Trying to understand the riots

Over the weekend, I had a Zoom conference call with relatives from across the world, nearly all of them living in countries other than the US, and the topic naturally turned to the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent nationwide unrest. They were naturally disturbed by the reports they heard and wanted to understand what was going on. One of my relatives said that she could not understand why people were rioting and asked what purposes were served by them since they were counter-productive and often inflicted economic harm on the black community itself. What follows was my attempt at an answer.
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How to properly destroy businesses

In the wake of the widespread unrest across the nation following the murder of George Floyd that has resulted in businesses being destroyed and other property damage, the Onion had this piece of advice from private equity specialists.

MINNEAPOLIS—Calling for a more measured way to express opposition to police brutality, critics slammed demonstrators Thursday for recklessly looting businesses without forming a private equity firm first. “Look, we all have the right to protest, but that doesn’t mean you can just rush in and destroy any business without gathering a group of clandestine investors to purchase it at a severely reduced price and slowly bleed it to death,” said Facebook commenter Amy Mulrain, echoing the sentiments of detractors nationwide who blasted the demonstrators for not hiring a consultant group to take stock of a struggling company’s assets before plundering. “I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn’t just endanger businesses without even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board terminations. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off. There’s a right way and wrong way to do this.” At press time, critics recommended that protestors hold law enforcement accountable by simply purchasing the Minneapolis police department from taxpayers.

Also from the Onion, we have this video of a police officer describing the fear he feels every day that someone might record him brutalizing a civilian.

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.
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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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