An Epidemic of Police Thuggery First Seen in US Occupied New Orleans

The Bush administration did not rebuild New Orleans. It occupied it. When normal folk looked at New Orleans they saw a picturesque, beautiful, culturally unique city. When the GOP looked at New Orleans, it saw Disneyland and Las Vegas! Certainly, the brutal Blackwater occupation of New Orleans was but a foretaste of an epidemic of police thuggery and brutality that now sweeps the US.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown –better known as ‘Brownie’–did a ‘helluva job’ for George W. Bush and the party/syndicate bosses. Just one year after the Gulf Coast region, New Orleans most dramatically, was devastated by Hurricane Katrina it was clear that nothing had been done to rebuild the city. ‘Brownie’ wasn’t fired, just ‘removed from his job’, hid from public scrutiny.

It is hard not to believe that this corrupt GOP administration deliberately punished New Orleans for its liberal, free-thinking, free-wheeling, Democratic history. The Bush administration did not rebuild New Orleans. It occupied it.

“It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is under government occupation, and portions of it under government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast roped-off regions here.

If we did not have the services of an off-duty law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on the air.” Brian Williams, for MSNBC, 18 Sept. 2005 “This vigilantism demonstrates the utter breakdown of the government,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. [1]

The occupation was cruel and unnecessary. People were forced to leave pets and property. Charities were deliberately turned away by the Bush occupation forces. Some who were merely trying to scavenge something to eat were treated like dangerous criminals.

The forces of US occupation in New Orleans disrupted private transportation; flights in and out of New Orleans were burdened with absurd police state measures put into effect after 9/11. Private property was confiscated. Families were broken up. Citizens were simply rounded up like cattle, herded into buses and buildings, deprived of adequate ventilation, water or plumbing.

�Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. �This is a desperate SOS,� the mayor said.�

[AP]

Meanwhile, back at GOP Occupied America Headquarters:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE GOES SHOE SHOPPING: �Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we�ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo�s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice�s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, �How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!��

[Gawker]

The imposition of martial law in New Orleans was deliberate. The hired killers of Blackwater were dispatched to the city of Louis Armstrong, Pete Fountain and the Marsalis family.

The Bush government did every thing it could to prevent Katrina survivors from surviving the US military occupation of New Orleans. Governor Kathleen Blanco described National Guard troops sent to New Orleans to impose order. She said that they were “fresh back from Iraq …locked and loaded …ready to “shoot to kill.” And they did!

The GOP never does anything unless there is something in it for the party. The party bosses were most certainly prepared to sacrifice New Orleans for the ambitions of filthy rich white guys and various land re-development schemes. Katrina, after all, had done the dirty work of displacing most of the city’s ‘poor’ population. The GOP ‘…don’t like po folk’ or as Kanye West told his audience: �George Bush doesn’t care about black people.� [BBC, 9/3/05]. Bush and his crooked party would have preferred not to get its hands dirty. How propitious Katrina! The GOP didn’t even have to come up with an absurd cover story –incompetent Arab pilots, impossibly hot fires, or parallel dimensions capable of swallowing up airliners. The Bush administration was, perhaps, inspired by ‘progress’ that was already evident.

The land has always been a part of the folklore. For years the leaders of New Orleans have been approving plans to tear down the city’s housing projects, which are mostly occupied by black people, and replace them with expensive condominiums. Uptown, the St. Thomas was the first to go. The Desire, in the Ninth Ward, soon followed. Now, on the Westbank, most of the Fisher has been demolished. And the other four seemed on their way out before Katrina even came. The result of all this is that a large part of the black community is being split up and shipped off to other areas. And as with the cases of the St. Thomas and Desire, when black people see white people moving in and taking over their part of town, conspiracy theories inevitably arise.

–Kenneth Cooper, ‘They’ Destroyed New Orleans

What was mistakenly called ‘incompetence’ was really just GOP strategy.

• Demoralize the Democratic base with phony press releases and whisper campaigns.
• Attack opponents’ strength with character assassination.
• Suppress the vote in every possible way.
• Buy some people off with tax cuts.
• Scare the rest into voting against their own interests.

