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by stickdog99 » Wed Dec 03, 2014 9:47 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Wed Dec 03, 2014 10:13 pm
stickdog99 » Wed Dec 03, 2014 8:47 pm wrote:
Watch this indisputable case of wrongful death fade from view much more quickly
by 8bitagent » Wed Dec 03, 2014 10:40 pm
by seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 03, 2014 10:54 pm
The New Movement: Are We There Yet?
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“This movement-in-the-making has no choice but to challenge the very legitimacy of the State and its armed organs of coercion.”
After decades of misleader-induced lethargy and quietude, Black America is finally in motion – or, at the very least, earnestly seeking ways to resist being plunged deeper into the abyss. The nascent “movement” is more like a pregnancy than a full-term child, and thus does not yet have a name beyond the focal point of “Ferguson.” Yet, it is kicking its way into the world robustly – even seismically – registering nearly two hundred demonstrations in the week following the non-indictment of killer cop Darren Wilson. This baby is reaching self-awareness in the womb of struggle, and will emerge screaming its own name at the top of its lungs.
Unlike its older siblings, Civil Rights and Black Power, this movement-in-the-making has no choice but to challenge the very legitimacy of the State and its armed organs of coercion and control: the police and, inevitably, the entire intelligence and national security apparatus of the ruling regime. Poor baby, but such is her fate.
A half century ago, when Civil Rights triumphed over official apartheid and Black Power strutted proudly across the landscape, a national white consensus quickly congealed around a project to contain the “Second Emancipation”: Mass Black Incarceration. The project began in high counterinsurgency drama with the launching of the first SWAT attack on the Black Panther Party headquarters in Los Angeles, in 1969. The initial blueprint and funding for the vast expansion and militarization of local police was established through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a product of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the great “friend” of Black and poor people (and Vietnamese). The FBI’s COINTELPRO spooks, provocateurs and assassins shredded the ranks of Black radical leadership, killing scores and burying many more in their dungeons, while President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs created the legal and physical infrastructure to put the Black America poor on permanent, nationwide lockdown. By 1970, Mass Black Incarceration had become a foundational organizing principle of U.S. domestic policy. Over the next four decades, the total prison and jail population would increase more than seven-fold, with Black and brown inmates becoming, for the first time, the overwhelming majority of inmates.
“By 1970, Mass Black Incarceration had become a foundational organizing principle of U.S. domestic policy.”
The Black Mass Incarceration State – or, as Michelle Alexander calls it, the New Jim Crow –penetrates and defiles every aspect of Black life. It killed Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Sean Bell and Oscar Grant and many thousands of other martyrs to police terror, stigmatized a whole race of survivors, and warped intra-Black social relationships beyond measure. Yet, even as two generations of Blacks were systematically dehumanized by a Mass Black Incarceration State that operated in near-identical fashion across the width and breadth of the country, the Black political class deepened its collaboration and identification with the ruling regime, reveling in their imagined and actual proximity and usefulness to Power. Black mayors and city councils functioned as cogs in the wheels of the people-crushing machine, dutifully sending millions of fellow African Americans into prisons and cemeteries, and then partying every September at the Congressional Black Caucus gala dinner, in Washington. Some of us at BAR call them the Black Misleadership Class, but that is far too kind.
In June of this year, the Congressional Black Caucus showed definitively that the bulk of the CBC are operatives of militarized racist oppression – that is, of the Mass Black Incarceration State. Eighty percent of the 40 full-voting members either opposed (27) or abstained from voting (5) for a bill that would have prohibited Pentagon transfers of weapons and gear to local and state police departments. These Black lawmakers paid for the army of occupation that patrols the streets of Ferguson and every other heavily Black city, and are fully culpable for the results. (See “The Treasonous 32: Four-Fifths of Black Caucus Help Cops Murder Their Constituents,” BAR Sept 10.)
Therefore, whatever this new Movement is to be called, it must find itself in opposition to the Black Misleadership Class and its constellations of collaborators in mass Black oppression, including – no, especially – the high profile Quislings of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The Nature of the Struggle
The movement that is now being born is unlike the Civil Rights struggle, which was, of necessity, a fight for full Black protection under the umbrella of bourgeois liberties afforded or implied by the U.S. Constitution. The Black Mass Incarceration State was created as a direct response to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. This “New Jim Crow” proved fantastically effective in containing the self-determinist imperatives of the Civil Rights Movement’s short-lived successor, Black Power, snuffing out its more radical political elements while diverting the energies of the newly upward mobile Black classes into collaboration with the supposedly “enlightened” corporate regime.
