The Real "Criminals and Thugs" Identified

Lawless President Obama Chides Baltimore “Criminals And Thugs,” Ignores Savagery Of Baltimore Police

Freddy Gray made eye contact with a Baltimore cop. He ran like a rabbit so cops chased him like hounds and did what hounds do when they catch a rabbit. They snapped his spine. But the elemental savagery of everyday policing in Baltimore and a hundred other cities is not a fit topic for presidential commentary. The only “criminals” and “thugs” the first black president and for that matter corporate news can see are the citizens in the streets protesting police murder and impunity.

According to the Baltimore Police Department's own story, all Freddie Gray ever did was make eye contact with a police lieutenant and take off running. In 21^st century America, the relation of young black men to the police is such that when you run like a rabbit, cops will chase you like hounds. When the hounds caught 25 year old Freddy Gray they did what hounds do when they catch a rabbit. Baltimore cops snapped Freddy Gray's spine, and they may have inflicted additional torture upon him during a half hour in leg irons in back of a police van after which they finally got around to calling the paramedics.

This kind of simple, elemental savagery is the ordinary everyday state of policing not just in Baltimore but in a hundred other US cities. Black Baltimore knows, just like black Chicago, black Los Angeles and Philly and Birmingham and Jacksonville and Detroit --- they all know that the courts and ballot box provide no credible remedies to the scourge of police violence or the national policy of mass incarceration inflicted upon Americans of African descent.

Our black political class was quick to point to the absence of black faces in high places in Ferguson Missouri. But most Baltimore mayors have been black for a generation, as have many of its top cops. There are black faces in judges' chambers, a mostly black city council and Maryland has a large and active legislative black caucus. Curbing the cops though, is not part of what any of our black political class actually DO.

"...when presidents and mayors call for “nonviolence” and “obeying the law” and “respect for private property” they're appealing to rules they would not dream of following themselves..."

President Obama is big on poor people remaining peaceful and nonviolent and respecting the law. This is a notion that should either make us laugh out loud, or cry, it's hard to decide which. President Obama you see, also claims the law entitles him to drone-bomb hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians across Asia and Africa whose names he doesn't even know based upon their “profiles” or their proximity to supposed “terrorists,” also frequently unknown by name. The president, along with his outgoing and incoming attorneys general assure us this is all perfectly legal. We have to take their word for it, because they've made the precise legal language of the rule they says permits this classified – a secret.

Along with the president, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake also drew the line at protesters interfering with the private property of others. This too is a joke. The Baltimore PD is one of hundreds of cop shops that routinely confiscate cash and assets with little or no justification from people for its own use, a runaway policy called asset forfeiture blessed by the incoming attorney general Loretta Lynch. So let's be clear – when presidents and mayors call for “nonviolence” and “obeying the law” and “respect for private property” they're appealing to rules they would not dream of following themselves.

These are the rules the police and prison state makes for its victims, the rules that hounds make for rabbits. If we no longer intend to be hunted by hounds, we have to start by ignoring their rules, as many of our finest young people are seizing the opportunity to do. The most important lesson of Freddy Gray's death may be that it's high time to stop running like rabbits.

For Black Agenda Radio I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party.  He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

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Mirrored from Black Agenda Report

The whole idea behind this effort by the faux Ruling Class is to loot and emasculate the poor and colored people. Unfortunately most males and females are totally ignorant of what it means to be a man or a woman. Mr. Dixon has it exactly right. It is high time to stop running and dying like gutless, simpering animals.

--Joe

The Right of Self-Defence, The American Way

This copy is reposted here specifically for the police and people of Humboldt County. Make your own comparisons, draw your own conclusions. Impunity is its own sin and brings its own sanctions. The empirical value of life or lack thereof speaks to the decadent moral character and to the truth of our dying society.

