A Real “Drawdown”?
“President Barack Obama,” reports CNN, “is expected to announce this week that 30,000 U.S. ‘surge’ forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.” As the latest installment of the Afghanistan “timetable” chronicles, the President’s speech can be expected to include all of the standard doublespeak bromides about “shifting responsibility” and “achieving our mission.”
Despite all of the White House’s solemn talk of drawdowns and “sustainability here at home,” the changes we’re supposed to regard as big news take place on the narrowest margins of United States foreign policy. Way out on the periphery of the neocolonialist agenda, a negligible tweak here or there is quite acceptable to the state capitalist elite, for whom there is never a real danger.
Policy shifts — even personnel changes — occur within a framework where the underlying assumptions of empire are taken for granted, and where an entire economy has been built upon what Dwight Eisenhower famously dubbed the “military-industrial complex.” For the power elites who formulate foreign affairs, whether Democrat or Republican, “liberal” or “conservative,” the war industry itself — the economic engine driving our endless wars — is as American as apple pie
TSA Denies “Requiring” Leukemia Patient To Remove Adult Diaper
Orwell must be rolling in his grave. The TSA has just come out and stated they didn’t require the 95-yr-old dying leukemia patient to remove her diaper. Instead, they told the woman they had to inspect it or else she couldn’t board her plane, a requirement by any other name. Amazingly, CNN basically uncritically reports the TSA’s bull and titles their article to give the passerby the impression they presented some sort of evidence to the contrary of the woman’s claims, when instead all they did was attempt to redefine the term require.
Debtor’s Prison Just Around The Bend
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| The US Supreme Court in Washington © AFP/File Karen Bleier |
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Supreme Court ruled Monday that states did not have an automatic duty to provide counsel in civil courts in the case of a divorced father who was jailed for failing to pay child support.
By a majority 5-4 vote, the justices found that while the South Carolina father’s rights had been violated because he was not given free counsel, US states did not have to provide such advice in all civil contempt cases.
The case was being highly watched and had become emblematic of what civil rights groups have called a trend towards “debtors’ prisons” in America.
In the case before the Supreme Court, Michael Turner had been ordered to pay $51.73 a week in child support. But he had regularly fallen behind, and spent short spells in prison…
Rochester Police Arrest Woman Videotaping A Traffic Stop From Her Own Property
A woman was arrested for videotaping police from her front yard in Rochester, New York.
Emily Good, 28, was recording a traffic stop where police had a man handcuffed on May 12th. The video was uploaded to Blip TV today.
The cop who arrested her has been identified as Mario Masic, according to the Rochester Indy Media.
A man named Mario Masic who happens to be a police officer in western New York also runs a business called Harvest Moon Malamutes.
Mario Masic apparrently treats dogs better than he does camera-toting citizens
You can friend him on Facebook here. Or you can email him through his business email address at harvestmoonmalamutes@live.com.
The video, which has since gone viral, shows Masic hassling Good with absurd notions after he notices her recording.
“I don’t feel safe with you standing behind me, so I’m going to ask you to go into your house,”
“You seem very anti-police … due to what you said to me before you started taping me.”
It is not clear what Good said before she started recording, but if she said anything threatening, they would have arrested her at that moment.
She ended up getting handcuffed and taken away after she refused to walk into her house, even though she was clearly on her own property.
A friend or relative ended up taking the camera and we see her being led away.
Neighbors who witnessed the interaction confirmed she had done nothing wrong.
Meanwhile, the man they had originally handcuffed was released.
Mickey H. Osterreicher, attorney for the National Press Photographers Association, fired off a letter to Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard demanding that Good’s charges be dropped.
Sheppard told Osterreicher and the Democrat and Chronicle newspaper that he has ordered an investigation, which normally is police talk for sweeping it under the carpet until the media attention dies down.
Scientists Make Meat Substitute From Human Fecal Matter
BY LOGAN TITTLE
ANCHOR JENNIFER MECKLES
A Japanese researcher has discovered a way to turn human feces into meat.
