Of all the cities in America in which gun crime statistics are recorded, gun lobbyists are particularly fascinated with Chicago. The windy city is prominent in all arguments against gun control, cited as an example of how restrictions on gun ownership do not have the intended effect.

Why single out Chicago as the example of choice? The reason gun lobbyists like Chicago is the same reason that climate change deniers like the year 1998. It supports their narrative and allows them to quote facts which seem to strengthen their case, but it happens to be a statistical outlier that completely bucks the trend.

1998 was an unusually warm year thanks to an unusually strong short term El Niño event, a cyclical warming of the Pacific ocean. Hence average global temperatures recorded over the longer term show a spike in 1998. Climate deniers try to prove that global warming has stopped and gone into reverse by quoting global average temperatures over a time period that conveniently begins at 1998, and in so doing omits the previous two centuries of industrial activity, to say nothing of the previous hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Longer term temperatures dating back over centuries show an unmistakable increase beginning shortly after the start of the industrial revolution, and accelerating in more recent years as China and India have become industrialized. Taking that longer view, 1998 is little more than a statistical blip.

Similarly, Chicago is an exception to all of the available data on gun control laws and gun crime rates.  According to numerous sources, the NRA included, an examination of the strictness of gun control laws and gun crime rates on a state-by-state basis shows an undeniable correlation: states with tighter restrictions boast lower rates of gun deaths per head of population, and states with looser restrictions suffer higher rates of gun deaths per head of population.

One of the most difficult states in the union in which to obtain a gun is Hawaii, where purchasing a firearm requires a permit, buying a handgun online or at a gun show requires a background check, weapons have to be registered, concealed carry permits are difficult to obtain, and there is a two-week waiting period for handguns.  Hawaii is at the bottom of the table of gun-related deaths per head of population, at 2.5 per 100,000 for 2013.

Topping the gun deaths table for the same year was Alaska at 19.8 victims per 100,000. This is a state that does not implement any of the restrictions found in Hawaii. Between those two extremes is a clear pattern of increasing restrictions on gun purchases correlating with a decrease in gun deaths. The NRA’s oft-repeated claim that gun control does not work is a flat out lie. However none of this data matters to an organization that has become a lobbying group for the arms industry. No amount of facts about state-by-state figures will sway people who continue to focus on Chicago to the exclusion of the rest of the country.

Chicago’s equivalent of the El Niño climate pattern is a combination of factors that have precious little to do with city-specific gun control laws.  Overall, the state of Illinois is twelfth from the bottom of the gun deaths table for 2013 and also boasts tight restrictions on purchases. However Chicago has suffered unusually high gun crime in recent years, with 2,300 shootings in 2015 and a murder rate that is above the national average, in some neighborhoods higher than the most dangerous developing countries.

The city’s location puts it within a short drive of states like Indiana where controls are considerably looser. Police report that 60 percent of guns recovered from crime scenes were purchased out of state, with 20 percent of them coming from Indiana.  This means that someone living in the South side of Chicago can make a one-hour drive to a gun show in Indiana, to a location closer than O’Hare airport, and walk out with an assault rifle without so much as a background check or waiting period.

There is an unmistakable correlation between higher crime rates and poverty, evidenced by the relative tranquility of Chicago’s more affluent neighborhoods and the violence-infested poorer areas. Reports abound of innocent people in poor neighborhoods being tragically caught by stray bullets being exchanged by street gangs which tend to take root in places where opportunities are limited and the economic outlook is bleak. Combined with a strong “no snitch” culture that undermines cooperation with police, taking dangerous criminals off the street is so difficult that many violent people remain in circulation. Small wonder that criminals take advantage of lax gun control laws only a short drive away.

The solutions to these problems are complex and long term. They involve economic growth, improved education, better relations between police and the communities they serve, and a criminal justice system that should emphasize rehabilitation over retribution. One measure that would not help would be increasing the availability of guns.

Chicago’s crime figures are not an argument against gun control in the city. They are an argument for gun control in neighboring states.

The incident was caught on camera by one of Robinson’s laughing friends and posted online, resulting in an outcry by horrified animal rights activists.  Social media was called into play to highlight the case, as a Facebook page called Justice for King attracted over 12,000 followers demanding a custodial sentence for the perpetrator who was promptly identified, arrested, and charged.

The case highlights a number of issues.  One is the ubiquity of video recording devices. Twenty years ago video cameras were bulky, expensive, and rare, and an incident like this would not have made it into the local newspaper, to say nothing of becoming a story with a worldwide audience. Today video cameras are in almost everyone’s pockets as part of their mobile phones, and with internet connectivity and social media the footage can be distributed worldwide within minutes. People’s behavior is slowly being modified by this phenomenon.

