Monthly Archives: September 2019

The Mass Bail Fund comes to Bristol County

Posted by on 2019-09-26 No comments

The Mass Bail Fund is looking for additional volunteers to post bail for prisoners at the Bristol County jail. There will be a meeting in Dartmouth in November for those with time to give. Posting bail is the perfect volunteer gig for people with some privilege to put to good use. Email us if you’re interested.

The Mass Bail Fund doesn’t post bail of more than $500. A substantial percentage of those in county jails have not been convicted of a crime but cannot meet even a small bail amount. Click here for more information on how the Bail Fund works — but here’s the short version. You’ll get a call at an inconvenient hour. And when you show up to bail out your client, the Bristol County Jail will make you jump through more hoops than most; you’ll have to wait, come back later, or go to a different location. You’ll front the money for the Bail Fund, drive the client off the jail premises, and get your money back from the Bail Fund in roughly a week.

Anybody is welcome to volunteer, but if you’re older, whiter and a member of a religious organization you will magically get better results for your client. You’ll be doing your part to reduce mass-incarceration right in your own community.

Consider this. The inability to post bail can make a prisoner:

  • more likely to lose their children to DSS
  • more likely to lose their job, plunging their family deeper into poverty
  • more likely to plead guilty just to get out of abusive conditions
  • more likely to receive harsher sentences because of the inability to easily access legal resources
  • more likely to be found guilty

Email us to discuss attending the Bail Fund’s Dartmouth meeting in November.

Round three

Posted by on 2019-09-15 No comments

ABC News and Univision hosted the Democratic debate at Texas Southern University in Houston on September 12th. Those putting questions to the candidates were ABC News anchor George Stephanopolous, World New Tonight anchor David Muir, Univision’s anchor Jorge Ramos, and news correspondent Linsey Davis, who asked the toughest and brightest questions.

The ten candidates chosen by the DNC were: poll leaders Bernie Sanders; Joe Biden; and Elizabeth Warren, all of whom are 70 and older and white; Amy Klobuchar; Kamala Harris; Cory Booker; and Beto O’Rourke, ranging in age from 47 to 59; then Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg, all of whom are 45 or younger.

A friend thought Castro’s going after Biden for “forgetting” what he had just said about his healthcare plan was a cheap shot — and I agreed. But it was a self-inflicted wound since Biden was caught either denying the truth or really had forgotten his own health plan’s buy-in requirements. They say that lying only makes it worse — and they’re right. Biden also proved himself incapable of apologizing for past mistakes.

Following the debate, the talking heads scored candidates as if it had been a boxing match: how many punches landed, how many punches suffered. The talking heads said that Castro had disqualified himself. Maybe, but the low punch he landed on Biden had been effective — and instructive. Voters now know that Biden can’t keep his composure debating the Liar-in-Chief.

Linsey Davis asked hard questions of Kamala Harris, and I’m not sure Harris stood up to the scrutiny of her own criminal justice record. Like Biden, she seemed incapable of apologizing for past mistakes. Buttigieg is eloquent but inexperienced. Much of the time he sounded like he was delivering an award-winning high schooler speech to the VFW. Bernie had lost his voice and never managed to explain his views to voters as well as Warren, and Booker neither gained nor lost traction but, for me, was unmemorable. Andrew Yang has always been the candidate to save Capitalism from the income inequality it produces — by giving people some crumbs to live on. That’s his whole shtick.

Beto O’Rourke is an earnest, decent guy with a mix of great and not-so-great positions. But his position on guns is what all Democrats should aim for — hell, yeah, we’re coming for your AR-15s. The talking heads said his quip was a gift to Republicans. Democrats practically wet themselves in shock. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who sponsored an assault weapon ban himself, took pains to say that O’Rourke’s comment “doesn’t help.” Pete Buttigieg, who knows the damage the weapons can do, agreed that O’Rourke’s remark was just too much truth for voters to handle. Apparently, for mainstream Democrats, an assault weapon ban doesn’t really mean owners have to part with their weapons of war.

Finally, there was Amy Klobuchar, with her polite Midwestern version of “screw it, here’s what I think,” talking about legislation that could be voted upon today. While Klobuchar is a Centrist and hardly a visionary or a reformer, I can well imagine her at Donald Trump’s empty Oval Office desk, plugging away in an earnest bipartisan fashion at issues and political realities the country faces. If Democrats really need a Centrist to win, perhaps this is one that the progressive wing of the party may learn to grudgingly respect.

Let us remember 9/11

Posted by on 2019-09-11 No comments

Let us remember 9/11. Today we remember the victims who died in New York, Washington, and in Pennsylvania. In the years immediately following 9/11 we were told that as a nation we had come together, that we were stronger for our national trials — that our democracy had triumphed over terrorism. It was, unfortunately, a short-lived lie. Today we hardly remember the world that preceded 9/11.

The American economy has been ravaged by trillions spent on wars that have never ended. Newborns on September 11th, 2001 are now eligible to vote. The Bill of Rights has been shredded by wiretaps, ethnic and racial profiling, the Patriot Act, police militarization, the end of habeus corpus, torture, kidnapping, illegal detentions, secret courts, and assassination teams that have targeted even American citizens. We have declared war on millions of people in a dozen covert wars we fight by incinerating civilians with drones. Our wars of choice have destroyed half a dozen countries and made millions of refugees flee their homes.

The world we inhabit today is a twilight dream, a fantasy land in which evolution competes with creationism, multiculturalism clashes with nativism, and freedom challenges authoritarianism. We have for so long lived in denial of American slavery and imperialism — is it any wonder we are so good at denying science and verifiable fact?

Useful lessons will likely never be drawn from 9/11. Every print and video remembrance presents the saccharine, the patriotic, the triumphal. No one wants to know why so much of the world hates us. And if we did we couldn’t be bothered for an honest answer. No, they hate us for our democracy.

Let us remember 9/11. This is a day for candlelight memorials and somber speeches. We’ll trot out patriotic stories of death and sacrifice, ask each other where we were when the Twin Towers fell, mouth prayers invoking god and first responders, vow to never let it happen again, then cloak ourselves in the righteousness of martyrdom.

Let us remember 9/11. Next year there will be another anniversary. Another year of perpetual war, of drone attacks, meddling in the affairs of other nations, the squandering of national treasure on war, the loss of even more civil liberties.

Let us remember 9/11. But let us also regard with honest, open eyes the America we have created in its wake.