directed at oneself. Lisa Page, a researcher in psychology at King’s College London, notes:

“While speculative, perhaps the most promising mechanism to link suicide with high temperatures is a psychological one. High temperatures have been found to lead individuals to behave in a more disinhibited, aggressive and violent manner, which might in turn result in an increased propensity for suicidal acts.”

Hotter temperatures are taxing on the body. They cause an increase in the stress hormone cortisol, reduce sleep quality and disrupt people’s physical activity routines. These changes can reduce well-being and increase psychological distress.

Disease, water shortages, conflict and war

The effects of hotter temperatures on suicides are symptomatic of a much broader and more expansive problem: the impact of climate change on mental health.

Climate change will increase the frequency and severity of heat waves, droughts, storms, floods and wildfires. It will extend the range of infectious diseases such as Zika virus, malaria and Lyme disease. It will contribute to food and water shortages and fuel forced migration, conflict and war.

These events can have devastating effects on people’s health, homes and livelihoods and directly impact psychological health and well-being.

But effects are not limited to people who suffer direct losses — for example, it has been estimated that up to half of Hurricane Katrina survivors developed post-traumatic stress disorder even when they had suffered no direct physical losses.

The feelings of loss that follow catastrophic events, including a sense of loss of safety, can erode community well-being and further undermine mental health resilience

The Broken Ladder
by Keith Payne
pp. 3-4 (see here)

[W]hen the level of inequality becomes too large to ignore, everyone starts acting strange.

But they do not act strange in just any old way. Inequality affects our actions and our feelings in the same systematic, predictable fashion again and again. It makes us shortsighted and prone to risky behavior, willing to sacrifice a secure future for immediate gratification. It makes us more inclined to make self-defeating decisions. It makes us believe weird things, superstitiously clinging to the world as we want it to be rather than as it is. Inequality divides us, cleaving us into camps not only of income but also of ideology and race, eroding our trust in one another. It generates stress and makes us all less healthy and less happy.

Picture a neighborhood full of people like the ones I’ve described above: shortsighted, irresponsible people making bad choices; mistrustful people segregated by race and by ideology; superstitious people who won’t listen to reason; people who turn to self-destructive habits as they cope with the stress and anxieties of their daily lives. These are the classic tropes of poverty and could serve as a stereotypical description of the population of any poor inner-city neighborhood or depressed rural trailer park. But as we will see in the chapters ahead, inequality can produce these tendencies even among the middle class and wealthy individuals.

PP. 119-120 (see here)

But how can something as abstract as inequality or social comparisons cause something as physical as health? Our emergency rooms are not filled with people dropping dead from acute cases of inequality. No, the pathways linking inequality to health can be traced through specific maladies, especially heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and health problems stemming from obesity. Abstract ideas that start as macroeconomic policies and social relationships somehow get expressed in the functioning of our cells.

To understand how that expression happens, we have to first realize that people from different walks of life die different kinds of deaths, in part because they live different kinds of lives. We saw in Chapter 2 that people in more unequal states and countries have poor outcomes on many health measures, including violence, infant mortality, obesity and diabetes, mental illness, and more. In Chapter 3 we learned that inequality leads people to take greater risks, and uncertain futures lead people to take an impulsive, live fast, die young approach to life. There are clear connections between the temptation to enjoy immediate pleasures versus denying oneself for the benefit of long-term health. We saw, for example, that inequality was linked to risky behaviors. In places with extreme inequality, people are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, more likely to have unsafe sex, and so on. Other research suggests that living in a high-inequality state increases people’s likelihood of smoking, eating too much, and exercising too little.

White-on-White Violence, Cultural Genocide, and Historical Trauma

“What white bodies did to Black bodies they did to other white bodies first.”
~ Janice Barbee

How Racism Began as White-on-White Violence
by Resmaa Menakem

Yet this brutality did not begin when Black bodies first encountered white ones. This trauma can be traced back much further, through generation upon generation of white bodies, to medieval Europe.

When the Europeans came to America after enduring 1000 years of plague, famine, inquisitions, and crusades they brought much of their resilience, much of their brutality, and, I believe, a great deal of their trauma with them. Common punishments in the “New World” English colonies were similar to the punishments meted out in England, which included whipping, branding, and cutting off ears. People were routinely placed in stocks or pillories, or in the gallows with a rope around their neck. In America, the Puritans also regularly murdered other Puritans who were disobedient or found guilty of witchery.

In such ways, powerful white bodies routinely punished less powerful white bodies. In 1692, during the Salem witch trials, eighty-year-old Giles Corey was stripped naked and, over a period of two days, slowly crushed to death under a pile of rocks.

We know that the English in America, and their descendants, dislodged brains, blocked airways, ripped muscle, extracted organs, cracked bones, and broke teeth in the bodies of many Black people,Native peoples and other white colonists. But what we often fail to recognize about this “New World” murder, cruelty, oppression, and torture is that, until the second half of the seventeenth century, these traumas were inflicted primarily on white bodies by other white bodies — all on what would become US soil. […]

Throughout the United States’ history as a nation, white bodies have colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered Black and Native ones. But well before the United States began, powerful white bodies colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered other, less powerful white ones.

The carnage perpetrated on Black people and Native Peoples in the “New World” began, on the same soil, as an adaptation of longstanding white-on-white traumatic retention strategies and brutal class practices. This brutalization created trauma that has yet to be healed among American bodies of all hues today.

Chinese Social Political Stability Rests in “Dual Faceted Identity System” (A Model Societal System Analysis based on Recent Rise of White Nationalism in US)
by killingzoo

Equally interesting, while some minority groups in US seem to become more unhappy as they gained power, Asians in general still has little political influence in US, and yet remained very calm.

The clue laid in some worst examples: Kevin Yee, the 3rd Generation Chinese American neo-Nazi supporter, and Adolf Hitler himself (who had a Jewish grandmother).

1 friend said to me: These neo-Nazi “White nationalists”. They don’t even know who they are (where they came from)

Same problem with Yee and Hitler: They forgot (or never knew) their own heritage, so they convinced themselves to follow/worship a mythical “White” identity that really never existed. “White” is just the color of their skin, it doesn’t tell them anything about where their ancestors came from.

Heck, some neo-Nazis probably also had Native American and African slave bloodlines in their families!

The Monolithic “assimilation” in America has forced too many Americans to integrate and forget their own native culture and their native languages of many sides.

The opposite examples are the “hyphenated Americans”, Chinese Americans, Jewish Americans, etc..

The “hyphenation” denoted a multi-faceted identity of these groups. Chinese Americans are known for strongly preserving their Chinese culture and language, even as they integrated into US political economic processes.

Being “hyphenated” multi-faceted in identity has the benefit of greater tolerance for the “others”. As such groups recognize that they came from elsewhere, they tend to give higher tolerance to those who are different, or who are new to US, because a Chinese American himself is also different from many other Americans.

It’s hardly sensible for a Chinese American to demand a new immigrant to “speak proper English”, when others could easily make jokes about his accent. (Though Kevin Yee might do so).

For this reason, many hyphenated American groups with strong multi-faceted identities tend to be very tolerant, less inclined to feel that they are under threat from other groups, and more likely to be liberals in political social views, even if they are conservative in fiscal beliefs. For example, Jewish Americans are typically conservative fiscally but liberal socially. Similarly, Mormons (with their religious enclaves in Utah), tend to be conservative, but very welcome of immigrants. Mennonites of Dutch origin, also tend to be conservative in lifestyle, and yet hold some very liberal tolerant and very friendly views of others.

Fearful Cops and Gun Culture

What should I absolutely not do when visiting the USA?
Quora

Don’t get out of your car if you get pulled over by police.
by Charlie Knoles
(I have lived in 5 countries and am an Aussie expat in the USA.)

I was pulled over by a police officer while driving in Iowa. It was one week after I had arrived in the USA for the first time. I had accidentally made a minor mistake disobeying a traffic sign. Back home in Australia it’s considered polite to get out of your car and walk over to the police officer’s car and hand him your license* so he doesn’t have to get out of his seat. I wanted to be extra polite so I immediately jumped out of my car and walked towards his car while reaching into my back pocket.

I’m lucky to be alive.

If you come from a gun-free country like the UK or Australia you don’t have any natural instinct for gun culture. You don’t realize that police assume that everyone is armed.

Things got immediately serious. The police officer’s hand went to his weapon and I responded by dropping to my knees with my hands up. He yelled a bunch of things at me but my memory is vague because my heartbeat was suddenly pulsing in my ears blotting out all sound. I don’t know if he drew his weapon or not. I was staring intently at the ground, shaking and trying to project non-threatening vibes. My next memory is that there were three police cars around me and a bunch of cops who’d been called for backup. They were all keeping their hands close to their guns. After some time passed (a minute? 30 minutes? I have no idea) the tensions de-escalated and they told me to get up. I gave the officer my license and tried to explain why I’d approached him. It was completely incomprehensible to him that there was a place where people don’t fear cops and vice versa at traffic stops. It was as though I was trying to tell him that I came from Narnia and our cops were all talking animals.

I’ve spoken to several British people, New Zealanders, and Australians who have shared almost identical stories. They really need to put signs up in all major US airports.

Don’t get out of your car if stopped by police. They will assume you are armed and they might shoot you.

Comment
by Bill Null

As the country has gotten safer the police have become more aggressive. It’s now at the point where you are far more likely to die by interacting with a police officer than they are to die by interacting with you.

In 2015, out of the 980,000 police employed nation wide, there were 26 recorded cases of homicide against a police officer, 4 of which occurred during a traffic stop. By contrast, 1093 people were killed in the same year; more than half of which didn’t have a firearm, and 170 were completely unarmed at the time.

