Trump Stood For Anything the White Votary Would Fall For. Racists Want to be Deceived & Might Believe Anything [know that]

[MORE] Racists have propelled Trump into the Whitehouse. Racism is a "virus in the mind." [MORE] Suffering from the disease of constant comparison racists and their imaginary cartoon beliefs, [imagining themselves to be a part of a hierarchy where persons unable to produce color and lacking melanin are supreme; imagining themselves to be higher than what they imagine you to be] want to be deceived. In a state of unconscious stupidity a racist might believe anything. According to FUNKTIONARY, to "believe" is to wish one had proof or could rely on the illusion of proof to uphold a cherished assumption not based in or supported by the fundamental nature and workings of reality. All believing is make believing b/c to know, only you just have to know; whereas to believe, you have to make others believe also." A "believer" is one who accepts that which has no basis in reality; a person who enjoys being deceived." [MORE] These programmed victims create their own deceivers. So, don't blame Trump or fake news. Trump fulfills a need and if he wasn't around some other deceivers would take this fool's place. 

Watch your mind. Because if you begin to believe in their fairy tale - that you are somehow inferior to all powerful whitey- then you are also going crazy. Self oppressive. Dr. Bobby Wright calls this "mentacide."

Bhagwan says: 

"Whatsoever you believe, you project. Belief is a projection.

It is just like a projector in a movie film-house:

you see something on the screen which is not there.

The projector is hidden behind,

but you never look at the projector, you look at the screen.

The projector is at the back,

and the whole game is going on there,

but you look at the screen.

The whole game is going on in your mind,

and a mind filled with belief

always goes on projecting things in the world,

it sees things which are not there.

This is the problem.

The mind which believes is always vulnerable

and always provides an opportunity to be exploited

by the cheaters - and the cheaters are all around.

The whole path is filled with robbers, because no map exists.

Moving into religion is moving into the uncharted,

into the unmapped. Robbers can flourish there very easily,

they can wait for you - and they are waiting.

And sometimes, even if the person is not deceiving you,

you want to be deceived. Then you will be deceived.

Nobody can deceive you if, deep down, you are not ready to be deceived.

Just a few days before, a man came to me and he said:

A baba has deceived me, and he is a great yogi.

I asked him: And what has he done?

He said: He can make gold out of any metal.

He has shown me and I have seen it happening with my own eyes.

Then he said that I should bring all my gold

and he would make it tenfold.

So I collected all my ornaments

and he has simply escaped with them. He has deceived me.

Everybody will think that he had deceived him,

but I told this man: It is your greed that has deceived you.

Don't throw the responsibility onto anybody else.

You are simply foolish. Greed is foolish.

You wanted your ornaments to be made tenfold.

That mind has deceived you; the other person has simply used the opportunity.

He is just a clever person, that's all. You are the real problem.

If he had not deceived you, somebody else would have.

So who deceives it not the question.

It has been my observation that if somebody deceives you,

it shows a certain proneness in you to be deceived.

And if somebody can lie to you,

it means you have a certain affinity with lies.

A man of truth cannot be deceived.

A man who lives in truth cannot become a victim of liars.

Only a liar can be deceived by another liar;

otherwise there is no possibility.

There are millions of people who are ready to be deceived,

who are simply waiting for someone to come

and deceive them - because of their beliefs,

because of their vicious desires, because of their greed.

And remember well that greed is greed,

whether it exists in the material world or in the spiritual

makes no difference." [MORE]

Former U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah Sentenced to 10 Years in Prison

From [HERE] A U. S. District Court judge Monday sentenced former Congressman Chaka Fattah, Sr., to 10 years in prison for his conviction last June on racketeering charges.

Judge Harvey Bartle of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia ordered the 60-year-old Fattah to report to prison in January. Fattah represented Pennsylvania’s 2nd Congressional District since 1994 until his defeat for re-election in April. The 2nd District includes North, South and West Philadelphia and Lower Merion in suburban Montgomery County.

A jury convicted Fattah of bribery, wire fraud and 27 other charges after a four-week trial. The jury found that Fattah took out an illegal $1 million loan to prop up his failed 2007 run for Philadelphia mayor. Fattah resigned in June from Congress shortly after his conviction.

While in Congress, Fattah was the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Commerce, Justice, and Science Committee. The subcommittee oversees billions in federal spending, including the budget of the Justice Department. He was also chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation the non-profit research organization that hosts the annual legislative conference of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Fattah also has been ordered to pay a $614,000 fine, and he will be supervised for three years following his release. Chattah Fattah Jr., his son, was sentenced to prison in February for defrauding Philadelphia banks. He was a Philadelphia businessman.