When George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four he envisioned an omnipresent surveillance network operated by a tyrannical state, since in his day only a state would have the resources to implement such a system.  He had no way of foreseeing that it would eventually be citizens who would choose to put a surveillance camera everywhere.

Secondly, the fact that animal cruelty is being taken more seriously will be welcome news for those who hold strong views about animal rights. Society’s attitude to these matters evolves over time.  It was not so long ago that it was considered acceptable to employ children as laborers in dirty and dangerous occupations.  It was not so long ago that homophobic attitudes were considered the norm and it was acceptable to openly express them. The evolution of attitudes is one of the ways in which we build a better society, and as part of that process it would seem that our view of animals is changing to a more humane one. This is driven in part by the better organization of animal welfare activists who can more easily get organized to identify perpetrators, train law enforcement in dealing with it, and apply pressure for stiffer sentences for offenders.

Law enforcement agencies are now taking animal abuse more seriously than they used to and are dedicating more resources to tackling it, reflecting its status as a more mainstream concern rather than something that only matters to fringe activists. Animal cruelty as a gateway to more serious offenses is also highlighted as a need to crack down on it in order to prevent escalation to even more violent crimes.

However a third aspect of the case involves the issue of what should be the appropriate consequences of someone convicted of such an offense. Lawyers defending the accused are said to have argued that a custodial sentence would have damaging long term effects such as encouraging gang affiliations, or removing someone from a job or school to which he would not be able to return.

That lawyers are now arguing against prison time on the basis that it makes offenders more dangerous is surely an indictment of the American penal system. The purpose of prison should be to make people less dangerous upon release, not more so. But try explaining that to the posturing politicians in the “tough on crime” lobby who seem to think that being “tough on crime” is the same as being tough on criminals by sending them into a hellish prison system in which they are likely to be brutalized, raped, perhaps even killed, and if they survive the ordeal they will emerge into a society that often deprives them of the means of making an honest living, effectively punishing them for life even after they have served their time.

The concept of prison as a means of rehabilitation is notable by its absence in much of the discourse on this topic. The Department of Justice estimates that 200,000 inmates were sexually abused in 2011, most of them male. However sexual assault on male prisoners is still considered acceptable comedy fodder for entertainers and even some aspiring politicians. The mass incarceration of nonviolent offenders, many of whom are mentally ill or suffering from addiction, has produced an overcrowded penal system in which all hell breaks loose and the most vulnerable people are treated as subhuman by an uncaring society that dismisses their concerns with a “should have thought about it before you committed the crime” attitude. America is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prisoners. The “land of the free” locks up a larger proportion of its black population than South Africa did in the darkest days of apartheid.

America is a long way from the Scandinavian model of jail as an educational resource that is so successful in the case of Sweden that prisons have had to be closed for lack of prisoners. One glaring obstacle is the sheer size of America’s prison population, something that can only be shrunk by a sensible approach to substance abuse and the legalization of marijuana. An end to mandatory minimum sentencing, which ratchets up sentences to medieval levels, would also help. Only with a smaller prison population is there any chance of changing the emphasis to rehabilitation and even then it would require a shift in incentives. As it stands, the for-profit prison system has an incentive to lobby for longer sentences to sweep up more people into its expanding dragnet, since more prisoners means more money. If it is too much for America to see prisons run by the state, then prison management and staff should be given performance-based pay that takes into account recidivism rates among prisoners who pass under their watch.  This would concentrate more minds to find solutions that actually work in practice, rather than perpetuating the current humanitarian catastrophe at the behest of the baying mob. It would also help if former prisoners had their rights restored on release and were not prevented from voting or finding employment.

For people like Mr Robinson, an appropriate sentence would act as a deterrent to others, but it should also ensure that he does not repeat such a vile act and that he respects animals. If that means a custodial sentence then it should not be so long that it places excessive costs on the taxpayer, but it should be in a system that makes him less dangerous on release.

A federal judge in California has struck a blow against the amateur status of college athletes playing in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) competitions. The ruling, if it is upheld on appeal, will pave the way for college athletes to earn money from image rights, something that GAA players have been doing for years. For the first time, a student athlete whose likeness appears in a video game will be able to earn a share of the millions of dollars generated by it.

