Bust the Police Unions

bustthepoliceunions

In this month’s issue, we draw on decades of Reason journalism about policing and criminal justice to make practical suggestions about how to use the momentum of this summer’s tumultuous protests productively. Check out Damon Root on abolishing qualified immunity, Jacob Sullum on ending the war on drugs, Sally Satel on rethinking crisis response, Zuri Davis on restricting asset forfeiture, C.J. Ciaramella on regulating use of force, Alec Ward on releasing body cam footage, Jonathan Blanks on stopping overpolicing, Stephen Davies on defunding the police, and Nick Gillespie interviewing former Reasoner Radley Balko on police militarization.

“One of the major obstacles standing in the way of privatizing police operations or even substituting civilians for uniformed employees in nonpatrol positions is opposition from the police unions. Although many police organizations rally behind the cry that only a police officer can do a police officer’s job, the fact is that often they are simply trying to protect ‘uniformed’ slots and create as many openings as possible for fully trained police officers.”
Theodore Gage
“Cops, Inc.”
November 1982

In 2018, as a gunman murdered 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Sgt. Brian Miller, a deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, hid behind his police cruiser, waiting 10 minutes to radio for help. For his failure to act, Miller was fired. The official cause was “neglect of duty.”

In May 2020, however, Miller was reinstated and given full back pay. His 2017 salary was more than $138,000. Miller had challenged his firing, and he had done so with the full backing of his union.

Miller’s reinstatement is notable in that it relates to a high-profile case. But the essential story—an officer performs poorly, with fatal results, and the union comes to his defense—is all too common. That is what police unions do: defend the narrow interests of police as employees, often at the expense of public safety. They start from the premise that police are essentially unfireable and that taxpayers should foot the bill for their dangerous, and even deadly, negligence. And although unions are not the only pathology that affects American policing, they are a key internal influence on police culture, a locus of resistance to improvements designed to reduce police violence. To stop police abuse and remove bad cops from duty, police unions as we know them must go.

In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement. In 2014, for example, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. As a result of Pantaleo’s chokehold, Garner died, gasping the words, “I can’t breathe.”

The incident, caught on video, helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, but five years after Garner’s death, he was fired from the force following a police administrative judge’s ruling that the chokehold was, indeed, a violation of department policy.

Pantaleo had violated his police department’s policy in a way that resulted in the death of a man who was committing the most minor of offenses. Yet when Pantaleo was finally fired, Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, Pantaleo’s union, criticized the city for giving in to “anti-police extremists” and warned that such decisions threatened the ability of city police to carry out their duties. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” Lynch said.

In essence, the police union’s position was: Officers of the law should not be punished for using prohibited techniques in ways that result in the deaths of nonviolent offenders, because to do so would unduly inhibit police work. A deadly violation of department policy is just police “doing their job.”

Too often, when police wantonly use deadly force, their unions slow or prevent justice. In March, plainclothes police raided a Louisville, Kentucky, home. They used a battering ram to break down the door in the middle of the night and then fatally shot one of the occupants, an unarmed emergency room tech named Breonna Taylor. Police were investigating two men believed to be selling pot out of another home, but a judge also allowed police to search Taylor’s home, because they believed the men were using it for package delivery. The raid was executed under a no-knock warrant that gives police permission to break into a private residence without announcing themselves.

Taylor’s death resulted in calls for the officers involved to be fired, but Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer warned that the process would be slow. A significant part of why he expected it to take so long, he said, was the city’s collective bargaining agreement with the police union. Fischer lamented the process, saying he recognizes “the system is not a best practice for our community.”

The city’s police union, meanwhile, has expressed outrage that a city council member described Taylor’s boyfriend, who fired on police during the raid, as a hero. This is the union’s focus: not demanding justice for a woman killed by police in her home but demanding an apology from a local politician who had the temerity to praise a citizen for defending himself and his girlfriend during a botched police operation. The union’s focus has been on protecting the police from public criticism, not on protecting the public from bad policing.

These are anecdotes, but other evidence bears the point out. The Police Union Contract Project, which collects and compares police union contracts across the country, notes that the agreements are generally designed to make it difficult to hold police accountable, in part by giving them privileges that are not afforded to the broader public. For example, the contracts often prevent officers from being questioned quickly after incidents and often give them access to information not available to private citizens. Cities are often required to shoulder the financial burdens of officer misconduct, and disciplinary measures are often restricted. Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria’s economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining does not correlate with a reduction in total crime, but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities.

In other words, the research finds roughly what one would expect given a public sector workforce with unions set up to protect police officer compensation while limiting discipline and oversight. Police get paid more, yet the public is no safer—and it’s at greater risk of violence by police.

For a study in the ways that police unions can foster cultures of corruption and self-protection at the expense of public safety, consider the case of Camden, New Jersey. For decades, the city was among the most violent in the country, plagued by one of America’s highest murder rates and commensurate levels of property crime. In 2012, The New York Times reported, with the murder rate approaching record highs, police acknowledged “that they have all but ceded these streets to crime.” City officials said the police union was to blame. Union contracts made hiring officers prohibitively expensive. The cops on the payroll were being paid too much, and they weren’t getting the job done.

So the city made a novel decision: Fire the police. All of them. That year, Camden began the process of terminating hundreds of officers and hiring a new force, controlled by the county and initially made up of less expensive, non-union labor.

It was a decision meant to address both budget and crime problems. Naturally, the police union opposed the plan, saying it was “definitely a form of union-busting.” City officials, the union said, were relying on a reform that was “unproven and untested,” putting faith in an agency that did not yet exist.

By many measures, however, the unproven and untested new police force worked. After Camden disbanded the city police department and reorganized it under the county with lower pay, while adding a focus on rebuilding trust with the community (which is among the nation’s poorest), murders declined. The city is still dangerous compared to some others, but there’s been clear progress in reducing crime and improving community relations. In May, as residents took to the streets to protest disparate and abusive treatment in black communities, Camden police officers marched with the protesters.

