DAVID EDWARDS, - Raw Story
Stephan: In 1964, when President Johnson signed the voting rights act, I thought that, "well we are still far from being racially blind, but we're on our way. Civil Rights worked." I was wrong. I think racism is worse in some quarters than it was in the 60s. Consider this:
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A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Republican-appointed judges on average give black Americans sentences that are three months longer than those given to white convicts.
In a paper released this month, researchers Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang concluded that a judge’s political ideology can impact the sentencing of non-white criminals.
“In sharp contrast to the prior literature relying on court-level variation, we find economically meaningful and statistically significant evidence that judge political affiliation is a source of disparities in federal sentencing,” the authors explained. “We find that Republican-appointed judges give substantially longer prison sentences to black offenders versus observably similar non-black offenders compared to Democratic-appointed judges within the same district court.”
“The racial gap by political affiliation is 3.0 months, approximately 65 percent of the baseline racial sentence gap,” the paper observed. “We also find that Republican-appointed judges give female defendants 2.0 months less in prison than similar male defendants compared to Democratic-appointed judges, 17 percent of the baseline gender sentence gap.”
The authors noted that much of […]
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Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Trump is destroying the 70 year old geopolitical structure that has maintained the peace, and we are going to come out of the Trump era severely diminished.
Credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP
BERLIN — Since Jan. 20, 2017, European leaders have managed U.S. relations with one eye on the clock, anxiously counting down the hours until President Trump’s term is up and hoping the core of the Western alliance isn’t too badly damaged in the meantime.
But as Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward America’s closest allies has evolved into hostile action this spring, a new fear has swept European capitals.
Trump may not be an aberration that can be waited out, with his successor likely to push reset after four or eight years of fraught ties. Instead, the blend of unilateralism, nationalism and protectionism Trump embodies may be the new American normal.
“It is dawning on a number of European players that Trump may not be an outlier,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “More and more people are seeing it as a larger change in the United States.”
Even before Trump was elected, Europeans sensed that Washington’s traditional role as guarantor of […]
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Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton - truthdig
Stephan: Everyday now I am seeing reports, essays, and research papers about the growing crisis that is America; Chris Hedges writes an excellent example of what I mean. I have never in my life previously seen this kind of commentary coming out of rational well-educated men and women. The very existence of this mainstream literature is a matter of note, and concern.
Credit: Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many […]
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School shootings in US outnumber other G7 nations
