Exclusive: A Black Woman's Perspective on Ferguson

(Editor's note: The following – one of the most thought-provoking commentaries on Ferguson I have yet read – is excerpted by permission from an exchange of e-mails between myself and a fellow writer I met in 2010 during a National Writers Union non-fiction workshop. Besides being a dear friend and a respected colleague, she is what might be termed “a true American”: her ancestry includes African, First Nations and Caucasian peoples and exemplifies the genetic melting-pot the American continents have been for at least the past 25,000 years. She was born in a small southern town, and though she appears white, her birth certificate defines her as “Negro” – a reality that gives her a unique perspective on life in the United States. So does her personal history: she spent a summer driving across the southeast, worked and camped in every section of the nation, and lived in apartments and houses in the suburbs and the hearts of four U.S. metropolitan areas as well as on a farm. For professional reasons, she prefers to remain anonymous. [LB/30 November 2014])

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THE ONE THING I haven't seen or heard in all the Ferguson coverage is a comparison of the present-day policing of U.S. minorities with the strategy and tactics used against the labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – specifically from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through the Haymarket Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921.

Militarization of law enforcement (then via the National Guard and the Pinkerton Agency), the ever-present possibility of provocateurs and the law-enforcement organizations' protection of the rights of the establishment over those of the individual – all are similar to what is happening to folks of color now, whether in Ferguson or on our southern border.

Then as now, the conflicts are about labor – though the pivotal elements tend to be obscured by the fact labor rights no longer threaten our economic establishment. With the advent of containerization, just-in-time production and stocking, and very speedy transport, the unionized jobs have gone – either overseas or to the "right-to-work" states – the outsourcing helped by various tax breaks.

But something had to be done with the remaining workers. Oh, we can start a new industry! Besides the military-industrial (and Congressional) complex, we now have the prison-industrial-Congressional complex. Like the 19th Century practice of giving away land and tax benefits to railroads, we now have 21st Century giveaways to private, for-profit prisons, and we can even guarantee them a certain number of prisoners – or detainees in the case of Immigration Detention Centers.

The reason we haven't heard such comparisons being made is there is no longer a Labor Radio or a newspaper sponsored by labor. There aren't even any labor programs on air or columns in the press any more. And without constant publicity, labor unions, corrupt or clean, begin to fade.

During the civil rights era, reporters and editors, even for the top newspapers and networks, earned middle class incomes. Newspaper workers lived in the neighborhoods where the average Joe lived. Now they earn enough money not to have to live with the hoi polloi. This only increases their lack of understanding of the real story.

At the heart of the Ferguson conflict is economics and education. Typically due to the tax breaks granted corporations (see above), there isn't enough money to fully fund good schools with good teachers for all students. In addition, few state governments are empowered to do more than minimally contribute to public school (K-12) funding. In most states, the critical budget decisions are made by local school districts. That's because most of the money spent in a given district is generated – mostly from real estate taxes – within that district. Thus the impoverished districts stay poor and the rich ones get richer.  And yes, I agree that teachers' unions have fostered some of the malaise in our schools, but that really didn't start until desegregation – until white teachers felt they had to fend off what they regarded as encroachment by "new" (often African-American) teachers.

Once upon a time, our land-grant colleges were supposed to be for workers' families. Now they, and community colleges (which used to be free to students in their service area), are beyond the reach of today's lower income families: a year at Washington State University costs about $28,176 a year for tuition, books, fees, room and board, transportation, and miscellaneous expenses. Tacoma Community College charges $109.59 per credit hour, plus fees, books, etc.

But even if a college education were free, the good jobs have been leaving the nation at least since the Reagan years. I watched a factory that was making tools for the auto industry get shipped piecemeal to Korea in 1982-1984. It went from 50-plus people per shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week, shutting down only on Christmas, to zero people in two years. None of those middle-aged men were retained by the company. Likewise, Boeing is slowly moving its work from the Seattle area to non-union states from Kansas to South Carolina.

And even if we reform the education system, where are the jobs? As in Egypt, Tunisia, Italy, and Spain – where are the jobs that would give these kids a purpose?

