Linh Dinh writes:
As we police the world and become more of a police state each day, basic police functions are being neglected here at home. In Detroit, seven out of ten murders are unsolved. In Oakland, the police will no longer respond to a host of crimes, including burglary, theft, embezzlement and extortion. The problem is mostly manpower. Atlantic City has axed 60 cops this year, on top of 13 who retired without being replaced. Last year, Camden was rated as the second most dangerous city in America. Two years ago, the most deadly. Faced with this, Camden is about to lay off half of its cops. Flint, MI, has also fired nearly half of its police. Its murder rate is at record high. In Illinois, more than 300 policemen have been let go in 2010.
With unemployment getting higher and higher, there will be less tax revenues, meaning more cops will be laid off even as crime rises. In Newark, 167 cops have been let go. With more murders and carjackings, the National Guard has been proposed as a solution, yes, the same National Guard that occupied Newark’s streets with tanks during the 1967 riot, where 26 people were killed and 725 injured.
In Camden, Guardian Angels have shown up. In Oakland, there are private security guards patrolling downtown. Called “Ambassadors,” quaintly enough, they are unarmed, for now. Gun packing security guards are already all over America, however, though usually confined to private properties. Expect this to change. (In England, even bona fide cops are not armed as they patrol the streets!) After Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired 150 Blackwater mercenaries to roam New Orleans. Wielding assault weapons, many were fresh from the mayhem of Iraq.
Recently, I was in Newark’s Ironbound, a working class neighborhood of mostly Portuguese, Brazilian and Latin American immigrants. Wandering around, I paused in front of a cartoon rooster towing a Volkswagen. Was this some weird allegory of our power-down future? A diss against the car? Against Hitler? A 40-ish man, Jose, appeared to explain that pollo al carbon, grilled chicken, has become Karpollo, the name of his restaurant. Thus, a chicken pulling a car. Jose has been in that location three years. So how’s business, I asked. Not too bad, Jose said, though he had expected it to be much better. Many people in the Ironbound do construction work, so they’re seriously hurting. A few years ago, a man could easily make $900 a week. Now they’re losing homes and apartments. Many have moved out. With fewer jobs and cops, crime has gone up even here, for long one of the safer parts of Newark. “Just a week ago,” Jose pointed down the street, “a guy was carjacked with a gun, right at that corner!”
Jobless, you can always sign up for flag-waving genocide and foddership. Granted, the starting pay isn’t all that great, but it sure beats McDonald’s. Plus, you’ll get grub, fox holes and trauma care au gratis. Discharged in pieces, you’d be done, but if you could come back sorta whole, you may luck into a well-armed job to patrol the good old USA terrorizing all these home-bound slobs, whether muggers, pickpockets or protestors, desperate and often angry folks, you know, just like you.
If a government doesn’t look after its citzens, it must go.
PITCHFORKS!
Unless it’s a pen name, LINH DINH knows something quite personal as a refugee about America that was vs. America that is from a past sensitivity from skin-close to yet another “people’s regime.” Yep, under Bush all the National Guard that would have dealt with natural disasters and catastrophes were chasing alleged Jihadis in their own side of the world far from home. Intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb, these reservists sent abroad, relied on midbrain instead of cerebral cortex to shoot at anything that moves, creating ten Jihadis to avenge everyone they killed. Of course, careerist generals like Franks and Petraeus, the hayseeds in command, needed these ill-conceived wars to gather stars to four before retirement (we already have 3xs as many four stars generals as we had during Vietnam War when it was 2xs as large). Though the Petraeus’s COIN manual’s asserted that low-intensity warfare is a police job, not an army job, this was disregarded as COIN created a lot of stars-laden ladders for them to climb before they leave for a civilian future. Ironically, the troops we needed to deal with domestic weather crisis created by our CO2 emissions were busy shooting “towel heads.”
As “homeland security” careers are made in the new anti-Muslim war, replacing our anti-Communist ones, police departments remembered what J Edgar Hoover, head of FBI, long insisted: there ain’t any organized crime, only organized Communists! As WAR IN CONTEXT showed us, this results in peace activists treated in the US as they were treated in the Soviet Union. Back during the Vietnam War the First Amendment meant something because no one believed LBJ’s claim: if we don’t stop’em in Vietnam we’ll have to stop’em in San Francisco” and everyone’s son was draft-eligible. And then there were no free unlimited Internet free-speech machines, so there was no need to punish doubt of official lies as suspicious behavior. So then, MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE proliferated widely, despite the war.
Learning from the military the art of statistical manipulation….then making the raw data security secrets, police departments have made us think that crime is way down and terror is way up. Rather than walk the beat, cops are learning to use the new dang-fangled electronic devises that enable them to tell what’s going through a person’s mind or learn the art of enticement so they can draw out ABOUT-TO-THINK-OF-BEING terrorists as the really biggest bang for the municipal buck. After all, it’s federally funded, creates a few more specialty pay-grades with far better remuneration than learning CPR and ACLS to save a sudden cardiac arrest victim.
Sooo, when the municipalities went broke recently because of Wall Streets’ defrauding of the municipal tax base from real-estate, it is the beat cops that got laid-off, not these terrorist-catchers that can spot the thought before it becomes thought of an action.
I often warned: Anti-Arab anti-Semitism is a fire that Zionists dangerously play with domestically, enticing some unstable angry young Muslims to react to the taunting so the point can be made that Muslims should not be allowed in the US. In fact, much of the funding for the anti-immigration campaigns is the same as for Zionism. After all, we wouldn’t want Arabs in America that succeed professionally and then coalesce around Arab interests; there are already 8 million of them here and only 6 million Jews….who knows how they organizing and lobbying would change out “for sale” Congress on Mideast issues, especially on foreign aid. Let’s not forget that $10billions/yr now going to Israel would put a lot of beat cops back on the streets. Let’s not forget that once you set fire to one end of anti-Semitism, the flames quickly spread to the other.
What good gumshoes journalists could investigate is from where all this anti-terror slippery slope sliding in violation of the Bill of Rights originates (as America becomes akin to the European states on their way to Fascism in search of Anarchist and Communist terrorists; back then the assumption was that they were mostly Jews). The arsonists will be consumed by their own arson so I think only American Jews– like the many heroes devoted to the civil rights tradition ending past American racism at home– can lead us back to our Bill of Rights roots, saving us from anti-Semitic Fascism– a path now greased by well funded fear mongering hasbara.
Perhaps DE is on to something about the American Jews making a change. But it would more likely be the youth than the elders. After the exhibition in New Orleans a while back, it doesn’t look like the elders will change to meet the youth. Perhaps if the U.S. wasn’t so caught up in the so called terror thing, pulled back all the troops in America, then just maybe there would be a change in the elder stance? Of course, that would also take backbone from the Congress & Executive branches of the Government, tighten the purse string on the Defense Department, Perks, Military/Industrial cabal, Wall Street with the T.B.T.F.’s but most of all, bitch slap the whole lot of them back to reality that the U.S.A. comes first, before even any other country including Israel, is even thought about. As it stands right now, this present cast of characters in the KABUKI performance, are all guilty of Treason to the U.S.A., guilty of the R.I.C.O. act, War Criminals, incompetent fraudsters. Considering that this doesn’t seem to stand a chance of becoming reality, then it would do the population to copy the homeless & learn to survive on your wits, for that’s where the vast majority is headed when the collateral damage is again wrought upon the U.S.A.
So be it! Since I came to America I saw Jewish youth call its parents to account over and over again and accept the consequences. Norman, may the New Year be full of youthful Jewish JUSTICE. Together with the other American youth they may save America from its dark side as they did in 1960s!