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Free Riders

Governments — local, state, and federal — spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. It’s never hard to find some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has come up with a government program that will eliminate, or ameliorate, or at least contain, the worst aspects of grinding poverty, especially as experienced by city folks, and especially as experienced by black people, brown people, immigrants, or other people marked for the special observation and solicitude of the State bureaucracy. Depending on the frame of mind, these programs may be more aimed at doling out conditional charity to deserving poor people, or they may be more aimed at bringing more at-risk poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or they may be more aimed at beating recalcitrant poor people up and locking them in cages. (Most programs involve a combination of at least two, and possibly all three.) But one thing that they will never, ever do is just get the fuck out of the way and let poor people do the sort of things that poor people have done from time out of mind to help themselves scratch by.

There are too many ways to list them all here. But one notable example is the way in which city governments constrain and control taxi cabs. In principle, anyone who needed to make some extra money could start a part-time cab service with a car they already have, a cell phone, and some word of mouth. That’s good money for honest labor providing a useful service to willing customers, all under the direction and control of a single independent worker, who can put as much or as little into it as she wants to in order to make the money she needs. And so what do the statesman in city governments do? They create tightly regulated, tightly restricted cartels on taxi service, impose arbitrary numerical limits and financial barriers to entering the cartel, and hit anyone they catch operating outside of the cartel with exorbitant fines or jail time.

One of the worst offenders is New York City, in which all taxi service are regulated by a central city commission, and the city enforces an arbitrary cap on the number of taxi cabs that can pick up passengers off the street. The licenses (medallions) for serving willing customers without John Law punching your head are closely controlled by the city government; a handful of new ones are occasionally auctioned off by the city, and existing ones can be bought and sold by existing license holders — usually at a cost measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lots of poor people have a car laying around that they could use; not a lot have a few hundred thousand dollars.

Just in case those expenses and legal barriers to entry weren’t enough, I find that Mayor Bloomberg has decided that your taxi needs high-cost high-tech GPS and payment systems — whether or not you, as a driver, wants to lay out the time, money, and lost work to install and maintain it, and whether or not you, as a rider, want to pay the fares needed to cover the expense. Why would they need that? Well, hell, why not? Bloomberg knows what you need or want to pay for better than you do, anyway.

Right after Labor Day, a slew of New York City taxi drivers protested plans to roll out credit- and debit-card payment systems in the back seats of all 13,000 medallion cabs.

They feared they would lose money on tips if passengers didn’t pay in cash.

But proponents, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, outnumbered the protesters.

Supporters say the ongoing program will better serve customers and actually help bring in more money for cabbies.

— Investor’s Business Daily (2007-09-06): Wireless, Cashless Payments Come To The World Of Taxi Drivers

So, thanks to the supporters, the cabbies will be treated like imbeciles who do not know how to conduct their own business, and also like conscripts who do not have any say in the conditions of their own labor. Well, in any case, somebody is sure to get a sweet deal:

It certainly will help bring in more revenue for San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone Holdings (NYSE:PAY) PAY. The company is a leading maker of point-of-sale terminals and wireless systems.

VeriFone — in partnership with MasterCard’s MA PayPass — was the first firm approved to provide the wireless systems in New York’s cabs. The systems make use of an ATM-style interface to accept credit and debit fare payments.

The company’s back-seat screen monitors also deliver news, weather and tidbits on restaurants, night life, hotels and other attractions. An extra bonus: Like billboards, they bring in revenue-generating ad money.

Every year, we find a free ride on a new segment of the economy that is going electronic, said Doug Bergeron, VeriFone’s chief executive.

— Investor’s Business Daily (2007-09-06): Wireless, Cashless Payments Come To The World Of Taxi Drivers

In this case, it is a free ride indeed. Who needs to actually go out and sell a product when you can get government cartels to force clients to come to you?

I wish the independent cab drivers well. If Bloomberg shoves this corporate welfare screwjob through, I would encourage them all to go on a permanent strike from officially-licensed cab driving. New York City already boasts a vibrant and growing fleet of gypsy cabs, and an influx of new labor and resources into the counter-economy would be something to welcome.

(Link thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-09-07: Unto Him Who Hath.)

Further reading:

Over My Shoulder #33: from the introduction to Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology

Here’s the rules:

  1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

  2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

  3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. This is from the introduction to the Incite! anthology, Color of Violence (2006).

