The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings →

...As Rebecca Traister has written, for New York magazine, “what perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often have in common more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories of domestic violence.” Traister cites Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, last summer, and Omar Mateen, the Pulse night-club shooter. She also cites Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in 2015. According to Traister, “two of his three ex-wives reportedly accused him of domestic abuse, and he had been arrested in 1992 for rape and sexual violence.”
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Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass shooter. But it’s clear that an alarming number of those who have been accused of domestic abuse pose serious and often a lethal threats, not just to their intimate partners but to society at large.
The statistical correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings has also been documented. As the Times reported:
When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed F.B.I. data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims — and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.

Illinois legislature passes civil asset forfeiture reform →

Hopefully a national trend:

The Illinois House of Representatives voted 100-1 in favor of an amendment to House Bill 303, meaning the bill ultimately passed. If the governor signs the bill into law, it will take effect July 1, 2018.
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Law enforcement uses a tool called asset forfeiture, which breaks down into two categories. Criminal asset forfeiture allows government agencies to take property the government has proved was involved in criminal activity. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement officials to seize property they suspect was involved in criminal activity; no conviction is required for officials to take property under civil asset forfeiture laws.
Eighty-seven percent of all federal property seizures are civil, not criminal – meaning that most often, property is taken from people not convicted of a crime, according to a report from the Institute for Justice.
Since 2005, while federal law enforcement took in more than $404 million through asset forfeiture in Illinois, state and local law enforcement took $319 million from private citizens over the same time period.
The most important reform in the amended version of HB 303 is that the legislation shifts the burden of proof from the property owner to the government. In simple terms, that means that when law enforcement decides to take property under forfeiture laws, the state must be able to show a court that law enforcement was entitled to seize the property. Today, that burden falls on property owners, who must make the case to keep their property.
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The legislation also eliminates the requirement that property owners must pay a “cost bond” equal to 10 percent of the value of the seized property before their case can be heard by a judge. Currently, some of Illinois’ forfeiture laws require property owners to post a “cost bond” of 10 percent of the property’s value and to agree to pay all costs and expenses of forfeiture proceedings in the event the government prevails, in order to have the case heard by a judge. Failure to post the bond will result in nonjudicial forfeiture of the property. Even if the claimant prevails in the forfeiture case, the law provides that the circuit court clerk shall retain 10 percent of the bond amount as “costs.”

How inequality makes our government corrupt and our democracy weak →

In absolute terms, lawmakers have had their pay cut by 10 percent since 2009. And like most Americans (but not CEOs), they received less compensation in 2015 than they did in 1975. It seems odd to say that members of Congress have more in common with the average American than they do with corporate CEOs, but in this case, it is true. Of course, $174,000 is pretty great compared to most people in a country where the median household income is about a third of that. And it is. But it’s peanuts relative to CEO pay; the average CEO made $12.2 million in 2015. And the salary for members of Congress is actually less than an average 26-year-old first-year lawyer gets at a top corporate law firm. The differential is often starker with state level legislators. In fact, politicians have actually seen relative pay stagnation along with teachers, social workers, journalists, and most American workers.
This differential shows how much we value our public sector leadership versus our private sector leadership. We are say that CEOs are the essential actors in our culture, while public leadership is a sinecure for the already wealthy.
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...Lobbyists write statutes, track process, enact legislative strategy, and work with administrative agencies to make sure the laws are carried out. It’s just government work, on a private payroll. And corporate interests are a lot more effective if most Hill staffers are 23-year-olds with second jobs bartending to make the rent. Current anti-corruption models, like underpaying congressman, staff, state legislators and regulators, will simply lead to more power for corporate interests that are only too happy to pay for governing work that favors them. The combined attack on the public sector and its ability to govern, and the dramatic concentration in the control of corporate resources, has led to a dangerously weak and unbalanced political culture.
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If we want to restore a democratic culture, we’re going to have to not just raise the pay of public servants, but reduce inequality dramatically. We must attack the problem of a two-tiered society. We must go after the concentration of corporate assets through strong competition and anti-monopoly policy so that we don’t have a society split between billionaires with rights and powerless peasants living with varying degrees of comfort. Basic public goods – quality education, health care, transportation, nutrition — must be available to all without the need to incur huge debts. Private sector CEOs perhaps should be able to have more lavish lifestyles than the rest of us, but it should be a matter of living a fancier version of the same life. No one should go broke if they have a medical problem, not just because that’s a problem in and of itself, but because that is a route to social corruption.
There is no free lunch. If we want a functioning democracy, we need to pay for a functioning public sector. If public servants are treated poorly relative to corporate CEOs, then we will get bribed and subservient public servants and government via the board room. Public servants, and citizens themselves, will become dependent upon private concentrations of power. If we want to stabilize our society, we must strengthen the public institutions designed to protect our democracy. If we don’t, we may not have a democracy for much longer.

