Tag: posts

At least seven people, including five
school children, were injured by rubber bullets fired by police
in Tumakuru, India, during a practice exercise. Most of those
injured were playing protesters in the drill. Police officials say
they will pay for their medical treatment.

Did you miss
Thursday’s special “Be Reasonable” episode of
Stossel
on Fox Business Network, featuring two local jackalopes
talking about for-a-magazine-named-Reason?
Don’t you fret: It’s on again on Fox News tonight at 10 p.m. ET, 7
p.m. PT, with repeats three hours later.

On the episode, John Stossel (see his Reason
archive here) tries
to inject some reason into such subjects as climate change,
authoritarianism, the minimum wage, ghosts, astrology, and how
people prefer other people who are attractive. Here’s how he
describes the Reason segment:

REASON: Twenty years ago, I wasn’t
so rational. When neither liberal nor conservative publications
made much sense to me, I discovered the libertarian magazine
“Reason,” which is skeptical of both the left and right. Reason
editors Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch (host of “The Independents”)
say libertarians are more rational than others.

Here’s a video tease of the segment:

Follow along on Twitter, using the hashtags #STOSSEL and
#Reason during the show. Follow Stossel on
Twitter: @fbnstossel.

“Is the Vice Presidency an Irrelevant Position?,” interview by
Nick Gillespie and produced by Amanda Winkler. About 8 minutes.

Original release date was December 5, 2014 and original writeup
is below.

“Who am I? Why am I here?” asked Admiral
James Stockdale, one-time running mate to Ross Perot, in a
famous 1992 vice presidential debate. The admiral’s remarks
garnered ridicule from the public, but recently acclaimed
political journalist and author Jules Witcover
has asked the same questions about the vice presidential role
itself: Just what does the vice president do and why does it
matter?

Witcover’s new book,
The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to
Power, explores how the roles and
responsibilities of the vice president have shifted and expanded
over the years. No longer expected to just preside over the Senate,
modern vice presidents have, according to Witcover, gained more
power through political maneuvering and manipulation. 

Witcover recently sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to
discuss his new book, his least favorite vice president, and why
John McCain’s 2008 choice of Sarah Palin for a running mate was a
hail Mary pass. 

Approximately 8 minutes.

Edited by Amanda Winkler. Camera by Joshua Swain and Meredith
Bragg. 

Scroll down for downloadable versions of this video and
subscribe to Reason
TV’s YouTube channel to receive automatic updates when new
material goes live.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s reaction to the death of Eric
Garner may seem like
weak sauce to advocates of
serious police reform, but it still went too far many members
of the NYPD. If you go to the website of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent
Association—the largest of the city’s police unions—the first thing
you’ll see is this notice:

The downloadable document looks
like this:

I’ve seen no figures on how many officers have actually
submitted such a request, but that’s almost beside the point. This
is the line the association is taking. Don’t expect even the
smallest changes to be easy.

Bonus links: Earlier this year, Garner’s death led to a
war
between the police union and the teachers union, which in turn
provoked some skirmishes
within the teachers union as well.

“Will Regulation Ruin School Choice in New Orleans?,” written
and produced by Todd Krainin. About 8 minutes.

Original release date was December 10, 2014 and original writeup
is below.

Here’s the paradox of pre-Katrina New Orleans: For its 10
million pie-eyed vacationers trolling the sticky streets of the
French Quarter, the city was a pulsating, profit-making pleasure
dome. For a few bucks, the city would happily serve up just about
anything you could scarf down.

Yet right across the Mississippi River, the Orleans Parish
School Board made the Department of Motor Vehicles look like a
model of efficiency. A toxic swamp of fraud and incompetence, the
school board was tilting on the edge of bankruptcy, when Hurricane
Katrina wiped out much of the city, taking the bureaucracy with
it.

School choice swept in as a replacement, and nine years later,
test scores and graduation rates are on the rise. With red tape
cut, and the teachers union largely out of the picture, the quality
of public education has made steady gains in the Big Easy. “We’re
going to be the first mostly black city to outperform its mostly
white state in the history of this country,” says Julie Lause,
co-founder of Crescent City Schools and principal of Harriet Tubman
Charter School in Algiers.

