The militarization of America's Police Forces leads to a battlefield mindset in which all civilians are seen as the potential if not in fact enemy.
photo Members of the Johnston, Rhode Island, Police Department SWAT team stand outside the station with some of the surplus military equipment they have accumulated. (Photo: Glenn Osmundson/The Providence Journal)
" When you dress, train and arm civilian police officers like combat soldiers, eventually they’re going to start acting like their fighting a war and the American people are the inevitable enemy. This has almost always been the case for communities of color and political activists, whose civil rights are routinely violated by police decked out in military gear eerily similar to that of a soldier in Afghanistan. "Rania Khalek at Dispatches From the Underclass,Feb. 1, 2013.
Pentagon Arms Zoos and Universities with M16s
Obama Betrayed His True Believers By Defending Wall Street Crooks
Obama's Department Of Justice was concerned over damaging careers of individuals and Wall Street firms than with justice. Justice has become a dirty word in the Obama administration's lexicon except when Obama makes speeches to get re-elected and to boost polling numbers.
What is most disturbing about Obama's about face in his concerns and his claimed intentions during his campaigning and how he operates in the White House is that so many self-proclaimed liberals and progressives defend many of Obama's most egregious criminal actions from expanding the Global War on Terror and taking part in unwarranted criminal attacks on or in sovereign nations in acts akin to Wars of Aggression ie Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Syria , Iran and a dozen or more other nations.
Even when it was disclosed that the White House may have been involved in the secretly orchestrated brutal crackdown on the Occupy movement these Faux progressives defended Obama or attacked the FBI but not the FBI's real boss President Obama.
Obama has not only betrayed his followers and proven himself to be a liar he has also become a war criminal and has breached American laws and the US Constitution knowing his base would take no action and might chastise him from time to time but this did not and will not lead to any action being taken against him.
As George W,. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld knew that their conservative base and its media would defend their policies no matter what Obama depended on his supporters and the supposedly liberal media to defend him and make excuses for his actions or lack of action..In taking part in drone attacks murdering civilians ("collateral Damage" in News Speak) and in continuing renditions, torture , taking down one dictator while defending a dozen other dictators and Regimes who are just as anti-democratic, corrupt and brutal ; to codifying into law indefinite detention ; abuse of prisoners of war ("detainees" in Newspeak); continuing and expanding warrantless wiretaps; to going after Whistleblowers ;to refusing to deal with a corrupt racist system of justice which preys upon minorities and the poor; to giving Wall Street and to giving a free pass to the most environmentally unfriendly industries such as the oil and coal industries .
After recently reading Ron Suskind's book The Confidence Men one gets an insight of how Obama was and is not in charge when it comes to a variety of issues but rather for example Obama forgets he is the president and so defers to the same usual suspects such as Larry Summers who helped to create the Wall Street crash of 2008 and rather than go after all of those who took part and /or enabled the Bush Regime in its lies and propaganda and it's use of torture and its War Of Aggression and illegal occupation of Iraq and so forth instead Obama reassured the CIA and other agencies responsible for these misdeeds and criminal actions that he had somehow unilaterally absolve them all of these crimes giving them a blanket pardon and exoneration while tracking down with a vengeance to persecute those who did their public duty by leaking information about these ongoing crimes which are still occurring.
Obama defends Wall Street because as they say America is built upon corruption and without it America would be much poorer so they claim. These self-serving Wall Street experts convinced Obama that if he started arresting CEOs or shut down some Wall Street firms America's economy would fail and the world's economy with it ie the Sky will fall (Chicken Little) So allowing corruption to go unpunished like Bush's War Crimes was the only solution???
Ethics, morality and the Rule Of Law are just empty vacuous terms used in speeches to cover up Wall Street and Obama's own on going crimes.
What America needs is a new Teddy Roosevelt the trust buster or an FDR who would stand up to the Wall Street bankers and the rich and powerful in favor of the American people.
Instead Obama supports these unpatriotic crooks who outsource jobs and investments and ships large sums of money to offshore accounts without any real concern for average Americans or the American economy.
The main problem with this expose by PBS on the Wall Street scandal is that the producers do not go after Obama himself since he as president was the one who could decide upon what legal and investigative actions the Department of Justice and others would be permitted to do. Video removed .
Pentagon Arms Zoos and Universities with M16s by Rania Khalek ,Dispatches From the Underclass, Feb. 1, 2013
While the militarization of domestic law enforcement is nothing new, there’s always surprises to be found in the increasingly combat-ready arsenals of local police departments.And more revelations from insider Paul Weyrich about the real reasons the religious right became fanatically anti-abortion . More to do with with being upset over Jimmy Carter's new laws forcing these religious institutions to desegregate or lose subsidies from the US government and lose their tax exemption status.