The Color of Violence: Introduction

Many years ago when I was a student in San Diego, I was driving down the freeway with a friend when we encountered a Black woman wandering along the shoulder. Her story was extremely disturbing. Despite her uncontrollable weeping, we were able to surmise that she had been raped and dumped along the side of the road. After a while, she was able to wave down a police car, thinking that they would help her. However, when the white policeman picked her up, he did not comfort her, but rather seized upon the opportunity to rape her once again.

Angela Davis’s story illustrates the manner in which women of color experience violence perpetrated both by individuals and by the state. Since the first domestic violence shelter in the United States opened in 1974, and the first rape crisis center opened in 1972, the mainstream antiviolence movement has been critical in breaking the silence around violence against women, and in providing essential services to survivors of sexual/domestic violence. Initially, the antiviolence movement prioritized a response to male violence based on grassroots political mobilization. However, as the antiviolence movement has gained greater prominence, domestic violence and rape crisis centers have also become increasingly professionalized, and as a result are often reluctant to address sexual and domestic violence within the larger context of institutionalized violence.

In addition, rape crisis centers and shelters increasingly rely on state and federal sources for their funding. Consequently, their approaches towards eradicating violence focus on working with the state rather than working against state violence. For example, mainstream antiviolence advocates often demand longer prison sentences for batterers and sex offenders as a frontline approach to stopping violence against women. However, the criminal justice system has always been brutally oppressive towards communities of color, including women of color, as the above story illustrates. Thus, this strategy employed to stop violence has had the effect of increasing violence against women of color perpetrated by the state.

Unfortunately, the strategy often engaged by communities of color to address state violence is advocating that women keep silent about sexual and domestic violence to maintain a united front against racism. Racial justice organizing has generally focused on racism as it primarily affects men, and has often ignored the gendered forms of racism that women of color face. An example includes the omission of racism in reproductive health policies (such as sterilization abuse) in the 2001 United Nation World Conference Against Racism. Those forms of racism that disproportionately impact women of color become termed simply women’s issues rather than simultaneously racial justice issues.

There are many organizations that address violence directed at communities (e.g., police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, colonialism, and so on). There are also many organizations that address violence within communities (e.g. sexual/domestic violence). But there are very few organizations that address violence on both fronts simultaneously. The challenge women of color face in combating personal and state violence is to develop strategies for ending violence that do assure safety for survivors of sexual/domestic violence and do not strengthen our oppressive criminal justice apparatus. Our approaches must always challenge the violence perpetrated through multinational capitalism and the state.

It was frustration with the failures on the part of racial justice and antiviolence organizations to effectively address violence against women of color that led women of color to organize The Color of Violence: Violence Against Women of Color conference held at the University of California-Santa Cruz on April 28-29, 2000. The primary goals of this conference were to develop analyses and strategies around ending violence against women of color in all its forms, including attacks on immigrants’ rights and Indian treaty rights, the proliferation of prisons, militarism, attacks on the reproductive rights of women of color, medical experimentation on communities of color, homophobia/heterosexism and hate crimes against lesbians of color, economic neo-colonialism, and institutional racism; and to encourage the antiviolence movement to reinsert political organizing into its response to violence.

–Andrea Smith, Beth Richie, Julia Sudbury, and Janelle White (with the assistance of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence collective members, The Color of Violence: Introduction, in Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology, pp. 1-2.

Further reading:

Drinking the Kool-Aid

Quick quiz. What’s wrong with this Monday’s Doonesbury?

[Mike Doonesbury and Kim are watching the news on television.]

Announcer: Today, the White House moved to further shore up its deeply unpopular war policy…

Announcer: In what is being termed surge protection, leading GOP lawmakers were invited to a private reception.

Announcer: Light refreshments were served.

[Dialogue coming from the White House.]

Bush: Another glass of Kool-Aid, Senator?

Senator: Sure, why not?

I’ve commented on this before, briefly, elsewhere. But I’ll repeat myself, because I think it’s important.

I don’t know how clearly many people remember this anymore, but the phrase drinking the Kool-Aid entered our pop culture as a reference to the massacre at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978. Jonestown was a communal farm established in the jungle in Guyana by a preacher named Jim Jones and about 1,000 members of his People’s Temple–an interracial, evangelical church which had become a major presence in the politics and culture of the San Fransisco Bay Area after Jones and many of his followers relocated to northern California in the mid-1960s. The church’s doctrines combined charismatic religion with a radical form of socialist liberation theology, and in San Francisco Jones won praise from the city press and Leftist politicians. But within the church, Jones had grown increasingly authoritarian and paranoid as he became more powerful in the outer world, and in the late 1970s reports began to reach the press of harassment and violence against former members. After Jones and his followers relocated to Guyana, the utopian community in Jonestown soon descended into little more than a prison farm, with beatings, confinement, and torture used to keep members from leaving the community.

