Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement are linked to historical lynchings: U.S. counties where lynchings were more prevalent from 1877 to 1950 have more officer-involved killings [feedly]

Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement are linked to historical lynchings: U.S. counties where lynchings were more prevalent from 1877 to 1950 have more officer-involved killings
https://www.epi.org/blog/black-deaths-at-the-hands-of-law-enforcement-are-linked-to-historical-lynchings-u-s-counties-where-lynchings-were-more-prevalent-from-1877-to-1950-have-more-officer-involved-killings/

"A lynching is much more than just a murder. A murder may occur in private. A lynching is a public spectacle; it demands an audience… A lynching is a majority's way of telling a minority population that the law cannot protect it." — Aatish Taseer, British journalist

George Floyd's death was more than just a murder, it was a modern-day lynching.

The agonizing similarity in the death of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, is that current and former police officers participated in their lynching. From 1877 to 1950, nearly 4,000 individuals were the victims of lynchings. Some have speculated that as many as 75% of historical lynchings "were perpetrated with the direct or indirect assistance of law enforcement personnel." Despite drawing attention from large crowds, many perpetrators of historical lynchings were never charged with a crime —a fact seen in many modern-day officer involved shootings.

While historical lynchings peaked more than a century ago, these racist acts can be linked to officer-involved shootings today.

Using county-level data on historical lynchings and present-day officer involved shootings, Figure A shows that historical lynchings are positively associated with officer-involved shootings for Blacks. That is, counties that experienced a higher number of historical lynchings have larger shares of officer-involved shootings of Blacks in the last five years.

Figure A

Yet, Figure B shows the opposite relationship exists for whites: as the number of historical lynchings increases, the share of modern officer-involved shootings of whites decreases.

Figure B

To examine whether these relationships are statistically different, our analysis uses a statistical method that accounts for black population during the historical period.

Figure C shows that a statistically significant relationship exists between historical lynchings and the difference in the share of officer-involved shooting of blacks compared to whites. In fact, blacks who live in areas that had fewer historical lynchings (fewer than 12) makeup a lower share of officer-involved shootings compared to whites. Yet, blacks who live in areas that had high levels of historical lynchings (more than 12) makeup a larger share of officer-involved shootings compared to whites.

Figure C

Taken together, these three figures suggest that lynchings continue to plague our communities, including our police departments.

As we see protesters across the country demanding justice for Floyd, Arbery, Taylor and countless others, let's remember that no amount of justice will bring their lives back. While justice is necessary, there needs to be a fundamental change to how, and on whom, laws are enforced. By demanding change, in addition to justice, protesters can stop being forced to demand justice, with varying levels of success, every time police officers lynch Black people.

There are steps being taken to stop these heinous crimes, including an anti-lynching bill that, as of Thursday, was being held up in the Senate by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.)who added an amendment to the bill, strongly opposed by several Democratic senators, including Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

Lynchings, she stressed in a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday opposing the amendment, are "the great stain of America's history."

"Senator Paul is now trying to weaken a bill that was already passed—there's no reason for this, there's no reason for this. There is no reason other than cruel and deliberate obstruction on a day of mourning," she said, about Floyd's memorial service in Minnesota.

To learn from our past, we must break the cycle of state sanctioned violence.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

The Fed’s crisis response: Helping corporations, yes, but mostly at the expense of financial predators [feedly]

The left ultimately pays a steep  price for hot rhetoric about capitalism, etc., and the rich that disconnects from real paths and choices in the present. As the founders of modern socialism opined: "...all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided". Nonetheless, we all tend to exclaim our intuitions when doing  "fast thinking".  Before committing precious troops and treasure to battle, good advice to slow down.