What Crimes Are Eligible for Deportation? [non-whites are deported for minor crimes or no crime at all]

From [HERE] Last December, Mayra Machado was pulled over for a routine traffic stop in Arkansas. Turns out she had an unpaid ticket for failing to yield. And as a teen, she’d spent four months in boot camp for writing bad checks. Now 31, the single mother of three, who is an undocumented immigrant, faces imminent deportation to El Salvador, the battle-scarred country she fled when she was 5 years old.

Sylvester Owino, 40, said he survived torture in Kenya as a young activist and came to the U.S. on a student visa, which ran out. A 2003 robbery conviction in San Diego resulted in a nine-year stint in a detention facility. Now, he is part of a U.S. Supreme Court case that will determine whether immigrant detainees have a right to a bond hearing.

The two situations illustrate the variety of crimes that can get immigrants detained and deported, even after they have served a jail or prison sentence for the crime — and even if they are in the country legally. And while the federal government says it targets noncitizens who are serious or repeat offenders, immigrants with minor offenses often are deported.

Immigrants with criminal records may soon come under increased scrutiny. Republican President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to immediately deport “the people that are criminal and have criminal records.” There are, he said, “a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country.”

Immigration advocates say those numbers are inflated, and point to figures that indicate most immigrants are being deported for minor crimes or for no crime at all.

First-generation immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than do U.S. citizens. But for those who do commit crimes, it’s hard to get a clear picture of whether they are serious or misdemeanors, violent or nonviolent.

Since 2014, the Department of Homeland Security has prioritized deporting noncitizens who pose a serious threat to public safety or national security — and from October 2014 through September 2015, of the 235,413 people who were deported, 59 percent had criminal convictions.

But federal data on criminal deportees does not specify the crimes they’ve committed — or how many of them are undocumented. Technically, if someone is undocumented and entered the country after January 2014, they are considered a high priority for criminal deportation, even if they have committed no other offense.

Further complicating matters: what constitutes a “criminal alien” is not defined in U.S. immigration law or regulations, and is used broadly, according to a September report by the Congressional Research Service. A criminal alien may be someone who is undocumented or an authorized immigrant who may or may not be deportable, depending on the crime they have committed. He or she may be incarcerated or free, or have already served time.

“We see a ton of people deported for misdemeanors, probation violations, petty theft, shoplifting,” said Alisa Wellek, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project, a legal services group that advocates for immigrant rights in the criminal justice system.

“The federal government has these really overreaching laws on the books, laws that are very unforgiving for anyone who’s had any contact with the criminal justice system — even if you’ve never served a day in jail.”

Noncitizens convicted of an “aggravated felony” face particularly harsh penalties. Congress expanded the definition of the term since 1988 so that they can be deported for a crime that may be neither “aggravated” nor a “felony,” according to Joshua Breisblatt, policy analyst for the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration research group.

Thirty offenses qualify as aggravated felonies, including theft, failing to appear in court, or offenses that most states consider a misdemeanor or do not criminalize at all, such as consensual sex between a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old, the group said. 

Any new offense Congress adds to the list is retroactive. So a noncitizen can become deportable even if he or she already served the sentence for the crime years before.

When she was 19, Machado pleaded guilty to three felony counts: forging a friend’s name on a check, writing bad checks, and failing to appear in court.

Because of her criminal history, Machado is considered a “priority aggravated felon,” according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.

Machado, who considers herself “totally Americanized,” is in a detention facility in Louisiana. She is facing deportation any day now to El Salvador, a country where she said she knows no one and cannot read or write the language.

Targeted for Deportation

In 2014, President Barack Obama announced stepped-up deportation for “felons, not families.” At the same time, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be prioritizing deporting noncitizens who posed a serious threat to public safety or national security. [MORE]

'Make Believe Media' Re-write History. Pretend Something Other than Racism/White Degeneracy Fueled Trump Voters

From [WashPost] No, minority workers are not taking jobs away from white people. [to white folks "minority" means non-whites. Even though 90% of the world is non-white.]

Yet that's the conclusion some drew from a report recently released by the Economic Cycle Research Institute. After a New York Times columnist wrote about the report this week — highlighting the disparity in recent job gains by race — readers resolved that whites were “left out” of the nation's financial recovery and are victims of “economic disenfranchisement.”

But other economists say that the analysis tells an incomplete story of what the economic recovery has meant for demographic groups.

