Yanno, there are just times when one of these is required:
You’ll remember that in 2015 our Comprador-in-Chief signed an EO declaring that the end of the road had come for po-po departments getting free grenade launchers and tanks with tracks, I reckon. Well, just after the sniper shot five police in Dallas, Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, and Bill Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations told Reuters that they and six other heads of police associations met with Obama at the White House. He agreed to review their requests for reinstating those ever-so-crucial military items to the 1033 program. For one thing, in certain situations, like Dallas, the po-po just couldn’t protect the police state protestors from…the sniper adequately. In some wars on citizens, wheeled tanks just won’t cut it:
Now to be fair, what Reuters reported was that they couldn’t protect themselves adequately, but some reports had claimed the former silliness. Three days later, three cops were killed in Baton Rouge. What do you think his administration will decide?
While speaking to the three authors at Reuters:
“The White House thought this kind of gear was intimidating to people, but they didn’t know the purpose it serves,” said Pasco, noting a grenade launcher can also launch tear gas for crowd control.”
So, see? As a bit of extra enticement, Pasco showed the Prez that grenade launchers are actually not just for launching grenades, but can serve dual purposes. Whew; I’m glad to know that, aren’t you? My tax dollars have more breadth and depth than I’d realized. Reuters made no mention of Obomba’s having curtailed the weaponized drones formerly given to police, however.
“At Obama’s request, White House chief legal counsel Neil Eggleston will review the ban, Pasco and Johnson said.”
Now Glen Ford quoted these figures recently:
“A recent study shows that, under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, enacted in 1997, the value of military weapons, gear and equipment transferred to local cops did not exceed $34 million annually until 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, when it nearly tripled to more than $91 million. By 2014, the year that Michael Brown was shot down – and when the full Congress, including 32 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rejected a bill that would have shut down the 1033 program – Obama was sending three quarters of a billion dollars, more than $787 million a year, in battlefield weaponry to local police departments. In other words, President Obama oversaw a 24-fold (2,400%) increase in the militarization of local police between 2008 and 2014. Even with the scale-back announced in 2015, Obama still managed to transfer a $459 million arsenal to the cops – 14 times as much weapons of terror and death than President Bush gifted to the local police at his high point year of 2008.” [snip]
“Obama came into office with the intention of vastly reinforcing the two-generations-long siege of Black America, but was temporarily chastened by the emergence of a resistance movement during his second term.”
The Obama administration marks a new stage in the street war against Black and brown people – a war he escalated before the emergence of a new Black movement, rather than in response to it. Activists should dismiss, out of hand, the Obama administration’s propaganda about “community policing,” a catch-all for finessing an ever deeper police presence in Black communities. When Obama was earmarking $163 million for U.S. Justice Department “community policing” projects in 2015, he was simultaneously budgeting more than half a billion dollars for militarization of the police. Conclusion: Obama is willing to invest limited funds in cultivating more snitches, but he’s really gung-ho about outfitting the cops with tanks, machine guns and grenade launchers.”
On July 30, the Popular Resistance newsletter reported that police brutality protestors across the US shut down the offices of various police unions, including Oakland, DeeCee, NYC, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and others. “In Chicago, activists using lockboxes and ladders blocked the street in front of the notorious Homan Square CPD torture facility and twelve were arrested.” No media covered the event, as I remember it.
Now back to New York City, on July 25, it was announced by Bill Bratton that in response to the killings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the NYPD would be spending $7.5 million to buy 6,000 bulletproof vests and 20,000 helmets, and plans to buy bulletproof doors for police cars, possibly with bulletproof windows, according to Bratton. Bill de Blasio looks serious and proud in the photos.
Now the following Monday, protestors held the Million March #ShutDownCityHallNYC in an attempt to force DeBlasio to fire Bratton. They also demanded reparations for victims of police brutality, as well as using the NYPD budget to support minority communities.
