Oakland: Rental Criminal Background Checks Now Illegal!

It is my belief and often state or federal law that it's wrong to mistreat someone for an immutable characteristic. Refusing to hire or rent to someone because of race or religion is wrong. 

Assuming a young woman woman will become pregnant and declining to hire or promote her is wrong. And so on. 

Now unfortunately there are loopholes in and ways around all of those restrictions.  A racist can't legally place a "No N*****s!!!"  clause in her company's hiring policy but no one can force her to mentor Black employees with the same vigor that she does for others. Still, laws that prevent mistreatment for race, religion, ethnicity are good things. It's trickier when we make laws to prevent differential treatment for actual individual past wrong doing. The city of Oakland has banned most background check usage by landlords.

Oakland became the first city in California to ban criminal background checks in most housing applications for private and other rental units under a measure adopted by the City Council on Tuesday. The council unanimously passed a “fair chance housing” ordinance that bars landlords from conducting criminal background checks on prospective tenants. 

The ordinance in Oakland is the first to include rental units outside subsidized affordable and nonprofit housing. The measure, supporters say, could prevent homelessness and bring down the recidivism rate. 

“There is only one place in America that any one of us is guaranteed a roof over our heads and that is in prison,” said John Jones III, campaign director for Alameda County Fair Chance to Housing Coalition. “All of us seek to have safe shelter. That should not be a matter of privilege.”

Applicants who believe they were discriminated against due to their criminal background can file a complaint with the city or a lawsuit. The city can issue penalties of up to $1,000 per violation.
If a private action is filed, a court could award damages.

LINK 

Democratic Debate: The Knives Come Out For Bernie

I didn't have the time or the energy to watch all of the televised recent South Carolina Democratic debate. My Day Job Boss has made it clear that it would be in my interest to arrive to work earlier. But the parts of the debate that I did see fit perfectly in line with The Janitor's prescient predictions. It was pretty eerie actually. 

As you may have heard pundits, statisticians and self-serving politicians say before, Black people are a slight majority of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina.  Black men are 20% of Democratic primary voters while Black women are 35% of Democratic primary voters.This is thanks to mass incarceration and an almost complete abandonment of the Democrats by Southern whites who have a rather strong dislike of any political party that includes you know who. Any politician worthy of the name knows who his or her audience is. Here is what The Janitor had to say:
Democratic debate tonight in South Carolina so get ready for 2 hours of shameless pandering like:

Warren: "You know when my brothers joined the military they made friends with a black soldier. True story."
Bernie: "I once marched (all the way in the back of the crowd) with Dr. King..."
Klobuchar: "We gave you Prince. You're welcome."
Buttigieg: 😶
Bloomberg: "So about that stop & frisk, you see what had happened was..."
Biden: "O-hibety hoo-blah-Bama..."
Steyer: "I bought the rights to reparations, shrimp n grits, Migos, cocoa butter, Red Lobster biscuits, and Beats by Dre."

Book Reviews: Dark Crusade, Darkness Weaves

Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves
by Karl Edward Wagner

The late Karl Edward Wagner was an author, editor, publisher, poet and graphic novelist who originally trained as a psychiatrist. Wagner wrote fantasy, sci-fi, and horror stories. Wagner may have been best known for his Kane stories. These tales weren't always consistent in which world they were set. Generally it's a world that's not our own but occasionally Kane is shown in modern Earth. 

Kane, the allusion to the Biblical character is deliberate, is one of the first humans to exist. Kane claims that Adam was his father and Eve was his stepmother. Kane rebelled against the insane God who created humanity. Kane murdered his brother when that brother supported the deity.

The enraged God cursed Kane to wander the world, knowing neither age nor disease, until Kane succumbs to the violence he introduced. Kane has his own marks of evil: red hair, left handedness, and most notably disturbing cold blue eyes. Kane radiates violence and insanity to anyone who meets his gaze. Kane CAN be disabled and killed but it's very hard to do as he quickly heals from all but the most damaging wounds.

Kane is NOT a good guy. Kane doesn't experience the world as other humans do. Time and morality are meaningless to Kane. Kane staves off boredom and depression by using magic, technological knowledge, or violence to achieve temporary dominance. Kane is an anti-hero, a villain protagonist. 

Wagner makes him barely sympathetic by (a) creating worse antagonists and (b) having most of Kane's obviously immoral actions take place in the past. People remember evil sorcerers or pirates named Kane when they meet him before convincing themselves that the muscular man they see couldn't possibly be the man from the legends.

Warren Destroys Bloomberg At Debate

At the recent Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Senator Elizabeth Warren showed what happens when one person (that would be her) comes to the debate prepared and fiercely determined to show everyone she's still in it to win it, while another person (that would be former NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg) saunters into a debate evidently not having bothered to do minimal preparation. 

Bloomberg apparently thought that his wealth and support from certain anti-Sanders media pundits meant that he was above the fray. It was seemingly inevitable that Bloomberg was going to win the Democratic nomination, despite having been a Republican just five minutes ago. In Bloomberg's mind, this debate was just a dog and pony show that for some reason he had to join. Senator Warren didn't see things that way.

