[blind-democracy] Re: Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State

From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 06 Jul 2015 15:00:36 -0400

Yes, but then there's what I read in
DB-Leovy_ Jill Ghettoside_ a true story of murder in America DB80674

It's a book about a white cop in the LAPD whose purpose in life is to find
the murderers of black ghetto residents. The book tells the stories of the
grief and horror of black families when their family members are killed and
their fervent wish for the killers to be found and held accountable for
their crimes. It describes how often, the police don't find the
perpetrators, sometimes because it's impossible, sometimes because they're
not trying hard enough. Interestingly, the white cop who is described, and
these are all real people, is a politically conservative guy, but the
community residents respect him and he is the person whom they want to
investigate murders.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, July 06, 2015 12:50 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police
Brutality and the Prison State

Chris Hedges cuts through the crap and gets to the heart of the problem.
Of course, "Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and
the Prison State".
Did we really believe that the police were trained and put on the streets to
protect the Lower Classes? Police departments are established to maintain
Law and Order. And whose law and order are they defending? They protect
and defend those citizens who write the laws and set them in place.
Those members of the Upper Class, the Ruling Class, draft the laws to their
benefit. Then they use our tax dollars to put in place the police who will
enforce those laws.

Carl Jarvis
On 7/6/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the
Prison State
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_capitalism_is_the_founda
tion_o
f_police_20150705/
Posted on Jul 5, 2015
By Chris Hedges

New Yorkers protest the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in a show
of solidarity at Union Square in April. (RTNJennings / MediaPunch /
IPX) Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a
fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security,
especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized
or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss
issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political
systems of exploitation-all of it legal and built into the ruling
apparatus-that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No
discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and
class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed
reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to
murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more
minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more
equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force
or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor.
Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially
poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison
system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And
until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor,
especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police
in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately
locked in prison cages.
"The strength of 'The New Jim Crow' by Michelle Alexander is that, by
equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically
impossible to defend it," said Naomi Murakawa, author of "The First
Civil
Right: How Liberals Built Prison America," when we met recently in
Princeton, N.J. "But, on the other hand, there is no 'new' Jim Crow,
there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant
self-preservation."
"We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how
they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out
arrests," she said. "Reforms are oriented to making violence appear
respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate
someone's life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does
not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about
combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the
perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact
configuration."
Murakawa, who teaches at Princeton University, laid out in her book
that liberals, in the name of pity, and conservatives, in the name of
law and order-or as Richard Nixon expressed it, the right to be safe
and free of fear-equally shared in the building of our carceral state.
"Liberal racial pity mirrored conservative racial contempt," she
writes. These "competing constructions of black criminality, one
callous, another with a tenor of sympathy and cowering paternalism,"
ensured that by the time these forces were done, there was from 1968
to 2010 a septupling of people locked in the prison system. "Counting
probation and parole with jails and prisons is even more astonishing
still," she writes. "This population grew from 780,000 in
1965 to seven million in 2010."
Racism in America will not be solved, she writes, by "teaching
tolerance and creating colorblind institutions." The refusal to
confront structural racism, which in the 1930s and '40s among
intellectuals "situated domestic racism and colonialism abroad in an
integrated critique of global capitalism," led to a vapid racial
liberalism that, as Penny Von Eschen writes, conceived of racism as
"an anachronistic prejudice and a personal and psychological problem,
rather than as a systemic problem rooted in specific social practices
and prevailing relations of political economy and culture."
Police brutality will not be solved, Murakawa points out, by reforms
that mandate an "acceptable use of force." The state may have outlawed
lynching and mob violence-largely because of international outcry and
damage to the image of the United States abroad-but insisted that
capital punishment "could be fair with adequate legal defense for the
poor, proper jury instructions, and clear lists of mitigating and

aggravating circumstances."

