Tampa: One of America’s Most Screwed-Up Cities Is Home to the GOP Convention

  This piece originally appeared at Salon . Poke around the White House website and you can still find the hopeful  “fact sheet”  for a 324-mile high-speed rail line linking Miami, Orlando and Tampa. No such system exists, of course — it was killed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Today, there’s a 40-acre vacant lot where the Tampa terminal would have stood. And when Republicans arrive for their national convention in about a week and catch a glimpse of it, they’ll likely see a big win. In fact, the GOP will find a lot of things in Tampa that exemplify their commitment to not investing in the future. “The trend [in Tampa] today is to say, ‘We don’t need it — no new taxes — we are not going to invest anymore,’” former Pinellas County Commissioner Ronnie Duncan recently  told Tampa Bay Online. “And that message resonates from not only the constituents, but the leadership of the Republican Party.” You could fairly call the GOP vision for the country the Tampafication of America. Tampa is a hot urban mess, equal parts Reagan ’80s and Paul Ryan 2010s. Urban renewal projects decimated the city in the ’60s, but its current persona was forged in earnest starting three decades ago, when finance and insurance companies started moving their back-office operations there, attracted by the sunshine and low-cost labor. The 1988 bestseller “Megatrends” declared Tampa “America’s next great city.” Real estate joined the service economy as a major economic pillar, and the city embarked on a building spree, sprouting large glass towers disconnected from the city itself, a development pattern that offered little incentive to invest in things like parks, transit or walkable spaces. This left little of the quality urbanism people now pay a premium for. And while other cities made similar mistakes, Tampa has been slow to correct theirs, stymied by tight-fisted Tea Party politics. “We look at Dallas or Houston, with all the same challenges we have; they’ve managed to start changing their patterns of development and attract the creative-class younger folks who are looking for alternatives to the suburban lifestyle,” says Steve Schukraft, the Tampa Bay area’s representative to the Congress for the New Urbanism.  When you’re wistfully pining for Houston’s urban virtues, things are not going well. But that’s where Tampa finds itself. Even Houston, like other Sun Belt cities, has been working to rectify its mistakes, constructing successful light-rail lines and some lively mixed-use neighborhoods. Meanwhile, in 2010, voters in Tampa’s Hillsborough County rejected a one-cent sales tax that would have funded a new light-rail system. (That same year, the Tampa Bay area saw the nation’s largest increase in traffic congestion.) Fifty percent of the urban core is now set aside for parking, says Shannon Bassett, assistant professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of South Florida. These choices have left their mark. In 2010,  Forbes ranked Tampa dead last  out of 60 metro areas for commuting. Transportation for America declared it the  second-most-dangerous city for pedestrians.  And a 2007 survey of 30 metropolitan areas found  exactly one with no walkable destinations:  Tampa, Fla. “Tampa is not a particularly pedestrian-friendly city,” Mayor Bob Buckhorn  recently admitted. Bassett is working to “de-engineer” the city from this current state. “How do you address the lack of pedestrianism, the lack of civic space, the lack of shade, which is crucial for Florida urbanism?” she asks. “There’s some bike paths now, and landscaping, but to me it’s not integrative. I think it needs a larger rethinking of its infrastructure. It’s operating in more of an ’80s mentality.” But de-engineering isn’t easy in a city with an aversion not only to public spending, but urban planning. Tea Party paranoia includes a  bizarre fear of smart-growth policies,  in which more intelligent land-use management is seen as a shadowy United Nations conspiracy (complete with a scary-sounding name: Agenda 21). And while the city of Tampa might not be hard-right politically, Hillsborough and Pinella Counties, which control many of the decisions that affect it, are bona fide birther territory. “The county commission is much more conservative now than it was in the late ’80s, early ’90s,” says Robert Kerstein, who teaches the city’s history and politics at the University of Tampa. “They have a strong religious-right orientation.” One of their commandments is Thou Shalt Not Densify. Sprawl is gospel in Tampa Bay — the city itself has only about 4.6 people per acre. Rather than build up, in 1988, Tampa annexed 24 square miles to its north, filled it with low-density development and named it New Tampa (the name itself implying that “old” downtown Tampa is obsolete). The Suncoast Parkway, opened in 2001, is emblematic of the area’s development, and one reason why the region’s growth is mostly occurring 50 miles away. Downtown Tampa, meanwhile, has a windswept, desolate feel outside of business hours. “It still suffers from CBD (central business district) syndrome,” says Bassett. “People come to work and then leave. To me the city is rural-urban. Not to the extent of