Policing in the US has never really been a dangerous job, at least not in comparison to other outdoor occupations. The Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the job of police and sheriff’s deputy as the 16th most dangerous job, right below grounds maintenance workers. That figure however, includes all officer related fatalities, including traffic and health related incidents. If you compare on-the-job injury rates, the numbers aren’t much higher.

21st Century American Violence and Authoritarianism

From Gods & Radicals, by Dr. Bones:

The rules of honor common among herding societies, marked by an aggressive stance towards the world and a wariness towards outsiders who might take what has been rightfully stolen — still remain as well. Southern white males commit murder at a rate of 2 to 1 when compared to the rest of the country; in small cities (pop. 10k-50k) the ratio is 3 to 1; in rural areas it is 4 to 1. Shiftless, fiddle-footed, they wander into the towns and outposts of the coast and become painfully aware they don’t belong, that somehow they’ve been left behind and they are angry about it.  As our time progresses and the old trades close down they are once again becoming abandoned, shuttered from the social standing they hold so dear. The old compacts are gone, Rhyd. High school and a knowledge of engines won’t cut it. The land and the money are going fast and by god they know it. […]

Trump knows his audience. He framed the government shutdown as the Democrats choosing “illegal immigrants” over paying the troops. The polls seem to show the people ate it up, which should come as no suprise. Trump strongholds in the South and rural America send a much higher proportion than the national average of their children into the armed forces, so any patriotic gesture is a sure winner among them. Recall too that polls indicate American troops continue to be stronger supporters of Trump than the public at large, U.S. veterans more pro-Trump than almost any other group. […]

Last year The Military Times conducted a confidential poll that revealed 42 percent of non-white troops polled had personally experienced examples of white nationalism in the military. When asked whether white nationalists pose a threat to national security, 30 percent of respondents labeled it a significant danger, more than many international hot spots, like Syria (27 percent), Pakistan (25 percent), Afghanistan (22 percent) and Iraq (17 percent).

Most disturbingly “a notable number of poll participants also bristled at the assertion that white power ideology is a real problem.”

“Nearly five percent of those polled left comments complaining that groups like Black Lives Matter — whose stated goal is to raise awareness of violence and discrimination towards black people — weren’t included among the options for threats to national security…

‘White nationalism is not a terrorist organization,’ wrote one Navy commander, who declined to give his name…

‘You do realize white nationalists and racists are two totally different types of people?’ wrote another anonymous Air Force staff sergeant.”

These ideas come home, not only in the soldiers but in the children they raise, spreading like the sound of laughter at a politician’s promise. Kathleen Belew, in her forthcoming book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, reveals a 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security that states the single factor correlating most highly with surges in Ku Klux Klan membership (going all the way back to the 1860’s) is an influx of veterans returning from war. […]

4 in 10 Southerners still sympathize with the Confederacy. Those are the same people making up the majority of the military, which is to say a large amount of people with a lot of guns holding a certain fondness for the idea of a civil war. Imagine if they had the blessing of the president, the highest honor in the land…

Read full article here:
Trump’s Military Parade Isn’t Fascist. It’s Older and Much Worse.

And from The Violent Ink, by rauldukeblog:

While it’s true that the train will now move to the next station what matters is what has mattered since day one: Trump is not normal. Even Nixon was, by governmental standards, normal. A cursory look at the facts shows that Nixon was as much of a monster as any number of other people who were creatures of the system but he turned on the system and that’s when things went off the rails. It’s one thing to rattle the nuclear saber but to do it while drunk and high on pills and to seriously say you want to drop a fat one on someone is where the other goons start looking for the nearest exit and a tranquilizer dart in the shape of impeachment.

Which brings us to Trump. It’s not just that, as we’ve said elsewhere and repeatedly, he’s an unhinged professional demagogue and amateur fascist. It’s that he really is incapable of understanding how the system works and he really is in the grip of several out of control pathologies each of which is at any moment capable of causing him to do something truly dangerous. Like pick up the phone and order someone to drop a bomb somewhere setting in motion a catastrophic chain of events.

It is not a joke, though it is funny, that at various times senior military figures have said in not so coded language, that they will not obey crazy orders from a crazy man. While that is a relief, it should still be cause for alarm. […]

Or, there will be a very loud coup which will be called something else (like the 25th amendment). […]

The damage that he can do lays in his causing the thugs to actually have to remove him and in forcing the spineless whores and old ladies of both sexes in the House and Senate and judiciary and the media to do the dirty work of what amounts to, staging a coup.

One of the things that so far has gone more or less unremarked upon in regards to the utterly vile Harvey Weinstein mess is the look – a hard look – at complicity. […] the entire creaking mess ran on complicity because the entire system demands obedience and is corrupt. And when someone says I didn’t see anything it all depends on the definition of seeing and of things.

Trump did not arrive from another planet any more than Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Hitler or Kissinger arrived from another planet. They were here all along.

That he is a monster is undeniable. That he is a symptom and not the disease is also undeniable but just look at all the complicit creeps lining up for their moment when he’s gone and the smouldering wreckage of the constitution and the limp remains of the shattered republic are on display and you’ll be able to hear them say (with unintended irony just as they did when they sent off Nixon) the magic words: the system worked.

Read full article here:
The Russians are Coming! And so is The Day of Reckoning.

12 Rules for Potential School Shooters

In response to the Parkland school shooting, Jared Sichel takes a different perspective. He puts it into the context of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.

I’m not sure of my opinion on this article, as might be noted by the title of this post. We should take Peterson seriously, but it is hard to know how his message applies to extreme cases of young males that are struggling to such an extent that they might commit mass violence. That is a lot to ask of a public intellectual, even when he has experience in clinical psychology as does Peterson.

The article begins with a general description of American school shooters, the implication being that by knowing who these people are we could help them before they turn violent (via the sage advice of a professorial father figure):

“He, like every one of America’s other young, school shooters since Columbine, is male. And like many, he grew up without a father present, is not socialized, is a loner, is not religious, sees himself as a victim, is angry and depressed, wants to get even, is attracted to violence, and meticulously planned his final, redemptive, act of chaos.”

I wanted to break this down a bit (although in less detail than I did with an earlier post on the demographics of violence). Let me start with the religious component. Whatever they identify or don’t identify as, many and maybe most school shooters were raised Christian and one wonders if that plays a role in their often expressing a loss of meaning, an existential crisis, etc. Birgit Pfeifer and Ruard R. Ganzevoort focus on the religious-like concerns that obsess so many school shooters and note that many of them had religious backgrounds:

“Traditionally, religion offers answers to existential concerns. Interestingly, school shootings have occurred more frequently in areas with a strong conservative religious population (Arcus 2002). Michael Carneal (Heath High School shooting, 1997, Kentucky) came from a family of devoted members of the Lutheran Church. Mitchell Johnson (Westside Middle School shooting, 1998, Arkansas) sang in the Central Baptist Church youth choir (Newman et al. 2004). Dylan Klebold (Columbine shooting, 1999, Colorado) attended confirmation classes in accordance with Lutheran tradition. However, not all school shooters have a Christian background. Some of them declare themselves atheists…” (The Implicit Religion of School Shootings).

Princeton sociologist Katherine Newman, in studying school shootings, has noted that, “School rampage shootings tend to happen in small, isolated or rural communities. There isn’t a very direct connection between where violence typically happens, especially gun violence in the United States, and where rampage shootings happen” (Common traits of all school shooters in the U.S. since 1970).

It is quite significant that these American mass atrocities are concentrated in “small, isolated or rural communities” that are “frequently in areas with a strong conservative religious population”. That might more precisely indicate who these school shooters are and what they are reacting to. Also, one might note that rural areas in general and specifically in the South do have high rates of gun-related deaths, although many of them are listed as ‘accidental’ which is to say most rural shootings involve people who know each other; also true of school shootings.

Sichel goes onto focus one particular descriptor of so many school shooters, that they are young males: “America is in the midst of a well-documented crisis of young males. […] “Boys are suffering in the modern world,” Peterson writes. […] Thus “toxic masculinity.” […] The combination of a toxic culture and broken homes has produced millions of anxious, confused, and even angry, teenage and young adult males.”

I’d put it more simply. America is in the midst of a well-documented crisis. Full stop. The crisis is found in every demographic and area of American society, even though it impacts and manifests in diverse ways of dysfunction and unhappiness.

But I might emphasize the point that some of the worst harmed are GenXers, which is to say middle agers, especially among certain demographics of white males such as in the lower classes and rural areas (the most harm in the relative sense of having experienced the greatest decline, the only demographic with worsening mortality rates). And I could add that GenXers — a generation with high rates of violent crime and social problems — are probably the majority of young parents right now, which is to say the parents of these school shooters and other struggling young men (and young women).

James Gilligan, among other issues, discusses this in terms of loss of status and loss of hope. This leads to stress and short term thinking, shame and frustration. Et cetera. It’s a whole mess of factors, across multiple generations, especially in considering how GenXers were the first mass incarcerated generation which caused much devastation, from absentee fathers to impoverished communities. It’s not only individuals who are hurting but also families and communities.

It just so happens that yesterday I wrote a post about American violence. Based on extensive data, I made the argument that lead toxicity and inequality are the most strongly proven explanations of violence, both in its increase and decrease. And it must be noted that violence in the US has been on a steep decline since the 1990s.

School shootings and other mass murder, however, is a different kind of action. Even though lead toxicity has been dealt with to some degree, although less so in poor communities (both inner city and rural communities full of old lead pipes and old buildings with lead paint), inequality keeps rising and that is one of the clearest predictors of a wide variety of social problems. And James Gilligan, as I discuss in that post, goes into great detail about why high inequality affects males differently than females. As part of his analysis of the stresses of inequality, he speaks of a culture of shame that particularly hits young men hard. To his credit, Jordan Peterson does admit that inequality is an important factor (as I recall, he discusses it in an interview with Russell Brand).