WEEKEND EDITION DECEMBER 26-28, 2014

An Unaccountable Army

Police Violence and Violence Against the Police

by RON URIE

On March 31, 2004, one year after the launch of the U.S. war against Iraq, four U.S. military contractors, mercenaries, were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah and their charred corpses were hung from a bridge. The indignation expressed by the American political leadership and senior military officials was that their imperial privilege had been challenged— how dare the people whose country they had illegally invaded and substantially destroyed and whose relatives, neighbors and friends they had murdered fight back? The city of Fallujah was surrounded; women and small children were told to leave and then the slaughter began. White phosphorus and depleted uranium shells were dropped until thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Iraqi boys and men in Fallujah had been murdered.

Left unsaid at the time was that most Americans subjected to an illegal war, invasion and occupation would respond largely as the citizens of Fallujah had done. Self-defense against invading hordes is as close to a natural right as the term could convey. The real crimes committed in / on Iraq were the war and occupation launched by the Americans and Brits. And the collective punishment visited upon the male citizens of Fallujah very closely resembled the acts that led to collective punishment being designated a war crime in the first place— the group slaughters regularly meted out by the Nazis in WWII for acts committed by unrelated individuals or groups. Today the Americans and Israelis (against Palestinians) are the main global keepers of the war crime tradition of collective punishment.

Picture (1) above: An NYPD motorcycle cop gratuitously rides his motorcycle over the leg of an NLG (National Lawyers Guild) legal observer at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. The role of the police as armed thugs protecting the privilege of connected kleptocrats on Wall Street is framed in the language of the radical right as protecting ‘the public’ from over-privileged, elitist kids disrupting the public order. When former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who made his early career prosecuting Wall Street criminals, says that the police are concentrated in ‘high crime’ areas he fails to mention that any concentration of police in the financial districts of major U.S. cities is to protect financial criminals from being held accountable for their crimes. Source: Washington’s blog.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made explicit the military role of the police when he bragged that he had ‘the seventh biggest army in the world,’ the NYPD. Mr. Bloomberg claimed the NYPD to be ‘his’ army in 2011 as he was violently repressing the Occupy Wall Street movement. A short time after the comments were made the NYPD participated in a coordinated national assault against lawfully assembled protestors that included the total destruction of the Occupy library, kitchen and associated infrastructure. Through an ongoing campaign of violence, infiltration, disinformation, ‘pre-emptive’ kidnappings and legally dubious arrests the Occupy movement was effectively destroyed. Mr. Bloomberg made his fortune from Wall Street and he used ‘his’ army to prevent it from being held legally and socially accountable for its crimes.

When Ismaaiyl Brinsley murdered NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in self-proclaimed revenge killings for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner spokespersons for the NYPD and the PBA (Police Benevolent Association) were quick to personalize the victims while using the language of belligerent militarism to politicize the broader context of growing public resistance to police violence. What wasn’t expressed by NYPD spokespersons was any regret for the unjustifiable murder of Eric Garner or any number of other black and brown youth, for participation in systematic racial repression like stop-question-and-frisk or for the acting as an occupying army in poor neighborhoods of color. What was affirmed through the words of spokespersons for the police was that black lives don’t matter but that cop lives do.

Picture (2) above: The NYPD applies an illegal choke hold in the murder of Eric Garner. The allegation against Mr. Garner was that he was selling ‘loosey’ cigarettes, individual cigarettes on which applicable taxes were not paid. In the run-up to the Great Recession Wall Street made dubious, in many cases fraudulent, mortgage loans of over one-trillion dollars. The economic calamity that resulted cost millions of families their homes and millions more their jobs and life savings. The everyday business of U.S. corporations is avoiding hundreds of billions per year in tax liabilities through sham transactions. Eric Garner could in theory have sold loosey cigarettes for the next 500,000 years and not neared the annual tax avoidance of Apple Computer or General Electric had the police not murdered him. Source: ABC News.

The loss of any life through violence is tragic, which makes the police practice of casual, consequence-free, assault, murder and harassment so worthy of public condemnation. The contention put forward by PBA spokesperson Patrick Lynch that those protesting police violence have ‘blood on their hands’ leaves unaddressed the reasons why protestors are protesting— around the country heavily armed, militarized police routinely assault and murder people, largely black and brown youth, with impunity and largely without conscience. Seventy-six unarmed black and brown youth have been murdered by the police since 1999 and it is only the murder of two cops that raises the moral outrage of the police. And here lies irony— the protestors by-and-large have great sympathy for the families of the slain cops whereas, as best can be determined by the words and actions of the police, courts and political leadership, the imperial privilege of police to murder with impunity remains intact.

