Sunday, August 24, 2014

in "lethal situations" under the "rule of law" your mileage will very definitely vary...,


newappsblog |  Only a couple of weeks after the Ferguson shooting, and only about three miles away, St. Louis police shot and killed another black man, Kajieme Powell, after he apparently shoplifted from a convenience store.  The details of what happened in Ferguson are in dispute, which has allowed the law and order crowd to defend putting six bullets into unarmed Mike Brown – two into his head – as a proportional act of self-defense.

No such ambiguity exists in the Powell case.  The police released cellphone video yesterday, and it is absolutely chilling.  Powell emerges from the convenience store with a pair of canned drinks.  He seems a little confused – puts them down, paces around, and so on.  Then the police show up in a white SUV, and jump out, guns drawn (already! They decide to escalate before even arriving at the scene).  Powell backs away, says “just shoot me” a couple of times, climbs up on a retaining wall, takes a couple of steps in the direction of the police… and then they shoot him dead.  Total time between the police arrival and his death? About 15 seconds.

The video, of course, completely contradicts the police department’s story about a drawn knife and aggression on Powell’s part.  When confronted with the contradiction, the police chief replied that “in a lethal situation, they used lethal force.”  The only thing harder to understand from that video clip than why killing Powell was justified by the situation is how anyone can continue to deny that the problem is structural.  I am not accusing the officers or the police chief of lying.  It’s much, much worse than that: I’d be pretty sure they really did think their lives were in immediate danger.

To put it differently: Clive Bundy is alive today, and was not shot even though he and his supporters repeatedly pointed guns at police.  Kajieme Powell and Mike Brown and Eric Garner and a lot of other people are not.  It turns out that you get your white privilege even if you deny the sovereignty of the federal government.

14 comments:

DD said...

So is this situation driven by classical racism or is racism a coping tool for those who are harvesting from amongst their livestock? In other words, is the parasitic government that has learned to treat it's citizens as a resource doing this because they are racist or are they racist because it allows them further delineation between themselves and their source of revenue?


Did the local government set out to be racist or did they set out to squeeze their constituents and develop racist policies and attitudes as a result?


I can see this question going sideways here, so let me try and be very clear. The racism is apparent. There are always multiple factors. Is the racism in this community the cause of the problem, or a reaction by the extractive class to their economic exploitation (see my most recent post)?

CNu said...

Note: refrain from citing Ken as an example of the awesome power of post hoc rationalization to abstract the individual from any intentionality, agency, or accountability for political policies which cause egregious harm to others - and - which abstractions can be made through arcane deductive processes to reconcile with a pseudo-christian moral canon.

DD said...

Right, and of course all in-group/out-group predatory/extractive behavior between groups of humans comes from the same place, be it racism or economic predation.

That old lady is just a pattern-monkey like the rest of us. We're addicted to routines, their effects be damned.

Don't give anglo-civilization all the credit; that behavior pattern is consistently repeated across all our genus' forefathers pretty universally. That's root-level code!

CNu said...

That behavior pattern is by no means root-level. It's nearly as old as agriculture, and it appears in conjunction with agricultural surpluses. Why we call it livestock management...,

Ed Dunn said...

Constructive Feedback - do you find it coincidental the rapid GDP growth of Western African countries (inside Africa with internal investments and trade) happen to occur after the fall of Gadaffi? The amount of rebel activity and atrocities in Western Africa by these Libya funded groups are now diminished? I would say that is a huge benefit.


The USA is investing in infrastructure trying to compete with China investment in infrastructure. Mo Ibrahim is able to provide more capitalization to developing nations and support entrepreneurs within Africa in terms of technology startups benefit Africa that were once war-torn.


I'm not saying the USA is right but an Arab Gadaffi funding black-on-black in Africa to maintain a selfish dictatorship just had to be dealt with for a greater Africa...end justify the means....

Vic78 said...

Nothing's wrong with having political operatives; they just have to be good at their job. The majority of them suck. I won't argue with that. Most of them are hacks doing whatever it takes to keep their seats.

makheru bradley said...

“ISIS grew fast, not the BPP party.” You’ve demonstrated that you don’t know the history of either the organization founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or th Black Panther Party. The Party grew from two people in October 1966, to 5,000 members in 1968. The chairman of the Party, Bobby Seale says it grew too fast. So your agrument is with the primary source. The BPP was not even on Hoover’s COINTELPRO radar when he released this memo in August 1967.