Let’s let Keegan Stephan tell it:
His replacement? Keegan says:
“As highest ranking uniformed cop, new NYPD commissioner (Jim) O’Neil was essentially in charge of deploying cops on all Broken Windows assignments.”
But where, oh where… will Billy Bratton go? You guessed it:
“Later on Tuesday, the WSJ revealed that he would take a job at Teneo, a global consulting firm with ties to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. Bratton will run a new risk division.” RT also includes some of Bratton’s illustrious career spanning several cities across the nation, from Boston to LAPD, back to NYC (thanks, De Blasio).
In other police state news, and yes: there were a lot more of these:
August 1: ‘Black Mother Killed in Her Home by Baltimore Police, Child Shot’, via Telesur. “Police confirmed they killed Korryn Gaines, who was wanted for traffic violations, after a standoff. Her 5-year-old son was also shot.” Rest in Power, Korryn Gaines, may your family find some way to accept the pain of your assassination.
For some history and facts, you might want to read ‘Why Black Lives Matter Won’t Go Away: a Primer on Systemic Racism in America’, by Anthony DiMaggio
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Movement for Black Lives issues platform and policy briefs
“In response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally, a collective of more than 50 organizations representing thousands of Black people from across the country have come together with renewed energy and purpose to articulate a common vision and agenda.
….
Our hope is that this is both an articulation of our collective aspirations as well as a document that provides tangible resources for groups and individuals doing the work. We recognize that some of the demands in this document will not happen today. But we also recognize that they are necessary for our liberation.
For each of the 30+ policies in the document, we have policy briefs that describe the steps that must be taken to get us closer to our liberation. These briefs include information about whether legislation can happen at the local, state or federal level, information about groups already working on related projects, and resources including model legislation and talking points.”
Link to platform: https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/
Link to About Us: https://policy.m4bl.org/about/
thank you, marym; you are indeed a champion of human rights. i’ve only peeked into your platform link, but ajamu bakaru speaks about ‘dignity’ being one of the least articulated human rights. ‘stop killing us’ would be another.
when mine eyes and soul are a bit more rested in the morning, i’ll love checking out the second link.
” ‘It is an unweeded garden
That is going to seed, only things that are decaying and
Disgusting grow there. That it should come to this!’
~ act 1 scene 2, Hamlet
“They thought they would bury us; but they forgot we were seeds”.
for you and all people of good will in the movement:
thanks again marym. after reading their ‘about’ page, i got sucked into the blackout collective account. gloriously militant they are, save for maybe their comments on electoral politics. ;-)
too many things to bring, but this i’d never known:
If’n ya don’t have ya Bearcat, ya can’t haul yore deer limit back to the city. Or hide yore keggers. C’mon! Can’t the guys have them some fun on their tuff tuff job? Ya want ’em to look like bus drivers?
And them there grenade launchers? They kin chuck a can of PBR right into the fourth row bleachers. Dule purpose it is. Really civilian gear.
‘bus drivers;, lol. fuck me, them po-po unionists never said nuffin’ bout no pabst blue tossin’. do them launchers also tip some cows?
thanks, amigo. will the utah bundy bros. get some, as well?
‘ Movement For Black Lives Releases a Political Agenda That Stretches Far Beyond Police Violence; Janae Bonsu & Montague Simmons say their demands for black power, freedom and justice go beyond reform and require transformative change’
the transcript
cop love & troop love everywhere! well, everywhere in officialdom.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/04/poli-j04.html
maybe all that military ware is cuz cops know folks gonna start shooting back? and who can blame folks for doing so?
ooof. thanks for the exposé; loads in there i hadn’t read about korryn’s history. yep, she made herself the Enemy of the State, didn’t she? sure they had to snuff her out w/o video evidence. the ‘they’re here to kidnap me’ is just heart-rending. traffic warrants, my sweet bum.
what are the figures in baltimore? every family has an average of ten petty warrants, many false or satisfied earlier? it’s just got to be stopped, but i fear is that it well get even worse, and yes, more might just look to defend themselves.