Detroit, but kind of comparable.” Without a downtown that bustles beyond the 9-to-5, “America’s Next Great City” has fallen to last place among six nearby economies as measured by the Tampa Bay Partnership’s economic scorecard. The median family income in Tampa Bay (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater) is $55,700, lower than most others in the region. And  business owners are starting to panic  that letting the city go to pot will start impacting the tourism industry. “Behind the scenes, [business leaders] have discussed the need to provide ‘political cover’ for elected officials interested in working toward infrastructure investment,” reported Tampa Bay Online. Some of those elected officials, especially the ones in the city proper, are doing their best to push through improvements even as their countywide counterparts just say no. Mayor Buckhorn, elected last year, spoke in July at a Politico-hosted discussion about the RNC, and talked about the need for the city to transform both physically and philosophically.  “It’s a city that’s trying to change its economic DNA from real estate and tourism to a more technological, value-added economy,” he said. “I’ve got a 6-year-old and an 11- year-old … and if I want them to come home someday, and not go to Austin, Texas, or San Diego or to some other technology center, I’ve got to create an environment that allows them to come home to a job that wants the education my wife and I are going to give them.” On that front, the city has been talking up two marquee efforts. The first is the University of South Florida’s new Center for Advanced Medical Learning and Simulation. Billed as the largest facility in the world that allows med students to practice surgery without a patient, the $38 million facility, right downtown, hopes to draw 60,000 people to the city each year. The other is the Riverwalk,  which will open up the Hillsborough River with 2.6 miles of green space. In June, the city received $11 million from the Obama administration to finish the project. Already, the Tampa Museum of Art has relocated there, alongside a new eight-acre park that stages live performances and events. Yelp reviewers have been  gushing with gratitude  for the desperately needed public space. Buckhorn’s predecessor, Pam Iorio, also worked to get more residents downtown, but the housing collapse — which hit Florida hard, and Tampa in particular — slammed the brakes on much of that. “Before the downturn hit, very substantial pieces of downtown had been redeveloped,” says Gary Sasso, president of the legal services outfit Carlton Fields and former chairman of the Tampa Bay Partnership. “That’s starting to come into its own again. I think there’s a real demand for that here. It’s very exciting and I think will launch an era of prosperity in Tampa.” Bassett isn’t so sure. Two years ago, when Rick Scott sent back the $1.2 billion that President Obama had allotted for Florida’s high-speed rail, she got the idea for a contest called  [Re]stitch Tampa.  Entrants conceptualized public spaces along the new Riverwalk, which, while ambitious, seemed to Bassett to suffer from the design issues that often plague Tampa’s attempts at better urbanism. “The city does have design guidelines, but in this economy they’ll usually give in to what the developer wants. There was a law firm asking if they could keep their parking lot on the Riverwalk, and it’s like, no, it’s not OK to have a parking lot on the Riverwalk! There’s no large-scale vision for the civic realm.” Indeed, many of Tampa’s efforts have either seemed too small — a bike lane here, a sidewalk there — or large, but not exactly current. “We do spend public money,” says Kerstein. “They built the convention center, the aquarium, the baseball stadium,” (the last of which, Tropicana Field, is in St. Petersburg.) One doesn’t sense an overarching plan. And that may be exactly how some of the local political leaders want it. Plans cost money, require collaboration, and stink of an elitist plot in which the government’s guiding hand quashes our freedom to grow as un-smart and un-sustainably as we want to. There are people in Tampa who want to improve the city — it’s worth noting that even though the light-rail tax was overwhelmingly rejected by the county at large, a majority of the city’s residents voted yes. And Mayor Buckhorn’s 2013 budget proposal, unveiled this month, manages to scrape together $100 million for capital improvements to public amenities. But Tampa can only do so much thanks to a toxic combination of hostility toward government, revenue and collectively used amenities. What’s the matter with Tampa? The Republican conventioneers will get to see for themselves when they arrive. Except that some of them will be staying up to 90 miles away from the convention venue. “Tampa’s reeeally spread out,” the host of the Politico discussion observed to Mayor Buckhorn. That it is. And because of this, the city has chartered over 400 buses to move the convention visitors around while they’re there. It’s an inconvenient, makeshift, make-do solution — the kind that’s necessary when you don’t plan and don’t invest — and a cautionary tale for America at large should a Romney-Ryan ticket reach the White House.   Wed, 08/22/2012 (All day)

