Saturday, August 23, 2014

Thoughts on Ferguson, MO.

From someone who actually thinks...

     Hot on the heels of the recent strangling death of 43-year-old Staten Island resident and member of the productive class, Eric Garner, the almighty edict-enforcement arm of that cancer which we call the state has yet again come under fire for exercising its supposed authority to determine who deserves to live, and who to die.  This time, the victim was 18-year-old Michael E. Brown, of Ferguson, MO.  When a peaceful vigil and protest, which amassed in response to an officer gunning down the unarmed Brown and leaving his body in the street for hours, subsequently turned unruly, police responded by doing what any sensible cohort of peace officers would, of course, do: they donned camouflage, gas masks, combat boots, helmets, and bulletproof vests, wheeled out their MRAPs, complete with LRADs, and proceeded to escalate the fuck out of an already tense situation.  Their claim was that such a heavy-handed response was necessary to prevent property damage to stores concentrated around the protest area, and to preserve the safety and security of the protesters and bystanders.  Their conduct, however, served not only to undermine that explanation, but also to provide leftist ideologues with a real-time lesson on the importance of preserving the second amendment.  After failing to protect anyone's person or property whatsoever, the police continued doing their part to encroach upon those freedoms enshrined in the American Bill of Rights.  These included, but were not limited to, the freedom of the pressfreedom of assembly, the freedom not to be deprived of liberty (of movement or otherwise) without due process, and, in the spirit of the ninth amendment, the general freedom not to have whatever arbitrary rights revoked by the state is it sees fit.  And while the mainstream media has, quite surprisingly, provided at least some valuable commentary on the situation, their response in general has, thus far, been lackluster at best.

     To their credit, the coverage from traditionally left-leaning news outlets like NBCCNN and ABC of at least one aspect of this event --police militarization-- has been decent, insofar as the prognosis for stage 3 cancer is certainly decent when compared to that of stage 5.  Quite surprisingly, even one op-ed writer at the National Review Online offered up a measured criticism of both the government's response, and the total disregard for private property rights by the protesters who opportunistically capitalized on the chaos and tension to appropriate property which did not belong to them. BreitbartNewsmax, and Fox, however, have been far too busy being fair and balanced to concern themselves with the rights of those not included among their readership (i.e. black people and those antagonistic to the government enforcement caste), and so have almost unanimously approved of every one of the tactics employed by the Ferguson P.D., St. Louis County Sheriff's Department and the Missouri Highway Patrol.  The failure of much of the media on the right (the traditional safe-haven of "law-and-order" ideologues) to question the official narrative, and the better-than-nothing discussion of police militarization by those on the left is certainly, however, not to suggest that any of these organizations actually engaged in any respectable form of first-incident reporting.  Nearly all of the left's talking points have been parroted from the mountains of masterful journalistic work that the heroic Radley Balko has amassed over the last decade at CatoThe Huffington PostReason Magazine and The Washington Post, and nearly all of the right's have been regurgitated from police spokesmen, politicians and witnesses friendly to the shooter.

     While those of us who prefer not to have our streets inundated with cabals of state-sanctioned murderers in paramilitary gear --dying to play soldier and employ their shiny new toys from the Department of Defense-- are certainly appreciative that mainstream outlets have given some attention to the federal 1033 Program, we also recognize that their coverage of events in Ferguson has, thus far, left much to be desired.  When Andrea Mitchell dispatched some flaky questions regarding the Ferguson P.D.'s handling of Brown's death to Missouri governor Jay Nixon, her line of inquiry was weak at best, and maliciously conciliatory of a greater state evil at worst.  Not one mention that this writer could find was made of the de-facto authority of localcountystate and federal police to kill, rapesteal fromdetain, or mob beat anyone, of any racegender, or age at any time, day or night, so long as they are clocked in. No one in the mainstream has, likewise, ventured to question the moral veracity of the doctrine of qualified immunity, which holds that an officer may not be held criminally liable for acts committed on the job, so long as it can be "reasonably established" that the officer was attempting to execute his professional duty.  As anyone familiar with the vagaries of government language would know, this amounts to carte blanche for state-sanctioned dispensers of violence to commit whatever crimes against persons or property they desire, provided they are acting in an "official" capacity, and cleared of wrongdoing by internal "review."  Some members of the left-leaning MSM have at least dug up statistics on homicides involving police and unarmed black men, and the Washington Post has broached the subject of reliable statistics on the number of police homicides found to be "justified" (more than 6,000 in the last 20 years), versus those found to be "unjustified," (not counted by the FBI), but found insufficient data to draw accurate, independent conclusions.  Certainly, anecdotal evidence has long suggested, and public opinion (whatever that means) would seem to support, the idea that instances of police held accountable are about as hard to come across as bad weed in Colorado.  No mention was made in any mainstream outlet, of course, of the fact that police are subject to less stringent rules of engagement than U.S. soldiers in active combat zones.