I’ll respond to one last bit from Sichel’s article: “And the aim of your life, Peterson argues, should not be happiness. He does not belittle it as a worthy pursuit among many, but “in a crisis, the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual.””

I wonder what Jordan Peterson would think of Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything. She clarifies the issue of individualism. The United States is simultaneously too individualistic and not individualistic enough. Or one could say that few Americans take seriously what individualism means or could mean, instead being mired in the pseudo-individualistic rhetoric that authoritarianism hides behind.

Partanen argues that the Nordic social democracies, on a practical level, have greater individual rights and freedoms. Individual happiness can only be attained through the public good. Nordic laws treat people as individuals, whereas US law prioritizes family which Partanen sees as being oppressive in how it is used to undermine public responsibility. The American nuclear family is expected to hold up the entirety of society, an impossible task.

This relates to the difference between the cultural notion of Germanic freedom (etymologically related to ‘friend’) and the legalistic tradition of Roman liberty (simply meaning one isn’t a slave). But I don’t think Partanen discusses this distinction. Maybe American (pseudo-)individualism is too legalistic. And maybe precisely because individualism is less of a political football in Nordic countries that genuine individualism is possible. Individualism can be a result of a functioning social democracy, but not a starting point as an abstract ideal.

 

* * *

Here is a relevant section from my violence post where I share a passage from Gilligan’s book. He goes into more detail about other factors influencing males, specifically young males. But this particular passage fits in with Partanen’s view. Simply put, it can’t so easily be blamed on family breakdown, missing fathers, and single mothers.

Preventing Violence
by James Gilligan
Kindle Locations 1218-1256

Single-Parent Families Another factor that correlates with rates of violence in the United States is the rate of single-parent families: children raised in them are more likely to be abused, and are more likely to become delinquent and criminal as they grow older, than are children who are raised by two parents. For example, over the past three decades those two variables—the rates of violent crime and of one-parent families—have increased in tandem with each other; the correlation is very close. For some theorists, this has suggested that the enormous increase in the rate of youth violence in the U.S. over the past few decades has been caused by the proportionately similar increase in the rate of single-parent families.

As a parent myself, I would be the first to agree that child-rearing is such a complex and demanding task that parents need all the help they can get, and certainly having two caring and responsible parents available has many advantages over having only one. In addition, children, especially boys, can be shown to benefit in many ways, including diminished risk of delinquency and violent criminality, from having a positive male role-model in the household. The adult who is most often missing in single-parent families is the father. Some criminologists have noticed that Japan, for example, has practically no single-parent families, and its murder rate is only about one-tenth as high as that of the United States.

Sweden’s rate of one-parent families, however, has grown almost to equal that in the United States, and over the same period (the past few decades), yet Sweden’s homicide rate has also been on average only about one-tenth as high as that of the U.S., during that same time. To understand these differences, we should consider another variable, namely, the size of the gap between the rich and the poor. As stated earlier, Sweden and Japan both have among the lowest degrees of economic inequity in the world, whereas the U.S. has the highest polarization of both wealth and income of any industrialized nation. And these differences exist even when comparing different family structures. For example, as Timothy M. Smeeding has shown, the rate of relative poverty is very much lower among single-parent families in Sweden than it is among those in the U.S. Even more astonishing, however, is the fact that the rate of relative poverty among single-parent families in Sweden is much lower than it is among two-parent families in the United States (“Financial Poverty in Developed Countries,” 1997). Thus, it would seem that however much family structure may influence the rate of violence in a society, the overall social and economic structure of the society—the degree to which it is or is not stratified into highly polarized upper and lower social classes and castes—is a much more powerful determinant of the level of violence.

There are other differences between the cultures of Sweden and the U.S. that may also contribute to the differences in the correlation between single-parenthood and violent crime. The United States, with its strongly Puritanical and Calvinist cultural heritage, is much more intolerant of both economic dependency and out-of-wedlock sex than Sweden. Thus, the main form of welfare support for single-parent families in the U.S. (until it was ended a year ago) A.F.D.C., Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was specifically denied to families in which the father (or any other man) was living with the mother; indeed, government agents have been known to raid the homes of single mothers with no warning in the middle of the night in order to “catch” them in bed with a man, so that they could then deprive them (and their children) of their welfare benefits. This practice, promulgated by politicians who claimed that they were supporting what they called “family values,” of course had the effect of destroying whatever family life did exist. Fortunately for single mothers in Sweden, the whole society is much more tolerant of people’s right to organize their sexual life as they wish, and as a result many more single mothers are in fact able to raise their children with the help of a man.

Another difference between Sweden and the U.S. is that fewer single mothers in Sweden are actually dependent on welfare than is true in the U.S. The main reason for this is that mothers in Sweden receive much more help from the government in getting an education, including vocational training; more help in finding a job; and access to high-quality free childcare, so that mothers can work without leaving their children uncared for. The U.S. system, which claims to be based on opposition to dependency, thus fosters more welfare dependency among single mothers than Sweden’s does, largely because it is so more miserly and punitive with the “welfare” it does provide. Even more tragically, however, it also fosters much more violence. It is not single motherhood as such that causes the extremely high levels of violence in the United States, then; it is the intense degree of shaming to which single mothers and their children are exposed by the punitive, miserly, Puritanical elements that still constitute a powerful strain in the culture of the United States.

* * *

After writing this post, another factor occurred to me related to this.

There aren’t only the chemicals kids get accidentally exposed to — including far from being limited to heavy metal toxins for there also such things as estrogen-like chemicals in plastics and the food supply, not to mention a thousand other largely untested chemicals that surround us on a daily basis — but also those we intentionally prescribe them such as the increasing use of psychiatric medications on the entire population, more problematically prescribed to the still developing youth. A relevant example are the ADD/ADHD medications that are given mostly to boys to get them, as some argue, to act less like boys and more like girls. And these drugs have been proven to permanently alter neurocognitive development, specifically affecting areas of the brain related to motivation.

Dr. Leonard Sax in Boys Adrift (see my post) argues that, by way of chemicals and drugs along with schools constraining and punishing typical male behavior, we have now raised two generations of boys who are stunted (physiologically, cognitively, and psychologically). This is seen in the growing gender disparity of sexual development, girls maturing earlier than ever before and boys reaching puberty later than seen with previous generations. The consequence of this is that more young women are now attending and graduating college, including in many fields (e.g., business management) that used to be dominated by males.

It’s even a wider problem than this. The dramatic changes are also seen in the larger ecosystem. Males of other species showing the effects of shrinking testicles and egg-laying, the latter being particularly non-typical for males of all species, in fact one of the defining features of not being male. It appears to be a multi-species gender problem. Boys aren’t just adrift but stunted and maybe mutating. Why would anyone be surprised that there is something severely problematic going on and that it is pervasive? Simplistic psychological and social explanations, especially of the culture war variety, are next to worthless.

Take the challenges targeting the young, especially boys, and combine them with the worsening problems of inequality and segregation, classism and racism, climate change and late stage capitalism, and all the rest. The worst cases of lost young males are indicators of deeper troubles coursing through our entire society. The stresses in the world right now are immense, leaving many to feel overwhelmed. If anything, I’m surprised there isn’t far more violence. With the increasingly obvious decline and dysfunction of the United States, I keep waiting for a massive wave of social turmoil, riots, revolts, assassinations, and terrorist attacks. The occasional school shooting is maybe just a sign of what is to come.

Connecting the Dots of Violence

When talking to people or reading articles, alternative viewpoints and interpretations often pop up in my mind. It’s easy for me to see multiple perspectives simultaneously, to hold multiple ideas. I have a creative mind, but I’m hardly a genius. So, why does this ability seem so rare?

The lack of this ability is not simply a lack of knowledge. I spent the first half of my life in an overwhelming state of ignorance because of inferior public education, exacerbated by a learning disability and depression. But I always had the ability of divergent thinking. It’s just hard to do much with divergent thinking without greater knowledge to work with. I’ve since then remedied my state of ignorance with an extensive program of self-education.

I still don’t know exactly what is this ability to see what others don’t see. There is an odd disconnect I regularly come across, even among the well educated. I encountered a perfect example of this from Yes! Magazine. It’s an article by Mike Males, Gun Violence Has Dropped Dramatically in 3 States With Very Different Gun Laws.

In reading that article, I immediately noticed the lack of any mention of lead toxicity. Then I went to the comments section and saw other people noticed this as well. The divergent thinking it takes to make this connection doesn’t require all that much education and brain power. I’m not particularly special in seeing what the author didn’t see. What is strange is precisely that the author didn’t see it, that the same would be true for so many like him. It is strange because the author isn’t some random person opinionating on the internet.

This became even stranger when I looked into Mike Males’ previous writing elsewhere. In the past, he himself had made this connection between violent crime and lead toxicity. Yet  somehow the connection slipped from his mind in writing this article. This more recent article was in response to an event, the Parkland school shooting in Florida. And the author seems to have gotten caught up in the short term memory of the news cycle, not only unable to connect it to other data but failing to connect it to his own previous writing on that data. Maybe it shows the power of context-dependent memory. The school shooting was immediately put into the context of gun violence and so the framing elicited certain ways of thinking while excluding others. Like so many others, the author got pulled into the media hype of the moment, entirely forgetting what he otherwise would have considered.

This is how people can simultaneously know and not know all kinds of things. The human mind is built on vast disconnections, maybe because there has been little evolutionary advantage to constantly perceive larger patterns of causation beyond immediate situations. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. It’s all too common. The thing is when such a disconnect happens the person is unaware of it — we don’t know what we don’t know and, as bizarre as it sounds, sometimes we don’t even know what we do know. So, even if I’m better than average at divergent thinking, there is no doubt that in other areas I too demonstrate this same cognitive limitation. It’s hard to see what doesn’t fit into our preconception, our worldview.