Eight years after the shakeup, Camden police are once again represented by a union. But the new labor representation signed off on a use-of-force policy that is aimed at de-escalation. Police unions have tended to object to such proposals: In 2016, for example, after a think tank put forward a de-escalation policy suggesting that cops think about how the public might react to the use of violence by police, the vice president of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs called it “a ridiculous piece of claptrap,” and the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police collaborated on a joint statement opposing the idea.

Unions aren’t the only problem plaguing American police forces; there are plenty of other reforms worth pursuing, from demilitarization to ending qualified immunity. But unions have consistently proven to be a force of organized resistance to calmer, safer, less aggressive policing, in part because of how they perceive the nature of the job.

That has been true in Minneapolis, where the police killing of George Floyd has sparked nationwide protests this year. Bob Kroll, the president of the city’s police union, wrote a letter to fellow officers describing Floyd, who was not resisting as an officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes, as a “violent criminal.” Kroll has also referred to protesters as part of a “terrorist movement”; argued that officers were wrongly made to hold back on using “gas munitions and less-lethal munitions” to suppress riots; and complained that the officers fired for their involvement in Floyd’s death were “terminated without due process.”

Like other police union leaders, Kroll has resisted efforts to rein in police aggression. After Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned “warrior training” courses that teach violent confrontation, Kroll decried the ban and struck a deal for city cops to take the course anyway. In an interview with STIM radio in April, Kroll lamented the emphasis on training cops to de-escalate tense situations and cast the job as one for people who have a high threshold for violence: “If you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people, then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.” These are the kinds of attitudes that police unions extol and reinforce. They contribute to a workplace culture that views policing as a job for individuals who are unbothered by the results of violence.

Police are public servants granted enormous power over the citizenry. They are tasked with protecting the public and serving their interests. Police unions, in contrast, are tasked with protecting police and serving their interests—even in direct contravention of serving the public. That distinction makes them a barrier to reforms aimed at improving public safety and increasing oversight of law enforcement. If union busting is what it takes to reduce this pernicious influence on policing, then it’s time to bust some police unions.

 

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Today in Supreme Court History: September 6, 1983

9/6/1983: The City of Richmond solicited bids for installing plumbing fixtures at the city jail. The J.A. Croson Company’s bid was denied because it did not meet the “set-aside requirement” for minority contractors. The Supreme Court declared this decision unconstitutional in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989).

The Rehnquist Court (1989)

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Bust the Police Unions

bustthepoliceunions

In this month’s issue, we draw on decades of Reason journalism about policing and criminal justice to make practical suggestions about how to use the momentum of this summer’s tumultuous protests productively. Check out Damon Root on abolishing qualified immunity, Jacob Sullum on ending the war on drugs, Sally Satel on rethinking crisis response, Zuri Davis on restricting asset forfeiture, C.J. Ciaramella on regulating use of force, Alec Ward on releasing body cam footage, Jonathan Blanks on stopping overpolicing, Stephen Davies on defunding the police, and Nick Gillespie interviewing former Reasoner Radley Balko on police militarization.

“One of the major obstacles standing in the way of privatizing police operations or even substituting civilians for uniformed employees in nonpatrol positions is opposition from the police unions. Although many police organizations rally behind the cry that only a police officer can do a police officer’s job, the fact is that often they are simply trying to protect ‘uniformed’ slots and create as many openings as possible for fully trained police officers.”
Theodore Gage
“Cops, Inc.”
November 1982

In 2018, as a gunman murdered 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Sgt. Brian Miller, a deputy with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, hid behind his police cruiser, waiting 10 minutes to radio for help. For his failure to act, Miller was fired. The official cause was “neglect of duty.”

In May 2020, however, Miller was reinstated and given full back pay. His 2017 salary was more than $138,000. Miller had challenged his firing, and he had done so with the full backing of his union.

Miller’s reinstatement is notable in that it relates to a high-profile case. But the essential story—an officer performs poorly, with fatal results, and the union comes to his defense—is all too common. That is what police unions do: defend the narrow interests of police as employees, often at the expense of public safety. They start from the premise that police are essentially unfireable and that taxpayers should foot the bill for their dangerous, and even deadly, negligence. And although unions are not the only pathology that affects American policing, they are a key internal influence on police culture, a locus of resistance to improvements designed to reduce police violence. To stop police abuse and remove bad cops from duty, police unions as we know them must go.

In case after case, police unions have defended deadly misdeeds committed by law enforcement. In 2014, for example, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold for selling loose cigarettes. As a result of Pantaleo’s chokehold, Garner died, gasping the words, “I can’t breathe.”

The incident, caught on video, helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement. A grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo, but five years after Garner’s death, he was fired from the force following a police administrative judge’s ruling that the chokehold was, indeed, a violation of department policy.

Pantaleo had violated his police department’s policy in a way that resulted in the death of a man who was committing the most minor of offenses. Yet when Pantaleo was finally fired, Patrick Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, Pantaleo’s union, criticized the city for giving in to “anti-police extremists” and warned that such decisions threatened the ability of city police to carry out their duties. “We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job,” Lynch said.

In essence, the police union’s position was: Officers of the law should not be punished for using prohibited techniques in ways that result in the deaths of nonviolent offenders, because to do so would unduly inhibit police work. A deadly violation of department policy is just police “doing their job.”

Too often, when police wantonly use deadly force, their unions slow or prevent justice. In March, plainclothes police raided a Louisville, Kentucky, home. They used a battering ram to break down the door in the middle of the night and then fatally shot one of the occupants, an unarmed emergency room tech named Breonna Taylor. Police were investigating two men believed to be selling pot out of another home, but a judge also allowed police to search Taylor’s home, because they believed the men were using it for package delivery. The raid was executed under a no-knock warrant that gives police permission to break into a private residence without announcing themselves.

