Today's TweeXt

Wanna a little glimpse at racism in America - and the total fucking sewer TriXter has become?

Check out the replies

What invention would you miss the most? pic.twitter.com/4r1unFBAkY

— AlphaFo𝕏 (@Alphafox78) April 12, 2024

Here are a few: 

This African concept car pic.twitter.com/15lUWFrsYX

— Entertain Me HQ (@EntertainMeHQ) April 12, 2024

Great news! The boat is ready to go pic.twitter.com/RFtaHCwkKt

— Bravo Sierra 🇺🇸 (@BSmi2030) April 13, 2024

Not the watermelonium! pic.twitter.com/36bRQuV09I

— Bad AI (@Bad_AI_) April 12, 2024

America, you are nine kinds of fucked up.

I'm Not Racist But...

... I think the Dems are the racists because they blame white people who're just trying to keep the brown people from ruining this country.

It's Not - But It Is - What We Tho't

In spite of this nerd's maddening difficulty landing the fucking plane, he does finally get around to the point:

The idiots who fucked up the Capitol trying to shitcan American democracy are racist assholes who are scared to death of brown people.

Soak that one in. All these hyper-macho faux-big-dick "alpha" males can't stand the competition, so they'll burn down their own shit rather than see it shared with people they can't admit are out-working them.

Meritocracy my dyin' ass.

Tell Me About It, Marge

Marge The Impaler Greene is a piece of work.

Tell me you’re racist without telling me you’re racist.

MTG: “I know a ton of white people that are as lazy and sorry and probably worse than Black people.”pic.twitter.com/zlEcxa3hAl

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 3, 2023

Smart Money

The guy had to be smart in a particular way, at a particular thing, and at a particular time.

Coupla things though, Elmo:

• You did not make it all by yourself - you had - and continue to have - a metric fuck ton of help from people who deserve credit, but never even get mentioned when you talk
• Being smart in one way, doing one thing, doesn't mean you're smart in any other way, doing anything else
• You had to be smart to make the money, but the money does not make you smart

Elon Musk Has Crossed a Line

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men who is now most famous for running the website X, formerly known as Twitter, has a new excuse for the company’s shaky performance since he bought it last year. The problem, according to Mr. Musk, is the Jews.

In an outburst on his platform on Monday, Mr. Musk claimed — without presenting any evidence — that ad revenues on Twitter are down 60 percent “primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL”— the Anti-Defamation League — which he said “has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.”

While the website has long had a reputation as a cesspool for lies, hate speech and a significant neo-Nazi user base, under a former chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, Twitter had begun to take steps to ban the most provocative and openly racist and antisemitic users. A 2018 report by the ADL noted that 4.2 million antisemitic tweets had been shared or re-shared on the platform in the previous year, before Twitter’s ban on extremist accounts took effect. Mr. Musk largely reversed those policies under the aegis of free speech. Thanks to the reinstatement of extremist accounts — and a new algorithm which prioritizes posts from “verified” users who have forked over $8 a month to the company — X/Twitter now functions as a bullhorn for the most toxic elements of the white nationalist right.

Mr. Musk also blamed a collapse in the company’s value — estimates place the company’s current worth at roughly one-third the $44 billion Mr. Musk paid for it — on the ADL, saying that he was considering legal action against the ADL and signaling that he supported banning the organization from X.

Mr. Musk insists that his claims are not antisemitic and that he harbors no animus toward the Jews; still, over the past week he has repeatedly launched personal attacks against the ADL head, Jonathan Greenblatt, accusing him of lying about the ADL’s political influence.

There is a long history of far-right groups attacking the ADL for its alleged “smears.” In the late 1950s Russell Maguire, the owner of the right-wing American Mercury magazine, claimed Jewish groups were falsely smearing him and his publication as antisemitic — and, like Mr. Musk, suggested they were organizing a boycott against him. A few years later, in the mid-1960s, Robert Welch, the leader of the far-right John Birch Society, similarly claimed that the ADL was unfairly smearing his organization’s reputation by alleging it was harboring anti-Semites in its ranks.