Big time college sports have been controversial in America for quite some time, and not just because of the NCAA’s amateur status. College campuses have become home to shiny, modern, opulent stadiums that would not look out of place on the professional sporting circuit. The highest paid staff in some universities are not world-renowned professors but basketball and gridiron football coaches. Indeed coaches are the highest paid public employees in some states, the highest earning $5.6 million per year, with Athletic Directors and assistant coaches earning seven figure sums. Under pressure from influential alumni who see sporting success as essential to maintaining a school’s prestige, massive amounts of resources are poured into what is essentially a source of on-site entertainment for undergraduate students.

Observers from Europe are taken aback by the sheer scale of American college sports. While in the rest of the world college sports are student-led, part-time, extracurricular activities used by students as a means of socializing and staying in shape, top-flight US college sports are the gateway to a potentially lucrative career in the professional leagues. Attendances of 100,000 at football games are not unheard of, some stadiums have a capacity of 170,000. College basketball’s March Madness, which generates $800 million in revenue, dominates televised sport and is the subject of betting pools in workplaces all over the country.

Meanwhile many “student” athletes are enrolled by colleges purely for their athletic abilities and not on academic merit. Sports scholarships offer a pathway to a college education for athletically inclined students, but their academic goals are secondary to their sporting ambitions. 

The NCAA has become an all-powerful institution, but it was not always so. College football teams used to negotiate their own broadcasting rights with television networks. Prior to 1951, Notre Dame and Penn State themselves negotiated with television networks for the broadcasting rights to their games and kept the revenue. The NCAA stepped in and insisted that they should hold the broadcasting rights and only they could negotiate with the networks. If Notre Dame and Penn did not comply and hand the rights over to the NCAA, the two teams would be expelled from all NCAA-sanctioned games against other colleges and deprived of what had become a lucrative source of income. The two universities had no choice but to agree and the NCAA immediately became a very wealthy organization.

Today it posts revenues in excess of $10.5 billion per year, more than the National Football League (NFL), the largest of the big four American sports leagues. It has palatial headquarters and a large paid staff of executives earning substantial salaries. Critics point out that this wealth is built on what is essentially the indentured servitude of vulnerable young athletes who are forced to accept grueling working hours in the hope of progressing to professional sports careers.

NCAA rules prevent a student athlete from earning money from any products that use their personal image. They are not permitted to earn a wage on a pay-for-play basis, there are heavy restrictions on gifts that they can accept, and they are limited to accepting free tuition plus room and board. If a coach buys a player lunch, that is a violation of NCAA rules and could in theory see a scholarship being revoked. The result is many student athletes living in poverty while working long hours in professional-level training with the bare minimum class time thrown in. Indeed the academic merits of many courses attended by athletes is questionable to say the least, and academic fraud is said to be rife. The problem is further compounded by NCAA rules that prevent student athletes from claiming compensation for on-the-job injuries that they would be entitled to in any other line of work, the argument being that they are not employees but unpaid amateurs. This is a big problem for a sport like gridiron football where injuries, particularly concussions, are becoming a major concern because of their long-term effects.

The NCAA defends this situation by maintaining the fiction that the students are playing the sport purely for the love of the game. While this was enough to deny compensation to injured players in the past, the Californian federal judge is no longer buying that argument. 

If this opens up the pathway to pay-for-play, is it another case of yet another sport played for the love of the game falling to the inevitable commercial pressures of professionalism? It most certainly is not. While club sports in less popular pastimes remain student-led activities, big time US college sports have been raking in huge sums of money for decades, much of it flowing into the pockets of NCAA executives and college athletics departments who have then splashed out on the massive concrete and steel arenas in which this sham is played out. Less than a third of the NCAA’s money goes to scholarships and other players’ financial aid, nowhere near enough to allow the students to get by in some degree of comfort commensurate with the value they generate.

If the NCAA wanted to lend some hint of truth to the idea of students playing the sport for the love of the game, it could have tried to position itself as a community-based organization that reinvests all of its surplus cash at grassroots level, enabling communities to further grow their recreational sports facilities. But the NCAA is no GAA. Instead it has established itself as the launch pad for careers in the professional leagues. NFL players must complete three years playing college football. National Basketball Association (NBA) players must be at least 19 years old, making it difficult to get into without experience in the college game. The professional leagues and the NCAA also cooperate by avoiding scheduling clashes, playing college games on a Saturday and professional games on a Sunday.