Taylor’s death resulted in calls for the officers involved to be fired, but Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer warned that the process would be slow. A significant part of why he expected it to take so long, he said, was the city’s collective bargaining agreement with the police union. Fischer lamented the process, saying he recognizes “the system is not a best practice for our community.”

The city’s police union, meanwhile, has expressed outrage that a city council member described Taylor’s boyfriend, who fired on police during the raid, as a hero. This is the union’s focus: not demanding justice for a woman killed by police in her home but demanding an apology from a local politician who had the temerity to praise a citizen for defending himself and his girlfriend during a botched police operation. The union’s focus has been on protecting the police from public criticism, not on protecting the public from bad policing.

These are anecdotes, but other evidence bears the point out. The Police Union Contract Project, which collects and compares police union contracts across the country, notes that the agreements are generally designed to make it difficult to hold police accountable, in part by giving them privileges that are not afforded to the broader public. For example, the contracts often prevent officers from being questioned quickly after incidents and often give them access to information not available to private citizens. Cities are often required to shoulder the financial burdens of officer misconduct, and disciplinary measures are often restricted. Forthcoming research out of the University of Victoria’s economics department finds that the introduction of collective bargaining does not correlate with a reduction in total crime, but it does eventually correlate with higher numbers of killings by police, especially of minorities.

In other words, the research finds roughly what one would expect given a public sector workforce with unions set up to protect police officer compensation while limiting discipline and oversight. Police get paid more, yet the public is no safer—and it’s at greater risk of violence by police.

For a study in the ways that police unions can foster cultures of corruption and self-protection at the expense of public safety, consider the case of Camden, New Jersey. For decades, the city was among the most violent in the country, plagued by one of America’s highest murder rates and commensurate levels of property crime. In 2012, The New York Times reported, with the murder rate approaching record highs, police acknowledged “that they have all but ceded these streets to crime.” City officials said the police union was to blame. Union contracts made hiring officers prohibitively expensive. The cops on the payroll were being paid too much, and they weren’t getting the job done.

So the city made a novel decision: Fire the police. All of them. That year, Camden began the process of terminating hundreds of officers and hiring a new force, controlled by the county and initially made up of less expensive, non-union labor.

It was a decision meant to address both budget and crime problems. Naturally, the police union opposed the plan, saying it was “definitely a form of union-busting.” City officials, the union said, were relying on a reform that was “unproven and untested,” putting faith in an agency that did not yet exist.

By many measures, however, the unproven and untested new police force worked. After Camden disbanded the city police department and reorganized it under the county with lower pay, while adding a focus on rebuilding trust with the community (which is among the nation’s poorest), murders declined. The city is still dangerous compared to some others, but there’s been clear progress in reducing crime and improving community relations. In May, as residents took to the streets to protest disparate and abusive treatment in black communities, Camden police officers marched with the protesters.

Eight years after the shakeup, Camden police are once again represented by a union. But the new labor representation signed off on a use-of-force policy that is aimed at de-escalation. Police unions have tended to object to such proposals: In 2016, for example, after a think tank put forward a de-escalation policy suggesting that cops think about how the public might react to the use of violence by police, the vice president of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs called it “a ridiculous piece of claptrap,” and the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police collaborated on a joint statement opposing the idea.

Unions aren’t the only problem plaguing American police forces; there are plenty of other reforms worth pursuing, from demilitarization to ending qualified immunity. But unions have consistently proven to be a force of organized resistance to calmer, safer, less aggressive policing, in part because of how they perceive the nature of the job.

That has been true in Minneapolis, where the police killing of George Floyd has sparked nationwide protests this year. Bob Kroll, the president of the city’s police union, wrote a letter to fellow officers describing Floyd, who was not resisting as an officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes, as a “violent criminal.” Kroll has also referred to protesters as part of a “terrorist movement”; argued that officers were wrongly made to hold back on using “gas munitions and less-lethal munitions” to suppress riots; and complained that the officers fired for their involvement in Floyd’s death were “terminated without due process.”

Like other police union leaders, Kroll has resisted efforts to rein in police aggression. After Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned “warrior training” courses that teach violent confrontation, Kroll decried the ban and struck a deal for city cops to take the course anyway. In an interview with STIM radio in April, Kroll lamented the emphasis on training cops to de-escalate tense situations and cast the job as one for people who have a high threshold for violence: “If you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people, then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.” These are the kinds of attitudes that police unions extol and reinforce. They contribute to a workplace culture that views policing as a job for individuals who are unbothered by the results of violence.

Police are public servants granted enormous power over the citizenry. They are tasked with protecting the public and serving their interests. Police unions, in contrast, are tasked with protecting police and serving their interests—even in direct contravention of serving the public. That distinction makes them a barrier to reforms aimed at improving public safety and increasing oversight of law enforcement. If union busting is what it takes to reduce this pernicious influence on policing, then it’s time to bust some police unions.

 

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Today in Supreme Court History: September 6, 1983

9/6/1983: The City of Richmond solicited bids for installing plumbing fixtures at the city jail. The J.A. Croson Company’s bid was denied because it did not meet the “set-aside requirement” for minority contractors. The Supreme Court declared this decision unconstitutional in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989).

The Rehnquist Court (1989)

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Germany, Not Russia, Should Answer Questions Over Navalny Case

Germany, Not Russia, Should Answer Questions Over Navalny Case

Tyler Durden

Sun, 09/06/2020 – 07:00

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has all but accused the Russian government of attempted murder in the strange case of Alexei Navalny, the dissident figure who reportedly remains comatose in a Berlin hospital.

Merkel spoke after a German military laboratory announced earlier this week it had “unequivocal proof” that Navalny had been poisoned with “Novichok”, a Soviet-era military-grade nerve agent.

“It raises serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer,” Merkel told media reporters.

The chancellor’s assertions were immediately reinforced by the United States, Britain and the head of NATO, each demanding Moscow to be held to account.