The post-Sixties Mass Black Incarceration order became steadily harsher with U.S. capitalism’s rejection of the social contract with labor, finance capital’s rise to political hegemony, and the quickening cascade of global capitalist crises. After 1980, the pace of general Black economic and social progress slowed to a crawl or, in some indices, halts entirely, soon accompanied by a renewed War on Drugs (crack) and another round of draconian penal legislation and prison building. This slide into hell for the masses of Black folks had no effect on the political behavior of the Black Misleadership Class, which continued to revel in its Oprahs, the growing ranks of Black generals and corporate executives, and every trophy awarded to Black movie stars. In 1986, half the Congressional Black Caucus voted for 100-to-1 penalties for crack cocaine versus the powdered kind. It was no great leap at all when, 28 years later, four out of five CBC members voted to continue arming local cops as if they were Marines preparing to assault Fallujah.
“There will be an entrenched, organized class of Black people deeply connected to Power who will attempt to thwart and betray the movement at every critical juncture.”
Given that the “traditional” civil rights organizations have always acted in close concert with their state and national legislative Black caucuses, the CBC’s behavior is a good measure of the political stance of the larger Black Misleadership Class in relation to the rest of Black America. The lesson of history is clear: the selfish, grasping classes that were propelled into leadership of Black America by the opportunities opened to them by the mass-based Civil Rights Movement, and whose hold on leadership was further strengthened by the State’s decimation of Black radicals and the diversion (and perversion) of popular Black Power sentiments into Democratic Party politics, will not play any positive role in the new movement directed against the State’s police. This, alone, sets the nascent movement apart from its predecessors, in that there will be an entrenched, organized class of Black people deeply connected to Power who will attempt to thwart and betray the movement at every critical juncture.
An Anti-Police Movement
Most importantly, this movement is fundamentally different than the Civil Rights struggle because it is directed against the police, the embodiment of the State’s monopoly on the use of force. Inevitably, it challenges the legitimacy of the American State – the same government that is currently led by a Black man and which has overseen the militarization of police and the relentless enhancement of the Black Mass Incarceration State for nearly a half-century.
Under these circumstances, some level of violence is inevitable – the police will make sure of that, and Black youth will demand payback. Moreover, although it is necessary and right to pursue reforms, especially to establish the most thoroughgoing community control of the hiring, firing, and tactical and strategic direction of local police, reactionary white majorities in state legislatures are likely to stymie such reforms at every turn. In the final analysis, cities will almost certainly have to be rendered ungovernable before the State will accede to substantive people-power demands – which was why Ferguson posed such a threat to power, and such a strong appeal to those who desperately need a fundamental change in power relationships in Black America.
“Some level of violence is inevitable – the police will make sure of that, and Black youth will demand payback.”
The movement-in-the-making has been inexorably propelled by the objective facts of Black urban life to the same political juncture that confronted the newly formed Black Panther Party for Self Defense, in late 1966. This does not mean that the new movement will have to take the same path, but it must confront much the same quandaries, against a far more powerful national security state. The comparison is inescapable, for the simple reason that the “police army of occupation” that the Panther Party struggled against is the same one that killed Michael Brown and the rest of the current era’s victims – only far bigger and better armed, backed by an incredibly pervasive intelligence apparatus. The circumstances of struggle will be more difficult than any other that Black people and their allies have faced since Reconstruction was sold out by northern capital in 1877. However, the alternative is continuation of the Black Mass Incarceration State, buttressed by a lawless gendarmerie – a regime that has led to African Americans making up one out of every eight prison inmates on the planet.
In this vortex of struggle, the newborn movement will name itself, and choose its own leaders.
by MayDay » Wed Dec 03, 2014 11:42 pm
BOOGIE66 » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:15 am wrote:The media painting this as a race issue does nothing but make the racists feel that the shooting was justified because "blacks are violent out of control etc" and sets the narrative as a black vs white issue which is bullshit divisive nonsense that allows the real issue (police abuse of power) to be ignored yet again
If it was presented as it is, another sign of the US police state and abuse of police power, something might get done. Cops also kill unarmed white people and get away with it all the time (remember Kelly Thomas) by saying they feared for their safety.
Just because the cop was white and the victim black it isn't necessarily a racial issue.