Picture (3) above: it has been nearly fifteen years since unarmed Amadou Diallo was murdered by the NYPD in a hail of bullets. In the intervening years the police across the country have murdered seventy-six unarmed people of color (link above), have been increasingly militarized, given the right to rob people of their possessions at will, made immune from prosecution for crimes committed and dedicated to systematic race-based repression like stop-and-frisk. The failure of the political leadership and the judiciary to hold the police accountable at any level demonstrates the political role that the police fill— that of an army of the rich existing to protect the ruling class from social accountability. Source: Life Magazine.

The existence of a heavily armed, highly militarized, wholly unaccountable army to protect a class and race based social order is totalitarian by degree— those on the side being repressed bear the brunt leaving the illusion of justice for those not paying attention. The one-sided response of the political leadership and police spokespersons to the tragic murder of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos is evidence of the social order being protected. Left entirely unaddressed is the historical role of the police in maintaining an unjust race and class based social order from slave patrols to convict leasing to mass incarceration and for-profit prisons to class and race-based enforcement of selectively repressive laws. And to be clear, it is the political leadership that has designated and so-armed the police to be the quasi-military force they now are.

The mainstream press is claiming that the murders of Messrs. Liu and Ramos have reframed the protests against police violence to be against violence. Without disarming the police and changing their role from militarized guardians of ruling class interests to servants of all of the public it is difficult to see how opposing violence without opposing the existing role of the police is politically coherent? And reduction of the idea of justice to the will of the police is to accept the role they have been given in protecting class and race interests by a political leadership that straightforwardly answers to economic interests. Put differently, if fealty to the law had anything to do with the current role of the police then areas with high levels of criminal activity could be found in the financial towers of lower Manhattan and on Park and Madison Avenues just north of Forty-Second Street. As of a few days ago the NYPD was nowhere to be found enforcing the law in these locations.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is forthcoming.

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--Joe

No Mistake, Just Plain Murder

The police committed a crime when they killed Tommy McClain on September 17, 2014, in Eureka, CA. They made NO mistake, NO miscalculation, NO slip-up, NO misjudgment, or NO error in judgment when they deliberately confronted him that night. They admittedly had been watching him and other family members for some time. They knew he was not doing anything illegal or presenting himself as a threat to them or anyone else that justified several of them confronting him as if he was a known armed and deadly felon with their guns drawn. They, the Eureka Police Officers deliberately brought violence to this boy at his home on the premise or assumption he might be packing something in his belt that could be a gun. In their desire to bully and cow him into submission, show him who the Man is, in their paranoia they fabricated or conjured in their scared feeble minds a hallucination about some supposed threat to them, and he died. In fact, he was dead the moment they decided to assault him – no matter what he did.

That boy died for absolutely nothing, accept being a boy, trying to be a man. With, I might add, having the misfortune to cross paths with a gang of effeminate Eureka Police Officers. He was doing exactly what they told him to do and used his compliance as an excuse to shoot him. No sniveling punk was going to talk to them like he did nor was he going to tell them what to do. So, they taught him and everyone like him in Eureka a lesson. Tragically, this exactly what the people of Eureka want from their police and so-called justice system.

What does it say about an old community when their police can murder a boy in cold blood and absolutely no one gets angry or outraged? Where a new police chief and an old and a new District Attorney sweep the crime under the rug to protect these criminals from answering for their crimes? No one demands justice for the murder. No one is outraged over the crime and its cover-up. Nothing about going to the Grand Jury. Nothing about going to the State's Attorney General or any demands for a police review board with teeth. JUST NOTHING.

This police murder of Tommy McClain tells you everything you need to know about the City of Eureka and the people that live here. This incident clearly shows just how debased and depraved the city of Eureka and it's people are. They are not just morally corrupt, but are totally lawless as well.