The Data Defying The Job-Killing Robot Myth →

The story of mass displacement of workers by robots is a story of rapid productivity growth. Robots are supposed to be doing the work formerly done by people. This means that we should be seeing far more output for each hour of human labor. This is something we can easily check, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts out data on productivity growth every quarter.
Rather than going through the roof as the robot story would imply, productivity growth has fallen through the floor. It’s averaged just 1.2 percent annually in the last 10 years and 0.6 percent in the last five years. By comparison, productivity growth averaged 3.0 percent in both the decade from 1995 to 2005 and the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973.
It’s possible to point to many great advances in technology. It’s also possible in future years that innovations like driverless cars will lead to mass displacement of workers, but to date the data are very clear: This mass displacement is not happening. Insofar as people are seeing job opportunities disappear, it is due to factors other than robots.
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However, if robots are expensive and therefore redistributing large amounts of money from ordinary workers to the people who own robots, it is because of the patent and copyright monopolies associated with building robots. But these monopolies have nothing to do with the technology; these are incentives the government gives to support innovation. In other words, the length and strength of patents and copyrights are determined by public policy.
If these protections were leading to upward redistribution it would indicate that we have made patent and copyright protection too long and/or too strong. This is especially true if we aren’t seeing much payoff in the form of higher productivity growth. Robots don’t provide an alternative to the explanations for inequality that attribute it to deliberate policy choices. On more careful examination, the robot story ends up being just one more policy based explanation like trade, the weakening of labor unions, declining minimum wages, and contractionary macroeconomic policy.
The robot story is likely attractive to many people since it appears to pin the blame for inequality on the natural development of technology. This undoubtedly explains why we hear it so frequently even though there is zero evidence to support it.

Multnomah County Republican Party Approves Oath Keepers and Three Percenters as Private Security →

A dangerous precedent, given the fanaticism of these groups. This increases tension and the likelihood of violence.

The Multnomah County Republican Party voted this week to use far-right milita groups as private security at events.
The resolution is the brainchild of party chairman James Buchal, who last month suggested to The Guardian that the GOP could use Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, two paramilitary groups, as security guards to protect them from antifascist protesters, or antifa.

North Korea Isn't the Only Rogue Nuclear State →

North Korea's loony regime of Kim Jong-un conducted a successful missile launch test – landing about 60 miles south of the Russian city of Vladivostok, according to some reports – marking a frightening nuclear escalation that has heightened tensions across the planet.
That this first serious confrontation in ages is happening now is ironic, given that a little-reported showdown about the use of nuclear power will soon take place in the U.N.
A draft of a U.N. treaty to ban all nuclear weapons is about to be voted on. It has the support of 132 nations and is very likely to pass, at which point the United States will soon once again be in technical violation of a major international agreement, as it long has been with regard to the International Treaty banning land mines.
While practically the ban may not accomplish much, it matters a little when we violate treaties, at least intellectually speaking. North Korea's violation of similar international agreements is at the crux of the international consensus against allowing the country to have a nuclear program in the first place.
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The calculus for small countries like North Korea is not hard to understand. On the one hand, they see the nuclear powers not moving toward disarmament as planned. On the other, they see countries like the United States routinely sweeping into countries like Libya and Iraq – who either abandoned or never started nuke defense programs – to pursue "regime change" policies.
As such, many smaller countries may feel like developing nukes is the only way to ensure their sovereignty. This pushes us into situations like this mess with North Korea.
Complicating the problem in North Korea is that the United States has long taken the position that it will not sit down at the negotiating table with the North Koreans until they pledge to disarm. But the situation is so severe now that the only way to get something done might be to dial down the macho, drop the preconditions and agree to sit at the table with the man John McCain calls the "crazy fat kid," Kim Jong-un. The chances of that sort of move coming out of this White House don't seem high