The ADL was certainly critical of both men — but for good reasons. Mr. Maguire was, in fact, a committed antisemite. He endorsed the authenticity of the infamous antisemitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his magazine. Mr. Welch, in large part due to pressure from the ADL, was forced to purge the John Birch Society of its most outspoken antisemites in 1966. Considering that Mr. Musk has reinstated and retweeted a number of openly antisemitic and white nationalist accounts since acquiring the website, his attacks on the ADL are very much in keeping with this tradition.

The Anti-Defamation League is not the only organization that monitors far-right speech, nor has it been alone in drawing Mr. Musk’s ire and that of the online far right on Twitter. The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded by civil rights activists in the 1970s, employs a bevy of researchers to monitor and catalog right-wing extremism and has long been the target of attacks by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and yet the S.P.L.C., a nonsectarian organization, has not been singled out by Mr. Musk.

Part of the reason is that the ADL, until relatively recently, was ambivalent — even supportive — of Mr. Musk. In 2022 Mr. Greenblatt of the ADL praised the billionaire entrepreneur. In comments on CNBC, Mr. Greenblatt called Mr. Musk an “amazing entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time.”

Henry Ford, of course, became famous as the creative genius behind the Ford Motor Company. And, like Mr. Musk, Mr. Ford was a veritable celebrity. In the same way that Mr. Musk’s fanboys on Twitter gush about how his company SpaceX will lead humanity into a cosmic future, Mr. Ford was seen as the apostle of industrial modernity. Joseph Stalin sought out experts from the Ford Motor Company to help industrialize the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. Aldous Huxley dated the calendar in his 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World” “A.F.” — “After Ford.”

Mr. Ford was also — next to Charles Lindbergh — one of America’s most infamous antisemites of the 20th century, and Mr. Greenblatt was pilloried by liberal and left-wing critics for failing to note this.

Despite Mr. Greenblatt’s tone-deaf lauding of Mr. Musk as the second coming of Henry Ford, the ADL has been justifiably concerned with monitoring Twitter as one of the major global forums for antisemitism since Mr. Musk’s takeover. Twitter’s historical free-for-all approach to speech, while it has allowed for previously marginalized voices to be major players in media narratives, has also allowed for new platforming opportunities for open antisemites and racists, hitherto confined to websites for true believers. Twitter was not the only social media platform to flirt with extremism — Facebook infamously became a vector of disinformation during the 2016 election — but it was unique in its power to shape media narratives.

What explains Mr. Musk’s questionable decision making? It does not take much of a leap to imagine that an immensely wealthy businessman — one who strongly believes in his own messianic mission to uplift humanity and who is facing intense and sustained public criticism over his politics and business acumen for the first time in decades — might conclude that nefarious forces are at work to undermine him. What separates this simple scapegoating from full-blown conspiracism is the sense one gets from Mr. Musk and his acolytes that criticism of him imperils the utopian future of mankind. That, combined with the fact that Mr. Musk has been consistently boosting far-right, white nationalist, and antisemitic accounts on Twitter since the beginning of his tenure, effectively melds his sense of victimhood with the conspiratorial antisemitism of the most toxic elements of the right.

X, née Twitter, despite losing significant value due to Mr. Musk’s incompetence and having to contend with rivals like Meta’s Threads, is still the most influential social media platform in shaping the national news narrative. As Kanye West, himself no stranger to making unhinged antisemitic statements, has said, “No one man should have all that power.”

The Republican Party already has a serious problem with some campaign staffers openly trafficking in antisemitic and white nationalist speech. Mr. Musk scapegoating the Jews for his own catastrophic business decisions regarding his management of one of the most influential social media platforms in the world will only add fuel to the fire.

Praising By Faint Damnation

Tommy Tuberville may be dumb as a mud fence, but his handlers aren't.

And Tommy Tuberville may not be the racist asshole he seems to be, but there're lots of people who wear the label "Racist Asshole" like a merit badge, and they all think he's one of their own.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville refuses to agree white nationalists are racist

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said that the definition of a “white nationalist” is a matter of “opinion” during a television interview Monday night in which he was given the opportunity to clarify remarks from this spring, when he appeared to be advocating for white nationalists to serve in the U.S. military.

During the CNN interview, Tuberville repeatedly said that he rejects racism but pushed back against host Kaitlan Collins when she told him that by definition white nationalists are racist because they believe their race is superior to others. Tuberville at one point in the back and forth characterized white nationalists as people who hold “a few probably different beliefs.”

