Category: police terrorism
The Mafia State
| December 7, 2016 | 8:20 pm | Analysis, Donald Trump, Economy, Fascist terrorism, police terrorism | Comments closed

Source: A socialist in Canada – Writings by Roger Annis

By Chris Hedges, published in his weekly column on Truthdig, Dec 4, 2016

The Mafia State

Systems of governance that are seized by a tiny cabal become mafia states. The early years—Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in the United States—are marked by promises that the pillage will benefit everyone. The later years—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—are marked by declarations that things are getting better even though they are getting worse. The final years—Donald Trump—see the lunatic trolls, hedge fund parasites, con artists, conspiracy theorists and criminals drop all pretense and carry out an orgy of looting and corruption.

The rich never have enough. The more they get, the more they want. It is a disease. CEOs demand and receive pay that is 200 times what their workers earn. And even when corporate executives commit massive fraud, such as the billing of hundreds of thousands of Wells Fargo customers for accounts they never opened, they elude punishment and personally profit. Disgraced CEO John Stumpf left Wells Fargo with a pay package that averages nearly $15 million a year. Richard Fuld received nearly half a billion dollars from 1993 to 2007, a time in which he was bankrupting Lehman Brothers.

The list of financial titans, including Trump, who have profited from a rigged financial system and fraud is endless. Many in the 1 percent make money by using lobbyists and bought politicians to write self-serving laws and rules and by forming unassailable monopolies. They push up prices on products or services these monopolies provide. Or they lend money to the 99 percent and charge exorbitant interest. Or they use their control of government and the courts to ship jobs to Mexico or China, where wages can be as low as 22 cents an hour, and leave American workers destitute. Neoliberalism is state-sponsored extortion. It is a vast, nationally orchestrated Ponzi scheme.

This fevered speculation and mounting inequality, made possible by the two ruling political parties, corroded and destroyed the mechanisms and institutions that permitted democratic participation and provided some protection for workers. Politicians, from Reagan on, were handsomely rewarded by their funders for delivering their credulous supporters to the corporate guillotine. The corporate coup created a mafia capitalism. This mafia capitalism, as economists such as Karl Polanyi and Joseph Stiglitz warned, gave birth to a mafia political system. Financial and political power in the hands of institutions such as Goldman Sachs and the Clinton Foundation becomes solely about personal gain. The Obamas in a few weeks will begin to give us a transparent lesson into how service to the corporate state translates into personal enrichment.

Adam Smith wrote that profits are often highest in nations on the verge of economic collapse. These profits are obtained, he wrote, by massively indebting the economy. A rentier class, composed of managers at hedge funds, banks, financial firms and other companies, makes money not by manufacturing products but from the control of economic rents. To increase profits, lenders, credit card companies and others charge higher and higher interest rates. Or they use their monopolies to gouge the public. The pharmaceutical company Mylan, in a classic example, raised the price of an epinephrine auto-injector used to treat allergy reactions from $57 in 2007 to about $500.

These profits are counted as economic growth. But this is a fiction, a sleight of hand, like unemployment statistics or the consumer price index, used to mask the speculative shell game.

“The head of Goldman Sachs came out and said that Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world,” the economist Michael Hudson told me. “That’s why they’re paid what they are. The concept of productivity in America is income divided by labor. So if you’re Goldman Sachs and you pay yourself $20 million a year in salary and bonuses, you’re considered to have added $20 million to GDP, and that’s enormously productive.”

“We’re talking with tautology,” said Hudson, the author of “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.” “We’re talking with circular reasoning here. So the issue is whether Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and predatory pharmaceutical firms actually add product or whether they’re just exploiting other people. That’s why I used the word ‘parasites’ in my book’s title. People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it’s much more complicated. The parasite can’t simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn’t realize the parasite’s there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host’s brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done. It depicts itself as part of the economy. Not as a wrapping around it, not as external to it, but actually the part that’s helping the body grow, and that actually is responsible for most of the growth. But in fact it’s the parasite that is taking over the growth.”