The Fed's crisis response: Helping corporations, yes, but mostly at the expense of financial predators
https://www.epi.org/blog/the-feds-crisis-response-helping-corporations-yes-but-mostly-at-the-expense-of-financial-predators/

A number of recent articles imply that Americans should be mad at the Federal Reserve for bailing out the rich in the coronavirus crisis. This seems wrong to me. We should be mad at nearly every other policymaker—mostly Congress and the president—for failing to do enough to bail out typical working families.

The Fed, conversely, has maximized the weak tools it has available right now for helping these families. Maybe we should give the Fed more and better tools for future recessions—but it's not useful to get mad at the Fed for failing to do things it can't do right now.

This is not to say the Fed is a force for good always and everywhere. There really are times when the Fed intervenes on the side of corporate interests in what is essentially a distributive conflict between labor and capital. (By "capital" I'm including the corporate managers who serve as corporate agents and whose rewards trade-off pretty sharply against typical workers' pay.) Usually the Fed's intervention on behalf of capital occurs when it cuts economic expansions short by raising interest rates in the name of controlling inflation, robbing typical workers of the leverage to secure faster wage growth that really tight labor markets could give them. As we have often written, these actions by the Fed have been hugely consequential, contributing significantly to the disastrously slow wage growth for the bottom 80% of the U.S. workforce for most of the last 40 years.

However, lots of recent evidence suggests that the Fed—now recognizing how distributionally important these past episodes have been—is genuinely concerned about avoiding the kind of prematurely contractionary policies that curtail employment possibilities for traditionally disadvantaged groups and hamstring typical workers' wage growth. This has been a huge progressive win.

Today's Fed intervention is not part of a capital–labor conflict

By lending to and buying the debt of private businesses in response to the coronavirus crisis, the Fed is not wading into a capital–labor conflict on the wrong side. Instead, it is wading into a conflict between nonfinancial capital and financial predators. Take the case of a notably unsympathetic nonfinancial corporation: Carnival Corp., operator of Carnival Cruise Lines. In a recent article generally critical of the Fed's actions, The American Prospect's David Dayen tells a story about how Carnival needed bridge financing to survive the shutdown in the cruise industry caused by the coronavirus:

Carnival was flirting with a consortium of hedge funds on a high-interest loan above 15 percent. These vulture funds, including Apollo Global Management and Elliott Management, specialize in distressed debt, squeezing governments and businesses with no alternatives. If Carnival couldn't repay the loan, the hedge funds would be primed to take ownership.

But the March 23 announcement, signaling a Fed backstop to all comers, suddenly gave Carnival new options. Within days, it had secured $5.75 billion in loans, including a $4 billion bond issuance at 11.5 percent interest, and a $1.75 billion bond at an even smaller 5.75 percent rate that could be converted into Carnival stock.

To boil this down: Hedge funder predators were looking to exploit a nonfinancial corporation that needed loans as it faced distress caused by a global pandemic and economic crisis, and the Fed intervened and offered the nonfinancial corporation a better deal. From my perspective, there are no presumptive good guys in distributive conflicts between nonfinancial capital and financial predators. But it's not obvious to me why we should shove more firms like Carnival closer to bankruptcy—and threaten to extinguish even more jobs than have already been destroyed—just to allow hedge fund vultures to reap the benefits of having their predatory loans be Carnival's only option.

The Fed was actually founded in 1913 precisely to serve as a public lender of last resort that could give nonfinancial businesses an option for obtaining loans for survival without throwing themselves on the mercy of Wall Street. In very real terms, the Fed was created so that J.P. Morgan (the person, not the bank) wouldn't get to decide who did and did not survive financial panics, and wouldn't get to decide the price of this survival. The Fed experiment as a public service to break the power of private financial capital has not gone without a hitch in the century-plus since its founding, but, during the crisis it seems to me that it's mostly going how one would want.