The Russian government rejected the accusations, saying they were being made improperly. It noted that the German authorities did not inform Moscow of its claims directly, but rather communicated first with its Western allies. There is more than a suggestion that the Western response is being coordinated to railroad accusations against Russia without Moscow being afforded due process. There is a presumption of guilt which violates due process and diplomatic protocol. And, of course, this is not for the first time when it comes to Western contemptuous relations with Russia.

Contrary to Western assertions about Russia having to answer questions about the Navalny case, the onus is very much on the German authorities to explain their “findings” and to back them up with verifiable evidence. Otherwise it amounts to hearsay and innuendo.

First of all, the Germans say they have “unequivocal proof” that Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, reportedly from tests carried out on his blood samples. But the German military laboratory and doctors in Berlin have not provided any biomaterials to Russia for the latter to independently verify the alleged detection of Novichok.

Secondly, the Russian doctors who first treated Navalny after he suddenly fell ill on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow on August 20 have affirmed that they carried out comprehensive toxicology tests on his biological fluids and organs, and they detected no traces of toxins. Specifically no traces of organophosphate nerve agents. The Russian medics concluded that Navalny may have become ill from a metabolic disorder, such as extremely low blood sugar.

The Russian doctors who treated Navalny, and possibly saved his life by their quick intervention, said they detected the presence of cholinesterase inhibitors which affect the nervous system, but such substances can be caused by a wide range of clinical pharmaceuticals, including those used for the treatment of diabetes which Navalny reportedly suffers from.

However, the crucial point is this: the Russian toxicology tests found no presence of Novichok or any other such nerve poison in Navalny’s body. The Russian medics reportedly still possess the original body samples taken when Navalny was being treated in Russia. It is the Germans who are claiming they have detected Novichok, but so far they have not provided verifiable proof. It is their word for it, that’s all.

There are more questions needing answers.

Navalny was airlifted from Russia to Berlin on August 22 under heavy pressure from Germany and other Western states for Moscow to permit his relocation. Why the urgency to do so? Why did Moscow relent in allowing this strange foreign intervention in its internal affairs?

If, for argument sake, the Kremlin had in some way plotted to cause Navalny harm with Novichok or some other poison, why would Moscow permit his relocation to Berlin where toxicology tests would uncover the purported plot? That scenario is illogical.

Navalny’s aides immediately claimed he was poisoned when he fell ill. They said he may have been poisoned from drinking tea at Tomsk airport before his flight. But CCTV footage shows Navalny being handed the drink by an aide. So, if anyone intended Navalny’s intoxication from the beverage, they wouldn’t have known he was to be the person who received the drink.

Furthermore, the Russian scientists who invented Novichok have stated categorically that if the nerve agent was somehow involved in the Navalny case, then he would most likely be dead by now and not in a coma. Also, they say, his aides and those who treated Navalny onboard the flight from Tomsk, would inevitably have been contaminated and sickened, so deadly is this chemical weapon.

Let’s recap. Navalny did not have toxins in his body and specifically not organophosphate nerve agents of the Novichok type, according to the Russian toxicologists. Let’s give them benefit of doubt. The poison was only detected – allegedly – by the German military laboratory five days after Navalny was received at the Berlin hospital last weekend. Yet the Germans – and this is crucial – are not sharing their bio-evidence with Russia. They have instead rushed to make grave accusations against Moscow, along with their Western allies. Without a chain of verifiable evidence, this is a travesty of due process.

What this all relies on is presumption of guilt, as well as large prejudice stemming from Russophobia, and the invocation of dubious past unproven cases such as the 2018 alleged poisoning of British double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. The whereabouts of Skripal and his daughter Yulia, a Russian citizen, remains a mystery which only the British authorities can reveal, yet their strange case is thrown at Moscow to answer for, just like the current Navalny case.

The timing of the Navalny case is also significant. There are several current geopolitical factors at play.

  • First there is the isolation of Washington at the United Nations in its attempt to force the reimposition of sanctions on Iran over the nuclear accord. This week saw Russian, Chinese, British, French and German diplomats meeting in Vienna in a bid to save the international nuclear deal in spite of American sabotage efforts. The Navalny case “poisons” diplomatic unity to defend the nuclear accord.

  • Another geopolitical factor is the political upheaval in Belarus. Washington and the European Union appear to be exploiting the unrest to destabilize relations between Russia and its neighbor. The Navalny case fits an agenda of undermining Moscow and impeding its relations with Minsk.

  • A third factor – and this may be the most significant – is the Nord Stream 2 gas supply project from Russia to Germany. The $11 billion, 1,200-kilometer pipeline has been targeted intensely by the Trump administration for derailment. There are also pro-Washington politicians in the ruling German Christian Democrat party who have been persistent in their opposition to the ambitious boost to energy trade between Russia and Europe.

The New York Times headlined on September 3: “Navalny Poisoning Raises Pressure on Merkel to Cancel Russian Pipeline”.

Last week, Merkel was insisting that the Navalny case did not impinge on the Nord Stream 2 project’s completion. This week, German military intelligence is claiming that Novichok was used to poison Navalny, and now Merkel is under intensified pressure to abandon the Nord Stream 2 project. As ever, the old criminologist question of who gains should be foremost here.

Indeed, there are several serious questions to answer in the Navalny case. But it is Germany and its Western allies who are best placed to provide answers, not Russia.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3573MAZ Tyler Durden

Steven Pinker Survives Attempted Cancellation 

Q&A

In early July, a group of linguistics researchers published an open letter calling for the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) to revoke the organization’s distinguished fellow status from linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now.

The signatories, many of them graduate and undergraduate students, pointed to years-old tweets of Pinker’s that they claimed revealed his racist and sexist biases. Almost immediately, a group of established scholars leapt to his defense. “The letter shows no familiarity with Pinker’s work, and takes statements out of context in a way that, with the merest checking, are seen to be represented duplicitously,” wrote Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Academics from across the disciplinary and political spectrum joined Coyne in rebutting the letter, including linguist (and Reason contributor) John McWhorter, leftist firebrand Noam Chomsky, and formal semantics pioneer Barbara Partee.

