The Niggerization of America

"Against a historical backdrop of a people who have been so terrorized, traumatized and stigmatized that we have been taught to be scared, intimidated, always afraid, distrustful of one another and disrespectful of one another.

When you niggerized you unsafe,unprotected,subject to random violence,hated for who you are and you become so scared that you defer to the powers that be and are willing to consent to your own domination"

Cornell West

Monday, February 25, 2013

Verbal Deathtrap: Standard police excuses, they have a purpose in unarmed shootings.

by D.Large

In nearly every police shooting of an unarmed individual there are 'standard police statements or excuses' employed to explain and justify the actions of a  officer. The following italicized story was was released by Ware County, Georgia prosecutors office briefly detailing the events which led to the April 12, 2012 shooting of unarmed Andrew Poole.

"The Ware County dis­trict attor­ney iden­ti­fied the Waycross police offi­cer Wednesday who shot an unarmed man in April as Matthew Brooks, a patrol officer.
Rick Currie, dis­trict attor­ney of the Waycross Judicial Circuit, said this week he will not ask a grand jury to indict Brooks in the April 12 shoot­ing of Andrew Poole at the Garlington Heights pub­lic hous­ing com­plex on the west­ern edge of the city.
Brooks was search­ing the upper floor of an apart­ment for a sus­pect in a homi­cide when Poole emerged from behind the door of a bed­room that Brooks had been told was unoc­cu­pied. Brooks said he saw some­thing sil­ver in Poole’s hand and fired, although no weapon was found. Poole has recov­ered from being shot in the abdomen.
Brooks has been with the Waycross Police Department five years, is SWAT-trained and had pre­vi­ously served five years as a deten­tion offi­cer in Glynn County, Currie said."

The statement, "Brooks said he saw some­thing sil­ver in Poole’s hand and fired, although no weapon was found."  I call statements like this a "verbal deathtrap" because like spiders both police and prosecutors weave these statements in defense of the officer while attempting to convince the public of the dangerous demands of the police profession (the officer walking into a room that was suppose to be unoccupied). Statement like this are used to to also justify the high frequency of unarmed victims being shot and killed.

These statements also serve to help investigators and prosecutors expend the least amount of time and resources in clearing a officer of any misconduct. The redundant use of these statements by police has conditioned the public to believe the victim is always to blame for requiring the officer to use deadly force.

"The suspect looked like he was going for a gun", "the suspect's body movement was interpreted as threatening", "the suspect wrested for the officers weapon or the suspect was running away."

One of the following statements are usually provided in a initial police statement to the media and in subsequent investigation reports. These statements provide the cornerstone in supporting the exoneration of a police officer involved in the shooting of unarmed individual. The brief list below are some of the more familiar statements often heard:

1.. "I thought subject was going for a weapon"
2. "He had a hand in his waistband"
3. "I could not see his hands"
4. "He was moving or fidgeting in the car" 
5. "I thought his cell phone was a weapon"
6 ."He reached to the floorboard of his car"
7. "He leaned and reached over towards his glove compartment"
8. "I though my gun was my taser"
9. "I thought his wallet was a weapon"
10 ."He tried to run me over with his vehicle"
12 ."He tried to take my weapon in a struggle"
13. "It was dark but I saw something shiny in his hand"
14. "His facial expression and disposition led me to think he had a weapon"

One of the most overly used explanations given by a police officer involved in a shooting of an unarmed person is , "I feared for my life." which is mutually exclusive from the other above statements. "I feared for my life" requires no other supporting evidence. It can be viewed as a 'blanket or catch all statement' taken at face value and not questioned by investigators.  A police officer involved in a shooting has as much latitude in using any of these statements as does a prosecutor in deciding not to charge a officer in a shooting regardless of contradictory evidence.

The problem with accepting the veracity of any of these statements from police is the inability to challenge whether the officer decision to use lethal force could have been improper.  Any of these standard excuses given by a officer can be shaped and contoured to fit whatever circumstances that present the officer in the most favorable position to be released from any charge of  misconduct. Families of unarmed victims have a extremely hard uphill battle to disprove the officers version of events. Even contradictory witnesses statements who were present on the scene or in some cases captured video of an incident take a lower priority than a officer's explanation.

