Marshall “Eddie” Conway joined the ancestors on February 13, 2023, surrounded by family and loved ones. After falling ill nearly a year ago, while still dealing with the immeasurable toll nearly 44 years of incarceration as a political prisoner took on his body, Eddie had been hospitalized and fighting valiantly to recover. That is who he is, who he was, and who he always will be: a fighter. After a lifetime of fighting, though, the time has come at last for dear Eddie to rest—and for all of us to carry on his fight. 

Eddie was born on April 23, 1946, in a deeply segregated Baltimore—a city shaped by blockbusting, white flight, and organized disinvestment from Black communities. At 18, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, an experience that would prove to be politically formative for Eddie, throwing into sharp relief the contradictions of a country founded on slavery, structural racism, and genocidal violence that nevertheless professed to defend “democracy” with bombs, guns, and endless war. 

Returning home to Baltimore, Eddie confronted the pervasive evils of racism head-on. He was working in the medical sector and at Bethlehem Steel when, in 1968, the city erupted like so many others following the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.—an explosion of rage and pain and need for action that brought Eddie into the orbit of the nascent Black Panther Party, in which he became a core member of the newly-established Baltimore chapter.

The Baltimore BPP chapter, with Eddie’s support and leadership, built strong community ties through efforts like a free breakfast program, a system of robust internal political education, and an increasingly widespread local distribution network for the national BPP newspaper—despite near constant police harassment, and even high-level infiltration of the branch. This was the era of COINTELPRO, in which local police forces were enlisted by the national security state to crush the successful systemic challenge the Panthers and other associated revolutionary groups were posing to America’s racist, exploitative status quo. It was at the height of this era that Eddie was framed for the 1970 killing of a Baltimore police officer, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in 1971, after a heavily politicized trial in which Eddie was denied proper legal representation.  

Even in the darkest of times, in the most hopeless of places, Eddie’s commitment to organizing for liberation was unwavering. Within his first weeks inside the Maryland penitentiary, he had already emerged as a leader of the incarcerated chapter of the BPP. Despite constant, dehumanizing, and often violent pushback from prison authorities, he would go on to play a lead role in creating organizations like the United Prisoners Labor Union and the Maryland Penitentiary Intercommunal Survival Collective, organizing with fellow incarcerated people to build collective power for self-determination and self-defense. While incarcerated, Eddie worked relentlessly to protect and expand prisoners’ rights to communication and education; for instance, he helped organize the “To Say Their Own Word” seminar program, developed as a way to cross-pollinate radical thought inside and outside the prison. He was also instrumental in the founding of Friend of a Friend, a mentorship program designed to help young incarcerated men prepare for reintegration into their communities upon release.

Year after year, decade after decade, Eddie carried on not only with the tremendous bravery needed to contest America’s brutal system of mass incarceration while he was himself confined within it but also with an enduring and perhaps surprising commitment to modesty. 

As he wrote in his autobiography, published in 2011: 

Organizing is my life’s work, and even though I initially balked at becoming a prison organizer, that is where most of my work has been done. Friends and family tell me that I have influenced hundreds of young people, but I don’t know. I simply see the error of this society’s ways up close and feel compelled to do something about it; I have tried my hardest to avoid getting caught up in the cult of the personality that often develops around political prisoners. I have walked the prison yard and seen admiration in the eyes of others, but had to remind myself, as I straightened my posture, that it is about something bigger than me. Prisons are the place where society dumps those who have become obsolete, and at present there are perhaps no other people who have become more dispensable in this country than African-descended people. The minute that we began to stand up and hold this country accountable for the many wrongs done to us, the prisons began to swell with black women and men. It is as if the entire justice system is a beast that consumes black bodies, and prisons are the belly.

Eddie’s loved ones and supporters never gave up on him, keeping a decades-long solidarity movement going and agitating persistently for his release, but it was only in 2014—after a 2012 decision by the Maryland Court of Appeals that invalidated many historical verdicts due to faulty jury instructions—that Eddie was finally able to secure his freedom.