“The result is an inversion of classical economics,” Hudson said. “It turns Adam Smith upside down. It says what the classical economists said was unproductive parasitism actually is the real economy. And that the parasites are labor and industry that get in the way of what the parasite wants, which is to reproduce itself, not help the host, that is, labor and capital.”

The established elites dislike Trump because he is gauche, vulgar and boorish. He is not part of the refined group of mandarins trained to become plutocrats in Ivy League universities and business schools. He never mastered the cloying patina of refinement and carefully calibrated rhetoric of our courtier class.

Trump and his coterie of half-wits, criminals, racists and deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s novels “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion.” The Snopeses rose up out of the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family—which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality—are fictional representations of the scum we have elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the ethos of modern capitalism Faulkner warned us against.

“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”

“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”

The Snopes-like mentality of our president-elect is portrayed in a documentary movie, “The Queen of Versailles,” about another sleazy developer. The film, by Lauren Greenfield, chronicles the tawdry and insatiable greed of David Siegel and his ditzy trophy wife, Jackie, who is three decades younger, and their quest to build one of the largest private residences in the United States, a 90,000-square-foot mansion modeled after Versailles. Siegel and his wife, who once dated Trump, are fervent Trump supporters. Siegel, like Trump, is a barely literate philistine. He, like the president-elect, sponsored beauty pageants, was accused of sexual assault, made his money through high-pressure sales tactics and had access to hundreds of millions in bank loans. And he, like Trump, uses bankruptcy or the threat of bankruptcy to protect his wealth. And like our next president he has a volatile and vicious temper.

“The great Roman historians Livy and Plutarch blamed the decline of the Roman Empire on the creditor class being predatory, and the latifundia,” Hudson said. “The creditors took all the money, and would just buy more and more land, displacing the other people. The result in Rome was a dark age, and that can last a very long time. The dark age is what happens when the rentiers take over.”

“If you look back in the 1930s, Leon Trotsky said that fascism was the inability of the socialist parties to come forth with an alternative,” Hudson said. “If the socialist parties and media don’t come forth with an alternative to this neo-feudalism, you’re going to have a rollback to feudalism. But instead of the military taking over the land, as occurred with the Norman Conquest, you take over the land financially. Finance has become the new mode of warfare.”

“You can achieve the takeover of land and the takeover of companies by corporate raids,” he said. “The Wall Street vocabulary is one of conquest and wiping out. You’re having a replay in the financial sphere of what feudalism was in the military sphere.”

What comes next, history has shown, will not be pleasant. A cruel and morally bankrupt elite, backed by the organs of state security and law enforcement, will, as the Eupatridae did in sixth-century-B.C. Athens, bankrupt the citizenry through state-sponsored theft, war, austerity and debt peonage. They will reduce workers to the status of serfs or slaves. The most benign dissent will be criminalized and crushed. America’s Snopes-like elites have no external or internal constraints. They are barbarians. We will remove them from power or enter a new dark age.

Chris Hedges is a U.S. writer, author and RT.com host. His many books include ‘Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt’ (2015); ‘Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt’ (2012); and ‘The Death of the Liberal Class’ (2010). He is the host of the weekly program on RT.com, ‘On Contact’. The latest episode of ‘On Contact’ aired on December 4, 2016: Looking back at the 1971 Attica prison uprising and the ‘poisoning’ of the U.S. penal system, with guest Heather Ann Thompson, author of the newly published ‘Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy’.

La Riva: Solidarity with Standing Rock!

http://icp.sol.org.tr/americana/la-riva-solidarity-standing-rock

NODAPL_16301715940389.jpg

The Gloria La Riva for President Campaign stands in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock and calls for an end to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. La Riva calls for freedom for all those who have been arrested at Standing Rock including the 141 people arrested on Oct. 27; all charges should be dropped. Millions of people witnessed the arrests over social media; the police have exposed themselves as protectors of private property and the oil companies, and as agents of ongoing colonialism.

October 27 started out normally in the camps surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline and Standing Rock Sioux tribal lands. People had begun morning prayers and activities but police began to converge on an area outside of the main camp known as Treaty Camp or bridge 1806.