Officers who shoot unarmed citizens coupled with prosecutors who rarely challenge the officer's explanation of events contribute to the public apathy towards a corrupt criminal justice system. These excuses have become as common as the grand juries decisions that vote against indicting the the guilty officers. If only dead men could talk.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Miami civilian review panel to expand probe into 2010 fatal police shooting - Miami-Dade - MiamiHerald.com

Miami civilian review panel to expand probe into 2010 fatal police shooting

Miami Herald
The city of Miami’s independent oversight board has temporarily rejected a recommendation to exonerate a Miami police officer who fatally shot an unarmed man in 2010, deciding instead to conduct a deeper investigation into the shooting.

The 7-1 vote late Tuesday came after a coalition of community activists voiced concerns about the Civilian Investigative Panel’s initial probe.

“This is a real victory for the community,” said Jeanne Baker, who chairs the police practices committee for the ACLU in Miami. “It was heartening to see so many community members attend the meeting and speak passionately about the need for a more thorough investigation into why an unarmed black man was shot and killed.”

The shooting on July 5, 2010, was one of a string of seven deadly shootings of black men in the inner-city by Miami police officers in 2010 and 2011. Two of the men, including DeCarlos Moore, were unarmed.
Officer Joseph Marin, then a rookie, had run Moore’s license plate through a national database and believed the car to be stolen. But before Marin and his field training officer, Vionna Brown-Williams, could conduct a traffic stop, Moore pulled to the side of the road and got out of his white Honda Accord.

The two officers stepped out of their patrol car and ordered Moore to put his hands on the Accord, according to the CIP report.
Instead, Moore reached for a shiny object inside the car, prompting Marin to fire a single fatal shot.
Police later learned that the shiny object was rock cocaine crumpled in tin foil and that the car was not stolen. Investigators blamed a glitch in the computer system.
Miami-Dade prosecutors cleared Marin of criminal wrongdoing the following year.

But a coalition of community groups, including the NAACP and the ACLU, implored the Civilian Investigative Panel to take another look at the case.
Earlier this month, the CIP’s outside counsel determined that Marin’s use of deadly force was reasonable and did not violate city policy.

“Officer Marin’s use of deadly force in this tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving encounter with a non-compliant driver of a suspected stolen car comports with the Fourth Amendment’s ‘objective reasonableness’ standard,” investigators wrote.

They recommended that the CIP exonerate Marin.

The community activists were not convinced. They argued that the investigation should have reviewed the events that preceded the shooting, and taken a deeper look at the department’s use-of-force policy. They also argued they had been prevented from giving input into the investigation.
More than two dozen members of community groups turned out at the CIP meeting Tuesday to make the case for a deeper investigation.

“We wanted to make sure the CIP is more than just a rubber stamp,” said Nathaniel Wilcox, executive director of People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality, the community group known as PULSE. “We’ve already had a lot of witnesses come and speak to us,” CIP Chairman Thomas Cobtiz said. “But we are always open to hear what everyone has to say.”
Miami Herald writer Erin Jester contributed to this report.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/20/3244597_miami-civilian-review-panel-to.html#storylink=addthis#storylink=cpy










www.truthatlarge.blogspot.com

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Chicago City Council approves settlement for unarmed man shot by officer

Chicago taxpayers took it on the chin — or rather, in the wallet — again Wednesday one month after shelling out $33 million to settle two high-profile cases of police misconduct, including the largest pay-out in history to a single plaintiff.
This time, a $4.1 million settlement approved by the City Council will go to the family of Flint Farmer, an unarmed, 29-year-old man fatally shot by a Chicago Police officer in June 2011 while lying on the ground in a fetal position.
 
Chicago Police officer Gildardo Sierra had been drinking before reporting for work, but the Police Department waited more than five hours after the shooting to test him for alcohol.
“The drinking was something we discovered at a later point in time. That played into the settlement, but I don’t think that was a major reason for the value,” Steven Muslin, an attorney representing the Farmer family, told the Chicago Sun-Times last week.
“It was the actions of the officer in depriving him of his constitutional rights and his life. Police allegedly shot a young man when he was laying in the fetal position after the police had been called to respond to a domestic battery. Mr. Farmer was unarmed at all times.”
After being confronted about beating his girlfriend and her3-year-old daughter, Farmer allegedly ran across the street, put his hands in his pockets and pulled out a dark object that turned out to be a cell phone.
 