Despite the unimaginable toll that 44 years of incarceration had taken on him, Eddie’s organizing did not stop when he walked out of prison. He became a beloved colleague at The Real News Network, where he continued his passion for education and media-making in the service of the fight against mass incarceration as Executive Producer and the host of Rattling the Bars, his weekly video program. He also played a key role in the formation of Tubman House, which, in the wake of the Baltimore Uprising, seized vacant property and land for community needs in Sandtown-Winchester—the neighborhood where Baltimore police killed Freddie Gray.

Eddie never left the struggle he had been waging for so long, even as his health declined. We are endlessly grateful to him for that. And we are grateful that this incredible man, who endured so much, was also able to find years of joy, love, and solace in his marriage to Dominque Conway, a true comrade and freedom fighter who supported him inside and outside of the prison walls. 

He will be missed—by everyone here at The Real News, by the city that loves him, and by all those around the world who were touched by his light. We will miss his voice, his revolutionary clarity, and his unbreakable commitment to fighting on the side of the oppressed. We will carry on that fight because that’s what Eddie would do. We are heartbroken that he is gone, but we are grateful that we were lucky enough to know him, and we are sending all our love and solidarity to his family. 

In memory of Eddie Conway, 

The Real News Network

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The big stories this year aren’t isolated events, earthquakes that shake the world and subside. They are nexuses of events, which should be teased apart by the press—although much of the time the corporate media seems to go out of its way to avoid context and connection, for fear of seeming biased. Instead it reports on each story as an isolated occurrence.

Real News covers the faultlines, not just the earthquakes. These are five of the biggest stories we’ve covered this year.

The Climate Crisis: The biggest story of the year from here on out is likely to be the climate crisis, which has reached a point of existential danger. But most people don’t see it. We elected a climate denier last year because news outlets cover each event—a flood, a hurricane, a fire—as something isolated and discrete, random chance.

People have done those calculations and it’s not random. “A calculation of the likelihood of three consecutive record-breaking years like we’ve seen now with 2014, 2015, and 2016, in the absence of human-caused climate change, if it were just the random dice of weather and natural climate variability? That sort of event, three consecutive record-breakers should be a one in a million event,” Michael Mann, Director of The Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University, told the Real News. “And what the warming of the planet has done is taken an event like that, that should be a one in a million event and turned it into a, you know, one in 10 event—the sort of event that we expect to happen over the course of a decade or so.”

Mann said that climate change was one of the greatest national security threats we face as a nation—and yet the current administration has pulled us out of the Paris Agreement, all but ensuring that things will get worse.

“The effects of climate change are no longer subtle. You don’t have to tease them out with clever statistical tools,” Mann said. “We can see the impacts of climate change now, playing out on the 24-hour news cycle with our very own eyes.” (Baynard Woods)

Men Are Being Held Accountable for their Actions: Mainstream media had to give this story a lot of attention—because their own anchors and reporters were getting fired. And even though it shows how grim reality is, half of us already knew that—that we are reckoning with it is almost the only good news of the year.

It started on Oct. 5, when the New York Times outed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator. A deafening chorus of #MeToos erupted online, and the hashtag went viral. Millions of women came forward with their own stories of sexual harassment and assault. And unlike most hashtags, this one didn’t get chewed up and spit out by the carnivorous news cycle; it became a global rallying cry. The #MeToo hashtag turned into a #MeToo moment, and then a #MeToo movement.

The idea that virtually all women have dealt with some form of harassment or assault shouldn’t surprise people, although it did (mostly men). But the hashtag’s visibility made the problem impossible to ignore, even by the corporate media, and the online solidarity empowered women to finally begin calling out the men who hurt them.

The craziest part? Men were actually being held accountable. High-profile, powerful men. From Weinstein to Kevin Spacey to Dustin Hoffman to Louis C.K. to Sen. Al Franken—the list really does go on—dozens of influential men in entertainment, media, and politics were suddenly paying a price for their actions.

Unfortunately, Donald “Grab ’em by the Pussy” Trump, who’s been accused of harassing or assaulting more than a dozen women (that we know of), has managed to skirt all accountability, which shows that the movement still has its limits. But its impact is undeniable.