Yet another ridiculous aspect to drug sentencing →

...For example, when Florida pain patient Richard Paey was arrested for illegally obtaining painkillers containing oxycodone, prosecutors charged him with possessing more than 28 grams of the drug, which allowed them to charge him with trafficking instead of mere possession, despite the fact that by all accounts, Paey had obtained the pills solely to treat his own pain. But the pills Paey possessed were 98 percent acetaminophen, a legal, over-the-counter medication. Under Florida law, if the pill contains both legal and illegal substances, the state can charge you as if everything in the pill is illegal.
This is also true of non-prescription drugs. A hit of LSD dissolved in a sugar cube will weigh exponentially more than the same hit dissolved into blotter paper. But in most states, it’s the total weight that matters, not the weight of the actual LSD. (The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the policy.) The same is often true of cocaine. A pound of pure cocaine is obviously much more valuable and has the potential to get a lot more people high than a pound of a substance consisting of cornstarch and a small amount of cocaine. But many states treat them the same (though in some federal circuits, at least with cocaine, the two are now treated differently). In some states, whether or not you’ve just harvested your pot plants could determine whether you’re charged with a misdemeanor or a felony. Ironically, if the plant is unharvested, the police can charge you for the weight of the entire plant, while if you’ve just harvested, dried and sold the leaves, you’re less culpable.
What’s clear from all of this is that today’s drug laws were written in an era in which lawmakers were less concerned about rationality, harm prevention and punishment that is proportional to the alleged harm done. Rather, they wrote the laws in ways that give prosecutors the most power to put the most people in prison for as long as possible.

Here are all the ways Jeff Sessions is wrong about drug sentencing →

So this is the thing Sessions got right. Drug trafficking is violent. It is violent because courts and other traditional nonviolent means of settling disputes aren’t available to anyone involved...
It’s encouraging that Sessions realizes this. What’s puzzling is how Sessions can (a) acknowledge that black markets cause violence, (b) claim to worry about said violence, and yet (c) work behind the scenes to expand black markets. Sessions not only opposes legalizing drugs, but he also wants to return states that have already legalized recreational marijuana — and who seem to be doing just fine — to the days when marijuana was available only on the black market...
Why does Jeff Sessions want people in Washington, Colorado, and the other states that have legalized marijuana to experience increased violence — violence that he himself acknowledges would be inevitable if he were to get his way? Is it really that important to make it more difficult for people to get high? What for Sessions would be an appropriate “dead bodies”-to-“euphorias prevented” ratio?
For the approximately 52,000 Americans who died of a drug overdose in 2015, drug trafficking was a deadly business.
About 18,000 of those deaths involved prescription opioids, which are legally available. About 8,000 involved benzodiazepines, which are also available legally. Both of those types of drugs are made by pharmaceutical companies, prescribed by doctors and sold by pharmacies. Does Sessions believe those are all inherently violent industries? The Journal of the American Medical Association estimates that 88,000 people die each year from alcohol-related deaths. Does Sessions believe that Anheuser-Busch, Diageo and E & J Gallo run “deadly businesses”? What about the 480,000 people who die each year from smoking? Is tobacco a “deadly business”?
Moreover, there’s solid and mounting evidence that marijuana may be an effective substitute for opioids when it comes to treating pain. States that have legalized marijuana have seen a drop in hospitalizations for opioid addiction and overdose, suggesting that if it’s easily available, people prefer to treat pain with marijuana rather than with opioids. Which means that under Sessions’s preferred policy of pot prohibition, we’d almost certainly see much higher numbers of opioid addiction and overdose deaths.