Quote of the day

12.25.2012 Leave a comment

Robert Parry wrote:

If one follows the “logic” of the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre, the United States should become an armed camp with armored-up police carrying high-powered weapons stationed at virtually every location where children might congregate and where a crazy person might show up with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

After all, why stop at protecting schools? A mentally unstable individual could just as easily walk into a shopping mall at Christmas and murder kids waiting to talk to Santa Claus or enter a theater showing a Disney film and open fire on the tiny movie-goers or stroll onto a field where children are playing soccer and empty a 100-round magazine.

f we are to really protect the children as LaPierre suggests, we should have armor-encased SWAT officers at literally every event where there are kids. It clearly wouldn’t do to just have some donut-eating cops with simple sidearms. All they would do is provide initial target practice for a gunman with his Bushmaster AR-15.

No, we would need “good guys with guns” at least equal in firepower to the “bad guys with guns.” That is, if we were to apply LaPierre’s reasoning as expressed at the NRA’s news conference on Friday, belatedly responding to the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, a week earlier.

So, rather than enact commonsense gun-control laws that could begin ratcheting down America’s crazy arms race, LaPierre recommends escalating the arms race by turning pretty much the entire country into security zones, the sort that U.S. airports have become, except at airports the passengers are not allowed to carry guns.

It might be surprising but one can locate a bit of symmetry among the various kinds of reactionary thought. Some — the neoliberals — want people to confront a police state so that prices may be free. Some — gun rights fundamentalists — want people to confront a police state so that guns may circulate freely. A pox on both kinds.

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Quote of the day

12.8.2012 Leave a comment

This report is not surprising:

In a recent investigative report by the Center for Responsive Politics and Hearst newspapers, the authors expressed concern that drones were being pushed into the domestic market before safety and ethics issues had been sufficiently addressed. Such fears played out when the first police department in the country to acquire an aerial drone crashed the $300,000 aircraft into its own SWAT team.

Fools with weapons are only funny when found in a movie

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Re: The GOP Tampa Bay Convention

8.23.2012 Leave a comment

Boy Scouts always prepare:

Thousands of Republicans from around the country will descend upon Tampa, Florida next week for the Republican National Convention, and if recent history is any guide, so too will hundreds of protesters.

To prepare, Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee has ordered the Orient Road Jail, a 1,700 bed prison in Tampa, emptied, relocating some inmates to another nearby prison and releasing others on bond. The entire facility has been transformed into a one-stop booking, detention, and bond-issuance center capable of handling large numbers of arrests, which begs the question: will Tampa police keep demonstrators on a short leash?

The upshot: Sheriff Gee intends to jail protesters for exercising some of their First Amendment Rights. To make this political repression efficient and effective, Sheriff Gee released some prisoners who committed crimes against property, persons and propriety! Is Sheriff Gee’s action bizarre? Yes, a rational mind would consider it bizarre to release prisoners in order to suppress legally protected speech and assembly. Is Sheriff Gee’s action surprising? No, not at all!

Let us recall how St. Paul Minnesota greeted protesters during the 2008 GOP Convention:

Police violence is now endemic, and is a recurring problem during political conventions. And it is not limited to Republican Conventions:

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No comment

8.21.2012 Leave a comment

The student’s name: Joe Diaz. His account of his arrest and the assault he suffered can be read here. The event occurred last December and was publicized by Kevin Carson on his blog.

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The well-armed DHS

4.11.2012 1 Comment

The Department of Homeland Security, another dubious post-9.11 artifact, recently ordered 450 million rounds of .40 cal. hollow-point bullets from the defense contractor ATK. The quantity ordered is massive when compared to the current population of the United States (estimated to be 309M as of 2010), and immediately raises questions about the purposes to which this ammunition will be put.

The quality of the item purchased is also questionable because these bullets serve only one purpose: To efficiently kill human beings. Because this kind of bullet is so destructive and deadly, the Hague Conventions of 1899 banned its use in international war.

David Lindorff asked some of the relevant questions generated by this disturbing news:

First of all, why does the DHS need so much deadly ammo? Are they anticipating a mass surge over the Mexican or Canadian border that would require ICE agents to slaughter the masses “yearning to breathe free”? Are there so many terror cells in America that they feel they need to be ready for a mass extermination campaign? Or are they worried that eventually the quiescent and submissive US population will finally decide it’s had it with the crooked banks and insurance companies, and are going to start taking the law into their own hands, so that the government will have to institute martial law and start gunning down masses of citizens?

If not any of the above, it seems to me that the order for 450 million rounds of ammunition, hollow-point or not, is pretty wildly excessive.

But secondly, I’d suggest we need to rethink this domestic obsession with killing. In the U.K., police are not routinely issued hollow-point rounds. Many other foreign police agencies also do not use them. Here in the US though, they are standard-issue for cops on the beat.

…

Finally, when it comes to Homeland Security, the situation is really different [than the kind of situations faced by most law enforcement officers]. Most of the gun-toting officers working for Homeland Security are not in the business of chasing down vicious killers. They are ICE officers who are going after border crossers, TSA personnel who are patting down air travelers, and the Federal Protective Service, who are really glorified building guards tasked with protecting federal property.

The work these armed personnel do can on occasion be dangerous, I’ll grant, but for the most part their work does not require killing people or dodging bullets. Do we really want them shooting to kill with hollow-point bullets?

The DHS has yet to publicly defend its purchase of this product. While its silence is unsurprising in the current political situation — which is defined by excessive governmental secrecy, global war-making, expansion of the security-surveillance apparatus, prosecution of whistleblowers, erosion of civil and political rights, suppression of popular dissent, etc. — it is disturbing in its own right, for a federal agency quietly and unnecessarily arming itself to the teeth provides just another data point among many which shows the United States abandoning the rule of law, a modern public sphere and a modern civil society.

Is it too soon to identify the government of the United States as a terrorist state?

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Quote of the day

2.8.2012 Leave a comment

Glenn Greenwald drew this conclusion from his discussion of the Federal government’s fear- and terror-mongering:

The central linchpin of Endless War and civil liberties erosions is keeping fear levels high. Foreign Al Qaeda villains once served that role, and Homegrown Terrorists have now replaced them. That they are, in fact, a “miniscule threat to public safety” seems to have no force in even slowing down, let alone grinding to a halt, the never-ending war mentality imposed on the citizenry even though we are now more than a full decade away from the last successful Terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

If I were asked to choose a government institution that best illustrates bureaucratic-monument building and excessive resource usage, I would select the security-surveillance apparatus. What is truly disturbing about the apparatus is that it is a network of related institutions which would have no reason to exist if the United States were not an empire. But it is an empire, one struggling to remain so for an indefinite future.

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