Time magazine awarded Person of the Year to “the Silence Breakers.” Of course, in a tweet, Trump claimed the magazine told him he would “probably” be given the honor, but he “took a pass” because he didn’t want it. A Time spokesperson quickly clarified that Trump was lying. Silence breakers: 1; Groper-in-chief: 0. Let’s see if women can start racking up some more points against the Lecher of the Free World in 2018. (Jess Kamen)

The Failure of the Corporate Democrats: Trump’s first year in office is obviously the giant story of 2017. But the same outlets that failed to provide context during the election, which they covered as a horse race, are still playing the same game—the tax cuts for the rich are portrayed as a “victory for Trump” rather than something that will harm millions of people. They may have sent a few reporters out to Appalachia to talk to some angry white Trump voters and doubled their coverage of Russia, but most major outlets are still trying to imagine that mainstream American politics are OK and that Trump is somehow an aberration, rather than a result of the system.

The Democratic party is now co-opting #Resistance to mean retweeting neocons who are against Trump.

“This was a non-establishment year and the Democrats’ biggest failure, both on the state party level and the national level, is that we refused to hear the cries of the people, the coalition of the forgotten, basically saying, ‘We’re not gonna take this anymore. We mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore. And we’re gonna vote either by not voting, or we’re gonna vote for Mr. Trump,’” Nina Turner told Paul Jay days before the inauguration.

And over the course of the year, the party apparatus has continued to attempt to try to smash its insurgent progressive wing. (Baynard Woods)

The Criminalization of Dissent: On the day of Trump’s inauguration, Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department cordoned off and arrested more than 200 people, 193 of whom will now stand trial. They are all being charged under the federal Riot Act based on the fact that they were wearing black clothes. A few windows were broken as a “black bloc” moved through the city—but to charge hundreds of people with any crime committed at a protest they attend can only be intended to keep people from attending protests.

The case involves thousands of GBs of evidence—data taken from defendants’ cell phones, surveillance cameras, livestream footage, bodycams, and even video taken by sleazeball video editor James O’Keefe.

Two of the people being prosecuted in this case are journalists, but at the same time that corporate media complains every time Jim Acosta doesn’t get called on at a White House press briefing, they largely ignore the plight of Aaron Cantú and Alexei Wood. To be clear, everyone, and not just journalists, should be protected by the First Amendment, but it is especially egregious when the TV stars posing as reporters can’t even mention that members of their own profession face decades in prison.

But this case is only part of the larger move to criminalize protest at state houses and police departments around the nation. (Baynard Woods)

The Mainstreaming of Hate: When President Trump failed to condemn the terrorist Nazis who killed Heather Heyer and injured numerous others in Charlottesville, many people in the ruling class were shocked, shocked! And it was shocking—but it was also obvious.

In the months between Charlottesville and the election, we saw numerous profiles pointing out how dapper uber-alt-right idiot Richard Spencer is. The alt-lite internet personalities who aren’t so openly racist scrambled to distance themselves from the overtly fascist Spencer and his ilk—while still acting like everyday racists. Even Steve Bannon sought a little distance from the confederate cosplayers at Charlottesville. But when Buzzfeed printed the emails of former Breitbart provocateur and everyone saw how deeply enmeshed sites like Breitbart were with full-on Nazis, they started to recoil. Robert Mercer, the billionaire partly behind Trump’s ascent, sold his stake in Breitbart to his daughters.

The way that Breitbart and alt-lite celebrities make their extreme compatriots more mainstream is called bridging, and it allowed Breitbart to legitimate ideas of farther-right sites like the Daily Stormer without being tarred by them—which is a perfect description of the role the president has played for the far right. This plays out in everything from judicial appointments to campaign endorsements. And it’s inspiring a new generation of far-right racists around the world. If the right sees itself as a global force, we need to look at it that way as well. (Baynard Woods)

The Transfer of Wealth: The last decades have seen an unprecedented transfer of wealth from everyone else to the rich. A few years ago, Occupy Wall Street briefly focused the attention of corporate media on this transfer with relentless activism against it, but then, because they are so entrenched in the theft itself, the mainstream press abandoned the story (Matt Lauer made $20 million?). The only good thing about Trump and the new tax plan is that it may force people to focus on this great siphoning of money from all of us to the rich. From net neutrality to tax cuts, Trump and the current crop of Republicans are all about making the rich richer. Even war, which the Trump regime seems desperate to get into, especially with Iran, is ultimately about the money. (Baynard Woods)

Visit therealnews.com for independent local, national, and international journalism that examines the underlying causes of chronic problems and searches for effective solutions.

