Showing posts with label ferguson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ferguson. Show all posts

Monday, September 1, 2014

The Militarization of the Police Has Produced a Murder Machine

Paul Craig Roberts

Update: Here is a report on the autopsy of Michael Brown

The facts directly contradict the false information police apologists are sending around the Internet. Note that the Missouri governor blamed the violence on the black community, not on the police who enraged the black community by gratuitously murdering a black teenager. One reader suggested that the macho goon thug cops with their military gear should be sent to Iraq where ISIS would cut them to ribbons.

I wasn’t surprised at some of the crude comments and hatred expressed toward blacks that came from a few white male anti-immigration Republicans in response to my article Cops Gone Wild. A few were so choked with rage over a “fucking pinko-liberal-commie” who would take the side of a “black bully thief” over the police that they never read beyond the introductory comment about Ferguson. Criticizing police can ignite the same kind of hysterical hatred as criticizing the Israeli governments murders of Palestinians.

As readers know, I often emphasize that a significant percentage of the population is incapable of thought and rational response. They want to hear what they want to hear and go into a rage when they don’t. They read not to learn but to have their ignorant biases substantiated.

Perhaps this is the way Americans have always been. However, it seems to me that it is much worse today than I remember from earlier decades. However mindless Americans might have been in the past, they seem much more so today.

Indeed, the media seems to speak with one voice–the government’s. Even academic freedom has been terminated in universities. There are so many examples.

One of the most notorious examples is the case of Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were holocaust survivors. Finkelstein, who is Jewish, is a distinguished scholar who became a high profile critic of Israel’s misguided and immoral policies toward the Palestinians. The Zionist Lobby was able to reach into DePaul University, a Catholic university, and cause the cowardly president to overrule the decision of the Political Science Department and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee, supported by the student body, to grant Finkelstein tenure.

Some suspect that the Zionist Lobby bought off the university president with promises of financial support for the university. Whether bribes were combined with threats, the university president, in my opinion, is a person devoid of integrity, and he drove a dagger through the heart of academic freedom and allowed Zionists to determine who receives tenure at DePaul University. Why parents would send their sons and daughters to such a university is beyond me.

Zionist attacks on American academic freedom are routine. Professor William Robinson of the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells the story of his experience with the Zionist Lobby on truth-out.org.

The Zionist Lobby’s unethical and immoral tactics create massive hostility toward Jews in general. From time to time I receive emails upbraiding me for refusing to blame everything wrong in the world on Jews. The extremism of Zionists prevents many critics of Jews from recognizing the fact that the strongest, most moral voices against Zionist extremism come from Jews themselves including some Israeli citizens and the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

Jewish critics of Israel’s behavior cannot be called “anti-semites.” The Zionist Lobby invented a new term for Jews afflicted by a moral conscience–”self-hating Jew.”

The Zionist Lobby with its ridiculous “enforcement organizations,” such as the ADL, by misusing the “anti-semite” accusation have made “anti-semite” and “self-hating Jew” badges of moral honor. Once upon a time “anti-semite” referred to a person who disliked Jews in general and perhaps wished harm to be inflicted on every Jew. Today “anti-semite” means a person who objects to illegal and immoral policies of the Zionist state, the government of which does not speak for all Jews or even for all Israelis.

Zionist focus on silencing their critics because Zionist policies cannot stand examination.

We see a similar response on the part of many Americans who rush blindly to the defense of the police whenever psychopaths with badges murder a black, a hispanic or a homeless person.

The gratuitous violence employed by police is no more justified than the gratuitous violence employed by the Israeli military toward Palestinians. “Law and order conservatives” confuse police accountability with the coddling of criminals and terrorists. They are unable to comprehend that unaccountable police are a greater threat to them than are criminals without badges.

This brief video, sent by a reader, shows how the militarization of US police has produced a murder machine.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Ferguson: No Justice in the American Police State

Paul Craig Roberts

There are reports that American police kill 500 or more Americans every year. Few of these murdered Americans posed a threat to police. Police murder Americans for totally implausible reasons. For example, a few days before Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, John Crawford picked up a toy gun from a WalMart shelf in the toy department and was shot and killed on the spot by police goons.

It appears that the murder of Michael Brown did not satisfy the blood lust of the goon thug cop murderers. Less than four miles from Ferguson, goon thugs murdered another black man on August 19. The police claims of “threat” are disproved by the video of the murder.

You can see the entire scene much better here. This is a clear case of outright murder of a man by our Nazi Gestapo police. The police then handcuff their dead victim.

Clearly, the American police are an enormous danger to the public. It will be interesting to see what excuses the police shills will come up with to justify this murder. It is not American civilians with carry permits who murder 500 people a year. It is the goon thug police. Gun control should be applied to the police who lack sufficient intelligence and judgment to go around armed.

Five hundred is more than one killing by police per day. Yet the reports of the shootings seldom get beyond the local news. Why then has the Ferguson, Missouri, police killing of Michael Brown gone international?

Probably the answer is the large multi-day protests of the black community in Ferguson that led to the state police being sent to Ferguson and now the National Guard. Also, domestic police in full military combat gear with armored personnel carriers and tanks pointing numerous rifles in the faces of unarmed civilians and arresting and threatening journalists make good video copy. The “land of the free” looks like a Gestapo Nazi state. To much of the world, which has grown to hate American bullying, the bullying of Americans by their own police is poetic justice.

For those who have long protested racial profiling and police brutality toward racial minorities, the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson is just another in a history of racists murders.