Police shot Farmer in the abdomen and thigh. Sierra was subsequently captured on a squad car video walking up to Farmer while he was lying on the ground and firing the last three shots that killed Farmer at point-blank range. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-111020-surveillance-sierra-video,0,3593326.premiumvideo

Farmer was involved in several on-duty shootings, at least one of them fatal, before Farmer’s death.
Last month, Chicago aldermen agreed to shell out nearly $33 million to settle two egregious cases of police misconduct.

The largest of the two settlements — $22.5 million — went to Christina Eilman, a mentally-ill California woman who was arrested at Midway Airport in 2006, held overnight in a South Side lock-up, then released in a high crime neighborhood, where she was kidnapped and sexually assaulted before falling or being pushed from the seventh-floor window of CHA high-rise.
The remaining $10.25 million was awarded to Alton Logan, who spent 26 years in prison for a murder he did not commit because of an alleged cover-up engineered by now-convicted former Area 2 Commander Jon Burge.

The city is insured only against catastrophic claims exceeding $15 million. The uninsured portion of the two settlements will eat up all but $2 million of the $27.3 million that Mayor Rahm Emanuel set aside to settle judgments and claims against the city for all of 2013.
The city plans to borrow money to pay excess claims, just as it did to pay nearly $80 million owed to black candidates bypassed by the city’s discriminatory handling of a 1995 firefighters entrance exam.
At the time, aldermen were told that three more cases in settlement talks could result in multimillion dollar pay-outs.

“We’re gonna continue to have ugly cases, but we’ll just have fewer of them,” said Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, referring to a backlog of unresolved police misconduct cases left behind by former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Family of Aiyana Jones, 7, says 'closure' again denied at killer cop hearing

•Judge delays Weekley trial until April, 2013; wants Aiyana’s dad’s case “disposed of” first

•Gruesome re-enactment of police raid indefinitely postponed

DETROIT – Aiyana Stanley-Jones’ mother, grandmother, grandfather and aunt sat directly behind a stone-faced Joseph Weekley, the Detroit police officer who shot the sleeping seven-year-old child to death May 16, 2010, prior to another in a seemingly unending series of court hearings Nov. 30. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway postponed delivering her decision on a defense motion to dismiss charges of “involuntary manslaughter” and “reckless use of a firearm” against Weekley until March 8, 2013, and set a trial date for April 8, 2013.

Weekley, who was not charged until Oct. 14, 2011, was originally to have been tried April 30, 2012.

“This is not fair to us, and it’s not fair to Aiyana,” the child’s maternal grandfather Jimmie Stanley told VOD before the hearing. “They’re treating us like we’re nothing. They think all we want is money from a lawsuit, but it’s not about money, it’s about closure. I miss Aiyana like crazy. Friends from all over the country keep calling to find out how we’re doing.” .

The Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct states in Canon 3, section A 5, “A judge should dispose promptly of the business of the court.” Hathaway has repeatedly postponed Weekley’s trial, agreeing in open court with the prosecution and defense that Weekley should not be tried until after Aiyana’s father Charles Jones is tried on first-degree murder charges brought against him 17 months after Aiyana’s killing, in the death of Je’Rean Blake.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Richard Skutt, who is handling that case, earlier barred the testimony of jail-house snitch Jay Schlenkerman against Jones. His trial has been postponed since an Appeals Court ruling which overturned that decision, as the parties await a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.

Hathaway also indefinitely delayed a demonstration of the use of a “flash-bang” grenade like the one thrown through the window over Aiyana seconds before her death, due to insufficient notice. The gruesome re-enactment had been set for Nov. 30, the date of the hearing, at an undisclosed address on Detroit’s impoverished east-side, to assist Hathaway in considering the defense motion to dismiss.

The defense contends among other issues that Weekley was dis-oriented by the explosion when he entered the home.