Meanwhile in Ireland, critics of the GAA’s broadcasting deal with British Sky Television lament that it is a step towards professionalism and a sign of the association’s “greed.” However anyone who accuses the GAA of “greed” usually does not know how the association works. Unlike the NCAA, the GAA has only a very small paid staff, and once the overheads are paid the remainder of the money, over 85 percent, is reinvested back into the association where it makes life better for communities worldwide. The extra revenue brought in by the Sky deal, less than $2 million, quickly spreads thin around 32 Irish county boards and half a dozen international units, nowhere near enough to sustain even a semi-professional setup.

The GAA’s amateur status is quite different from that of the NCAA. In the NCAA the players are not paid because of a cartel that has been set up to hoard its substantial revenues. In the GAA the players are not paid because not only is it not economically viable, but because the GAA’s amateur status is the real deal. “Amateur” comes from the Latin “amare”, to love. Gaelic games are played by those who genuinely love the game, and because of the association’s unique structure they actually do hail from the communities and the places being represented on the field. While there are legitimate concerns about the workload being put on inter-county players and steps have been taken to deal with player burnout, the GAA is the last holdout of sport played not because of commercial imperatives, and not on the back of any exploitation of athletes for private profit, but it is played purely for sport’s sake.

The reasons given at the time for this radical reform were increasing concerns about drunkenness and lawlessness, and the inefficiencies of existing parish-based law enforcement arrangements which had been inconsistent from one part of the city to the next. While the crime figures and corruption and incompetence of local patrols are disputed by some historians, and thought to be a pretext, the new Metropolitan Police did offer a standardized means of consistent enforcement citywide that did not suffer in less wealthy areas.

However one very important reason for systematic policing was to save the authorities the trouble of deploying soldiers to the streets. Peel understood that the military were trained to use deadly force against a hostile foreign enemy, and deploying them against the civilian population that they were supposed to be defending was a decidedly risky endeavor. An unarmed civilian agency could be better trained to specialize in dealing with street-level crime without causing loss of life that would undermine support for the state and its efforts to keep order.

Throughout history governments have made the mistake of using the military for law enforcement purposes, and the results have often been tragic and have led to massive political upheaval. In 1905, Russian authorities deployed troops around the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to contain a mass demonstration by striking workers who were marching on the Tsar’s winter residence. The confused and disorganized response of the thousands of soldiers led to the shooting and trampling to death of an estimated thousand or more unarmed civilians in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, an event that fatally undermined royal power in Russia and stoked the fires of revolution. The deployment of trigger-happy British troops in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, in the absence of a functioning impartial local police force, led to another Bloody Sunday in Derry, a loss of innocent civilian life that ultimately spawned the 25-year conflict of the Troubles. The Chinese authorities used troops to break up a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the outcome of that was a catastrophic human cost, the isolation of China, and the setting back of reform for decades.

One would think that enlightened governments would have learned by now that there is a distinction between the role of the military and that of law enforcement. However it would seem that this distinction is blurring in the United States.

With a military machine that is overflowing with equipment that is foisted upon it by posturing congressmen in thrall to their defense contractor donors who are strategically placed in just about every congressional district, the Pentagon has taken to giving away large swathes of its arms.

Since 2006, local police departments have acquired 432 Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles (MRAPs), 435 other armored vehicles such as Humvees, 44,900 night vision goggles, 533 aircraft, 93,763 machine guns, and 180,718 ammunition magazines. Hardly necessary for pulling someone over for a broken tail light.

The military transfer program allows police departments to snap up equipment at bargain prices, equipment that would otherwise be scrapped. The result is police departments of small towns and cities, far from the vast metropolises of the northeast that have always been the targets of terrorism in the past, stocking up on an arsenal that would hold back an alien invasion. By playing the “officer safety” card, they can find it easy to justify their acquisitions.

While police forces taking possession of such equipment claim that they are preparing for unlikely eventualities and the armored cars and tanks and guns are likely to spend most of their time idle, there are reports of heavily armed SWAT teams conducting terrifying military grade raids for tasks as mundane as liquor inspections and checking business licenses. Police recruiting videos now contain scenes that would not look out of place in war-themed video games, with the doors of homes being battered in and smoke grenades thrown in.

Furthermore, new technology is enabling law enforcement agencies to monitor society and process more data even faster. Privacy advocates balk at the ability of the government to snoop on private communications and the movements of citizens in public. Data processing centers can now find fingerprint matches against criminal records in minutes, a process that used to take months. Facial recognition technology can identify a person no matter what false name and address they give. An aerial observation system called Persistence Surveillance Systems can record the movements of vehicles and pedestrians for later analysis, allowing police to go back to the time and place where a crime was reported and see it taking place. This technology has limits for now—a getaway car will often drive out of camera range—and the low resolution prevents the actual identification of vehicles or individuals without corroboration from other surveillance sources, and as such it is yet to be adopted by any law enforcement body. Nonetheless, civil liberties advocates find this a sinister development, particularly since it was used on a trial basis by Compton police in LA County in 2012 without public knowledge or consent.

