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Tag: Police brutality

  • Comply or Die: The Only Truly Compliant Person in a Police State Is a Dead One

    by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 23rd, 2021

    If you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

    — Officer with the Los Angeles Police Department

    Americans aren’t dying at the hands of police because of racism.

    For that matter, George Floyd didn’t die because he was black and the cop who killed him is white.

    Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, died because America is being overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

    These warrior cops may get paid by the citizenry, but they don’t work for us and they certainly aren’t operating within the limits of the U.S. Constitution. As retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis warns:

    The system is corrupt. Police really are oppressing not only the black community, but also the whites. They’re an oppressive organization now controlled by the one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.

    Now, not all cops are guns for hire, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the populace.

    However, the unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that the good cops—the ones who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace—are increasingly being outnumbered by those who believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens.

    It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

    Indeed, if you ask police and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with law enforcement, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings during encounters with the police.

    In other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, it doesn’t matter if a cop is in the wrong, it doesn’t matter if you’re being treated with less than the respect you deserve: if you want to emerge from a police encounter with your life and body intact, then you’d better comply, submit, obey orders, respect authority and generally do whatever a cop tells you to do.

    In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”

    This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.

    This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

    As a result, Americans as young as 4 years old are being leg shackled, handcuffed, tasered and held at gun point for not being quiet, not being orderly and just being childlike—i.e., not being compliant enough.

    Americans as old as 95 are being beaten, shot and killed for questioning an order, hesitating in the face of a directive, and mistaking a policeman crashing through their door for a criminal breaking into their home—i.e., not being submissive enough.

    And Americans of every age and skin color are continuing to die at the hands of a government that sees itself as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.

    At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences.

    The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

    Warrior cops—trained in the worst case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.

    Worse, militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces. Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.)

    If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.

    Specifically, what we’re dealing with today is a skewed shoot-to-kill mindset in which police, trained to view themselves as warriors or soldiers in a war, whether against drugs, or terror, or crime, must “get” the bad guys—i.e., anyone who is a potential target—before the bad guys get them.

    This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat has all but guaranteed that unarmed Americans will keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

    Consider just some of the scenarios in which unarmed Americans have been shot and killed by police:

    Killed for taking public transit. Oscar Grant, traveling home on a train packed with New Year’s Eve revelers, was pulled off the train while police investigated reports of fighting, shoved against a wall, punched in the head, kneed in the face, then shot and killed by police while lying face down on a train platform.

    Killed for standing in a “shooting stance.” In California, police opened fire on and killed a mentally challenged—unarmed—black man within minutes of arriving on the scene, allegedly because he removed a vape smoking device from his pocket and took a “shooting stance.”

    Killed for holding a cell phone. Police in Arizona shot a man who was running away from U.S. Marshals after he refused to drop an object that turned out to be a cellphone.

    Killed for displaying air fresheners from a rearview mirror. Daunte Wright was shot and killed during a traffic stop over an expired registration and a state law prohibiting motorists from hanging air fresheners and other items from their rearview mirrors. Police claimed to have mistakenly used a gun instead of a Taser.

    Killed for behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat. Responding to a domestic disturbance call, Chicago police shot and killed 19-year-old college student Quintonio LeGrier who had reportedly been experiencing mental health problems and was carrying a baseball bat around the apartment where he and his father lived.

    Killed for opening the front door. Bettie Jones, who lived on the floor below LeGrier, was also fatally shot—this time, accidentally—when she attempted to open the front door for police.

    Killed for being a child in a car pursued by police. Jeremy David Mardis, six years old and autistic, died after being shot multiple times by Louisiana police in the head and torso. Police opened fire on the car—driven by Jeremy’s father, Chris Few, who was also shot—and then allegedly lied, claiming that they were attempting to deliver an outstanding warrant, that Few resisted arrest, that he shot at police (no gun was found), and that he tried to ram his car into a police cruiser. Body camera footage refuted the police’s claims.

    Killed for approaching police with a metal spoon. In Alabama, police shot and killed a 50-year-old man who reportedly charged a police officer while holding “a large metal spoon in a threatening manner.”

