Race Relations and the American Police State

This post is apropos observations made by Michael Eric Dyson and TJ Holmes on the Ed Show.
The genesis of said observations was TJ's traffic stop for Driving while Black.
Of course race relations have gotten uglier since Obama took office. The only way they wouldn't have is if he was stamped with the seal of approval from the far right. As, say, a marionette for the Koch bros who had famously observed that water from black water fountains tasted the same as water from white water fountains - Herman Cain; or a former torturer who specialized in mock executions and token black  member of a white supremacist biker gang who equates social security with slavery (I guess because the only people who are free are those who are starving to death) and accuses sitting representatives of being Communists - Allen West; or a Supreme Court Justice who has proven the old adage that there is no whore like a whore who is once bought, stays bought. In this instance by the Monsanto corporation and the tea party group his wife heads - Clarence Thomas.
Had any of these individuals, by way of ferinstance, had won the presidency...they'd be called the greatest thing since Reagan and sliced bread; because their is nothing more precious than a traitor. Witness Phyllis Schafly and what she did to the Equal Rights Movement.
But if any of those bastards were to take office, despite all the big love they would get from conservatives everywhere, woe to every minority member not fortunate enough to have a wealthy or power white patron.
This president would climb to power striding on their corpses.

As it is, Obama is to the right of Dwight Eisenhower yet characterized as a crypto-muslim, crypto-foreigner, and as a radical socialist by the likes of Newt Gingrich...proving that despite all of his vaunted erudition and intellectual achievement...Gingrich doesn't have a clue what a Socialist actually is.

I won't mince words. Obama is a disappointment. He takes nearly all of his policy cues from Clinton and Bush/Cheney. He is a more that willing captive of the conservative orthodoxy that there was no history before Reagan. As was Clinton. Hence he does nothing to drag the Overton Window back to the Left. This is a theme I explore frequently and at great length in many posts.
http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2012/06/conservative-orthodoxy-unified-theory.html

The fact is that I HAVE been paying attention since 1980 and their is alot I'm cognizant of that it is heretical to acknowledge. At least among conservatives.
Dig this: Forbidden knowledge.
After the the Civil War, there was an exodus from the agrarian South to the industrial North, this was accelerated by the Mississippi Flood of 1927.
The relative prosperity blacks had found had even lead to the birth of a literary tradition: The Harlem Renaissance. Unionization and support for unions by the federal government improved the lot now urban blacks.
In 1976, Reagan ran on the platform of War on the Welfare Queens. He lost
In 1980 he won and set about, among other things, gutting public assistance. And busting public unions. And sending manufacturing overseas. And closing factories here at home.
Within five years the inner-cities boiled with drug wars and the crack epidemic spread everywhere. Just like the AIDS epidemic which first ravaged the gay community and then everyone else.
To stamp down the violence, a racist police state was instituted. It was called the War on Drugs. It effectively rolled back the Civil Rights Act enacted by LBJ.
http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2011/12/pepperspray-nation-chapter-7-occupy.html

Most egregious is the history and law enforcement response to Occupy Oakland. Where the Occupy Movement in New York is an ideological siege against the Temple of Mammon to which the entire nation's economy was almost sacrificed, and the Occupy Seattle had veterans in protests against globalization; Oakland most invokes the warnings found in the Civil Disturbance Maneuver Army Field Manual:

Inciting a crowd to violence or a greater

intensity of violence through the use of brutish enforcement tactics should be

avoided. Publicity can be detrimental to authorities and beneficial to crowds

because it can further their causes....

Community unrest results in urban conflicts that arise from highly

emotional social and economic issues. Economically deprived inner city

residents may feel that they are treated unjustly or ignored by people in power

and authority. Tensions can build quickly in a community over a variety of

issues, such as hunger, poor employment opportunities, inadequate

community services, poor housing, and labor issues. Tension in these areas

creates the potential for violence. When tensions are high, it takes a small

(seemingly minor) incident, rumor, or act of injustice to ignite groups within a

crowd to riot and act violently. This is particularly true if community relations

with authorities are part of the problem.

As demonstrated by the L.A. riots in response to the officers being found not guilty in the beating of Rodney King.

1-5. Significant ethnic differences in a community can create an atmosphere

of distrust, even hatred. Unrest among ethnic groups competing for jobs,

living areas, and sparse essentials can cause an eruption of civil disorder and/

or riots. As emotions run high, violence becomes likely.

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf As quoted in  http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupiers-primer-chapter1-policy-is.html

It is worth noting that the police do not follow the protocol detailed in Army Field Manual, and as a result the consequences are crystal clear.

Rather than the malfeasance of Wall Street, or WTO protests of Seattle, the history of police antagonism goes back to the Reagan Administration and before. Decades and generations before.The first nail was the union busting going on at the time and the acceleration of off-shore manufacturing, which closed factories here in America. As jobs left, many families were forced onto public assistance. Reagan had already run on a platform of warring against Welfare Queens in '76 in his first bid for the presidency. With his election in 1980, he was able to put his platform into actual practice and shredded the social safety net. This created the contemporary picture of the inner-city. Chronic social decay and suffering worse than that seen during the Great Depression surrounding the derelict corpses of factories and warehouses.