To speak to the particulars of Darren Wilson versus Michael Brown, a one-inch differential in height should not have cowed Officer Wilson so much he immediately pulled his gun. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't kick his door open as Mike Brown got close enough. Anyone behind the steering wheel of a car is at a definite disadvantage when it comes to getting a nightstick or pepper spray as opposed to a firearm that's on his hip. For both men, the final 90 seconds probably ran on pure adrenalin. But the outcome was determined the moment Brown reached inside Wilson's car.

Yes, I do believe Wilson was terrified. Lots of people are afraid of large people, and large people depend on that fear to get their own way. Wilson probably had used his height to keep from having to pull his gun before. This time, his opponent was bigger than he was – certainly heavier though not much taller. And Wilson's testimony reflects that.

Should he have been terrified? I don't think so. I think his training and fitness level should have overcome that. Wilson might be in excellent shape for a Ferguson cop, but he spends his days in a squad car, not being a physically active teenager. He needs to up his fitness profile and his awareness quotient. People caught off-guard as he was are generally used to terrorizing other people by their mere presence.

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Ferguson Is Everywhere, and We Are All Michael Brown

THE WHITE RULING CLASS in Ferguson, Missouri is obviously terrified by the anger of the town's African-American majority population – hence the rush toward reforms  reported in useful detail by The New York Times two days ago.

The PollyAnna liberals, of course, will soon be hailing the reforms as a great triumph, the silver lining in the storm-dark clouds of Michael Brown's death and the still darker portends of the local police fulfilling the purpose for which they have been federalized and militarized – to serve as capitalism's army of occupation in the USian Empire's domestic colonies. But nothing will change save the gradual banishment of that conquered-territory image,  which must be suppressed because it (correctly) tells us our overlords think Iraq, Afghanistan and the imperial homeland are tactically and strategically interchangeable.  That's why, within weeks if not days, a team of obscenely salaried Josef Goebbels wanna-bees will be revising our recollections of what really happened so that eventually Ferguson fits the official Horatio Alger version  of U.S. history. And do not doubt they will succeed. The USian Ruling Class manages the most diabolically sophisticated tyranny in all human time, and its propagandists are the most effective truth-benders ever: note how they have already revised the story of Martin Luther King Jr. to remove the “r” from his call to revolution.

No doubt the propagandists will do with Ferguson as they have done with the life and death of Rev. King – they'll afix a smiley face to it. Picture a smiley face replacing the Roman execution order atop a medically accurate representation of Jesus' crucifixion agonies, or (like the Arbeit Macht Frei above the main gate at Auschwitz), hung at the entrance to Guantanamo: in either instance, complete with its slogan – “have a happy day” – and you'll understand the ultimate grotesquerie of this approach. Its historical context is especially telling: the smiley face emerged at the height of the Vietnam War, as if it were an admonition to capitalism's victims: “have a happy day” (or else).

Yes that is the precisely sort of predator nation in which we now live, as the dismantling of the New Deal,  the nullification of the Civil Rights Movement,  the defeat of feminism  and the terrifying triumphs of the lavishly funded theocratic counter-revolution  prove beyond all argument. “Reform” in this context is fraud – its sole purpose is deception, an illusion of “change” that does nothing more than temporarily cloak the savagery of capitalism, which is so malevolent it can no more be “reformed” than cancer.

But this time the marks know the score. The Ferguson residents who dismiss the reform effort as a scam  are undoubtedly correct. The black community, like all other USian minority communities, has learned from bitter experience that anything the Ruling Class gives, the Ruling Class can just as quickly take back – and no doubt will. Blacks know what too many of the rest of us still refuse to learn: the federalized, militarized police and their conversion into capitalism's army of occupation in the homeland colonies means Ferguson is Everywhere U.S.A. just as Michael Brown is all of us – every 99 Percenter regardless of race or gender or age.

Sometimes, rather than offer bogus reforms, the Ruling Class merely lies, a response at which the president is an obvious master. Hence Obama the Orator's 2008 campaign slogan, “change we can believe in” – possibly the most glaring Big Lie in U.S. political history – and his post-electoral transformation to Barack the Betrayer. Now in the latter persona he is again showing his true Republican selfhood by helping Pennsylvania privatize Medicaid, which – exactly as intended – will significantly worsen the plight of the state's poor, no doubt in some cases fatally, all the while enabling the One Percent to turn a handsome profit on the resultant misery.