Racial violence was seen as an "administrative deficiency."
Murakawa goes on in the book:
Liberal lawmakers would come to evaluate fairness through finely
honed, step-by-step questions: Did legislators enact a sufficiently
clear criminal statute? Did police properly Mirandize? Did prosecutors
follow protocol in offering a plea bargain or filing charges? Did
parole officers follow administrative rules of revocation? And, in any
single step, did a specific actor deviate from the protocol or
intentionally discriminate? As a methodology for 'finding racism' in
the criminal justice system, liberal law-and-order reinforced the
common sense that racism is a ghost in the machine, some immaterial
force detached from the institutional terrain of racialized wealth
inequality and the possessive investment in whiteness. At the core of
liberal law-and-order was the promise to move each individual qua
individual through a system of clear rules that allow little room for
individual bias. In effect, a lasting legacy of liberal law-and-order
is
this: we evaluate the rightness of criminal justice through the
administrative quality by which each individual is searched, arrested,
warehoused, or put to death.
All penal reform, from President Truman's 1947 Committee on Civil
Rights report to the Safe Streets Act of 1968 to the Sentencing Reform
Act of 1984 to contemporary calls for more professionalization, in
effect only hand more power and resources to the police. It does
nothing to blunt police abuse or reverse mass incarceration. It does
nothing to address the bias of white supremacy.
"Truman's version of the civil rights agenda came through lynching,"
Murakawa said. "It illuminates how the rule of law and white supremacy
operate hand in hand. Lynching hurt U.S. credibility. It hurt its
force projection abroad. The concern over lynching was not a concern
for black lives. It was a concern that mob and state violence were too
easily conflated. The objective became to make a sharp difference
between white supremacist mob violence and white supremacist state
violence. The difference is not that one is white supremacist and one
is not. The difference is one [is] proceduralized, one is rights
based, one is orderly, bound by rule of law with ever more elaborate
procedures. That is the only thing that makes it different from the lynch

mob."

The real crime-poverty, institutional racism and capitalist
exploitation-is rarely discussed. Therefore, the blame for crime is
easily shifted to the "pathology" of black families. The Moynihan
report, for example, argues that black criminality results from
dominant black mothers and absent black fathers.
"You can perfect due process so it operates like a machine and have
perfect quality control," Murakawa said. "This is what the
due-process-right revolution was. You can have full adherence to the
panoply of rights. And yet you also have a machine that only grows.
Everyone thought the Miranda decision would stop the rate at which
police arrest people. They thought it would curtail the scale and
scope of policing. Instead, Miranda rights are used to protect police
officers in civil litigation. Police officers say they got the waiver.
They say people were informed of their rights. Miranda is used mostly
to deflect lawsuits against police departments. These little
procedural interventions give the system a patina of legitimacy. If we
are processing at the same scale and at the same racial concentration,

then the machinery of death only gets bigger and bigger."

The more that "carceral machinery was rights-based and rule-bound, the
more racial disparity was isolatable to 'real' black criminality." In
other words, as liberals and conservatives became convinced that the
machinery of the judiciary and the police was largely impartial and
fair, the onus for punishment shifted to the victims. State-sponsored
white violence remained entrenched. Institutionalized murder remained
acceptable. In the minds of liberals and conservatives, those who were
arrested, locked up or shot deserved to be arrested, locked up or
shot. Federal mandatory minimum statutes tripled under President Bill
Clinton, and this is one example Murakawa points out of how "with each
administrative layer to protect African Americans from lawless racial
violence, liberals propelled carceral development that, through perverse

turns, expanded lawful racial violence."

By 1993, she points out, "African Americans accounted for 88.3 percent
of all federal crack cocaine distribution convictions." And because
the judicial system is stacked against poor people of color, it does
not matter, she said, if the arresting officers are also people of
color.
"There is no evidence that having a minority police officer changes
arrest or use of force," she said. "The better evidence suggests that
black police officers tend to arrest everyone at higher rates across
races. I interpret this as black professionals having to over-perform
in any number of professions to get to comparable ranking. Maybe
interpersonally, people will find it a little less offensive. But it
does not diminish the violence."
By the Clinton administration, liberals and conservatives were
competing with each other to be "tough" on crime. Murakawa notes that
between 1968 and 1976, no one was executed in the United States. But
this changed under Clinton. Democrats and Republicans proposed bill
after bill until the number of crimes punishable by death leapt from
one in 1974 to 66 in 1994. The two parties engaged in "a death penalty
bidding war." Then-Sen. Joe Biden was one of the most enthusiastic
proponents of expanding the death penalty-he boasted that he had
"added back to the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties"-and the
Democrats effectively "neutralized soft-on-crime accusations with
punitive outbidding." But while this may have been politically
advantageous to the Democrats, it was devastating to poor people of
color and in particular blacks.
Change, Murakawa said, requires us to formulate a very different
vision of society.
"We should follow Angela Davis' call to ask the question: What is it
we have to imagine if we abolish the social functions of police and
prisons?" she said. "What is it we have to build if we can no longer
jail people who are mentally ill or suffering from long-term addiction
or homeless? We are going to have to build a lot."
But few people, and perhaps no one in the political establishment, are
asking these questions.
"These bipartisan coalitions are conjoined in the rhetoric of cost
cutting,"
Murakawa said, referencing Marie Gottschalk's book "Caught: The Prison
State and the Lockdown of American Politics." "They may say there is
bias, that it is not racially fair. They may attack prisons as big
government, as inefficient or as a bad investment. But once you follow
the logic of austerity, you push the cost of punishment on those who
are punished. You are not committed to building anything. The reason
Portugal has been so successful with drug legalization is because of
the Portuguese National Health Service. Fighting addiction requires
pharmacological and medical intervention, along with psychological and
financial support.
"I worry that we are once again moving toward more professionalized
police who have had more training but still have the scope to arrest
and issue citations and summonses the same way they do now," Murakawa
said. "Indeed, there will probably be an increase in arrests,
citations and summonses if the police forces get bigger. Even with
scaling back the war on drugs, I worry that we will still have a
massive number of people embroiled in the criminal justice system. It
will be death by a thousand cuts rather than the 20-year mandatory
minimums for drug conspiracy. Bipartisan coalitions that are about
cutting costs justify pushing the cost of punishment on punished
populations. I worry we are moving toward a population, mostly black
and poor, that is cycling through jail and effectively serving 20-year
sentences but in stints of about 90 days at a time. With each jail
stay they accumulate more debt for room and board. A municipality in
Missouri is billing people for the Tasers used against them-$26 per
Taser discharge.
Roughly half of all states are now charging people for the services of
indigent criminal defense. A 2013 Supreme Court decision said that
extended families could be held responsible for the debts of those