For whatever reason, lead toxicity has struggled to become included within public debate and political framing. Lead toxicity doesn’t fit into familiar narratives and the dominant paradigm, specifically in terms of a hyper-individualistic society. Even mental health tends to fall into this attitude of emphasizing the individual level, such as how the signs of mental illness could have been detected so that intervention could have stopped an individual from committing mass murder. It’s easier to talk about someone being crazy and doing crazy things than to question what caused them to become that way, be it toxicity or something else.

As such, Males’ article focuses narrowly without even entertaining fundamental causes, not limited to his overlooking lead toxicity. This is odd. We already know so much about what causes violence. The author himself has written multiple times on the topic, specifically in his professional capacity as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ). It’s his job to look for explanations and to communicate them, having written several hundred articles for CJCJ alone.

The human mind tends to go straight to the obvious, that is to say what is perceived as obvious within conventional thought. If the problem is gun violence, then the solution is gun control. Like most Americans (and increasingly so), I support more effective gun control. Still, that is merely dealing with the symptoms and doesn’t explain why someone wants to kill others. The views of the American public, though, don’t stop there. What the majority blames mass gun violence on is mental illness, a rather nebulous explanation. Mental illness also is a symptom.

That is what stands out about the omission I’m discussing here. Lead toxicity is one of most strongly proven causes of neugocognitive problems: stunted brain development, lowered IQ, learning disabilities, autism and Asperger’s, ADHD, depression, impulsivity, nervousness, irritability, anger, aggression, etc. All the heavy metals mess people up in the head, along with causing physical ailments such as hearing impairment, asthma, obesity, kidney failure, and much else. And that is talking about only one toxin among many, mercury being another widespread pollutant but there are many beyond that — this being directly relevant to the issue of violent behavior and crime, such as the high levels of toxins found in mass murderers:

“Three studies in the California prison system found those in prison for violent activity had significantly higher levels of hair manganese than controls, and studies of an area in Australia with much higher levels of violence as well as autopsies of several mass-murderers also found high levels of manganese to be a common factor. Such violent behavior has long been known in those with high manganese exposure. Other studies in the California prison and juvenile justice systems found that those with 5 or more essential mineral imbalances were 90% more likely to be violent and 50% more likely to be violent with two or more mineral imbalances. A study analyzing hair of 28 mass-murderers found that all had high metals and abnormal essential mineral levels.”

(See also: Lead was scourge before and after Beethoven by Kristina R. Anderson; Violent Crime, Hyperactivity and Metal Imbalance by Neil Ward; The Seeds that Give Birth to Terrorism by Kimberly Key; and An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018 by Kevin Drum)

Besides toxins, other factors have also been seriously studied. For example, high inequality is strongly correlated to increased mental illness rates along with aggressive, risky and other harmful behaviors (as written about in Keith Payne’s The Broken Ladder; an excerpt can be found at the end of this post). And indeed, even as lead toxicity has decreased overall (while remaining a severe problem among the poor), inequality has worsened.

There are multiple omissions going on here. And they are related. Where there are large disparities of wealth, there are also large disparities of health. Because of environmental classism and racism, toxic dumps are more likely to be located in poor and minority communities along with the problem of old housing with lead paint found where poverty is concentrated, all of it being related to a long history of economic and racial segregation. And I would point out that the evidence supports that, along with inequality, segregation creates a culture of distrust — as Eric Uslaner concluded: “It wasn’t diversity but segregation that led to less trust” (Segregation and Mistrust). In post-colonial countries like the United States, inequality and segregation go hand in hand, built on a socioeconomic system ethnic/racial castes and a permanent underclass that has developed over several centuries. The fact that this is the normal conditions of our country makes it all the harder for someone born here to fully sense its enormity. It’s simply the world we Americans have always known — it is our shared reality, rarely perceived for what it is and even more rarely interrogated.

These are far from being problems limited to those on the bottom of society. Lead toxicity ends up impacting a large part of the population. In reference to serious health concerns, Mark Hyman wrote, “that nearly 40 percent of all Americans are estimated to have blood levels of lead high enough to cause these problems” (Why Lead Poisoning May Be Causing Your Health Problems). The same thing goes for high inequality that creates dysfunction all across society, increasing social and health problems even among the upper classes, not to mention breeding an atmosphere of conflict and divisiveness (see James Gilligan’s Preventing Violence; an excerpt can be found at the end of this post). Everyone is worse off in a high amidst the unhappiness and dysfunction of a highly unequal society, far beyond homicides but also suicides, along with addiction and stress-related diseases.

Let’s look at the facts. Besides lead toxicity remaining a major problem in poor communities and old industrial inner cities, the United States has one of the highest rates of inequality in the world and the highest in the Western world, and this problem has been worsening for decades with present levels not seen since the Wall Street crash that led to the Great Depression. To go into the details, Florida has the fifth highest inequality in the United States, according to Mark Price and Estelle Sommeiller, with Florida having “all income growth between 2009 and 2011 accrued to the top 1 percent” (Economic Policy Institute). And Parkland, where the school shooting happened, specifically has high inequality: “The income inequality of Parkland, FL (measured using the Gini index) is 0.529 which is higher than the national average” (DATA USA).

In a sense, it is true that guns don’t kill people, that people kill people. But then again, it could be argued that people don’t kill people, that entire systemic problems triggers the violence that kills people, not even to talk about the immensity of slow violence that slowly kills people in even higher numbers. Lead toxicity is a great example of slow violence because of the 20 year lag time to fully measure its effects, disallowing the direct observation and visceral experience of causality and consequence. The topic of violence is important taken on its own terms (e.g., eliminating gun sales and permits to those with a history of violence would decrease gun violence), but my concern is exploring why it is so difficult to talk about violence in a larger and more meaningful way.

Lead toxicity is a great example for many reasons. It has been hard for advocates to get people to pay attention and take this seriously. Lead toxicity momentarily fell under the media spotlight with the Flint, Michigan case but that was just one of thousands of places with such problems, many of them with far worse rates. As always, as the media’s short attention span turned to some new shiny object, the lead toxicity crisis was forgotten again, as the poisoning continues. You can’t see it happening because it is always happening, an ever present tragedy that even when known remains abstract data. It is in the background and so has become part of our normal experience, operating at a level outside of our awareness.

School shootings are better able to capture the public imagination and so make for compelling dramatic narratives that the media can easily spin. Unlike lead toxicity, school shootings and their victims aren’t invisible. Lead toxins are hidden in the soil of playgrounds and the bodies of children (and prisoners who, as disproportionate victims of lead toxicity, are literally hidden away), whereas a bullet leaves dead bodies, splattered blood, terrified parents, and crying students. Neither can inequality compete with such emotional imagery. People can understand poverty because you can see poor people and poor communities, but you can’t see the societal pattern of dysfunction that exits between the dynamics of extreme poverty and extreme wealth. It can’t be seen, can’t be touched or felt, can’t be concretely known in personal experience.

Whether lead toxicity or high inequality, it is yet more abstract data that never quite gets a toehold within the public mind and the moral imagination. Even for those who should know better, it’s difficult for them to put the pieces together.

* * *

Here is the comment I left at Mike Males’ article:

I was earlier noting that Mike Males doesn’t mention lead exposure/toxicity/poisoning. I’m used to this being ignored in articles like this. Still, it’s disappointing.

It is the single most well supported explanation that has been carefully studied for decades. And the same conclusions have been found in other countries. But for whatever reason, public debate has yet to fully embrace this evidence.

Out of curiosity, I decided to do a web search. Mike Males works for Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. He writes articles there. I was able to find two articles where he directly and thoroughly discusses this topic:
http://www.cjcj.org/news/5548
http://www.cjcj.org/news/5552

He also mentions lead toxicity in passing in another article:
http://www.cjcj.org/news/9734

And Mike Males’ work gets referenced in a piece by Kevin Drum:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/kids-are-becoming-less-violent-adults-not-so-much/

This makes it odd that he doesn’t even mention it in passing here in this article. It’s not because he doesn’t know about the evidence, as he has already written about it. So, what is the reason for not offering the one scientific theory that is most relevant to the data he shares?

This seems straightforward to me. Consider the details from the article.

“Over the last 25 years—though other time periods show similar results—New York, California, and Texas show massive declines in gun homicides, ones that far exceed those of any other state. These three states also show the country’s largest decreases in gun suicide and gun accident death rates.”

The specific states in question were among the most polluting and hence polluted states. This means they had high rates of lead toxicity. And that means they had the most room for improvement. It goes without saying that national regulations and local programs will have the greatest impact where there are the worst problems (similar to the reason, as studies show, it is easier to increase the IQ of the poor than the wealthy by improving basic conditions).

“These major states containing seven in 10 of the country’s largest cities once had gun homicide rates far above the national average; now, their rates are well below those elsewhere in the country.”

That is as obvious as obvious can be. Yeah, the largest cities are also the places of the largest concentrations of pollution. Hence, one would expect to find the highest rates and largest improvements in lead toxicity, which has been proven to directly correlate to violent crime rates (with causality proven through dose-response curve, the same methodology used to prove efficacy of pharmaceuticals).

“The declines are most pronounced in urban young people.”

Once again, this is the complete opposite of surprising. It is exactly as what we would expect. Urban areas have the heaviest and most concentrated vehicular traffic along with the pollution that goes with it. And urban areas are often old industrial centers with a century of accumulated toxins in the soil, water, and elsewhere in the environment. These specific old urban areas are also where old houses are found which are affordable for the poor, but unfortunately are more likely to have old lead paint that is chipping away and turning into dust.

So, problem solved. The great mystery is no more. You’re welcome.

https://www.epa.gov/air-pollution-transportation/accomplishments-and-success-air-pollution-transportation

“Congress passed the landmark Clean Air Act in 1970 and gave the newly-formed EPA the legal authority to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation. EPA and the State of California have led the national effort to reduce vehicle pollution by adopting increasingly stringent standards.”