Maybe people should read about what happened at the grand jury and the bullshit circular logic that was used to protect a killer cop, and think about how the guy is protected not because he is white, but because he is a cop.
by 82_28 » Thu Dec 04, 2014 12:52 am
by 8bitagent » Thu Dec 04, 2014 1:09 am
MayDay » Wed Dec 03, 2014 10:42 pm wrote:BOOGIE66 » Tue Dec 02, 2014 1:15 am wrote:The media painting this as a race issue does nothing but make the racists feel that the shooting was justified because "blacks are violent out of control etc" and sets the narrative as a black vs white issue which is bullshit divisive nonsense that allows the real issue (police abuse of power) to be ignored yet again
If it was presented as it is, another sign of the US police state and abuse of police power, something might get done. Cops also kill unarmed white people and get away with it all the time (remember Kelly Thomas) by saying they feared for their safety.
Just because the cop was white and the victim black it isn't necessarily a racial issue.
Maybe people should read about what happened at the grand jury and the bullshit circular logic that was used to protect a killer cop, and think about how the guy is protected not because he is white, but because he is a cop.
What i am seeing is a widespread admittance of the fact that people of color are targetted, harrassed, and murdered by police far more often than white people. I am seeing a multiracial, respectful movement that isn't afraid to tell ol' whitey to SHUT UP AND LISTEN for once, and I'm seeing white folk respect this request. Recognizing the racial aspects of class warfare is not causing us to become more divided. It is bringing us together in ways that matter. It is prompting a dialogue that has largely been shoved into the corner since the late '60s.
Watching the Oakland, CA protest on livestream just now, I saw a crowd of red, yellow, black, brown, and white folk chanting "ONE HUMAN FAMILY!!" all together. How is this divicive?
ERIC GARNER, MICHAEL BROWN, SHUT IT DOWN, SHUT IT DOWN!
#SHUTITDOWN
by MayDay » Thu Dec 04, 2014 2:49 am
by 8bitagent » Thu Dec 04, 2014 7:04 am
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Dec 04, 2014 11:51 am
Charles Barkley Stands By Calling Ferguson Rioters ‘Scumbags’
Charles Barkley isn’t retreating from recent comments in which he called people rioting in Ferguson, Mo., “scumbags,” defending the police in a new interview and dismissing as “ridiculous” the notion that they’re “just killing black people.”
“The cops are awesome,” Barkley told CNN on Tuesday. “They’re the only thing in the ghetto between this place being the wild wild West.
“We’ve always had a racial issue in this country, and the biggest problem with it is we never discuss race until something bad happens,” Barkley added. “We never have meaningful dialogue over a cold beer when things are going good.”
Barkley recently called people who torched buildings in Ferguson “scumbags,” after a grand jury’s decision not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager sparked renewed unrest in the St. Louis suburb.
“There are some black people out there who are crooks, and when the police come to your neighborhood, it’s a tense situation,” Barkley told CNN. “There’s a reason they racially profile us at times. Sometimes it’s wrong, sometimes it’s right. To act like we have no responsibility for some of this stuff is disingenuous.”
Kenny Smith's open letter to Charles Barkley about Ferguson
Editor’s Note: NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley’s comments about recent events in Ferguson, Mo. have prompted a strong reaction from many, including Kenny Smith, his friend and fellow analyst on TNT’s “Inside the NBA.”
Smith addressed Barkley’s remarks in an open letter submitted exclusively to For The Win. The letter is featured below in its entirety:
Dear Chuck,
I hope this finds you in the way I always see you, in great spirits, with great joy and full of life. There are some things I want to openly say to you that sometimes in conversation get lost.
Firstly I lied! You ARE the greatest Power Forward of all time. It’s not (Tim) Duncan or (Karl) Malone, they had size and height that you weren’t blessed with and you never had near the talent around you that they were blessed to have. Contrarily you took your teams to similar heights. Secondly, you are a champion in my book. Effort and determination is what makes a champion, not a ring.
Lastly, you are the most entertaining person in sports television (partly because I throw you so many assists lol).
However, what I consistently find interesting is how writers and media members view your insights in politics, and now race relations, with the same reverence as your insights in sports.
They did it in the Trayvon Martin trial and now with Mike Brown and the decision in Ferguson. It’s not that you shouldn’t ever have an opinion, but you are often quoted alongside the likes of Al Sharpton and even President Obama. I would hope that Sharpton or President Obama would never be referenced with you when picking the next NBA Champs!
The body of work that our Black Civil Rights leaders put in by planning, executing and activating does not justify you being in the conversation. While your body of work on the court very few compare to nor should be mentioned when you are giving your expert analysis. Again, I respect that you have an opinion on Ferguson. And here’s mine.
The question must be asked: Why is there so much distrust in the police and the legal system from the African American community? Without manifesting what the effects of slavery still have today, Dec 1st still marks only 59 years since Rosa Parks sat on that memorable bus. Many of our parents and grandparents have lived through those times and have passed those stories on to all of us. Those civil rights changes were at one time the law! They were not illegal.