Rising stock prices are not proof that the Fed's actions are malign or misguided

It is often pointed out that share prices of nonfinancial corporations rose after the Fed announced its lending programs. Given that most stock is owned by the already-wealthy, this seems like prima facie evidence that the Fed's actions have helped the rich, no? Yes, but, while wealthy households own most of any companies' stock right now, they also will be the buyers of that stock eventually, and so policy actions that raise stock prices reduce the future rate of return. In short, the real distributive conflict between a lower and higher share price for Carnival isn't really between rich and poor (who will never own this stock), it's between today's rich and tomorrow's rich. Further, as a spillover potential benefit, the more-generous loan terms offered by the Fed (relative to other sources of capital) will likely keep many companies in business and avert layoffs of typical workers.

The Fed can do more at the margins—but its existing tools are too weak to provide the help typical families need—it's up to Congress and the president now

I've already noted that Carnival is hardly a sympathetic company. It has a terrible record on labor and environmental standards and bungled its obligation to provide safe accommodations for its passengers during the coronavirus pandemic. It may well be the case that all of this means Carnival shouldn't exist as a company. But policing these things is a job for labor, environmental, and health authorities, not the Fed. The proper tool for doing this policing is transparent and consistently enforced regulation, not decisions—made on the fly during a meltdown of the economy— that the company should not get access to financial support being widely offered to other firms.

This theme that the Fed can't be held responsible for all aspects of economic policy is an important moral of this story. It is absolutely true that we as a country have not yet done near enough to ensure that human misery and economic suffering are minimized in the wake of this recession and after. But this is on Congress and the president. They have the tools—fiscal policy measures such as stimulus spending—that can provide relief and recovery at scale and targeted toward typical families. In moments like this, the Fed's official tools really can only keep financial predators from exploiting the vulnerability of nonfinancial corporations and provide a verymodest across-the-board stimulus to economic activity once it starts again.

Has the Fed utterly maximized the modest help it can provide? Not quite yet. It should lower interest rates on loans offered to state and local governments, extend these loans' maturities, and make them more broadly available to cities and countries. Unofficially, Fed leaders can jawbone Congress to be better—and they've largely been doing this.

The Fed has shown more concern and intelligence than other branches of the economy policymaking apparatus for more than a decade now. Because of this, and because the Fed is not hobbled by the filibuster or other things that hamstring fiscal policy, it is not surprising that many want the Fed to be in charge of crisis response generally. And when the Fed doesn't do things that many think (rightly) should be part of this general crisis response, people get mad. But this is not the Fed's fault. The Fed lacks the legal and logistical capability of delivering aid more directly to households. Would it be nice if the Fed one day had this capability? Sure. But Fed leaders don't have it today. And in the meantime, it's better than they use the frustratingly weak and indirect tools they have available to them rather than do nothing.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Some Economics of the 1968 US Riots [feedly]

Tim Taylor always digs deep....

Some Economics of the 1968 US Riots
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/06/some-economics-of-1968-us-riots.html

"The Kerner report was the final report of a commission appointed by the U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 28, 1967, as a response to preceding and ongoing racial riots across many urban cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. These riots largely took place in African American neighborhoods, then commonly called ghettos. On February 29, 1968, seven months after the commission was formed, it issued its final report. The report was an instant success, selling more than two million copies. ...  The Kerner report documents 164 civil disorders that occurred in 128 cities across the forty-eight continental states and the District of Columbia in 1967 (1968, 65). Other reports indicate a total of 957 riots in 133 cities from 1963 until 1968, a particular explosion of violence following the assassination of King in April 1968 (Olzak 2015)."

 The September 2018 issue of the  Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences includes a 10-paper symposium from a range of social scientists concerning "The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Kerner Commission Report." The introductory essay by Susan T. Gooden and Samuel L. Myers Jr., "The Kerner Commission Report Fifty Years Later: Revisiting the American Dream" (pp.  1–17) does an excellent job of setting the historical context and contemporary reactions to the report, along with offering some comparisons that I at least had not seen before about difference between rioting and non-rioting cities over over time.

[This post is republished from my earlier post of September 6, 2018, when this issue came out, with weblinks refreshed and a touch of editing.]