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/lead/lead-2012report.pdf

The progress has been dramatic. For both children and adults, the number and severity of poisonings has declined. At the same time, blood lead testing rates have increased, especially in populations at high risk for lead poisoning. This public health success is due to a combination of factors, most notably commitment to lead poisoning prevention at the federal, state and city levels. New York City and New York State have implemented comprehensive policies and programs that support lead poisoning prevention. […]

“New York City’s progress in reducing childhood lead poisoning has been striking. Not only has the number of children with lead poisoning declined —a 68% drop from 2005 to 2012 — but the severity of poisonings has also declined. In 2005, there were 14 children newly identified with blood lead levels of 45 µg/dL and above, and in 2012 there were 5 children. At these levels, children require immediate medical intervention and may require hospitalization for chelation, a treatment that removes lead from the body.

“Forty years ago, tackling childhood lead poisoning seemed a daunting task. In 1970, when New York City established the Health Department’s Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, there were over 2,600 children identified with blood lead levels of 60 µg/dL or greater — levels today considered medical emergencies. Compared with other parts of the nation, New York City’s children were at higher risk for lead poisoning primarily due to the age of New York City’s housing stock, the prevalence of poverty and the associated deteriorated housing conditions. Older homes and apartments, especially those built before 1950, are most likely to contain lead­based paint. In New York City, more than 60% of the housing stock — around 2 million units — was built before 1950, compared with about 22% of housing nationwide.

“New York City banned the use of lead­based paint in residential buildings in 1960, but homes built before the ban may still have lead in older layers of paint. Lead dust hazards are created when housing is poorly maintained, with deteriorated and peeling lead paint, or when repair work in old housing is done unsafely. Young children living in such housing are especially at risk for lead poisoning. They are more likely to ingest lead dust because they crawl on the floor and put their hands and toys in their mouths.

“While lead paint hazards remain the primary source of lead poisoning in New York City children, the number and rate of newly identified cases and the associated blood lead levels have greatly declined.

“Strong Policies Aimed at Reducing Childhood Lead Exposure

“Declines in blood lead levels can be attributed largely to government regulations instituted in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that banned or limited the use of lead in gasoline, house paint, water pipes, solder for food cans and other consumer products. Abatement and remediation of lead­based paint hazards in housing, and increased consumer awareness of lead hazards have also contributed to lower blood lead levels.

“New York City developed strong policies to support lead poisoning prevention. Laws and regulations were adopted to prevent lead exposure before children are poisoned and to protect those with elevated blood lead levels from further exposure.”

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/

“But if all of this solves one mystery, it shines a high-powered klieg light on another: Why has the lead/crime connection been almost completely ignored in the criminology community? In the two big books I mentioned earlier, one has no mention of lead at all and the other has a grand total of two passing references. Nevin calls it “exasperating” that crime researchers haven’t seriously engaged with lead, and Reyes told me that although the public health community was interested in her paper, criminologists have largely been AWOL. When I asked Sammy Zahran about the reaction to his paper with Howard Mielke on correlations between lead and crime at the city level, he just sighed. “I don’t think criminologists have even read it,” he said. All of this jibes with my own reporting. Before he died last year, James Q. Wilson—father of the broken-windows theory, and the dean of the criminology community—had begun to accept that lead probably played a meaningful role in the crime drop of the ’90s. But he was apparently an outlier. None of the criminology experts I contacted showed any interest in the lead hypothesis at all.

“Why not? Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the ’60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously.

“More generally, we all have a deep stake in affirming the power of deliberate human action. When Reyes once presented her results to a conference of police chiefs, it was, unsurprisingly, a tough sell. “They want to think that what they do on a daily basis matters,” she says. “And it does.” But it may not matter as much as they think.”

* * *

The Broken Ladder:
How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die
by Keith Payne
pp. 69-80

How extensive are the effects of the fast-slow trade-off among humans? Psychology experiments suggest that they are much more prevalent than anyone previously suspected, influencing people’s behaviors and decisions in ways that have nothing to do with reproduction. Some of the most important now versus later trade-offs involve money. Financial advisers tell us that if we skip our daily latte and instead save that three dollars a day, we could increase our savings by more than a thousand dollars a year. But that means facing a daily choice: How much do I want a thousand dollars in the bank at the end of the year? And how great would a latte taste right now?

The same evaluations lurk behind larger life decisions. Do I invest time and money in going to college, hoping for a higher salary in the long run, or do I take a job that guarantees an income now? Do I work at a regular job and play by the rules, even if I will probably struggle financially all my life, or do I sell drugs? If I choose drugs, I might lose everything in the long run and end up broke, in jail, or dead. But I might make a lot of money today.

Even short-term feelings of affluence or poverty can make people more or less shortsighted. Recall from the earlier chapters that subjective sensations of poverty and plenty have powerful effects, and those are usually based on how we measure ourselves against other people. Psychologist Mitch Callan and colleagues combined these two principles and predicted that when people are made to feel poor, they will become myopic, taking whatever they can get immediately and ignoring the future. When they are made to feel rich, they would take the long view.

Their study began by asking research participants a long series of probing questions about their finances, their spending habits, and even their personality traits and personal tastes. They told participants that they needed all this detailed information because their computer program was going to calculate a personalized “Comparative Discretionary Income Index.” They were informed that the computer would give them a score that indicated how much money they had compared with other people who were similar to them in age, education level, personality traits, and so on. In reality, the computer program did none of that, but merely displayed a little flashing progress bar and the words “Calculating. Please wait . . .” Then it provided random feedback to participants, telling half that they had more money than most people like them, and the other half that they had less money than other people like them.

Next, participants were asked to make some financial decisions, and were offered a series of choices that would give them either smaller rewards received sooner or larger rewards received later. For example, they might be asked, “Would you rather have $ 100 today or $ 120 next week? How about $ 100 today or $ 150 next week?” After they answered many such questions, the researchers could calculate how much value participants placed on immediate rewards, and how much they were willing to wait for a better long-term payoff.

The study found that, when people felt poor, they tilted to the fast end of the fast-slow trade-off, preferring immediate gratification. But when they felt relatively rich, they took the long view. To underscore the point that this was not simply some abstract decision without consequences in the real world, the researchers performed the study again with a second group of participants. This time, instead of hypothetical choices, the participants were given twenty dollars and offered the chance to gamble with it. They could decline, pocket the money, and go home, or they could play a card game against the computer and take their chances, in which case they either would lose everything or might make much more money. When participants were made to feel relatively rich, 60 percent chose to gamble. When they were made to feel poor, the number rose to 88 percent. Feeling poor made people more willing to roll the dice.

The astonishing thing about these experiments was that it did not take an entire childhood spent in poverty or affluence to change people’s level of shortsightedness. Even the mere subjective feeling of being less well-off than others was sufficient to trigger the live fast, die young approach to life.

Nothing to Lose

Most of the drug-dealing gang members that Sudhir Venkatesh followed were earning the equivalent of minimum wage and living with their mothers. If they weren’t getting rich and the job was so dangerous, then why did they choose to do it? Because there were a few top gang members who were making several hundred thousand dollars a year. They made their wealth conspicuous by driving luxury cars and wearing expensive clothes and flashy jewelry. They traveled with entourages. The rank-and-file gang members did not look at one another’s lives and conclude that this was a terrible job. They looked instead at the top and imagined what they could be. Despite the fact that their odds of success were impossibly low, even the slim chance of making it big drove them to take outrageous risks.

The live fast, die young theory explains why people would focus on the here and now and neglect the future when conditions make them feel poor. But it does not tell the whole story. The research described in Chapter 2 revealed that rates of many health and social problems were higher, even among members of the middle class, in societies where there was more inequality. One of the puzzling aspects of the rapid rise of inequality over the past three decades is that almost all of the change in fortune has taken place at the top. The incomes of the poor and the middle class are not too different from where they were in 1980, once the numbers are adjusted for inflation. But the income and wealth of the top 1 percent have soared, and those of the top one tenth of a percent dwarfed even their increases. How are the gains of the superrich having harmful effects on the health and well-being of the rest of us? […]

As Cartar suspected, when the bees received bonus nectar, they played it safe and fed in the seablush fields. But when their nectar was removed, they headed straight for the dwarf huckleberry fields.

Calculating the best option in an uncertain environment is a complicated matter; even humans have a hard time with it. According to traditional economic theories, rational decision making means maximizing your payoffs. You can calculate your “expected utility” by multiplying the size of the reward by the likelihood of getting it. So, an option that gives you a 90 percent chance of winning $ 500 has a greater expected utility than an option that gives you a 40 percent chance of winning $ 1,000 ($ 500 × .90 = $ 450 as compared with $ 1,000 × .40 = $ 400). But the kind of decision making demonstrated by the bumblebees doesn’t necessarily line up well with the expected utility model. Neither, it turns out, do the risky decisions made by the many other species that also show the same tendency to take big risks when they are needy.

Humans are one of those species. Imagine what you would do if you owed a thousand dollars in rent that was due today or you would lose your home. In a gamble, would you take the 90 percent chance of winning $ 500, or the 40 percent chance of winning $ 1,000? Most people would opt for the smaller chance of getting the $ 1,000, because if they won, their need would be met. Although it is irrational from the expected utility perspective, it is rational in another sense, because meeting basic needs is sometimes more important than the mathematically best deal. The fact that we see the same pattern across animal species suggests that evolution has found need-based decision making to be adaptive, too. From the humble bumblebee, with its tiny brain, to people trying to make ends meet, we do not always seek to maximize our profits. Call it Mick Jagger logic: If we can’t always get what we want, we try to get what we need. Sometimes that means taking huge risks.

