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                              From The Ramparts

                        Junious Ricardo Stanton

                            Police State USA

“In the half-century that has passed, gratuitous police violence has spread to the public in general.  Today it is not only blacks and Hispanics who experience police brutality. Everyone suffers from it. Being white is no longer a protection. In a recent column, ‘Call the Cops at Your Peril,’ I reported a few of the recent atrocities police have committed against the public. Ninety-three-year-old Pearlie Golden was shot down in her front yard in Hearne, Texas. In Miami, 23 police officers fired 377 bullets, literally blowing away two men trapped inside a wrecked car. The police were under no threat whatsoever from the 93-year-old woman or from the two men trapped inside a wrecked car. In Cornelia, Georgia, a SWAT team made a no-knock entry at 3 a.m. and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s crib.  The grenade blew up in the baby’s face, leaving him disfigured, unable to breathe without a ventilator, and with a 50 percent chance of survival.  According to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal, the raid produced no drugs, no weapons, no bundles of cash, and no suspected drug dealer.  It was just another of the thousands of mistakes routinely made by SWAT goons who put American citizens at risk every time they break unannounced into a home, usually a wrong address.” Cops Gone Wild: The Militarization of Law Enforcement in America By Dr Paul Craig Roberts http://www.globalresearch.ca/cops-gone-wild-the-militarization-of-law-enforcement-in-america/5396123

The turmoil we witnessed in Ferguson is just one example of a long train of events of police overreaction and militarization. Police overreaction has become the norm in this country. Africans in AmeriKKKa have experienced the surveillance, terrorism and violence at the hands of white militia, “pattyrollers” (patrols), Sheriffs Departments and police since the seventeenth century colonial times. We were always viewed with suspicion and as threats to the slaveocracy by the colonial administrators and later the local, state and federal governments that sanctioned slavery as the linchpin of the US economy.

Following the War Between the States the North imposed martial law on the former Confederacy that protected the rights of the newly emancipated Africans in AmeriKKKa. When the politicians shifted their focus from the rights of Blacks back to strengthening and expanding the economy, Black rights and protection under law were kicked to the curb and a reign of terror was instituted to reestablish a social milieu of racial subjugation and oppression. Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and a tacit agreement was made not to interfere in the violence and terrorism that was unleashed against Black folks to return them to a subservient position.

Legalized injustice, state sanctioned violence and apartheid were reestablished and enforced by the powers of the state with help from extrajudicial entities like the Klu Klux Klan and other racist organizations. Cruelty, violence and every form of disrespect and degradation was used to “keep us in our place”.

Whenever there was any open resistance to the oppression whether it was individual or organized, whether it was ideological or activist, whites responded by intensifying the violence. The government sanctioned and supported the aggression against Blacks. During the Civil Rights movement the FBI infiltrated the KKK and other white supremacist organizations but that did not stop or abate the violence aimed against Blacks. COINTELPRO the government’s counter insurgency campaign was launched to disrupt, quell and destroy dissent and radicalism during the ‘60’s and 70’s. No person or groups were immune it was a widespread nation wide campaign.

When the government murdered Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968 over one hundred US cities went up in flames in angry response. President Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission to study the civil unrest. It was named The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission after its chairman former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. Many of us may remember all the controversy about racism which we now know was deliberately manufactured to distract us and cover up the recommendations of the Commission which called for among other things the militarization of US police and the break up of concentrated pockets of Black inner city neighborhoods.  