To start, the report asserts that of the more than 5 million jobs added since November 2007, the pre-recession employment peak, more than half went to Hispanics — a stunning proportion that accounts for four times their share of the labor force that year.

Disproportionately large gains also occurred among black and Asian workers, according to the report. African Americans accounted for 25 percent of the job gains, more than double their share of the labor force. Asians accounted for nearly 30 percent of the gains, about six times their share of the labor force.

But white workers fell behind, the report said. Whites had fewer jobs than they did nine years ago — even though they made up more than 80 percent of the labor force in 2007.  

These statistics were enough to drive many, including the report’s author, to conclude that white economic despair led to Donald Trump’s election victory.   

“The shock of the election spoke to a kind of disconnect,” said Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, in an interview with The Washington Post. “There is a huge cohort — you can call it whites, people in rural areas — who weren’t feeling the 5 percent unemployment rate. They weren’t feeling the stock market at new highs. They weren’t feeling a recovery that’s seven, eight years old.”

But other economists pounced on the report after the New York Times columnist, Eduardo Porter, highlighted it in his column. The statistics Porter cited paint too simplistic of a picture, they said.

“The implication is there are hundreds of thousands of white people who lost their jobs to blacks, Asians and Hispanics. Yet if you look at the unemployment rate differentials by race, you don’t see a huge increase in the white unemployment rate,” said Jonathan Rothwell, a Gallup economist.

The recession and its aftermath were not dramatically worse for white workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for whites — 4.6 percent in 2015 — is lower than for all racial groups except Asians. In comparison, 9.6 percent of African Americans, 6.6 percent of Hispanics and 3.8 percent of Asians are unemployed.  

And a far higher share of whites are employed than blacks; 59.9 percent of whites 16 years old and over who are not in the military or institutionalized are employed, compared with 55.7 percent of blacks. The percentages of Hispanics and Asians who have jobs are just slightly higher than for whites — not nearly the alarming portrait painted by the Economic Cycle Research Institute.

All demographic groups experienced declining rates of employment between 2007 and 2015, but white workers’ plight is not as dramatic as the institute implies.

“I don’t see any evidence that whites were disproportionately harmed over the last nine years,” Rothwell said. “The main concern I have with the [Economic Cycle Research Institute] chart is it’s potentially grossly misleading in terms of how it could be interpreted.”

In video captured on Facebook, white students from Warrensburg High School turned their backs and flashed a Trump sign at the basketball team from Kansas City's Center High School, which is all non-white. 

Click to read more ...

Rep. Elijah Cummings Says Racist Suspect Governor is Hiding Documents in Flint Water Crisis

Yup. That is the Same Racist MF that Made Sure Detroit & Flint Voted on Broken Voting Machines. From [HERE] and [HERE] The investigation Congress launched into the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, is over one year since the city issued a state of emergency over the lead-tainted water that left nearly 100,000 residents relying on bottled or filtered water to cook, clean and drink.

Nothing new came out of the investigation, which concluded December 16, according to The Associated Press. The investigation emphasized the faults of state officials and the EPA, but this was already made clear through several cases throughout 2016: the firing of the state’s Department of Environmental Quality’s former head, Liane Shekter Smith; criminal charges Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette put forth against Smith and five other state employees; and through the EPA’s Office of Inspector General finding in October 2016 that the agency could have issued an emergency order to protect Flint residents as early as June 2015.

The panel’s senior Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, was unsatisfied with the results. He “insisted the investigation should continue and accused Michigan's Republican governor of stonewalling the committee over documents related to the crisis,” the AP writes. Cummings accuses Snyder and his administration of withholding documents that are key to the investigation. 

Cummings is calling on Gov. Rick Snyder to provide the necessary documents within 30 days, which the governor has failed to produce or search for, Cummings says.

"The Governor has refused to provide - or even search for - key documents. As a result, the Committee is still unable to answer critical questions about what the Governor knew about the crisis as it unfolded, why he did not act on concerns about water quality, even while his inner circle sounded repeated alarms, and why families in Flint continue to subsist on bottled water almost a year after he declared an emergency," Cummings' letter reads.

A letter from Cummings to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Friday, Dec. 16 also alleges the governor's attorneys "defied the Committee's requests for documents and refused to conduct searches," as well as delayed responding to the committee.

Attached to the letter were six pages of requests from Congress to Snyder's office for communication surrounding the water crisis, including:

• Documents between Jan. 6, and Feb. 26, 2016.
• Documents relating to response to health crisis.
• Documents without redactions.
• Daily briefings after switch to Flint River.
• Information relating to "the governor's destruction of email records."
• Detailed descriptions of 130 documents withheld for attorney-client privilege.