We saw in Chapter 2 that people judge what they need by making comparisons to others, and the impact of comparing to those at the top is much larger than comparing to those at the bottom. If rising inequality makes people feel that they need more, and higher levels of need lead to risky choices, it implies a fundamentally new relationship between inequality and risk: Regardless of whether you are poor or middle class, inequality itself might cause you to engage in riskier behavior. […]

People googling terms like “lottery tickets” and “payday loans,” for example, are probably already involved in some risky spending. To measure sexual riskiness, we counted searches for the morning-after pill and for STD testing. And to measure drug- and alcohol-related risks, we counted searches for how to get rid of a hangover and how to pass a drug test. Of course, a person might search for any of these terms for reasons unrelated to engaging in risky behaviors. But, on average, if there are more people involved in sex, drugs, and money risks, you would expect to find more of these searches.

Armed with billions of such data points from Google, we asked whether the states where people searched most often for those terms were also the states with higher levels of income inequality. To help reduce the impact of idiosyncrasies related to each search term, we averaged the six terms together into a general risk-taking index. Then we plotted that index against the degree of inequality in each state. The states with higher inequality had much higher risk taking, as estimated from their Google searches. This relationship remained strong after statistically adjusting for the average income in each state.

If the index of risky googling tracks real-life risky behavior, then we would expect it to be associated with poor life outcomes. So we took our Google index and tested whether it could explain the link, reported in Chapter 2, between inequality and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s index of ten major health and social problems. Indeed, the risky googling index was strongly correlated with the index of life problems. Using sophisticated statistical analyses, we found that inequality was a strong predictor of risk taking, which in turn was a strong predictor of health and social problems. These findings suggest that risky behavior is a pathway that helps explain the link between inequality and bad outcomes in everyday life. The evidence becomes much stronger still when we consider these correlations together with the evidence of cause and effect provided by the laboratory experiments.

Experiments like the ones described in this chapter are essential for understanding the effects of inequality, because only experiments can separate the effects of the environment from individual differences in character traits. Surely there were some brilliant luminaries and some dullards in each experimental group. Surely there were some hearty souls endowed with great self-control, and some irresponsible slackers, too. Because they were assigned to the experimental groups at random, it is exceedingly unlikely that the groups differed consistently in their personalities or abilities. Instead, we can be confident that the differences we see are caused by the experimental factor, in this case making decisions in a context of high or low inequality. […]

Experiments are gentle reminders that, in the words of John Bradford, “There but for the grace of God go I.” If we deeply understand behavioral experiments, they make us humble. They challenge our assumption that we are always in control of our own successes and failures. They remind us that, like John Bradford, we are not simply the products of our thoughts, our plans, or our bootstraps.

These experiments suggest that any average person, thrust into these different situations, will start behaving differently. Imagine that you are an evil scientist with a giant research budget and no ethical review board. You decide to take ten thousand newborn babies and randomly assign them to be raised by families in a variety of places. You place some with affluent, well-educated parents in the suburbs of Atlanta. You place others with single mothers in inner-city Milwaukee, and so on. The studies we’ve looked at suggest that the environments you assign them to will have major effects on their futures. The children you assign to highly unequal places, like Texas, will have poorer outcomes than those you assign to more equal places, like Iowa, even though Texas and Iowa have about the same average income.

In part, this will occur because bad things are more likely to happen to them in unequal places. And in part, it will occur because the children raised in unequal places will behave differently. All of this can transpire even though the babies you are randomly assigning begin life with the same potential abilities and values.

pp. 116-121

If you look carefully at Figure 5.1, you’ll notice that the curve comparing different countries is bent. The relatively small income advantage that India has over Mozambique, for example, translates into much longer lives in India. Once countries reach the level of development of Chile or Costa Rica, something interesting happens: The curve flattens out. Very rich countries like the United States cease to have any life expectancy advantage over moderately rich countries like Bahrain or even Cuba. At a certain level of economic development, increases in average income stop mattering much.

But within a rich country, there is no bend; the relationship between money and longevity remains linear. If the relationship was driven by high mortality rates among the very poor, you would expect to see a bend. That is, you would expect dramatically shorter lives among the very poor, and then, once above the poverty line, additional income would have little effect. This curious absence of the bend in the line suggests that the link between money and health is not actually a reflection of poverty per se, at least not among economically developed countries. If it was extreme poverty driving the effect, then there would be a big spike in mortality among the very poorest and little difference between the middle- and highest-status groups.

The linear pattern in the British Civil Service study is also striking, because the subjects in this study all have decent government jobs and the salaries, health insurance, pensions, and other benefits that are associated with them. If you thought that elevated mortality rates were only a function of the desperately poor being unable to meet their basic needs, this study would disprove that, because it did not include any desperately poor subjects and still found elevated mortality among those with lower status.

Psychologist Nancy Adler and colleagues have found that where people place themselves on the Status Ladder is a better predictor of health than their actual income or education. In fact, in collaboration with Marmot, Adler’s team revisited the study of British civil servants and asked the research subjects to rate themselves on the ladder. Their subjective assessments of where they stood compared with others proved to be a better predictor of their health than their occupational status. Adler’s analyses suggest that occupational status shapes subjective status, and this subjective feeling of one’s standing, in turn, affects health.

If health and longevity in developed countries are more closely linked to relative comparisons than to income, then you would expect that societies with greater inequality would have poorer health. And, in fact, they do. Across the developed nations surveyed by Wilkinson and Pickett, those with greater income equality had longer life expectancies (see Figure 5.3). Likewise, in the United States, people who lived in states with greater income equality lived longer (see Figure 5.4). Both of these relationships remain once we statistically control for average income, which means that inequality in incomes, not just income itself, is responsible.

But how can something as abstract as inequality or social comparisons cause something as physical as health? Our emergency rooms are not filled with people dropping dead from acute cases of inequality. No, the pathways linking inequality to health can be traced through specific maladies, especially heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and health problems stemming from obesity. Abstract ideas that start as macroeconomic policies and social relationships somehow get expressed in the functioning of our cells.

To understand how that expression happens, we have to first realize that people from different walks of life die different kinds of deaths, in part because they live different kinds of lives. We saw in Chapter 2 that people in more unequal states and countries have poor outcomes on many health measures, including violence, infant mortality, obesity and diabetes, mental illness, and more. In Chapter 3 we learned that inequality leads people to take greater risks, and uncertain futures lead people to take an impulsive, live fast, die young approach to life. There are clear connections between the temptation to enjoy immediate pleasures versus denying oneself for the benefit of long-term health. We saw, for example, that inequality was linked to risky behaviors. In places with extreme inequality, people are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, more likely to have unsafe sex, and so on. Other research suggests that living in a high-inequality state increases people’s likelihood of smoking, eating too much, and exercising too little.

Taken together, this evidence implies that inequality leads to illness and shorter lives in part because it gives rise to unhealthy behaviors. That conclusion has been very controversial, especially on the political left. Some argue that it blames the victim because it implies that the poor and those who live in high-inequality areas are partly responsible for their fates by making bad choices. But I don’t think it’s assigning blame to point out the obvious fact that health is affected by smoking, drinking too much, poor diet and exercise, and so on. It becomes a matter of blaming the victim only if you assume that these behaviors are exclusively the result of the weak characters of the less fortunate. On the contrary, we have seen plenty of evidence that poverty and inequality have effects on the thinking and decision making of people living in those conditions. If you or I were thrust into such situations, we might well start behaving in more unhealthy ways, too.

The link between inequality and unhealthy behaviors helps shed light on a surprising trend discovered in a 2015 paper by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Death rates have been steadily declining in the United States and throughout the economically developed world for decades, but these authors noticed a glaring exception: Since the 1990s, the death rate for middle-aged white Americans has been rising. The increase is concentrated among men and whites without a college degree. The death rate for black Americans of the same age remains higher, but is trending slowly downward, like that of all other minority groups.

The wounds in this group seem to be largely self-inflicted. They are not dying from higher rates of heart disease or cancer. They are dying of cirrhosis of the liver, suicide, and a cycle of chronic pain and overdoses of opiates and painkillers.

The trend itself is striking because it speaks to the power of subjective social comparisons. This demographic group is dying of violated expectations. Although high school– educated whites make more money on average than similarly educated blacks, the whites expect more because of their history of privilege. Widening income inequality and stagnant social mobility, Case and Deaton suggest, mean that this generation is likely to be the first in American history that is not more affluent than its parents.

Unhealthy behaviors among those who feel left behind can explain part of the link between inequality and health, but only part. The best estimates have found that such behavior accounts for about one third of the association between inequality and health. Much of the rest is a function of how the body itself responds to crises. Just as our decisions and actions prioritize short-term gains over longer-term interests when in a crisis, the body has a sophisticated mechanism that adopts the same strategy. This crisis management system is specifically designed to save you now, even if it has to shorten your life to do so.

* * *

Preventing Violence
by James Gilligan
Kindle Locations 552-706

The Social Cause of Violence

In order to understand the spread of contagious disease so that one can prevent epidemics, it is just as important to know the vector by which the pathogenic organism that causes the disease is spread throughout the population as it is to identify the pathogen itself. In the nineteenth century, for example, the water supply and the sewer system were discovered to be vectors through which some diseases became epidemic. What is the vector by which shame, the pathogen that causes violence, is spread to its hosts, the people who succumb to the illness of violence? There is a great deal of evidence, which I will summarize here, that shame is spread via the social and economic system. This happens in two ways. The first is through what we might call the “vertical” division of the population into a hierarchical ranking of upper and lower status groups, chiefly classes, castes, and age groups, but also other means by which people are divided into in-groups and out-groups, the accepted and the rejected, the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, the honored and the dishonored. For people are shamed on a systematic, wholesale basis, and their vulnerability to feelings of humiliation is increased when they are assigned an inferior social or economic status; and the more inferior and humble it is, the more frequent and intense the feelings of shame, and the more frequent and intense the acts of violence. The second way is by what we could call the “horizontal” asymmetry of social roles, or gender roles, to which the two sexes are assigned in patriarchal cultures, one consequence of which is that men are shamed or honored for different and in some respects opposite behavior from that which brings shame or honor to women. That is, men are shamed for not being violent enough (called cowards or even shot as deserters), and are more honored the more violent they are (with medals, promotions, titles, and estates)—violence for men is successful as a strategy. Women, however, are shamed for being too active and aggressive (called bitches or unfeminine) and honored for being passive and submissive—violence is much less likely to protect them against shame.