    Killed for holding a tree branch. Georgia police shot and killed a 47-year-old man wearing only shorts and tennis shoes who, when first encountered, was sitting in the woods against a tree, only to start running towards police holding a stick in an “aggressive manner.”

    Killed for crawling around naked. Atlanta police shot and killed an unarmed man who was reported to have been “acting deranged, knocking on doors, crawling around on the ground naked.” Police fired two shots at the man after he reportedly starting running towards them.

    Killed for hunching over. Responding to a domestic trouble call, multiple officers with the Baltimore County police forced their way inside a home where they proceeded to open fire on an unarmed 41-year-old man who was hunched over in a defensive posture. The man was killed in front of his two young daughters and their mother.

    Killed because a police officer accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his taser. An Oklahoma man suspected of trying to sell an illegal handgun was shot and killed after a 73-year-old reserve deputy inadvertently fired his gun instead of his taser. “Oh! I shot him! I’m sorry!” the deputy cried out.

    Killed for wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey. Donnell Thompson, a mentally disabled 27-year-old described as gentle and shy, was shot and killed after police—searching for a carjacking suspect reportedly wearing similar clothing—encountered him lying motionless in a neighborhood yard. Police “only” opened fire with an M4 rifle after Thompson first failed to respond to their flash bang grenades and then started running after being hit by foam bullets.

    Killed for telling police you lawfully own a firearm. Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop allegedly over a broken tail light. As he was reaching for his license and registration, Castile explained to police that he had a  conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times in the presence of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter.

    Killed for leaving anywhere at all when a police officer pulls up. Deravis Caine Rogers was killed after starting to drive away from an apartment complex right around the same time as a police officer pulled up. Despite the fact that the police officer had no reason to believe Rogers was a threat or was suspected of any illegal activity, the officer fired into Rogers’ passenger side window.

    Killed for driving while deaf. In North Carolina, a state trooper shot and killed 29-year-old Daniel K. Harris—who was deaf—after Harris initially failed to pull over during a traffic stop.

    Killed for shopping at Walmart. John Crawford III was shot and killed by police responding to reports of an armed man in an Ohio Walmart. Crawford, shopping and talking on his phone, had been holding an unpackaged pellet gun that had been sitting on a store shelf.

    Killed for being homeless. Los Angeles police shot an unarmed homeless man after he failed to stop riding his bicycle and then proceeded to run from police.

    Killed for brandishing a shoehorn. John Wrana, a 95-year-old World War II veteran, lived in an assisted living center, used a walker to get around, and was shot and killed by police who mistook the shoehorn in his hand for a 2-foot-long machete and fired multiple beanbag rounds from a shotgun at close range.

    Killed for playing in a park. Tamir Rice was shot and killed in an Ohio park when a police officer mistook the 12-year-old’s toy airsoft pistol for a real gun.

    Killed for having your car break down on the road. Terence Crutcher, unarmed and black, was shot and killed by Oklahoma police after his car broke down on the side of the road. Crutcher was shot in the back while walking towards his car with his hands up.

    Killed for being in your own apartment. Botham Jean was shot and killed when a police officer entered Jean’s unlocked apartment, mistaking it for her own and mistaking Jean for a burglar.

    Killed for staying up late. Atatiana Jefferson, up late playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew, was shot and killed after neighbors who were concerned about that the lights were on in the house asked police to do a wellness check.

    Killed for holding a garden hose. California police were ordered to pay $6.5 million after they opened fire on a man holding a garden hose, believing it to be a gun. Douglas Zerby was shot 12 times and pronounced dead on the scene.

    This is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

    Making matters worse, when these officers, who have long since ceased to be peace officers, violate their oaths by bullying, beating, tasering, shooting and killing their employers—the taxpayers to whom they owe their allegiance—they are rarely given more than a slap on the hands before resuming their patrols.

