Author: mopress

By Greg Moses

Indymedia Austin / Counterpunch

On a hot day in July the chamber of the Texas Senate turns out to be a
great place to catch some A/C and think about how there are two
monuments to Confederate heroes on the front lawn of the Capitol.

Read that Southmost monument carefully. The
only reason they lost that war, explains the marble script, was because the Heroes were outnumbered six to
one. It never was a fair fight, and the monument testifies that the Heroes never lost it.

The Heroes put 400,000 lives on
the line, but so did the Northern Aggressors, so the Heroes had not
another 400,000 to waste, but the Northern Aggressors did. Jesus,
what a bloody mess. In 1901, they were not at all ready to let that one
go, so they built another monument on the South Capitol lawn.

And even today, over my bar-b-que lunch I see a fellow
diner in a Confederate flag
t-shirt. Here we are at Ben’s Long Branch Bar-B-Que on East 11th Street, where they
serve Soul Food Wednesdays. And in walks this confederate
flag. Do
these fights never go away?

To comment on this article please go to the comment blog.
These are the things you can ponder as you stare at the chandeliers
round about 1:30 PM Thursday, as the titans of the Democratic Party
huddle on the Senate floor, having no company to keep with
Republicans who were huddled somewhere out of sight.

In the huddle that you could see, there were, among others, Gonzalo Barrientos, the long-time survivor from Austin; John
Whitmire, the filibusterer from North Houston; Royce West, the
education whip, hobbling around with a kind of cast on his left
leg no less (it was West wasn’t it with the cast? if I’d known that was
going to be the best image of the day, I’d have taken notes); and
Eliiot Shapleigh, the one who will tell you plain out
that Texas would do much better having an income tax.

Other than that, all we see in terms of Senators is one guy on the Right side of the aisle cruising
Google Earth in search of various properties that we up in the gallery
suppose that he owns.

Everybody could see that these hapless pols weren’t part of the back-room deal making that,
by day’s end, would be sure enough promised to deliver the Senate this time once more,
yeah sure, to successful conclusion on education policy.

When Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst walked out to rationalize for
the press, you could see that it was gonna be a little more talk and a
lot less action. Not a bad time to get a
Starbuck’s coffee, read the New York Times article about Rumsfeld in
Baghdad, and cross your fingers about mid-term elections next year.

It also
helps to sit near lobbyists. "There she
goes back to her office," said two well-heeled suits at the same time,
indicating a well-placed staffer who smiled briefly into the galleries
before disappearing. "It’s going to be awhile," they agreed.

But can you believe it? Not one, but two monuments to the Confederacy out
front? The history of this legislature is surely written in
granite priorities outside.

I had time to mosey through the monuments Thursday morning, being as how I
was early to the Latino Coalition’s press conference, and even after
circling both Civil War monuments, I was still early enough to catch the
MALDEF team standing alone at the South Steps.

David Hinojosa, Luis Figueroa, and an intern were staking out the
territory for this morning’s announcement of a six-point plan–a simple
way of reminding Texas what a good education bill would look
like–one that wouldn’t require court intervention either.

"They say we’re out of ideas and we only oppose bills," said
Figueroa. "So we’re here to show them the ideas that we’re for."

"People have asked whether no bill would be better than a bad bill," said Hinojosa. "But what about a great bill?"

A great education bill would:

(1) Equalize Funding so that all children would share the wealth regardless of where they are born.

(2) Make sure facilities are up-to-date, a need that remains unmet in
many of MALDEF’s client districts in the
latest round of education litigation.

(3) Fund realistic "weights" for the education of English Language
Learners (15 percent of all students) and Low Income Children (50
percent, yes half of all Texas Students are Low Income). These
students need a forty percent increase right away.

(4) Pay teachers good wages. The Southwest Workers Union was on
hand Thursday morning with signs asking, "Living Wages for School Workers",
and a huge banner demanding: "Mandamos Justicia".

(5) Accountability without high stakes testing. As the press kit

explained, many students take tests that assume they have been taught the
material in the first place by obedient if not qualified teachers.

(6) And finally (because there are only really five things that the
legislature refuses to do, not six) why not give the kids of Texas a
chance to excel in
education. Give them the education they need to rank among the top
tiers of their
globalized peers. Wouldn’t that be the kind of thing a state
would want for its kids? Isn’t this the kind of things heroes
fight for?