The interview resurrected another controversy for the first-term senator, who has been in the news mostly for stalling scores of senior military nominations in an attempt to stop a Defense Department policy that helps ensure access to abortions for service members and their families.

Asked to clarify his comments on white nationalists in the military, Sen. Tommy Tuberville's response: pic.twitter.com/deTfS4XKnR

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) July 11, 2023

In a May interview with a local public radio station in Alabama, Tuberville, a former football coach, criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for his efforts “to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists” from the military. Tuberville said it was part of an effort to politicize the armed services and accused Pentagon leaders of “ruining our military” and driving away supporters of former president Donald Trump.

Tuberville subsequently told reporters that he looks “at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican,” adding: “That’s what we’re called all the time.”

Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is ‘going wrong’

On Monday night, Collins pressed Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, offering a definition of a white nationalist as someone who “believes that the white race is superior to other races.”

“Well that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.

Asked for his opinion, Tuberville said: “My opinion of a white nationalist, if someone wants to call them white nationalist, to me, is an American. It’s an American. Now if that white nationalist is a racist, I’m totally against anything that they want to do because I am 110 percent against racism.”

Tuberville then accused Democrats of using the term to push “identity politics,” which he said is “ruining this country.”

Collins continued to press Tuberville on whether white nationalists should be able to serve in the military, saying they are people who believe “horrific things.”

“Well that’s just a name that has been given,” Tuberville said of white nationalism.

Collins told him, “it’s a real definition.”

“If you’re going to do away with most White people in this country out the military, we’ve got huge problems,” Tuberville responded.

“It’s not people who are White. It’s white nationalists,” Collins said.

“That have a few probably different beliefs, they have different beliefs,” Tuberville said. “Now if racism is one of those beliefs, I’m totally against it. I’m totally against racism.”

Earlier in the interview, Tuberville cited his coaching experience at Auburn University and elsewhere.

“I was a football coach for 40 years and had the opportunity to be around more minorities than anybody up on this Hill,” Tuberville said.

“A white nationalist is racist, senator,” Collins said.

“Well that’s your opinion, that’s your opinion,” Tuberville said.

He added: “I’m totally against any type of racism.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “[w]hite nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhite persons.”

“Their primary goal is to create a white ethnostate,” the group says on its website. “Groups listed in a variety of other categories, including Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity, could also be fairly described as white nationalist.”

Military leaders have long worried about extremist views in their ranks.

A study by the Center for Strategic International Studies found that 6.4 percent of all domestic terror incidents in 2020 involved active-duty or reserve personnel, more than quadrupling the tally from the previous year. Hate groups actively target troops to become recruits while encouraging their own extremists to join the military ranks.

The presence of many military veterans at the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol further alarmed senior Pentagon officials and prompted Austin to create a counter-extremism working group in April 2021.

BTW, WaPo - maybe you could ask the Senator to name a kind of politics that isn't "identity politics".

Disparities

"In America, we value each and every individual."

The NYT piece is an example of how racism manifests itself at the level of 'systemic', without much conscious effort to be racist.

There was undoubtedly some racial consideration on the part of some of the decision-makers, but even without it, this shit would still have just grown naturally out of the policies that put major traffic carriers thru poorer (ie: brown) neighborhoods because the richer (ie: white) neighborhoods had the political power to influence the decisions.

American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap
Why dangerous streets are concentrated in minority neighborhoods, and what to do about it.

An estimated 19 pedestrians a day, on average, were struck and killed by automobiles in this country in 2022. The year before, pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high.

While these deaths spiked across the board during the pandemic, the fatalities follow a clear and consistent pattern: Across the country, Black and Hispanic pedestrians are killed at significantly higher rates than white pedestrians.

A study published last year by Harvard and Boston University deepened our understanding of this phenomenon by controlling for the distance traveled by different racial groups when driving, walking or riding a bicycle. It found that Black people were more than twice as likely, for each mile walked, to be struck and killed by a vehicle as white pedestrians. For Black cyclists, the fatality risk per mile was 4.5 times as high as that for white cyclists. For Hispanic walkers and bikers, the death rates were 1.5 and 1.7 times as high as those for white Americans using the same modes of transportation.

