This piece was done because of an interview that Hedges did with Matt Taibbi
whose book, mentioned in the article, I Can't Breathe, is on BARD.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2019 4:34 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The New 'Black Codes'
Another Tale of the End Days. When will folks learn that it is the System that
is broken.
"The bloated System sat on the Wall.
The bloated System had a great fall.
And all of the Women,
and all of the Men,
Couldn't put the System together again."
Carl Jarvis
On 12/2/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The New 'Black Codes'
The New 'Black Codes'
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The police forces in impoverished urban communities, equipped with
military-grade weapons and empowered to harass and kill largely at
will, along with mass incarceration, are the principal tools for the
social control of the poor. There is little pretense of justice and
even less of protection and safety. The corporate state and our
oligarchic rulers fear a backlash from those they abandoned in
deindustrialized enclaves across the country, what Malcolm X called
our "internal colonies." The daily brutality and terror keep the poor,
especially poor people of color, in bondage. On average, more than
1,100 people, or one every eight hours, almost all unarmed, are killed
every year by police in the United States. These killings are not accidents.
They are not the results of a failed system.
The
system works exactly as it is designed to work. And until the system
of corporate power is destroyed, nothing will change for the poor, or
the rest of Americans.
Every police reform going back decades, including due process, Miranda
rights and protocols for filing charges, has only resulted in
increased police power and resources. Our national conversation on
race and crime, which refuses to confront the economic, social and
political systems of exploitation and white supremacy, has been a
whitewash. The vast pools of the unemployed and underemployed,
especially among people of color, are part of the design of predatory
corporate capitalism. And so are the institutions, especially the
police, the courts, the jails and the prisons, tasked with maintaining
social control of those the system has cast aside.
The elites are acutely aware that without police terror and the U.S.
prison system, which holds 25% of the world's prison population, there
would be intense social unrest. Outrage over the police killings of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York City, Walter
Scott in Charleston, S.C., Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in
Baltimore and Laquan McDonald in Chicago-fanned by video recordings or
social media exposure-may have led to the rise of groups such as Black
Lives Matter but it has done nothing, and will do nothing, to curb
police abuse. More training, body cameras, community policing, the
hiring of more minority members as police officers, a better probation
service, equitable fines and special units to investigate police abuse
are public relations gimmicks. No one in power has any intention of
loosening the vise. Authorities are too afraid of what might happen.
Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the loss of industrial,
unionized jobs with sustainable incomes, and the collapse of public
institutions have decimated city and county budgets. Police
departments are used to make up lost revenue through the constant
imposition of fines on the poor, often for manufactured crimes such as
blocking pedestrian traffic (which means standing on a sidewalk),
drinking from an open container or selling tax-free cigarettes.
Arrests and consequent fines for such violations are called "quality
of life" actions. Poverty has forced many, especially the young, to
derive an income from the illegal economy. The lack of work in the
legitimate economy and the bottomless need for governmental revenue
have turned policing into a sustained war on the underclass. It was in
this war that Garner, attempting to provide for his family by selling
tax-free cigarettes, became a repeated target of police harassment and
was eventually choked to death by police officers on July 17, 2014, in
Staten Island.
Matt Taibbi's book "I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street" uses the
killing of Garner to expose the architecture of state repression. None
of this repression and abuse, as Taibbi illustrates, is accidental,
and none of it will be fixed until the social, political and economic
injustices perpetrated upon the poor by corporate power are reversed.
[Click here to see Hedges interview Taibbi.]
"Eric Garner was murdered by history," Taibbi writes. "The motive was
the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more
than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and
determined to stay there."
The war on poor people of color has been a bipartisan project. No one
was executed in the United States between 1968 and 1976, but drastic
changes in laws occurred in the 1990s. During the administration of
President Bill Clinton, Democrats and Republicans passed a series of
"law and order" bills that saw the number of crimes punishable by
death leap to 66 in 1994. In 1974, there had been only one such crime
identified in federal law.
The two parties, in the words of Naomi Murakawa, engaged in "a death
penalty bidding war." Then-Sen. Joe Biden was one of the leading
proponents of expanding the death penalty. Biden boasted that he had
"added back to the Federal statutes over 50 death penalties." The 1994
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, pushed through by
Clinton and Biden, provided funding for tens of thousands of community
police officers and drug courts.
It banned some assault weapons. It mandated life sentences for anyone
convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions,
including for drug crimes. The mandated life sentences were known as
three-strikes provisions.
The population in state and federal prisons during the Clinton
administration rose by 673,000 inmates-235,000 more than during Ronald
Reagan's presidency. The police became omnipotent on the streets of
poor communities. The courts became a conveyor belt transporting the
poor into the nation's jails and prisons.
Taibbi writes at the opening of his book of an unprovoked police
assault in
2014 on Ibrahim Annan, the son of two immigrants from Africa, while he
was seated in his car in Staten Island. Annan, in his late 30s, was
beaten mercilessly on his face and head by police with what is
believed to have been a telescoping metal baton. His left leg was
broken in three places. A year later he would still be walking with a
cane. As is typical in police abuse cases, a number of charges were
filed against him: menacing; criminal possession of marijuana in the
fifth degree; obstructing government administration; unlawful
possession of marijuana; assault in the second degree, and assault in the
third degree, among others. Taibbi writes:
"
The long list of charges slapped on Annan were part of an elaborate
game police and prosecutors often play with people caught up in "problematic"
arrests. A black man with a shattered leg has a virtually automatic
argument for certain kinds of federal civil rights lawsuits. But those
suits are harder to win when the arrest results in a conviction. So,
when police beat someone badly enough, the city's first line of
defense is often to go on the offense and file a long list of charges,
hoping one will stick. Civil lawyers meanwhile will often try to wait
until the criminal charges are beaten before they file suit.