ford says the black is back coalition on self-determination is having a couple national conferences soon, but the last one seemed pretty poorly attended.
i support the right of afghanis to shoot & bomb & capture & expel any & all ISAF personnel. absolutely. (for whatever my lil opinion means, but that’s not my schtick. as woody allen said, i’m not the heroic type. i got beaten up by Quakers.) when a battalion of domestic stormtroopers assault your home, ostensibly for traffic tickets as in the wsws piece, how is that any different? why are the american cops any better than filipino pres. Duterte’s US-supported death squads? or US-backed ISIS?
add in the special ops and mercenaries, and i hear you. but wait: O declared that war over in 2013, ha. ah, well, they’re just keepin’ troops there ta ‘keep the peace’, aren’t they? and train more local troops and police? and er…it seems the insurrectionists are winning, right?
US Military: TRAINING AFGHANI TROOPS FOR SIXTEEN YEARS!
i remember when some NGO went there to see how well the troops were being trained by blackwater, and it turned out they’d never even been shown (or learned, anyway) how to site in their rifles.
love the allen quote. ;-)
yep, and no one knows how many of the po-pos are vets, nor how many should have been diagnosed with ptsd or worse. rania khalek says most police are trained by the IDF now but that seems a bit unlikely, and there are plenty good ol’ merikkan trainers of similar ilk. remember, too, the NYPD has headquarters in israel.
“the thing is…i scream under torture. I’m a screamer. i scream. i wake up screaming.” same quote. yes, nice bed of incest, those kosher pigs & ours got going. the whole world, i think, is fascinated by israel’s methods of ghettoizing a huge chunk of its populace. lots of lessons for the various states. light unto the nations. a la the blackwater thing, there is a goodly portion of “security” which is really security theater. in the “not doing a damn thing” sense.
and a goodly portion that ain’t. but security theater ain’t cheap. how much bling does uncle sam throw at a “natsec event” like the recent conventions? 10, 15 billion? plus tons of gear. lots of training. etc., etc. to manufacture “security” in a “threat environment”. wasting money on this kind of BS is part of the program. got to pony up lots of money just to make the threats look credible. (those ISIS head-chopping scimitars didn’t just GoFund themselves, did they?) then make the response look credible too. all those shields & batons & riot gear…man, the threat must be serious or we wouldn’t be playing all this dress up with live ammo would we? all the behind the scenes data collection wouldn’t be going on if the threat weren’t serious, would it? spying on everything ain’t cheap folks. pay up! it’s a gigantic shake down, ain’t it? the threat manufacture & response.
well, his/their personal life didn’t make his comedy and satire less funny, though, and i confess i stayed away from most of it.
the twittersphere has revived the “we came…he saw…he died” cackling video, by the heir apparent new amerikka’s mother (that sobriquet used to be liz warren’s property, eh?).
security as theater: yes, good on ya. i saw the ‘defense’ budget quoted the other day, but i’ll embarass myself if i try to name it. according to nick turse, the ‘shadow’ military budget usually equals the public one, anyway.
talk about theatrics, though, check out nato’s twitter thang. proof of (intended) superioritity as a cautionary tale, esp. to china and roosia. the photos are mimics of popeye after downing his spinach, bulging arms aloft, striking poses like wrestlers in the WWE. no codpieces, not after dubya’s ‘mission accomplished!’ photo, though.
i guess you may be right that more states are agog at the ease of israel to apartheize (that a word?) palestinians. but regular people seem not tobe amused by it any longer, yes?
surveillance: i haven’t looked at it yet, may or may not, but this came in on the pop resistance newsletter today:
‘Global Surveillance Industry Database Helps Track Big Brother Worldwide’, The US is a top exporter of invasive surveillance tools, according to Privacy International
plus amerika sells the most military weapons and systems; millitary keynesianism of a sort, the bad sort, that is.