    This lawlessness on the part of law enforcement, an unmistakable characteristic of a police state, is made possible in large part by police unions which routinely oppose civilian review boards and resist the placement of names and badge numbers on officer uniforms; police agencies that abide by the Blue Code of Silence, the quiet understanding among police that they should not implicate their colleagues for their crimes and misconduct; prosecutors who treat police offenses with greater leniency than civilian offenses; courts that sanction police wrongdoing in the name of security; and legislatures that enhance the power, reach and arsenal of the police, and a citizenry that fails to hold its government accountable to the rule of law.

    Indeed, not only are cops protected from most charges of wrongdoing—whether it’s shooting unarmed citizens (including children and old people), raping and abusing young women, falsifying police reports, trafficking drugs, or soliciting sex with minors—but even on the rare occasions when they are fired for misconduct, it’s only a matter of time before they get re-hired again.

    Much of the “credit” for shielding these rogue cops goes to influential police unions and laws providing for qualified immunity, police contracts that “provide a shield of protection to officers accused of misdeeds and erect barriers to residents complaining of abuse,” state and federal laws that allow police to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing, and rampant cronyism among government bureaucrats.

    It’s happening all across the country.

    This is how perverse justice in America has become.

    If you’re starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, intimidated and fearful for your life and your property, you should be, because as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only truly compliant, submissive and obedient citizen in a police state is a dead one.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2021 at 10:16am and is filed under Police brutality, Police militarization.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gestapo Switzerland

    In the morning of 5 February 2021, a distinguished gentleman, professional, in his early 70s, impeccably dressed in suit and tie (no name shall be mentioned) – was running to catch an 8 AM train at the Geneva principal railway station, Cornavin.

    He was in a hurry not to miss the train, and was just about to put on the obligatory mask, when two gendarmes grabbed him, one on each arm, and told him about mask obligation. He responded that he was just about to put it on – which was visible to the police, as he held a mask in his hand – and that he had to run to catch the train.

    The policemen harassed him, despite the fact that he had a medical certificate that dispensed him from wearing a mask for serious health reasons which he explained to them. He is 72 years old and had in the past two lung embolisms and has breathing difficulties. He also has hearing aids. The strings of the mask infringe on the effectiveness of the hearing aid.

    He kept pleading with them that he had to go and needed to catch the train. No chance, they didn’t let go. He couldn’t move his arms. They held him tight, pressed him against a wall. They asked for his ID. The gentleman gave them his wallet to look for it. He got nervous and kept repeating that he would put the mask on, but could not miss the train, that they please would let him go.

    Finally, they got the ID and released them, took all the details from the ID and told him that he would get a hefty fine for shouting at the police. This gentleman, whom I know, would certainly not shout at the police, maybe getting upset and speaking with a firm voice, but not shouting.

    In the meantime, many similar cases have come to my attention, including one where a medical doctor issued a mask dispensation to a patient for chronic breathing difficulties. The person was brutally arrested in a train for not wearing a mask despite the medical certificate. He was told that he will be summoned by the Court.

    In another case, mass brutality on children was ordered by a municipality in Switzerland sending a letter to the parents requesting them that all school-age children, including from Kindergarten, had to be tested for covid-19 within 24 hours. In the meantime, everybody, including parents had to remain in quarantine.

    The case is not unique. It is now in the hands of lawyers. What they will be able to achieve in a Gestapo state is unclear.

    This, dear reader – I hope many of you in Switzerland – is no longer a question of health or reason, but only of obedience. It marks the beginning of a fascist tyranny.

    As a side note, the German newspaper “Die Welt am Sonntag” just revealed today that the German Ministry of the Interior had “hired” scientists to prepare studies and reports for the German Government to spread fear and to justify repressive measures against people and society in the name of covid. See 8 minute video in German.  If this happens in Germany, it may be strongly suspected to also happen in Switzerland.

    Police behavior of this kind is exactly compatible with the Swiss anti-terror law under which children of 12 years of age could be arrested, and police without any evidence, just “suspicion”, can enter any house and arrest “terror suspects”. In other words, anybody who voices his/her opposition to the ever-increasing oppression under the pretext of covid-health protection, may be considered a terrorist.  A people’s referendum against it has been launched and will presumably be voted on in June 2021.