The design of our cities is partly to blame for these troubling disparities. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods that have a larger share of Black and Hispanic residents. These neighborhoods share a history of under-investment in basic traffic safety measures such as streetlights, crosswalks and sidewalks, and an over-investment in automobile infrastructure meant to speed through people who do not live there. Recent research from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that formerly redlined neighborhoods — often the targets of mid-century “slum clearance” projects that destroyed residences and businesses to allow for new arterial roads and highways — had a strong statistical association with increased pedestrian deaths. The neighborhoods graded D for lending risk by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had more than double the pedestrian fatality rate than neighborhoods graded A.

Decades of civic neglect, collapsing property values and white flight took a further toll on pedestrian safety. Sidewalks — which many cities rely on property owners to maintain — were left to crumble along with vacant buildings, turning a simple walk down the street to a bus stop or store into a perilous journey. One study of Florida roads found that the likelihood of a crash involving a pedestrian was three times as great per mile on roadways with no sidewalks.

The broken streetscape is only part of the problem. These neighborhoods are “much more likely to contain major arterial roads built for high speeds and higher traffic volumes at intersections, exacerbating dangerous conditions for people walking,” according to a recent report from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit focusing on urban planning and sustainability. These roads and highways, designed in the middle of the last century to provide convenient access to the city from the ever-sprawling suburbs, often brought misery to the minority communities they hurtled through.

In Los Angeles, for instance, a 2020 analysis by U.C.L.A. researchers found that although Black residents made up 8.6 percent of the city’s population, they represented more than 18 percent of all pedestrians killed and around 15 percent of all cyclists. From 2016 to 2020, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had more pedestrian deaths than any other metro area in the United States and a pedestrian death rate higher than the metropolitan areas around New York, Philadelphia or Washington.

As a society, we have been laying the blame for pedestrian traffic injuries on the victims ever since the 1920s, when pro-car groups backed by the automobile industry coined the term “jaywalking” to suggest that pedestrians were at fault when hit by drivers. But an emphasis on individual responsibility for road safety doesn’t seem to help, even when it’s shifted back to drivers. In its most recent report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave driver training an effectiveness rating of one star out of five as a strategy to increase pedestrian safety, noting, “There is no evidence indicating that this countermeasure is effective.”

Engineering solutions like speed humps, lane narrowing, better lighting, the installation of sidewalks and “complete street” designs are far more effective at reducing pedestrian deaths. The ubiquity of speeding is not necessarily because people are bad drivers, but because the design of our roads — wide, straight stretches of asphalt meant for high speeds above all else — encourages them to do so.

Many American cities have already introduced what are known as “Vision Zero” campaigns based on the idea that even a single pedestrian death is one too many.

Vision Zero can be remarkably effective. Death rates have dropped in many cities properly carrying out the program. Oslo and Helsinki, which adopted Vision Zero in the 1990s, recorded zero traffic deaths in 2019, and Helsinki had just two pedestrian deaths in 2021. But it requires a committed redesign of city streets and bikeways, not just rhetoric and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

In the United States, minimal funding, political inertia and a lack of state and federal participation have limited the effectiveness of these programs. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, pedestrian deaths have actually risen since the adoption of Vision Zero. “All these safety efforts come to die in the United States,” said Beth Osborne, the director of the transportation arm for Smart Growth America. “All of these could be incredibly effective, but we have to be willing to change our approach, not just make plans and talk about changing our approach.”

Last year, 312 people died in traffic accidents in Los Angeles, the majority of them pedestrians and cyclists. “If 300 people died of something in the city, whether it was something violent or whether it was something else like Covid, the resources were put behind it to try to prevent those things, to respond to those things,” said Eunisses Hernandez, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We have not seen that same urgency with people dying in traffic accidents as pedestrians and as cyclists.”

The United States can reverse the trend of rising traffic deaths, a trend that disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic communities, by investing in safer road design: narrowing streets, reducing the amount of space devoted to cars, enforcing speed limits and adding trees to provide visual cues for drivers to slow down. While these interventions may seem simplistic compared to the scale of the problem, other countries have proved that they can work. City planners must recognize that we all should be able to walk or ride a bicycle through our own neighborhood without fearing for our life.