New Orleans could turn out to be the greatest turnaround story
in the history of American public education. But the nation’s first
all-charter district is fragile, and the reforms behind its success
could be pushed back—or even reversed over time. “It’s something we
have to be very careful of,” warns Neerav Kingsland, a school
choice advocate with New Schools for New Orleans. “A system like
this could be undermined by a death by a thousand regulatory
cuts.”

The city’s charter school system continues to struggle to find
the right balance between regulation and autonomy. Although the old
education bureaucracy has been drastically downsized from the
pre-Katrina era, the new system retains a byzantine bureaucratic
structure. And new regulations are chipping away at some of the
freedoms enjoyed by students and schools alike.

Some rules address issues of equity, while others set limits on
the very idea of school choice. The school board has standardized
the application procedure for all charter schools. Student
discipline procedures are now adjudicated at the state level, with
common standards for suspensions and expulsions at every charter
school. More controversially, students can no longer transfer to
another charter school after six weeks into the semester—a
prohibition that seems to strike at the very notion of school
choice.

Can libertarian concerns about freedom find a balance with
progressive notions of fairness—without threatening nine years of
hard-won educational gains? So far, the progress in New Orleans is
hard to deny, and has silenced most critics.

But there is much more to be done. Today, only a few New Orleans
schools have earned Lousiania’s highest marks for quality
education. Many charter schools are on the verge of failing, and
some will have to be closed. “We’re not yet there, we’re not yet
perfect,” says Lause. “We aren’t an A-school system yet. But I
think we’re on the way.”

Produced, edited, shot, and narrated by Todd Krainin.

Runs about 7:30 minutes.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to
ReasonTV’s YouTube Channel to receive notification when new
material goes live.

This has been a rough year for the freedom
movement. We’ve lost five luminaries: Leonard Liggio, John
Blundell, Gordon Tullock, Tonie Nathan, and now Nathaniel Branden,
at age 84. Branden, writes Sheldon Richman, became known to the
world as the man who helped systematize and present the philosophy
dramatized in Ayn Rand’s novels, especially Atlas
Shrugged. The Objectivist movement became an integral part of
the budding libertarian movement in the late 1950s and ’60s. After
his break with Rand, Branden moved from New York City to Los
Angeles, where he made a name for himself through a series of books
about the role of self-esteem in the pursuit of happiness, work he
had begun while he was Rand’s associate. The binding together of
“perfection” (virtue, or excellence, in the Greek sense) and
liberty (internal and external) with the pursuit of happiness is
noteworthy.

View this article.

This week, the Department of Justice announced
new guidelines against racial profiling. The changes don’t
actually change all that much. As regular incidents of police
brutality get more and more mainstream media attention, it’s time
for a bold move from the White House. There’s a moral obligation to
keep bad cops off the streets. A job with a police department is
not a right and shouldn’t be treated like one. Police unions that
push for permissive rules that end up protecting bad
cops pose a serious public safety threat. Nevertheless,
dismantling them where they’ve taken root is a difficult prospect
even in the long-term. There are other ways to keep bad cops off
the streets. The federal government, writes Ed Krayewski, ought to
create and encourage the use of a police offender registry list to
close the revolving door for bad cops.

View this article.

“Garry Kasparov on Chess, the Cold War, and the West’s Shameful
Appeasement of Putin,” interview by Nick Gillespie and produced by
Joshua Swain. About 28 minutes.

Original release date was December 3, 2014 and original writeup
is below.

“I think we’ve forgotten many important lessons of the Cold
war,” says human-rights activist and former World Chess
Champion Garry
Kasparov. Especially when it comes to dealing with Russian
leader Vladimir Putin: “You cannot project weakness…. Putin’s
game is [not chess but] poker. And he knows how to bluff.”

As the leader of United
Civil Front and chairman of the Human Rights Foundation,
Kasparov also worries that business and political leaders in what
used to be called “the Free World” are no longer interested in
backing large, transformative projects similar to landing a man on
the Moon and the creation of the Internet. “It is very important
that we have these projects to energize society,” he says. “And
also that we don’t eliminate risk. Because it seems to me that now
we teach kids from school that failure is nothing but failure. If
you fail, you are a failure. No, no, I believe that failure is a
logical move on the way to success.”

After becoming the youngest World Chess Champion in 1985,
Kasparov went on to a career that is among the greatest in the
sport. Originally supportive of Gorbachev’s reform, when the Soviet
Union collapsed, Kasparov became increasingly outspoken against the
failures of Russian leadership, especially under Putin.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie interviewed Kasparov in New York in
November at a dinner co-hosted by the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that
promotes free-market think tanks in the developing world.