    The “anti-terror law” – if final approval goes through – would be the worst and most stringent law against human and civil rights in the western world, even surpassing the US Patriot Act.

    People wake up.

    Such atrocities may soon become common place.

    The more we accept these inhuman police – and maybe soon military – infringements on our human and civil rights, the more such atrocities will become law, either imposed and approved by the government, or exerted as ‘common law’.

    Dear fellow citizens do not accept this turn to fascism, unfortunately to various degrees already visible in many western countries.

    Protest!

    Resist!

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 13th, 2021 at 12:04pm and is filed under COVID-19, Fascism, Fearmongering, Germany, Human Rights, Masks, Militarism, Police brutality, Resistance, Switzerland.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Questions In the Wake of the Beer Belly Putsch

    After seeing some very strange, amnesiac discussion threads on social media, I have a few words to consign to the screen.

    Naturally, social media and the media media are all going nuts since the more or less successful far right siege of the Capitol.  There are a variety of talking points that I’ve been hearing that I have some thoughts on.

    First of all, in one of Trump’s various post-siege missives, he assured his followers that the “our incredible journey is only just beginning,” meaning his political ambitions, and the future of the far right.  He’s getting on in years and evidently not in the greatest health, but if he lives long enough, my guess is he’ll start a TV network, a social media network, and a new political party, which will soon eclipse the Republican Party, and become the main competition for the Democrats.  Whoever planted explosives at the headquarters of both the RNC and the DNC during the event clearly agrees with Trump’s coming rejection of the two major parties.

    The most relevant historical anecdote in terms of what just happened in DC could be the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.  Ten years before Hitler came to power, he and two thousand other fascists tried to seize the reigns of state in Munich, but the police fought them back, and their effort failed, with 16 dead.  It was the main event early in Hitler’s career that propelled him to far more widespread recognition, and eventually, to become dictator.  Obviously, Trump is already in power, sort of, so it’s a very imperfect historical reflection, but still very relevant.

    This was an event that Trump or his descendants will be able to use to their benefit.  There weren’t many martyrs, but there will presumably be trials and prison sentences, as there were after the 1923 putsch in Munich, and these will be used to great propaganda advantage.  Two different folks I know independently came up with the term Beer Belly Putsch for this one.

    On a separate historical note, loads of politicians keep making bizarre comparisons to the torching of the Congress by British forces in the War of 1812, such as Senator Cory Booker.  Senator Booker had lofty words about how the last time the Congress was attacked by people with guns, it was the British Navy, unlike this attack, which we brought upon ourselves.  But actually, we brought the other one upon ourselves as well.

    As with every other war the US has ever been in, with the partial exception of the European theater of World War 2, the War of 1812 was started by the US.  The British colony of Canada was harboring escaped African slaves, and the US government, dominated as it was by slave-owners, didn’t like that at all.  And so the US sent in their military forces, such as they were back then, to burn down the Canadian city of York (now Toronto).  Government buildings as well as residential homes were burned to the ground by the marauders from the US.

    Two years later, in response to this cross-border attack, the British Navy sailed down the Potomac River and burned down the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House, leaving all residential houses untouched.  A very measured military response, you could say.  But it was most definitely brought down upon the nation by US policy.

    But what seems to be especially dominating the conversation lately revolves around questions of security, or the lack thereof, at the Capitol.

    Most of the comparisons being made are between the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer and yesterday’s siege on the Capitol.  While these comparisons are definitely relevant, they can be misleading on their own, because they can give the impression that police only crack down heavily, in large numbers, with severe brutality, when the protesters are mostly Black.  If your main experience with protests have been from 2014 to the present, and have mainly involved Black Lives Matter, this would be a very sensible conclusion to reach.

    So I thought I’d just share a few brief descriptions of protests that I have physically participated in over the years, for a little bit of a broader context than we’re getting on TV.

    I’ve been to many protests like one I attended as a teenager, led by Jesse Jackson circa 1982, where we marched around on a permitted route in DC, a diverse group of tens of thousands, mostly people who vote Democrat, where everything was peaceful, no one committed civil disobedience, the police were not numerous and sometimes even nice, basically what you imagine a permitted march is supposed to be like.

