Sandra Bland, a young African American woman, was pulled over for “improperly signaling a lane change.” The officer then arrested her for assaulting a police officer. She was in jail for three days, and then right before getting out, she apparently hanged herself. I love the “assaulting a police officer” charge. The police commonly brutalize people during arrests, but if they get accidentally slapped in the process: “Police brutality!” But we know it is all nonsense, because the police department put the arresting officer on “administrative duty” because they claim that the arrest was improper.

The question is why did a simple traffic stop turn into an arrest. Bland was not some street kid. She was a college graduate who had recently moved to Texas for a job working at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M University. But she was from Chicago, so maybe she was just too sassy with the officer. In fact, I’m 99% certain that is what happened. The greatest crime in the United State is to not show the police enough respect. And as the police get less and less respectable, they demand this respect more and more. They think they deserve it. I think they deserve unemployment.

Many people don’t accept that Bland killed herself. I don’t have as hard a time accepting this. People who are not used to being in jail have a tendency to freak out about it. And even after three days in jail, it may have simply occurred to the 28 year old Bland that her live was over. Now she would have an arrest and almost certainly a felony on her record. It is quite understandable that she would not see the situation in perceptive. She was, after all, someone who had done everything right: went to college, got a good job. And now this.

What I fear will happen in this case is that the jail video will show that she did in fact kill herself. And that will be the end of it. But that isn’t the end of it. People don’t just end up dead in jail cells. She was there because a wimpy police officer got his fee-fees hurt because the woman from the big city didn’t treat him right. And then, they put her in a badly maintained, under staffed jail where a number of other people have managed to kill themselves without being noticed.

The original sin was with the arresting officer. And he brutalized her. As is seen in a video of the incident, Sandra Bland says, “You just slammed my head into the ground, do you not even care about that?” But of course they don’t care about that. They have bigger issues on their minds. They have egos the size of Manhattan that are fragile as a sickly egg. And if it takes beating up young women and oppressing them into suicide, that’s okay. Because the police must be respected. And young Africans Americans like Sandra Bland don’t matter.

Afterword

I am not a violent man. And this feeling won’t last. What’s more, I know this is a systemic problem. But right now, I so want to see that police officer publicly whipped. If that happened, it would perhaps have an effect on the systemic problem that is our racist and fear-based policing.

Jonathan Bernstein explained something important, Why Obama Won’t Stop Talking About Iran. The situation right now is that Congress has 60 days to pass a law killing the deal. I’ll come back to that. But the main thing is that Obama needs Congress to do what it does best: nothing. Of course, when it comes to really bad things, Congress is usually eager to act. So this bill should have little problem making it through through the House. In the Senate, the Democrats might be able to filibuster it. But in the end, Obama will probably have to veto it, and that means he can’t allow 290 votes in the House — and that would require only 43 Democratic defections.

Bernstein explained that under normal circumstances, when presidents talk about pending legislation, it just causes more polarization. But in this case, that’s exactly what he wants. All he needs is for the Democrats to remain cohesive. So the more he talks, the more that should happen. And in this case, he has nothing to lose. The Republicans hate him and everything he does. Other than some must-pass legislation like the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions, there has basically been no Republican support for anything that Obama is in favor of.

The whole thing makes me very sad. I really do think that the Republican Party has it out for America. They believe that they must destroy the America that is in order to create the “America” of their delusions. I seriously wonder if 9/11 happened today, how would the Republicans respond? Would they fall in line and decide we are one big country? Or would they instead start impeachment proceedings? This is a serious question. But it is most concerning that I’m no longer sure of the answer. As it is, conservatives are linking the Iran deal to what looks like some kind of ISIS wannabe attack in Chattanooga. I think these people would see Obama as part of the attackers, not the victims.

It reminds me the moral of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” This speaks very much to the Republican Party of the last two decades. I’ve never thought that Newt Gingrich actually believed the nonsense that he spouted. He’s just a power hungry jerk. He figured out a way to get people to vote for him. And 20 years later, not only is the Republican base in a constant state of fear and outrage, now most of the establishment Republicans are too. The biggest change in the House is not how many seats the Republicans control, but just how fanatical the people who hold those seats are.

So here we are with what looks like a good deal with Iran. Yet the Republicans are against the deal on principle. A lot of them would only be happy with a war with Iran. But few of them have the strength of their convictions. And that means in practice, they don’t want to do anything: no military engagement but also no diplomatic engagement. It’s the same old thing: just pretend that the situation doesn’t exist and hope it goes away; in the mean time, talk tough but do nothing. And this is apparently what the American electorate wants. It doesn’t want war, but it wants to feel “strong” to ease its constant fear of, well, everything.

We are lucky that in this case, all we need to get something done is nothing. But I won’t feel good until this is all done. Because I can easily see the Republicans grabbing a handful of Democrats in the Senate or a few dozen in the House. Fear, outrage, and stupidity is not something that the Republicans have a lock on. Keep talking Mr President; it may well be our best way forward.

