Showing posts with label Missouri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Missouri. Show all posts

Saturday, September 27, 2014

"I am Darren Wilson" Bracelets Banned by Justice Department

In a display of solidarity, Ferguson police have been wearing "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets, apparently in order to valorize the use of deadly force from a distance. The U.S. Justice Department has now asked Chief Thomas Jackson to stop this form of comradery, officially in writing noting that Chief Jackson had already taken action.


A letter issued by Christy Lopez, Deputy Chief of the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, stated that officers had been wearing these bracelets while having black tape over their name plates earlier this week, and that it was agitating the population. The letter was careful to point out that no particular officer or department had been cited in evidence gathering. It alerted the police that the bracelets appear to foster an "us against them" mentality that was further embroiling the situation.

Protests from Tuesday were referenced. The initiating event, the shooting of Michael Brown, started protests which brought issues surrounding the militarization of the police to the public's attention. Extensive abuses of journalists, both corporate and citizen, were witnessed and captured on video and film.

According to the language of the letter, the officers could wear the bracelets while off duty.

Oddly, no officers are wearing "I am Officer Go Fuck Yourself" bracelets, despite a lack of deaths in that encounter and many laughs.


Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Arrested Reporter in Ferguson is Critic of the Surveillance State

Wesley Lowery

By Lou Saboter
I wish I could say I'm surprised by the news out of Ferguson, Missouri, where the police are continuing the resort to paramilitary style tactics in response to a response to their assassination of an unarmed college student, but I can't.
After what I saw happen in Albuquerque, New Mexico with James Boyd, I will never be surprised again when the militarized police of the United States act exactly like the stormtroopers of a Banana Republic junta. I mean, they are, after all, being equipped by the same institutions.
Apparently, two reporters were threatened, had guns waved at them, and were then arrested, some of which was caught on videotape.
I am awaiting further news of the long slide into ubiquitous fascism, and wondering how the public will ever respond as the police grow more abusive.
Wesley Lowery is a critic of the surveillance state.


Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Gun Control and the Foreign Police State

A House Divided Against Itself Can Not Stand
Divided Against Ourselves

“Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand." - Frantz Fanon
By Lou Saboter

The Nazification of America has gone off splendidly, thanks to your gleeful participation, including the globalization of our military-industrial-intelligence complex directed at ourselves.

I'm not sure what is happening in America anymore, because there is no news that has any credibility. The news that is credible according to the news has become such a ridiculous fiction that you might as well believe Orson Wells was serious about that Martian invasion in 1938. It's literally as good an explanation as any you could derive from the dumbed-down history which one could cull from corporate news.

So, we can safely say the bad guys won now and just submit, right? Well, that's certainly a viable option. Many have been trained to believe that even mentioning the overwhelming influence of intelligence agencies and secret societies makes the speaker certifiable. Furthermore, many people defended even the collection of data by the NSA, after the Edward Snowden affair, on the basis of Obama having Kenyan inheritance. And these are people who are allowed to do more than tie shoelaces.

The fact is, the USA's homeland security has been intensely interwoven with multinationalist (dare I say Globalist?) threads that easily paints the picture that the population is considered the threat to the people (read: multinational corporations) that have assumed more rights than the citizenry. It is no longer actual human beings that have rights, but only the ownership principles associated with any said human being that grants him any rights whatsoever. By this I mean to say, the more you own, and this could even be in terms of the debt you own, the more value you are granted by the enforcement systems in place and increasingly being put into place in the USA.

Homeless people sometimes still have the right not to be mowed down with assault rifles for selecting the wrong piece of earth to fall asleep upon. But that's only if the right people notice at the right time. Otherwise, it seems clear that the police have been green-lighted by someone, somewhere to treat the wretched of the earth as targets. And those wretched often continue to be the age-old second class citizens, persons of color, and are also increasingly the new, trial FEMA campers: the homeless.

Furthermore, other interesting trends would indicate that what is often depicted as the hyperbolic gun-owning population will be no match for what is swiftly being thrown into place for...what?  Assault rifles, night vision goggles, MRAPs, and drones are being handed out to the already paramilitary police forces of the nation, and secretly arranged legislation is handing away our rights constantly. Horror stories, such as prolonged solitary confinement of teenagers who haven't been found guilty of a crime at Rikers Island, and the recent execution of an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, highlight trends toward a complete abandonment of all civil rights based upon the Constitution. Instead, your property, position in a corporation, or alignment with a political interest, which has itself been corporatized, appears to be the only form of defense one has against sudden arrest or murder by the police. As in Albuquerque, NM, police responded with ferocity to protests against their right to murder civilians, in this case Michael Brown, an 18 year about to start college.

Because corporations have been granted personhood and the right to buy elections, which has already been shown to open the door the foreign interests consuming our democracy, it is no stretch to state that the police are now killing you in the interests of foreign powers.

And they're armed to the teeth.

What a great time for gun control.