Biff loses his office lease

In a post a couple of days ago, I wrote about a Minneapolis venture capitalist Tom Austin who challenged a group of black men when they entered the gym in his office building because he felt that they had no right to be there. He told them that he was going to call the police because they were behaving in a threatening manner. It turned out that the men also had an office in the same building and thus they were perfectly entitled to use the gym. (I am calling Austin ‘Biff’ for acting like the male equivalent of a ‘Karen’, which is “a mocking slang term for an entitled, obnoxious, middle-aged white woman.”)
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What the hell?

How can people behave like this?

A woman who drove through a protest in Denver on Thursday appeared to deliberately try to run over a young black man, swerving directly at him and knocking him to the ground, according to a video of the incident.

The protest was one of many that have broken out nationwide over the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed by police in Minneapolis after an officer pushed a knee into his neck as he repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe.”

Video of the incident shows a car driving through the crowd, with the young man clutching onto the hood. He falls off the hood, landing on his feet.

The car then sharply turns, knocking him to the ground, before speeding away in the other direction.
…

A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department told BuzzFeed News it is “aware of the incident” and is “looking for the victim as well as the driver.”

She could have easily driven off after the man fell off her hood. I hope someone had the presence of mind to get her license plate number.

Minneapolis police and Trump make a bad situation worse

This morning, authorities announced that Derek Chauvin, who was the Minneapolis police officer whose knee on George Floyd resulted in his death, has been arrested and charged with third-degree murder.

Last night, protests continued in Minneapolis by people demanding that justice be done and some of those protests turned violent with buildings being set on fire.. As is often the case, the police in the US make bad situations worse by using excessive force against people who are protesting or just covering the protests even when it is clear that they could have de-escalated the situation. Last night a black CNN reporter and his producer and camera operator were arrested while covering the ongoing protests even as they politely asked the police where they should move to avoid interfering with whatever the police were doing.
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The racial profiling never ends

You would think that given the wide publicity surrounding the recent incident where Amy Cooper, a white woman whose dog was off leash in New York’s Central Park, was fired from her job after calling the police and telling them that she feared for her life because Chris Cooper, a black birdwatcher, had told her that the area they were in required dogs to be on leashes, people would be more cautious about calling the police on black men for the most trivial of reasons.
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The aftermath of the George Floyd killing

There have been large demonstrations following the death of George Floyd after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground and kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for over five minutes, despite Floyd protesting that he couldn’t breathe and bleeding from his nose. Some of the demonstrations erupted into violence and looting and the police are again accused of over-reacting.
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The silent Trump supporters who are no longer that silent

In the May 11, 2020 issue of the New Yorker, in an article titled How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump, Evan Osnos profiles the wealthy country-club Republicans who live in this enclave in Greenwich, Connecticut, home of the elitist Bush family and their friends, who originally thought of Donald Trump as nouveau riche and utterly gauche and beneath them. They have now been completely converted to him because of how much wealthier he has made them and because he says the racist and misogynist and xenophobic things that they always thought but felt that they could not say out loud because it would reveal to others that their publicly professed socially enlightened values were all a sham.
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How big name companies aid and abet global corruption

The fascinating Netflix series Dirty Money explores the world of high-level corruption. I discussed in an earlier post an episode of season 2 of the show about how Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is a slumlord who preys on poor and vulnerable people. The show also examines how drug cartels launder their money. When it comes to laundering drug money the problem is always how to convert large amounts of cash in small currency bills collected on the streets into deposits in bank accounts without the authorities being alerted, where the money can be more easily transferred around the globe.
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The long-lasting effects of institutionalized racism

That excellent radio program This American Life just recently won the first-ever Pulitzer prize for excellence in journalism awarded to a radio program. It is well deserved because it is a truly outstanding program. The show they won the prize for dealt with the terrible plight of the migrants who have been turned away at the US-Mexico border because of the cruelty of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy. They rebroadcast that program last week after winning the prize and you can listen to it here. Back in 2005, I wrote to the program offering to nominate them for a prize for their coverage of the terrible treatment meted out to poor people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit. You can listen to that program here.
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The Biden problem

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have never been a fan of former senator, vice-president, and now presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. I strongly favored Bernie Sanders and Biden was way down the list of the many people who sought the nomination. Biden has always seemed to me to be shallow, lacking a central core of convictions, and thus easily swayed by pressure groups, lobbyists, and those whom he considers more powerful than him. He has been, like the Democratic party establishment, a loyal servant of the business class, especially those in the financial sector. His home state of Delaware is the choice of tax-evading and money-laundering companies because of its very loose regulatory structure.
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