—Republican Dirty Tricks

Even now, the city is little changed but for the symbolic photo ops and other staged media events. New Orleans is not rebuilt and when it is, Bush will have had nothing to do with it. If New Orleans is lucky, it will escape the evil schemes that the right wing has in store for a city utterly beyond its comprehension.

Various schemes to rebuild New Orleans range from nothing at all to GOP visions of golf courses, Potemkin villages, and glitzy casinos owned by crooks and other heavy contributors to the GOP crime syndicate. Much of those proceeds, you can be sure, will wind up in party coffers. Most unsettling is the reasonable suspicion that in New Orleans, we glimpsed the horrible future that awaits us all, a future in which a fascist central government patrols our streets and dominates our lives with corporate armies like Blackwater, killer vigilantes, armored, blacksuited thugs, Nazis cum Robocop!

In the duplicitous �War on Terror,� mercenary armies like DynCorp, Blackwater USA, KBR, Custer Battles, and Aegis plunder Iraq and other victims of Pax Americana, operating with no rules of engagement and near-total legal immunity, usually earning at least four times the salaries of enlisted U.S. soldiers.

A Sept. 21 London Independent investigation labeled the $120 billion sector �arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy,� with operations in 50 countries, adding, �None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq have been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the U.S. does not keep records.�

—Private contractors threaten U.S. democracy, Rice Thresher

More than 1,800 people died in the Katrina disaster –less than died on 911. The GOP got off cheap. 911 cost the government some hardware. It is only the people who lose their lives whenever the GOP dreams of a ‘permanent GOP majority’. Dictatorship!

For news straight from the Crescent city, check out the New Orleans News Ladder

Essential resources.

• Thug Cop Beats Up Defenseless Handcuffed Woman
• Fuck you, Milton Friedman.
• The Inside Dope
• Supreme Court to Katrina Survivors: Drop Dead
• Black Voters and White Racists Frustrate Louisiana GOP
• How to Rig an Election: Convicted Former GOP Operative Details 2002 New Hampshire Phone Jamming Scheme
• GOP Occupied America: Does the GOP “Vision Thing” Include Blackwater Patrolling America’s Cities, Innocent People Awaiting Death?

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Tasers, Torture and Terror Tactics: America Becomes a Police State

How Ronald Reagan Blew the World’s Last Chance for Peace

Ronald Reagan is remembered for doubling the Federal Bureaucracy, tripling the national debt, and ushering in a two year long depression. He is remembered for making the rich, richer, the poor, poorer and all at taxpayer expense. As bad as all that is, Reagan’s lasting legacy is his worst and most dangerous. Reagan may have blown the world’s last chance to achieve a non-nuclear peace.

Reagan is a study in complexity. He believed in balanced budgets but never submitted one; feared a nuclear apocalypse but built a huge stockpile of weapons; preached family values while presiding over a dysfunctional family.

—American Experience

The story is about the talks Reagan held with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik. It was Gorbachev who first put total nuclear disarmament on the table. It was Ronald Reagan, indebted to his radical base, who blinked.

If, that is, the ensuing �Great Society,� to borrow a term from JFK�s successor, Lyndon Johnson, were laid low by a nuclear attack on an American city (or seven, if al Qaeda had its way).

This is the territory into which Gorbachev launched his most daring raids. First, in 1985, he announced that the Soviet Union would no longer deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs) in Eastern Europe. Later that year, he proposed that both his country and the US slice their nuclear arsenals in half.

The next year, at the memorable Reykjavik summit, Gorbachev got Ronald Reagan to agree in principle to his plan for removal of all INFs from Europe, as well as to draw them down worldwide. Caught up in Gorbachev�s enthusiasm, Reagan expressed a willingness to join Russia in eliminating all nuclear weapons in 10 years.

In the end, though, Reagan clung to his blankie, the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). Gorbachev feared SDI would lead to nukes in space, not to mention leave the Soviet defense establishment with the impression he�d been played. Their dreams of saving the world came crashing back down to earth.