“I’ve watched the programs on TV where they train these cops,” Aiyana’s paternal grandmother Mertilla Jones told VOD. “They train them how to stay oriented while the grenade goes off. The ‘First 48’ calls Weekley ‘The Brain’ because he’s always the first to go in.”

Jones was sleeping on the couch with Aiyana when Weekley burst in and shot the little girl through the top of her head. She said the grenade had already gone off and that Weekley did not appear dis-oriented. She herself was held by police for several days on claims that she “interfered” with Weekley, causing his gun to go off.

The A&E reality cop show “The First 48,” which featured Weekley as a star, filmed the May 16, 2010 raid on Aiyana’s home. Re-runs of his shows are still playing on the A & E Channel through Blockbuster Home.

Aiyana’s supporters say that the proposed “flash-bang” demonstration diverts attention away from the question of why the flash-bang and a military-style raid were used in the first place, at a home full of toddlers whose toys were strewn all over the yard. Her family said they want not only Weekley, but everyone involved in the raid and the police chain of command which ordered it, charged and tried in the child’s death. Aiyana’s mother Dominika Stanley and her aunt LaKrystal Sanders were also present during the Nov. 30 hearing. Distressed family members said Assistant Prosecutor Robert Moran, who is prosecuting both Weekley and Jones in what the prosecutor’s office denies is a conflict of interest, has not spoken with them once about the case against Weekley. They said the Office of Victim’s Rights has not been in touch either, to notify them of hearings or other information.

“There is nothing that would ethically preclude him from handling these two cases; there is no conflict of interest,”

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s chief of communications Maria Miller said in an email response to an inquiry from VOD.

“They are two separate cases. I spoke to Mr. Moran and he indicated that he has not called Jones a companion case, it was the judge who used this language about the Jones case.”

At a previous hearing, Moran called the Jones case a “companion” case to Weekley’s, but quickly corrected himself. He has however repeatedly said that the Weekley trial should be held after the Jones trial, despite Miller’s comments that the two are separate cases. In a lengthy lecture to the electronic media, Judge Hathaway again made the two cases seem as one. Detroit police who raided the Jones home after midnight were looking for Chauncey Owens, who lived upstairs from the Jones family in a two-family flat, with a warrant related to the killing of Je’Rean Blake, 17, two days before.

According to Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, who filed a civil suit against the police days after Aiyana’s killing, Owens left the house earlier in the day in full view of officers surveilling the place, and could easily have been arrested then.

“I remind everyone, especially the family, friends and media, this is a situation where there are two children not alive anymore because they were killed,”

Hathaway said at the beginning of the hearing.

“This matter should be taken very seriously. Our case is related to another case that another judge has. We are waiting for that judge to dispose of that case so we can proceed with our trial.” Hathaway said someone from “the electronic media,” who she did not identify, had contacted her staff prior to the scheduled “flash-bang” re-enactment and insisted that they would be present despite her order excluding the media.

She also said the prosecutor had not confirmed the time and location of the re-enactment until the day before. Hathaway said not only she, but members of her staff and deputy sheriffs were to be present at the demonstration. She expressed concern for the safety of those individuals, but said nothing about the safety of neighbors or their reaction to watching such a spectacle in their neighborhood. Moran said during the hearing that the Michigan State Police had selected a house from among 200 houses on the east side identified by the Detroit Department of Buildings and Safety as “similar” to the Jones family’s home on Lillibridge near Mack at the time.

Mom of slain National Guardsman blasts Queens grand jury for not indicting cop who shot her son