In November 1978, California Representative Leo Ryan traveled to Guyana with a group of reporters and concerned family members to investigate the situation at Jonestown. Several residents at Jonestown approached Ryan to beg him to take them back to the United States. On Jones’s orders, Ryan and four others were murdered at the airstrip on before they could leave, and after the murders he and his lieutenants decided to order a ritual mass suicide for everyone at Jonestown.

Jones’s lieutenants killed several of the elderly members of the congregation by injecting them with poison in their sleep. (About two-thirds of the population at Jonestown were children or senior-citizens.) After they were killed, two buckets of grape Flavor-Aid were prepared and laced with Valium and cyanide. The drink was brought into the assembly hall and passed around in paper cups. Babies and children were the first to drink, with the mixture squirted into the throats of the youngest children with a syringe. The poisoned drink caused convulsions, unconsciousness, and death within about 5 minutes. After the children died, some of the adults began to commit suicide by drinking the Flavor-Aid themselves. It is not known how many of the parents knew that the drink was poisoned before they gave it to their children; some may have killed themselves partly out of guilt after realizing that they had killed their own children. In any case, those who refused were forced to drink the poison or shot to death by armed guards.

The Guyanese authorities learned about the massacre from Jones’s legal advisers, who were not members of the Temple and did not participate. Relief workers discovered the bodies of 913 of the inhabitants lying dead in the jungle. Among the dead were 276 infants and children. The ghastly massacre is still often misleadingly referred to as a mass suicide in the press and reference sources.

Please remember that all those punchlines and snarky little throw-away epithets about how the devotees of some cause you dislike are drinking the Kool-Aid are actually jokes with the senseless deaths of nearly 1,000 people less than 30 years ago, for their punch-line.

Jokes like that suck.

The tribute that vice pays to virtue

So it turns out that yesterday was officially proclaimed Milton Friedman Day in the state of California, by executive edict of the Governor. Because, really, what better way is there to honor a libertarian intellectual’s memory than to get a tax-raising, insurance-mandating government windbag to proclaim a day for praising his accomplishments and influence?

I was busy working for a living last night; so I seem to have missed the Spontaneous Demonstration. Well, damn. Maybe I can catch the next big event, like when the USPS issues a Lysander Spooner stamp.

Law and Orders: UCLA campus police “found it necessary” to repeatedly taser an Iranian student already lying helpless on the ground

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who are not posing any serious threat to anyone, in order to make sure that they stay in control of the situation. They have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves; or pregnant women possibly guilty of a minor traffic violation, if they get tired enough of being talked back to and if their bellowed orders are no longer sufficient to end an argument–even without any plausible reason whatsoever for fearing any physical threat to themselves or others. When they are caught in the act police administrators will wring their hands, make up some lies to try to excuse the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all, except perhaps question the decision to arm the pigs with tasers (as if the equipment were the issue here). This is a cellphone video of what happened to UCLA student Mostafa Tabatabainejad when he refused to show identification to campus police and then demanded that they not touch him while he left the library.

(Link and story via Brian Doherty @ Reason Hit and Run 2006-11-16.)

Here is the story from The Los Angeles Times:

The latest in a recent spate of cellphone videos documenting questionable arrest tactics surfaced Wednesday, this one showing a UCLA police officer using a Taser to stun a student who allegedly refused to leave the campus library.

Grainy video of the Tuesday night incident at UCLA’s Powell Library was broadcast Wednesday on TV news and the Internet, prompting a review of the officers’ actions and outrage among students at the Westwood campus.

The footage showed the student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, falling to the ground and crying out in pain as officers stunned him.

According to a campus police report, the incident began when community service officers, who serve as guards at the library, began their nightly routine of checking to make sure everyone using the library after 11 p.m. is a student or otherwise authorized to be there.

Campus officials said the long-standing policy was adopted to ensure students’ safety.

When Tabatabainejad, 23, refused to provide his ID to the community service officer, the officer told him he would have to show it or leave the library, the report said.

After repeated requests, the officer left and returned with campus police, who asked Tabatabainejad to leave multiple times, according to a statement by the UCLA Police Department.

He continued to refuse, the statement said. As the officers attempted to escort him out, he went limp and continued to refuse to cooperate with officers or leave the building.