Let's read this one more time:

Community unrest results in urban conflicts that arise from highly

emotional social and economic issues. Economically deprived inner city

residents may feel that they are treated unjustly or ignored by people in power

and authority. Tensions can build quickly in a community over a variety of

issues, such as hunger, poor employment opportunities, inadequate

community services, poor housing, and labor issues. Tension in these areas

creates the potential for violence. When tensions are high, it takes a small

(seemingly minor) incident, rumor, or act of injustice to ignite groups within a

crowd to riot and act violently. This is particularly true if community relations

with authorities are part of the problem.

It could well have been written describing this picture. Bad enough.
However, people are not content or inclined to quietly starve to death. There could be a parallel found in the mass extinction of the dinosaurs:

The earth was struck by an asteroid that caused, among other multitudinous disruptions, a quasi nuclear winter which killed off all the growing plants at the time. Plants form the basis of the food chain. When the plants died out, the herbivores - plant eaters - followed. When the herbivores died out, the carnivores followed.
-Without factory jobs or even public assistance, all businesses died because nobody had money for goods or services. A situation being replicated in many ways today by the Great Recession.


But not all life on earth is dependent on plants or meat. Insects survive on any form of organic matter and survive in nearly every environment. Animals that thrive on insects, though marginal, are very durable. Cockroach vitality, hardy as a rat. Insects became the new base for the food chain. And those creatures that survived as insectivores were later able to diversify and fill the roles of mega fauna herbivores and carnivores left vacant by the destruction of the dinosaurs.
-When legitimate commerce died in the inner city, the economies of last resort...criminal enterprises; drug dealing, prostitution, other peoples' property, and violence...stepped in to take its place out of necessity. People don't quietly starve.

Unfortunately, right at this time, a new product appeared.
A product that could make people wealthy, but at the cost of living their lives in dog years and almost guaranteeing either a violent death, or spending the rest of their lives in prison and the weight of knowing they were poisoning their own communities. Who wouldn't jump at that when the alternative is grinding poverty and degradation? You don't even need a high school diploma!


What product was this? It was crack cocaine.


The Reagan ad Morning in America would have been accurate only if it included the screams of crack babies and the sound of machine gun fire from the drive-bys of competing gangs.


Everything here, from the exportation of jobs to the shredding of the social safety net to the appearance of the crack cocaine economy and the gang warfare it fostered were all the products of classic Reagan era. These were the triumphs of Reagan economic and social policy.

Later triumphs included multi-trillion dollar federal deficits, a crashed stock market in 1987, and saving and loan bailouts fueled by "junk bonds." Truly a precursor to the wonders of the Bush/Cheney White House.

That Reagan was the cause of the social decay in the inner city is, as demonstrated, a straight line computation. There are allegations that his Administration may have also had a more direct hand in the the appearance of Crack as a way to help fund his adventures in Central America, in ADDITION to selling weapons to the very same Iranians who had held Americans hostage and released on the same day he was inaugurated. Great PR that was...

 ^{In this fashion the police response became militarized, fostered as it was by Daryl Gates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Gates}

Gates earned notoriety for his controversial rhetoric on many occasions. Some of the most notable examples of this were:

• His testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that infrequent or casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot" because "we're in a war" and even casual drug use is "treason."^[14] He later said the testimony was calculated hyperbole.^[15]
• His dismissive response to concerns about excessive force by police employing "choke holds." Gates attributed several deaths of people held in choke holds to the theory that "blacks might be more likely to die from choke holds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on 'normal people.'"^[16] (In his autobiography, Gates explained that he had been misquoted, saying that black people were more predisposed to vascular conditions and therefore less likely to have normally-functioning arteries.)

The tactics used against Occupy Oakland demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that Gates' statement were not hyperbole. The use of teargas, flash grenades and rubber bullets are the tools of law enforcement at war with those it is sworn to protect and are things that would have made more sense on the streets of Apartheid South Africa, or Israel. Add some police dogs and fire hoses and it could have been the Civil Rights movement in Jim Crow South.
To be black or brown in America, thanks to the continued War on Drugs, is to live in a police state. Ask any black or brown man or woman who has been the subject of a sidewalk shakedown, or who has been pulled over for driving while black or brown. If as many whites were randomly stopped and given similar treatment, roughly the same proportion would be caught with things they'd rather not. Jails and prisons would be filled with representation of races far more in keeping with what you actually see on the street.


A post-script.   (T)he prosaic upward mobility of a factory job leading to security upon retirement with money to send the kids to college died with a stake in its heart, and not just for those in the inner city. It is THIS coincidentally, that has lead to the death of the Middle Class for ALL America....