A look at the history of policing finds that new methods of law enforcement are usually initially met with some opposition, but are eventually accepted. The unflattering nicknames given to the police, some with porcine connotations, are lingering signs of resentment that have never fully gone away since the inception of policing. Closed circuit television cameras in British town centers were once treated with horror by anyone who had read Nineteen Eighty Four, but are now commonplace and a largely accepted safety feature. Advocates of expanded surveillance claim that street lighting was once criticized as Big Brother personified, but soon came to be seen as an essential public safety feature, and advanced surveillance will eventually find the same acceptance as the public gets used to it.

They may a have a point. The American public waits in line for air travel with its pain-in-the-neck security theatre, an ordeal that is met with a mixture of quietly anxious watch-checking and resignation.

Even the most invasive Orwellian surveillance may come to be as accepted as the TSA pat-down, but only if the truly guilty find themselves on the receiving end of special police attention. However if innocent people are caught up in over-zealous policing, particularly if military-grade equipment and war combat methods are used, then support for law enforcement will be undermined. Police departments could do well to remember that the effectiveness of their operation depends a lot more on the cooperation and trust of the communities they are sworn to protect than on the intimidating size of their vehicles or the war-readiness of their weapons. The citizens of Compton, California are not the Iraqi insurgency. They must never be treated as such.

High profile cases of wage theft have been reported before in low-income jobs, such as workers being pressured to work “off the clock” or the falsifying of time sheets. A survey carried out by Hart Research Associates and published in April found that 90 percent of fast food workers have had their wages illegally deducted, and McDonald’s managers have reported that off-the-clock working has been routine for years through such practices as manipulating the data in the corporate payroll system to reduce the number of hours worked. The company is now subject to a lawsuit to recover stolen wages. Such theft is rife in fast food and other blue collar occupations, a practice that is said to add up to more stolen money than all the store robberies and bank robberies nationwide.

The LinkedIn case is noteworthy in highlighting how wage theft is also a white collar problem. Google, Apple, Intel, Intuit and Adobe are in the process of settling a $3 billion lawsuit for their infamous “anti-poaching” deal that suppressed wages by preventing employees from moving from one company to another. Hedge funds have been known to press criminal charges for “theft of trade secrets” against former employees who dare to switch jobs and go to a competitor, landing them potential jail time. White collar wage theft has historically been hidden behind such complex legal stratagems, but the LinkedIn case is the kind of blatant direct thievery one would expect to find in a drive-thru.

“Off-the-clock hours are all too common for the American worker,” says Susana Blanco, district director for the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division in San Francisco. “This practice harms workers, denies them the wages they have rightfully earned and takes away time with families. We urge all employers, large and small, to review their pay practices to ensure employees know their basic workplace rights and that the commitment to compliance works through all levels of the organization.”

LinkedIn has agreed to provide compliance training and distribute its policy prohibiting off-the-clock work to all nonexempt employees and their managers, meet with managers of current affected employees to remind them that overtime work must be recorded and paid for, and remind employees of LinkedIn’s policy prohibiting retaliation against any employee who raises concerns about workplace issues.

Whether or not the case acts as a deterrent to unscrupulous employers in the high-tech industry remains to be seen.

Meanwhile Republicans, who have gerrymandered their way into a House majority despite having only 47.6 percent of the popular vote, play to their base by demanding more elaborate ways of keeping people out. Despite the fact that an estimated 40 percent of undocumented immigrants arrive legally as tourists and visitors, many through airports, and simply stay longer than allowed to, Republicans insist on more elaborate physical barriers on the actual Mexican border. Election candidates in the primaries get into a bidding war, each trying to out-do the other in how high they would build a wall. That it might not be possible to build a wall high enough to keep out the commercial aircraft flying over it and into American airports is neither here nor there. GOP politicians also vie for attention with promises of all manner of gimmicks they would add to keep those pesky Mexicans out, such as an electrified fence, a moat, or in the case of Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, locking and loading a rifle and putting in a personal appearance on the border. President Obama has joked that perhaps they would like to add alligators to the moat.