By 11 am the police were reinforced with light armored vehicles and riot police. As resistance increased, the police attacked the people with concussion grenades, bean bag rounds, rubber bullets, and other weaponry. .

Police actions included attacking people in a sweat lodge at gunpoint and shooting at horseback riders via ATV. This resulted in a horse being so severely injured it had to be put down.

As protectors continue to stand up for clean water and energy, the voices of Native people have been heard across the world. The UN has called for the United States to end the Dakota Access Pipeline and people in many major cities are gathering in support of the NO DAPL stance of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. We can’t drink oil, keep it in the soil!

Just curious, what is to be done about the prisoners at Guantanamo?
| October 6, 2016 | 8:27 pm | Cuba, police terrorism, political struggle | Comments closed

By James Thompson

There has been a lot of discussion about the projected devastation of hurricane Matthew. Some reports indicate that essential personnel have been evacuated from Guantanamo naval base in Cuba. Those reports suggest that only personnel assigned with the task of defending the naval base remain. One must ask if their task is to defend Guantanamo, which is located in Cuba, from the Cuban people?

Another question comes to mind which is “What is to become of the detainees at the prison at Guantanamo?” Some may ask what difference does it make. However, if any semblance of humanitarianism is left in the USA, the safety and humane treatment of foreign prisoners should not be taken lightly.

It will be interesting to see if news reports in the coming days address this important international legal question.

PHill1917@comcast.net

US Political Prisoner Abu-Jamal Sues Prison for Denying Life-Saving Medicine
22:06 06.10.2016(updated 00:49 07.10.2016)
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Former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal has leveled a federal lawsuit against officials in the Pennsylvania prison system for denying treatment to him for hepatitis C, which has reached life-threatening levels. On September 30, Abu-Jamal sued five high-ranking officials in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PDOC) Bureau of Health Care Services, including the physician who treated him, PDOC Secretary John Wetzel and private, for-profit medical contractor Correct Care Solutions. Abu-Jamal states that “he has requested that he be provided with antiviral medication that would cure his disease but the defendants have denied that treatment,” according to Courthouse News Service. The writer and activist, jailed since 1982, said that he was diagnosed with hepatitis in 2012, developing a “severe skin rash” that covered 70 percent of his body by February 2015, confining him to a wheelchair. Abu-Jamal was given only topical creams, which resulted in an allergic reaction. Abu-Jamal is a journalist and activist, formerly with the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. In 1982 he was sentenced to death for the murder of Philadelphia police officer David Faulkner, a sentence that was later commuted to life without parole after public outcry. The morning of March 30, 2015, Abu-Jamal was rushed to intensive care after going into diabetic shock and losing consciousness. He had a glucose level of 600. He said that, after being released, prison medical staff did not take “any steps to investigate whether the hepatitis C may be the cause of the rash and/or other medical issues.” A grievance submitted in April protesting poor medical treatment was denied, and Abu-Jamal was subsequently hospitalized in May. Even after constant requests and blood work revealing that his hepatitis was chronic, the writer was still denied treatment. According to the complaint, “On several occasions between late July 2015 and September 2015, plaintiff requested from his treating physicians that his hepatitis C be treated with either Harvoni or Sovaldi, the two antiviral medications. The physicians told him that the matter was out of their hands, that the DOC was not treating anyone with the antivirals because of the medications’ cost.” In August, a federal judge denied an injunction request from Abu-Jamal that would have forced the PDOC to supply him with Harvoni, which costs roughly $90,000 for the full-treatment regimen. However, the court found that denying treatment “prolong[s] the suffering of those who have been diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C and allow[s] the progression of the disease to accelerate so that it presents a greater threat of cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma [i.e. liver cancer], and death of the inmate with such disease’ in violation of the Eighth Amendment,” according to the Abolitionist Law Center. The ALC said that Abu-Jamai is not alone, as some 5,400 inmates in the PDOC are estimated have hepatitis C. Less than one percent receive treatment, despite the fact that in recent years several medications have entered the US market that cure the disease in a matter of weeks. Mumia is currently being held at State Correctional Institution Mahanoy, a medium-security jail in Frackville, Pennsylvania.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/20161006/1046075678/mumia-sues-for-poor-treatment.html

