You Must Be Kidding

I hear the talk all the time about how our civil liberties are slowly being eroded. This is happening because we are letting it happen. The people in charge don't want us to have any power or question their actions at all. This is why a cop at UC Davis gets away with pepper spraying a whole line of peaceful protestors. This is why a cop in Oakland gets away with spraying a tear gas canister into a crowd and almost kill someone. But the column I read today in the New York Times about an innocent, pregnant woman named Malaika Brooks trying to drive her kid to school takes the cake for the worst act of abuse of power I have ever heard.

This poor woman was doing nothing but driving her kid to school when she was pulled over for speeding. She was doing 32 in a 20 mph zone. I would say she deserved a ticket. But that was far from all that happened to her.

She was given a speeding ticket but refused to sign it, mistakenly believing that doing so was an admission of guilt. She was told that refusal to sign the ticket would result in her arrest but she would not change her mind. A sergeant arrived at the scene and instructed the officers to arrest Ms. Brooks. She refused to get out of the car. She told the officers she was pregnant and had to go to the bathroom. They asked her how pregnant she was. As if that makes a difference.

Her son had by now left the car and walked to the school. This spared the young child from having to witness the atrocity that was then committed against his mother. The police tasered her three times in less than a minute, first in her thigh, then in her arm and then in her neck, causing her intense pain, leaving permanent scars and finally rendering her unconscious. 

Thank God she gave birth to a healthy baby. The officers were admonished for excessive use of force, but it has been ruled that no action can be taken against them because the law written to regulate the use of Tasers was not written clearly to cover such an incident. The woman is seeking damages in civil court.

There shouldn't need to be a law. Common sense should tell you that tasering a pregnant woman is cruel and unnecessary. Any judge that says differently should be immediately removed from the bench.

But the deeper question is, what are we becoming? When a helpless woman with an unborn child who poses no threat can be abused in such fashion, the time has come for some serious soul searching. This is supposed to be a democracy, government of the people by the people. Policeman have sworn to protect and serve. How did these officers protect and serve in this case? Suppose the woman had died, which has happened before. Would these officers still face no charges because the law is unclear?

What is clear is that these officers wanted to use their high tech toy to hurt someone. They acted without any conscience whatsoever and, to add insult to injury, they are seeking to have even their admonishment overturned because they are so sure that they have the right to inflict their cruelty upon anyone they choose.

This is becoming a consistent pattern. Public servants who inflict pain upon the innocent public. A new system has to be developed to screen out the psychopaths who want to become police officers. We need public servants who actually place serving  the public before their own ego. We cannot call ourselves a civil society when we allow such injustices to go unpunished. This is the kind of hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy that fuels the hatred of terrorists. Wake up people, your America is vanishing before your eyes.

We Still Haven't Learned

The disclosure the other day that JP Morgan experienced a two billion dollar loss in its trading portfolio came as no surprise. We gave the banks nothing more than a slap on the wrist after they created the last crisis. No one went to jail or was even prosecuted. Practices that ruined the lives of thousands of Americans went unpunished. So why should we expect the banks to learn any lesson from their past misdeeds?

What did we do? We bailed them out. We had to do that. But we should have put conditions in place to make sure crises like the one we still haven't recovered from can't happen again. We have tried. Laws were passed. But the banks were successful in lobbying to make sure the laws were so watered down as to be ineffective.

So I say we haven't learned. Why do I say we? It can be seen that the banks have learned nothing. They are content to take their unnecessary risks and don't care if they create another crisis. They'll get bailed out again if need be. But what is more important is that we haven't learned. We, the people. We have allowed our lawmakers to water down the laws and listen when the banks say they can handle the risks. We are complacent. We are content to let our lawmakers do nothing. But of course when the next crisis happens we will raise our voices in protest and ask how our lawmakers let this happen again. But it won't be their fault exclusively. It will be the fault of every American citizen who sits back and lets Congress do nothing and be unduly influenced by the institutions they are in charge of regulating.