    The first time I witnessed police brutality was in San Francisco sometime around 1987 at a protest against US support for the right-wing dictatorship in El Salvador.  Several hundred mostly white people in our twenties and thirties wanted to shut down the Federal Building for the day through civil disobedience, so the police preempted us by setting up barricades around the building and defending the barricades with clubs.  People pulling at the barricades were beaten from the other side of the barricades every second or so.  Then we discovered that about 10% of our ranks were actually made up of undercover cops, and people who we thought were fellow protesters began to savagely attack anyone on the street.  I saw four cops pulling in different directions on each limb of a young white woman that day.  The police were so brutal, the event made national headlines, briefly.

    In Washington, DC on April 16th, 2000, tens of thousands of folks associated with the global justice movement succeeded partially in shutting down the biannual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, by surrounding ninety blocks of the city in a human chain.  I saw police vans rev their engines and plow into the human chain, nearly killing young, mostly white college students that made up the majority of the people surrounding the ninety-block area, which the police had fenced off with 10′-high fences.

    A few months later in Quebec City, tens of thousands of protesters came to the city, again with the intent of shutting down meetings of the global elite through mass civil disobedience and other tactics, such as launching teddy bears from a home-made catapult.  In Quebec City, the police used so much tear gas against us that I had a welt on my eye for six months afterwards.  The city had spent millions of dollars to wall off the walled city even more, with a big metal wall around 20′ high surrounding the old stone walls of North America’s only walled city.  But they still saw fit to disperse such massive amounts of tear gas that it got into the meetings of the global elite within the walls, and they caused thousands of local Quebec City residents to flee the area.  I vividly recall the fear on the faces of the children clutching their dolls, holding hands with their parents, walking down the hill, away from the city center, towards safety.

    Two years later in November, 2003, in Miami, they again walled off downtown with high fences in preparation for their meetings.  Again, thousands of riot police attacked thousands of people who had come with the perhaps vague idea that they might hope to shut down the meetings, which never had a chance, because of the overwhelming and overwhelmingly brutal police presence.  If you did not get hit by a plastic-coated steel bullet or inhale copious amounts of tear gas, you were very lucky.  On a tour of the east coast I did after Miami, I saw welts on my friends bodies of every possible size and description.

    At an anti-war protest in New York City in 2004, they wouldn’t let us march.  Half a million people or more clogged the city streets, penned in by countless steel pens erected by Bloomberg’s cops.  Later in the same year, at the Republican National Convention in New York City, they allowed us to march, but not to have a rally.  And when several hundred people marched without a permit in the course of the RNC events then I was among them, and barely escaped mass arrest, when the police boxed us in with their netting and held everyone there who didn’t slip out at the right time.  I’ve seen many mass arrests of hundreds of mostly white people.  Sometimes they hold everyone over the weekend, like they did to 600 mostly white youth in DC on April 15th, 2000.  I was there for that, too.

    Randomly skipping ahead, there were protests at the G20 meetings in 2009 in Pittsburgh, around ten thousand people in attendance at the peak.  At one point a collection of a couple hundred mostly white college students were having an unpermitted meeting on a college campus, outdoors, when for no apparent reason the police announced the campus was locked down, and they began to systematically attack anyone who was there, and not inside a building.  The buildings were locked, so anyone who didn’t get in to one in time was running away from the campus for their lives.  Police were roving around, randomly clubbing anyone they saw.  I saw them knock a white woman off her bicycle very violently.  A cop clubbed me in the back and nearly knocked me over, but I kept running.  I can still feel the impact of his club on my back, as easily as I can feel the whiplash I got from a car accident I was in several years ago.

    These are just a few samples to give a little flavor of how the police mobilize when faced with the prospect of ten or twenty thousand mostly young white people who want to commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, for the most part, such as sitting in the street.  They spent upwards of a hundred million dollars on security in Pittsburgh.  The following G20 in Toronto in 2010, I was there, too, they spent $1 billion on security.  And we’re talking about totally militarized security.  They had loads of armored vehicles at those aforementioned protests in Quebec City, Miami, Pittsburgh, and Toronto.  Total robocop gear everywhere, no badges or faces to be seen, only armor and clubs and amplified voices in armored vehicles to go along with them.