About 30 minutes. 

Camera by Meredith Bragg and Jim Epstein. Edited by Joshua
Swain.

Free Minds, Free Markets, and Free Kasparov aren’t free!
Support Reason’s annual Webathon with a tax-deductible donation and
help change the world in a libertarian direction. For details on
giving levels and swag, go here
now.

Here is a rush transcript of the interview (check all quotes
against video for accuracy):

Reason TV: This is not just the
anniversary of the Berlin’s Wall’s Collapse, it is also the
anniversary of your world championship.

Garry Kasparov: I celebrated this date
four years before the collapse of Berlin Wall. November 9, 1985, I
won my world championship title in Moscow.

Reason TV: We’d like to think that the two
events are not unlinked. Talk a little bit about what the enduring
lessons of the fight against communism, that we are in 25 years it
seems a couple of worlds ago. What are the lessons that we’re in
the danger in losing from long after the twilight of the cold
war.

Kasparov: I think we’ve
forgotten many important lessons of the Cold war. I have to say
that when I entered this field in the mid 80’s as the newly born
world champion, it was not as dangers. So Gorbachev badly needed to
reconcile with the west. The soviet economy was in terrible shape.
Oil prices were sharply falling thanks to the cooperation between
Reagan’s administration and the Saudis. And it was absolutely clear
even for the soviet politburo that the arms race in the competition
against the United States on the global scale was no longer a
plausible option.

So Gorbachev tried hard and he made several attempts to convince
Ronald Reagan to accept some sort of peace accord. Thanks to
Reagan’s intuition and despite the advice of all his advisors, his
administration, the state department, the pentagon, he said no in
Reykjavik. And I think by saying no in Reykjavik, Reagan made
Perestroika and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union
inevitable in such a short period of time.

Reason TV: And of course Reykjavik…

Kasparov: A symbolic place. 1972, Bobby
Fisher beat Boris Spassky. That was another episode of the big
victory of the free world in the cold war.

Reason TV: And thereby condemning all of
us in grammar school in the 70’s to joining chess clubs. What was
it like to grow up in the Soviet system? You were in the relatively
privileged position.

Kasparov: I was relatively privileged,
because of my chess.

Reason TV: What was it like and what was
the psychological effect on yourself on people around you?

Kasparov: I think certain things are very
hard to describe. Because to understand them, you have to live with
them. I was always amazed to hear comparison in America or Western
Europe about Soviet Union and certain wrong doings of the
governments in the free world without recognizing that in the
Soviet Union, just was a dictatorship.

I grew up in the later 60’s, 70’s, early 80’s. Of course I
haven’t experienced horrors of Stalin’s time. But it was still the
country that was not free and thanks to my ability to place chess
and the fact that I was a chess prodigy, I could travel abroad. SO
my first trip to France was when I was 13. And it was a very
shocking experience.

Reason TV: What was shocking about it?

Kasparov: I don’t think that in my family
and I’m not just talking about very few people, but extended
family, cousins and among my friends, there was no single person
that had visited a capitalist country. So at age 13, I carried a
sacred knowledge of how people lived on the other side of the Iron
Curtain. So people knew that there was another world. They could of
course read some literature that was officially banned but you
could buy and listen to radio liberty or voice of America and
BBC.

You could not find hard believers in a Communist regime, so it
was all dying down. My grandfather, my mother’s father was a
diehard communist. He died in 1981. I was 18, and we were talking
about Afghanistan. And he was shocked after spending 15 years in
the Communist party, he had to line up to buy butter and bread. It
was mind boggling. So something went wrong. So that’s why the
collapse of the Communist system was somehow imminent. I think’s
Gorbachev’s plan was not to remove communism and replace it with
something more plausible but without giving up the role of the
communist party.

Reason TV: Do you think that in the end,
that there’s no way to do that. It’s kind alike being a little but
pregnant. If you give people a little bit of freedom, the whole
thing’s going to collapse. Don’t follow that illusion all the
way.

