Police officers carry out random acts of legalized murder against poor people of color not because they are racist, although they may be, or even because they are rogue cops, but because impoverished urban communities have evolved into miniature police states.
Police can stop citizens at will, question and arrest them without probable cause, kick down doors in the middle of the night on the basis of warrants for nonviolent offenses, carry out wholesale surveillance, confiscate property and money and hold people—some of them innocent—in county jails for years before forcing them to accept plea agreements that send them to prison for decades.
They can also, largely with impunity, murder them.
Those who live in these police states, or internal colonies, especially young men of color, endure constant fear and often terror.
Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” calls those trapped in these enclaves members of a criminal “caste system.”
This caste system dominates the lives of not only the 2.3 million who are incarcerated in the United States but also the 4.8 million on probation or parole. Millions more are forced into “permanent second-class citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher education and public assistance, including housing, difficult and usually impossible to obtain. This is by design.
The rhetoric of compassion, even outrage, by the political class over the police murders in Baton Rouge, La., and near St. Paul, Minn., will not be translated into change until the poor are granted full constitutional rights and police are accountable to the law.
The corporate state, however, which is expanding the numbers of poor through austerity and deindustrialization, has no intention of instituting anything more than cosmetic reform.
Globalization has created a serious problem of “surplus” or “redundant” labor in deindustrialized countries. The corporate state has responded to the phenomenon of “surplus” labor with state terror and mass incarceration. It has built a physical and legal mechanism that lurks like a plague bacillus within the body politic to be imposed, should wider segments of society resist, on all of us.
The physics of human nature dictates that the longer the state engages in indiscriminant legalized murder, especially when those killings can be documented on video or film and disseminated to the public, the more it stokes the revenge assassinations we witnessed in Dallas. This counterviolence serves the interests of the corporate state. The murder of the five Dallas police officers allows the state to deify its blue-uniformed enforcers, demonize those who protest police killings and justify greater measures of oppression, often in the name of reform.
This downward spiral of violence and counterviolence will not be halted until the ruling ideology of neoliberalism is jettisoned and the corporate state is dismantled.
Violence and terror, as corporate capitalism punishes greater and greater segments of the population, are, and will remain, the essential tools for control.
No one, with the exception of the elites, champions neoliberal policies. Citizens do not want their jobs shipped overseas, their schools and libraries closed, their pension and retirement funds looted, programs such as Social Security and welfare cut, government bailouts of Wall Street, or militarized police forces patrolling their neighborhoods as if they were foreign armies of occupation—which in many ways they are. These policies have to be forced on a reluctant public.
This is accomplished only through propaganda, including censorship, and coercion.
Unfortunately, all the calls by the political class for reform in the wake of recent murders by police will make things worse. Reform has long been a subterfuge for expanded police repression. This insidious process is documented in Naomi Murakawa’s book “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” [Click here to see excerpts at Google Books.]
Murakawa wrote that lawmakers, especially liberal lawmakers, “confronted racial violence as an administrative deficiency.” Thus, they put in place “more procedures and professionalization” to “define acceptable use of force.” They countered the mob violence of lynching, she points out, with a system of state-sanctioned murder, or capital punishment. “The liberal’s brand of racial criminalization and administrative deracialization legitimized extreme penal harm to African-Americans: the more carceral machinery was rights-based and rule-bound, the more racial disparity was isolatable to ‘real’ black criminality.” In other words, the state was “permitted limitless violence so long as it conformed to clearly defined laws, administrative protocol, and due process,” while those who were the victims of this violence were said to be at fault because of their supposed criminal propensities.
The so-called “professionalization” of the police, the standard response to police brutality, has always resulted in more resources, militarized weapons and money given to the police. It has been accompanied, at the same time, by less police accountability and greater police autonomy to strip citizens of their rights as well as an expansion of the use of lethal force.
If the state of siege of our inner cities were lifted, if prisoners were allowed to return to their communities and if evictions, which destroy the cohesion and solidarity of a neighborhood, were to end, the corporate state would face a rebellion.