Anti-immigration sentiment is to be found in right wing thinking in Europe as well as the United States. However in Europe there is a better understanding of the need for movement of labor across international borders, since more European companies do business internationally for obvious reasons. Therefore in Europe there is a stronger business-backed lobby that sees the free movement of labor as a key part of international trade. Vociferous anti-immigration sentiment is largely confined to fringe parties on the far right.

EU enlargement has certainly unsettled many people in Western Europe who are now adjusting to seeing a more diverse population in their midst, but the economic impact has generally resulted in a better distribution of wealth across the continent. Poland was an exhausted victim of decades of subjugation in the communist bloc by the time the Iron Curtain fell in 1991, but since it joined the EU along with over half a dozen other Eastern European nations in 2004, its economy grew annually at 6 percent and the unemployment rate halved from 20 percent to 10 percent until the financial crisis of 2008. While there are residual problems, notably a tendency of young people to emigrate, in general Poland has benefited from its access to the large market and the other benefits that come with EU membership.

In the United States where there is a large domestic market, protectionism is a much more popular idea and anti-immigration sentiment is more mainstream than in Europe. Indeed protectionism has historically been found as much on the left as on the right. Tariffs, which funded much of the federal government before the federal income tax was implemented, were once championed by the GOP but backfired spectacularly with the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that was widely blamed for plunging America into the Great Depression. George W Bush infamously raised tariffs on imported steel in 2002 in a move that damaged domestic manufacturing, and was criticized by Democratic minority leader Dick Gephardt for not going far enough. President Obama has repeatedly lambasted companies that outsource production overseas and has raised tariffs on goods such as Chinese tires.

That there is such a low political price to pay for protectionism indicates how an idea can gain so much traction on the right even though it actually contradicts core conservative principles. In their book, the free market is the best judge of how to manage resources, be it goods, services or labor. However as soon as any of these start to cross international borders, American conservatives start to diverge from their European counterparts and suddenly want the government to step in and do some regulating. Instead of “getting big government out of the way,” suddenly we become “a nation of laws that must be obeyed.” However attempts to physically block immigrants are like putting a bigger bucket under a leaky roof instead of fixing the leak. The movement of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America is merely the free market at work. There is demand for labor that Americans are unwilling to perform, and the market is stepping in of its own accord to fill that vacuum. Yet conservatives oppose the very immigration that is needed to keep the economy running according to what the market wants.

If concern about immigration is overstated (net immigration from Mexico fell to zero in 2012), it is still in America’s own interest that there is a prosperous Mexico to the south in the same way that there is now a prosperous Poland to the east of the EU’s original membership. There is no point in having a nice house if the rest of the street is derelict. Through free trade Mexico is more likely to prosper; the country has much going for it, notably a stable democracy and at least the potential for a strong rule of law.

As for the United States, there is a disconnect is between the reality and the perception of imported labor, legal or otherwise. Most imported labor is either very highly skilled or very lowly skilled. American labor is mostly in between. For all the panic of foreigners taking “our” jobs, most are working in jobs that most Americans are either unable or unwilling to take.

Fear of foreigners is what drives the anti-immigration movement on the right, and as the Latino and foreign-born share of the population continues to grow, Republicans are going to find themselves alienating an ever larger proportion of voters.

Hollywood frames the value of life in terms of what suits the narrative. The protagonist and the main characters generally survive, but in the tradition of the Star Trek red shirted officers who are doomed before they beam down into a dangerous situation, the characters who are less well developed are usually sacrificed to keep the story emotionally rewarding.

In Black Hawk Down, a 2001 film set in America’s 1993 intervention in Somalia, an injured American pilot crawls to temporary safety while the baying mob surrounds the wreckage of the helicopter and desecrates the bodies of the dead crew inside. He fires his few remaining shots and kills a few Somalis, the deaths of these extras recorded as mere split-second incidents, the characters unknown, faceless, nameless. Their deaths barely register on the audience’s attention meter. Our hero then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a picture of his sweetheart for one last look, and the camera zooms into his tragic face as he awaits his fate, certain that he is about to die. The long and detailed treatment of his experience is in contrast to that of the gunmen whose lives he so casually ended a few seconds ago. We know nothing of their lives or their motivations for fighting in the first place. All we know is that they are bad guys and their casual deaths are probably justified.

