Robbers and cops
"Education" is one of those priorities that you probably assume everybody in politics is for. Well, you’re wrong. Education is the great financial equalizer, and that’s the most dangerous enemy possible in a kleptocracy. The Koch-funded Ayn Rand cultists in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Illinois are each trying to pull off the most draconian of cuts in state education funding. It turns out that if you don’t tax people enough, you don’t have the money to fund the future economic prosperity of your state.In Scott Walker country, the Badger State, the proposed cut is 13% of the current budget over two years and the elimination of tenure protections for faculty under state law. In Louisiana, where another Republican presidential candidate, Bobby Jindal, holds the executive, the proposal is for a one-year 78% cut. In April, a march by student groups to the legislature in that state drew 1,200 attendees. In Illinois, it’s 31% for one year. The president of Southern Illinois University says that tuition price would have to double statewide if the cuts turned out to be that drastic.
It’s bad enough that working class Americans are increasingly priced out of higher education. Millionaires and their heirs realize that an educated populace only mean more competition for pie slices. The high cost of college helps tamper upward mobility.
Particularly in respect to private colleges and universities, nobody in power in America questions the logic that poor people have to earn their way in while wealthy people make a purchase, even though these private schools couldn't survive without their buckets of taxpayer money that arrive in the form of government backed-loans. To the wealthy, a shared prosperity only translates to higher prices on goods. To keep the economic gap as wide as possible, it’s cheaper for them to keep the money that should go to the U.S. Treasury as tax and spend it instead directly on the politicians and on building walls around their homes.
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Over and over we hear, as one disgusting phone video after another goes viral, that "most cops are good." Well, probably in the sense that most haven't shot and killed a black person, this is true. But I'll bet it would be almost impossible to find one that hasn't falsified a statement. The unwillingness of cops at every level to accept oversight in the form of mandatory public record-keeping and statistics on misconduct and shootings tells us all we need to know. When a civilian files a false statement, that's a crime. When a cop files a false statement, that cop is subject to punishment at the discretion of a supervisor. They kill with impunity and steal in the mega-millions under a law called civil forfeiture. They have relentlessly opposed cameras forced upon their car hoods and on their person, and they have lobbied far and wide for laws that prevent the public video recording of officers while they're working on the job. Accusations of intimidation directed towards the public are legion. An unwritten rule stands that cops don't report misconduct on other cops.
If the police are constantly telling us that we "have nothing to worry about if we haven't done anything wrong," why do they oppose any form of oversight for themselves, and why take such aggressive action when they feel threatened? The man who shot the video of Freddie Gray being arrested in Baltimore was arrested. So was the man who shot the video of Eric Garner being choked out. And the primary witness in the Michael Brown shooting. Cops in New York even went so far as to try to poison the man behind the Garner video. (Only a hunger strike in prison by a suspicious Ramsey Orta may have saved his life.) The Fraternal Order of Police is attempting to make anti-police rhetoric a hate crime and public protests against police behavior subject to counter-terrorism laws.
Warning shots, mace, and tasers continue to be trumpeted as preferable alternatives to shootings and yet the killings of civilians by police continue unabated. In fact, they're ramping up. Why? The pattern of suppression suggests that cops view anybody on the civilian side of the "blue line" as untrustworthy when it comes to promoting the malignant culture of police corruption and terrorism ahead of truth.
posted by CM @ 10:37 PM
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