A World of Hillbilly Heroin: The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal

Illustration by Joe Sacco To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives.  There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings.  Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the power to resist and even rebel. On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book  Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt  opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years, the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day Sun Dance which I attended, where dancers fast and make small flesh offerings. In Camden, New Jersey, it was the power and cohesiveness of the African-American Church.  In the coalfields of southern West Virginia, it was the fundamentalist and evangelical protestant churches, and in the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic mass. Those who are not able to hang on, fall long and hard.  They retreat into the haze of alcohol — Pine Ridge has an estimated alcoholism rate of 80% — or the harder drugs, easily available on the streets of Camden: from heroin to crack to weed to something called Wet, which is marijuana leaves soaked in PCP.  In the produce fields, drinking was also a common release. In West Virginia, however, the drug of choice was OxyContin, or “hillbilly heroin.”  Joe and I went into some old coal camps, largely abandoned, and there it was as if we were interviewing zombies; the speech and movements of those we met were so bogged down by opiates that they were often hard to understand. This passage from the book is a look at some of those West Virginians, discarded by the wider society, who struggle to deal with the terrible pain of rejection and purposelessness that comes when there is a loss of meaning and dignity. –  Chris Hedges, August 2012 *** A Community on Overdose About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file disability claims and seek state and federal payments. “Disability and Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP. Harry M. Caudill, in his monumental 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, describes how relief checks became a kind of bribe for the rural poor in Appalachia. The decimated region was the pilot project for outside government assistance, which had issued the first food stamps in 1961 to a household of fifteen in Paynesville, West Virginia. “Welfarism” began to be practiced, as Caudill wrote, “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.” Government “handouts,” he observed, were “speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.” Obtaining the monthly “handout” became an art form. People were reduced to what Caudill called “the tragic status of ‘symptom hunters.’ If they could find enough symptoms of illness, they might convince the physicians they were ‘sick enough to draw’… to indicate such a disability as incapacitating the men from working. Then his children, as public charges, could draw enough money to feed the family.” Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” — payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI — a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival. “They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.” The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl — 80 times stronger than morphine — Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result. A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses. OxyContin — nicknamed “hillbilly heroin” — is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income. Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist. We meet Vance Leach, 42, with his housemates, Wayne Hovack, 40, and Neil Heizer, 31, in Gary. The men scratch out a meager existence, mostly from disability checks. They pool their resources to pay for food, electricity, water, and heat. In towns like Gary, communal living is common. (Click to enlarge) When he graduated from the consolidated high school in Welch in 1987, Leach drifted. He went to Florida and worked for the railroad. He returned home and worked in convenience stores. He held a job for 11 years for Turner Vision, a company that took orders for satellite dishes. He lost the job when the company was sold. He worked at Welch Community Hospital for six months and then as an assistant manager of the McDowell 3, the Welch movie theater. His struggle with drugs, which he acknowledges but does not want to discuss in detail, led to his losing his position at the theater. He is preparing to start a course to become licensed as a Methodist minister and serves the two local United Methodist churches, neither of which muster more than about a half dozen congregants on a Sunday. The 20 theology classes, which cost $300 a class, are held on weekends in Ripley, about four hours from Gary. Leach is seated in his small living room with Hovack, who bought the house when his home was destroyed by flooding, and Heizer. Hovack was given $40,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Authority to relocate. Heizer tells us how he almost lost his life from an overdose a few weeks before. The three men are the sons and grandsons of coal miners. None of them worked in the mines. “My dad worked with his dad,” Heizer says, nodding towards Leach. “My grandfather died in the coal mines in 1965. He had a massive heart attack. Forty-nine years old.” “It