So did the protection of the law by the courts and police make it right? Obviously not, so as African Americans we still know and feel that there are laws and jurisdictions that severely penalize the poor and, most importantly, African Americans greater than any other group. Some laws were initially made without us as equals in mind; that’s just the facts. So the thought process that it’s not for us or by us will unfortunately lead to distrust.
When someone is in “the struggle”, which many of our black communities are in, they are living with a lack of educational facilities, high unemployment and poor recreational facilities. The masses involved in “the struggle” will react in several ways. They can overcome it, challenge it, live in it, or fall victim to it … For those of us who are decades removed from “the struggle” because of our life through sports or business, we now have to acknowledge that every option listed exists. If not, then we are the ignorant ones.
That leads me to the looters and civilians burning buildings which you referred to as “scumbags”. Here’s an analogy: If you put 100 people on an island with no food, no water, no hope of a ship coming, then some will overcome it and be resourceful, some will live in it, others will panic and others will show horrific character, which is wrong. But not to understand that all alternatives are possible is wrong as well.
I was also disheartened to see the reaction of burning buildings and looters by some. However, when you are in “The Struggle” to not expect that potential reaction is foolish on our part.
The real issue is learning to positively manage your anger so you can be heard. It’s not that they are “scumbags”, their emotions won’t allow them to rationally think through their anger. I applaud that you have done a great job in your anger management in recent times … but not always.
Mike Brown wasn’t about race relations, nor Trayvon Martin or even Hurricane Katrina for that matter. It’s about trust. Do I trust you to help me off the island? If so, do you have my best interests at heart? Do I trust that you will you send a ship or allow me access to build my own ship?
And you were right Chuck, let’s not discredit that there are great police officers in all neighborhoods, but let’s not credit that we shouldn’t have doubt.
See you Thursday night!
Kenny Smith
by MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 04, 2014 11:57 am
Brooke Jarvis
@brookejarvis
It's easy to read #EricGarner's final words and feel like he's speaking for thousands
https://twitter.com/brookejarvis/status ... 72/photo/1
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Dec 04, 2014 3:35 pm
Wave of Protests After Grand Jury Doesn’t Indict Officer in Eric Garner Chokehold Case
A Staten Island grand jury on Wednesday ended the criminal case against a white New York police officer whose chokehold on an unarmed black man led to the man’s death, a decision that drew condemnation from elected officials and touched off a wave of protests.
The fatal encounter in July was captured on videos and seen around the world. But after viewing the footage and hearing from witnesses, including the officer who used the chokehold, the jurors deliberated for less than a day before deciding that there was not enough evidence to go forward with charges against the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, 29, in the death of the man, Eric Garner, 43.
Officer Pantaleo, who has been on the force for eight years, appeared before the grand jury on Nov. 21, testifying that he did not intend to choke Mr. Garner, who was being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. He described the maneuver as a takedown move, adding that he never thought Mr. Garner was in mortal danger.
The decision came barely a week after a grand jury found no criminality in the actions of another white police officer, Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man in Ferguson, Mo.
After a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed Eric Garner, his
family called for peace, and New Yorkers vented their emotions in the streets.
Video by Adam Freelander, Mac William Bishop, Joshua Davis and Stephen Farrell on Publish Date December 4, 2014. Photo by Kirsten Luce for The New York Times.
After the news from Staten Island, a wave of elected officials renewed calls for Justice Department intervention, saying the grand jury’s finding proved that justice could be found only in the federal courts. By the evening, the department announced it would open a civil rights inquiry.
On the streets of the city, from Tompkinsville to Times Square, many expressed their outrage with some of the last words Mr. Garner uttered before being wrestled to the ground: “This stops today,” people chanted. “I can’t breathe,” others shouted.
While hundreds of angry but generally peaceful demonstrators took to the streets in Manhattan as well as in Washington and other cities, the police in New York reported relatively few arrests, a stark contrast to the riots that unfolded in Ferguson in the hours after the grand jury decision was announced in the Brown case.
President Obama, speaking in Washington, said the decisions in New York and Missouri highlighted the frustrations that many African-Americans have harbored about a legal system that has a long history of discrimination against black people.
by 8bitagent » Thu Dec 04, 2014 4:29 pm
MacCruiskeen » Thu Dec 04, 2014 10:57 am wrote:Brooke Jarvis
@brookejarvis
It's easy to read #EricGarner's final words and feel like he's speaking for thousands
https://twitter.com/brookejarvis/status ... 72/photo/1
by Nordic » Thu Dec 04, 2014 7:30 pm
by Nordic » Thu Dec 04, 2014 7:37 pm
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