An investigation by Chicago’s local ABC Affiliate, WLS, reveals that the military surplus program has left local law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois armed for battle, with everything from high powered automatic weapons and armored battlefield vehicles to combat helicopters.
The police department at Benedictine University, a catholic school in Lisle, Illinois, has two M-16 rifles and a Humvee, courtesy of the Military Surplus program.
The University’s police chief, Michael Slatino, told WLS that “Short of a weapon of mass destruction, you can get any kind of military gear that’s out there.” He added that the automatic rifles and Humvee, which is used as a command center, “gives the community a sense that they’re dealing with a professional law enforcement agency.” I think he’s mistaking “law enforcement agency” with “military soldiers.”
Police at Brookfield Zoo, located in the Chicago suburb of Brookfield, acquired M-16 and M-14 combat rifles thanks to the Pentagon program. The crazy part is that they actually believe they need them:
A Brookfield spokesperson would not say how many guns they got but said zoo police are thankful that they are better able to protect the public, the animals and save money.
Police in Round Lake Park, Illinois, which has a population of just around 7,500, didn’t want to be left out:
In far north suburban Round Lake Park, the police department is fully outfitted by the LESO program equipment, from a Hummer used for patrols and SWAT deployments to an armored vehicle, a snowmobile, a segway and an ATV.
The department’s 17 officers each have a military patrol rifle but they also have this battering ram.
“Somebody is not responding to the door, maybe an elderly person or somebody disabled, we may need to make entry into their home,” Round Lake Park Police Department Chief Dan Burch said.
The Round Lake Park Police also have special forces night vision devices, an expensive digital evidence camera, a brand new Apple computer, two flat-screen televisions and even the carpet tiles on the floor came from the program.
Even more disturbing is that the Chicago Police Department lost some of their military hand-me-downs, among them body army and night vision goggles. If they can’t keep track of those, whose to say they won’t lose an M16 or two?
Based on heavily redacted documents WLS obtained throughout the FOIA, they learned that Illinois law enforcement agencies have received $37 million dollars worth of equipment from the Pentagon. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing exactly the type of weapons police departments have obtained because that information is blacked out because otherwise, say defense officials, it would be a threat to homeland security.
The most common critique of the military surplus program is that it’s a waste of taxpayer money, which isn’t wrong. But the bigger issue here that often gets missed is the increasing militarization of domestic law enforcement, whose supposed to be tasked with keeping the peace while upholding the constitution.
When you dress, train and arm civilian police officers like combat soldiers, eventually they’re going to start acting like their fighting a war and the American people are the inevitable enemy. This has almost always been the case for communities of color and political activists, whose civil rights are routinely violated by police decked out in military gear eerily similar to that of a soldier in Afghanistan.
The Not-So-Lofty Origins of the Evangelical Pro-Life Movement By Jonathan Dudley Religion Dispatches, Feb 4, 2013
...Although evangelicals were mostly silent on abortion after Roe v. Wade, they were not silent on other political issues. Paul Weyrich, one of the evangelical right’s most influential founders, recalls that the movement initially emerged to defend racially segregated Christian schools from government intrusion:
[W]hat galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.
In other words, as Randall Balmer has succinctly put it: “the religious right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.”
Only after the movement was underway did it begin advocacy on abortion. It did so, in large part, based on highly dubious arguments advanced by the popular writer Francis Schaeffer.
Schaeffer held a master’s degree from Westminster Theological Seminary (though he went by “Dr. Schaeffer”) and argued, in 1979’s Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (co-written with the surgeon C. Everrett Koop, and offered as both book and film series), that legalized abortion represented an abandonment of the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. He is introduced in the film as “one of the world’s most respected thinkers”—a generous title given that Schaeffer plays loose with history, neglecting to mention that abortion was in fact legal when the nation was founded.
Schaeffer and Koop advance the argument that if evangelicals don’t mobilize to stop abortion, infanticide and involuntary euthanasia will soon become widespread.
They have to go back to Roman theologian Tertullian to reinforce their claim that the “orthodox position” is that life begins at conception, conveniently leaving out the fact that Church fathers Augustine and Aquinas—and most evangelicals up until the 1970s—are on the other side of the argument. As Aquinas put it (in a view that remained the official position of the Catholic Church from the medieval era to the mid-1800s), “The rational soul ought to be united to a body which may be a suitable organ of sensation... before the body has organs in any way whatever, it cannot be receptive of the soul.”
More sophisticated anti-abortion arguments were advanced once the movement was already underway, notably the 1982 publication of Michael Gorman’s Abortion and the Early Church or the 1984 publication of John Jefferson Davis’ Abortion and the Evangelical. But Schaeffer’s arugments are often cited by the founders of the evangelical right as what convinced them to take up the cause against abortion.
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