Professor Mitsuyuki Ikeda took a look at the mass amounts of sewage mud in Japan and ended up with one mean cuisine.
“Sewage mud contains a great deal of protein. We researched whether we could extract the protein and recycle it to make a meat substitute.” (Video source: Slashdot.org)
Manilla Bulletin explains the process.
“The fun part started when the researchers extracted the protein from the sewage mud, worked their scientific magic on it by combining it with some enhancers, added some soy proteins and voila, the ‘feces steak’ was born. And just to make it more appetizing, they also added some red food coloring, just to give it that ‘medium rare’ feel.”
Eat Drink Better reports the finished product is “63 percent protein, 25 percent carbohydrate, 3 percent fat and 9 percent minerals.” It’s a whole new take — on recycling. But is it really okay for human consumption? A blogger from Bliss Tree says…
“…it’s actually safe to eat, as the bacteria usually found in feces is killed by heat during the manufacturing process.”
So it’s edible, healthy and even good for the environment, why not give a whirl? One Buzz Media blogger said regardless of the pros, convincing her to eat it is out of the question.
“Yeah, that still doesn’t put me remotely in the universe of wanting to eat one. Or eat anything for the rest of the day for that matter. Thanks, science!”
Scientists know the thought of eating fecal matter is unappealing — but so is the price.According to DailyTech, Ikeda says due to research costs…
“… our artificial meat is 10 to 20 times more expensive than normal meat. But once the research is complete and it’s put on the market, we’ll probably be able to price it at roughly the same level as normal meat.”
It’s a lot to digest, but if the protein-packed “poo” makes it to super market shelves — the only question left is, would you eat it?
Publicopoly & The Sale Of America
At The Huffington Post, Dylan Ratigan bemoans the “ownership and operation of public services, such as airports, toll roads and shipping ports,” by private companies with “monopolistic positions.” Ratigan notes the “conflicts of interest” created by the venal, revolving-door business of political privatization, asking “if truly want to see America for Sale.”
Ratigan’s column implicates a number of issues of importance for anyone who calls himself a “libertarian.” What many Americans may not realize, though, is that the free market left shares many, if not all, of Ratigan’s concerns about the game of monopoly being played with the country’s infrastructure.
In virtually every country, there is some version of the same folklore that casts the state as the trust-busting crusader for the powerless, bullied consumer. The familiar fallacy, which places business and government in adversarial struggle, is summed up in twin, art deco statues at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) headquarters in Washington.
The statues, collectively called “Man Controlling Trade,” depict a burly man locked in contest with raging horse, trade, that, if left unchecked, would rampage out of control. A question thus arises as to the origin of monopolies or trusts, as to what society can do to prevent the undesirable condition of one or a handful of commercial powerhouses cornering a given market.
When discussions of antitrust or competition law arise, mainstream economists and FTC lawyers alike are quickly to invoke the nebulous idea of “perfect competition,” a state they imagine can be brought about under their careful nurturing. Without the state’s many regulations, they claim, companies would naturally gravitate together and collude, amassing the market power to set prices wherever they wished.
And since the state’s does, from time to time, prosecute firms for monopolizing or attempting to do so, there is an assumption that what I’ll call the “Man Controlling Trade” thesis is, for the most part, true. But are the economic incentives of a genuine free market really such that firms will abandon competition freely? Were anyone allowed to enter any market, would we really witness an utter lack of enterprising entrants ready to undercut a price-gouging monopolist?
Distinguishing real free markets from capitalism as it exists today, market anarchists contend that the accepted conjectures about “perfect competition” and market power are mistaken. Rather than curbing the market power of firms dreaming of combination, the state — without any mastermind’s conspiracy — installs the preconditions of cartelization in society. Market anarchists suggest a different solution for staving off commercial domination.
The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon envisioned a society without the state in which “the notion ofcommutative justice, first brought forward by the primitive fact of exchange, … is substituted for distributive justice.” For Proudhon, commutative justice, synonymous with “the reign of contract, [and] the industrial oreconomic system,” was itself the best means to a fair distribution of wealth in society, to the full reward of labor.