In a conversation with Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey on the day the LSA announced it would not take any action against him, Pinker explained what efforts like the LSA letter tell us about the state of debate in America’s elite institutions.

Q: This LSA letter is an astonishing document. 

A: I think it’s part of a larger mindset that does not see the world as having complex problems that we fail to understand and ought to try to understand better to diagnose and treat, but rather as a kind of warfare between powerful elites and oppressed masses. In the classic Marxist analysis, these would be economic classes, but they’ve been transformed to racial and sexual classes.

In this mindset, analysis, debate, evidence are just tools—propaganda exercised by those in power. What has to happen is not a deeper understanding of social problems, but a wresting of power from elites and redistributing it to the disenfranchised.

Q: You’ve said the letter wasn’t specifically about you, but it was quite targeted. 

A: It was quite targeted, but it’s part of a larger movement seeking monsters to destroy. That is, to look for prominent people and do “offense archeology,” which is to troll through tweets and statements seeking to find evidence, however tortured, that there’s some kind of prejudice behind them.

Q: The writers of the letter said that by challenging the claim that police are more likely to kill black people than to kill white people, you showed a “willingness to dismiss and downplay racist violence regardless of any evidence.” 

A: That’s completely wrong. It’s an open question to what extent police are racially biased. As a social scientist, I consider it my responsibility to try to understand that in light of the facts. You’re literally committing a logical blunder if you hold a belief that police are more likely to shoot unarmed African Americans and you don’t count up all the people police shoot. That is by no means a denial of the existence of racism.

There’s a distinct question of whether African Americans are subject to more sublethal harassment, and I think your former colleague Radley Balko wrote a very good summary for The Washington Post that shows there is evidence of racial discrimination in harassment and man-handling and arrests. But when it comes to lethal incidents, the evidence suggests that there isn’t.

Q: I’m trying to get a sense, from your point of view, of why your critics would misread what you are doing.

A: [There’s a] mindset that we evaluate what people mean based on whether the underlying idea is likely to be true or false; that we should use evidence in doing so; that all of us, in large part, start from a position of ignorance when dealing with social problems; and that the imperative is to understand their causes and therefore arrive at the best possible solutions.

There’s an alternative mindset in which the content of someone’s statements and attempts to evaluate them with respect to evidence are beside the point. The imperative is not to examine ideas that may be true or false; it is to maximize passion and solidarity. Because the elites are already in a position of power and the downtrodden have only their own solidarity and emotional passion as countermeasures, therefore anything that undermines the passion and solidarity is harmful in the struggle. And it is a struggle! It’s a kind of warfare that is zero-sum, and the imperative is to change the power balance.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

 

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Steven Pinker Survives Attempted Cancellation 

Q&A

In early July, a group of linguistics researchers published an open letter calling for the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) to revoke the organization’s distinguished fellow status from linguist and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now.

The signatories, many of them graduate and undergraduate students, pointed to years-old tweets of Pinker’s that they claimed revealed his racist and sexist biases. Almost immediately, a group of established scholars leapt to his defense. “The letter shows no familiarity with Pinker’s work, and takes statements out of context in a way that, with the merest checking, are seen to be represented duplicitously,” wrote Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Academics from across the disciplinary and political spectrum joined Coyne in rebutting the letter, including linguist (and Reason contributor) John McWhorter, leftist firebrand Noam Chomsky, and formal semantics pioneer Barbara Partee.

In a conversation with Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey on the day the LSA announced it would not take any action against him, Pinker explained what efforts like the LSA letter tell us about the state of debate in America’s elite institutions.

Q: This LSA letter is an astonishing document. 

A: I think it’s part of a larger mindset that does not see the world as having complex problems that we fail to understand and ought to try to understand better to diagnose and treat, but rather as a kind of warfare between powerful elites and oppressed masses. In the classic Marxist analysis, these would be economic classes, but they’ve been transformed to racial and sexual classes.

In this mindset, analysis, debate, evidence are just tools—propaganda exercised by those in power. What has to happen is not a deeper understanding of social problems, but a wresting of power from elites and redistributing it to the disenfranchised.

Q: You’ve said the letter wasn’t specifically about you, but it was quite targeted. 

A: It was quite targeted, but it’s part of a larger movement seeking monsters to destroy. That is, to look for prominent people and do “offense archeology,” which is to troll through tweets and statements seeking to find evidence, however tortured, that there’s some kind of prejudice behind them.

Q: The writers of the letter said that by challenging the claim that police are more likely to kill black people than to kill white people, you showed a “willingness to dismiss and downplay racist violence regardless of any evidence.” 

A: That’s completely wrong. It’s an open question to what extent police are racially biased. As a social scientist, I consider it my responsibility to try to understand that in light of the facts. You’re literally committing a logical blunder if you hold a belief that police are more likely to shoot unarmed African Americans and you don’t count up all the people police shoot. That is by no means a denial of the existence of racism.

There’s a distinct question of whether African Americans are subject to more sublethal harassment, and I think your former colleague Radley Balko wrote a very good summary for The Washington Post that shows there is evidence of racial discrimination in harassment and man-handling and arrests. But when it comes to lethal incidents, the evidence suggests that there isn’t.

Q: I’m trying to get a sense, from your point of view, of why your critics would misread what you are doing.

A: [There’s a] mindset that we evaluate what people mean based on whether the underlying idea is likely to be true or false; that we should use evidence in doing so; that all of us, in large part, start from a position of ignorance when dealing with social problems; and that the imperative is to understand their causes and therefore arrive at the best possible solutions.