    Practices of the police commissioners in charge of running the show at each of these events included little encouragement for people to peacefully protest and exercise their First Amendment rights or any of that bullshit.  What they did instead was terrorize their communities, spread fear in the press, and spread fear among the ranks of their officers.  They showed their cops videos implying that some of us coming to the protest had killed cops in the past (which was false).  They systematically encouraged residents in a poor, mostly Black neighborhood near downtown Miami to freely rob protesters.  Instead, people in the Overtown neighborhood went out of their way to help protect us from the police, harboring fugitives, you could say.

    I was also in Ferguson in 2014, a couple weeks after Michael Brown was killed, and, yes, I saw all the same stuff there in terms of militarized police forces responding to what was overwhelmingly nonviolent civil disobedience, in the form of people marching in the streets.  And over the past months I’ve seen lots more of that sort of thing here in Portland, with friends young and middle-aged, white and Black, suffering all descriptions of injuries at the hands of a savage police force.

    This is a viciously white supremacist, institutionally racist system, to be sure — it has been since the foundations of this once largely slave-based economy, and systems of racist oppression have continued ever since.  However, for the powers-that-be, the enemies are many.  The race-based system we have here is set up to divide and conquer the population in so many ways — and it succeeds in this endeavor.  The clubs come down against people of color just for being people of color, no doubt.  But if you think for a moment that white people are free to commit acts of civil disobedience or violence against the authorities, if you think they just let us do whatever we want if we want to shut down a meeting of the global elite, think again.  Usually they are much better prepared than they were on January 6th, 2021, whether the folks trying to shut them down are people of color or not.

    The primary difference, in this case, was not that the group of far right protesters, riots, coup-attempters, insurrectionists, or whatever you want to call them, were white, but the fact that they were from the far right.  This accounts for the lack of security preparation for this rally, which was planned in advance, like most of the aforementioned meetings of the elite — planned in advance because the joint session of Congress was, too.  And it also accounts for the fact that people were engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the police and not getting shot.  No group of white anarchists has ever tried to do what they did.  If we did, we’d be shot.

    And in case I need to explain why the far right get systematically treated with kid gloves, or just ignored entirely, when they want to have a rally in Portland or Charlottesville or Washington, long before this attack on the Capitol?

    Because, as we are learning daily with new revelations about who was involved with the Capitol siege, the police largely are already on their side.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2021 at 9:28am and is filed under Activism, Police brutality, Police militarization, Protests, Resistance, White Supremacy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • COVID-19 Behavior Policing: Rehearsal for Crackdown on Dissent Ahead of Climate Collapse?

    Newspeak, Trumpism and conspiracy theories

    News Junkie Post has a policy of zero tolerance for conspiracy theories. With a story as big and global as the COVID-19 pandemic, alternative narratives from conspiracy theorists were bound to happen. Like most news outlets, big or small, News Junkie Post‘s main focus in 2020 was the pandemic. Our Co-Editor-in-Chief, Haitian born microbiologist Dr. Dady Chery, superbly focused on and explained the science; our Indian Editor Imtiaz Akhtar gave us a heart felt testimony from Calcutta under lockdown. For my part, I handled the sociological, political and economical implications of a grossly mismanaged global crisis. As opposed to many, we covered the pandemic in a clinical and analytical way, without falling into the macabre body counts or the assumption that vaccines would be perfect silver bullets. We tried, with humility, to keep our eyes on the unpredictable shifts of a constantly moving target.

    In the Trump era, soon to fade away in our rear view mirror, catering to border line conspiracy theory narratives has become rampant. This phenomenon has deeply impacted people’s perception of reality, not only in the United States, but worldwide. Dismissal of information, valid or not, as fake news is commonplace. This notion has become so insidious that it has even entered, ad verbatim in English, France’s news outlets lexicons. Needless to say, and in accordance with Orwell newspeak, depending on the location or ideological orientation, the fake news for some are the real news for others.