The governor’s office denied Cummings’ claims, calling them “partisan political attacks from out-of-state politicians,” reports Mic.

The city of Flint received $170 million from the House on December 8 to fund its much-needed water line replacement to speed up residents’ access to clean drinking water. On December 16, a federal appeals court ruled that the state would have to begin water bottle deliveries, which the state tried to argue is “unnecessary and too costly,” according to the Detroit Free Press. This marks the third time that U.S. District Judge David Lawson has ordered the state to fulfill its responsibility and deliver bottled water to all households.

Walmart Selling Black Lives Matter Bulletproof Shirts, Teddy Bears, Candles & Crime Tape For Next Murder by Cop

From [HERE] Walmart is receiving criticism this holiday season as people have learned that they are selling a Black Lives Matter shirt with the slogan “Bulletproof.” However, these shirts are only available through a third party seller via the retail giant’s site - Walmart Marketplace. There also not actually bulletproof. [MORE] Candles, signs and crime scene tape ($7.99) are sold separately to prepare you for the next protest of a gunning down by a race soldier cop. It will happen any day, that's a guarantee - items non-refundable.

Praying, singing, burning candles, holding hands and posting up signs and teddy bears do not fight the power of white supremacy. All of these behaviors, and many more, have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the challenges and conditions of the open warfare continuously being waged against the Black collective. [MORE] Racists are the most provocative people in the world and they know how to push our buttons. [MORE] 

If you purchase a bulletproof shirt make sure it really repels bullets and also get yourself a gun.

Since election day gun sales to Blacks & Latinos have surged. According to an NBC News report, some gun store owners have seen a four-fold increase in minorities inquiring about and purchasing firearms in recent weeks. Earl Curtis, an African-American and owner of Blue Ridge Arsenal in Virginia, told a reporter that many people of color believe “that racists now feel like they can attack . . . just because [Trump] is doing it.”

According to NBC News black gun groups are reporting double the normal number of attendees at their meetings since the election. [MORE]

For a updated list of upcoming gun shows go [HERE] and [HERE] 

Unpopular Loser Wins Electoral College Vote in Election Hoax Dumbocracy

From [HERE] Devil Trump will be the next president of the United States. That's been the case since Nov. 8, when Trump won 306 electoral votes, despite losing the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million. And on Monday, the result was ratified by Electoral College voters, who gathered in state capitols across the United States to formally vote for president. Trump secured 304 electoral votes — two fewer than he earned in November. [MORE]

Dumbocracy - unrepresentative democracy tolerated by a public schooled in public schools. [MORE]

[1 Person 1 Vote Only Exists in a Real Democracy] Majority in Poll Wants Electoral College Vote Postponed

From [HERE] A majority of American voters favor delaying the Electoral College vote scheduled for Monday until electors can be fully briefed on Russian interference in the election, according to a new poll conducted by YouGov. The survey, sponsored by the progressive advocacy group Avaaz, found 52 percent of people supportive of stalling the vote. [MORE] Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, collecting 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. Her margin of victory was more than five times larger than Al Gore’s, the last candidate to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College. [MORE]

Electionomist Greg Palast explains that before the Electoral College votes, they should know the following: 

Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. Yet a record 75,355 ballots were not counted. The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic. The votes went uncounted because Blacks in Detroit and Flint voted on old, broken down voting machines. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" white GOP overlords appointed by the Republican governor. Budget cuts in Flint also required the city to turn to these GOP overlords. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines. [MORE] In other words, the GOP planned on thousands of Black votes never being counted from these deficient machines. 

At any rate, the so-called American "democracy" is not concerned with what the majority wants (as w/ Trump, where the unpopular vote has "won") and is not concerned with individuals having more than symbolic, token participation in it. As explained in FUNKTIONARY, "elections provide the comforting illusion of "democracy" where none exists." [MORE] 

Always endeavoring to undeceive, Dr. Blynd offers the following:

Electoral College - a scheme devised by the Framers of the Constitution designed to give discretionary power to the elected delegates and deny the people (the masses) direct choice of the so-called President (Article II, § 1). 2) a meaningless Madisonian holdover from the 18th century that allows the unpopular vote, on constitutional grounds (not on notionally democratic standards) to still steal an election.  The Electoral College is a flagrant violation (a complete affront) to any notion of the principle of one person—one vote. The Electoral College allows insignificant minorities to veto popular will in order to uphold or the status quo. The Electoral College (the charade of the political parade) is as insoluble as what we imagine true democracy to be achievable.   Direct and unencumbered self-government is unattainable in the current system (existing framework) of American style so-called "government." 3) an aristocratic junta. 4) a school for shoulder-clapping limaceous idiots, glad-handing lucripetous misfits, the mentally-challenged and naive, and for those who can't or do not know how to count votes that are "casted" but never seem to be "netted" (counted)—as you 're the catch of election day. You graduate from the Electoral College when you have demonstrated to the Board of Regents your ability and willingness to help maintain the sciolism of the status-ho and nimiety of the status quo by ensuring unequal playing fields, upholding continued disenfranchisement through rigged electionomics, dysfunctional or tamper-persistent voting machines, and unequal prophylactic protection under the law. November fourth has been hereby designated as Election Fool's Day. Mock the Vote! Whether elephant or jackass, the same bullshit will always come to pass. All souls to the polls—as poll-workers are always enjoyed as much as they are needed to add extras to the stage of democracy inaction. Who is your favorite political action figure hero or heroine? (See: Constitution for the United States, Pollworkers, Voting, Popular Sovereignty, Constitution, Intra-Political, The Do-Gooders, VOTERS, Americanism, Planarchy, Ho-Reps, Kakistocracy, Jawboning, Democracy & Secret Ballots) Electoral politics - a polylogue of agreed-upon illusions and false (deflectionary) issues. (See: Politicking & Pathocracy) electorate - the democratically hoodwinked. 2) the every four year scam-a-thon. (See: Voting & VoteScam)

Were the Voting machines in Detroit & Flint Racist or Broken or both? Trump "won" by 10,704 but 75,355 went uncounted

From [Greg Palast] Before the Electoral College votes, they should know this.

Michigan officials declared in late November that Trump won the state's count by 10,704 votes. But hold on – a record 75,355 ballots were not counted.

The uncounted ballots came mostly from Detroit and Flint, majority-Black cities that vote Democratic.

According to the machines that read their ballots, these voters waited in line, sometimes for hours, yet did not choose a president. Really?

This week, I drove through a snowstorm to Lansing to hear the official explanation from Ruth Johnson, the Republican secretary of state. I was directed to official flack-catcher Fred Woodhams who told me, "You know, I think when you look at the unfavorability ratings that were reported for both major-party candidates, it's probably not that surprising."

Sleuthing about in Detroit, I found another explanation: bubbles.

Bubbles?

Michigan votes on paper ballots. If you don't fill the bubble completely, the machine records that you didn't vote for president.

Susan, a systems analyst who took part in the hand recount initiated by Jill Stein, told me, "I saw a lot of red ink. I saw a lot of checkmarks. We saw a lot of ballots that weren't originally counted, because those don't scan into the machine." (I can only use her first name because she's terrified of retribution from Trump followers in the white suburb where she lives.)

Other ballots were not counted because the machines thought the voter chose two presidential candidates.

How come more ballots were uncounted in Detroit and Flint than in the white 'burbs and rural counties? Are the machines themselves racist?

No, but they are old, and in some cases, busted. An astonishing 87 machines broke down in Detroit, responsible for counting tens of thousands of ballots. Many more were simply faulty and uncalibrated.

I met with Carlos Garcia, University of Michigan multimedia specialist, who, on Election Day, joined a crowd waiting over two hours for the busted machine to be fixed.

Some voters left; others filled out ballots that were chucked, uncounted, into the bottom of machine. When the machine was fixed, Carlos explained, "Any new scanned ballots were falling in on top of the old ones." It would not be possible to recount those dumped ballots.

This is not an unheard of phenomenon: I know two voters who lost their vote in another state (California) because they didn't fill in the bubble – my parents! Meet mom and dad in my film, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.[VIDEO]

Whatever happened or did not happen in Detroit was the result of white supremacy/racism. 

How did Detroit end up with the crap machines?

Detroit is bankrupt, so every expenditure must be approved by "emergency" overlords appointed by the Republican governor [racist suspect in photo]. The GOP operatives refused the city's pre-election pleas to fix and replace the busted machines.

"We had the rollout [of new machines] in our budget," Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said. "No money was appropriated by the state."

Same in Flint. GOP state officials cut the budget for water service there, resulting in the contamination of the city's water supply with lead. The budget cuts also poisoned the presidential race.

The Human Eye Count

There is, however, an extraordinary machine that can read the ballots, whether the bubbles are filled or checked, whether in black ink or red, to determine the voters' intent: the human eye.