Relative Poverty and Unemployment

The most powerful predictor of the homicide rate in comparisons of the different nations of the world, the different states in the United States, different counties, and different cities and census tracts, is the size of the disparities in income and wealth between the rich and the poor. Some three dozen studies, at least, have found statistically significant correlations between the degree of absolute as well as relative poverty and the incidence of homicide, Hsieh and Pugh in 1993 did a meta-analysis of thirty-four such studies and found strong statistical support for these findings, as have several other reviews of this literature: two on homicide by Smith and Zahn in 1999; Chasin in 1998; Short in 1997; James in 1995; and individual studies, such as Braithwaite in 1979 and Messner in 1980.

On a worldwide basis, the nations with the highest inequities in wealth and income, such as many Third World countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, have the highest homicide rates (and also the most collective or political violence). Among the developed nations, the United States has the highest inequities in wealth and income, and also has by far the highest homicide rates, five to ten times larger than the other First World nations, all of which have the lowest levels of inequity and relative poverty in the world, and the lowest homicide rates. Sweden and Japan, for example, have had the lowest degree of inequity in the world in recent years, according to the World Bank’s measures; but in fact, all the other countries of western Europe, including Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have a much more equal sharing of their collective wealth and income than either the United States or virtually any of the Second or Third World countries, as well as the lowest murder rates.

Those are cross-sectional studies, which analyze the populations being studied at one point in time. Longitudinal studies find the same result: violence rates climb and fall over time as the disparity in income rises and decreases, both in the less violent and the more violent nations. For example, in England and Wales, as Figures 1 and 2 show, there was an almost perfect fit between the rise in several different measures of the size of the gap between the rich and the poor, and the number of serious crimes recorded by the police between 1950 and 1990. Figure 1 shows two measures of the gradual widening of income differences, which accelerated dramatically from 1984 and 1985. Figure 2 shows the increasing percentage of households and families living in relative poverty, a rate that has been particularly rapid since the late 1970s, and also the number of notifiable offences recorded by the police during the same years. As you can see, the increase in crime rates follows the increase in rates of relative poverty almost perfectly. As both inequality and crime accelerated their growth rates simultaneously, the annual increases in crime from one year to the next became larger than the total crime rate had been in the early 1950s. If we examine the rates for murder alone during the same period, as reported by the Home Office, we find the same pattern, namely a progression from a murder rate that averaged 0.6 per 100,000 between 1946 and 1970, increased to 0.9 from 1971–78, and increased yet again to an average of 1.1 between 1979 and 1997 (with a range of 1.0 to 1.3) To put it another way, 1.2 and 1.3, the five highest levels since the end of World War II, were recorded in 1987, 1991, 1994, 1995 and 1997, ail twice as high as the 1946–70 average.

The same correlation between violence and relative poverty has been found in the United States. The economist James Galbraith in Created Unequal (1997) has used inequity in wages as one measure of the size and history of income inequity between the rich and the poor from 1920 to 1992. If we correlate this with fluctuations in the American homicide rate during the same period, we find that both wage inequity and the homicide rate increased sharply in the slump of 1920–21, and remained at those historically high levels until the Great Crash of 1929, when they both jumped again, literally doubling together and suddenly, to the highest levels ever observed up to that time. These record levels of economic inequality (which increase, as Galbraith shows, when unemployment increases) were accompanied by epidemic violence; both murder rates and wage inequity remained twice as high as they had previously been, until the economic leveling effects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, beginning in 1933, and the Second World War a few years later, combined to bring both violence and wage inequity down by the end of the war to the same low levels as at the end of the First World War, and they both remained at those low levels for the next quarter of a century, from roughly 1944 to 1968.

That was the modern turning point. In 1968 the median wage began falling, after having risen steadily for the previous three decades, and “beginning in 1969 inequality started to rise, and continued to increase sharply for fifteen years,” (J. K. Galbraith). The homicide rate soon reached levels twice as high as they had been during the previous quarter of a century (1942–66). Both wage inequality and homicide rates remained at those relatively high levels for the next quarter of a century, from 1973 to 1997. That is, the murder rate averaged 5 per 100,000 population from 1942 to 1966, and 10 per 100,000 from 1970 to 1997. Finally, by 1998 unemployment dropped to the lowest level since 1970; both the minimum wage and the median wage began increasing again in real terms for the first time in thirty years; and the poverty rate began dropping. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate also fell, for the first time in nearly thirty years, below the range in which it had been fluctuating since 1970–71 (though both rates, of murder and of economic inequality, are still higher than they were from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s).

As mentioned before, unemployment rates are also relevant to rates of violence. M. H. Brenner found that every one per cent rise in the unemployment rate is followed within a year by a 6 per cent rise in the homicide rate, together with similar increases in the rates of suicide, imprisonment, mental hospitalization, infant mortality, and deaths from natural causes such as heart attacks and strokes (Mental Illness and the Economy, 1973, and uPersonal Stability and Economic Security,” 1977). Theodore Chiricos reviewed sixty-three American studies and concluded that while the relationship between unemployment and crime may have been inconsistent during the 1960s (some studies found a relationship, some did not), it became overwhelmingly positive in the 1970s, as unemployment changed from a brief interval between jobs to enduring worklessness (“Rates of Crime and Unemployment,” 1987). David Dickinson found an exceptionally close relationship between rates of burglary and unemployment for men under twenty-five in the U.K. in the 1980s and 1990s (“Crime and Unemployment,” 1993). Bernstein and Houston have also found statistically significant correlations between unemployment and crime rates, and negative correlations between wages and crime rates, in the U.S. between 1989 and 1998 (Crime and Work, 2000).

If we compare Galbraith’s data with U.S. homicide statistics, we find that the U.S. unemployment rate has moved in the same direction as the homicide rate from 1920 to 1992: increasing sharply in 1920–21, then jumping to even higher levels from the Crash of 1929 until Roosevelt’s reforms began in 1933, at which point the rates of both unemployment and homicide also began to fall, a trend that accelerated further with the advent of the war. Both rates then remained low (with brief fluctuations) until 1968, when they began a steady rise which kept them both at levels higher than they had been in any postwar period, until the last half of 1997, when unemployment fell below that range and has continued to decline ever since, followed closely by the murder rate.

Why do economic inequality and unemployment both stimulate violence? Ultimately, because both increase feelings of shame (Gilligan, Violence). For example, we speak of the poor as the lower classes, who have lower social and economic status, and the rich as the upper classes who have higher status. But the Latin for lower is inferior, and the word for the lower classes in Roman law was the humiliores. Even in English, the poor are sometimes referred to as the humbler classes. Our language itself tells us that to be poor is to be humiliated and inferior, which makes it more difficult not to feel inferior. The word for upper or higher was superior, which is related to the word for pride, superbia (the opposite of shame), also the root of our word superb (another antonym of inferior). And a word for the upper classes, in Roman law, was the honestiores (related to the word honor, also the opposite of shame and dishonor).

Inferiority and superiority are relative concepts, which is why it is relative poverty, not absolute poverty, that exposes people to feelings of inferiority. When everyone is on the same level, there is no shame in being poor, for in those circumstances the very concept of poverty loses its meaning. Shame is also a function of the gap between one’s level of aspiration and one’s level of achievement. In a society with extremely rigid caste or class hierarchies, it may not feel so shameful to be poor, since it is a matter of bad luck rather than of any personal failing. Under those conditions, lower social status may be more likely to motivate apathy, fatalism, and passivity (or “passive aggressiveness”), and to inhibit ambition and the need for achievement, as Gunnar Myrdal noted in many of the caste-ridden peasant cultures that he studied in Asian Drama (1968). Caste-ridden cultures, however, may have the potential to erupt into violence on a revolutionary or even genocidal scale, once they reject the notion that the caste or class one is born into is immutable, and replace it with the notion that one has only oneself to blame if one remains poor while others are rich. This we have seen repeatedly in the political and revolutionary violence that has characterized the history of Indonesia, Kampuchea, India, Ceylon, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and many other areas throughout Asia during the past half-century.

All of which is another way of saying that one of the costs people pay for the benefits associated with belief in the “American Dream,” the myth of equal opportunity, is an increased potential for violence. In fact, the social and economic system of the United States combines almost every characteristic that maximizes shame and hence violence. First, there is the “Horatio Alger” myth that everyone can get rich if they are smart and work hard (which means that if they are not rich they must be stupid or lazy, or both). Second, we are not only told that we can get rich, we are also stimulated to want to get rich. For the whole economic system of mass production depends on whetting people’s appetites to consume the flood of goods that are being produced (hence the flood of advertisements). Third, the social and economic reality is the opposite of the Horatio Alger myth, since social mobility is actually less likely in the U.S. than in the supposedly more rigid social structures of Europe and the U.K. As Mishel, Bernstein and Schmitt have noted:

Contrary to widely held perceptions, the U.S. offers less economic mobility than other rich countries. In one study, for example, low-wage workers in the U.S. were more likely to remain in the low-wage labor market five years longer than workers in Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden (all the other countries studied in this analysis). In another study, poor households in the U.S. were less likely to leave poverty from one year to the next than were poor households in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom (all the countries included in this second analysis).
(The State of Working America 2000–2001, 2001)

Fourth, as they also mention, “the U.S. has the most unequal income distribution and the highest poverty rates among all the advanced economies in the world. The U.S. tax and benefit system is also one of the least effective in reducing poverty.” The net effect of all these features of U.S. society is to maximize the gap between aspiration and attainment, which maximizes the frequency and intensity of feelings of shame, which maximizes the rates of violent crimes.