Since Obama's absolute fealty to the Ayn Rand principles of capitalism is so obvious, I would also question the promises by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Ferguson and an even more obvious atrocity in Louisiana, where a black man who'd been arrested, searched and shackled with his hands behind his back and locked into a police car then supposedly produced a concealed handgun and fatally shot himself.

The president has also called for a “review” of his own police federalization-and-militarization policies. (Yes, the process of turning the police into storm troopers was begun under Bush II, but like the nullification of the Bill of Rights, Obama has continued it with a vengeance.) Probably all the “review” means is the imposition of new measures to cover up the ongoing conversion of the police into a new Schutzstaffel.  We the People are becoming more rebellious, and the One Percenters, who worry the imperial war machine might not reliably kill U.S. citizens, are becoming terrified. Hence here in the United States the aristocracy turns to the police, exactly as the aristocrats did in Tsarist Russia, which gives “serve and protect” a new and decidedly more Ayn Randish meaning.

Hence too what I would anticipate from these investigations is nothing more than dramatic pronouncements in the characteristic Obama style: compelling rhetorical flourishes that when carefully analyzed say exactly nothing and change even less. Bear in mind too it's an election year: that means Obama's required to (seemingly) pander to the Democratic base. Never mind all the sensible Democrats (of which, long ago, I was one) have already figured out the party labels are meaningless – that we're governed by one Ruling Class party of two names, and that the only meaningful difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the former are fascists and brag about it while the latter are every bit as fascist but try to hide it behind a smokescreen of lies.

As many of you know I was an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and in 1963 was jailed on related charges in Knoxville, Tennessee. Reasoning from the eye-opening lessons I learned then and during the subsequent 18 months I remained in the South, I have selected a three more follow-up stories that seem to me to capture the essence of Ferguson's importance – and more importantly stress the fact Ferguson is (as I said above, and as cannot be said too many times) Everywhere U.S.A. One of these texts is a Popular Resistance.org piece that makes the point the killing of Michael Brown and other young black men is part of the nationwide class war,  “massive disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and unconscionable levels of joblessness and economic underdevelopment.” Another is an Associated Press dispatch Reader Supported News rescued from the Orwell hole: it says the Ferguson resistance is inspiring a nationwide resistance movement –  which is precisely what the Ruling Class doesn't want us to know. Lastly, also from the previous week – I now feel I should apologize for having been so caught up in the personal angst of viewing newsprint copies of my fire-destroyed photography – a Truthout exclusive examines the clash between “peacekeepers” and activists that is a vital part of the Ferguson backstory.  It is actually a new twist to an old conflict: in my day, the “peacekeepers” were called Uncle Toms.

Finally here are three more stories that fall into the “as-if-there-were-any-remaining-doubts” category.

The first reveals the extent to which the so-called Main Stream Media (MSM) has become the government's propaganda apparatus,  a perfectly logical evolution given the fact government at all USian levels is now a de facto subsidiary of Wall Street. In other words, government and business have merged, producing the ever-more-obvious reality of “capitalist governance” – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us – what earlier generations knew as fascism.

Next, in the second report, we have another revelation of the forceable imposition of Christian theocracy on the military.  Undoubtedly (though the text doesn't say it), this is a desperate effort by the Ruling Class to use the Prosperity Gospel  in an attempt to bolster the political reliability of the troops. Will the theocrats succeed? Will biblical law replace remnants of our constitution? Margaret Atwood  surely thinks so – and having lived in the South, which is already a functional theocracy, I tend to agree.

Lastly, an anti-Michael Brown website provides a new yardstick by which to measure the magnitude of USian racism  – one of the many reasons I believe we are not far from the emergence of an USian Nazism that will target racial, sexual, political and spiritual minorities here in the bourgeoning Fourth Reich much as they were targeted in the Third Reich. But here it will no doubt be under the aegis of a smiley face, perhaps even with clowns to comfort the children before they are gassed: “have a happy day.”

LB/14 September 2014

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Racial Hatred Implicit in USian Total Surveillance State

An iconic, oft-published image I increasingly regard as a lament for the United States. The woman, a student at Western Washington State College, was a participant in an anti-war demonstration. Nikon F, 105 f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click on picture to view it full size.)

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RACE HATRED SUSTAINED by unlimited police power was one of the defining characteristics of Nazi Germany, but is it now also a core principle in the new, post-Constitutional paradigm of U.S. governance? 