The mother of the National Guardsman who was shot and killed Oct. 4 blasted a Queens grand jury’s decision not to indict the cop who killed her son.
“I’m very upset,” said Cecilia Reyes, who collapsed in tears at the National Action Network in Harlem on Saturday morning. “I want justice, and I’m going to get justice.”
On Thursday, the grand jury rejected a witness account that veteran NYPD Detective Hassan Hamdy fatally shot 22-year-old Noel Polanco after a car chase on the Grand Central Parkway.
RELATED: COP NOT CHARGED IN SLAY
“My son had no weapon, and yet the officer gets away with this?” cried Reyes.
“What about my son? Where is the justice?”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who gave the eulogy at Polanco’s funeral, vowed that a civil lawsuit would be filed against the city and the NYPD.
RELATED: COP WHO KILLED NATIONAL GUARDSMAN ADDRESSES GRAND JURY
“I am outraged about the decision, and I question what was presented and what was not presented before the grand jury,” Sharpton told the Daily News on Saturday.
“We intend to pursue this in civil court.
“Clearly, (Polanco) had the right to drive down the Grand Central Parkway,” Sharpton added.
RELATED: DETECTIVE WHO FATALLY SHOT UNARMED NATIONAL GUARDSMAN TO TESTIFY
“No one can deny he was wrongfully killed.”
Polanco was giving his co-worker and her friend a lift to Elmhurst when he twice cut off an NYPD Emergency Service Unit van.
He was killed by a single bullet fired by Hamdy, 39, through an open window.
A cop with 14 years on the force, Hamdy said through his lawyer that he was “extremely relieved” with the grand jury’s decision and extended his condolences to the Polanco family.
But Reyes said it wasn’t enough for her son, who dreamed of becoming a police officer.
Flanked by relatives and wearing a pendant bearing an image of Polanco, she sobbed, “This emptiness that I’m going to feel inside is never going to go away.”

www.truthatlarge.blogspot.com
WAR INA BABYLON

The Oppression of Black people and the Crimes of this system

“The young man was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet”…“the 13-year-old was shot dead in mid-afternoon when police mistook his toy gun for a pistol”… “the unarmed young man, shot by police 50 times, died on the morning of his wedding day”… “the young woman, unconscious from having suffered a seizure, was shot 12 times by police standing around her locked car”… “the victim, arrested for disorderly conduct, was tortured and raped with a stick in the back of the station-house by the arresting officers.”

Does it surprise you to know that in each of the above cases the victim was Black?

If you live in the USA, it almost certainly doesn’t.

Think what that means: that without even being told, you knew these victims of police murder and brutality were Black. Those cases—and the thousands more like them that have occurred just in the past few decades—add rivers of tears to an ocean of pain. And they are symptoms of a larger, still deeper problem.

But some today claim that America is a “post-racial society.” They say the “barriers to Black advancement” have been largely overcome. Many go so far as to put the main blame for the severe problems faced by Black people today on…Black people themselves. Others claim that better education, or more traditional families, or religion, or elections will solve things.

CLICK FULL STORY

2012: A Brave New Dystopia

by Chris Hedges

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.



Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement.

Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”


The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.


The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”


The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”


Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.

“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.

The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.

“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

The Police Murder of Tarika Wilson

On January 4, a police SWAT squad broke into the home of Tarika Wilson in Lima Ohio. They shot Tarika dead and wounded her 14 month old son Sincere. The vocal outrage among Lima’s Black community has revealed a long and bitter history of police racism and brutalization.

LIMA, Ohio — The air of Southside is foul-smelling and thick, filled with fumes from an oil refinery and diesel smoke from a train yard, with talk of riot and recrimination, and with angry questions: Why is Tarika Wilson dead? Why did the police shoot her baby?

“This thing just stinks to high heaven, and the police know it,” said Jason Upthegrove, president of the Lima chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. “We’re not asking for answers anymore. We’re demanding them.”

Some facts are known. A SWAT team arrived at Ms. Wilson’s rented house in the Southside neighborhood early in the evening of Jan. 4 to arrest her companion, Anthony Terry, on suspicion of drug dealing, said Greg Garlock, Lima’s police chief. Officers bashed in the front door and entered with guns drawn, said neighbors who saw the raid.

Moments later, the police opened fire, killing Ms. Wilson, 26, and wounding her 14-month-old son, Sincere, Chief Garlock said. One officer involved in the raid, Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, a 31-year veteran, has been placed on paid administrative leave.

Beyond these scant certainties, there is mostly rumor and rage. The police refuse to give any account of the raid, pending an investigation by the Ohio attorney general.