Witnesses disputed that account, saying that when campus police arrived, Tabatabainejad had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack. When an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, the witnesses said, Tabatabainejad told the officer to let go, yelling Get off me several times.

Tabatabainejad encouraged library patrons to join his resistance, police said. The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser.

Officers stunned Tabatabainejad, causing him to fall to the floor.

The video shows Tabatabainejad yelling, Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your … abuse of power, the Daily Bruin reported, adding he used a profanity.

It was beyond grotesque, said UCLA graduate David Remesnitsky of Los Angeles, who witnessed the incident. By the end they took him over the stairs, lifted him up and Tasered him on his rear end. It seemed like it was inappropriately placed. The Tasering was so unnecessary and they just kept doing it.

Campus police confirmed that Tabatabainejad was stunned multiple times.

By then, Remesnitsky said, a crowd of 50 or 60 had gathered and were shouting at the officers to stop and demanding their names and badge numbers.

Remesnitsky said officers told him to leave or he would be Tasered.

Tabatabainejad declined to comment. He was arrested Tuesday night and cited by campus police for resisting and obstructing a police officer and was released.

The incident was the third videotape of an arrest to surface in the last week in Los Angeles.

One video showed a Los Angeles Police Department officer dousing a handcuffed suspect in the face with pepper spray as the suspect sat in a patrol car.

That video came to light Monday, just days after the LAPD and the FBI launched investigations into another videotape showing a police officer hitting a suspect in the face several times after a foot chase in Hollywood.

UCLA Assistant Police Chief Jeff Young said Wednesday that he had viewed the video of the campus incident on the Internet and would view any other videos that were shot.

We will gather as many samples as we can find, from different sources, Young said. We’ll use it for our own administrative investigation.

— Amanda Covarrubias and Stuart Silverstein, Los Angeles Times (2006-11-16): A third incident, a new video

Here is the campus police’s military necessity justification for repeatedly electrifying an unarmed man already lying on the ground and offering no physical resistance, let alone physical threat, to the armed and uniformed gang of peace officers surrounding him:

Tabatabainejab encouraged library patrons to join his resistance. A crowd gathering around the officers and Tabatebainejad’s continued resistance made it urgent to remove Tabatabainejad from the area. The officers deemed it necessary to use the Taser in a drive stun capacity.

— University of California Police Department (2006-11-15): Powell Library Incident

The Powell Library is university property, and authorized agents of the university have every right to force out someone who does not use the library according to the policies set by the university. What they have no right to do is to carry out those aims by repeatedly using powerful electric shocks to immobilize a helpless man with pain, over and over again, when he is already lying on the ground, solely in order to keep control of the situation or to ensure students’ safety when the students themselves feel far more threatened by the belligerent and violent police. Whether or not they found it necessary to torture Tabatabainejab with electric shocks in order to accomplish those things is quite irrelevant. As Edmund Burke once wrote,

To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary.

— Edmund Burke (1757): Vindication of Natural Society

There are three things about the video that are just terrible to watch and to hear. The first is the obvious one: Tabatabainejad screaming in pain and writhing on the floor as cops assault him again and again. But the second is just as awful: the crowd of 50 or 60 students, outraged at the police’s ongoing assault, and doing nothing about it other than yelling at the cops and indignantly demanding their badge numbers–apparently in the fantastical belief that a The Law is somehow going to protect them from violence at the hands of its own rampaging hired goons. The third are the comments from the bare-fanged sadists who inevitably came along, as they come along in every case like this one, to add remarks like this:

if you don’t cooperate you get tazed. it’s very simple to understand.

— trappednAZ, in replies to YouTube (2006-11-16): UCLA Student Tasered by UCLA Police for not showing ID

Or this:

I have a medical condition! Hahaha, so good. Damn that was funny. If you don’t wanna get tasered, then don’t a dick to the police. They’re just doing their job.

— symonwill, in replies to YouTube (2006-11-16): UCLA Student Tasered by UCLA Police for not showing ID

Or this:

This is why you dont scream like a 5 year old at police when they tell you to do something. The guy wouldnt comply with anything the police were saying. He deserved it. This shouldnt even be an issue.

— c17h25n, in replies to YouTube (2006-11-16): UCLA Student Tasered by UCLA Police for not showing ID

Did you know that if a college student has a bad attitude towards armed strangers giving him orders, that justifies the cops using violence, up to and including hitting him with immobilizing electric shocks, over and over again, while he lies on the ground, in response? Apparently in the world of authoritarian creeps and bureaucratic sociopaths, it does.

Further reading:

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