Cops Empowered: Death of a nation

Police banality is as much a problem as police brutality.  US cops have become so used to committing murder with impunity that they no longer hesitate to kill.  The white robes of "Birth Of A Nation" in 1915 have been replaced by blue uniforms during the death of the nation in 2016.

The US media no longer make any pretence about their overt racism.  Not one media member called the Dallas shooter a lone wolf, even though he was a lone wolf.  He acted alone, unaffiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, but good luck getting any racists in the media to admit that fact, to label a black shooter the same way as a white shooter committing the same crime. 

And good luck getting anyone to admit the shooting in Dallas is the fault of US cops, courts and so-called "legal system".  The murderers in Minnesota and Louisiana who murdered two black men bear more responsibility for the five dead cops in Dallas than the shooter.  Minnesota governor Mark Dayton deserves credit for calling the crime a murder, yet for doing so the rightwing media and corrupt police establishment have sought to vilify him - the same police establishment that publicly celebrated when one of the six murderers in Baltimore was "acquitted" by a corrupt legal system.

I am not wishing for this and don't want to see it, but Americans should brace themselves and expect to see a lot more tit-for-tat killings. People are tired of violent cops acting with impunity.  As happens in many other places, when legal means don’t work, people will resort to extralegal means. Note that I say extralegal, not illegal. There is a difference.

I won’t be shocked if the US turns into Vietnam on a small scale, warfare between the occupiers (cops) and the populace. The US military killed Vietnamese civilians indiscriminately to try and subdue the populace, but instead enraged people into supporting the resistance. The resistance killed US soldiers randomly to demoralize them, blending in with the population, and leaving the US military unable to find them.

Occupation of a population is impossible because people won’t stop fighting for their homeland until they win or they can’t fight anymore. It ends up in one of three results: a police state (e.g. USSR, South Africa), genocide to the point where the occupied populace can’t fight back anymore (e.g. US, Canada, Australia), or the occupiers realize they can’t win and give up (e.g. Vietnam, India, Afghanistan, the US civil rights fight). Palestine is a place heading towards one of these three endings.


Not two days after the Dallas shootings, cops in Baton Rouge have used trumped up charges to justify perpetrating violent acts against protesters.  The streets of the US are turning into Tiananmen Square.  The Black Lives Matter protester in this photo shows the same courage and dignity as the Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks.

Guns Kill: Three Sheats to the wingnut

In Houston, Texas, two young women were shot dead by their mother in a "family dispute".  Unless someone is trying to kill you, what sort of "family dispute" requires having a gun in your hand?

Texas Woman Killed By Police After Fatally Shooting Her Two Daughters

Texas police fatally shot a 42-year-old mother after she refused to put down the gun she used to murder two of her own daughters in a Houston suburb.

Christy Sheats was found by police just after 5 p.m. on Friday, standing in the street near the bodies of her two daughters, Madison, 17, and Taylor, 22.

[...]

The incident was apparently the result of a family dispute that spilled into the street.

Her daughters will never disobey her again, will they?  That'll teach 'em.  And mom won't kill anyone again either, not after the cops shot and killed her too.

Would it surprise you to learn that Christy Sheats was a rightwing gun fetishist?  Probably not.  She posted this drivel on facebook three months before killing her own children:

It would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semi-automatic handguns.

The NRA would like to remind you that this is no time to talk about gun control.

The IOC Games: South Korea's fascist government rounded up and imprisoned homeless people and pro-democracy activists

An investigative journalist has reported that during the 1980s the South Korean government rounded up and imprisoned homeless and poor people (falsely labelled "vagrants" to dehumanize them) in the years leading up to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.  During their captivity, these people (men, women and children) were subjected to abuses like beatings, slave labour, starvation, torture, rape and murder.

South Korea was still a US-backed (and armed) fascist government in 1981 when the 1988 Olympic bid was awarded.  That was only a year after the May 27th massacre of as many as 2000 pro-democracy protesters by the military (the government claims only 200-300, the families say differently).  In 1985, the torture and murder of a university student became the rallying point, leaving to the South Korean fascist regime giving up power in 1987.

That means many of the abuses of the homeless and poor continued after South Korea had allegedly become a free country.

South Korea covered up mass abuse, killings of 'vagrants'

In 1975, dictator President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun-hye, issued a directive to police and local officials to "purify" city streets of vagrants. Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up panhandlers, small-time street merchants selling gum and trinkets, the disabled, lost or unattended children, and dissidents, including a college student who'd been holding anti-government leaflets.
They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities. By 1986, the number of inmates had jumped over five years from 8,600 to more than 16,000, according to government documents obtained by AP.

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. But about 90 percent of them didn't even meet the government's definition of "vagrant" and therefore shouldn't have been confined there, former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers' records and interviews compiled before government officials ended his investigation.

Equally appalling, the current South Korean govenment is showing obscene hypocrisy and duplicity.  They have demanded for decades that Japan pay reparations to Korea's "comfort women", women who were forcibly held in brothels and raped by Japanese soldiers during World War II, more than seventy years ago.  And yet now that same South Korean government refuses to investigate and hold accountable those who participated in the imprisonment and abuses of their own citizens less than forty years ago.


One of those responsible was Park Chung-hee, South Korean dictator from 1962-1979, and the father of current South Korean president Park Geun-hye.

Trust Mistrusted: Once again, "Corrupt Cop" is a redundancy

Newark city's "settlement" with the US's Department of Justice settles nothing.  It does not reimburse victims of police corruption, not does it hold corrupt cops accountable for their actions.

Unlike most cases of police corruption, there is direct evidence of their misconduct that could be used to convict them.  Every time corrupt cops filed false reports, they put their names on them.  The US's DOJ is not charging those corrupt cops, and by not doing so they are condoning further corruption.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/nyregion/in-settlement-newark-agrees-to-a-series-of-police-department-reforms.html

In Settlement, Newark Agrees to a Series of Police Department Reforms

Federal officials announced on Wednesday that a sweeping settlement had been reached to reform the Newark Police Department after a three-year investigation uncovered a pattern of unconstitutional practices, including improper searches and stops and excessive use of force.