That's why Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, paid millions of dollars for a human eyeball count of the uncounted votes. While labeled a "recount," its real purpose is to count the 75,355 votes never counted in the first place.

Count those ballots, mostly in Detroit and Flint, and Trump's victory could vanish.

Adding to the pile of uncounted ballots are the large numbers of invalidated straight-ticket votes in Detroit. In Michigan, you can choose to make one mark that casts your vote for every Democrat (or Republican) for every office. Voters know that they can vote the Democratic ballot but write in a protest name – popular were "Bernie Sanders" and "Mickey Mouse" – but their ballot, they knew, would count for Clinton.

However, the Detroit machines simply invalidated the ballots with protest write-ins because the old Opti-Scans wrongly tallied these as "over-votes" (i.e., voting for two candidates). The human eye would catch this mistake.

Click to read more ...

new study: Same Crime, Same Criminal History as Whites But Harsher Sentences for Blacks in System of White Supremacy

From [NY Times] Decades of research have shown that the criminal courts sentence black defendants more harshly than whites. But a striking new investigation of sentencing disparities in Florida by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune expands our understanding of this problem in two important ways.

It exposes the fact that African-American defendants get more time behind bars — sometimes twice the prison terms of whites with identical criminal histories — when they commit the same crimes under identical circumstances. It also shows how bias on the part of individual judges and prosecutors drives sentencing inequity.

The Florida Legislature has been wrestling with this issue for decades. In the 1980s, for example, it tried to change sentencing policies that varied widely from place to place by creating sentencing guidelines. Today, prosecutors assign defendants points — based on the seriousness of their crime, the circumstances of their arrest and whether or not they have prior convictions — to determine the minimum sentence required by law.

In a fair system, black and white defendants who score the same number of points under this formula would spend the same time beyond bars. But The Herald-Tribune found that judges disregard the guidelines, sentencing black defendants to longer prison terms in 60 percent of felony cases, 68 percent of serious, first-degree crimes and 45 percent of burglaries. In third-degree felony cases — the least serious and broadest class of felonies — white Florida judges sentenced black defendants to 20 percent more prison time than white defendants.

The war on drugs weighs particularly heavily on black defendants. The police target their neighborhoods, herding people into a court system where judges are demonstrably harder on black offenders. The report found that nearly half of the counties in Florida sentenced African-Americans convicted of felony drug possession to more than double the jail time of whites — even when their backgrounds were the same.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers have come to accept this racist system as a fact of life. The Herald-Tribune cited two teenagers who were charged with armed robbery in the same county. Prosecutors and the defense lawyer, with the approval of one judge, ignored the sentencing guidelines for the white teenager and struck a plea agreement for probation with no jail time. The black teenager was sentenced to four years, as recommended under the guidelines, and was told by his lawyer that it was the best deal he could get.

The Florida system is inflicting a form of racial persecution that is strongly reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. The state’s sentencing structure is obviously in need of reform. Part of the solution may be for the courts to issue regular public reports detailing the sentencing decisions of individual judges and showing how they relate to guidelines. That would throw a spotlight on what is clearly a festering injustice.

If Only They Could See Reality like their eyes didn't have a mind behind it. Lone Black Juror Speaks on Slager Case

It Would Be Better If They Had No Eyes. At least there would have been no possibility of misunderstanding. A number of white jurors in the Slager case were reportedly undecided heading into deliberations, with many considering the lesser charge of manslaughter over murder. But jury foreman Dorsey Montgomery, the lone African-American on the panel, told reporters that the doggedness of a single white juror who said he could not convict Slager, who is white, under any circumstance helped lead to the mistrial. The jury’s final vote was 10 in favor of handing down a voluntary manslaughter charge and two who voted not guilty. Prosecutors now say they’ll retry the case. Slager also still faces federal civil rights charges.

Jurors in Slager’s trial ended up avoiding discussions of race during deliberations, jury foreman Montgomery told the “Today” show. [MORE] 

Huffington Post Study Finds that White Juries are Usually Empanelled When White Cops Murder Non-Whites

What is Collective Power? This Huff Post study missed the Eric Garner grand jury which was composed entirely of white people. Yes, an all white jury in NYC, the mecca or Blackest city in the country! White Collective Power exists where a race soldier cop murders a Black or Latino man in broad daylight in front of several cameras and their fellow white officers, white police chief, internal affairs, white run union, white jurors, white prosecutors, white elected officials and the white media support, defend, and finance the officers “right” to do so. [MORE] Thanks for the study Huff Post but we already know. 