What the wannabe so-called Upper Class people don't seem to understand, as they hunker down in what they believe are their secure Ivory Towers, is that they are just as threatened and endangered as everyone else. The people of Eureka have a choice, either enforce the law or see it enforced upon them. The debasement caused by these officer's actions and the universal impunity granted by everyone responsible for enforcing the law is merely a symptom of the disease destroying the whole community. The Eureka Police Department needs a complete attitude change. In fact, the whole town needs an attitude change. That starts when you stop cooperating with these lawless criminals and they are held to account and answer for their crimes. Until then, no one is free or safe from these sociopaths.

Make no mistake, the real thugs all wear flag pins.

--Joe

Welcome to the Hunger Games, Eureka

[UPDATE Below - Posted specially for the people of Eureka]
[UPDATE II - No accountability and blanket impunity - police granted de facto legal right to kill at will - A law unto themselves. The Grand Jury is NOT a Court of Law.]
N.Y. cop not indicted in chokehold death
New York grand jury declines to indict in the death of man who died after police officer put him in a chokehold.

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For want of something better, Eureka could easily be a city in District Seven.

The land Panem, or it's Capitol District where the Elite .01% live in unimaginable opulent luxury, dominating over their pandering, servile subjects, is where the people are all mostly gutless cowards - not unlike the United States of today. They give their children away for the State to play their deadly games, practice summary executions, torture and murder them at will without so much as a whimper from anyone of repute. Look no further than the number of children shot down and imprisoned - look no further than your neighbor.

The children - more importantly the young people (10 to 30 years), have no idea how their parents and grandparents have looted their rightful inheritance; betrayed them to a life of abject worthless beings, lawless corruption and wanton anarchy. They, the older generation, have taken from them all the resources they need to grow to become strong, prosperous individuals; someone of legitimate value; morally, ethically, physically and spiritually. For young people the Capitol system dominated by the Point Zero Nine Percent is permanently broken. The Law is whatever some insane lying lunatic chooses to personally impose at the time. Impunity for the elite criminal is codified by establishing "the need to only look forward, never back." This same principle was established locally when District Attorney Paul Gallegos decided not to enforce the law regarding the police murder of Tommy McClain. Now the people of Eureka, no thanks to E.P.D. Chief Andrew Mills determination, can suffer the in-your-face insult and deprivation every time they have to deal with or interact with Stephen Linfoot and Brian Stephens. In particular, know that Linfoot is motivated by his psychosis and fear that ravages his every thought. Know that you to can be shot dead for whatever he thinks or believes you are. To him and his otherwise trained compatriots their fear induced nightmares are as real as night and day - the imaginary movie scenario playing out within their crazed minds.

Rather than hold these murderers to the most menial of an accounting, the local police authorities rewarded them for their crimes.  And all with complicit acquiescence from the Eureka community.

acquiescence  noun
1. the act or condition of acquiescing or giving tacit assent; agreement or consent by silence or without objection
2. Law. such neglect to take legal proceedings for such a long time as to imply the abandonment of a right. [Emphasis mine.]

While the police murder of Tommy McClain never achieved the national recognition of the negro boy in Ferguson, MO the issues are the same. The problem or issue is not about justice for black people versus white people. Nor is it really about the poor underclass or I should say, other class versus the Elite wealthy upper class. As far as I know, Tommy McClain was white, but judged and executed the same as a black person. The real issue is he had the temerity to stand up for himself and to enforce the most meaningless, menial self-defense of one's personal self as a human being in his own home - something thugs and bullies cannot tolerate and still justify their existence. That is why he was killed. He exposed them for who and what they are. They judged themselves by extrajudicially murdering him. That lawless murder directly indicts every person living and working in Eureka. Either they enforce the law and accountability, eliminate the impunity or they all become complicit in the crime.

The wanton deaths of Tommy McClain and Michael Brown and so many more children are a living indictment, not only of their killers, but of everyone that votes and supports the lawlessness they call a "nation of laws," the same system that sanctifies and justifies the sanctioned anarchy and murder.

Welcome to the Hunger Games, Eureka Version 2.0 - they are not about the future, they are about NOW.