For Councilmember Hernandez, it is a matter of justice. “I have pictures of bike racks that are full inside of these high schools, yet there are no bike lanes around the high schools,” she said. More than one high school in her district is bordered by busy four-lane streets. And at least two pedestrians in the district have already been killed by vehicles this year.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently said that “every infrastructure choice is a safety choice,” and in 2022 launched a $1 billion pilot program to redesign roads with a focus on racial equity. Whether this federal action will be able to bend the statistics remains to be seen. For decades, the United States has prioritized the needs of people driving through cities over the well-being of the people living in them, and largely at the expense of communities with the least political clout. Adopting the framing of Vision Zero without finding sufficient funding and political will for road redesign is simply not good enough. Our elected officials must be willing to face an unpleasant set of facts: that the appalling racial disparity in road deaths continues on their watch, and that nearly every killing of a cyclist or pedestrian by a car is preventable.

Seemingly Simple

Meltdown In Dixie - Trailer

P is for public, but apparently, an awful lot of the content on our "public" broadcast system is buried so deeply behind pay walls, that it's practically impossible to find a link to the shit that airs on "my publicly-funded local PBS station".

You're on your own. Good luck.

Free, my dyin' ass.

Odd Quotes

Google "this day in history" = 9.4 billion hits

Google "this day in black history" = 5.6 billion hits

So now all I need is a bot that will look to see how many "black history" events are included in the "history" results.

A cursory, randomly-clicking sampling is not encouraging.

• White people living today are not to blame for the shitty things black people have had done to them - since even before 1619 - by WASPy white people in the past.
• That doesn't mean we have no responsibility for what's going on now, and it has to be obvious that some shitty things are still happening to black people.

Oy

A renowned expert on Black People In The American South explains:

How is that racist?

(white people proverb)

Today's Reddit

It's well documented here in USAmerica Inc, that every year, there's at least a few kids working hard to come up with Halloween costumes that are all but absolutely guaranteed to limit their career opportunities.

It may also be true that they've already committed to a work life that never goes beyond clerking down at the local Qwik Mart, and this kinda shit is how they buy their way into the guild.

History Redux

Why do we study History?

Tim Wise, at UC Santa Barbara 5 years ago.

Today's Neighbors

Posted on Twitter, so grains of salt all 'round, but does anyone really feel inclined to think this didn't happen because, "Hey - America is just too good a place for this shit to go on"?

First, there's this:

And then there's the bit about (paraphrasing) "your daughter is a slut who's trying to tempt my darling innocent boy, blah blah blah.

And we can overlook the glaring grammar fails, cuz the best part is the not-so-thinly-veiled threat at the end:

"...back to a reservation with your people. For the well-being of you and your family."

There is no hate quite like Christian love.

People Are Watching

It seems not to do a whole lot of good, but Americans are in fact coming to the realization that we live in a place that's too fucked up in too many ways.

CNN:

Doctor who treated victims at parade shooting says the dead had "wartime injuries"

Dr. David Baum, who treated victims in the Highland Park shooting on Monday, described some of the horrific injuries he witnessed.

Baum and his wife were at the parade, and their grandson was a participant. When their family ran away from the shooting, the doctor ran toward the scene.

Baum said some of the dead were "blown up."

"The horrific scene of some of the bodies is unspeakable for the average person. Having been a physician, I've seen things in ERs, you know, you do see lots of blood. But the bodies were literally — some of the bodies — it was an evisceration injury from the power of this gun and the bullets. There was another person who had an unspeakable head injury. Unspeakable," he told CNN.

Speaking as parade-goers' belongings could be seen abandoned at the scene in the background, Baum said the suburban community in Illinois will never be the same.

"I grew up here, and I moved back here with my wife. We raised our kids here. My daughter and my son-in-law moved here because they were concerned about gun violence and carjackings in the city when they had their son. And now people are, you know, they're scared to take their kids to nursery school. But what I saw was just families' lives forever changed because they were walking down with their kids and their scooters and somebody who shouldn't have had access to a high-powered rifle got up on a rooftop and decided to do what he wanted to do," Baum said.

Robert E. Crimo III, identified by police as the person suspected of shooting and killing six people and wounding dozens of others at the July 4 parade, was arrested on Monday hours after the shooting.

"You know, to me, you can't drink until you're 21, but I still do not know why this country allows an 18-year-old to have a weapon that was meant for war. And the injuries ... that I saw — I never served — but those are wartime injuries. Those are what are seen in victims of war, not victims at a parade," Baum continued.

Debra Baum said people were killed within 30 seconds.

"Today, it's just hitting me more how sad I am. And I'm also thinking we all have to change our behavior until this gets under control. I'm not going to a parade anymore. I'm not going to a sports event. I'm afraid for my grandson to go to school. We all have to change our behavior and not do the things we love to do because of this situation," she said.

"I don't think the average person has to see a body eviscerated or a head injury that's unspeakable ... to understand what the problem is with this country," Dr. Baum said. "And the problem with this country is the failure to recognize that every week, you all are going to a different community with a different Uvalde. And Uvalde was in Highland Park in a small way. I mean ... what happened in Texas is horrific. What happened here is horrific. The fact that my kids and my grandson and all of these other kids from this community who are nice community members were walking down the street on scooters in their wagon, that's all they have to know. They don't have to see what I saw. ... The people who were gone were gone instantly," he said.

So, some asshole with a gun kills 6 and sends 30 others to the hospital when he opens fire on a 4th of July parade, he leads the cops on a merry little chase, and they nab him without much incident.

Meanwhile, another black man is gunned down.

In this case, yes, Walked had a gun and the dumbass did apparently take a shot at the cops as he was trying to escape. One shot.

But when he lit out on foot, the cops fired 90 rounds, hitting the guy 60 times, and then they found he was unarmed, having left his gun in his car.

Sky News - Jaylon Walker shot 60 times

We have cops who are more than happy to support gun rights - many buying the whole deal about 2nd amendment and how an armed citizenry is necessary to a free state and blah blah blah - so we have guns out the ass. Which means we have law enforcement officers who are prepared for war, and hit the streets expecting to be a gunfight at some point in their careers - many of whom go looking for the trouble - sometimes causing the trouble - they're supposed to be trained to prevent.

And all of that is on top of the gut-wrenching continuation of a "justice system" badly skewed against anyone other than white males.

USAmerica Inc, you are nine kinds of fucked up.

It's Not The Way You Say

Justin King - Beau Of the Fifth Column

When the system dials back the privilege you've enjoyed your whole life, it feels like oppression. Welcome to the world.

Border Crisis

Gee, I wonder if our fucked up gun culture - in concert with our fucked up profit-no-matter-what culture - together with our fucked up covert policy of ignoring (or maybe aggravating) the problems of Communities of Color - could have something to do with making all those brown people so afraid to stay in their homes that they'll risk everything trying to get into the US.

Funny how there's never a crisis at our northern border - must be there's somethin' wrong with them brown people.

I've never seen it fail. Whenever "conservatives" make a big ugly noise about anything, if you look a little bit past the bluster, it's almost a dead solid cinch you'll find some racist shit tucked up in there somewhere.

Harvard Gazette: (Feb 2022)

Every year, half a million weapons enter Mexico illegally from the U.S., and many of them are military-style weapons that end up in the hands of drug cartels and other violent criminals, said Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, legal adviser of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“In addition to prosecuting criminals and seizing guns that are illegally in Mexico, we decided to go to the source of the problem. Like if this were a toxic river, in addition to cleaning the river, we need to go to the source and stop the toxic waste from being dumped at the river,” said Celorio Alcántara, referring to the landmark lawsuit the Mexican government filed against 10 U.S. gun manufacturers in U.S. federal court last summer. It is the first time that a foreign government has sued American gunmakers.

Celorio Alcántara spoke on Thursday at the online panel “Exporting Mayhem: Suing Gun Manufacturers in the U.S. to Stop Violence in Mexico” about the public health crises created by gun violence on both sides of the border and the legal arguments behind the action. The panel was sponsored by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Mexican officials have said that a significant part of the epidemic of violence and crime that has plagued their nation in recent decades is driven by the illicit traffic of weapons from the U.S. Mexico has restrictive firearms laws, with one gun store in the entire nation and only about 50 permits issued per year. Between 70 to 90 percent of guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico can be traced back to the U.S. Drug cartels, in particular, buy those weapons in the U.S., mostly in Texas or Arizona, and smuggle them across the border.

The lawsuit accuses gunmakers of marketing strategies and business practices to “design, market, distribute, and sell guns in ways they know routinely arm the drug cartels in Mexico.”

Alicia Ely Yamin, Senior Fellow in Global Health and Rights at the Petrie-Flom Center, drew a parallel between the lawsuit by the Mexican government and the settlement between Remington and the families of nine people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. In total the gunman, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, took the lives of 20 children and six adults in the attack.

Both lawsuits focus on the firms’ marketing strategies that target individuals who pose a higher threat of gun violence, said Yamin. The settlement with Remington announced Feb. 15 awards the families $73 million and, more importantly, requires the gun manufacturer to release internal company documents about their marketing strategies.

“We decided to go to the source of the problem. Like if this were a toxic river, in addition to cleaning the river, we need to go to the source and stop the toxic waste from being dumped at the river.”

-- Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, legal adviser, Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Mexico’s legal action is novel and innovative in its efforts to pierce the veil of impunity that has been constructed in the U.S. to protect gun manufacturers, said Yamin. Since 2005, when President George W. Bush signed into law the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, gun makers have enjoyed immunity from lawsuits because it shields them from liability when their arms are used in deadly crimes.

For Heidi Li Feldman, professor of law and co-director of the joint degree in law and philosophy at Georgetown University, the Mexican lawsuit is legally complex, but if it’s successful it could open possibilities for further lawsuits against U.S. gun manufacturers.

“At the heart of the Mexican complaint is the intuition that if you are feeding your guns into a criminal market and marketing your products to construct a criminal market, that is both intuitively and fundamentally unscrupulous,” said Feldman. “It may be good for your profits, but it’s clearly contrary to the social welfare. And that’s the angle that I think will ground one of the most promising arguments that the Mexican government is going to bring.”

Gun violence is a public health crisis, said David Hemenway, professor of health policy, and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. While lawsuits can help a great deal, Hemenway said, they’re just one part of a multifaceted public health approach.

Celorio Alcántara said the lawsuit is an effort to hold gun manufacturers accountable for their business practices and marketing strategies that are fueling gun violence in his country.

“This is not a lawsuit against the Second Amendment,” said Celorio Alcántara. “The companies we’re suing know their products end up in Mexico. They know their products are hurting people in Mexico, and they do nothing to change their business practices. We want to hold them accountable. We need our day in court.”

The panel was sponsored by the Global Health and Rights Project, a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center and the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, and the Mexico program at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

Ari Melber

"This happens all the time."

And the furor over the difference between cops killing unarmed black people and cops pampering armed white people is not to be construed to mean we want the cops to start killing the white guys too - THE COPS AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE KILLING ANYBODY.

The Beat with Ari Melber

Today's Reminder

Ignore for a minute the privilege and the class stratification implied, and notice the straightforward racism couched in terms of American exceptionalism.

"If black people study hard and work hard, they stand just as good a chance of success as anybody else."

The implication being that since most black people are still having inordinate difficulty attaining the status and the wealth and the success that white people enjoy here in USAmerica, then there must be something wrong with black people.

But no - there's no racism here - certainly no systemic racism - we're not a society built on racist policies - blah blah blah.

Tim Wise: It's not a glitch, it's a feature. The system has not failed brown people - the system is working as designed. 

Laying It Bare

Chris Hayes, with a look at the blatant Lee Atwater-style racism built in to the GOP.

Republicans beat up on black nominees for being black (ie: not voicing a yessir boss desire to be white).

Then they try to sell it as being no different from Dems beating up on a religious zealot who says her faith and her deference towards her husband will color her decisions - or a boozing sexual predator who came to the nomination with questions about how his predecessor was ushered out, and some shady-as-fuck shenanigans involving his finances.

But hey - money talks and integrity walks

Today's Wingnut Redux

You don't get to spout "America First" practically every time you open your tater trap, and then claim you don't have anything to do with the racist assholes who spout "America First" every time they open their tater traps.

That's what we call some primo Daddy State gaslighting.

Idaho Lt Gov Janice McGeachin caught some flak for her little sortie into Racist Asshole Country, and then she back-peddled trying to downplay the thing, but then, in almost perfect accordance with the standard playbook, she reversed field again and doubled down.

Right Wing Watch:

A news report:

Here's a little taste of that special brand of racist bullshit Nick Fuentes dishes all day every day.