“On Monday, France introduced sea patrols on passenger ferries to and from the UK. For the first of these operations, police officers were flown in by helicopter onto a ferry just as it entered French waters.”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/08/05/atta-a05.html
flown in by copter! why go to the movies for action? the whole article is fascinating. it’s the Theater of Menace. non-stop threat displays. Operation Hercules, 600 or whatever troopers paratrooping thru the streets of London…during a knife attack…all of which appears to have resulted in a massive increase of the amount of heat-packing, lead-slinging deputized bacon you can smell in the UK. fatal pork everywhere.
“We are at war,” mayor of london. who’s “we”?
holy crow; thanks for that narrative, and the fine song. the smiths described the zeigesit in 2013; my, my. remember, too, that the UK has what amounts to a total information awareness security state, down to CC cameras just about everywhere. the US congress balked at that what, a decade ago? but has been implementing it just a bit more slowly.
what was described in the ‘evolving/devolving’ police narrative pretty much echoes that CP satire of ‘the dawn of the non-terrorist terrorist’. the figures on the percentages of police calls for ‘crimes’ and the mentally ill ( i forget the other similar category) is only too telling, isn’t it?
but that ‘crazy’ served a purpose via the true aims of the security state: gin up fear of ‘terr’ists’ in order to make the population blithely accept police on every corner, closed borders, searches at check points ,airports (even some caity searches, it seems). what’s beyond orwellian?
but the ‘were at war’ quote was ‘Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’, small diff, except for the fact that the mayor of london is muslim, and the corbyn ally was down w/ it all, too.
oops. lots of strands to keep in the ol’ Duder’s head…and anti-authoritarian/oppositional defiant personality disorder is a thing. combine w/poverty, hunger, boredom, violence, fear, zenophobia, militarism, shake well and Kaboom! add PTSD for extra zing! in the US, add a heavy helping of guns b/c knives are boring.
the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram of circle “terrorist” and circle “mentally ill” will only increase over time. paranoia about GMO’s, e.g., is evidence of both malice to authority and irrational thinking. speaking of Manning, i couldn’t find the article via google or this guy’s blog:
https://jacobbacharach.com/blog/
but he has a breakdown of a silly NYT article from back when Manning was first outed as whistleblower suffering from “gender dysmorphia.” from memory, so…”whenever the old gray lady needs to explain something, she resorts to psychology…Clinical condition: gender dysmporphia. Clinical presentation: stealing gov’t secrets.” megalol.
i tried to find a few of shelley’s lines that are forward echoes of your venn diagram, one noting: “Visions of horror croud upon my sight,
They shed around their forms substantial night.”
yes, constant immeration by war, hunger, rule by wealth, ‘truth-telling’ bringing prosecution for ‘sedition’ , yanno, all that. it causes mental illness, though in those days, ya were just sent to bedlam, chained, whipped…
didn’t see the portion of the man’s blog you’d noted, but of course it was only recently that lgbt diagnoses were removed from the diagnosis and statistical manual, yanno: the big blue book for teh crazy?
but here it is, the fucking fuckers:
(there are petitions)
https://jacobbacharach.com/2013/01/25/girl-youll-be-a-woman-soon/
that’s the one. it’s juicy. jan. 2013
“All media must now report that Manning suffered from crippling gender dysmorphia and GAY SEX CONFUSION, the two leading causes of Opposing US Military Action Abroad, a confusing syndrome for which there is currently no known cure nor effective prophylaxis…Conflating his sex and gender with his dissenting acts is pure projection on the part of a condescending hetero who can’t imagine a queer person as anything other than a protean, inchoate shitpile of doubt and contradiction whose only outlet is adolescent acting-out.”
—————————————
Pamela Anderson huh? Obama/HRC-phile, but still. good for her.
that was great outrage; thank you. but wasn’t that the whole claim about the shooter at ‘the pulse’? not that he was a PTSD-vet, etc.?
dunno pamela anderson. but even a stopped clock…tra la la… she’s the only one who had the guardian link on chelsea’s twit acct. or her surrogate acct., i guess it is.
on edit: OMG! moar gender-dysphoria, this time at Hanford!
