There’s something terribly depressing about the hand-wringing commentary in US media that follows every small-town massacre. I suppose liberals have to go through the motions, because not to do so would be tantamount to tacitly condoning the craziness of US laws. So I started on Roger Ebert’s NYT OpEd piece with a sinking heart. But the closing paragraphs brought me up short. Here they are:

This would be an excellent time for our political parties to join together in calling for restrictions on the sale and possession of deadly weapons. That is unlikely, because the issue has become so closely linked to paranoid fantasies about a federal takeover of personal liberties that many politicians feel they cannot afford to advocate gun control.

Immediately after a shooting last month in the food court of the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto, a young woman named Jessica Ghawi posted a blog entry. Three minutes before a gunman opened fire, she had been seated at the exact place he fired from.

“I was shown how fragile life was,” she wrote. “I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath.”

This same woman was one of the fatalities at the midnight screening in Aurora. The circle of madness is closing.

Good column by Will Hutton about the kind of capitalism that Romney represents.

Bain Capital is part of the problem, not the solution. The private equity recipe has ripped the heart out of innovative US while leaving its banks encumbered by massive non-performing debts. The business model is now broken and the US has to start to ask questions about whether the Bain type of allegedly individualist capitalism really delivers growth and jobs. As the answer is: no, what does?

This is the line that’s always trotted out whenever a bent or violent or racist police officer is outed. It’s also the line invariably parroted by the tabloid press. We shouldn’t buy into it, as Jonathan Moses argues in this piece:

The charity Inquest notes that there have been just over 1400 deaths in police custody or following police contact since 1990 and not a single conviction of manslaughter. Clearly not all of these will be due to incidences of violence and neglect – but Tomlinson’s case is only one amongst many examples of police brutality leading to death. The public order unit Harwood was a part of, the TSG (Territorial Support Group), claims it recruits from the ranks “on merit, and much emphasis is placed upon their personal ability, motivation and good communication skills.” Yet Harwood already had ten complaints to his name by the time he joined the unit, and had been quietly dropped from the Met once before on medical grounds before disciplinary proceedings could begin against him.

Between 2005-2009, 5000 complaints were made against the TSG, with only 9 upheld, leading the Metropolitan Police Authority (the Met’s watchdog) to warn that TSG officers were seen as “practically immune” to criticism. Anecdotally, innumerable incidents of TSG violence are seared into my memory, nearly all of them involving unthreatening, unarmed young people posing no danger to the officers in question. I’ve come away with the feeling that a significant proportion of TSG officers, are, as London Assembly member Jenny Jones said of Harwood yesterday “thug[s] in uniform”, looking for the legitimacy of a police badge and the impunity of the legal system.

It is worth thinking about the culture which feeds this legitimacy, often facilitated by the mainstream media. As witnessed in the example of the Standard, the rule of thumb is that whilst protesters will inevitably be described as “violent” the moment that, say, a window is broken, police attacking protesters with batons, tasers, CS spray and shield strikes are never described as such. If it’s mentioned at all, it will always be under the pseudonym “robust”. The double standards are also apparent in the justice system. For protesters, what would be minor infractions in the context of everyday life become serious criminal offences in the context of public order. For the police, it is the other way around: Harwood used the abstract context of disorder on the day to justify his specific actions, which included pushing over a BBC cameraman, then another person who was helping someone on the floor, before going on to attack Tomlinson.

In some ways, the Territorial Support Group resembles News International’s journalists in the years before the Leveson Inquiry. They believed themselves immune from prosecution and so felt able to do whatever they wanted. Milly Dowler’s family were victims of that mindset. Ian Tomlinson was a victim of its police equivalent.

From Dexter Filkins’s sobering New Yorker assessment of the prospects for Afghanistan after the American withdrawal in 2014.

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

American soldiers and diplomats are engaged in a campaign of what amounts to strategic triage: muster enough Afghan soldiers and policemen to take over a fight that the United States and its allies could not win and hand it off to whatever sort of Afghan state exists, warts and all. “Change the place?” Douglas Ollivant, a former counterinsurgency adviser to American forces in Afghanistan, said. “It appears we’re just trying to get out and avoid catastrophe.”

Or this:

It may be that American officers, after eleven years of doing almost everything themselves, have created such a sense of dependency in the Afghan government and military that they must now see if their charges will stand on their own. And maybe they will. But the American strategy appears to be an enormous gamble, propelled by a sense of political and economic fatigue. The preparedness of the Afghan Army is only one of the many challenges that are being left unresolved: the Afghan kleptocracy, fuelled by American money and presided over by Hamid Karzai, is being given what amounts to a pass; and the safe havens in Pakistan which allow Taliban leaders and foot soldiers an almost unlimited ability to rest and plan remain open. After so many years, this is it. There is no Plan B. “I think it will be close,” a senior American diplomat told me in Kabul. “I think it can be done.”

Oh yeah? The Americans have discovered what every other Western government that tried to control Afghanistan has learned. It can’t be done. The funny thing is that the Brits could have told them. They tried — and failed — umpteen times between 1849 and 1947.

Good Observer column by Rawnsley.

We already knew from the financial crisis that the banksters were greedy, reckless and incompetent. We already knew from their reluctance to account for themselves or change their behaviour that they were shameless. The latest mis-selling scandals confirm something else we already knew: that they fleece their customers. What has changed over the past few days is that we now have proof that they are also corrupt and fraudulent. The rigging of Libor, the key interest rate which is used to value contracts worth trillions and affects everything from home loans to credit card charges, has shocked those who thought they were beyond being shocked. Sir Mervyn King has long held a scathing view of modern banking culture, but even the governor of the Bank of England seemed staggered that they had fallen so low. Barclays and the other institutions involved in this particular fraud were not just practising casino capitalism. They were rigging the wheel, loading the dice and marking the cards. The “few bad apples” defence will not wash. Some 20 further banks, including several other big household names, are also under investigation for perpetrating this scam. This could only happen in a City in which cheating and deception have become institutionalised.

A scandal of this magnitude demands a matching political response. That it has yet to receive.

Yep. And I see little evidence that it will.

Rawnsley also puts his finger on one of the most maddening aspects of all this — the fact that there really is one law for the rich and one for the rest of us:

One of the most shocking dimensions of this latest scandal is that no one may face prosecution. After last summer’s urban disorders, the police were imaginative in the use of the law to apprehend those involved. The courts handed down sentences to looters which were designed to be exemplary. A college student, with no previous convictions, was imprisoned for six months for nicking a £3.50 pack of bottled water. Yet there is serious doubt whether it will be possible to prosecute banksters who perpetrated a massive con involving sums which would buy many millions of bottles of water.