—It�s not a new JFK we need in Obama, but the next Gorbachev

Reagan was a typical Republican, that is, he said many things and did the opposite. That’s because every Republican has two stories to tell: one they tell to their base via “code words” like “family values”; the other, they tell to the world. This second category often consists of lies and pure BS. In this case, Reagan had talked the talked —world peace, nuclear disarmament, etc. When Gorbachev raised the stakes –total nuclear disarmament –Reagan suddenly recalled his base, the clique, the Military/Industrial complex, the moneyed class that “brung ’em”! He blinked!

Here is what Reagan himself said about the threat of nuclear war.

The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes. Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radarscope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that? There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn’t be won by either side. It must never be fought. Advocates of the MAD policy believed it had served a purpose: The balance of terror it created had prevented nuclear war for decades. But as far as I was concerned, the MAD policy was madness.

–Ronald Reagan, The Official Site

So, if that’s how Ronald Reagan really felt about nuclear madness, why did he blow what is perhaps our last chance at peace? The answer is simple. Reagan was not his own man.

There were early warning signs that Reagan was utterly incompetent but Reagan was held to a much lesser standard than Jimmy Carter, whose regime was the butt of universal and planned, top-down derision by the GOP.

February 2: Reagan testifies to the Tower Board for a second time. His testimony is inconsistent and confused. The Board pointed out Reagan hadn�t known about August shipment of anti-tank missiles, but Reagan had said he DID know. When asked for an explanation, Reagan picked up a briefing memo he had been provided and read aloud: “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.“

—The Timeline of Ronald Reagan’s Life

It is perhaps because the US media, during the Reagan’s years, stopped doing its job of informing the population that the myth persists: Reagan’s tax cuts were the foundation of a generation of American prosperity. The facts are these: 1) The regime of Ronald Reagan is characterized by anemic overall growth. 2) Jimmy Carter ranks second only to LBJ in over economic growth among American post-war Presidents. It is a myth, if not a deliberate GOP lie, that Reagan is among the best US Presidents in the category of job creation. He is, in fact, among the very worst:

Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents

Johnson   3.8%
Carter    3.1
Clinton   2.4
Kennedy   2.3
Nixon     2.3
Reagan    2.1
Bush      0.6

You might be surprised to learn that the United States has long had the lowest tax rates of any industrialized nation. And how does the level of taxation compare to each nation's standard of living? There are three general ways to measure standard of living: earning power, purchasing power and individual worker productivity. The U.S. has lost its lead in
the first and is losing its lead in the other two.

Earning power is defined as GDP per capita, or how much the average citizen earns in a year. It is an important statistic because it measures how advantageously nations trade on the global market. After the Second World War, the U.S. was number one for 40 years. But in the mid-80s, the U.S. suddenly began dropping down the list.

1991 Earning Power2

Switzerland    $35,490
Japan           27,300
Sweden          26,900
Denmark         24,230
Norway          24,150
Finland         24,110
United States   22,550
Canada          20,840
Germany         19,830
Netherlands     19,310

See: The Reagan Years, Steve Kangas

The US trails the rest of the world in many key areas. Space prevents my posting the official figures in every category. The general conclusion is valid: under Reagan, the US began a descent into third world status, a trend now aggravated by Bush who lately likes to compare himself to Lincoln ! Stop me! My sides are hurting!

It is because he was successful that Jimmy Carter is reviled today. The GOP will never tell the truth about Democratic successes just as it can be counted on to lie about its own failures. Reagan’s following remarks not only sound hollow today, they are indicative of just how out of touch was Reagan as he presided over the demise of American industry.

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism – money. Moreover, incentives inherent in the capitalist system had given us an industrial base that meant we had the capacity to maintain a technological edge over them forever.

–Ronald Reagan, The Official Site

In fact, the history of how the US lost its lead in automotive manufacturing, electronics, steel production and almost every other “heavy” industry is largely a history of the Reagan years. It is essential reading.

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Kucinich Throws Down the Gauntlet, Moves to Impeach Dick Cheney