But what does any of this have to do with tax cuts, you ask?
And aren’t tax cuts the one thing that legislators have to bring back
to their voters this year? The MALDEF team
takes no official line on taxes, but they have noticed that cutting
taxes is much more important to this legislature than doing six (or five) good
things for education. But who hasn’t noticed that?

The message of the Latino Coalition is crisp and bright. But it ain’t a
cheap message, that’s for sure. And Texas voters are having
difficulty rising to level of maturity required to say: children first.

By afternoon Thursday, it’s not clear that any of this Latino Coalition
sunshine has penetrated into the carpeted hush of Senate chambers where
up at the gallery level children come and go quickly with their
vacationing parents. It’s not a bad space to be walking around or
sitting around as the July sun climbs up the ladder outside.

A dozen blocks away at City Hall I tug on the first door handle, my
body looking forward to the whoosh of chilled air, but what’s that
noise? Turns out that door handle is unauthorized entrance and I’ve
just set
off an intruder alert. A guy is wagging his finger at me. I don’t
wait for him to finish his sentence. I step back out into the
heat. Great. Shows you how well I know
City Hall these days.

Okay so back out the door and around through the metal detector and
x-ray, probably a video tape, too. Here I don’t set off any
alarms, so I go stand by the Chief of Police for a second while I
search for a seat.

Councilmember Brewster McCracken is looking over the freshly drafted
city budget and trying to come to grips with the fact that the city is
headed toward a police state far as the eye can see. Of course,
that’s not the way he says it exactly. But he notices that the
police portion of the city budget is up to 75 percent and
climbing.

Give us a decade, and we’ll all be working for the
police union, while not doing jobs like librarian, park maintenance,
after school programs, health care–you know, all that socialist
nonsense that we began to finally outgrow round about 1980.

So I’m not unhappy to go out and join the socialists, anarchists,
greens, poets, artists, and possibly even Democrats who have gathered
along Cesar Chavez Street this aftern

oon to protest the killing of
18-year-old Daniel Rocha, who, according to the sign I was holding, was
shot in the back at point blank range. He was unarmed at the
time, although possibly guilty of having smoked a reefer two hours
earlier, if you believe the revised toxicology report, which folks out
here with signs aren’t really wanting to to.

And even if Rocha had
been stoned two hours earlier, so what? I mean you go around
killing previously stoned people in Austin, Texas? No wonder
Willie is keeping a heavy touring schedule these days.

Back inside the building, Councilmember Danny Thomas wants to know how
police get a 2.7 customer satisfaction rating? Those are the
kinds of questions you can sincerely wonder about in there with your
air conditioners humming, behind your security screens, as you pass out
an award to the cop who killed a mentally deranged woman who was
threatening someone with a knife. Today it is official, that the
cop has been cleared by the feds, so he is a hero, he saved a
life. Now on to the Rocha killing.

And, um, I forget, what
was that question you asked Mr. Thomas? Oh right. Why are people who
are not federal agents or Councilmembers not impressed with police
today? And I know you didn’t ask this, but why won’t they–even
in the face of what a police state looks like–raise taxes for
education?

"Money for jobs and ed-u-ca-tion. Not more po-lice
oc-cu-pa-tion." I put down my sign and make a note of this
chant. Sort of sums up my day. Two standing monuments to Confederate Heroes, can
you believe it?

"About 1,900 inmates currently sleep on the floor in the Harris County
Jail drawing the ire of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards," writes
Scott Henson, in his first report on the overcrowding problem.
"According to a recent consultant’s report (Word document), a major
reason is clear: A shift in bail policy over the last decade to require
cash bond in more cases instead of personal bond, or releasing
defendants on their promise to later appear in court. Half of all
inmates presently in the Harris County Jail are awaiting trial; a large
proportion couldn’t make bail."

Writes Henson: "Though other factors are also at play, much of the
Harris County Jail’s overincarceration crisis can be explained by this
shift in policy. In other words, Harris County’s jail overcrowding
crisis is a self-inflicted wound."

"In the last ten years, the number of misdemeanor defendants who were
ordered to pay bail instead of being released on "personal bond"
increased more than 30,000%! No, that’s not a typo: It increased more
than thirty thousand percent!"

For the rest, get your Grits for Breakfast here. This is what we call criminalization with civil rights implications,
since we feel like the problem wouldn’t grow so fast if it concerned
white kids in the suburbs, in other words, there is no evidence that
the refusal to grant personal bonds is tied to actual risks of
defendants not showing up.  So if there is no rational basis, we tender the hypothesis of racist bias.–gm

By Greg Moses

Sarah and Roxanne knew Daniel Rocha in high school, so at the press
conference called by Poder, LULAC, and the ACLU, they shared a sign
protesting the grand jury’s decision to issue no indictments against
the police officer who
killed him. Both Sarah and Roxanne say the same thing about the
situation: "Daniel was a small guy."

"Daniel was pretty cool," says Roxanne. "I had a dance class with his girlfriend, so he was always at the
door waiting for her. He always had a smile on his face. He
was always making everyone laugh. He would tell a lot of jokes." That was back in 2003 before Roxanne had her little girl,
Justice. "Her dad named her that." In fact, Sarah and Roxanne, who are cousins,
were at the courthouse Tuesday so that Justice could visit her dad
at the county jail. He’s been there for a couple of months, but
he should hopefully be getting out later this week.

Anyway, when the cousins saw what the protest was about they said to
each other, "let’s stay out here." At first there were enough
signs so that Roxanne and Sarah could each hold one, but then a guy
came to the protest who didn’t have a sign, so Roxanne gave him hers,
and after that she shared Sarah’s, all the while holding Justice on
her shoulder.

According to reports coming out of the courthouse Tuesday, the officer
told the Grand Jury how she had lost her taser while pushing Daniel to
the ground and feared that if he had the taser, he might use it against
another police officer at the scene and take that officer’s gun. "I
have been in a number of fights before and never have I felt this
scared and afraid. Instinctively, I grabbed for my gun and shot him
once. Self-preservation took over."

One news report Tuesday night stated matter of factly that Rocha "was
shot in the back as he stood over another officer who had fallen during
the fight." But witnesses reported that the officer who did the
shooting was standing over Daniel when she pulled the trigger. And Daniel was "already on the ground."

Says attorney Bobby Taylor in behalf of the Rocha family: "What we’re
being told is that the officer did not know where her Taser was, and that’s
the justification for shooting him in the back. That’s the
justification for it. That’s it. She did not see him with it. He did
not threaten her. If I were a police officer I’d feel pretty
comfortable in doing whatever the world I wanted to do."

The Police Officers Association sees it as fair warning: "I think it
tells people, ‘Don’t fight the police when we’re out there trying to do
our job.’ I think the public and the law states that you have to comply
with the officers," said the association’s rep.

Buried under Tuesday’s events was the memory that of three cop cars at
the scene that night, none of them was able to produce the required
video tape. One machine was empty, one malfunctioned, and the third car arrived too late, said police.

At any rate, says Sarah, "There were two cops there, and Daniel was a
little guy." The Grand Jury, she thinks, is "full of themselves."
Their decision to issue no indictments really, really, really upsets
her. "They have all the evidence there, but like a friend of mine
says, guns don’t kill people, police kill people. He wasn’t that
big."

"I’m not going to lie to you," says Sarah when I ask her about
Daniel. "He was a good guy, but I’m not going to say he didn’t
have some bad times. He was in and out of juvenile. Some
was for drug charges." As she sees it, Daniel drifted into hard
company in a hard neighborhood, he had no dad, but he cared.

For example, the last class she shared with Daniel was a self-paced
computer lab where students could make up for classes they had not yet
passed. Daniel was doing some math there. Sarah was doing
some history. She recalls that he was concentrating on his work, but he
would get up and start dancing now and then.

She remembers in early March that Daniel took his camera
to school and talked about pictures that he had taken of his mom. "I
love my mom so much," she recalls Daniel saying. "I know I’m
stressing her out really bad. I need to stop." But soon after that he
got into a fight, which caused him more trouble at school. They didn’t let him graduate.

Sarah senses that living in a troubled neighborhood is a double threat
to kids like Daniel. There’s the trouble they can get into, and
there’s the trouble that people will think they are up to, whether or
not they are. She thinks that because Daniel was caught in a car
that had just driven out of a poor neighborhood that "the cops took it
the wrong way."

Police say the car had been spotted in a drug transaction while under
surveillance, but Sarah asks if the car was under surveillance, why
weren’t the police better prepared for the stop? If this was a
planned drug trap in the first place, why was it handled like a
routine traffic stop, three suspects, two cops? And the missing video tapes? "Maybe
if there was one car and that video didn’t work, but all of them?
I don’t believe that."

For Sarah, there is an attitude of suspicion that cops bring to the
neighborhood that makes her angry. It also makes her worry about
baby Justice, who also lives in a troubled part of town. "What if
one day she’s at the wrong place at the wrong time. Just because
she has black in her, just because she’s Hispanic, just because she’s a
different color…"

But most of all she wants the world to know that Daniel had not yet
given up on himself. "He had dreams. He was trying to take
care of his mom. He had goals set for himself." Daniel
talked about starting his own clothing line named D-Roch that would
feature jerseys, shoes, and pants. He dressed like he cared about his
clothes.

"If it was raining," says Sarah, "and if he was wearing new shoes, he
would wear bags over his shoes." Over the telephone I hear a
little puffing sound as Sarah laughs through her nose. That was
Daniel, not too proud to wear bags on his shoes in the rain. "He
took real good care of himself. I really want you to put it out
there that he wasn’t a bad person."

A View from Mexico
By Rodrigo Saldaña Guerrero

There are people who insist that politics must be pragmatic. Its
purpose is reaching power and using it, not passing a test on party
principles. For others the most important thing in politics is
ideological authenticity. They complain about leftist support to Kerry,
for instance, and about the lack of true left credentials of that
candidate.

One gets the impression that being leftist is a question of ideological
purity, and little else. It does not really matter if the power goes to
someone else, as long as leftists are true to the faith. Both sides
have their pros and cons, of course.

The strength of pragmatism is an insistence in doing things and
(hopefully) a sensibility to detect what one has to have in order to do
things. That’s necessary, because politics is a practical, not a merely
theoretical, activity. Its weakness is that doing something is not an
end in itself.

Doing things is something widely admired today, so much so that someone
who “has done a lot” can be praised even if it is not very clear
whatever he did that for. We have to think of ends and consequences. We
act to do something or to get something. Did we achieve the end we
aspired to? What we do has results. How do we feel about them?

Its strengths and weaknesses mirror those of pragmatism. Its strongest
point is its attention to ends. The loftiest values are very important
to us, give sense to our life and actions. Ideals are not necessarily
utopias (utopia, a word coined by Thomas More, means etymologically no
place).

Ideals are not unrealizable ends, they just can not be achieved
immediately, completely, perfectly. They are in fact found everywhere
in provisional, incomplete, imperfect ways. This is all right, but it
presents us with a problem: if we have to admit that we will never have
a perfect implementation of an ideal, how can we criticize an imperfect
realization? The answer of some idealists is to center their interest
in formulas, not in facts. Since we know that we will never achieve
perfection, the only thing that matters is to be absolutely right in
our formulation of the ideals.

When a supposedly leftist party or movement is in power, all this may
lead to a Manichean approval of everything the regime does. The right
(the enemy) is always wrong, no matter what it does. The good side
(ours, of course) is always right, whatever it does. The Soviet regime
probably killed, tortured, terrorized, more people that the Nazi one.
No problem, for some time at least.

It took the left decades to understand the true nature of what was
eventually called real socialism. When they did, the Soviet Empire
dissolved from within, leaving an enormous void in the hearts of the
faithful.

What happens when the left is not in power is what really interests us
here. Policies that have had scarce effect in helping the poor are
defended because they are ideologically correct. A few decades ago many
shared that ideology, but most people have moved in the opposite
direction, and do not like the old leftist prescriptions.

Some social democrats (González, Miterrand, Blair, Lula, Lagos) have
done what to the eyes of the old left is at best a Socialist
administration of capitalism. Whatever the truth of that perception,
those politicians have done something at least for the poor, in
practice, while the pure leftists go farther and farther away from
popular support, and from power.

In the United States the left demands that a politician like Kerry take
positions that may be admirable examples of ideological orthodoxy, but
which now would keep him from any position of power.

I think that Marxism is one of the secular religions proceeding from
the Enlightenment, worldviews that have in their core a secularization
of the Christian History of Salvation (deprived of the divine guarantee
of success offered by the religious version, unless we assume that the
role of divinity has been taken over by History). It sees history as
ineluctable progress: at its end, there will be an earthly paradise,
whatever we do.

This belief did a terrible damage to the left, since it disconnected
rational evaluation and success from the means used by the
revolutionaries. No matter what strategies they used, or how clumsily
they applied them, triumph was assured. Temporary failure was no
argument against their way of thinking, just a setback that would
inevitably give way to final victory.

The self liquidation of what once seemed to be their earthly paradise
was a terrible blow to their faith. Some have faced it in a way that
would have surprised Marx enormously: making Marxism into an
ideological superstructure of a Capitalist society.

It is doubtful whether the unilineal left-right model ever was adequate
for the complexity of the ideological universe, and now everybody
admits that what is called the left is in a serious identity crisis.
Still, many of us would insist that something like that must exist.

I am not going to enter now the whole question of the reinvention of
the left; I will concentrate instead in the attitude of many leftists
toward the realization of its ideals.

Many leftists seem to think that the really important thing is to be
faithful to the right dogmatic formulations of the left ideals. It
matters much less or not at all if they are put into practice. Or, to
put it otherwise, it is clear that they can not be put into practice.
What one must do is to keep the purity of those formulas, and the best
way to do it is to be out of power, in the opposition.

Denouncing the wickedness of the right without the embarrassment of
having to perform a perfect leftist policy, something one knows to be
impossible. That is a way of being leftist. I think the problem is in
the way we see the relationship between the ideals and their
realization. The old left would say, as we have seen, that their
realization was assured, so that was not their problem.

A disenchanted left is used to think that the only possible thing is to
keep saying the right things, even if one knew that had little or no
effect in the real world. My solution is that we can realize those
ideals in the way I said before: provisionally, gradually,
incompletely, imperfectly; moving from a static conception of society
toward a dynamic, historical one. And our duty is not to do them in a
perfect and definitive way, which would be impossible anyhow, but to
keep improving the imperfect, tending asymptotically toward the perfect
realization.

What the left should do, and what it can not see, is to take the
necessary steps to bring social reality nearer and nearer to a real
social good, to a society in which inequality and inequity tend to
disappear, even if they never do in fact disappear.

By static criteria society will always be imperfect, that is to say,
unjust. Knowing that helps little. What matters is that it can be made
less unjust, that we can cooperate to give it a dynamic that means a
real movement toward a more just society and the improvement of the
conditions in which our less fortunate siblings have to live. And the
effective way to do this is to build popular strength, to convince
great numbers of citizens to support what is supposed to be the cause
of the people, a goal that seems to be now, paradoxically, very far
away…

RECOMMENDATIONS of Aug. 16 Press Conference

In Response to No-Billing of Police Officer

In Daniel Rocha Killing

1) Institute a "Uniform Disciplinary Matrix" that makes officer
punishments consistent from case to case, including mandatory
termination for the most serious offenses. Per the latter, the adoption
of this recommendation would induce the termination of Julie Schroeder,
who shot an unarmed, 132-pound 18-year-old boy in the back at point
blank range after he was already face down on the ground.

2) Mandate pairing of proven (i.e. no history of excessive force,
discrimination or suspension) veterans with rookies on the East side.

3) Institute accountable, documented and independent [of the patrolling
officer(s)] handling of all patrol car video cameras and tapes, and have
all video and audio recording devices in operation during all activity,
not subject to arbitrary control by the patrolling officer.

In addition to these recommendations, we call for a public apology by
Chief Knee to the Rocha family and to the community at large for the
behavior of Julie Schroeder, and for the behavior of all of the officers
who have used excessive force.
For Immediate Release: ADVISORY
August 16, 2005
Contact: Debbie Russell, 573-6194
or Austin Dullnig, 443-5616

ACLU & Other Community Leaders Call for Termination of Julie Schroeder
in Light of Grand Jury Decision

What: The Central Texas ACLU and other community leaders will hold a
press conference urging APD Chief Stan Knee to terminate Julie Schroeder
in accordance with their recommendations asserted earlier this week (see
below). Given the recent shooting of 18-year-old Hispanic Daniel Rocha,
such respected figures as Rev. Sterling Lands, II and prominent local
organizations as PODER, LULAC, the NAACP and the American Friends
Service Committee agree with the ACLU that these recommendations would
help to ensure that no more violent injustice is perpetrated by the APD
in our potentially peaceful city.

Where: Travis County Courthouse steps, 1000 Guadalupe St. (between 10th
and 11th on Guadalupe)

When: Tuesday, August 16, 2005, 5:00pm press conference and demonstration

Who: the Central Texas ACLU, PODER, LULAC, El Concilio, Austin Area NAACP

Why: too many people of color have died as a result of excessive use of
force by the APD, and many more have been wrongfully and violently
treated. The Grand Jury process is characterized by conflict of
interest, and the ball is now in the court of the APD. By terminating
Julie Schoreder and adopting a few very specific policies and practices,
the APD could prevent such tragedies as have occurred with Sophia King,
Jesse Owens and Daniel Rocha, and begin to restore the trust of the
Austin community.