Kasparov: I don’t think that you can
divide people genetically by saying these nations are not ready to
embrace democracy and I hear this argument about Russia or China.
You have two Koreas. If you look at the north, you can come up with
the conclusion that Koreans are born to be slaves and they live in
gulags. Unless you are aware that there is a South Korea, one of
the most flourishing economies in Asia. And again it’s a democracy
and market economy. And in China, you have China on the one side
but you have Taiwan. It’s a rocky island with the same people. And
I’m not even mentioning two Germanies.

I think people have the same aspirations. They want to be
successful. They want their kids to have good education. They want
to spend some money to have a vacation in a decent place. The
moment they are given this opportunity, I don’t think you can force
them back to the Communist stable.

Reason TV: You’ve been very forward and
very courageous in speaking out against Putin and other forms of
dictatorships, creepy fascism, and corporatism. You’re very
critical of the West’s engagement with Putin, with China. You’ve
written that we’re willing to trade with them, but we don’t draw a
line when they obviate civil liberties. When they continue to act
repressively. How should we be engaging them, those of us in the
free world?

Kasparov: We have to go back to the 1989,
1990, 1991, it was a great moment in history. Everyone was…

Reason TV: A lot younger.

Kasparov: Don’t mention that. We believe
that it was all over. If in August 1991, anyone would say in Moscow
or outside of Soviet Union, “in nine years, a KGB lieutenant would
be the President of Russia,” people would be laughing. It was
really impossible to believe that after all these changes, we can
go back.

In 1992, one of the best sellers was the End of History, by
Francis Fukuyama. The end of history, liberal democracy has won,
that’s it. I think this book ignored the fact that every generation
has to fight it own Berlin Wall. As Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is
only one Generation away from Extinction.”

So there’s no physical Berlin Wall, but there are walls. And the
problem of the Soviet Union specifically, that unlike Germany, Nazi
Germany, or Imperial Japan, there was no cleansing process. The
society couldn’t feel responsibility for the Communist crimes. For
ordinary Russians, “okay, that’s over.” Same as in 1918, in
Germany, we lost the war, but maybe somebody betrayed us. While we
had some good moments under Yeltsin, you could feel in the 90’s,
trying to build a system similar to the free world with parliament,
with presidential power, with checks and balances, with independent
court system, they failed. Because Russian people believe that all
we needed was to have the voting procedure and if we implemented,
it would immediately lead to the dramatic improvement in living
standards.

The irony is that nobody could see an improvement in the ’90s.
The majority couldn’t see it. When Putin took over, thanks to the
high oil prices, suddenly, life improved. It’s a very odd
connection. But in the minds of many ordinary people, “Wow! That’s
a democracy.”

Reason TV: They feel loyalty to Putin
rather than to democratic Institutions.

Kasparov: Absolutely.

Reason TV: How much of the problem of with
Russia is specifically a problem with Putin? You’ve written that
distinct from their Soviet Union, it is about him. He’s building a
cult of personality, where the state revolves around. You write
about the Sochi Olympics. That’s it was a glorification of him
similar to the way the Berlin Olympics were (for Hitler). So if
Putin is gone, does the trouble go away from within Russia or what
needs to happen within the country?

Kasparov: If dictator goes away, it
doesn’t happen through the normal election process. So that’s why
you can expect turmoil. Most likely uprising in Moscow, in the
capital. It won’t end up with a very peaceful resolution. Because
political opposition has been destroyed and I don’t think you can
have anything worse than Putin. All these threats that Putin is the
last line of defense, and if not Putin. Putin is the main problem.
Putin is a paranoid, aging dictator who believes he is Russia. The
same way Hitler believed he was Germany. And it’s not surprising
that Kremlin propaganda has been repeating the classical “Hitler is
Germany, Germany is Hitler” now “Putin is Russia, Russia is Putin.”
It is extremely dangerous because for him, his own collapse means
the collapse of his country. And unlike Hitler, he has his finger
on the nuclear button.

He is by far more dangerous to threat to world peace because
Russia today is not as old Soviet Union or modern China. It is not
an ideological dictatorship with politburo central committee of the
Communist Party. It’s one0man dictatorship. It means that this man,
if he believes he is the country, he can do whatever.

Reason TV: So how should the West, the
free world, the OECD countries, NATO, the US, what should they be
doing differently in dealing with Putin. Because you’re not talking
about military engagement but you have written a lot about economic
engagement and other types of trade policy. What are good way to
bring Putin to heel? 

