Police State USA: Justice for Mike Brown and an End to Extrajudicial Killings
“Groups on the ground in St. Louis are calling for nationwide solidarity actions in support of Justice for Mike Brown and the end of police and extrajudicial killings everywhere.”
As they should. And we should
all join in.
But “nationwide” and “everywhere” are odd terms to equate when
discussing police militarization. Are we against extrajudicial killings
(otherwise known as murder) by U.S. government employees and U.S.
weapons in Pakistan? Yemen? Iraq? Gaza? And literally
everywhere they
occur? The militarization of local police in the United States is
related to the militarization of U.S. foreign policy, which has now
reached the point that bombing and “doing nothing” are generally
conceived as the only two choices available. Local police are being militarized as a result of these factors:
- A culture glorifying militarization and justifying it as global policing.
- A federal government that directs roughly $1 trillion every year
into the U.S. military, depriving virtually everything else of needed
resources.
- A federal government that still manages to find resources to offer
free military weapons to local police in the U.S. and elsewhere.
- Weapons profiteers that eat up local subsidies as well as federal
contracts while funding election campaigns, threatening job elimination
in Congressional districts, and pushing for the unloading of weapons by
the U.S. military on local police as one means of creating the demand
for more.
- The use of permanent wartime fears to justify the removal of
citizens’ rights, gradually allowing local police to begin viewing the
people they were supposed to protect as low-level threats, potential
terrorists, and enemies of law and order in particular when they
exercise their former rights to speech and assembly. Police “excesses”
like war “excesses” are not apologized for, as one does not apologize to
an enemy.
- The further funding of abusive policing through asset forfeitures and SWAT raids.
- The further conflation of military and police through the
militarization of borders, especially the Mexican border, the combined
efforts of federal and local forces in fusion centers, the military’s
engagement in “exercises” in the U.S., and the growth of the drone
industry with the military, among others, flying drones in U.S. skies
and piloting drones abroad from U.S. land.
- The growth of the profit-driven prison industry and mass
incarceration, which dehumanize people in the minds of participants just
as boot camp and the nightly news do to war targets.
- Economically driven disproportionate participation in, and therefore
identification with, the military by the very communities most
suffering from its destruction of resources, rights, and lives.
But policing is not the only thing militarized by what President
Eisenhower called the “total influence — economic, political, even
spiritual” of the military industrial complex. Our morality is
militarized, our entertainment is militarized, our natural world is
militarized, and our education system is militarized. “Unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial
complex” is not easily opposed while maintaining the military industrial
complex. When Congress Members lend their support to a new war in Iraq
while proposing that the U.S. Post Office and a dozen other decent
things not be defunded, they are speaking out of both sides of their
mouths. The United States cannot live like other wealthy nations while
dumping $1 trillion a year into a killing machine.
The way out of this cycle of madness in which we spend more just on
recruiting someone into the military or on
locking them up behind
bars than we spend on educating them is to confront in a unified and
coherent manner what Martin Luther King Jr. called the evils of racism,
extreme materialism, and militarism. Not racism, extreme materialism,
and what the military does to the local police. Not racism, extreme
materialism, and what the military does to weapons testing sites. Not
racism, extreme materialism, and what the military does to the people of
Honduras causing them to flee to a land that then welcomes them with an
attitude of militarism. Not any of these partial steps alone, but the
whole package of interlocking evils of attitude and mindset.
There is a
no-fly-zone over
Ferguson, Missouri, because people in the U.S. government view the
people of the United States increasingly as they view the people of
other countries: as best controlled from the air. Notes the
War Resister League,
“Vigils and protests in Ferguson – a community facing persistent racist profiling and
police brutality – have been attacked by tear gas, rubber bullets,
police in fully-armored SWAT gear, and tank-like personnel carriers.
This underscores not only the dangers of being young, Black, and male in the US,
but also the fear of mobilization and rebellion from within racialized
communities facing the violence of austerity and criminalization.
“The parallels between the Israeli Defense Forces in Palestine, the
Military Police of Rio de Janeiro, the Indian police in Kashmir, the
array of oppressive armed forces in Iraq, and the LAPD in Skid Row could
not be any clearer. . . .
“This is not happening by accident. What is growing the capacity of
local police agencies to exercise this force are police militarization
programs explicitly designed to do so. As St. Louis writer Jamala Rogers
wrote in an article on the militarization of St. Louis Police this past April,
‘It became clear that SWAT was designed as a response to the social
unrest of the 1960s, particularly the anti-war and black liberation
movements.’ Federal programs such as DoD 1033 and 1122, and the Urban
Areas Security Initiative (UASI), in which St. Louis Police are active participants,
provide weapons and training to police departments across the country,
directly from the Pentagon. Commenting on the ominous growth of the
phenomenon, Rogers continues: ‘and now, Police Chief [of St. Louis
Police] Sam Dotson wants to add drones to his arsenal.’
“The events in Ferguson over these last few days demonstrate that the
violence of policing and militarism are inextricably bound. To realize
justice and freedom as a condition for peace, we must work together to
end police militarization and violence.”
The War Resisters League is
organizing against
Urban Shield, an expo of military weapons for police and training event
planned for Oakland, Calif., this September 4-8. The Week of Education
and Action will take place in Oakland from August 30-September 5.
Read all about it here.
Posts
The wife of former Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi is the latest Muslim Brotherhood “insider” to threaten to expose the special relationship between Morsi and the Obama administration—a relationship the latter insists never existed.
Nagla Mahmoud, Morsi’s wife, is reportedly angry at some statements recently made by Hillary Clinton, including that Morsi was “naïve” and “unfit for Egypt’s presidency,” as reported by Arabic media.In the words of El-Mogaz News, Morsi’s wife “is threatening to expose the special relationship between her husband and Hillary Clinton, after the latter attacked the ousted [president], calling him a simpleton who was unfit for the presidency. Sources close to Nagla confirmed that she has threatened to publish the letters exchanged between Morsi and Hillary.”The report continues by saying that Nagla accuses Hillary of denouncing her former close ally, the Brotherhood’s Morsi, in an effort to foster better relations with his successor, Egypt’s current president, Sisi—even though, as Nagla laments, “he [Morsi] was faithful to the American administration.”Earlier, the son of Khairat al-Shatter—another top ranking Brotherhood member who was arrested during the June 2013 revolution that ousted Morsi—made similar assertions, threatening to expose documents that would “undermine his [U.S. president Obama’s] political future and land him in prison.”Despite all these similar threats from Brotherhood insiders, and despite all the other evidence, the Obama administration insists that its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood was no more special than its relationships to other Egyptian parties.
