Posted on December 3, 2014 by Robert Barsocchini
Here only extracts: last paragraphs have been skiped
1.
The US has the world’s
second-highest incarceration rate (after US drone base/Western
colonial victim the Seychelles), the world’s largest number of prisoners, the
world’s largest number of female prisoners (comprising about 1/3rd of the world’s overall number of women behind bars), and
the world’s highest youth incarceration rate. The US uses for-profit prisons, prison labor, and widely tortures
(and here) prisoners, including
juveniles and people with mental
disabilities. Using the world’s most massive imprisonment/torture/labor
system, the US in some ways, consciously or not – certainly both –
disproportionately targets its ethnic minority citizens, particularly African
Americans.
“The U.S.
Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black
offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the
same crimes. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are
21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants
and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.” – Law
Professor Bill
Quigley
Jonathan
M. Feldman cites, for example, “A 2009 article by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
and Patricia Warren revealed systemic racial biases tied to racial profiling,
particularly in Missouri: “Missouri, which has been collecting data since 2000,
still has large race disparities in searching “practices among its police officers.”
Data for 2007 “shows blacks were 78 percent more likely than whites to be
searched” and “Hispanics were 118 percent more likely than whites to be
searched.” Furthermore, “compared to searches of white drivers, contraband was
found 25 percent less often among black drivers and 38 percent less often among
Hispanic drivers”.
2.
Professor
Quigley notes in
the Huffington Post that: “The [US] criminal justice system, from start to
finish, is seriously racist. Professor Michelle Alexander concludes
that it is no coincidence that the criminal justice system ramped up its
processing of African Americans just as the Jim Crow [segregation] laws enforced since the age of slavery ended [in 1965]. Her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as evidence of the new way the US
has decided to control African Americans – a racialized system of social
control.”
The US
mass-incarceration explosion has had no correlation to
crime rates, and continued
to rise sharply whether rates
increased, decreased, or remained steady.
3.
Anthony DiMaggio, Ph.D., Political Science, University of Illinois,
Chicago, notes: “…racial profiling, abuse, and discrimination on the part of
law enforcement … has been documented
in great detail by sociologists, political scientists, and those in the
field of criminal justice through observational and statistical analyses of
community and highway arrest rates by race (particularly as related
to drug searches).”
In the
wake of the Ferguson decision, it is this “broader significance” with which DiMaggio
is chiefly concerned. It includes “deference to authority figures” – an
“American tendency to simply side with police over alleged victims of
police brutality”, and “reluctance to even consider [that] police brutality
stems from racist stereotypes that endure in the minds of
citizens”.
4.
The US (often alone and in dubious contrast to neutral,
authoritative investigators) regularly claims to have precise numbers, down to the person,
for people killed in countries that the US seeks to conquer,
such as Syria. However, US reps
conveniently do not report full “body counts” (Gen. Franks), in foreign
countries or domestically, of people killed by the government that happens to
kill the most people, theirs. Thus, noting that the available information
necessitates “a conservative estimate”, Mother Jones and the Center for Disease
Control find that the data on police killings – unsurprisingly – fit with
the USA’s wider, fully documented pattern of apparent institutional
racism. They find that in the period since Jim Crow segregation laws
ceased being mandated by the US government in 1965 (1968-2011) black people are on average over 400% more likely than whites
to be killed in a confrontation with police.
5.
Noting the apparent trend, The United Nations Committee Against Torture reported
on the US last week:
“The
Committee is concerned about numerous reports of police brutality
and excessive use of force by law enforcement officials, in particular
against persons belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups,
immigrants and LGBTI individuals, racial profiling by police and
immigration offices and growing militarization of policing activities.
The Committee is particularly concerned at the reported current police
violence in Chicago, especially against African-American and Latino
young people who are allegedly being consistently profiled, harassed and
subjected to excessive force by Chicago Police 13 Department (CPD)
officers.”
“It also
expresses its deep concern at the frequent and recurrent police shootings
or fatal pursuits of unarmed black individuals.”
“…no
Chicago police officer has been convicted for these acts of torture for
reasons including the statute of limitations expiring. While noting that
several victims were ultimately exonerated of the underlying crimes,
the vast majority of those tortured –most of them African Americans–,
have received no compensation for the extensive injuries suffered.”
6.
Due to the off-the-charts US penchant for stockpiling weapons and WMD, carrying
out killings and other acts and threats of violence, and garrisoning the globe
with some one
thousand foreign military bases
(compared to Russia’s 12, China’s 0, and former champion the British Empire’s
40 foreign bases), the International Criminal Court system introduced in 2002
has been forcibly controlled chiefly by the US.
While the USA’s domestic regime disproportionately targets its own vulnerable/minority groups, mainly African Americans, the international system under the US stranglehold disproportionately targets African nations, as the West has done for centuries. Of the nine official ICC investigations that have taken place, all are of African nations. Of nine preliminary investigations being conducted, three more are African nations, all but two are non-white (and all are conducted against ”people the West doesn’t like”).
While the USA’s domestic regime disproportionately targets its own vulnerable/minority groups, mainly African Americans, the international system under the US stranglehold disproportionately targets African nations, as the West has done for centuries. Of the nine official ICC investigations that have taken place, all are of African nations. Of nine preliminary investigations being conducted, three more are African nations, all but two are non-white (and all are conducted against ”people the West doesn’t like”).