“Although the Kerner Commission has over the years become associated with a somewhat benign, if not benevolent character, codifying the obvious, ‘we live in two increasingly separate America s’ etc., the fact is that the commission itself was but one manifestation of a massive military/police counter-insurgency effort directed against US citizens, hatched in an era of emergent post-Vietnam ‘syndrome’ coupled with elite fears of domestic insurrection. While the movement chanted for peace and revolution, rebellious, angry and destructive urban uprisings were occurring with alarming frequency, usually the result of the usual spark, police brutality, white on black crime. The so-called urban riots of 1967-1968 were the zenith, during this period, of social and class conflict. ‘More than 160 disorders occurred in some 128 American cities in the first nine months of 1967.’ The executive order establishing the commission called for an investigation of ‘the origins of the recent major civil disorders and the influence, if any, of organizations or individuals dedicated to the incitement or encouragement of violence.’ The work of the commission was funded from President Johnson¹s ‘Emergency Fund.’ The executive order sought recommendations in three general areas: ‘short term measures to prevent riots, better measures to contain riots once they begin, and long term measures to eliminate riots in the future.’ Their two immediate aims were ‘to control and repress black rioters using almost any available means’, and to assure white America that everything was in hand. Commission members included Charles B. Thorton, Chairman and CEO, Litton Industries, member of the Defense Industry Advisory Council to the DoD and the National Security Industrial Association, John L. Atwood, President and CEO, North American Rockwell Corporation (Commission Advisor on Private Enterprise), and Herbert Jenkins, Atlanta Chief of Police and President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. During the early stages of staff recruitment, commission Deputy Executive Director Victor H. Palmieri ‘described the process as a war strategy’ so he might given the overwhelming presence within the commission and its’ consultants of military and police officials. One quarter of over 200 consultants listed were big-city police chiefs, like Daryl F. Gates, former chief LAPD. Numerous police organizations, including the heavily funded Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (financiers of SWAT), guided the commission¹s deliberations. No less than 30 police departments were represented on or before the commission by their chiefs or deputy chiefs.” US Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War At Home by Frank Morales http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/suppression.html

 After 1968, local police departments started receiving more federal funds and equipment under the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency (LEAA) and this continued during the War on Drugs under the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

When the Obama Administration shut down the Occupy Movement nation wide in 2011 using militarized police employing Gestapo tactics, and the Boston Police did the same thing following the Marathon Bombing they were examples of the prevailing mentality to forcibly stifle dissent, peaceful protest and respond to any situation in a militarized over handed manner.

During Hurricane Katrina mercenaries were employed and the initial response of the National Guard and military was one of hostility and military action towards the citizens rather than search and rescue. This was fueled and rationalized because of media reports of looting by Blacks while nothing was said about the whites who pilfered and stole to feed themselves and their families! It was only until a Black Lt. General named Russell Honore showed up that the hostility dampened and search and rescue became the primary mission. But there was another agenda at play General Honore was not aware of, ethnic cleansing or Black removal!

            In New Orleans the hidden agenda/mission was ethnic cleansing/removal of the poor Black population. “As a result, not just the Black working class, but also the Black professional and business middle classes are now facing economic extinction while Washington dawdles. Tens of thousands of blue-collar white, Asian and Latino residents of afflicted Gulf communities also face de facto expulsion from the region, but only the removal of African-Americans is actually being advocated as policy. Since Katrina made landfall, conservatives—beginning with Rep. Richard Baker’s infamous comments about God having ‘finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans’—have openly gloated over the possibilities for remaking New Orleans in a GOP image. (Medically, this might be considered akin to a mass outbreak of Tourette Syndrome, whose official symptoms include ‘the overwhelming urge to use a racial epithet.’) Republican interest in reducing the Black Democratic vote in New Orleans—the balance of power in state elections—resonates with the oft-expressed desire of local elites to purge the city of ‘problem people.’ As one major French Quarter landowner told Der Spiegel, ‘The hurricane drove poor people and criminals out of the city and we hope they don’t come back. The party's finally over for these people and now they're going to have to find someplace else to live in the United States.’” Gentrifying Disaster In New Orleans: Ethnic Cleansing GOP Style Mike Davis http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/10/gentrifying-disaster

What we are seeing in Ferguson Missouri is an overarching plan of police militarization, repression and mission creep using social frustration and unrest as justification for eventual martial law, lock down and a total police state; not just for Blacks but the non-rich population as well.  The US is rapidly devolving into a full spectrum police state.  Obama is part and parcel of it as were Bu$h and Clinton before him.

In recent years The War on Drugs, The War on Drugs and  9-11 were the justification for police repression but now aspects of COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS that were once clandestine and illegal are official policy thanks to the PATRIOT ACT I and II and the NDAA!  We live in an fascist imperialist banana republic police state, wake up, see what’s going on, don’t be fooled or fall for the okey-doke. Visit the Websites http://www.copblock.org/2841/police-brutality-statistics/, http://www.policestateusa.com  and http://www.policemisconduct.net to see how widespread police brutality, overreaction and overreach have become.

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