The opening paragraph above is quoted from the Gooden/Myers paper. As they point out, perhaps the most commonly repeated comment from the report was that it baldly named white racism as an underlying cause of the problems. As one example, to quote from the Kerner report: "What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

Although the report was widely disseminated, it was not popular. As Gooden and Myers report:

"President Johnson was enormously displeased with the report, which in his view grossly ignored his Great Society efforts. The report also received considerable backlash from many whites and conservatives for its identification of attitudes and racism of whites as a cause of the riots. `So Johnson ignored the report. He refused to formally receive the publication in front of reporters. He didn't talk about the Kerner Commission report when asked by the media,' and he refused to sign thank-you letters for the commissioners (Zelizer 2016, xxxii–xxxiii)."

Other contemporary critics of the report complained that by emphasizing white racism, the report seemed to imply that changes in the beliefs of whites should be the main topic, while not paying attention to institutions and behaviors. Gooden and Myers cite a pungent comment from the American political scientist Michael Parenti, who wrote back in 1970:

"The Kerner Report demands no changes in the way power and wealth are distributed among the classes; it never gets beyond its indictment of "white racism" to specify the forces in the political economy which brought the black man to riot; it treats the obviously abominable ghetto living conditions as "cause" of disturbance but never really inquires into the causes of the "causes," viz., the ruthless enclosure of Southern sharecroppers by big corporate farming interests, the subsequent mistreatment of the black migrant by Northern rent-gorging landlords, price-gorging merchants, urban "redevelopers," discriminating employers, insufficient schools, hospitals and welfare, brutal police, hostile political machines and state legislators, and finally the whole system of values, material interests and public power distributions from the state to the federal Capitols which gives greater priority to "haves" than to "have-nots," servicing and subsidizing the bloated interests of private corporations while neglecting the often desperate needs of the municipalities. . . . . To treat the symptoms of social dislocation (e.g., slum conditions) as the causes of social ills is an inversion not peculiar to the Kerner Report. Unable or unwilling to pursue the implications of our own data, we tend to see the effects of a problem as the problem itself. The victims, rather than the victimizers, are defined as "the poverty problem." It is a little like blaming the corpse for the murder." 

Gooden and Myers point to another issue with the report that social scientists immediately point out. The members of the Kerner Commission made personal visits to cities that had experienced rioting, and made an effort to talk with people in the affected communities. But they made essentially no effort to visit cities that had not experienced riots. It's hard to draw inferences about the causes of riots without making some effort to look at what differs across rioting and non-rioting cities. 

They offer a preliminary look at some of the economic differences across rioting and non-rioting cities. For example, this figure shows the black-white ratio of family incomes in rioting (blue) and nonrioting (orange) cities. The ratio hasn't moved much in the cities that had 1960s riots, while it increased substantially in the cities without riots. Indeed, the cities that did not riot have had slightly more equal black-white income ratios for most of the last few decades.  

These sorts of patterns are open to a range of interpretations. Perhaps cities were less likely to riot in the late 1960s if more immediate progress in black-white incomes was happening. Perhaps something about having a higher black-white income ratio at the start made rioting more likely. Perhaps rioting led to an outmigration of middle- and upper-class families of both races, which could contribute to a stagnation of the black-white ratio. The cities that rioted were mainly the northeast, midwest, and west, and so political, social, and economic differences across the geography of the US surely also have played a role. 

In other measures like the black-white ratios of unemployment rates, high school graduation rates, and poverty rates, the rioting and non-rioting cities look very similar. As Gooden and Myers write: 

"This evidence points to a possible flaw in the Kerner Commission's report. Although the evidence clearly points to a divided America—a divide that continues today—the trajectories of the riot cities and the nonriot cities are remarkably similar. Thus, it is a bit more difficult to embrace the conclusion that this racial divide was the cause of the riots given that the racial divide was evident in both riot cities and nonriot cities and perhaps was even more pronounced in the nonriot cities than in the riot cities before the riots."