There’s an alternative mindset in which the content of someone’s statements and attempts to evaluate them with respect to evidence are beside the point. The imperative is not to examine ideas that may be true or false; it is to maximize passion and solidarity. Because the elites are already in a position of power and the downtrodden have only their own solidarity and emotional passion as countermeasures, therefore anything that undermines the passion and solidarity is harmful in the struggle. And it is a struggle! It’s a kind of warfare that is zero-sum, and the imperative is to change the power balance.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

 

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Man Catches Fire After Comrade Throws Molotov In Portland; Riot Declared, Tear Gas Deployed

Man Catches Fire After Comrade Throws Molotov In Portland; Riot Declared, Tear Gas Deployed

Tyler Durden

Sun, 09/06/2020 – 01:45

A Portland protester rioter caught fire after running through a molotov cocktail thrown by a comrade Saturday night, during the city’s 100th straight of protests.

The man attempted to douse the flames as one onlooker shouted “stop, drop and roll!“

Play by play:

Portland police worked with state troopers to force the crowd to disperse, thwarting their attempts to march to the nearby East Precinct, where dozens of police officers were waiting for them, according to Oregon Live.

Dozens of officers arrived to block the crowd’s path on Stark Street. Around 9:20 p.m., some people in the crowd threw at least three Molotov cocktail-like devices toward the police line. Another person lit a firework. One of the devices appeared to wound the foot of a bystander.

The series of explosions prompted police to immediately declare the gathering a riot and order people to leave. Police forced the crowd east and, within minutes, released tear gas onto the crowd. –Oregon Live

Portland PD deployed tear gas as protesters tossed fireworks in the street.

Police eventually rushed in and took down several protesters.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2QW4JDX Tyler Durden

“Bipartisan” Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan For Chaos If Trump Wins The Election

“Bipartisan” Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan For Chaos If Trump Wins The Election

Tyler Durden

Sat, 09/05/2020 – 23:50

Authored by Whitney Webb via UnlimitedHangout.com,

A group of “bipartisan” neoconservative Republicans and establishment Democrats have been “simulating” multiple catastrophic scenarios for the 2020 election, including a simulation where a clear victory by the incumbent provokes “unprecedented” measures, which the Biden campaign could take to foil a new Trump inauguration.

A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios. 

Per several media reports on the group, called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), they justify these exercises as specifically preparing for a scenario where President Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave office, potentially resulting in a constitutional crisis. However, according to TIP’s own documents, even their simulations involving a “clear win” for Trump in the upcoming election resulted in a constitutional crisis, as they predicted that the Biden campaign would make bold moves aimed at securing the presidency, regardless of the election result. 

This is particularly troubling given that TIP has considerable ties to the Obama administration, where Biden served as Vice President, as well as several groups that are adamantly pro-Biden in addition to the Biden campaign itself. Indeed, the fact that a group of openly pro-Biden Washington insiders and former government officials have gamed out scenarios for possible election outcomes and their aftermath, all of which either ended with Biden becoming president or a constitutional crisis, suggest that powerful forces influencing the Biden campaign are pushing the former Vice President to refuse to concede the election even if he loses.

This, of course, gravely undercuts the TIP’s claim to be ensuring “integrity” in the presidential transition process and instead suggests that the group is openly planning on how to ensure that Trump leaves office regardless of the result or to manufacture the very constitutional crisis they claim to be preventing through their simulations. 

Such concerns are only magnified by the recent claims made by the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary Clinton, that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances.”

“I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton continued during an interview with Showtime a little over a week ago. The results of the TIP’s simulations notably echo Clinton’s claims that Biden will “eventually” win if the process to determine the election outcome is “dragged out.”

The Uniparty’s “war games”

Members of the TIP met in June to conduct four “war games” that simulated “a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day” in which “Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it,” according to a report from The Boston Globe. However, one of those simulations, which examined what would transpire between Election Day and Inauguration Day in the event of a “clear Trump win,” shows that the TIP simulated not only how Republicans could use every option at their disposal to “hold onto power”, but also how Democrats could do so if the 2020 election result is not in their favor.

While some, mostly right-leaning media outlets, such as this article from The National Pulse, did note that the TIP’s simulations involved the Biden campaign refusing to concede, the actual document from TIP on the exercises revealed the specific moves the Biden campaign would take following a “clear win” for the Trump campaign. Unsurprisingly, these moves would greatly exacerbate current political tensions in the United States, an end result that the TIP claims they were created to avoid, gravely undercutting the official justification for their simulations as well as the group’s official reason for existing.

In the TIP’s “clear Trump win” scenario (see page 17), Joe Biden – played in the war game by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager and chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton – retracted his election night concession and subsequently convinced “three states with Democratic governors – North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan – to ask for recounts.” Then, the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan “sent separate slates of electors to counter those sent by the state legislature” to the Electoral College, which Trump had won, in an attempt to undermine, if not prevent, that win.

Next, “the Biden campaign encouraged Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington, and collectively known as “Cascadia,” to secede from the Union unless Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms. (emphasis added)” Subsequently, “with advice from [former] President Obama,” the Biden campaign laid out those “reforms” as the following:

  1. Give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico

  2. Divide California into five states “to more accurately represent its population in the Senate”

  3. Require Supreme Court justices to retire at 70

  4. Eliminate the Electoral College

In other words, these “structural reforms” involve the creation of what essentially amounts to having the U.S. by composed 56 states, with the new states set to ensure a perpetual majority for Democrats, as only Democrat-majority areas (DC, Puerto Rico and California) are given statehood. Notably, in other scenarios where Biden won the Electoral College, Democrats did not support its elimination. 

Also notable is the fact that, in this simulation, the TIP blamed the Trump campaign for the Democrats’ decision to take the “provocative, unprecedented actions” laid out above, asserting that Trump’s campaign had “created the conditions to force the Biden campaign” into taking these actions by doing things like giving “an interview to The Intercept in which he [Trump] stated that he would have lost the election if Bernie Sanders had been nominated” instead of Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate. 