For
itself, the US has made up and passed a policy known as the “Hague Invasion Act”
that says the US will use violent force to prevent any member of the US
government from being subjected to justice in the international system.
This has implications for the dynamic in the US domestic system, as well.
The worst and most prolific killers in US history, such as Bush Jr., have
been white and have gone unpunished and usually been highly praised by
white-dominated culture.
7. Prof. Noam Chomsky reminds us of our culture’s
trajectory: “What’s happening in Ferguson is a reenactment of five hundred
years of American history. It
goes back to 1619. Slaves were brought over, they were tortured,
terrorized, treated hideously. You want to know how they were treated?
Take a look at this morning’s New York Times. There’s a very
evocative article on ISIS and how it treated Yazidi prisoners. That’s
American history. That’s the way our African American population was
treated. Worse than that, in fact, and for a long period – in
fact, as I said, there are only a few breaks in it. Militarization was
one of the techniques of crushing the slave movements, and everything that
followed… Now it’s incarceration and militarization of police.
We’re reenacting five hundred years of American history. You have
to understand that, and that’s hard to deal with, but it has to be faced
seriously. You can argue about the details of what happened in
Ferguson, but the background and the general framework is hideously clear.
It should be perfectly obvious to anyone who knows anything about
American history. It’s with us all the time.”
Will
extremist outlets and pundits like Fox News begin condemning the Yazidis for
not “fitting in” to the culture imposed by their exploiters? Will Fox
invite on Yazidis who apologize for “their people” who act out and refuse to
“assimilate”? Pro-ISIS outlets certainly will and constantly do behave
this way.
In 1967,
two years after Jim Crow “laws” had been removed from US officialdom, the
Kerner Commission concluded
that “African-Americans saw the
police as an occupying force, dispatched to protect the privileges of whites,
and insensitive to the protection of the minority community’s lives or rights”
(Rev. Jackson, Sr). Who would seriously argue that race-based practices
mandated de jure by a highly racist society would simply disappear within two
years and not be implemented de facto to some degree? Who would seriously
argue that such dynamics would completely disappear a mere fifty years later,
following hundreds and hundreds of years of Western exploitation of Africans in
perhaps the most extreme example of predation in human history? We know
very well who would make this argument. See preceding bullet point.
8.
“It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and
slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization…
American slavery [was] the most
cruel form of slavery in history…
There is not a country in world
history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the
United States.” - Historian Howard Zinn (PhD,
history, Columbia University)
9. To
dwell on or encourage others to dwell on peripheral and minor criminal elements
around the pro-justice Ferguson protesters reveals either ignorance or a
desire, perhaps a malicious one, to maintain the status quo. First, there
is virtually no case in history of a large scale protest wherein crime was not involved
in some way. Should all protests thus be
condemned and forbidden?
Crimes around protests in no way
bother the US or its synchronous media companies when they are perpetrated in
countries the US is targeting, such as China. Second, this is not a case
like the recent one in Ukraine, wherein
foreign governments, chiefly the US
but also Poland and others, helped extremist elements organize,
form battalions, and physically overthrow the elected national government, then
wage an ongoing terrorist war and possible genocide against resisters – actions the US
continues to support
materially and politically. No
one worthwhile thinks the Ferguson protesters are going to overthrow the US
government.
10.
Racism is far from being the only issue.
The US is also an outlier in terms of overall brutality and killings by
police. While the US system is oppressive
to the majority of its citizenry, African Americans
have a much worse history under the US. However, protests are also
carried out in response to police killings of unarmed white people, like
mentally disabled young man Kelly Thomas. Police smashed him while he cried for his dad,
triggering large protests.
General police brutality is front and center in
the Ferguson movement for reasons including:
Killings
by police “reached a record high
last year [461], while the number of officers killed in the line of duty
fell to its lowest level in decades [27].” (By comparison, police in
the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia killed under ten people each, and some
years kill none.)
In
addition, the figures for the US are “widely acknowledged to be an undercount,
according to the [Washington] Post…”
A community study that tracks killings by police by analyzing news reports
finds that there have been “At least 1,769 [people] killed [by police] since
May 1, 2013″, and “1,015 … since January 1, 2014″.
This while
policing is not
even one of the top ten most dangerous
jobs, and most police deaths “occurred accidentally rather than feloniously
… not in some heroic high speed pursuit of a child murderer, but in routine
traffic accidents.”
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Robert Barsocchini focuses on global force dynamics and writes
professionally for the film industry. Also see: Hillary Clinton’s Record of Support for
War and other Depravities.
Follow Robert and UK-based colleague, Dean Robinson, on Twitter.
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RELATED ARTICLES:
US
RACIAL CLEANSINGS, DENIAL, AND DOMINANT NARRATIVE Posted on W-B, Dec 9, 2014 by Robert Barsocchini Jaspin’s report, Buried
in Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America ,
and a lecture about his findings.
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Egalitarianism
Without Equality Is Tyranny
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/06/2014 The cult of
egalitarianism demands equal treatment of unequal circumstances, a model that
can lead only to tyranny and oppression. We have to stop thinking of
equality as a necessary feature of a healthy society. The only sense in which
people are truly equal is in their right to life and the control of their own
actions. Any interference with these must be closely guarded against, but the
politically correct imposition of equal outcomes on diverse personalities
destroys individualism and abolishes freedom.
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"Protect
& Serve" For Plutocracy
MILITARIZING POLICE Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 12/06/2014 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-06/protect-serve-plutocracy
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