Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015
Stephan: In yesterday's edition I ran a story from the Guardian, the leading newspaper in the British international press, about how commonplace bribery is in the U.S. Congress, and how cheaply you can buy a senator. It was the kind of story publications like The New York Times used to write about the corruption in Latin American governments. Basically business as usual. Do I need to say that I could find nothing in the Times or the rest of the U.S. corporate media on the subject?
Today the Guardian takes on another of those issues that we in the States either cannot or will not address ourselves, about ourselves. I am speaking about the statistics on police shootings of Americans. Here is the first of what I suspect will be a horrifying series of reports.
This is how the United States looks to those in other countries. Are you O.K. with this, I certainly am not.
The Guardian has, through its new investigative project The Counted, developed the capacity to count the number of people killed by police.
Credit: Nate Kitch/Guardian
In her biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, Valerie Boyd explains why it was so difficult to track Hurston’s whereabouts during the novelist’s early twenties. “In 1911 it was relatively easy for someone, particularly a black woman, to evade history’s recording gaze,” wrote Boyd in Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. “If not legally linked to a man, as daughter or wife, black women did not count in some ways – at least to the people who did the official counting.”
The question of who counts and whom is counted is not simply a matter of numbers. It’s also about power; the less of it you have the less say you have in what makes it to the ledger […]
Even more deaths of peoples pets such as dogs being shot by police for nothing more than being in their way or just doing their job of protecting their home. Ours is an immoral species with no consciousness in most of our minds to guide us in most “advanced” cultures.