Professor Warren (she was my brother's professor at Harvard) not only laid hands on the supercilious Bloomberg, she broke his jaw, kicked in his ribs, hit him upside the head with a brick, kneecapped him with an icepick, and shot him twice with a .45. And THEN she really went to work on him. Before she was finished I was expecting to get a late night call from Warren telling me to meet her at my northern Michigan property with shovels, duct tape and a tarp.

Book Reviews: The Mafia Hitman's Daughter

The Mafia Hitman's Daughter
by Linda Scarpa with Linda Rosencrance

Greg Scarpa was also known as The Grim Reaper, which probably tells you everything you need to know about his primary skill sets and value to the Profaci (later Colombo) Crime Family of which he was a ranking member. Scarpa boasted that he had stopped counting the number of people whom he had murdered after around fifty or so. 

Some accounts indicate that the number of murders he either committed personally (Scarpa was a hands on leader) or ordered could be somewhere between eighty and one hundred. The FBI employed Scarpa to intimidate and/or torture KKK members for information, something he boasted about to his family.

Somewhat surprisingly Scarpa had an unconventional home life. He married one woman and had four children with her. Sometime during that marriage Scarpa fell in love with another woman and had two children with her. However he didn't marry her. That woman, Linda Schiro, didn't want the stigma of having children outside of wedlock so she married (and cuckolded) another man. 

Cuckoldry became something of a recurring theme as Schiro later, with Scarpa's apparent enthusiastic support, took up with a delivery boy who would later become part of Scarpa's criminal network. Another book I read that focused on this family claimed that Scarpa would occasionally interrogate the younger man to ensure that he was properly satisfying Schiro. Hmm. 

Those must have been some rather uncomfortable conversations.

I guess the Mafia was not immune to changing sexual mores. I also guess that people who wanted to keep breathing did not needle Scarpa about his wife's behavior. You don't get a nickname like The Grim Reaper by letting people insult your common-law wife.

Movie Reviews: Angel Has Fallen

Angel Has Fallen
directed by Ric Roman Waugh

This is the third installment in an action adventure series that centers around men who try to kidnap or kill the President and the Secret Service agents who try to stop them. The movie is not boring. It is comfortable in the same way that wrapping yourself in a favorite old blanket is. As long as you don't care about the frayed ends, questionable spots, and rips where the stuffing is falling out, no one else will either. 

The quality of the acting and the cinematography are all what you would expect from work that involves A-list actors. The writing? Well like I said it is a comfortable sequel. The bad guys are way too obvious. People who don't even like or watch movies like this would be able to tell you who the bad guys are and what they want in the first ten minutes of the film.

That's not really a good thing.

Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is a Secret Service agent who is getting up there in age. He suffers from migraines, concussions and other pains from his Secret Service work and military experiences. It's about time for Banning to move out of the direct field work and take a promotion to head of the Secret Service. It's Washington D.C.'s worst kept secret that Banning will get the spot after the current Secret Service director David Gentry (Lance Reddick) retires. 

But Banning doesn't want to do that, because among other reasons, he still enjoys the frontline experience of being on President Trumbull's (Morgan Freeman) security detail. He doesn't want to sit behind a desk and do fake battle with corpulent staffers, Senators, and lobbyists for his budget each year.

The Benin Bronzes and Colonial Theft

In the movie Black Panther, Killmonger talks to a British museum curator, testing her expertise on various African artwork and artifacts. When Killmonger finds the item he's looking for and not so coincidentally tells the curator that she is incorrect about its origin, he informs her that she need not worry about such things any more as he is going to take it off her hands. 

She haughtily tells him that the item is not for sale. Killmonger asks her how does she think her ancestors obtained these items in the first place? Did they pay a fair price for them? Or did they, secure in their greater capacity for violence and total contempt for anyone not white, just take them. It's a powerful scene.

People, unfortunately especially people who are descended from colonizers and imperialists, often forget that much of the world's greatest art is in European museums not because of honest trade but because of violence and theft. I was reminded of this because of a recent NY Times article that detailed the halting and slow efforts of two people to convince European museums (in this case a British one) to do the right thing and return stolen art (in this case masks from Benin in what is now Nigeria).

In 2004, Steve Dunstone and Timothy Awoyemi stood on a boat on the bank of the River Niger. In the back of the crowd, Mr. Awoyemi, who was born in Britain and grew up in Nigeria, noticed two men holding what looked like political placards. They didn’t come forward, he said. But just as the boat was about to push off, one of the men suddenly clambered down toward it. “He had a mustache, scruffy stubble, about 38 to 40, thin build,” Mr. Dunstone recalled recently. “He was wearing a white vest,” he added. The man reached out his arm across the water and handed Mr. Dunstone a note, then hurried off with barely a word. 

That night, Mr. Dunstone pulled the note from his pocket. Written on it were just six words: “Please help return the Benin Bronzes.” At the time, he didn’t know what it meant. But that note was the beginning of a 10-year mission that would take Mr. Dunstone and Mr. Awoyemi from Nigeria to Britain and back again, involve the grandson of one of the British soldiers responsible for the looting, and see the pair embroiled in a debate about how to right the wrongs of the colonial past that has drawn in politicians, diplomats, historians and even a royal family.