 

How pervasive is this police state? Let's answer that question by examining what real racial equality would look like.
Blacks comprise about 13% of the population. True social and economic enfranchisement and participation would have black at about 13% of all millionaires, billionaires, college graduates and professionals.
Whites would be the proportionate majority in all prisons. Blacks would not be more than they are represented in their locales.
But this is all so far removed from the reality on the ground as to be a sick joke.
Whites get Stand Your Ground. A unarmed black youth gets a John Doe toe tag.  http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2012/03/trayvon-martin-and-black-on-black.html

Zimmerman's cheerleaders should not pretend that you give a rat's about the horror of black on black crime. The NRA is wrong. It is politicians who make firearms more plentiful than opportunities in depressed neighborhoods that kill people. It solves a multitude of problems...it shrinks the population of the black, the poor and the dispossessed through sheer attrition of casualties, the survivors who pulled the triggers are culled from their natural environment where they are kept out of harm's way in one of many fine penitentiaries where they are stripped of any future politically representative voice, even if they DO walk as free men and women once more. High body counts and rates of incarceration means less weight of the public dime in public assistance and education. Blacks with guns scare whites and the middle class, upping support for tough on crime legislation which is always a winner for both Conservatives and the gun lobby in particular.Black on black crime is not a social ailment. It is a SOLUTION. Why should the pro-gun lobby and their pet politicians interfere with a policy that has worked so well for them?

 And a young black mother firing a warning shot against her abusive husband gets over 20 years. Latino Americans get asked Papers Please, as is every nearly every Democrat who goes to vote.

With the browning of America, more and more people are being disenfranchised while more and more money and power are being funneled into fewer and whiter hands.
The stop and frisk in New York wasn't about getting guns off the street (in violation of the 4th Amendment Unreasonable Search and Seizure Laws. It was about keeping blacks in their place. Legalizing marijuana would result in fewer...maybe even many fewer arrests and criminal records for young blacks. Shaking down whites for weed and guns would fill holding cells beyond capacity. But as everyone knows...it's not about that at all.
More policing, disenfranchisement, and fewer social supports, voter suppression and union busting and possible Michigan style small bore Fascism across the country in Fiscal Martial Law and continued militarization of police forces for larger and larger minority populations  (the minority/majority issue) spells something very like Jim Crow. Or South African Apartheid.

Of course no-one wants to speak out against a police state that they perceive in working in their favor.
So what is the one thing that we can feel good about as a nation? That this can be discussed openly with no fear of reprisal. Yet.
In some times and in some places, this kind of talk would have been considered inflammatory sedition. We need to take advantage of the fact that its not and  not allow ourselves to be rebuffed with accusations of playing the race card. You would have heard the same accusations in the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa.
It's not impossible and not insolvable.

The enablers of  institutional racism all point to Social Darwinism and the moral inferiority of most blacks. Again from http://donquixokie.blogspot.com/2012/03/trayvon-martin-and-black-on-black.html
Do you REALLY want to get real about black on black crime? Black on black crime is social dysfunction caused by the same policies that Reagan instituted back in the '80s. Bust up the unions, ship out the jobs, replace former union workers with scabs from Mexico in those jobs that can't be exported, gut public assistance to the now swelling ranks of unemployed, and gut public education because the only people who go public schools are those who are going to prison anyway so it's a waste of the tax payer's money [in truth four or five white kids attend public schools for every black child...but let's not confuse the issue with FACTS!]
By the '80s a nice little Crack Epidemic sprouted up like a malignant poisonous mushroom, and why not? No jobs no future no security. But you don't need to have an education to make money. All you need is a supplier and a gun. Don't even need a GED. Besides you're are as likely to be killed by other fools making money or by the cops just by stepping foot out your door, so WHY NOT?

It didn't always used to be this way. (Dave Chappel inside the Actor's Studio, after the 2 minute mark.)

And it doesn't have to be this way. Crack is yesterdays news. The underlying causes are still intact however. Widespread unemployment, anemic public education, a skewed if not broken justice system, a gutted public assistance program.

Now we have houses cars and apartment buildings exploding from numbnuts making meth, which is really hardly a strictly black problem, face it. Why else is anyone not hollering for mandatory minimum sentences for meth cooks and dealers and users? Similar to gun violence, the crime isn't that people USE meth, or crack. The problem is that they honestly view making or selling meth as a viable alternative to ALL the other choices they have to choose from to make their way in the world. Just like crack back in the day. It speaks to a wealth of really crappy options. It, along with all the other crimes that involve money goods or property, are the economies of last resort.

You want to DO something about black on black crime? Shut up, pay your taxes, bring back manufacturing from overseas even if it means trade wars to do it, allow tax cuts to job creators ONLY IF all of their factories and customer service is right here in America, roll back Right to Work and other union busting laws, make sure that schools are well funded, and tell the NRA to back off. All of that all by itself will take weight of of the public dime in public assistance and provide more opportunities than those found in drug dealing, prostitution, theft and the moving of stolen merchandise - all of which will lighten the weight on the tax payers for the back-door institutional welfare of incarceration. Further, more legitimate employment means they become tax-payers as well.

It is NOT that blacks are morally inferior. It is that the social economic and justice systems are broken.
LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT.