Who's a Thug?

I've written before that, while I believe Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty of killing Philadelphia Police Office Daniel Faulkner, his death sentence should be overturned in favor of life in prison. When this finally happened this week, Maureen Faulkner, Officer Faulkner's widow, had this to say about his leaving death row:

"I am heartened that he will be taken from the protective cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind — the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons.”

(Read the AP article here.)

While Faulkner's anger is obviously understandable, her comparing Abu-Jamal to "thugs and common criminals" does not help bring clarity to this contentious case.

All sides agree on a few basic facts of that terrible night in 1981. Abu-Jamal witnessed his brother in an altercation with Faulkner and ran to the scene. In the ensuing mayhem, shots were fired both by Faulkner, hitting Abu-Jamal, and from a gun registered to Abu-Jamal, killing the officer.

Given the context, that would make Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop killer, something other than a common thug. It was not cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder, or an act driven by mindlessness, selfishness or greed. It was not crass barbarism of the variety seen in urban gang violence and atrocities against innocents on the sidelines of drug feuds and sectarian warfare the world over—that is thuggery. Thuggery can be murderous or just stupid and petty, such as the recent case in Philadelphia of a bicycle rider sucker punched on Kelly Drive. It is usually driven more by a type of sociopathy than strong emotion.

Abu-Jamal is not that. He is a convicted murderer who destroyed many lives, but we should not let rhetoric allow us to look at him—or this case—with clouded vision.

Anwar al-Awlaki was no fan of freedom. Are we?

So now we're killing U.S. citizens for saying unpopular things. Inspiring strangers with your YouTube videos makes you "linked" (in words of the New York Times) to their terrorist plots and actions. By this logic, the Beatles should have been assassinated for inspiring Charles Manson to commit terroristic murder after hearing their lyrics on "The White Album."

But wait, wasn't Anwar al-Awlaki also involved in operational planning for Al Qaeda, as statements from the Obama administration have taken pains to point out? Wasn't he directly involved in plots to kill Americans, as suggested by his email exchanges with Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan, accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood?

Possibly. We will never know for sure, because Awlaki will never be brought to trial. Neither he nor the rest of us will ever hear all of the evidence against him, nor will he have a chance to defend himself. All that has been preempted by a drone strike. We simply have to take Obama's word for it.

So this action is troubling on two levels. For one thing, we have handed out a death sentence to a U.S. citizen without any due process. All we know for sure is that he said things—on YouTube, in e-mails. That's not supposed to be a capital crime. The other problem is the media's normalizing the idea that unpopular speech can be tantamount to criminality, as in the Time's statement that "... his online lectures and sermons were linked to more than a dozen terrorist investigations." Linked how? In nearly all cases, this appears to refer to people who heard his words and did bad things.

It's not freedoms that get chipped away—it's the standards, definitions and limited exceptions applied to those freedoms which can be gradually undermined. This is the dark side of the War on Terror.

Food Activists Should Look Beyond 'The System'

A group of high school and college-aged food activists recently gathered in Philadelphia for a national conference, Rooted in Community. Attendees met for four days of workshops, after which they crafted a document calling for "food justice" and healthier food production and delivery systems in the U.S.—the Youth Food Bill of Rights, which was unveiled during a protest on Independence Mall.

The preamble to the bill states: "We the youth, declare, state, and demand the following rights for people around the world with an emphasis on equality. We demand healthy, organic, local, human, affordable, sustainable, and culturally appropriate food for all people and especially low-income people of color, and low-income people in our communities, and low-income people that are the most oppressed and hurt by the current food system."

While I agree with many of the goals of the document, there was irony in the time and place of the food activists' gathering. Just a few days earlier, an Inquirer article, "West Philly grocer struggles as eating habits are slow to change," profiled the plight of a family-owned, neighborhood produce market struggling to survive in the face of local indifference. "I always dreamed of this as a black-owned business in a black neighborhood, employing young black people from the neighborhood and helping this West Philadelphia community that I've spent my whole life in," Arnett Woodall told the paper. He sunk his life savings into his store, West Phillie Produce, which opened in 2009. The store is now in danger of closing.

"Only a few people on this block support this store," Woodall told the paper. "It takes a long time to change people's eating habits. I'm only still open because of my construction and landscaping businesses."

The youth food activists might do well to give a thought to the plight of Arnett Woodall. No strategy for food justice should ignore the need for personal responsibility and educating individuals to make good choices for themselves and their children. No amount of food gatherings or proclamations will make much difference without it. While you can promote choice and access, you cannot legislate what people choose to put on their fork.

Those on the left tend to stress things that are done to people; those on the right, things people do to themselves. While, in my view, liberals do a better job of embracing the call for personal responsibility than conservatives do the call for human rights and universal justice, liberals could do a still better job of acknowledging, and factoring in, the critically important need for individuals to make smart choices. Including this in a manifesto like the Food Bill of Rights would make a lot more people take it seriously.

The Soda Tax and Jobs: What's Your 'Special Interest'?

Maybe because it's accepted as an inevitable, unchangeable part of local political culture, the influence of special interests on government is perhaps nowhere more nakedly apparent than in Philadelphia. What occurs behind the scenes and through lobbying channels in Washington is shamelessly paraded in Dilworth Plaza every time a piece of legislation designed to promote the common good runs up against the interests of a connected few. The amount of money in question may be a pittance compared to what is bandied about on the state and federal level, but in an already cash-strapped city, bad fiscal decisions hurt more.

Take the recent fight over Mayor Nutter's proposed soda tax. Designed to raise money to fill a $35 million budget hole for city schools, it was clearly progressive: tax an unhealthy, non-essential item for the sake of the city's children, and maybe strike a blow against obesity at the same time. Who could be against it? The Teamsters, and a coalition of beverage industry groups (bottlers. etc.), that's who. With claims of jobs lost and a black market for soda as a result of residents having to pay 2 cents more per ounce of sugar water, the diabetes peddlers won the day. Instead, Council voted to increase already onerous property taxes.

The Jobs Question

Taxing soda has become an issue in other parts of the country as well. It's attacked as a "jobs killer." Whatever jobs are lost from adding pennies to the price of Pepsi (my guess would be something astride zero) is NOTHING compared to the jobs that have been bartered away by lawmakers looking to benefit executives and investors by opening up trade markets with countries that maintain protectionist policies (like China) or have low consumer spending (like Mexico). This is on my mind because of an excellent piece in the Inquirer recently about the trade deficit, "Why Jobs Keep Vanishing." The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) alone turned a nearly $2 billion trade surplus with Mexico in 1993 into a massive $631 billion deficit by 2010. An estimated 1.5 million American jobs have been lost to NAFTA, while 791,000 jobs have been created—a net loss of 700,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1993, Sens. Orrin Hatch and Phil Gramm said Americans would look back on the trade agreement as a great wellspring of prosperity and "have a hard time understanding what was controversial" about it.

I lived in North Carolina at the time and still remember Sen. Jessie Helms' proclamations in favor of NAFTA. Has any single American politician ever supported something worse for their own state? Textiles were once one of North Carolina's most important industries. There were 738,000 U.S. textile jobs in 1989. There are now 128,000. I'd like to know how many of those laid-off workers now fold shirts at Wal-Mart.

If I were a Teamster, I'd be more concerned about American highways being opened up to Mexican truckers (a never-implemented part of NAFTA that Obama plans to greenlight) than I am about Philadelphia soda. Does this mean I'm now siding with a special interest group? In the end, every single thing government does, or doesn't do, benefits some constituency. If you're a Republican, 99 percent of the time that special interest group is the very rich. (My litmus test for any piece of legislation is, "Does It Benefit the Koch Brothers?" If yes, the GOP will support it.) Whether in Philadelphia's City Hall or the halls of Congress, I'd like us to make more decisions that benefit the less powerful — students, taxpaying city residents, those who work manufacturing jobs, teachers and firefighters, the unemployed, the uninsured. Does that make me a radical?

Privatization For Amtrak?

When I said in my recent post about Republican economic policies that privatization can sometimes be a good idea, I could have been referring to proposed solutions for improving rail service along the Northeast Corridor.

Now, I'm not sure this is the way to go. Certainly, any private operator would have a lot of convincing to do, and need a lot of public help, if necessary infrastructure improvements and service upgrades were to come to the aging rail system.

But something needs to be done. There were three system shutdowns in the last few days, one of which stranded me at Penn Station for two hours on Thursday.

These are not like airport delays, almost always caused by weather conditions. These problems were the result of stress on a system built over a century ago and chronically underfunded by Washington.

Even Republicans in Congress acknowledge that, in the Northeast, Amtrak is vital to mobility and commerce, though that didn't prevent some of the usual jackass-ery when a privatization proposal for the Northeast Corridor was floated this week. Rep. John L. Mica, head of the House transportation panel, cited "40 years of costly and wasteful Soviet-style operations." (My guess is Soviet trains probably ran better.)

Could private operators do a better job? It's worked well for freight rail. The demand is there. It should be on the table.

The Inquirer printed a useful editorial on the subject this week.