     It should be noted that, while the mainstream's investigative merits have been lacking (as usual), the analysis of events from both left and right-leaning media outlets has been even worse.  Most of the left has engaged in what this author likes to call "racial reductionism," which is the assertion that the sole catalyst for an event which may, or may not, have a racial component was race alone.  In this instance, much of the left-leaning media has concentrated almost entirely on the fact that the shooter, Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, was white, and his victim, Michael Brown, was black.  It is no secret that it has been open season for police on young black men since the formation of the first police department as they are presently constituted.  Malcolm X likened the police in Harlem to an occupying army in a speech given in 1964.  Murray Rothbard echoed this version of events in a 1967 essay discussing that year's riots in Detroit and Newark.  While it is certainly possible that Darren Wilson's own racial prejudice made the decision to shoot Michael Brown easier for him, it is not simply half-hearted, but downright irresponsible from an analytic position to conclude it possible that race was the sole causal factor.  That assertion overlooks the following:

     a.) The role that the Department of Defense has played in turning police into a paramilitary force through its 1033 program

     b.) The way that the "war" on drugs and its rhetoric have conflated the work of local peace officers with that of soldiers 

     c.)  A complicit judiciary that has, over and over again, empowered police and destroyed our power to resist the violation of our constitutional rights

     d.)  The complete and utter failure of the mainstream media to give this topic any attention (excluding, of course, Radley Balko) prior to the events of the last two weeks

     e.)  The institutionalization of a legal doctrine which prevents cops from ever being held criminally liable for the rights they violate while on the job

     f.)  The subsequent shift in the mentality of the police, who, as John Whitehead details with extensive citation in his masterful book A Government of Wolves, receive military gear and, in turn, begin to act the part (this is evidenced by the sheriff of Pulaski County, Indiana, referring to the United States as a "war zone")

     g.)  The supreme court decision Warren v. District of Columbia, which holds that police have no duty whatsoever to protect any person, or their property

     h.)  The fact that, of the over 80,000 SWAT raids conducted by paramilitary police in this country every year, somewhere near 79% of them are done in execution of a simple search warrant (it is important to note, too, that whether or not the subject of a search warrant legally owns a firearm is, in turn, considered justification for deploying SWAT)

     i.)  The way the American empire's murderous foreign escapades have created the conditions for militarization to exist in the first place

     And this list is in no way exhaustive.  A racial-reductionist analysis does nothing to address any of the aforementioned concerns, which are a far greater threat to the citizens of this country than the personal racial prejudices of local police officers (consider that, if none of the above were true, it wouldn't matter how racist they were as individuals - they wouldn't have the capacity to kill anyone they wanted and never be held accountable).

     Likewise, the right's analytic offerings have also been terrible.  Almost unanimously, they have deferred to the police account of events, and proceeded to question absolutely nothing (or hopelessly little) in the official narrative.  Fox News, through evening conservative cable-staple Bill O'Reilly, engaged in its usual orgiastic state-worship by concluding that "only" 400 people killed by the police per year is a benchmark of "police efficiency. At the same time, they tacitly note that, in the land of the free, one in every 21 people over 18 will be arrested every year.  This still amounts to more people killed by police since 2001 than the number of U.S. soldiers who have died fighting in Afghanistan.  Consider that, were they 400 annual victims of a private company, the overt calls for government intervention on behalf of the people to protect them from a rogue organization would be endlessly forthcoming.  O'Reilly also asked what Al Sharpton claimed in his speech to "have enough of;" while I am no Sharpton fan, it would require ignorance or malice to dismiss entirely the plight of young black men --who constitute only 6% of the nation's population, but 32% of its police shooting victims-- and their relations with police.  Meanwhile, another writer at the National Review Online opined that the significance of police militarization is being exaggerated by both the left and right.  Certainly a 3:00 A.M. paramilitary raid on that author's house may well change his mind, should he ever be so unfortunate.  Breitbart pretended, temporarily, to give credence to the position of the protesters by citing Charles Ogletree's comments on the matter, but concluded the piece with a less-than-subtle attempt at character assassination regarding wholly unrelated matters.  World Net Daily made even less of an attempt to conceal their deference to the police narrative, and the list goes on.

     It is tragic that Michael Brown is dead.  But perhaps the greater tragedy is not just that his life was taken, but that thousands of cases like his never attracted this kind of attention, and collusion between government and their crony corporate media have swept (and will continue to sweep) this problem under the rug since its inception.  It is up to us --those in the alternative media-- to continue sounding the alarm about the encroachment of the police state on our civil liberties.  Heroes like William Grigg, Radley Balko, John Whitehead and others have been warning the public about this for years, and the time has come that we resist the forceful occupation of our streets by that parasite we call the state.  If the public at large continues to tolerate the metastasizing menace of police militarization, the day may soon come when we have no freedoms left to preserve.

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