    In our Orwellian kaleidoscope, figments of the imagination’s fictional mirages claim to be anchored in reality. In brief, the soon to be defunct Trump era has taught us that reality is a lot stranger than fiction; that propagandists of all stripes can be duly amplified to the dubious status of global influencers; and the scattered thought processes they promote through social media are a lot more contagious that the nastiest Influenza.

    In the surreal context of the US election aftermath circus, the startup network NewsMax has become Trumpism’s Newspeak vehicle of choice: a Trump propaganda echo chamber where Trump’s die hard supporters, independently of any rationality or moral decency, are told exactly what they want to hear, and therefore are given talking points and ammunition to fuel their simmering anger even more. Needless to say, this crescendo in the realm of the imaginary from their leader, where the elections were rigged and stolen, put into jeopardy the legitimacy of the entire US electoral process. It will be extremely tricky to ensure that the baseless grievances of Trump-hypnotized followers do, in time, heal rather than become festering maggot-infested open social wounds. In a time when the dark forces of the imaginary tromp rationality, the upcoming Biden-Harris administration faces this as its hardest challenge.

    Conspiracy theories such as “the 2020 elections were stolen from Trump by the US Deep State in cahoots with a globalist elite cabal” are a paranoid version of a narrative that contains factual elements. Like any mythology, religion, of course, included, some of the far-fetched assumptions are anchored in the cultural reality of a group’s collective psyche. For example, the toxic notions of purity of blood and Aryan master race were the foundations of the Nazi dogma. In the religious realm, the same can be said of the concept of being the chosen people, invented by the Jewish faith. In both cases, we are dealing with mythologies based on exclusion: the racist and elitist notion that a specific group of humans are above all others, as if humanity has an explicit pecking order, not based on personal merit but linked to almost tribal origins.

    In most conspiracy theories, the imaginary is perceived, almost through some sort of epiphany, as a hard unquestionable truth. Once rationality has ceased to be sociologically and psychologically relevant to enough members of a group, then propaganda, disinformation or religious fundamentalism can convince them that magical thinking is reality. Therefore, the Earth can be flat, a circle can be square, and the love of Jesus can be the best shield against COVID-19. Deep in the QAnon paranoia, a Chinese plague was created by the globalist elite, which is composed of blood sucking elderly pedophiles who might secretly be communists, to depopulate the planet, enslave everyone, and last but not least, make sure the proud patriot crusader against this new world order, Donald Trump, loses his reelection bid.


    A Trumpism myth, which curiously has some international appeal, is that Donald Trump was the champion of sovereign nations fighting against an evil globalist world order. But, as matter of fact, this is completely fabricated, as Trump is, and always was, entirely at the service of global corporate imperialism. Donald Trump attempted to run the United States not as a nationalist, like he claimed in his empty slogans with US citizens’ interests in mind, but as the CEO of America Empire Inc., a subdivision of capitalism global empire. Trumpism, and other brands of populism/neo-fascism are, in essence, disingenuous as they mislead their supporters into believing they are anti-globalist. How could they be when such politicians are, in reality, the obedient servants of mega-corporate interests?

    COVID-19: bonanza for disaster capitalism

    Capitalism, either using the bogus cover of populism or the pseudo humanitarian narrative of neoliberalism of someone like President Macron in France, always operates the same way. The beast is ruthless and has no mercy for the people it exploits, breaks and ultimately destroys. Capitalism‘s gargantuan appetite feeds on people’s miseries. For its engine to stay lubricated and fueled, it needs a colossal amount of human sacrifices. The COVID-19 crisis is no exception. If wars always end up translating into a financial boom, the same can be said about natural disasters like a nice little global pandemic. When you are morally depraved enough to put profit over people, your mindset is always: how could I and my investors make huge benefits from this crisis?