--Joe

PS. Don't make the mistake of answering or going to the door with a Black and Decker 3.6 Volt Lithium Ion Screwdriver in your hand, if it's a Eureka Police Officer, he or she will shoot you down like a rabid dog in a heartbeat. If you should be outside working, be doubly cautious because an antagonistic neighbor could call and report you flashing a gun around in public and that's a death sentence. 

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[UPDATE - Sunday, November 30, 2014]
If you have any doubts about my meaning Eureka, read this article. Considering I've only found one or two other local blogs and one letter to the North Coast Journal about the murder of Tommy McClain, essentially nothing, says more than any street demonstration could ever hope to say. This excerpt really speaks to Eureka's delegitimization as a law abiding community of any substantive worth. No universal outrage, no moral indignation and absolutely nothing about enforcing the law.

Welcome to the Sixteenth Century

"As bad as this is, the worst part is that there are millions of people who aren’t elites, who aren’t rich enough to financially survive a lost job or a divorce or a sick kid, but who think this is just fine. Those people vote for the system not just in elections, but by their hatred for their neighbors. Who could have predicted so many citizens would enjoy watching their neighbors thrown out of their houses rather than figure out some way to help? Who would have thought so many citizens would be thrilled to see families broken up and deported? Who would have thought so many citizens would be happy to drink oil instead of water for any reason? Who would have thought that so many citizens would prefer not just to let corporations pay so little to their neighbors, but also to support cutting off all government benefits to those workers? Who would have thought so many citizens would be happy to have some government agent collecting their phones and email and internet search histories?"

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It seems to me that this nation is infected by a nameless, faceless dread, a fear of something awful just beyond our ability to grasp. The media, right-wing politicians and demagogues, acting on behalf of their filthy rich patrons, actively exploit that fear to get what they want: a divided nation at war with itself.

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But really, a few immigrants are the problem?

It’s a mirror image of the US. The “Other” is the problem. It isn’t the unjust distribution of wealth, it isn’t the exploitation of the worker by the filthy rich, it isn’t unequal schools, it isn’t poverty or any other structural condition. It’s witches. It’s demons. It’s unholiness. It’s impurity. It’s smoke.

It isn’t fixable. The most you can hope for is bottling up that rage and fear in fewer and fewer people. Instead the media stokes those fires. Self-ordained ministers tell people that it’s sin that cause fires and floods and earthquakes and eclipses. Rage freaks like O’Reilly and Limbaugh and the incomparably stupid Hannity tell their listeners that the end times are coming. Politicians like Lindsey Graham shriek that terrorists are coming to kill them while they sleep. These pre-moderns are now in control of both the House and Senate, and the Supreme Court.

I’m thinking about being a bit fearful myself. [Emphasis mine.]

 When he gets done being fearful and he will, he will start acting in harmony with what he knows to be true, what he just wrote. He will stop cooperating with the fear, the fear mongers and deal with the threat, whether it be a hateful neighbor or thug cops.

The Diseased Face of Impunity

While these people celebrate, the city of Eureka dies. For Police Chief Andrew Mills to promote Brian Stephens to Captain in full justification of his blatant statement to this community that "early findings of the investigation revealed McClain had reached for a replica handgun in his waistband and Linfoot was justified in firing his weapon" is as foul an obscenity as there ever was. All I can say, is every citizen of Eureka will be sorry for the day they ever heard of Andrew Mills.

Welcome to Mexico. Your life isn't worth a pinch of rat shit.

If this murder stands, justified, then there is absolutely nothing stopping the Eureka Police from doing anything they want any time they want. What's next for the EPD? Death squads?

Tommy McClain did NOTHING to threaten anyone. The ONLY threat that existed was in the scared crapless, paranoid men's sick minds that brought pointless violence to Tommy McClain's home. The really corrupt sick bastards in this community are the people like Andrew Mills that justify and support such sickness, lawlessness and paranoia.

You wanted them Eureka, just like this country, the old voters anyway, wanted conservative Republicans running congress, well now you can just live with the consequences. When the District Attorney agrees with Chief Mills your deal with the Devil, everyone that voted, is sealed.

Here's the link to: Eureka police shooting investigation awaits DA's decision - Read it and weep. The war has only just begun.

--Joe