From [HERE] If you’ve been wondering why white police officers who murder people of color keep getting let off, take a look at the jury makeup. A new study by Huffiington Post shows that the majority of these juries are white, and when these all-white juries get the chance, they let white cops off the hook. 

Police officers in the U.S. fatally shot at least 991 civilians in 2015, and, with just weeks left in the year, 2016 is likely to keep pace. The overwhelming majority of the officers involved in these incidents, which The Washington Post and The Guardian have been tracking, were never tried in court. Legal protections shielded officers from criminal liability in many cases, leading police officials or prosecutors to determine that the shootings were justified.

In the few instances in recent years in which police officers did go to trial for fatal shootings in the line of duty, juries have been unlikely to return a guilty verdict.

A Huffington Post investigation using Philip Stinson's research (an associate professor of criminology at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University who has compiled nationwide data on the prosecution of officers facing murder or manslaughter charges for on-duty shootings since 2005) suggests the racial composition of juries may have influenced the outcomes in many of these cases. HuffPost obtained juror information for all 13 police shooting trials that have gone to a jury since August 2014 through reviews of news reports and interviews with court officials, attorneys and local reporters. See graph [HERE]

Their investigation found that majority-white juries decided 11 of those 13 cases, which represent those since Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. (In the Brown case, a grand jury ultimately declined to charge the officer, Darren Wilson.) As in Ferguson, at least eight of the cases HuffPost reviewed involved officers fatally shooting people of color. Of the 14 police officers tried in the 13 cases, one was Hispanic and one was Asian. The rest were white.

In nine of the 13 cases, one-third or fewer of the jurors represented a minority group. And in almost every case, the racial makeup of the jury did not reflect local demographics. Although jury pools are supposed to reflect a cross-section of the surrounding area, there is no requirement to seat a panel that looks like the community it’s representing.

[lol. The Dummies at Huff Post are only going back to 2014 with this study. As if the issue of police brutality started in Ferguson with Michael Brown! White folks are something else . . . police brutality is probably a century old tool of white supremacy. We suppose that, among thousands of other non-white victims, they have never heard of Rodney King & were unaware that a jury of 10 whites acquitted the white cops who tried to murder him -which led to a foul riot in LA in 1992] 

In the cases HuffPost examined, there was no clear connection between the racial composition of a jury and the likelihood of a guilty verdict. Majority-white juries were responsible for returning guilty verdicts in four out of the five cases that ended in convictions. The only majority-black jury among these cases also returned a guilty verdict, against former Portsmouth, Virginia, police officer Stephen Rankin, who is white, in the shooting of William Chapman, an African-American. [we already know - no study is necessary]. 

Filling juries with a disproportionate number of white people could benefit law enforcement [thus benefit white supremacy], as white Americans are more likely to express pro-law enforcement views than non-white Americans, and they are less likely to be acquainted with or sympathetic to issues of race and policing that many see as integral to these cases.

Sixty-eight percent of white respondents reported having favorable views of local police in a poll released in early December, compared with only 40 percent of African-Americans and 59 percent of Hispanics. In the same survey, just 35 percent of whites said police are too quick to use lethal force, compared with 73 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics. And 64 percent of whites were highly confident that their local police departments treat all racial groups equally, a position shared by just 31 percent of African-Americans and 42 percent of Hispanics.

Click to read more ...

Kentucky Supreme Court [which is All White] Says It is Wrong to Dismiss a Randomly Selected All White Jury

From [HERE] The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday that judges don't have authority to dismiss randomly selected jury panels for lack of racial diversity, weighing in on a case that sparked a legal feud and resulted in a Louisville judge's suspension.

Its ruling stems from a decision by Jefferson Circuit Judge Olu Stevens to dismiss a nearly all-white jury panel in a 2014 case involving a black defendant. Prosecutors in Louisville asked the state's high court to review the issue. Judge Stevens is Black [pictured below]. 

Writing for the court, Justice Daniel J. Venters said letting judges fix perceived flaws in a jury panel by dismissing all its members would be a "short-sighted" and "short-lived" policy. Different judges would have different ideas on what represents a fairly composed jury, he said.

"Without standards by which to judge the 'proper' composition of a jury, each trial judge would be left to apply his or her own individual criteria, discharging and replacing jury panels until a pleasing composition was attained," he wrote. "The advantage of random selection would be lost; successive random draws until the desired result is achieved is not random."

The case revolved around whether trial judges have the discretion to dismiss randomly selected jury panels that don't represent "a fair cross section of the community," even though jury selection rules were followed.