That's the underlying implication of Reuters' bold revelation an elite Drug Enforcement Administration unit routinely receives National Security Agency intercepts and reports from other intelligence agencies it then relays to state and local police departments throughout the nation. The DEA unit, says Reuters, is called the Special Operations Division or SOD and is partnered with the Department of Homeland Security.

Researched and written by investigative reporters John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, the Reuters exposé says the cops who receive the information are under strict orders to keep its source secret – “not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.” It adds that “federal agents are trained to 'recreate' the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.” 

A second Reuters report further details how the government is using spy tactics to nullify the Constitutional rights of suspects and defendants in a broader spectrum of ordinary criminal cases. 

Because the prosecutions disclosed in the initial Reuters report are all apparently drug-related, they are of especially grave concern to minority advocates, who cite compelling statistical evidence  the so-called “war on drugs” is in fact a war against African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples and indeed all other non-whites in the United States. 

The racial element in this story – which the carefully self-censured U.S. corporate media monopoly has yet to acknowledge – arises from the government's hugely disproportionate arrest and imprisonment of non-whites.  Whether in percentages or in raw numbers, the U.S. imprisons more of its people than any other nation. But the selectivity of its penal harshness is disclosed by the fact the vast majority of convicts are from nonwhite minorities. Though only 27.6 percent of the USian population is non-white (2010 census data), 67.6 percent of the nation's male convicts, and 50.7 percent of its female convicts, are nonwhite (see material linked immediately above). 

While minority advocates assert these statistics prove the racism the U.S. officially denies, the One Percent's fear of revolution is undoubtedly another major element in the targeting of minorities. Hitherto top-secret files of the KGB – Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security – revealed after the collapse of the Soviet Union its analysts had carefully evaluated the USian rebellions of the 1960s and concluded only the minority communities possessed any genuine revolutionary potential. Though the U.S. and Canadian news reports of these disclosures have seemingly vanished from public access, they nevertheless might explain why the intelligence agencies are using the rationale of the drug war to focus on minorities, particularly after the emergence of the Department of Homeland Security as the de facto USian secret police.

Lastly of course is the profit motive – the unapologetic savagery of for-profit prisons  as capitalism inevitably morphs into Ayn Rand fascism. “(T)he increasing overincarceration of people of color,” says the American Civil Liberties Union, “rakes in billions of dollars a year for (Corrections Corporation of America) and other for-profit prison companies.” In other words, the intelligence agencies are now aiding the increasingly privatized criminal justice system in its unacknowledged mission to ensure white supremacy and simultaneously add to the already obscene riches of the One Percent. 

But the dire implications of USian surveillance operations go far beyond matters of race. They are legitimately frightening to any and all dissidents everywhere in the nation. What is portrayed by the newest revelations is a power-mad government intent on imposing a 21st Century version of a Nazi or Stalinist police state. Given the Obama Administration's relentless campaign to forcibly disarm the civilian population, Second Amendment advocates are now especially wary of being unconstitutionally targeted. Under the new paradigm of USian governance – absolute power and unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us – all such fears are undeniably rational.

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Another element in the tsunami of tyranny that is sweeping away USian freedom is the rat-out-your-colleague program by which the government is indoctrinating its employees in how to achieve job security by spying on one another. While capitalism has always encouraged workplace paranoia and the associated back-stabbing, out-ratting and brown-nosing as a means of destroying or preventing worker solidarity, one of the (former) attractions of government employment was the relative absence of such pressures. But this new effort by the Obama Administration will make government employees as mutually distrustful as their private-sector counterparts, thereby facilitating the union-busting the Republicans openly demand and most Democrats secretly support – which may, beneath its national security disguise, be the program's primary purpose. 

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A comment by which I responded to a piece about John Kiriakou, the former Central Intelligence Agency officer who dared reveal the unconstitutional USian torture program and is now imprisoned as a result,  gets right to it: 

Government IS the enemy. Who put Mr. Kiriakou in jail? Who reads all our mail? Who monitors our lives every minute of every day? Who provides the goon squads that enforce the corporate will? Who falsely pledges to protect our freedom then damns us all to inescapable slavery?

 

This, alas, is the one point upon which the conservatives are now proven to have been truly prophetic -- and if we could but grant them that, perhaps then we could begin to build a Left/Right solidarity sufficient to salvage our liberty.

 

LB/11 August 2013

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