Most disturbing is the silence from Occupy Wall St. I look at their website this morning and I see no mention of any planned protests in the wake of JP Morgan's revelation. If I was the leader of the movement I would have issued an immediate call for a massive protest. Instead of some nebulous agenda, which the movement has often been accused of, here would have been the chance to scream about something real, something that we can all relate to, another misdeed that an overpaid executive perpetrated by not properly considering the risks he was taking. By staging a protest with a solid agenda, the movement could have legitimized itself and set itself on a course towards wider acceptance.

But, of course, what has happened is that this important event has passed without being exploited for the opportunity it presents. Sure, they will be looked at and a report will be made, but in the end, the banks will water this story down as well and Congress will excuse this so called "aberration" and let the banks go on taking unnecessary risks.

We can all sit back and be more concerned with Mariano Rivera's torn ACL and Amar'e Stoudamire's lack of self control. And when our standard of living has deteriorated to the point where major services have to be eliminated and 25 to 30% of the population lives in poverty, then we will all scream for Congress to act. And when they fail to act, it won't be there fault, it will be ours. All 300 million of us who fail to hold our elected officials accountable. And in our wonderful American way, it will be spun into something else by the mainstream media so we can point our fingers and evade our responsibility.

I Welcome Tracy Jordan- In Support of Dr. Janine Caffrey

I welcome a new contributor to my blog, Tracy Jordan. She is a good friend and a passionate resident of Perth Amboy, dedicated to shedding light on this town's many problems. Together we will be creating a new town paper, The Perth Amboy Wave, which will debut in the next 60 days.

I am posting this letter as a relatively new resident of the City of Perth Amboy. I moved here five years ago. I write to express support of Dr. Janine Caffrey, Superintendent of Schools for the Perth Amboy Public Schools for two distinct, yet related, reasons.

First, after attending several Perth Amboy Board of Education meetings, and keeping an eye on the Board of Ed website, Dr. Caffrey has earned my respect as a competent and forward-thinking change maker. She is focused and action-oriented. At the meetings I attended, various staff members presented everything from new curricula and creative teaching methods to meet high academic goals, to tracking databases and increased parental input mechanisms. All of these initiatives are being implemented under the administration of Dr. Caffrey. Frankly, I was very pleasantly surprised and very relieved. This leads me to my second reason.

Up to and including this year, Perth Amboy’s public school system ranked 500 out of 559 in the State of New Jersey (Source: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Dept of Education, and New Jersey Dept. of Education. Rank score is determined by averaging). I don’t have any children of my own and neither do most of my friends in this town. But that does not mean that I am not affected by the level of performance of our school children. Not at all.

I consider myself to be quite fortunate. I have held good jobs here, I currently own a business and a waterfront home. However, much to my distress, what I have seen over the past five years, is that parents of young children move out of town as the time draws near for their child to enter school. This has happened too many times for me to count. However, my experience has been that long time residents of Perth Amboy do not want to hear that. They supposedly “love” Perth Amboy, insinuating that I must not since I am “so negative.” Imagine all of the parents, or soon to be parents, who never even move here in the first place because the quality of the school system is considered to be substandard. If you don’t think that affects the quality of life of every person in this town, then you need to think again.

This city that I do love needs to break its pattern of poor decision making at critical moments. Ambitious waterfront development plans – scrapped. Five full time economic development jobs merged into one and all left vacant by the retirement of one very overworked woman. The willful disintegration of our Chamber of Commerce. Property assessments conducted by our assessor in a “random” pattern that goes unexplained. The list goes on and on and on.

Now we are faced with the possibility of losing a qualified and effective education administrator. And for what? It is frightening to think that the reason could be that she’s actually implementing the sweeping, dramatic changes needed to overhaul an educational system that languishes in the bottom 10% of the State. I implore the Perth Amboy Board of Education to not take another step backwards at yet another critical moment in the revitalization of Perth Amboy.