It's a leverage game. If the beating is on the severe side, the victim
has the power to take the city for a decent sum of money. But that's
just money, and it comes out of the taxpayer's pocket. The state,
meanwhile, has the power to make the losses in this particular poker
game very personal. It can put the loser in jail and on the way there
can take up years of his or her life in court appearances. As Annan
would find out, time is the state's ultimate trump card.
Victims of such violence are uniformly vilified to a public that has a
predisposition to fear people targeted by police. And so are those who
bear witness, such as Ramsey Orta, who used his phone to video-record
the killing of Garner.
"Try to imagine a world where there isn't a vast unspoken consensus
that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults
would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness," Taibbi
writes. "Instead, they're sold as battle scenes from an occupation
story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a
violent alien race is easy to understand."
Success in policing is not measured by combating or investigating
crime but in generating arrests and handing out summonses, turning the
work of police departments into what Taibbi calls an "industrial
production scheme." At the same time, there is an imperative to
suppress as many reports of felonies as possible to produce favorable
crime statistics. This creates a situation where, as Taibbi notes,
police are "discouraged from reporting real crime in the community,
which [has] the effect of letting people know that police weren't
interested in committing resources to their actual needs."
Police are empowered to stop anyone for a long list of reasons,
including "inappropriate attire" and "suspicious bulge." This provides
legal cover for the random stops and searches carried out by police,
especially against boys and men of color. Garner was harassed in this
way throughout much of his life.
"Garner was harmless, but he was also a massive, conspicuous, slovenly
dressed black man standing on a city block during work hours," Taibbi
writes. "People like him would become the focus of a law enforcement
revolution that by the late 2000s had become intellectual chic across
America with a powerfully evocative name: Broken Windows."
At its core, the broken-windows policy-the idea that arrests for minor
violations prevent major violations-was warped by what Taibbi calls a
"chilling syllogistic construct: New Yorkers who are afraid of crime
are already victims. Many New Yorkers are scared of black people.
Therefore, being black is a crime."
It is under this construct, as Taibbi writes, that "90 to 95 percent
of all people imprisoned for drug offenses in New York in the nineties
were black and Hispanic, despite studies showing that 72 percent of
all illegal drug users in the city were white."
The random stopping and searching of poor people of color became known
as stop and frisk, a bulwark of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New York.
The city government argued that it was not engaging in racial
profiling. It stopped poor black and brown people, it said, because
they were statistically more likely to be criminals. In 2011 and 2012,
Taibbi writes, "blacks and Hispanics represented 87 percent of all the
people stopped. The city of New York justified these stops by stating
that 'approximately 83 percent of all known crime suspects and
approximately 90 percent of all violent crime suspects were Black and
Hispanic.' "
It is a startling admission by the city, but one that explains the war
on the poor. There was, Taibbi writes, "a single, blanket
justification that covered 'reasonable suspicion' for at least 80 percent of
those searches:
they were black or Hispanic residents of high-crime neighborhoods."
The police targeting of black people is part of a long continuum in
American history. It has its origins in the post-Civil War era's Black
Codes, which prohibited blacks from owning weapons, restricted their
property rights, forbade them to assemble in groups and imposed severe
penalties on them for minor or meaningless crimes. "No matter what the
time period, police from the Civil War through the later Jim Crow
period always had a series of highly flexible laws ready if they felt
the need to arrest any black person uncooperative enough not to have
committed an actual crime," Taibbi writes.
Ghettos and crime-ridden neighborhoods, our "racial archipelagoes," he
writes, were "artificially created by a series of criminal real estate
scams." Real estate companies in the 1960s used scare campaigns to
drive out white residents. They brought in "a new set of homeowners,
often minorities, and often with bad credit and shaky job profiles.
They bribed officials in the FHA to approve mortgages for anyone and
everyone. Appraisals would be inflated. Loans would be approved for
repairs, but repairs would never be done."
"
The typical target homeowner in the con was a black family moving to
New York to escape racism in the South. The family would be shown a
house in a place like East New York that in reality was only worth
about $15,000. But the appraisal would be faked and a loan would be approved
for $17,000.
The family would move in and instantly find themselves in a house
worth
$2,000 less than its purchase price, and maybe with faulty toilets,
lighting, heat, and (ironically) broken windows besides. Meanwhile,
the government-backed loan created by a lender like Eastern Service by
then had been sold off to some sucker on the secondary market: a
savings bank, a pension fund, or perhaps to Fannie Mae, the
government-sponsored mortgage corporation.
Before long, the family would default and be foreclosed upon.
Investors would swoop in and buy the property at a distressed price one more
time.
Next, the one-family home would be converted into a three- or
four-family rental property, which would of course quickly fall into
even greater disrepair.
This process created ghettos almost instantly. Racial blockbusting is
how East New York went from 90 percent white in 1960 to 80 percent
black and Hispanic in 1966.
Once poor people of color were quarantined in these ghettos it was
almost impossible for them to get out.
Aggressive policing is the bulwark of a segregated America. The police
patrol the borders between our urban wastelands and affluent white
neighborhoods. This policing, Taibbi writes, "maintains the illusion
of integration by allowing police officers to take the fall for
policies driven by white taxpayers on the other side of the blue
wall."
"Follow almost any of these police brutality cases to their logical
conclusion and you will eventually work your way back to a monstrous
truth,"
Taibbi writes. "Most of this country is invested in perpetuating the
nervous cease-fire of de facto segregation, with its 'garrison state'
of occupied ghettos that are carefully kept out of sight and mind."
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the
college degree program