incarcerated.

"There are 10 to 12 million arrests every year; about half will never
be processed because these arrests are for charges so trivial they are
not worth pursuing or there is no evidence," she said. "Maybe 5
percent of these arrests are for charges of violent crime and 15
percent for property crimes.

"There is no reason why police on patrols should be armed," she went on.
"If
we were serious about stopping executions without trials, we would be
committed to the idea that all police have to call in special forces.
What we now see as regular police units would be SWAT patrols that
have to be specially called in to use lethal force. We have to
diminish the scale of everything. We have to wipe clean penal codes.
Most arrests are for misdemeanors, petty offenses like public
drunkenness or loitering. These are things no state agent with a gun
should be addressing. The only way to reduce the scale of police
brutality is to reduce the scale of policing.
People should not be arrested for not mowing their lawn or for selling
loosies.
"The idea we can put police officers through training to address their
implicit bias and then give them guns-the idea that two days of
intensive training will diminish the probability of shoot to kill-is

absurd,"

Murakawa
said. "I have zero faith in this."

http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ Corporate
Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_capitalism_is_the_founda
tion_o
f_police_20150705/
Posted on Jul 5, 2015
By Chris Hedges

New Yorkers protest the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in a show
of solidarity at Union Square in April. (RTNJennings / MediaPunch /
IPX) Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a
fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security,
especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized
or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss
issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political
systems of exploitation-all of it legal and built into the ruling
apparatus-that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No
discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and
class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed
reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to
murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more
minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more
equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force
or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor.
Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially
poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison
system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And
until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor,
especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police
in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately
locked in prison cages.
"The strength of 'The New Jim Crow' by Michelle Alexander is that, by
equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically
impossible to defend it," said Naomi Murakawa, author of "The First
Civil
Right: How Liberals Built Prison America," when we met recently in
Princeton, N.J. "But, on the other hand, there is no 'new' Jim Crow,
there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant
self-preservation."
"We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how
they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out
arrests," she said. "Reforms are oriented to making violence appear
respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate
someone's life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does
not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about
combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the
perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact
configuration."
Murakawa, who teaches at Princeton University, laid out in her book
that liberals, in the name of pity, and conservatives, in the name of
law and order-or as Richard Nixon expressed it, the right to be safe
and free of fear-equally shared in the building of our carceral state.
"Liberal racial pity mirrored conservative racial contempt," she
writes. These "competing constructions of black criminality, one
callous, another with a tenor of sympathy and cowering paternalism,"
ensured that by the time these forces were done, there was from 1968
to 2010 a septupling of people locked in the prison system. "Counting
probation and parole with jails and prisons is even more astonishing
still," she writes. "This population grew from 780,000 in
1965 to seven million in 2010."
Racism in America will not be solved, she writes, by "teaching
tolerance and creating colorblind institutions." The refusal to
confront structural racism, which in the 1930s and '40s among
intellectuals "situated domestic racism and colonialism abroad in an
integrated critique of global capitalism," led to a vapid racial
liberalism that, as Penny Von Eschen writes, conceived of racism as
"an anachronistic prejudice and a personal and psychological problem,
rather than as a systemic problem rooted in specific social practices
and prevailing relations of political economy and culture."
Police brutality will not be solved, Murakawa points out, by reforms
that mandate an "acceptable use of force." The state may have outlawed
lynching and mob violence-largely because of international outcry and
damage to the image of the United States abroad-but insisted that
capital punishment "could be fair with adequate legal defense for the
poor, proper jury instructions, and clear lists of mitigating and