Kasparov: We have been facing this problem
for quite a while. And so many mistakes have been made. These
mistakes created an impression for Putin and his cronies and also
his clients like Assad and others in the world. Iranian Ayatollahs.
The West is weak. The west is not willing to get engaged. So the
west will give them anything they want. Before we talk about the
right strategy, what the leaders of the free world must do, let’s
talk about what they must not do. You cannot project weakness. Yes,
I know that America will never consider seriously boots on the
ground in Ukraine. Why are you talking about it. Why do you say
publicly that you will not do that?

I could give you many examples where they violate the simplest
rules of negotiation. The secret letter from Obama to the
Ayatollahs, without mentioning the fact that it’s an insult for
Sunni allies. It’s the first time that the United States and the
free world had a great chance of creating a Sunni coalition to stop
Sunni terror. Then stabbing them in the back by writing a letter to
the Ayatollahs. By the way, they never responded. And now, at the
time when the nuclear deal is about to be reached or not. He’s
asking them to help with ISIS. ISIS will probably be destroyed. You
need more planes, maybe some soldiers, material resources. ISIS is
not a global threat, it’s very local. For the sake of Iranian
cooperation, this relatively small issue to put at stake the global
cooperation of Sunnis and also the non-proliferation policies,
that’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do.

Reason TV: You’ve written about how
starting under Clinton, as well as under George W. Bush, and under
Barack Obama, you talked about Bush being reckless, Obama being
aimless. Who are these Western leaders you think that are heads of
states who have actually articulated a post-cold war framework for
spreading democracy and market liberalism?

Kasparov: I don’t think that any Western
leader even thought about doing that because again, the mood was
“we won.” Many talk about Clinton’s presidency as a great success.
I wouldn’t doubt certain achievements in economy. But
geopolitically, it was the greatest disaster among all because it’s
not about the final position. The game is still on. In 1992,
America was all powerful. It could design the world map the way it
wanted. In 2000, al Qaeda was ready to strike. So what happened in
these eight years? 

Eight years of complacency, of doing nothing. Nobody formulated
policies for Russia for Soviet Union, for Islamic terrorism. It
requires a global vision. The same way as Winston Churchill, Harry
Truman had these policies designed in 1946, in 1947. The Marshall
plan. There were plans. Plans they learned from World War II and
they knew that to oppose Stalin and to oppose Communism, they
needed to come up with a grand strategy and also leadership.

When I hear about potential dangers of confronting Putin today,
my first question is, “Is he more dangerous than Joseph Stalin in
1948?” For 11 months, American and British planes had been
supplying West Berlin besieged by Stalin’s troops. And Joseph
Stalin didn’t shoot a single American plane. Why? Because Harry
Truman already used nuclear weapons. And Stalin, as every good
dictator, had an animal instinct. He knew where he could be
repulsed. So he knew that Harry Truman could not play a game. It
happened in 1962, when Khrushchev recognized that he pushed JFK to
the ropes. And Ronald Reagan. And don’t tell me that the Soviet
Union in 1981, 82, 83, was less powerful than Putin’s Russia
today.

Reason TV: You have written recently about
how America is hugely important to the world and that America needs
a strong economy and that economic force will help spread democracy
and freedom, markets throughout the world. You’ve talked about how
people in America don’t seem to have the kind of bold sense of
vision, of innovation, of change. Can you talk a little bit about
that? What happened to that? The idea that we were going to
reinvent the world.

Kasparov: I wish I knew. You can just look
at the literature that says in the 1950’s, 60, science fiction was
the most popular genre. It has disappeared. Now, you either talk
about elves, or magic, or it’s dystopia. It’s all you talk about is
machines attacking us. There’s no more positive vision, of machines
cooperating.

Reason TV: Let me push back on that
though, because you talk about 40 years ago…

Kasparov: 50 years ago.

Reason TV: But since then we’ve had things
like the Internet; we’ve had things like fracking, which has
totally undermined Russia’s ability to dictate oil prices. Does
anybody here think that the world is less good than it was 50 years
ago?

Kasparov: Let’s be very specific. You
mentioned the Internet, it is a result of the space race. The
foundation for the Internet was created, designed, and eventually
developed by the scientist from DARPA—Defence Advanced Research
Projects Agency— 1962, and 1963. So from packet switching, to the
full description of every element, including Skype. And in 1969 the
first signal came, via ARPANET, from UCLA to Stanford. So what you
are talking about today, www, the world-wide-web, is commercial
application of technology that has been developed 20 years
before.