was good growin’ up in McDowell County twenty-plus years ago,” Leach says. “Except for when the mines would go on strike,” adds Hovack. “That was rough. I can remember that.” “Welch used to be a boomin’ place,” Vance says. “When you went to Welch you really thought you went somewhere.” “Used to be about three thee-ay-ters in Welch many, many years ago,” Leach says. “All them stores,” says Hovack. “I can remember my mom goin’ to take me to Penny’s and Collins. An’ H&M. But when the U.S. Steel cleaning plant went out, that was it for this county.” “I went to school here in Gary, and when the plant closed down I was ’bout twelve or thirteen and my friends in school would say, ‘My dad and mom, we’re movin’ ’cause they have to go look for work,” Hovack says. “You seen a lot of people depressed after that, wonderin’ how they were gonna make it, how they were gonna pay their bills, how they were gonna live, how they were gonna pay their mortgage,” says Leach. “It was devastating. A lot of people didn’t have a good education, so there wasn’t anything else to turn to. The coal mines was all they ever knew. My dad, he didn’t finish high school. He quit in his senior year, went right into the mine.” Heizer speaks in the slowed cadence of someone who puts a lot of medication into his body. He recently lost his car after crashing it into a fence. His life with his two roommates is sedentary. The three men each have a television in their bedrooms and two more they share, including the big-screen television that, along with an electric piano for Hovack, were bought with Heizer’s first disability check. The men spent the $20,000 from the check in a few days. “I became disabled back in late 2006,” Heizer tells us. “I had degenerative disc disease and I hurt my back. I was workin’ at this convenience store. They knew that I had a back injury, but yet they had me come in on extra shifts and unload the truck. Now I’ve got four discs jus’ layin’ on top of each other, no cushion between them. For three years I lived here without an income, and my dad helped support me, and then last November I finally was awarded my disability.” Heizer, who is gay, saw his drug addiction spiral out of control four years ago after his boyfriend committed suicide. He tells us he has been struggling with his weight — he weighs 324 pounds — as well as diabetes, gout, and kidney stones. These diseases are common in southern West Virginia and have contributed to a steady rise in mortality rates over the past three decades. OxyContin takes a few hours to kick in when swallowed. If the pills are crushed, mixed with water, and injected with a syringe, the effect is immediate. Heizer says that after the drug companies began releasing pills with a rubbery consistency, they could not be ground down. Heizer heated the newer pills in a microwave and snorted them — leading to his recent overdose. It took place at his mother’s house. He went into renal failure. He stopped breathing. His kidneys shut down. He was Medevac’d to a hospital in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, where he stayed for four days. “I was just sittin’ around watching TV and started aspiratin’,” Heizer says flatly. “The medication was goin’ into my lungs. You gurgle with every breath. You are drownin’, basically. I remember walkin’ down my mom’s steps and gettin’ in the ambulance. I remember at Welch, they put me on the respirator and then transferred me. After they put me on the respirator, I stopped breathing on my own. And then I remember in Charleston wakin’ up an’ they had my hands restrained so I wouldn’t pull the tubes out. I had a real close call.” The men sit in front of their flat-screen television and chat about friends, classmates, and relatives who died of overdoses. Hovack talks about a niece in her early twenties, the mother of two small children. She recently died of a drug overdose. He tells us about a high-school classmate, an addict living in a shack we can see from the window. The shack has no electricity or running water. The men, who rarely leave the house, mention the high bails being set for selling drugs, with some reaching $50,000 to $80,000. They joke about elderly grandmothers being hauled off to prison for drug dealing. “I’ve seen a lot of busts in the county over the last few years, and a lot of the people that have been arrested are elderly people that are sellin’ their medication just to live,” Vance says. “When I was workin’ at the hospital I seen ODs all the time. Young people were comin’ in. It’s bad. The depression and the pain. I guess some people that hang and live in this area, they just have to turn to somethin’.” “Since the drug problem is so bad you see the crime rate as well,” Leach says. “People breakin’ into homes, stealin’ whatever they can to sell or pawn, just to keep up with their drug habit.” Heizer, seven weeks later, dies of a drug overdose, sitting on the living room couch in front of the big-screen television. Copyright 2012 Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco This excerpt is taken from  Days of Revolt, Days of Destruction  by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco (Nation Books), pp. 153-158.  All rights reserved. Joe Sacco is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine,  Footnotes in Gaza  (winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize), and Safe Area: Gorazde.   Tue, 08/21/2012 – 12:08