The post Year In Review: The Realest News Of 2017 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Local and national briefs from last week via The Real News Network.

Federal charges say sergeant planted drugs on a suspect for Det. Suiter to discover; Investigation into Suiter’s death handed over to F.B.I.

New federal charges were filed on Nov. 30 against Wayne Jenkins, a sergeant in the Baltimore Police Department’s corrupt Gun Trace Task Force. The charges are related to a 2010 case about which slain detective Sean Suiter was scheduled to testify a day after his death in Baltimore’s Harlem Park neighborhood on Nov. 15.

In the 2010 statement of charges, Jenkins wrote that he saw a man named Brent Matthews approaching a car with “an unknown amount of currency.” Jenkins and Suiter blocked the car in. Jenkins and Det. Ryan Guinn approached the car. According to Jenkins, the man in the car, Umar Burley, drove away and the officers followed him. Burley struck another car, killing one of its occupants. The statement says Det. Suiter “recovered a total of 32 grams of suspected heroin laying on the passenger side of the floorboard.”

“There were no drugs in the car driven by U.B. prior to the crash,” the federal indictment reads. After the crash, Jenkins told Officer #2, whom we have identified as Det. Guinn, to “call a Sergeant who was not at the scene because he had the ‘stuff’ or ‘shit’ in his car.” The sergeant arrived on the scene and Guinn spoke to him before turning “his attention to the elderly driver who remained trapped inside his car on the front porch of the row house.”

The sergeant—who allegedly had an ounce of heroin in his car—has not been identified.

After medics arrived on the scene, Jenkins told Guinn that “the ‘stuff’ or ‘shit’ was in the car,” and said he was going to send Officer #1, Suiter, to the car to find it because he was “clueless.”

“What Jenkins did was set-up officer number one to find the drugs and recover the drugs that Jenkins himself had planted,” Commissioner Kevin Davis said at a press conference where he identified Officer # 1 as Suiter. “Det. Suiter was used, he was Officer Suiter at the time. He was used and put in a position where he unwittingly recovered drugs that had been planted by another police officer. And that’s a damn shame. It really, really is.”

“The extent of criminal activity conducted by BPD officers on duty over many years is shocking,” said Debbie Katz Levi, head of the Baltimore City Public Defender Special Litigation Section in a statement. The Office of the Public Defender has identified more than 2,000 people with either pending cases or convictions related to indicted members of the Gun Trace Task Force. Levi says that Jenkins is personally involved in hundreds of cases.

Both Burley and Matthews pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute heroin “despite the fact that they knew they were innocent,” according to federal documents. “They did so because heroin had been planted in the vehicle in which Burley was the driver and Matthews was a passenger by a Baltimore Police Officer. Both men concluded that in a trial involving the Officer’s word against theirs they would lose.”

At a press conference the next day, Dec. 1, Commissioner Davis announced that the BPD has requested the FBI take over the investigation of the death of slain Detective Suiter.

“I am growing increasingly uncomfortable that my homicide detectives do not know all of the facts known to the FBI and the USAO that could, if revealed to us, assist in furthering this murder investigation,” Davis said, reading his letter to FBI director Christopher Wray.

A growing number of Baltimore leaders, including Congressmen Elijah Cummings, had called on the BPD to hand over the investigation to federal authorities. Davis said he waited until after Suiter’s funeral to make the call. Davis also said he has no reason to believe Suiter’s death was related to his pending testimony on Federal Grand Jury regarding the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force who have been indicted on federal racketeering charges. (Baynard Woods; additional reporting by Brandon Soderberg)

Trump’s HHS Nominee ‘Should be Under Criminal Investigation’

The U.S. Senate held its first confirmation hearing for Alex Azar to replace Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services last week. Price resigned last September after it was discovered that he spent over $400,000 on private chartered flights during his brief tenure. Alex Azar is a long-term conservative who most recently was president of the U.S. affiliate of Eli Lilly and Company. Before that he served in the George W. Bush administration and as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Many observers in the U.S. healthcare sector argue that Azar would be less ideological than Price, who had a background in the Tea Party movement.