US Government ‘Violates Human Rights of Black People Every Single Day’
| September 22, 2016 | 7:49 pm | Analysis, police terrorism, political struggle, Struggle for African American equality | Comments closed
21:27 22.09.2016
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Police and government corruption is endemic in the US, where politicians should work to tackle human rights abuses at home rather than lecturing other countries, Civil rights activist Toni Sanders, founder of the group Think MOOR (Movements of Organized Revolutionaries), told Radio Sputnik. On Tuesday afternoon a 43-year-old black man, Keith Lamont Scott, was shot dead by police in Charlotte, North Carolina. The shooting sparked protests from the local community, who dispute the police version of events. The local police claim that Scott was armed and “posed an imminent deadly threat to officers” who shot him. However, Scott’s family insist he was unarmed and reading a book in his car at the time of the shooting. On Tuesday and Wednesday residents of Charlotte took to the streets in protest at Scott’s death, and North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency and ordered the deployment of the National Guard and highway patrols after the protests turned violent. One protestor is in critical condition in hospital after being shot, and 12 police officers were injured after protests on Wednesday. Civil rights activist Toni Sanders, founder of the group Think MOOR (Movements of Organized Revolutionaries), told Radio Sputnik that the quick deployment of the National Guard is another sign of disparity in the treatment of African-Americans. “Look how quick they declared a state of emergency in North Carolina and brought the National Guard in. We had (Hurricane) Katrina, which was a major natural disaster over in Louisiana and all those people were stranded on rooftops, thousands of people died, it took eight days for the National Guard to even do anything,” Sanders said. Sanders said that the protests are a response to the shooting and inadequate police investigations into previous police shootings of unarmed black men. “If you commit a crime and then I tell you to investigate yourself, what can I expect except corruption? You don’t want to be found guilty, you don’t want to be liable, so what are you going to do? You’re going to make up evidence and you’re going to try to find ways to get yourself off, which is what they do every single time,” Sanders said. Sanders made a radical proposal for black people to tackle police brutality against them. This includes setting up new educational, economic and security institutions to rival those of the US government. “One of the things I advocate for, honestly, is for black people to get their own schools, start growing gardens and feeding their own communities. To stop depending on the economic structure of the US, because we need to withdraw our funds and keep our money in our communities.” “We mean community policing, that is what is going to empower us and keep us safe. The government is corrupt. The government here in the US is trash, and they tell these other countries, ‘you’re violating human rights, we need to invade your country,’ and right here in their own territory they are violating the human rights of black people every single day,” Sanders said.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/20160922/1045605392/us-government-human-rights.html

Dakota Access Pipeline Company Attacks Native American Protesters with Dogs & Pepper Spray
| September 5, 2016 | 9:15 pm | Analysis, police terrorism, political struggle, Struggle for Native American equality | Comments closed

Texas Cop Slams 12-Year-Old Girl to the Ground (VIDEO)
| April 7, 2016 | 7:58 pm | Local/State, police terrorism, political struggle | Comments closed

03:52 08.04.2016Get short URL

A video posted online of a police officer using absurdly excessive force on a 12-year-old student in San Antonio, Texas, has resulted in the suspension of the cop.

Brandon Brooks

Texas Cop Suspended After Assaulting Black Teens With Gun at Pool Party (Video)

According to media reports, the officer, breaking up a confrontation between the girl and another student, stated that he was kicked by the girl. The officer then grabbed her from behind, spun her around and propelled her head sharply to the concrete floor, rendering the child briefly unconscious.

An investigation has been launched on the officer’s actions. The officer was placed on paid administrative leave after officials saw the video of the incident.

“We need to find out all the details as to what occurred, but I can also say that we will not tolerate excessive force in this district,” said Leslie Price, San Antonio Independent School District spokeswoman.

The use of excessive force by police officers remains an ongoing problem in the United States. Last year, a sheriff’s deputy in South Carolina was fired after he was caught on video knocking a student out of her classroom chair and on to the floor.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/us/20160408/1037671702/Texas-Cop-Slams-Girl-Ground.html#ixzz45ByDvVtW