Shock and Humiliation: How People Are Being Strip-Searched for Trivial Offenses

The following article first appeared in the Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here. This past April, the five conservative Supreme Court Justices gave jail officials the right to strip and search every person arrested and jailed, even if the alleged offense is trivial and there is no reason to suspect danger of any kind. The ruling, in  Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington , compounds the assault on human dignity committed by the Court in another 5-4 decision eleven years ago, in  Atwater v. City of Lago Vista , when it authorized a full custodial arrest for even trivial “fine-only” offenses like a temporarily unbuckled seat belt. Our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures has once again been undermined by a narrow conservative majority concerned more with protecting public officials than with the rights of ordinary Americans. Florence  grew out of a mistake. On March 3, 2005, Albert Florence, an African-American businessman, his pregnant wife and their 4-year-old son, were in the family BMW, when a New Jersey state trooper pulled them over. Florence’s wife was driving; no reason for the stop appears in the record and no citation was ever issued. The trooper ordered Florence, the owner, out of the car. A computer check disclosed that an arrest warrant for civil contempt had once been issued against him for nonpayment of a fine but failed to note that the fine had been paid and the warrant withdrawn. Florence had been stopped several times before, which he attributed to his being an African-American driving an expensive car. He therefore carried a certificate attesting to the cancellation of the warrant, which he showed to the trooper. Nevertheless, he was handcuffed, arrested and taken to the Burlington County jail. The jail authorities conceded that they had no suspicion of any wrongdoing by Florence apart from the fine. Yet he was still forced to strip, shower with a delousing agent, open his mouth for inspection, hold out his arms and lift his genitals, and turn around so the officer could examine his buttocks. After six days without appearing before a magistrate as required by law, Florence was transferred to the Essex County jail. There he was again strip-searched, again without any indication that he had done anything wrong, only this time he was required to squat and cough, and to undergo close examination of his ears, nose, mouth, scalp, armpits, inner thighs and other parts of his body. The next day Florence was brought before a judge who, “appalled” at his treatment, ordered his immediate release. Florence sued the two counties and was joined in a class-action by others subjected to the same treatment. What happened to him could happen to anyone. Had the mother of three at the center of  Atwater —who was handcuffed and jailed after she and her children were found to have unbuckled their seatbelts temporarily—been arrested today, she could have also been subjected to a strip search. This is because state penal and traffic codes are stuffed with a vast array of such minor and often trivial offenses for which an arrest can be made wholly at the discretion of police. Among those who joined the class-action lawsuit filed by Florence were people who had been charged with having a noisy muffler, an inoperable headlight, a bald tire, high beams on and a faulty windshield wiper. Others were charged with ignoring a stop sign, improperly backing up, crossing a double line, and parking in a no-parking zone, and two were charged with improperly riding a bicycle and riding without an audible bell. All were stripped and searched. In DC, the lawsuit notes, a 12-year-old girl was arrested for eating a French fry in Metro station and a driver was arrested for “false pretenses” after backing out of a parking garage. In Kentucky, a woman was charged for failing to appear in traffic court when the judge provided her with the wrong appearance date. People of color, like Florence, are especially vulnerable to such police tactics, for in many cases, the arrests and subsequent searches are really for the “offenses” of Driving While Black, being in the wrong neighborhood, or talking back to the police. Political protesters like the civil rights workers who marched in the South and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, especially protesters and demonstrators in hostile settings, are also vulnerable to the abuses made possible by the  Florence  and  Atwater  decisions. The Supreme Court justified both the  Atwater  and  Florence  decisions with the argument that police and jail officials need a “bright-line” rule so as not to be subject to personal liability for making an unnecessary arrest or search and not to be discouraged from taking such action when they should. But a bright-line rule for both such situations is readily available: Police should not be authorized to arrest or search someone for a minor fine-only violation except in extraordinary circumstances. The police are in no danger of personal liability if they make a good-faith mistake, because they are entitled to immunity for such mistakes. No one can dispute a federal appellate court’s characterization of a strip search as “demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing, [and] repulsive, signifying degradation and submission.” Even the Supreme Court has said that a search that intrusive “demand[s] its own specific suspicions.” The shock and humiliation suffered by persons subjected to such arrests and searches is aggravated by the fact that they are almost always ordinary citizens who have never been in jail before. In one case a Chicago woman doctor who had been strip-searched afterward suffered paranoia, suicidal feelings and depression and would not undress anywhere but in a closet The conservative majority in  Florence  stressed that jails are dangerous places, and therefore the actions of jail officials are entitled to judicial deference. Jails are dangerous—and drug smuggling is indeed a problem. But people like Florence don’t pose a threat, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshals Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all forbid strip searches of minor offenders except upon reasonable suspicion. Similarly, standards defined by the American Correctional Association—the accrediting body for adult correctional facilities—require a reasonable belief or suspicion of contraband for a strip search. The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled. rooper pulled them over. Florence’s wife was driving; no reason for the stop appears in the record and no citation was ever issued. The trooper ordered Florence, the owner, out of the car. A computer check disclosed that an arrest warrant for civil contempt had once been issued against him for nonpayment of a fine but failed to note that the fine had been paid and the warrant withdrawn. Florence had been stopped several times before, which he attributed to his being an African-American driving an expensive car. He therefore carried a certificate attesting to the cancellation of the warrant, which he showed to the trooper. Nevertheless, he was handcuffed, arrested and taken to the Burlington County jail. The jail authorities conceded that they had no suspicion of any wrongdoing by Florence apart from the fine. Yet he was still forced to strip, shower with a delousing agent, open his mouth for inspection, hold out his arms and lift his genitals, and turn around so the officer could examine his buttocks. After six days without appearing before a magistrate as required by law, Florence was transferred to the Essex County jail. There he was again strip searched, again without any indication that he had done anything wrong, only this time he was required to squat and cough, and to undergo close examination of his ears, nose, mouth, scalp, armpits, inner thighs and other parts of his body. The next day Florence was brought before a judge who, “appalled” at his treatment, ordered his immediate release. Florence sued the two counties and was joined in a class-action by others subjected to the same treatment. What happened to him could happen to anyone. Had the mother of three at the center of  Atwater —who was handcuffed and jailed after she and her children were found to have unbuckled their seatbelts temporarily—been arrested today, she could have also been subjected to a strip search. This is because state penal and traffic codes are stuffed with a vast array of such minor and often trivial offenses for which an arrest can be made wholly at the discretion of police. Among those who joined the class-action lawsuit filed by Florence were people who had been charged with having a noisy muffler, an inoperable headlight, a bald tire, high beams on, and a faulty windshield wiper. Others were charged with ignoring a stop sign, improperly backing up, crossing a double line, and parking in a no-parking zone, and two were charged with improperly riding a bicycle and riding without an audible bell. All were stripped and searched. In D.C., the lawsuit notes, a 12-year-old girl was arrested for eating a french fry in Metro station and a driver was arrested for “false pretenses” after backing out of a parking garage. In Kentucky, a woman was charged for failing to appear in traffic court when the judge provided her with the wrong appearance date. People of color, like Florence, are especially vulnerable to such police tactics, for in many cases, the arrests and subsequent searches are really for the “offenses” of Driving While Black, being in the wrong neighborhood, or talking back to the police. Political protesters like the civil rights workers who marched in the South and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, especially protesters and demonstrators in hostile settings, are also vulnerable to the abuses made possible by the  Florence  and  Atwater  decisions. The Supreme Court justified both the  Atwater  and  Florence  decisions with the argument that police and jail officials need a ‘bright-line’ rule so as not to be subject to personal liability for making an unnecessary arrest or search and not to be discouraged from taking such action when they should. But a bright-line rule for both such situations is readily available: Police should not be authorized to arrest or search someone for a minor fine-only violation except in extraordinary circumstances. The police are in no danger of personal liability if they make a good-faith mistake, because they are entitled to immunity for such mistakes. No one can dispute a federal appellate court’s characterization of a strip-search as “demeaning, dehumanizing, undignified, humiliating, terrifying, unpleasant, embarrassing, [and] repulsive, signifying degradation and submission.” Even the Supreme Court has said that a search that intrusive “demand[s] its own specific suspicions.” The shock and humiliation suffered by persons subjected to such arrests and searches is aggravated by the fact that they are almost always ordinary citizens who have never been in jail before. In one case a Chicago woman doctor who had been strip searched afterward suffered paranoia, suicidal feelings and depression and would not undress anywhere but in a closet The conservative majority in  Florence  stressed that jails are dangerous places, and therefore the actions of jail officials are entitled to judicial deference. Jails are dangerous—and drug smuggling is indeed a problem. But people like Florence don’t pose a threat, which is why the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the US Marshals Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs all forbid strip searches of minor offenders except upon reasonable suspicion. Similarly, standards defined by the American Correctional Association—the accrediting body for adult correctional facilities—require a reasonable belief or suspicion of contraband for a strip search. The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The Framers would be appalled. Mon, 08/20/2012 – 08:56

Right-Wing Media Completely Distorts Educational Initiative for Undocumented Students

The UCLA Labor Center recently publicized a new, affordable, educational initiative that allows undocumented students to receive college credit. Sounds great, right? After all, it’s the least we can do while we still have a broken immigration system. But when FOX News and their conservative buddies got a hold of the good news, their coverage was, well, awful as always — filled with distortion, wrong numbers and entirely made up facts. The college credits would come through the National Dream University, an online program offering both undocumented and documented students opportunities to learn about labor and immigrant rights. The UCLA Labor Center and the National Labor College, an accredited higher education institution devoted to union members, partnered up to offer this new one-year program after having much success with educational programs serving immigrant students. “We’ve had many undocumented students in our classes at UCLA, and we wanted to provide an opportunity for other undocumented students across the country to access college courses,” said Kent Wong, director of UCLA’s labor center. The 18-credit program, as of now, will costs students $2,490. But Wong hopes, through fundraising, he could raise enough money to subsidize their tuition. Wong said that Dream University has received a very positive response.  “There’s been a lot of interest and a lot of support from faculty all across the country and a lot of interest from DREAM Act students,” he said. The DREAM Act is a proposed bill that would provide undocumented immigrants a pathway to U.S. citizenship through college or armed services. Wong continued, “Most of the media coverage has been very favorable.” Except for — you guessed it — the right-wing media coverage. So, how did FOX twist the story this time? On an episode of FOX & Friends , commentators suggested that “illegal students” would pay $2,400 to attend Dream University, while “legal students” would “get punished” for their citizenship and be forced to pay $6,642 — a completely fabricated number and concept, as both undocumented and documented students will pay the same costs. Ready for co-host Brian Kilmeade’s ridiculously offensive summary of this utterly false information? Kilmeade said that UCLA will: Offer illegal aliens, people here without any ID, an opportunity to get an education about a third of the price of people that actually belong here. Other conservative media outlets were quick to follow suit, and pounced on the Dream University program. “We’ve been barraged by all of these requests for comments by these right-wing journalists, who harass us and just keep spinning all of this misinformation out there,” Wong said. He said that he’s received threatening emails, especially from people who assume that because he has a Chinese surname that he was not born in this country. “[They say] that I should be deported along with the students.” Wong said that now, trying to get the right message out there has been very time-consuming. This past Wednesday, as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program went into effect, tens or thousands of undocumented immigrants lined up to receive their two-year reprieve from deportation if they met certain requirements . Wong said that while the DREAM Act is still being fought, he wants to open up opportunities for undocumented students to receive a college education. “Even though deferred action will now stop the deportation of DREAM Act-eligible students … in most jurisdictions around the country, there’s still no pathway to an accessible higher education,” he said. “That’s what Dream University’s all about.” While every state, except for Georgia, allows undocumented students to attend its universities, only 13 allow them to pay in-state tuition and only three provide state financial aid. Wong hopes to have about 35 students entering Dream University come January 2013. Students will earn college credit and can transfer it to other two or four-year institutions, could use it toward a bachelor’s degree in labor studies via the National Labor College, or could seek