August 25, 1967 (From) Director, FBI

Primary targets of the Counterintelligence Program, Black
Nationalist-Hate Groups, should be the most violent and radical groups and their leaders. We should emphasize those leaders and organizations that are nationwide in scope and are most capable of disrupting this country. These targets, members, and followers of the:

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM)
NATION OF ISLAM (NOI)

Offices handling these cases and those of Stokely Carmichael of SNCC, H. Rap Brown of SNCC, Martin Luther King of SCLC, Maxwell Stanford of RAM, and Elijah Muhammed of NOI, should be alert for counterintelligence
suggestions. click here

By 1968 Hoover declared that the Black Panther Party was "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Obviously the growth of the Party had nothing to do with Hoover's declaration.

[On Sept. 8, 1969, armed police raided the Watts breakfast program.) This raid accorded with an early 1969 FBI directive to "eradicate [the BPP's] serve the people programs." On May 15, 1969, in an internal memo, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote: "The Breakfast for Children Program B represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities B to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for."]

[A 1970 national poll (conducted by Louis Harris) found that 25 percent of African Americans felt the Black Panther party represented their views.]

Your opinions are just that opinions--not history. Your discussion of religion is irrelevant to the critical points being raised by the author of this post: “The bottom-up, communitarian socialism practiced by the Black Panther party and boldly demonstrated for all to see was their crime – empowering the community at the local level - will always be perceived by the power elite as a crime.”

"you want us to give a f*ck about the Black Panther Party for no other reason but to support your ego with some nostalgia eccentric ass movement that was basically a cult of personality and no real effectiveness." That statement is a figment of your imagination. My interest here is purely historical. I would not waste my time wanting you to support anything.

Constructive_Feedback said...

My ANALYSIS stands!!!


In the greatest fraudulent application of the "Jedi Mindtrick Scheme" the "BLACK LEADERSHIP" that is ordinarily giving us a HISTORY LESSON about how EUROPEAN/WHITE IMPERIALISM is the "Oil" of "White Supremacy" - used the time in our history when THEY HAD A FAVORABLE COMMANDER IN POWER - to AGREE TO PUNT on any criticism against him as he FIRED MISSILES into Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Pakistan BECAUSE they understood that the AMERICANIZED NEGRO could be made to look past this OFFENSE - and focus on fighting for SOCIAL JUSTICE in Staten Island and Ferguson.


DO YOU NOT THINK that the 'Obama Administration' had a conversation with the "Emergency Managing Minister Of Social Justice" Al Sharpton and told him that they needed him to LAY OFF any criticism over LIBYA and YEMEN - as they are DOING HIS BIDDING on "Domestic Photo ID Voter Suppression?"


LOOK AT HOW THEIR "INFINITE UNIVERSE" has looped around on them.
The NEGRO ONLY CARES ABOUT "HIS AMERICAN EXISTENCE" and are pacified to finally get national (US Justice Department) attention speaking IN THEIR VOICE.


From THE SAME DAMNED BODY , however, is another tentacle that are doing EVERYTHING that they teach in "Black Studies" classes about IMPERIALISM and the attacks on "Non-Peoples Of Color" BUT the SILENCE from the DIVERSION orchestrated by these FRAUDS make the entire body of academia fraudulent.


In the "Final Call" 3 weeks ago there was a RACISM SUMMIT among Black Progressive Fundamentalist intellectuals. DO YOU KNOW that when they got to OBAMA - the POINT OF RACISM was that "Obama was depicted as a MONKEY" but NOT any mention that "NO AMERICAN BOMB DURING OBAMA'S TERM HAS LANDED ON ANYTHING OTHER THAN A 'NATION OF COLOR'"


It is clear that the AMERICANIZED NEGRO did not ever expect to have so many of his CONTRADICTIONS exposed at one time BUT you have to give it to his media because they do a good job keeping attention away from these eye opening escapades.

Ed Dunn said...

Mali, Chad, Niger - do you understand the strategic significane of these countries in relation to Libya and Gadaffi? These were the established smuggling from Libya through these countries to the rest of Africa. i'm not making anything up like Makheru - I actually read the Human Rights reports and also the local tribunals throughout Africa and the findings. These are African nations who did their own inquiry came to these conclusions and knew about Gadaffi. I'm just perplexed that if we going to claim we know Africa and African affairs, we should at least understand the atrocities and how they manifested and who was funding and behind them - Gadaffi name came up so many times, I had a headache...