For a take on the Kerner Commission report earlier this year, see "Black/White Disparities: 50 Years After the Kerner Commission" (February 27, 2018). Here's the Table of Contents of this issue of the Russell Sage Foundation Journal, with links to the papers:

• "The Kerner Commission Report Fifty Years Later: Revisiting the American Dream," by Susan T. Gooden and Samuel L. Myers, Jr.
• "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? The Missing Kerner Commission Report," by Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards, Malik Chaka Edwards, Cynthia Neal Spence, William A. Darity, Jr., Darrick Hamilton, and Jasson Perez
• "From Bakke to Fisher: African American Students in U.S. Higher Education over Forty Years," by Walter R. Allen, Channel McLewis, Chantal Jones, and Daniel Harris
• "Whither Whiteness? The Racial Logics of the Kerner Report and Modern White Space," by Matthew W. Hughey
• "Measuring the Distance: The Legacy of the Kerner Report," by Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen
• "Changes in the Policing of Civil Disorders Since the Kerner Report: The Police Response to Ferguson, August 2014, and Some Implications for the Twenty-First Century," by Patrick F. Gillham and Gary T. Marx
• "The Effects of the Neighborhood Legal Services Program on Riots and the Wealth of African Americans," by Jamein P. Cunningham and Rob Gillezeau
• "Fifty Years After the Kerner Commission Report: Place, Housing, and Racial Wealth Inequality in Los Angeles," by Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, Paul M. Ong, Andre Comandon, William A. Darity, Jr., Darrick Hamilton
• "The Evolution of Black Neighborhoods Since Kerner," by Marcus D. Casey and Bradley L. Hardy
• "Detroit Fifty Years After the Kerner Report: What Has Changed, What Has Not, and Why?" by Reynolds Farley

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Republican Attacks on State and Local Government Are Yet Another Assault on Black People [feedly]

Republican Attacks on State and Local Government Are Yet Another Assault on Black People
https://cepr.net/republican-attacks-on-state-and-local-government-are-yet-another-assault-on-black-people/

Democrats in Congress have been pushing for a large amount of assistance for state and local governments in the next pandemic aid package. The finances of these governments have been devastated by the pandemic, with all of them seeing massive shortfalls in revenue due to the shutdowns and the weak economy that is projected for the months ahead. At the same time, they have had enormous demands for public services as a result of the pandemic, largely due to the need for additional health care spending. The demand for services has been further increased as a result of state and local government efforts to deal with the protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

The Republicans have thus far balked on providing aid to state and local governments. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has openly said that states should declare bankruptcy, which would allow them to default on their pension obligations.

Defaulting on the pensions of state and local employees would be a huge hit to African American workers and retirees. They are substantially over-represented among current and retired public sector employees. This is due to the fact that they faced less discrimination in employment opportunities in public sector employment than in private sector employment.

Currently, the African American share of the state and local workforce is almost 25 percent higher than its share of the private sector workforce. In the 1990s, the African American share of state and local employment was almost 40 percent higher than its share of private sector employment. State and local governments provided millions of African Americans middle class jobs that they were denied in the private sector.

Part of the compensation for a middle class job has historically been a pension. These pensions are not a gift from the government, workers sacrifice pay during their working years in exchange for this pension in retirement. Mitch McConnell's plan to have states declare bankruptcy, and thereby renege on pensions promised to workers, is in effect an effort to take away pay that workers have already worked for. And, the victims of Senator McConnell's scheme would disproportionately be African American workers.

And Republicans wonder why so many black people are angry.

The post Republican Attacks on State and Local Government Are Yet Another Assault on Black People appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Enlighten Radio:Talking Socialism: Unemployment skyrockets, racial violence explodes.

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Enlighten Radio:End of the Road: Trump calls for military rule

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