The American media’s current coverage of the latest escalation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict also follows a particular narrative. We see Israelis running for cover in the airport while the largely ineffective Hamas rockets are intercepted. We see the first world problems and inconvenience suffered by travelers trying to get to Israel from American airports amid air traffic diversions from Tel Aviv. But we scarcely see any of the blood and flesh being spilled at the receiving end of Israeli shelling and air strikes. We do not get a sense of the experience of the Palestinian civilians who are dying in their hundreds and being injured and maimed in their thousands under the watchful eye of Israeli spectators camped on hillsides watching the destruction as a form of sick entertainment. One Israeli soldier going missing has been deemed worthy of an entire story in the New York Times, while the background of the conflict that would go a long way to explaining why the Palestinians have a grievance is absent from much of the media coverage. The term “occupied territories” is never heard on American television, nor are the multitude of UN resolutions that have been violated by Israel over the years. All we hear is the well worn soundbites about Israel’s right to self defense, and nobody questions the assumption that artillery fire and air strikes in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth are the only way to deal with extremists. Nobody seems to be discussing how civilian casualties, the biggest recruiting tools that Hamas could ever ask for, are being handed to the extremists on a plate, almost as if the Israeli government is determined to make a two-state solution impossible.

As well as as parroting claims by Israeli authorities that Hamas are using civilians as “human shields”, accusations that are disputed, reports are framed in terms of balance even where none exists. Fighting is reported “on both sides”. Both sides are “trading” rockets and missiles, when in fact one side is scarcely being touched while the other is facing the annihilation of large portions of the civilian population.

False balance has been a problem in American reporting for quite some time, so terrified are journalists of accusations of bias. If the World Cup had been reported according to the prevailing standards of American journalism, every match would have been reported as a draw including Germany’s 7-1 demolition of Brazil.

However the dehumanization of the Palestinians is perhaps the most telling aspect of this coverage. Middle class Israelis in western-looking cities are much easier to relate to than displaced Palestinians who have been penned into Gaza and forced to live in appalling conditions. Even President Obama’s statements on such matters are noteworthy in their emphasis. At a press briefing on July 18, in condemning the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, he talked at great length of the “nearly 300 innocent lives were taken — men, women, children, infants — who had nothing to do with the crisis in Ukraine. Their deaths are an outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Obama spoke of America’s long standing relationship with the Dutch people, its shared grief about the tragedy, and vowed to get to the bottom of it. Fine words, and delivered as eloquently as ever. However of the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, after the usual preamble about Israel’s right to defend itself, he warned that he was “deeply concerned about the risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life.” Note the absence of an assessment of the scale of that human tragedy and no offer of condolences to the families of the dead.

This is perfectly in keeping with American media portrayal of the situation. As long as this kind of disregard for Palestinian lives persists, it is likely that America’s support for Israel, support that ultimately maintains the lopsided imbalance of military power, will remain in place.

Support for capital punishment is strong in America, but there are signs that it is waning. According to Pew Research, support peaked at 78 percent in the mid 1990s and has been declining since, now at 55 percent. Over the same period, opposition has climbed from 18 percent to 37 percent. Reasons for this are varied but America’s changing demographic make-up is undoubtedly a factor. White Protestants are the most supportive group, while Hispanic Catholics and black Protestants are most opposed. This is unsurprising since the likelihood of receiving a death sentence is largely determined by the respective races of the victim and the accused in each case. It is a known fact that a black person convicted of killing a while person is more likely to be sentenced to death than a white person convicted of killing anyone. As minorities grow to engulf a larger share of the population, it is reasonable to assume that abolitionist sentiments will become stronger.

Support will doubtless be undermined further by grisly tales of botched executions, that of Mr Wood being the third such fiasco this year. European drug makers have refused to sell their products to the United States for use in executions, resulting in a shortage of drugs needed to administer lethal injections. States now have to choose between either resurrecting even more grisly killing methods, or experimenting with untried chemical concoctions that can lead to the kind of death that could easily be deemed a violation of the US constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Further pressure is being applied because of the length of the appeals process. Cormac Carney, a federal judge, overturned 748 capital sentences and struck down capital punishment in California on July 16 for being too slow and inconsistent. That inmates should spend indefinite time on death row unaware of how along they have to live is a fate that “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose.” Whether the ruling survives appeal remains to be seen, but it is a significant shift.

Abolitionists could also do well to highlight the sheer financial cost of the practice. Because of the heightened security and the laborious appeals process, execution is by far more expensive than imprisonment for life without parole.

However the most potent argument that does not seem to be used is the danger of executing an innocent person. Mike Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for the 1988 presidential election and a former Massachusetts governor, took a hit in his poll numbers when he answered a question about whether he would support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered, maintaining that he would still oppose it. A better answer would have been to turn the question around and ask how would the questioner feel if a family member were wrongfully executed for a crime they did not commit.