CNu said...

failings...., ta loco....,


Ken, I have seen higher and better moments of moral lucidity from you than from just about any other sibilant hissing of the Interweb voice that I know - and - I know quite a bit more about how you're living than you've disclosed and that I would ever consider letting on.



The combination of these factors have made it important to me, for you to see, what it is that I'm trying to show you. If I can persist long enough for you to string together these moments of lucidity - you have a very real chance of waking yourself up.



You awake, and engaged with your world and your context from that perspective, is a very exciting prospect indeed.

Ed Dunn said...

You said the discussion of religion is irrelevant - funny how you can say this but a non-religious organization like the Black Panther Party made it how far? Hell, how many true active months have the BPP even lasted, screw the storytelling party - how many months of true activity?


How long as religious orders been around - hundreds of years? How long as economic driven interests like secret wealthy families been around - hundreds of years? You want to shift how about my lack of knowledge of how these groups are founded - who cares how they were founded if the organization was a failure due to having no religious or economic baseline to sustain a purpose other than be a cult of personality.

Constructive_Feedback said...

Brother Ed:

There are several Regional Economic and or Defense coalitions in various portions of Africa.
ECOWA for example. The US of Africa is not merely "A Gadaffi thing" it is a logical next step to develop a more self sufficient - intra-continental economic ecosystem and a means of using shared military resources to maintain stability.


They are continually frustrated by the lack of POWER in their trade negotiations (mostly ) with Europe and they see the classical union adage of "Power In Numbers".


I BEG YOU to indeed factor in the interests of China compared with the United States and Europe into the debate.


Whereas today Europe is the conduit for a good portion of African commerce (just recently a long distance call between two African nations had to be switched through Europe for the call to be completed)


While the Chinese are no doubt interested in building up an African transportation system (rail) to more efficiently haul minerals out to the sea ports and new Chinese consumer goods into the land-locked nation - the UNITED STATES AND EUROPE have a vested interest in making a counter-initiative which keeps the existing dependency on their respective markets in tact.


I am going to post an audio analysis of Obama's "African Summit". The brother uses the observation that not every "African leader" was invited - namely Robert Mugabe - to make the case that the United States (and Europe) want this so called "African Development" done on THEIR TERMS which are ultimately favorable to "The West".


How is Gadaffi's legacy in Africa any different than that conducted by the American CIA in support of various corrupt dictators or insurgent groups?

Constructive_Feedback said...

Keep this map up as a reference.

http://www.nationsonline.org/maps/north-africa-map.jpg



You get no argument from me that "There Are Few Eagle Scouts" in any governments in this region.


You seem intent on identifying "Gadafi's Human Rights Record" and pointing out his impact in the region - when the larger picture shows the "Par For The Course".


There is a battle between Muslims and Christians and the split of the nation of "Sudan" points to the line of demarcation. (Nigeria North and South as well)


But they you a significant flow of "East African" migrants who flood through Libya on their way to Europe.


You can't place the blame of "Human Trafficking" on the deposed government of Libya. It is still happening today. In fact a ferry full of immigrants capsized in Libya over the past 2 days.


The more accurate "Big Picture" is - just as there is regional chaos that produces migration as people seek to depart from "Central America" to the United States - the truth is that those more southern nations in Africa - Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Mali, Chad are "Central American" (source nations), Libya is the conduit - like Mexico and EUROPE is the destination - just like the United States.


PLEASE specifically detail if you believe that TODAY'S CHAOTIC situation in Libya is a "Better Set Of Conditions" than the OPPRESSION under Gadaffi?

makheru bradley said...

I’m assuming that you actually read this post by the unidentified author. Did it not cause you to pause and think, why was the BPP savagely attacked by the State, while the religious organization you’re praising was left standing. Were they rewarded for supreme service to TPTB--participating in the assassination of Malcolm X.

March 4, 1968 COINTELPRO memo Goal #2: Prevent the RISE OF A "MESSIAH" who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a "messiah;" he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and Elijah Muhammed all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed "obedience" to "white, liberal doctrines" (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.

I don’t know who your religious orders are, but I do know that Dr. King was the foremost religious leader of his day. He never embraced Black Nationalism. He did abandon white liberal doctrines, thus the State decided that Dr. King had to be taken out--exactly one month after the above cited COINTELPRO memo. So you’re applauding the accommodationists who were allowed to survive, while denigrating those attacked by the state for attempting “empower the community at the local level.” LOL

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...