Reason TV: Which also is the thing that
makes it transformative, though.

Kasparov: Yes I know, but we are talking
about break-through technology.

Reason TV: So do we need another Cold War?
Is that what we need, a kind of regimented goal that society is
moving towards?

Kasparov: It’s 2012, 50 years after the
JFK speech in the Rice University, about the Moon project. America
had no more rockets, no more means to send it’s astronauts into
space, they had to use Russian ones, which were also built in the
60s and 70s. So I think it constitutes a disaster, a scientific
disaster, because space projects are important, not just for the
sake of landing on the Moon or on Mars, but because of the side
effects. As we had GPS, we had Internet, and many other things that
have been developed alongside the space project. For instance, the
expedition to Mars, which has probably a 50-50 chance of safely
returning the crew, will force us to do more work on diet, and on
medicine. And while today—people here, I am sure, know much better
than I do—what are the chances of introducing a new drug? If you
have one out of 1000, the rate of failure, out of production? Now,
if you produce new drugs or new food, for the expedition, with
50-50 chance of return, then one out of three is already good. So
it is very important that we have these projects to energise
society, and also not to eliminate risk. Because it seems to me
that risk, now—we teach kids from school that failure is nothing
but failure. If you fail, you are a failure. No no, I believe that
failure is a logical move on the way to success.

Reason TV: Well as somebody who fails more
often than I succeed, I feel much better, in this conversation.

We were talking earlier in the evening, and you said there is a
huge amount of complacency, in what used to be called “The Free
World”. Is this kind of a Marxist analysis of capitalism, that we
get fat and lazy because things comes easily after a certain point,
and we fall into an inability to actually take the kinds of risks
or create the kind of innovations that will actually push us
forward?

Kasparov: Again, the Free World needs
challenges. Definitely wars, and the Cold War, were challenges. We
don’t want to see these challenges again, but it is natural, and we
have to recognize that the real innovation is not the IPhone 6,
it’s Apollo 6. There is a fundamental difference. And it seems to
me that we have multinational corporations that are now sitting on
hundreds of billions of dollars of cash, without investing them in
new ideas. I understand that paying shareholders in important, but
creating new value is probably more important.

Reason TV: Alright. And at that point we
are going to turn it over to some questions. And also, by the way,
if any of you are sitting on billions of dollars of cash, I do want
to point out that both Atlas and Reason 501(c3)s.

So let’s go to questions, please.

Questioner: I asked you earlier,
privately, Sir, why you played the Sicilian Defence to win your
first World Chess Championship, and you declined to answer. So I
just want to ask that question publically, and then I want to ask
you how you would apply that to the global scene today.

Reason TV: And for those of us who only
play checkers, what is the Sicilian Defense?

Kasparov: It doesn’t matter. It was a game
that I was leading, 12 to 11. Karpov had to win the game—he played
with white, so he started the game—to retain the title. So I could
be happy with a draw. Now the question is why I played a very sharp
opening, instead of trying to play very defensive. Now, the answer
is very simple: when you reach the climax of any battle, you better
be in the situation that feeds your nature. So I was much more
comfortable in a sharp position. It doesn’t matter, we play a
game—I could win, I could lose, it could be a draw—but I am
comfortable. And my calculation was right, because at the crucial
moment of the game Karpov had to push, had to make a sacrifice, but
it was against his nature. He tried to improve his position, he
wasted time, and eventually I could make a powerful counter attack.
It is the same in politics; you have to play the game that feeds
your strengths. So again, there are so many arguments, there are so
many trump cards in the hands of the Free World, and you have to
start using them.

From the crowd: So what game do you
play?

Kasparov: I play the game of Chess.

Unfortunately the parallels between the game of Chess and modern
geopolitics is very questionable, because Putin’s game is more of a
Poker, and he knows how to bluff. Normally he has a very weak hand,
I would say a pair of nines, but he bluffs, and he knows that his
opposition always tries to fold out the cards. So once I said that
Putin has this pair of whatever—eight, nine, or ten—and he acts as
if he has a Royal Flush; and Obama has a Full House, and he flushed
it down the toilet.