And the corporate state knows it. It needs to maintain these pod-like police states if it is to continue the relentless drive to further impoverish the country in the name of austerity. The continued cutting or closing of the few social services that keep people from facing total destitution, the massive unemployment that is never addressed, the despair, the hopelessness, the retreat into drugs and alcohol to blunt the pain, the heavy burden of debt peonage that sees families evicted, the desperate struggle to make money from the illegal economy and the forced bankruptcies all are about social control. And they work.
The state insists that to combat the “lawlessness” of those it has demonized it must be emancipated from the constraints of the law. The unrestricted and arbitrary subjugation of one despised group, stripped of equality before the law, conditions the police to employ brutal tactics against the wider society.
“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt wrote. “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”
The miniature police states are laboratories. They give the corporate state the machinery, legal justification and expertise to strip the entire country of rights, wealth and resources. And this, in the end, is the goal of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism, like all utopian ideologies, requires the banishment of empathy. The inability to feel empathy is the portal to an evil often carried out in the name of progress. A world without empathy rejects as an absurdity the call to love your neighbor as yourself. It elevates the cult of the self. It divides the world into winners and losers. It celebrates power and wealth. Those who are discarded by the corporate state, especially poor people of color, are viewed as life unworthy of life.
They are denied the dignity of work and financial autonomy. They are denied an education and proper medical care, meaning many die from preventable illnesses. They are criminalized. They are trapped from birth to death in squalid police states. And they are blamed for their own misery.
Disenfranchised white workers, also the victims of deindustrialization and neoliberalism, flock to Donald Trump rallies stunted by this lack of empathy. The hatred of the other offers them a sense of psychological protection. For, if they saw themselves in those they demonized, if they could express empathy, they would have to accept that what is being done to poor people of color can, and perhaps will, be done to them. This truth is too hard to accept. It is easier to blame the victims.
Our political elites, rather than addressing the crisis, will make it worse. If we do not revolt, the savagery, including legalized murder, that is the daily reality for poor people of color will become our reality. We must overthrow the corporate state. We must free ourselves from the poisonous ideology of neoliberalism. If we remain captive we will soon endure the nightmare that afflicts our neighbor.
By Paul Craig Roberts We know that the police have been, or are being, militarized. They are armed with weapons of war that hitherto have been used only on battlefields. We don't know why police are armed in this way, as such weapons are not necessary for policing the American public and are not used in police work anywhere except in Israeli-occupied Palestine.
In response to my request for information on US police training, readers have sent in a variety of information that seems to fit together. I will assemble it as best I can as a working hypothesis or provisional account. Perhaps a former or current police officer concerned about the change in the behavior of US police, or an expert on police training and practices, will come forward and verify or correct this provisional account.
First, we know that the police have been, or are being, militarized. They are armed with weapons of war that hitherto have been used only on battlefields. We don't know why police are armed in this way, as such weapons are not necessary for policing the American public and are not used in police work anywhere except in Israeli-occupied Palestine.
There is an undeclared agenda behind these weapons, and neither Congress nor the presstitute media have any apparent interest in discovering the hidden agenda.
Nevertheless, the militarization of the police fits in with what we know about police training.
There are sourced reports that US police are receiving training from Israel, both from traveling to Israel and in the US from Israeli training firms or from US firms using Israeli methods. See, for example, here and here.
The training of American police by Israeli occupation forces is not an Internet rumor or "conspiracy theory." It is a fact acknowledged by the Israeli press.
Israeli police practices arose from decades of occupying a hostile Palestinian population while stealing the Palestinians' land and isolating the population in ghetto enclaves. Essentially, Israeli police practices consist of intimidation and violence.
We know from innumerable news reports over many years the behavior of the occupying Israeli Army toward the Palestinian population. In four short words: it is extremely brutal.
For a soldier, especially a female soldier, to execute a child and his mother in the streets of Palestine or in the family's home requires that soldier to have been desensitized to human life that is not Israeli. This requires Palestinians to have been dehumanized, as the native inhabitants of what is today the United States and Australia were dehumanized by the European immigrants who stole their land.