employment with the labor movement. Students will learn about the DREAM Act movement and take classes with leaders such as Reverend Jim Lawson, who will teach about nonviolence and social change, and Tom Hayden, who teaches about students and pro-democracy movements. “We want to build an online learning community of DREAM Act leaders who will help to transform this country,” Wong said. “We think that they will be leading the fight to pass the federal DREAM Act, to pass immigration reform and to open up avenues of higher education for immigrant youth throughout the country.” As conservatives realized that FOX’s tuition numbers were just plain wrong, they began criticizing this objective itself. Michael Patrick Leahy, a contributor to the conservative Breitbart News, led the charge by taking issue with this goal, absurdly claiming , that the program’s requirement to be committed to social justice and immigrant and/or labor rights was discriminating against applicants based on their political ideology. “Clearly this is a labor and social justice curriculum,” Wong said. “Any other program you’re recruiting for asks for interests — a business school might ask for ‘an interest and commitment to business.’” Wong said this is all a part of the right-wing scare tactic of immigrants taking away opportunities from those who were born in the United States. He added that we are a nation of immigrants, and immigrants contribute vastly to our society. Wong continued: Immigrants are mainstays in major parts of our economy. If the undocumented immigrant workforce were to be removed, major parts of the U.S. economy would collapse. The right-wing knows that, but they would much rather divide workers against each other and inflame racism than address some of the problems of corporate greed, domination by the one percent and failed U.S. economic policies. As Wong said, when conservatives push this false narrative that undocumented immigrants are getting a free ride, immigrants end up as scapegoats for the economic crisis, unemployment and other societal issues.  This distracts our society from criticizing the real causes of these issues, while fueling racism and distorting meaningful attempts to improve the lives of undocumented immigrants. Mon, 08/20/2012 – 08:05

Marijuana Legalization Proponents in Washington Unveil First TV Ad

The campaign behind I-502, a ballot measure that would end cannabis prohibition in Washington State this fall, unveiled their first TV advertisement in support of the initiative. This commercial kicks off a recently announced million dollar ad campaign, which aims to keep marijuana legalization at the forefront of Washington voters’ minds as we approach November. You can view the ad below: Click here to view the embedded video. Polling data taken in July by SurveyUSA shows an upward swing in support for the initiative, with 55 percent of likely voters approving of the measure, 32 percent opposing, and 13 percent undecided. Get all the latest information on cannabis law reform in the 2012 Election by viewing NORML’s voter guide, Smoke the Vote, here .

What Terry Sullivan’s Reinstatement at U. Va Really Tells Us about the Future of Higher Ed

Does the reappointment of University of Virginia’s president mark a triumph over corporate interests? Or is it more proof that public universities are headed for demise?

Don’t Blame Technology For The Shrinking Middle Class

Some economists are arguing that high tech inevitably doomed the middle class — but they’re not telling the whole story.

How Millennials Are Driving The Great Migration of the 21st Century

Suburbs are so 20th century. Here’s why so many of us are moving back downtown.

Obama Signs Knee-Jerk Ban on Synthetic Drugs Like "Bath Salts" and "Fake Weed"

Because basement and garage chemists can tweak the formulas to create similar, legal drugs, we may be entering an endless loop of prohibition.

Exposing How Donald Trump Really Made His Fortune: Inheritance from Dad and the Government’s Protection Mostly Did the Trick

This excerpt from “The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed” tells the real story about how Trump got so obscenely rich.

Next Page »