Reason TV: Do you believe that Putin would
be expansionary beyond the confines of the former Soviet Union? And
then what is the challenge that is posed by a country like China,
is it similar in kind to the Russian challenge, or is it something
very different?

Kasparov: I think that the nature of
Putin’s challenge, today, is very much domestic. He has a
fundamental problem of finding the rationale for staying in power.
He has been in power for 15 years. And every dictator, who is not
relying on democratic institutions, must come up with a story, a
myth, an idea about why the hell they are there. For many young
Russians this is a question. The economy doesn’t offer any more
excuses, to the contrary, it all goes down. So the Russian middle
class that used to see gradual improvements in their living
standards—in money, in perks, in their ability to travel around, in
their communications—suddenly they just recognized that it all
could disappear. So now Putin’s only rationale is to present
himself as a big hero, “Vladimir the Great”; “The collector of
Russian lands”; “Putin, the man who is restoring the Russian
empire”. Again, for him, the main audience for him is inside the
country. The propaganda—and I can still hear it by just listening
to Russian television, or just reading the press—it’s worse than Dr
Goebbels, it’s Orwell, it’s “War is peace, slavery is freedom”.
Twenty-four-seven, it’s anti-American. And they keep talking about
horrible things, including even using nuclear weapons. Even Putin
himself, in his latest speech, praised Nikita Khrushchev for making
these threats. It’s almost quote-unquote, when he said that
Khrushchev acted like a crazy man, banging with his shoe at the
United Nations, but everybody respected him because they knew he
was crazy and they were afraid that he would throw nuclear missiles
at them—that is literally quote-unquote. Now, combine it with his
clear statement that all the borders of the former Soviet Union are
in question—that is why he believes that Russia was in it’s rights
to challenge Ukrainian borders, and others as well. Now the
question is whether he could attack Estonia and Latvia, they are
members of NATO—with article five. My answer is: he might do that,
because he doesn’t have to start a whole invasion. He could provoke
violence in the Russian enclaves, in Estonia or in Latvia, and then
you could see some volunteers crossing the border. At the end of
the day it is not about “Invading” Latvia or Estonia, it’s all
about undermining NATO. Obama had a big speech in Tallinn, claiming
that the United States was behind Estonia—nice. The next day,
Russian intelligence kidnapped an Estonian officer from Estonian
territory, dragged him into Russia, and he is now in a Russian jail
awaiting trial for espionage. The next day! Why? Just to show that
there was no protection. So it is all about undermining western
institutions, and NATO, and demonstrating that the United States is
a paper tiger, is an empty shell.

A mass of people came
together in Washington, D.C., Saturday for a national march against
police violence. The crowd gathered in front of the White House and
marched toward the U.S. Capitol, stopping on Pennsylvania Avenue,
where the families of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and
other young men recently killed by American police spoke about
their heartbreak and their hopes for some meaning to come from the
death of their loved ones.

The Reverend Al Sharpton, whose nonprofit National Action
Network organized today’s “Justice For All March”, presided over
the event. I showed up near the Capitol just in time to catch to
Sharpton and the family members speaking. The crowd was much larger
than I’d imagined, stretching down several blocks and fanning out
thick in all directions around the stage and screens reflecting it.
I have no idea how many people were there—Sharpton says 50,000,
which seems dubious; most coverage so far is just saying “thousands”. Regardless, there were
a lot of people—buses had been organized from around the north and
south east—many holding signs or wearing t-shirts printed with
“Black Lives Matter”, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, and “I Can’t
Breathe”.

Sharpton took the stage, calling for a spate of uninspiring
reforms that mostly seemed to revolve around shifting more power
from states to the federal government; he was better spouting the
kind of rhetoric that may not really translate directly to politics
but makes people feel like they are a part of something that has
momentum and potential. Whatever you feel about Sharpton, the man
can rally a crowd.

“This is not a black march, or a white march, but an American
march for the rights of American people,” said Sharpton. Bad cops
and their allies “thought it would be kept quiet. You thought you’d
sweep it under the rug. You thought there’d be no limelight. But
we’re going to keep the light on Michael Brown, on Eric Garner, on
Tamir Rice, on all of these victims because the only way—I come out
of the hood—the only way you make roaches run is you got to cut the
light on.” 

Sharpton brought the families of Brown, Garner, and others up on
stage, and they took turns speaking. Some of their stories are
well-known, some not; some led the crowd in short chants; many
thanked the crowd for being there; most spoke of justice. 