The TIP also claimed that the Trump campaign would seek to paint these “provocative, unpredecented actions” as “the Democrats attempting to orchestrate an illegal coup,” despite the fact that that is essentially what those actions entail. Indeed, in other simulations where the Trump campaign behaved along these lines, the TIP’s rhetoric about this category of extreme actions is decidedly different.

Yet, the simulated actions of the Biden campaign in this scenario did not end there, as the Biden campaign subsequently “provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress [on January 6th] by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award the presidency to Biden,” adding that this was “based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by pro-Biden governors.” The Republican party obviously did not consent, noting that Trump had won the election through his Electoral College victory. The “clear Trump win” election simulation ended with no president-elect being inaugurated on January 20, with the TIP noting “it was unclear what the military would do in this situation.” 

Of course, some TIP members, including its co-founder Rosa Brooks – a former advisor to the Obama era Pentagon and currently a fellow at the “New America” think tank, have their preference for “what the military would do in this situation.” For instance, Brooks, writing less than 2 weeks after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, argued in Foreign Policythat “a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders” was one of four possibilities for removing Trump from office prior to the 2020 election.

Full TIP document below:

Who is behind the TIP?

The TIP was created in late 2019, allegedly “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process.” It was co-founded by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman and its current director is Zoe Hudson. Brooks, as previously mentioned, was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.

OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power. 

Subsequent leaked emails revealed the cozy ties between Soros and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including one email where Soros directed Clinton’s policy with respect to unrest in Albania, telling her that “two things need to be done urgently,” which were to “bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha” and “appoint a senior European official as mediator.” Both “urgent” tasks were subsequently performed by Clinton, presumably at Soros’ behest.

In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, where she focuses on “the relationship between the military and domestic policing” and also Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program. She is a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to “capitalize” off of legitimate calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks’ interest in the “blurring line” between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP’s subsequent conclusion that the military “may” have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group’s “war games” described above.

Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America. New America’s mission statement notes that the organization is focused on “honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.” It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay). In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State Department to research “ranking digital rights.” Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was caught “meddling” in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The Never Trumpers

Aside from Brooks, the other co-founder of TIP is Nils Gilman, the current Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute and, prior to that, worked for Salesforce, a major tech company and government contractor. Gilman is particularly focused on artificial intelligence and transhumanism, recently telling the New York Times that his work at the Berggruen Institute is focused on “building [a] transnational networks of philosophers + technologists + policy-makers + artists who are thinking about how A.I. and gene-editing are transfiguring what it means to be human.” Nicholas Berggruen, for whom the Berggruen Institute is named, is part of the billionaire-led faction, alongside Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman and Eric Schmidt, who seek to develop A.I. and the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in conjunction with the political leaders and economic elite of China. 

They are critics and rivals of those in the “nationalist” camp with respect to A.I. and China, who instead prefer to aggressively “leapfrog” China’s A.I. capabilities in order to maintain U.S. global hegemony as opposed to a “new order” promoted by Berggreun, Schmidt, Schwarzman and Henry Kissinger, another key member of the “cooperation” faction. The battle over the U.S.’ future A.I. policy with respect to China appears to be a major yet widely overlooked reason for some of the antipathy towards Trump by those in the “cooperation” faction, including those who employ TIP’s founders, given Trump’s tendency to, at least publicly, support “America First” policies and increased tensions with China. In contrast, the Biden family is invested in Chinese A.I. companies, suggesting that Biden would be more willing to pursue the interests of the “cooperation” faction than Trump.

While the identities of the TIP’s founders and current director have been made public, the full member list of the TIP has not. However, the TIP’s “sister” organization, called The National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC), does have a public membership list and several of its members are also known to be part of the TIP. Some of these overlapping members include Michael Chertoff, former head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Michael Steele, former chairman of the RNC and Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Chertoff, Steele and Wilkerson, though Republicans, are part of the so-called “Never Trump” Republican faction, as are the TIP’s other known Republican members. Thus, while the “bipartisan” nature of TIP may be accurate in terms of party affiliation, all of known TIP’s members – regardless of party – are united in their opposition to another term for the current president.

Other known members of the TIP include David Frum (the Atlantic), William Kristol (Project for a New American Century, The Bulwark), Max Boot (the Washington Post), Donna Brazile (ex-DNC), John Podesta (former campaign manager – Clinton 2016), Chuck Hagel (former Secretary of Defense), Reed Galen (co-founder of the Lincoln Project) and Norm Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute).

Of their known members, the most outspoken is Lawrence Wilkerson, who has fashioned himself the group’s “unofficial” spokesperson, having done the majority of media interviews promoting the group and its “war games.” In an interview in late June with journalist Paul Jay, Wilkerson notes that the TIP lacks transparency and that, aside from their “war games,” their other activities are largely confidential.

He specifically stated that:

“There is some confidentiality about what we agreed to, and what we’ve put out publicly, and who’s responsible for that, and other aspects of our doing that. The Transition Integrity Project is to this point very, very close, whole, and confidential.”

In that same interview, Wilkerson also noted that the current “combination of events” involving the recent unrest in several U.S. cities, the coronavirus crisis, the national debate over the future of policing, the economic recession and the 2020 election was the foundation for a revolution in the U.S. He told Jay that:

“I want to say this is how things like 1917 and Russia, like 1979 and Tehran, and like 1789 in France. This is how these sorts of things get started. So we’ve got to be very careful about how we deal with these things. And that worries me because we don’t have a very careful individual in the White House.”

Pre-planned chaos – who benefits?

While it certainly is possible that, in the event of a clear Biden win, President Trump could refuse to leave the White House or take other actions that would challenge the faith of many Americans in the national election system. However, while the TIP claims to be specifically concerned about this eventuality and about “safe guarding” democracy without favoring either candidate, that is clearly not the case, as their simulation of a clear Trump win shows that extreme, “undemocratic” behavior, in their view, is permissible if it prevents another four years of Trump. Yet, this clear double standard reveals that an influential group of “bipartisan” insiders are intent on creating a “constitutional crisis” if Trump wins and are planning for such a crisis regardless of the 2020 election’s results.

