I don’t know Miriam Krinsky; judging by her Twitter feed, she’s probably a very decent person who is, like most decent people in the US, so absurdly clueless about sex work that she believes in the “sex trafficking” mythology and therefore thinks everyone who wraps himself in that filthy banner is a great guy. Otherwise I can’t fathom why she’d send out a tweet praising two utterly loathsome, racist, misogynistic, wastes of human flesh:
"Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs. It is relying less on the criminal justice toolbox to deal with hard drugs and more on the public health toolbox." Great read by @NickKristoff on inspiring work of @DanSatterberg https://t.co/Aj9CMfGQCd
— Miriam Krinsky (@miriamkrinsky) August 23, 2019
The “inspiring work of Dan Satterberg” includes criminalization of consensual adult sex & racist pogroms against Asian-owned businesses, not to mention wantonly destroying lives of hundreds of men in return for money from a sociopathic billionaire. No surprise the vile Nick Kristof likes him. Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown on some of Satterbergs’s “inspiring work”, and Sydney Brownstone on more of it; SO INSPIRATIONAL! There are plenty of other examples of Dan Satterberg being an “inspiration” to those who dream of a universal police state controlling and “regulating” all private human behavior; just search his name on this blog. It appears dozens of times in connection with oppression & lies. But there’s a bigger issue here than a pompous, self-serving politician who knows how to get votes in a city which likes to pretend it’s “progressive”, and a smarmy white-savior hack journalist who thinks brown people are props for his various self-aggrandizing publicity stunts. The problem is nice middle-class white ladies who hear about horrific ideas like “Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion” (which basically consists of giving violent thugs the ability to label someone “sick” and force them into conversion therapy instead of labeling them “criminal” and locking them in a cage) and think the politicians who push them – thereby increasing cops’ power and doing nothing to shrink the government’s power to interfere in people’s lives – are some kind of heroes. You know how Satterberg’s crony Pete Holmes reacted when he found out very few people are interested in Seattle’s patronizing cop-controlled “program”? He started threatening women with increased police violence (including, as we know, rape) in order to intimidate them into “accepting” the “diversion”. All this should make any reasonable person ask, “If LEAD is so great, why are so few people interested in enduring it?” But Kristof doesn’t ask that question; he just lies to enable yet another monster who destroys women’s lives for power and profit, as he enabled Somaly Mam for years. And the same nice middle-class white ladies who funded Mam’s horror show, and who fund every other prohibitionist group working to inflict violence on human beings for the “crime” of consensual sex, continue to fawn on Kristof and vote for people who enable them to disguise their racism and their hatred of other women behind a mask of “concern”. No wonder they find Satterberg’s duplicity, racism, misogyny, and authoritarianism “inspiring”; he’s everything they want to be.
Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has leaned the new game in town is to publicly talk a lot about documentaries like 13th and keep a copy of The New Jim Crowe around for the media. To talk to the press and public about the need for criminal justice reform, restorative justice, humility before the law, and to “partner with defense attorneys, community leaders, and service providers in our regions to make our communities safer.”
That in practice Mr. Satterberg flagrantly ignores and makes a mockery of those very talking points whenever it suits him on a regular basis and faces little to no bad press, or public backlash for doing so. That alone tells you all you need to know about the media in general, but local media that depends on access to his office (read pleasing him) for stories in particular. We saw this with Robert Kraft in Florida as well. Long after Robert Kraft’s billions bought him the fair national media coverage he deserved and even the local prosecutor walked back early lies about “human trafficking” and “exploitation,” local media beholding to police and the prosecutor continued to push the human trafficking and exploitation narrative all facts to the contrary. In the US, local news is almost entirely owned by the police and prosecutor narrative of events and proof of facts have nothing to do with that.
In the rare event a credible reporter such as Sydney Brownstone, Elizabeth Nolan Brown or Allison Bass expose a Dan Satterberg’s self serving narrative, or corruption in taking bribes from a multi millionaire as he did with Swanny Hunt from Demand Abolition, Mr. Satterberg flies into a panicked rage and turns to the well funded police and prosecutor media office to convince local media they should support his dishonest self serving narrative he depends to to claim the moral high ground, all facts to the contrary.
All this is possible because Dan Satterberg is not just a politician, but a prosecutor. That makes him a politician with little accountability or oversight to either the people or other institutions that exercises special powers such as absolute immunity, mandatory sentencing rules that allows him to determine prison length from the prosecutor’s office, almost complete control over a bail system designed to bankrupt the family members of those charged with a crime and the ability to use the criminal code to settle personal scores and punish political enemies. Dan Satterberg has been very honest that his primary job is to “change the culture.” As DA that doesn’t mean change through persuasion or conversion it means cultural change at the point of a gun. It’s no wonder the media, judiciary, and every other person in a position of power of authority within King County refuses to cross swords with him once he decides the agenda they will all persue.
The larger problem is that even if someone with character and integrity were to take his position as DA, the complete lack of oversight and accountability would (and does) soon turn them into the type of unaccountable monsters an entirely unchecked ego always creates.
A government position like district attorney with no public or government oversight or accountability is precisely what the founders feared and wrote an entire constitution to prevent. Remember, while Dan Satterberg regularly talks about the need to hold his voters “accountable,” it was largely themselves our founders feared would end up unaccountable and Dan Satterberg is one expression of their worst fear for American Society. That Dan Satterberg has increasingly ignored the civil rights and even the Bill of Rights (most recently his criminalization of the 1st amendment, but over the past 30+ years has worked consistently to degrade all of them to increase his power and incarceration) as it applies a those under his power is not a surprise. No judge was ever re-elected, or promoted based on limiting a DA’s almost absolute power over something as quaint and unfashionable as Constitution Rights and no local reporter ever got anything but a letter of termination for reporting corruption within such an all powerful branch of government.
And yet, like all politicians Dan Satterberg is simply a follower and always has been. The reason he can maintain power through a script designed to appeal to bigotry, hate, blood lust, revenge as a solution of complex problems, fear of the other, arrogance, false pride and pretty much every other disgusting impulse humanity has worked for eons to overcome is because we consistently allow him to exploit and appeal to the worst within us.
This about this for a moment: All the organizations that work to prevent human pain and suffering: Doctors, social workers, human rights organizations have almost universally come to the science based conclusion that decriminalizing of sex work would reduce harm in society at all levels, yet large swaths of voters around the country continue to instead listen to a tiny fraction of people who have built their entire careers on inflicting pain, suffering and shame of their fellow humans while also violently locking them cages for State sanctioned torture. A politician could only sell that level of hate through fear.
Motivated by the primitive, imaginary fear of those who are different from our tribe he’s spent his career promoting. He has convinced large swaths of his constituency that unless they give in to their worst primitive impulses and hand him almost absolute power to carry out those evil impulses, society itself will collapse. Is it any wonder that traits like humility and compassion and almost universally scorned within his criminal division despite how constant narrative to the contrary? His appeal is as old as totalitarianism itself and unless evolve to resist the worst within us (and I’m not hopeful) we will continue to put the worst among us in charge to exploit and motivate the worst within us.
That is excellently well put. Is it any wonder why I support abolishing all public sector unions and their lobby groups?