    For COVID, the financial bonanza that has driven world wide stock markets to record highs, while the real economy experiences a depression, has the following factors. Firstly, huge injections of cash were made using a mechanism known as quantitative easing, a euphemism for printing money. This practice, to mitigate an initial crash of the markets, was applied world wide, but considerably more in the US and the EU. Secondly, because of various lockdown measures established in almost all countries since March 2020, there has been a huge boost for online one-stop shopping providers such as Amazon, as well as corporations such as Zoom that facilitate teleconference work. Thirdly, and this is the most important one as it is becoming Wall Street’s Holy Grail, we have, of course, the vaccines!

    Who knows if the vaccine candidates in question will be efficient or have any side effects, but Wall Street and all the financial markets could care less. Moderna might not be a pandemic panacea, but one thing is obvious: it is the new El Dorado! How can you possibly go wrong with a stock that traded at around $20 in January and now trades at more than $130! Now, this is the shot in the arm that global capitalism has longed for. While millions starve, the vaccine boon is a great Christmas bonus for Wall Street!

    While capitalist junkies are getting their fix, and the likes of Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos are becoming trillionaires, millions of ordinary people have died and are dying, millions more have lost their jobs, millions of small businesses worldwide are in dire straights. Countless people all over the world, included in the rich nations, rely on food banks to eat. The obscenity of it all is in our faces, defiantly staring at us. In brief, the COVID-19 crisis has been used by global capitalism and its political surrogates as a giant wealth-concentration machine. One of the stupid empty slogans of the pandemic was “We’re all in this together.” With the unbearable mismanagement of COVID from the get go, what an insult to people’s basic intelligence. No. There is no “together” at all in all this, but just a dog-eat-dog social construct.

    COVID and social inequality fatigue: dissent against police states?

    As more people are becoming aware, at least intuitively, that their governments have failed them or are trying to impose on them drastic measures such as lock-downs, curfews and other arbitrary behavioral rules that have varied throughout the pandemic, a general sense of fear, a collective depression triggered by anxiety and isolation seems to be turning into anger for many. Fear and anger are powerful primal emotions. Unlike fear, which paralyzes, properly channeled anger can be a positive force. Especially collective anger towards incompetent governments that are either not making decisions at all, like Trump did in the US, or are dictating authoritarian measures, like Macron in France, which seem to be based on medical science, but are, in fact, a form of political navigation in a stormy sea, without a compass.

    To add insult to injury, Macron thought it was a good idea to give a little more muscle to his repressive tool kit by passing an extremely police friendly law in France called Loi de Securite Globale. Fortunately, dissent and protest in France are not dead yet, and 10 days after the infamous police-state friendly law was passed, 500,000 people took to the streets despite the pandemic rules curtailing freedom of movements and assembly.

    The COVID-19 crisis will give many governments an opportunity to push some authoritarian policing strategies. After about 20 years under the cover of supposed terrorist threats, the police have become meaner and more omnipresent in most countries’ social landscapes. As most countries ruling classes largely use their police forces as a tool of repression against their own citizens, police brutalities have blossomed almost universally. In fact, the Robocops of global corporate imperialism wear pretty much the same gear and adopt the same brutal techniques. Police forces are in the advance process to become the Praetorian Guard of the global capitalist empire and its billionaire ruling class as well as political surrogates.

    This must be stopped at any cost, the Loi de Securite Globale is a prime example. If the world citizenry do not forcefully and diligently oppose it, hybrid police states could be maintained in place for the much bigger challenges humanity will face once the climate crisis builds its unstoppable momentum. Only a global movement can tackle the enormity of the task at hand, collectively make a stand “by any means necessary,” to quote Malcom X, and get from governments drastic systemic changes, to avoid humanity’s looming collapse.

    • Photographs two, three, five, seven and eight by Gilbert Mercier; photograph six from the archives of Backbone Campaign; photograph nine by Daily Chalkupy; and photograph eleven by Johnny Silvercloud.

    This article was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2020 at 1:22pm and is filed under Activism, Authoritarianism, Capitalism, Civil Disobedience, Climate Change, COVID-19, Deep State, Donald Trump, Economy/Economics, Fearmongering, France, Lockdown, Media, Neoliberalism, Police, Police brutality, Police militarization, President Emmanuel Macron, Repression, Surveillance, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.