On the basis of this information, we can infer that the Israeli training of US police teaches the police to see only police lives as valuable and the lives of the public as potential threats to police lives. This is why American police often murder a wrongly suspected person and almost always an unarmed one. The examples are numerous. You can spend much of your life just watching on youtube the existing videos of wanton murders of US citizens by police.
The American police are being taught at public expense that only their lives are valuable, not our lives. Therefore, in any encounter with a citizen, the automatic assumption is that the citizen intends harm to the police and must be immediately forcefully subdued and handcuffed or, alternatively, shot dead. The police are trained that the safest thing for the police to do is to terminate the suspect even if it is a soccer mom who forgot to signal a turn while driving her kids to a practice.
In other words, the American police have no more obligation to respect the lives and rights of US citizens than the Israeli occupying forces have to respect the lives and rights of Palestinians.
This does appear to be an accurate description of the situation. Even the New York Times has blown the whistle on William J. Lewinski, who trains US police to shoot first and he will answer the questions for them in court, on the rare occasion that the wanton murder they committed lands them there.
What about racism? Racism is the answer put forward by liberals, progressives, the putative leftwing, and by blacks themselves.
There are problems with the racist explanation. One obvious problem is that the American police wantonly murder and brutalize white people also. Just the other day the police murdered a 19-year-old white American while he lay on the ground. And the TSA abuses far more whites than it does blacks. See my website for recent examples of both.
A former black police officer provides revealing insight into the real situation. He says that about 15% of a police department consists of people who are there for the right reasons and represent a culture of public service. Another 15% are psychopaths who routinely abuse their power. The remaining 70% of the department goes with whichever of the two cultures prevails. Unfortunately, "the bad officers corrupt the department" and the Chicago police under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge proves the case.
The former black police officer assigns blame to "institutional racism." However, based on what we have learned about Israeli police training, the police bias against black Americans might not be racist or totally racist. Blacks in America have a history of dehumanization. In the eyes of police trainers, American blacks fit the mold of Palestinians. It is easier to begin the training process by making American police indifferent to the lives of an already dehumanized element of the US population. Once the police are indoctrinated to see themselves not as servants of the people but as "exceptional, indispensable people" whose lives must never be at risk, it is a simple matter to generalize the feeling of police superiority over the white population as well.
I have always been suspicious of the racist explanation. This is an explanation fed to the public in order to break the public into waring factions that cannot unite against their real oppressors. Indoctrinated as we are to hate and fear one another, those who rule and abuse us can do as they will.
It is as clear as a clear day that only a tiny percentage of white Americans belong to the One Percent. The rest of us are of no more consequence to those who rule than are blacks. Yet, we are divided, fearful of and opposed to one another. What a success for the One Percent!
Let me be clear. Just as we oppose the mentality of violence that is being inculcated into the police who live on our earnings, numerous Jews and Israelis themselves oppose the settler mentality that the Israeli government has come to represent. Jews are among the most ardent defenders of human rights of our time. Think of Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky Ilan Pappe, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Think of the brave Israeli organizations that oppose the theft of Palestinian lands and villages. We cannot damn an entire people for the sins of their political masters. If so, then after Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama, all Americans are damned.
The two greatest threats to the world are American and Israeli exceptionalism. It is the success of the indoctrination of this Nazi doctrine of exceptionalism that is the source of the violence in the world today.
The problem of American police violence is that the police are now defined as exceptional and unaccountable. They can kill the rest of us without accountability, just as Washington slaughters untold numbers of peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. Unexceptional peoples are dispensable.
It is paradoxical that training US police in the violent methods of the Israeli occupying forces is justified with the argument that it is necessary to save American lives from terrorists when the actual result is far more Americans killed by police than by terrorists.
Clearly the police training is counterproductive. It would seem that the families of those murdered and abused by police have good grounds for suing mayors, city councils, county commissioners, governors and state legislators for negligence in police oversight. The evidence is in. The police are taking lives, not saving them. The training is a total failure. Yet it persists. This is a high order of negligence and failure by public authorities.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. He has had numerous university appointments. His books, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available here, and How America Was Lost, can be ordered here. His latest book, The Neoconservative ThreatTo International Order: Washington's Perilous War For Hegemony, can be ordered here.
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