It is difficult not to feel inferior if one is poor when others are rich, especially in a society that equates self-worth with net worth; and it is difficult not to feel rejected and worthless if one cannot get or hold a job while others continue to be employed. Of course, most people who lose jobs or income do not commit murders as a result; but there are always some men who are just barely maintaining their self-esteem at minimally tolerable levels even when they do have jobs and incomes. And when large numbers of them lose those sources of self-esteem, the number who explode into homicidal rage increases as measurably, regularly, and predictably as any epidemic does when the balance between pathogenic forces and the immune system is altered.

And those are not just statistics. I have seen many individual men who have responded in exactly that way under exactly these circumstances. For example, one African-American man was sent to the prison mental hospital I directed in order to have a psychiatric evaluation before his murder trial. A few months before that, he had had a good job. Then he was laid off at work, but he was so ashamed of this that he concealed the fact from his wife (who was a schoolteacher) and their children, going off as if to work every morning and returning at the usual time every night. Finally, after two or three months of this, his wife noticed that he was not bringing in any money. He had to admit the truth, and then his wife fatally said, “What kind of man are you? What kind of man would behave this way?” To prove that he was a man, and to undo the feeling of emasculation, he took out his gun and shot his wife and children. (Keeping a gun is, of course, also a way that some people reassure themselves that they are really men.) What I was struck by, in addition to the tragedy of the whole story, was the intensity of the shame he felt over being unemployed, which led him to go to such lengths to conceal what had happened to him.

Caste Stratification

Caste stratification also stimulates violence, for the same reasons. The United States, perhaps even more than the other Western democracies, has a caste system that is just as real as that of India, except that it is based on skin color and ethnicity more than on hereditary occupation. The fact that it is a caste system similar to India’s is registered by the fact that in my home city, Boston, members of the highest caste are called “Bsoston Brahmins” (a.k.a. “WASPs,” or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). The lowest rung on the caste ladder, corresponding to the “untouchables” or Harijan, of India, is occupied by African-Americans, Native Americans, and some Hispanic-Americans. To be lower caste is to be rejected, socially and vocationally, by the upper castes, and regarded and treated as inferior. For example, whites often move out of neighborhoods when blacks move in; blacks are “the last to be hired and the first to be fired,” so that their unemployment rate has remained twice as high as the white rate ever since it began being measured; black citizens are arrested and publicly humiliated under circumstances in which no white citizen would be; respectable white authors continue to write books and articles claiming that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites; and so on and on, ad infinitum. It is not surprising that the constant shaming and attributions of inferiority to which the lower caste groups are subjected would cause members of those groups to feel shamed, insulted, disrespected, disdained, and treated as inferior—because they have been, and because many of their greatest writers and leaders have told us that this is how they feel they have been treated by whites. Nor is it surprising that this in turn would give rise to feelings of resentment if not rage, nor that the most vulnerable, those who lacked any non-violent means of restoring their sense of personal dignity, such as educational achievements, success, and social status, might well see violence as the only way of expressing those feelings. And since one of the major disadvantages of lower-caste status is lack of equal access to educational and vocational opportunities, it is not surprising that the rates of homicide and other violent crimes among all the lower-caste groups mentioned are many times higher, year after year, than those of the upper-caste groups.

Kindle Locations 1218-1256

Single-Parent Families Another factor that correlates with rates of violence in the United States is the rate of single-parent families: children raised in them are more likely to be abused, and are more likely to become delinquent and criminal as they grow older, than are children who are raised by two parents. For example, over the past three decades those two variables—the rates of violent crime and of one-parent families—have increased in tandem with each other; the correlation is very close. For some theorists, this has suggested that the enormous increase in the rate of youth violence in the U.S. over the past few decades has been caused by the proportionately similar increase in the rate of single-parent families.

As a parent myself, I would be the first to agree that child-rearing is such a complex and demanding task that parents need all the help they can get, and certainly having two caring and responsible parents available has many advantages over having only one. In addition, children, especially boys, can be shown to benefit in many ways, including diminished risk of delinquency and violent criminality, from having a positive male role-model in the household. The adult who is most often missing in single-parent families is the father. Some criminologists have noticed that Japan, for example, has practically no single-parent families, and its murder rate is only about one-tenth as high as that of the United States.

Sweden’s rate of one-parent families, however, has grown almost to equal that in the United States, and over the same period (the past few decades), yet Sweden’s homicide rate has also been on average only about one-tenth as high as that of the U.S., during that same time. To understand these differences, we should consider another variable, namely, the size of the gap between the rich and the poor. As stated earlier, Sweden and Japan both have among the lowest degrees of economic inequity in the world, whereas the U.S. has the highest polarization of both wealth and income of any industrialized nation. And these differences exist even when comparing different family structures. For example, as Timothy M. Smeeding has shown, the rate of relative poverty is very much lower among single-parent families in Sweden than it is among those in the U.S. Even more astonishing, however, is the fact that the rate of relative poverty among single-parent families in Sweden is much lower than it is among two-parent families in the United States (“Financial Poverty in Developed Countries,” 1997). Thus, it would seem that however much family structure may influence the rate of violence in a society, the overall social and economic structure of the society—the degree to which it is or is not stratified into highly polarized upper and lower social classes and castes—is a much more powerful determinant of the level of violence.

There are other differences between the cultures of Sweden and the U.S. that may also contribute to the differences in the correlation between single-parenthood and violent crime. The United States, with its strongly Puritanical and Calvinist cultural heritage, is much more intolerant of both economic dependency and out-of-wedlock sex than Sweden. Thus, the main form of welfare support for single-parent families in the U.S. (until it was ended a year ago) A.F.D.C., Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was specifically denied to families in which the father (or any other man) was living with the mother; indeed, government agents have been known to raid the homes of single mothers with no warning in the middle of the night in order to “catch” them in bed with a man, so that they could then deprive them (and their children) of their welfare benefits. This practice, promulgated by politicians who claimed that they were supporting what they called “family values,” of course had the effect of destroying whatever family life did exist. Fortunately for single mothers in Sweden, the whole society is much more tolerant of people’s right to organize their sexual life as they wish, and as a result many more single mothers are in fact able to raise their children with the help of a man.

Another difference between Sweden and the U.S. is that fewer single mothers in Sweden are actually dependent on welfare than is true in the U.S. The main reason for this is that mothers in Sweden receive much more help from the government in getting an education, including vocational training; more help in finding a job; and access to high-quality free childcare, so that mothers can work without leaving their children uncared for. The U.S. system, which claims to be based on opposition to dependency, thus fosters more welfare dependency among single mothers than Sweden’s does, largely because it is so more miserly and punitive with the “welfare” it does provide. Even more tragically, however, it also fosters much more violence. It is not single motherhood as such that causes the extremely high levels of violence in the United States, then; it is the intense degree of shaming to which single mothers and their children are exposed by the punitive, miserly, Puritanical elements that still constitute a powerful strain in the culture of the United States.

Kindle Locations 1310-1338

Social and Political Democracy Since the end of the Second World War, the homicide rates of the nations of western Europe, and Japan, for example, have been only about a tenth as high as those of the United States, which is another way of saying that they have been preventing 90 per cent of the violence that the U.S. still experiences. Their rates of homicide were not lower than those in the U.S. before. On the contrary, Europe and Asia were scenes of the largest numbers of homicides ever recorded in the history of the world, both in terms of absolute numbers killed and in the death rates per 100,000 population, in the “thirty years’ war” that lasted from 1914 to 1945. Wars, and governments, have always caused far more homicides than all the individual murderers put together (Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, 1960; Keeley, War Before Civilization, 1996.) After that war ended, however, they all took two steps which have been empirically demonstrated throughout the world to prevent violence. They instituted social democracy (or “welfare states,” as they are sometimes called), and achieved an unprecedented decrease in the inequities in wealth and income between the richest and poorest groups in the population, one effect of which is to reduce the frequency of interpersonal or “criminal” violence. And Germany, Japan and Italy adopted political democracy as well, the effect of which is to reduce the frequency of international violence, or warfare (including “war crimes”).

While the United States adopted political democracy at its inception, it is the only developed nation on earth that has never adopted social democracy (a “welfare state”). The United States alone among the developed nations does not provide universal health insurance for all its citizens; it has the highest rate of relative poverty among both children and adults, and the largest gap between the rich and the poor, of any of the major economies; vastly less adequate levels of unemployment insurance and other components of shared responsibility for human welfare; and so on. Thus, it is not surprising that it also has murder rates that have been five to ten times as high as those of any other developed nation, year after year. It is also consistent with that analysis that the murder rate finally fell below the epidemic range in which it had fluctuated without exception for the previous thirty years (namely, 8 to II homicides per 100,000 population per year), only in 1998, after the unemployment rate reached its lowest level in thirty years and the rate of poverty among the demographic groups most vulnerable to violence began to diminish—slightly—for the first time in thirty years.

Some American politicians, such as President Eisenhower, have suggested that the nations of western Europe have merely substituted a high suicide rate for the high homicide rate that the U.S. has. In fact, the suicide rates in most of the other developed nations are also substantially lower than those of the United States, or at worst not substantially higher. The suicide rates throughout the British Isles, the Netherlands, and the southern European nations are around one-third lower than those of the U.S.; the rates in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as Norway and Luxembourg, are about the same. Only the remaining northern and central European countries and Japan have suicide rates that are higher, ranging from 30 per cent higher to roughly twice as high as the suicide rate of the U.S. By comparison, the U.S. homicide rate is roughly ten times as high as those of western Europe (including the U.K., Scandinavia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria), southern Europe, and Japan; and five times as high as those of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. No other developed nation has a homicide rate that is even close to that of the U.S.