In 1956 a man was shot dead in his home in Georgia in front of his wife who survived the ordeal. When James Foster, an ex-convict, was arrested for a minor unrelated offense a few weeks later, hauled to her house by police, and presented to her in the living room where the horror occurred, she identified him as the killer. Her testimony was seen by the court as more convincing then the numerous alibis that Foster had and he was promptly sentenced to death. Only after Foster’s tenacious lawyer got a lucky break and tracked down the real killer and convinced him to confess was Foster spared a gruesome appointment with the electric chair. There are plenty more cases like that in American history.

Death penalty advocates would argue that modern forensic scientific techniques such as DNA fingerprinting mean that wrongful convictions are less likely. However this is disingenuous. DNA can appear at a crime scene for a multitude of reasons, and the accuracy of the process has no bearing on the circumstances of the case. There is no guarantee that all evidence will only point in the direction of the truth. American faith in technology as the answer to all problems is misplaced. Forensic science will always be prone to human error no matter how sophisticated it becomes, and the television crime show experience of the detective always getting the culprit before the hour is up is far removed from reality.

The trend in the developed world has long been towards abolition of this outdated and ineffective punishment. America, the only developed western country that still kills its own people, may be behind the rest of the world in progress towards a more evolved system of justice, but it is on its way.

When he took office he set about reforms aimed at reducing crime, making it easier for former offenders to find work for the city, increasing the amount of affordable housing under development, and all the while reducing the city’s budget deficit. In fact he was particularly aggressive about balancing the books, instituting one-day-a-month furloughs for non-uniformed city workers in 2010, as well as taking a cut in his own salary.

He tackled the issue of removing illegal guns from the streets, an unusual move for a politician in a country in which there is a powerfully lobby vehemently opposed to any form of gun crime reduction by way of gun regulation.

However it is the personal stories that make great campaign fodder. Showing how he is famously responsive to his Twitter feed, he once showed up at an elderly man’s house to shovel his driveway in response to a tweet that was sent to him by the man’s daughter who was worried that her father was going to attempt it himself.  Other good deeds include inviting Newark residents left without power by Hurricane Sandy to sleep in his home, helping a shy constituent to propose to his girlfriend, rescuing a dog from freezing temperatures, rescuing another dog that had been abandoned in a cage, and saving a woman from a house fire, suffering from smoke inhalation and second degree burns in the process.

A good political resumé may be important in US presidential elections, but experience has shown that voters are much more easily swayed by personal stories.  The anecdote about Mitt Romney putting the family dog in a cage and tying it to the roof of the car on a long journey is in sharp contrast to Mr Booker’s animal-friendly pedigree. The episode about literally running into a burning house to save a woman is so Hollywood-like that it will doubtless be subject to swift-boating from his future opponents who will question the story’s veracity and fill the right wing media machine with all manner of doubt-sowing questions about it.

Now in the senate, Mr Booker is taking bipartisan action to work with Rand Paul, a Republican Senator from Kentucky, on a bill to address problems in the criminal justice system.  The REDEEM Act proposes to stop trying children as adults, restrict the use of solitary confinement on children, stop denying access to government benefits for certain low-level adult drug offenders, and seal criminal records of nonviolent offenders to make it easier for them to obtain gainful employment after having served their time.

This resonates with a growing movement in America that sees mass incarceration as a costly and ineffective means of tackling crime, and its aims to reduce public spending on criminal justice should strike a chord with fiscal conservatives.  Whether or not the bill survives the lunatic asylum of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is an entirely different matter, but Booker’s name on the bill alongside Rand Paul will count in his favor even if it fails.

Promising political careers can often be torpedoed by moments of indiscretion in a candidate’s personal life.  Will Mr Booker be found to have had an extra-marital affair and the news released sensationally the night before election day?  Not likely since he is single.

Voting records in the senate have a tendency to get messy as time wears on.  With all the horse-trading and with decisions that seemed sensible at the time, votes can come back to haunt a presidential candidate in later years, as John McCain found out in the 2008 campaign when Barrack Obama made capital out of McCain’s tendency to vote with George W Bush.  Indeed Obama had not been in the senate for long enough to acquire a controversial voting record, often voting “present” rather than picking sides on issues that might become a liability later.  This is more than can be said for Hillary “yes on the war in Iraq” Clinton.

Mr Booker has denied that he is interested in running for the presidency.  Is he pretending?  Time will tell.  Two years before he moved in, the current occupant of the White House was equally adamant that he was not running for the top job.