Rob Urie is correct that blacks receive disproportionate punishment from the white criminal justice (sic) system. See, for example.

Myself, former US Representative Dennis Kucinich, and others see Michael Brown’s murder as reflective of the militarization of the police and police training that creates a hostile police attitude toward the public. The police are taught to view the public as threats against whom the use of violence is the safest course for the police officers.

This doesn’t mean that racism is not also involved. Polls show that a majority of white Americans are content with the police justification for the killing. Police apologists are flooding the Internet with arguments against those of the opposite persuasion. Only those who regard the police excuse as unconvincing are accused of jumping to conclusions before the jury’s verdict is in. Those who jump to conclusions favorable to the police are regarded as proper Americans.

What I address in this article is non-evidential considerations that determine a jury’s verdict and the incompetence of Ferguson’s government that caused the riots and looting.

Unless the US Department of Justice makes Michael Brown’s killing a federal case, the black community in Ferguson is powerless to prevent a cover-up.

What usually happens in these cases is that the police concoct a story protective of the police officer(s) and the prosecutor does not bring an indictment. As Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, are partially black (in skin color alone), the black majority community in Ferguson, Missouri, might have hopes from Holder’s visit. However, nothing could be more clear than the fact that Obama and Holder, along with the rest of “black leadership,” have been co-opted by the white power structure. How else would Obama and Holder be in office? Do you think that the white power structure puts in office people who want justice for minorities or for anyone other than the mega-rich?

If the cop who killed Brown is indicted and he is tried in Ferguson, the jury will contain whites who live in Ferguson. Unless there is a huge change in white sentiment about the killing, no white juror can vote to convict the white cop and continue to live in Ferguson. The hostility of the white community toward white jurors who took the side of a “black hoodlum who stole cigars” against the white police officer would make life for the jurors impossible in Ferguson.

The trouble with purely racial explanations of police using excessive force is that cops don’t limit their excesses to racial minorities. White people suffer them also. Remember the recent case of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy protester who was brutalized by a white goon thug with a record of using excessive force. McMillan is a young white woman. Her breasts were seized from behind, and when she swung around her elbow reflexively and instinctively came up and hit the goon thug. She was arrested for assaulting a police officer and sentenced by a jury to a term in jail. The prosecutor and judge made certain that no evidence could be presented in her defense. Medical evidence of the bruises on her breast and the police officer’s record of police brutality were not allowed as evidence in her show trial, the purpose of which was to intimidate Occupy protesters.

In America white jurors are usually sheep who do whatever the prosecutor wants. As Cecily McMillan, a white woman, could not get justice, it is even less likely that the black family of Michael Brown will. Those who are awaiting a jury’s verdict to decide Michael Brown’s case are awaiting a cover-up and the complicity of the US criminal justice (sic) system in murder.

If there is a federal indictment of the police officer, and the trial is held in a distant jurisdiction, there is a better chance that a jury would consider the facts. But even these precautions would not eliminate the racist element in white jurors’ decisions.

The situation in Ferguson was so badly handled it almost seems like the police state, in responding to the shooting, intended to provoke violence so that the American public could become accustomed to military force being applied to unarmed civilian protests.

Ferguson brings to mind the Boston Marathon Bombing. Two brothers of foreign extraction allegedly set off a “pressure cooker bomb” left in a backback that killed and injured race participants or observers. The two brothers were deemed, without any evidence, to be so dangerous that the entirety of Boston and its suburbs were “locked down” while 10,000 heavily armed police and military patrolled the streets in military vehicles conducting door-to-door searches forcing residents from their homes at gun point, while the police ransacked homes where it was totally obvious the brothers were not hiding. Not a single family evicted from their residences at gunpoint said: “Thank God you are here. The bombers are hiding in our home.”

The excessive display of force and warrantless police home intrusions is the reason that aware and thoughtful Americans do not believe one word of the official account of the Boston Marathon Bombing. Thoughtful people wonder why every American does not see the bombing as an orchestrated state act of terror in order to accustom Americans to the lock-down of a city and police intrusion into their homes. Logistically, it is impossible to assemble 10,000 armed troops so quickly. The obvious indication is that the readiness of the troops indicates pre-planning.

In Ferguson all that was needed to prevent mass protests and looting was for the police chief, mayor or governor to immediately announce that there would be a full investigation by a civic committee independent of the police and that the black community should select the members it wished to serve on the investigative committee.

Instead, the name of the cop who killed Michael Brown was withheld for days, a video allegedly of Michael Brown taking cigars from a store was released as a justification for his murder by police. These responses and a variety of other stupid police and government responses convinced the black community, which already knew in its bones, that there would be a coverup.

It is entirely possible that the police chief, mayor, and governor lacked the intelligence and judgment to deal with the occasion. In other words, perhaps they are too stupid to be in public office. The incapacity of the American public to elect qualified representatives is world-renown. But it is also possible that Michael Brown’s killing provided another opportunity to accustom Americans to the need for military violence to be deployed against the civilian population in order to protect us from threats.

Occupy Wall Street was white, and these whites were overwhelmed by police violence.
This is why I conclude that more is involved in Ferguson than white racist attitudes toward blacks.

The founding fathers warned against allowing US military forces to be deployed against the American people, and the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of military forces against civilians. These restrictions designed to protect liberty have been subverted by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes.

Today Americans have no more protection against state violence than Germans had under National Socialism.

Far from being a “light unto the world,” America is descending into cold hard tyranny.

Who will liberate us?

This from BloombergBusinessweek.