“My husband was a quiet man”, said Garner’s wife, Esaw, after
thanking the crowd. “But he’s making a lot of noise right now.” One
of Garner’s daughters spoke about what a good father and family man
he was. 

Samaria Rice, the mom of 12-year-old Tamir Rice—fatally
shot by a Cleveland police officer for
holding a toy gun—announced the newly-released results of her son’s
autopsy: it was ruled a homicide. In November, Tamir was shot by
Officer Timothy Loehman within two seconds of the police car
pulling up beside him in the park after receiving a 911 call from
someone who reported a “probably fake” gun. 

The father of 22-year-old John Crawford, shot by Ohio police in WalMart for carrying around
a pellet rifle he picked up there and planned to buy, said he
was there so everyone would remember his son’s name. “Please stay
focused,” he urged, stressing that his son hadn’t been gunned down
by cops “on the streets” but at America’s number one retailer. Not
only did the family not “get one condolence” from WalMart, the
company refused to release the footage from store cameras of
Crawford’s death. 

The brother of Cary Ball Jr., shot 25 times by St. Louis
police officers in 2013, spoke and urged audience members to
remember his brother’s name alongside more recent, high-profile
victims of police violence.  

Levar Jones, the man shot by a South Carolina state trooper as
he was reaching for his license at the officer’s request, spoke at
the rally alongside his wife. The incident was caught on a widely-circulated dashcam video
(“Sir, why was I shot?” Jones asks as he’s lying on the ground). In
this case the officer, Sean Groubert, was actually arrested and is
facing a felony charge of aggravated assault and battery. Jones
urged those in the crowd to connect with one another and others in
their individual communities to keep an appetite for reform
alive. 

Though most of the family members ended with hopeful remarks
about obtaining justice or change, Kadiatou Diallo—mother of
Amadou Diallo, the unarmed 23-year-old shot
down by four white New York Police Department officers in 1999
(all were aquitted)—offered a sobering reminder that momentum can
be meaningless, or at least painstakingly slow to build into any
actual change. Diallo held up a 2000 issue of Time magazine and noted that her son’s
story had made it on the cover; the crowd cheered. She read the
cover blurb: Cops, Brutality & Race. “And today,” said
Diallo, “16 years later we are standing still and debating the same
thing.” If a palpable awkward silence can descend on a crowd of
thousands, it did.

Diallo spoke also of Sean Bell, the New York man gunned down
along with two friends by NYPD on the day before his wedding in
2006. The men had been at a strip club where police were
investigating prostitution, and apparently rubbed cops the wrong
way—they used 50 bullets between the three young men. Diallo
went to see them in the hospital. Bell was handcuffed to the
hospital bed. 

In all of these cases we have to ask the same question: “Why
(do) our sons look suspicious?” said Diallo. “Time and time again,
we are going through the same history, and reliving the tragedy
every time, … Our sons died so that we could come here and review
what is happening,” have a conversation, make reforms, and then
heal. “We want to heal,” Diallo added, with all the doubt
and wariness but cautious optimism of someone who’s been fighting
this particular battle for more than a decade. “We need
healing America.”

“Stand with Hillary: Part 2” was originally released on
Dec. 12, 2014. The original text is below:

Remy helps the
Stand with Hillary super PAC come up with a new music
video.

Approximately 2 minutes.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks and background
vocals by Ben Karlstrom. Video by Meredith Bragg.

Scroll below for lyrics, downloadable versions, and more.

Subscribe to Reason
TV’s YouTube channel to get automatic notifications when new
material go live.

Follow Remy on Twitter at @goremy and Reason at @reason.

LYRICS:
Just like the last time around
Republicans are gonna frown
Mitt Romney and Ben Carson now?

Like Twitter stock you’re going down

You’d that you were riding in

Billy Joel’s car I swear
because you’re gonna see
shattered glass everywhere

I’m talking Arkansas Badonkadonk..
Perfect voting record make you wanna vote along
Gonna bring along ol’ Bill Clinton
and ooh-wee, shut my mouth, slap your grandma

You think she’s gonna lose
in the early primaries?
You’d sooner see
Al Sharpton
promptly filing quarterlies

Somehow I’m a crusader
Can label you a hater
While I say “nominate
anybody with a baby-maker”