“…Hanford in eastern Washington, the site of the most expensive (and likely dangerous) environmental clean-up in the world.” fukushima?
let’s guess where else this kind of stuff is going on. to be safe, let’s go w/…everywhere?
and let’s hear it for those brave DOE whistleblowers! it’s encouraging to hear no one knows what the hell is going on at the civvy nuke facilities around the country. and the DOE is there to prevent the public from knowing this stuff, to manager the P/R for the industry.
The DOE is the P/R arm of the nuclear industry. stick that in your DU tankbuster & FIRE!
you’re only too right about the DOE. as to the most expensive, ‘cleaning up hanford’ has been going on for a long, long time. and the tanks keep leaking and leaking. last thing i’d read was a plan to pump liquid hydrogen or something into the waste and flash-freeze into something akin to rock. but don’t quote me on that. ;-)
but fukushima may never be ‘cleaned up’, and efforts will likely take many more decades, yes? i’m not sure the japanese Offishulls have ever fessed up to how bad it really is (PR, yanno). spent uranium: the gift that keeps on giving.
Planned obsolescence. Well as long as its planned…
Oopsie. Wrong reply
i see where it was meant to go. i just listened to some of trnn’s live streaming of the green nat’l convention in houston. dammit, i missed ajamu; stein was okay fer a white gurl. ;-) with all the solidarity she touted, i hope to hell he and baraka told all the greens to get out on the streets w/ the movemental folks, and *not* w/ sign up sheets or whatever.
that would be bad form (ya hear me, al sharpton?)
well, frank quoted a link to $100 billion cleanup, mebbe by 2070. but even in feb. 2013: ‘More Hanford Pools Leaking Radiation’, etc.
“The plant’s $12.3 billion price tag, already triple original estimates, is well short of what it will cost to address the problems and finish the project. And the plant’s start-up date, originally slated for last year and pushed back to its current target of 2019, is likely to slip further.
“We’re continuing with a failed design,” said Donald Alexander, a senior U.S. government scientist on the project.
later: “From Whistleblower.org:
Liz Mattson of Hanford Challenge set the context for the rousing discussion with a presentation about Hanford’s history – one shrouded in secrecy as the facility manufactured plutonium for atomic bombs. For over five decades, several hundred billion gallons of contaminants were released into the air, soil, and nearby Columbia River. While no longer producing plutonium, the facility is responsible for cleaning up the 53 million gallons of highly radioactive and hazardous waste that are sitting in 177 underground tanks … many of which are leaking and all of which are long past their designed lifespan.
Another important part of Hanford’s history is that of its whistleblowers. Since the 1980s, many employees have come forward about safety violations at Hanford, often resulting in outrageous forms of retaliation (one of the six stages whistleblowers often experience). Walt Tamosaitis worked as a Deputy Chief Process Engineer and Research & Technology Manager for the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, a government-owned, contractor-operated facility. Walt was terminated from the project by contractor Bechtel after raising concerns about issues that would impact the overall safety and operation of the plant. But he wasn’t fully fired – just sent to a windowless basement, literally to do nothing – a clear message to other workers who might wish to speak out.”
“2.8 million U.S. gallons (10,600 m3) of liquid waste, together with 27 million U.S. gallons of salt cake and sludge, remains in the single-shelled tanks. That waste was originally scheduled to be removed by 2018. The revised deadline is 2040. Nearby aquifers contain an estimated 270 billion U.S. gallons (1 billion m3) of contaminated groundwater as a result of the leaks.” then the timeline to reach the Columbia, etc. ugly, ugly stuff.
ugh. what’s up w/that pope feller? this is depressing. brita filters radioactive material out of water, right?
fiddlesticks; was there a pope mentioned up yonder? me and my magic brain…yanno. of course brita filters take it out!!! oh; guess not…. but the shit might melt the britas. planned obsolescence.
speechless.