Lao Tzu said, "You need wrong people to run this whole wrong system." When you don't fit in, you get filtered out by elite whites. The primary goal of the criminal jusitce system is to create the appearance of justice. It takes great effort to make it look authentic while simaultaneously making sure it does not produce justice. Thus, the wrong people are necessary. What will happen with Judge Stevens?   

"No one would reasonably argue that a judge could properly strike a qualified individual juror from the ... jury panel simply to make room for a different juror of another race or ethnicity," Venters wrote in the court's answer. "Outrage would be properly expressed if a trial judge said to a juror, 'You are excused because you are white and I need to get a black person on the jury;' or 'You are excused because we have enough African-Americans on this panel and I need to have an Asian.'"

"That is, however, exactly what happened here, although it was done en masse rather than individually."

For a time, that legal question was overshadowed by the feud that erupted between Stevens and Jefferson County Commonwealth's Attorney Tom Wine. Stevens turned to social media to express outrage at the white prosecutor's request for the Supreme Court review of his decision to scrap the jury panel for lacking minorities.

Stevens wrote on Facebook that Wine's request amounted to an attempt "to protect the right to impanel all-white juries." Wine vehemently denied the charge. Stevens also suggested there was "something much more sinister," and wrote that the prosecutor would "live in infamy."

His posts ignited a debate about racial fairness, judicial impartiality and free speech for judges. It also got him into trouble.

A remorseful Stevens eventually accepted a 90-day suspension without pay in an agreement approved by the Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission. Stevens, once dubbed "Judge Selfie" by a colleague for his prodigious use of social media — acknowledged he violated judicial canons and said his social media onslaught against the prosecutor was wrong. Wine accepted Stevens' apology.

Fuck Trump: Degenerate-elect thanks African Americans for not voting [participating in his Election Hoax & Theft]

After election, Fortune declared private prisons “the biggest (stock market) winner in Trump’s victory”

From [HERE] FOR NEARLY TWO decades, the Bureau of Prisons has contracted with a handful of private companies to incarcerate thousands of non-U.S. citizens [non-whites] serving time for low-level federal offenses. Held in a dozen so-called “criminal alien requirement” prisons largely concentrated in remote, rural areas, the inmates in private custody are, for the most part, locked up for immigration offenses or drug violations.

CAR facilities have been the target of sustained criticism from advocacy organizations, which argue that their existence reflects a two-tiered federal prison system that outsources a select population of inmates to contractors with a track record of abuse and neglect. In August, it seemed that years of pressure had finally paid off, when the Justice Department announced it would begin phasing out private prisons.

Under the DOJ directive, the facilities — which “do not maintain the same level of safety and security” as their BOP-run counterparts, according to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates — would see their contracts reduced or allowed to expire without renewal and the inmates in their custody transferred.

Within hours of the announcement, the stocks of industry heavyweights Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group plummeted more than 35 percent. The Department of Homeland Security pledged to undertake a review of its own reliance on for-profit detention centers, and CCA and GEO shareholders filed class-action lawsuits accusing the companies of false or misleading statements about the safety of their facilities. In October, CCA embarked on a re-branding campaign, changing its name to CoreCivic.

While advocates applauded the DOJ memo as a long-overdue step in the right direction, the momentum was short-lived.

On November 9, as it became clear that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in the race for the presidency, Fortune declared private prisons “the biggest (stock market) winner in Trump’s victory,” noting a 49 percent surge in CCA stock. In the weeks that followed, Trump would tap Jeff Sessions as his choice for attorney general. Not only could Sessions, a famously hardline figure on issues of immigration and criminal justice, undo the DOJ’s directive, but the plans promoted by Trump and his advisers threaten to drastically increase the number of people held by companies that have repeatedly demonstrated the conflict of profit motive when it comes to depriving people of physical liberty.

“I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons,” Trump said on the campaign trail earlier this year. “It seems to work a lot better.”

As the policies of the president-elect come into focus, it’s worth revisiting one of the incidents that prompted the DOJ’s resolve to cut ties with the industry in the first place — a deadly clash at a low-security, CCA-run facility on the outskirts of Natchez, Mississippi, that reflects how private prisons not only endanger inmates, but can also force low-wage workers from economically depressed communities into perilous circumstances.

In May 2012, inmates at Adams County Correctional Center staged a protest over a litany of grievances, including claims that men had died in custody as a result of medical negligence. Though CCA officials were forewarned that dire conditions had bred a sense of desperation in the prison, they failed to prevent the escalation that followed. [MORE]