Black people in Lima, from the poorest citizens to religious and business leaders, complain that rogue police officers regularly stop them without cause, point guns in their faces, curse them and physically abuse them. They say the shooting of Ms. Wilson is only the latest example of a long-running pattern of a few white police officers treating African-Americans as people to be feared.

“There is an evil in this town,” said C. M. Manley, 68, pastor of New Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church. “The police harass me. They harass my family. But they know that if something happens to me, people will burn down this town.”

Internal investigations have uncovered no evidence of police misconduct, Chief Garlock said. Still, local officials recognize that the perception of systemic racism has opened a wide chasm.

Surrounded by farm country known for its German Catholic roots and conservative politics, Lima is the only city in the immediate area with a significant African-American population. Black families, including Mr. Manley’s, came to Lima in the 1940s and ’50s for jobs at what is now the Husky Energy Lima Refinery and other factories along the city’s southern border. Blacks make up 27 percent of the city’s 38,000 people, Mr. Berger said.

Many blacks still live downwind from the refinery. Many whites on the police force commute from nearby farm towns, where a black face is about as common as a twisty road. Of Lima’s 77 police officers, two are African-American.

If I have any frustration when I retire, it’ll be that I wasn’t able to bring more racial balance to the police force,” said Chief Garlock, who joined the force in 1971 and has been chief for 11 years.

Tarika Wilson had six children, ages 8 to 1. They were fathered by five men, all of whom dealt drugs, said Darla Jennings, Ms. Wilson’s mother. But Ms. Wilson never took drugs nor allowed them to be sold from her house, said Tania Wilson, her sister.

“She took great care of those kids, without much help from the fathers, and the community respected her for that,” said Ms. Wilson’s uncle, John Austin.

Tarika Wilson’s companion, Mr. Terry, was the subject of a long-term drug investigation, Chief Garlock said, but Ms. Wilson was never a suspect.

During the raid, Ms. Wilson’s youngest son, Sincere, was shot in the left shoulder and hand. Three weeks after the shooting, he remains in fair condition, said a spokeswoman at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus.

Within minutes of the shooting, at around 8 p.m., 50 people gathered outside Ms. Wilson’s home and shouted obscenities at the police, neighbors said. The next day, 300 people gathered at the house and marched two miles to City Hall.
“The police can say whatever they want,” Tania Wilson said. “Even before they shot my sister, I didn’t trust them.”

More Than Half of ‘Armed’ Suspects Shot by LA Sheriff Were Not Armed

A new study has found that in most shootings in which Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies fired at suspects who appeared to be reaching for a weapon, the suspect turned out to be unarmed. And in the last six years, all but two of those people shot were black and Latino, according to the study by the Police Assessment Resource Center for LA County Supervisors.
Over the past six years, approximately 61 percent of all suspects shot because an officer believed they were armed were confirmed to be unarmed at the time of the shooting. A little more than half of those suspects were holding an object such as a cell phone or sunglasses that was believed by deputies to be a possible firearm.
The analysis also found that 61 percent of those shot at by deputies were Latino, 29 percent black and 10 percent white. The LA Times provides some more context: “Waistband shootings” are particularly controversial because the justification for the shootings can conceivably be fabricated after the fact, according to the county monitor’s report. The monitor was careful to point out that the report wasn’t making the case deputies were being dishonest, simply that the spike in those shootings left the department vulnerable to criticism.
Merrick Bobb, special counsel to the county Board of Supervisors, also found a rise in shootings in which deputies didn’t see an actual gun before firing. In those cases, the person may have had a weapon on them, but never brandished it.
Those shootings spiked by 50% last year, according to the report. Last year also had the highest proportion of people shot by deputies who turned out to be unarmed altogether.
The sheriff’s department says these figures are not surprising because deputies patrol areas in south and east Los Angeles County that are home to “a plethora of black and Latino gangs,” the San Jose Mercury News reported.
But Bobb, the special council to county supervisors and the author of the report says training and time on the job has a lot to do with how officers react when suspects hands move. “Knowing that black and Latino men are more likely to be shot or shot at … the sheriff’s department should be doing a better job to reduce as far as possible mistaken shootings,” Bobb wrote.
His report found that in almost a third of shootings deputies had received no relevant training in the past two years.