Well before the TIP or any of their affiliated groups emerged to conduct these doomsday election simulations, other groups were similarly engaged in “war games” that predicted complete chaos in the U.S. on election day as well as the imposition of martial law in the U.S. following the emergence of unprecedented unrest and disarray in the country. 

Several of these I detailed in a series earlier this year, which mainly focused on the “Operation Blackout” simulationsconducted by the U.S.-Israeli company, Cybereason. That company has considerable ties to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence and its largest investor is Softbank. Notably, Softbank is named by the Eric Schmidt-led National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) as forming the “backbone” of a global framework of A.I.-driven companies favored by the “cooperation” faction as a means of enacting the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in cooperation with China’s economic and political elite. 

In addition to Cybereason, several mainstream media reports and a series of suspect “predictions” from U.S. intelligence and other federal agencies released last year had seeded the narrative that the 2020 election would not only fail spectacularly, but that U.S. democracy “would never recover.” Now, with the TIP’s simulations added to the mix and the advent of the previously predicted chaos throughout the country with the 2020 election just two months away, it is clear that the November 3rd election will not only be a complete disaster, but a pre-planned one.

The question then becomes, who benefits from complete chaos on and following the 2020 election? As the TIP suggested in several of their simulations, the post-election role of the military in terms of domestic policing, incidentally the exact expertise of the TIP’s co-founder Rosa Brooks, looms large, as most of the aforementioned doomsday election simulations ended with the imposition of martial law or the military “stepping in” to resolve order and oversee the transition.

The domestic framework for imposing martial law in the U.S., via “continuity of government” protocols, was activated earlier this year under the guise of the coronavirus crisis and it remains in effect. Now, a series of groups deeply tied to the Washington establishment and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have predicted the exact ways in which to engineer a failed election and manipulate its aftermath.

Who would stand to benefit the most from the imposition of martial law in the United States? I would argue that one need look no further than the battle within Washington power factions over the future of AI, which has been deemed of critical importance to national security by the public sector, the private sector and prominent think tanks. The Schmidt-led NSCAI and other bodies determining the country’s AI policy plan to implement a series of policies that will be deeply resisted by most Americans – from the elimination of individual car ownership to the elimination of cash as well as the imposition of an Orwellian surveillance system, among other things.

All of these agendas have advanced under the guise of combatting coronavirus, but their advance can only continue to use that justification for so long. For groups like the NSCAI, Americans must welcome these AI-driven advances or else, even if it means Americans face losing their jobs or their civil liberties. Otherwise, these groups and their billionaire backers argue, the U.S. will be “left out” and “left behind” when it comes time to set the new global standards for AI technology, as the U.S. will then be left in the dust by China’s growing AI industry, which is fed by its own implementation of these technologies. 

By keeping Americans angry and distracted by the partisan divide through pre-planned election chaos, a “New America” waits in the wings – one that is coming regardless of what happens on election day. That is, of course, unless Americans quickly wake up to the ruse…

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Dwp27E Tyler Durden

“In Complete Shock”: China’s Lead Chip Maker Denies PLA Military Ties As Trump Mulls Blacklisting

“In Complete Shock”: China’s Lead Chip Maker Denies PLA Military Ties As Trump Mulls Blacklisting

Tyler Durden

Sat, 09/05/2020 – 23:20

Executives of Chinese companies which produce chips — vital in every device that stores data from computers to mobile phones to barcode scanners — are increasingly worried their industry is next on the Trump sanctions hit list, also after widespread reports that Beijing plans to in desperation ramp up its lagging domestic semiconductor development over the next decade as continued outside access to the most advanced chips looks increasingly in doubt.

Some are speaking out, attempting to make crystal clear to Washington that they are not puppets of either the Chinese state or PLA military. The country’s largest and leading homegrown chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), is vehemently denying its technology is for military use after Reuters on Friday said Trump is mulling adding the publicly traded company to a US blacklist.

Via DigiTimes

The Shanghai-based company expressed that it is “in complete shock” over contents of the report, which said earlier this past week that “the Pentagon made a proposal to place SMIC on the entity list to the End User Committee, a panel led by the Commerce Department that also includes the State and Energy Departments and makes decisions about entity listings.”

A follow-up official Semiconductor Manufacturing International statement said Saturday:

“The company manufactures semiconductors and provides services solely for civilian and commercial end-users and end-uses. We have no relationship with the Chinese military.”

The statement added, “Any assumptions of the company’s ties with the Chinese military are untrue statements and false accusations.”

At moment there’s an inter-agency review underway in Washington over whether to add the company to the list, which would immediately require American suppliers to obtain a specially approved license in order to ship materials to the company. If it goes on the list, SMIC would go the way of Huawei in facing huge hurdles and intense scrutiny any time it does business with Western companies. 

Meanwhile some are counter-threatening various nuclear option scenarios, a rapid downward spiral:

Consider the dire warnings issued at the World Semiconductor Conference held in Nanjing at the end of August of the fragile early state of China’s domestic capabilities. 

Bloomberg relates of one of the more revealing conference moments:

“The entire chip industry is too fragile to defend itself. We are at least 20 years behind comparing to Silicon Valley from scale and quality of talent to size of the ecosystem,” said Wang Xuguang, chief executive officer of AINSTEC, a Suzhou-based company that develops 3D visual chips. “If we can prosper (with the U.S.), that’s the best, but if the situation doesn’t allow this to happen, we need to think what we have on our hands.”

Crucially, China remains the world’s largest importer of chips, and will spend some $300 billion to import semiconductors this year.

The country still faces a huge technology gap in this area which Chinese developers have struggled to close over and ahead of more advanced industry rivals in the US, Japan, and Europe.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lXpHQQ Tyler Durden