Last week, Matt Taibbi wrote, Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold. I will admit to not staying up on matters of corporate malfeasance. But I find it especially outraging whenever I do read about it. And I’ve long had major problems with Eric Holder. Taibbi summed him up this way, “He institutionalized a radical dualistic approach to criminal justice, essentially creating a system of indulgences wherein the world’s richest companies paid cash for their sins and escaped the sterner punishments the law dictated.” That’s what so terrible about it all: the double standard where the poor get prison and the rich get, well, nothing.

But I didn’t know that Holder came from a top corporate law firm before he became Attorney General. He made $2.5 million as a partner at Covington & Burling, the last year he was there. And for the six years he was gone, they left his old office empty, waiting for the day that he would return. And now that day has arrived. And we can only assume that the corporate criminals that Holder consistently let get away will be very happy to pay him and his law firm back now.

Taibbi figures that the amount of money that Holder saved the banking industry amounts to billions of dollars, just based upon what happened to bank share prices after each wrist slap was announced by the Justice Department. But it doubtless goes deeper than that. After all, what is the value of not going to prison for a bank CEO? It’s got to be huge for them. Not only are people like that terrified of prison, but every year they were in prison would have been tens of millions of dollars that they weren’t getting paid. So I have little doubt that the bankers are indeed very pleased with Holder, and thus Covington & Burling is too.

As Attorney General, Holder invented a concept called “collateral consequences.” According to it, the Justice Department should avoid criminal prosecutions against banks “if they believed prosecuting them might result in too much ‘collateral’ damage.” This is exactly “too big to jail.” And think about that. When a father is sent to prison, it has huge consequences beyond those of the man imprisoned. His family is devastated. The consequences span generations. Yet no judge cares about this. But when it comes to the richest, most powerful people, well, considerations must be made.

Another thing that Holder pushed was the “extrajudicial settlement.” These were agreements with banks that circumvented the judicial system. The reason for this is so that even judges aren’t able to stick their noses in the process. You see, some judges would occasionally look at the giveaways that Holder and company were offering to the banks, and balk. The banks didn’t like this because the deals were great for them. And Holder didn’t like this because it highlighted what a farce he was as Attorney General.

There are plenty of other things like Holder allowing banks to call fines for wrongdoing “remedial payments,” so they could write them off (that is, make taxpayers pay part of them). But the picture is clear. On the other hand, Holder was the perfect Attorney General for Obama: a man totally beholden to the power elite, who thinks that being beholden is the right thing to do.

Steve M over at No More Mister Nice Blog wrote, The Conservative Ethic: Punish the Losers. It’s a comparison of two articles by Paul Krugman: one about Jeb Bush and the idea that Americans should work more, and one about Europe’s cruel treatment of Greece. They certainly are linked. The essence of conservatism is that those with power are the right kind of people and those without it are the wrong kind of people. This is what leads to hundreds of billions of dollars given to banks without a thought but protests in the streets about helping home owners.

But I think Steve trivialized the situation a bit when he wrote, “The underdogs are supposed to do all the sacrificing, because the world is divided into the deserving and the undeserving, and the deserving shouldn’t really sacrifice at all.” Certainly, that’s true on some level, but it is just how the disease presents itself. The cause is deeper. And he got at it when he summed up the thinking of the power elite, “They think of themselves as the ones who have a genuine work ethic and who are willing to delay gratification, but in reality they insist that their gratification must proceed uninterrupted, because they deserve that.”

There are two attributes of the power elite that motive them. The first is a callousness toward others. All people have a tendency to over-honor those they are around and to mistrust those they aren’t. But the poor don’t dehumanize the rich, because our entire media and entertainment system is designed to lionize the rich. For every appearance of Montgomery Burns, there is an appearance of Undercover Boss and literally dozens of “rich people as oracles” segments on the news. And that is to say nothing of rich guy superheroes like Bat Man and Iron Man. These are the images our society has of the rich. The images the society has of the poor are of unkempt and dirty street people — usually also criminals. So it is no wonder that the rich especially can disregard them as undeserving.

The other attribute of the power elite is that they are shortsighted. That is a great irony, of course. As Steve noted, they are the ones who think they delay gratification, but they do no such thing. And the best example of this is how they fight tooth and nail against anything that will help the working class. You literally cannot help the poor without indirectly helping the rich. But you can very easily help the rich without helping the poor. Helping the poor grows the economy. The rich would be richer with more equality, but that might take a couple of quarters — even years. Can’t have that!

But it also takes us back to the first attribute of callousness. To a large extent, the rich don’t care about the absolute level of their wealth. It is the relative wealth. And that is a zero sum game. The rich can’t feel rich unless the poor are doing badly. If it came down to it, I’m sure the rich would be happier being poorer if the working class did even worse, than they would be to be wealthier if the working class were to close the gap. Of course, I don’t expect a rich person to think this in the abstract, but this is the conclusion based on how they act.

So there you have it. The rich are shortsighted and callous. It isn’t that they are necessarily horrible people — at least at first. But our system of economics and politics makes them horrible. And this is why they feel very good about themselves as they call for the lower classes to work more hours or for Greece to suffer for another decade or two.