Alex Lawson, the executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told The Real News that Azar should be under investigation for price-fixing that has allowed the cost of insulin to skyrocket. “Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Elijah Cummings wrote to the federal government last year and requested an investigation into this. Five states are investigating this. There’s a civil class action against this illegal price fixing, and they were found guilty of this in Mexico and fined for doing this,” he said. “This is what Alex Azar was running. He was running a cartel that was robbing people by raising the prices up and up and up. (Gregory Wilpert)

Protests Erupt as Honduras Presidential Election Results Reversed

Police and protesters clashed in Honduras last Thursday after tens of thousands took to the streets to contest the presidential election results. Protesters and opposition leaders accused the incumbent president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, of committing voter fraud. When the first results were announced last Monday, Salvador Nasralla, the opposition candidate who is supported by a left-of-center coalition, led the count by five percentage points. Since then, though, the Electoral Council suspiciously interrupted the vote count twice, and when it restarted, President Hernandez had caught up with Nasralla and was leading with just under one percent of the vote. (Gregory Wilpert)

If Tillerson’s Out, is Iran War In?

The White House is reportedly planning a major cabinet shakeup that has strong implications for the world. According to reports, the White House is seeking to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo. To replace Pompeo at the CIA, the White House is reportedly planning to install Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Both Pompeo and Cotton have many things in common, including an avowed disdain for Iran and the Iran Nuclear Deal.

“I think this would be quite disastrous,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, told The Real News. “One of the things we should be looking out for, again, is that they will start trying to make connections that simply are not there. The Bush administration was trying to say that Saddam Hussein was working with Al-Qaeda and was behind 9/11. It was completely false. I would suspect that we will see similar type of arguments.” (Aaron Maté)

“Invisible No More:” Andrea Ritchie on Police and Racial Profiling

Andrea Ritchie, who describes herself a police misconduct attorney and organizer, was in Baltimore last month at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, where she talked about her book “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women.”

“Invisible No More is a book about racial profiling, police violence, and criminalization,” Ritchie told The Real News. “The title is both a statement of fact and an aspiration. While we’re at the point of unprecedented visibility of Black women as targets of state violence, we nevertheless have a long way to go.”

Ritchie noted that Black women make up the fastest-growing group of inmates in the U.S., noting that neoliberal policies implemented by purportedly liberal cities had only made the situation worse. “I think that the notion that broken windows policing, for instance, makes us safer is a complete fallacy and it is one that is actually built on protecting property and encouraging and moving gentrification,” she said. “It’s something that’s being advanced by folks who otherwise are perceived as or claim to be progressives but in fact are advancing a model of policing that’s about pushing low-income Black people, people who are deemed to signify disorder, out of public spaces. That’s done in racially gendered ways. For instance, anywhere where women of color are hanging out and perceived to be engaged in prostitution becomes a target and it becomes a place where women are arrested without evidence, for loitering for the purposes of prostitution.” (Taya Graham)

GOP Tax Bill is Even Worse Than We Think

The Senate tax bill that passed in a dramatic vote in the middle of the night on Dec. 2 has been called the largest ever transfer of wealth to the very top in U.S. history, and it’s also been called the largest ever U.S. tax increase. That’s because while corporations and millionaires will benefit the most, some 24% of the country would see their taxes actually go up. All told, the measure would add $1 trillion to the federal deficit.

“It’s the largest tax bill in 30 years, and yet you can smell a rat here because of the way the Republicans are going about this,” James Henry, a senior advisor at the Tax Justice Network, a group that advocates for progressive tax policy . “This is indeed one of the largest wealth transfers to the top 5% of the country.” (Aaron Maté)

The post The Real News: Davis requests Det. Suiter investigation to be handed over to F.B.I., protests in Honduras, Andrea Ritchie on police and racial profiling, more appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

What we can learn from the 10th grade mock trial of Caesar Goodson

Last week, an all-police panel cleared officer Caesar Goodson on all 21 administrative charges he was facing for the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. Last year, a group of students at Reginald F. Lewis High School came to a very different conclusion.

The 10th grade law class spent the semester preparing for a mock trial for Goodson, who drove the van that transported Gray. The students, who were mostly black, said they were touched deeply by Freddie Gray’s death.

“We’re scared because what happened to him could have happened to any one of us,” Antonio Satchell said.

Living in the same world and facing many of the same problems as Freddie Gray, the students found Goodson guilty of involuntary manslaughter for his role in Freddie Gray’s death. The hearings Goodson faced focused instead on technicalities of what an officer should be expected to do, rather than what the law requires. Although no other public body has found Goodson—or anyone else—guilty of any crimes in Gray’s death, many students say that the months they spent studying the case in preparation for the mock trial inspired them to work on correcting the injustice and institutional racism they face everyday. Satchell said that after college he would like to work at an organization like the Innocence Project, which works toward exonerating the wrongfully convicted.

Poverty, joblessness, and a lack of hope are still endemic in these students’ communities. And the police don’t make it easier. With fresh reports on youth violence across the city, there have been calls to increase the number of police and set up undercover squads of officers who look young.

There is media hysteria. “Baltimore leaders, community frustrated by juvenile crime they say is ‘out of control,’” a Sun headline blared.

“This kind of headline and reporting drives false narrative. Buried in story is the truth ‘Overall juvenile arrests in the city are down 11 percent,’” Public Defender Jenny Egan tweeted.

There is no denying violence remains a problem for young people. But they are able to see its causes. It’s “caused by unnecessary laws and poverty,” Satchell said. “Because if you have nothing else to do you are going to resort to selling drugs.”

Students like Sa’mon Fedd don’t need the studies that have found that Baltimore is among the worst places to grow up poor and black to explain their realities, they already knew all that.

“We’re trapped, we’re afraid, and we’re hurting,” she said. (Jaisal Noor)

Housing activists argue for new community land trust plan

On Wednesday, Nov. 8, a coalition of housing activists marched into the offices of the city’s finance department, where they presented petitions demanding that the city adopt a plan called 20/20 Vision for Baltimore, a proposal to establish two separate $20 million funds to bolster affordable housing and fight blight through community land trusts.

Financed by city-backed bonds, the two pools of money would be administered in part by community groups, not just the mayor or city council. Activist Destiny Watford said the distinction was critical to address the dearth of affordable housing and the further encroachment of vacant homes in neighborhoods that have received little attention from City Hall.

“This tool will allow us to keep wealth in our neighborhood,” Watford said. “It would allow us to build the things that we need in our neighborhoods because no one else in Baltimore knows what we need more than the people that live there.”

Led by Workers United, a textile and gaming union under the umbrella group United Not Blighted, the housing activists made their case during a press conference just before entering City Hall. They argued that the existing process of funneling housing funds through the city council and the mayor has not worked.

“We need for our city leaders to be more than leaders at the podium,” said Terell Askew. “We need for them to join us and this great cause of building the city into a better place to live and building us all into better people to live in it.”

This argument seemed prescient just 24 hours later when the City Council held a briefing on the myriad tax breaks the city has granted developers to stimulate growth. During the hearing finance officials presented statistics that revealed just how costly this policy has been.

Baltimore Development Corporation President William Cole told the council that in 2017 the city lost $12 million in tax revenue annually as the result of payment in lieu in taxes (PILOTs), tax incentives that allow developers to forgo taxes for a prescribed length of time. During the same period the city collected just $2 million from projects where the PILOT had either ended or was winding down.

Deputy Budget Director Steve Kraus also told the council the that the city’s tax increment finance deals (TIFs), which hand over future property tax revenues to developers to invest in infrastructure, has almost maxed out the city’s credit.

“With Port Covington, we will reach $1 billion,” Kraus said of the amount the TIFs have contributed to the city’s debt. That number has nearly quadrupled as a result of a roughly $600 million TIF to build out Port Covington, a development backed by Under Armor billionaire Kevin Plank.

“We don’t have much room left,” Kraus said.

The numbers didn’t seem to faze the council: A number of members heaped praise on the presenters even as they failed to give an in-depth accounting of just how much the tax breaks are costing the city in aggregate, or what terms the city has committed to going forward.

The moment that best encapsulated the concerns of the 20/20 supporters was a question from Councilman Kristerfer Burnett, who asked Kraus if there was a database or web site where residents could track the progress of the growing array of tax subsidies.

“We don’t have the resources for that,” Kraus replied. (Taya Graham & Stephen Janis)

The post The Real News: Kids counter cops on Officer Goodson trial, housing activists challenge City Hall appeared first on Baltimore Beat.