The free market, then, the sum of all voluntary exchanges, was to be the practical answer to the “social question” or “social problem” defined by the disjunction between work and wealth in society. This was the puzzle that the anarchist movement of the nineteenth century set out to unravel, both challenging and absorbing the foregoing liberal tradition. Following from Proudhon, American anarchists like Benjamin Tucker saw the competition of true free markets as constantly undercutting attempts at monopolization, preventing the over-accumulation of wealth in a few hands.
Far from thriving due to unhampered competition, powerful businesses were (and are) properly to be regarded as the principle beneficiaries of state protection and privilege. Their market power is sheltered from the strains of competition by the very legal framework that the state has sold as serving the consumer.
Market anarchists have long been dedicated to showing that markets freed from the strictures of the state are best not just to, for instance, promote innovation, but also to fairly distribute wealth. Indeed, the only way the bosses can get the better of the blue collars is through the use of state coercion to corrupt what would be the effects of consensual exchange.
True competition law is simply the law of nonaggression. Once the state is extracted from the economic system, monopoly and exploitation will go with it.
Bank Of America & China Construction Bank Corp.
Bank of America Corp. (BAC) may sell some of its $21 billion stake inChina Construction Bank Corp. (939) to bolster capital before new international standards take effect, said three people briefed on the plans.
Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, wants to keep about half its CCB shares so it can remain a strategic investor in the world’s second-biggest bank by market value, said two of the people, who declined to be identified because the plans are private. CCB led declines among Hong Kong-listed Chinese banks today.
“This is obviously a forced sale — it’s a big chunk of a valued enterprise in an attractive place in the world,” said Greg Donaldson, chairman of Evansville, Indiana-based Donaldson Capital Management, with $465 million in assets, including Bank of America shares. “It’s a relatively poor time to be selling because the Chinese stock market hasn’t done well recently.”
Selling the shares could help Bank of America raise capital to comply with tougher minimums that may be imposed by regulators as they try to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is considering plans that may include a surcharge on the largest lenders, people briefed on those talks have said.
Ties That Bind
Shares of CCB dropped 2.3 percent in Hong Kong to close at HK$6.44 today, extending its decline this year to 7.6 percent. Still, that values the Beijing-based company at about $206 billion, a more than threefold increase from its market capitalization at the time of its October 2005 initial public offering in Hong Kong.
Bank of America, which began investing in CCB before the IPO, owned 25.6 billion shares valued at $21 billion as of March 31, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender said in a May regulatory filing. The stake, which is the U.S. bank’s largest holding by market value, equals about 10.6 percent of CCB’s Hong Kong-listed shares, according to Bloomberg data. A lockup period in which Bank of America is prohibited from selling most of its shares expires in August.
“It’s a strategic relationship and it will continue to be one for a long time,” said Larry DiRita, a spokesman for Bank of America. Yu Baoyue, a spokesman for CCB, declined to comment.
The U.S. bank may decide to divest more holdings, with the sale taking place later this year, the people said.
Asset Sales
Bank of America has been selling assets including its Balboa insurance unit, First Republic Bank and holdings in BlackRock Inc. to boost capital and focus on core clients. The firm can build capital through earnings and doesn’t need to issue stock, Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan, 51, said last week. Capital surcharges on the largest banks may crimp lending and drive off investors from financial firms, he said.
China Construction Bank had annual profit growth of 33 percent since 2007 and is forecast to increase net income by 23 percent this year, according to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Bank of America was the second-biggest shareholder in CCB at year-end, trailing only the Chinese government’s 59 percent stake in its Hong Kong shares, according to Bloomberg data. Temasek Holdings Pte is the third-largest investor with a 7 percent stake. CCB has 240.4 billion shares outstanding in Hong Kong and 9.6 billion yuan-denominated shares listed in Shanghai.
Bank of America fell 8 cents to $10.60 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have dropped 21 percent this year, the worst performance in the 24-company KBW Bank Index, as housing-related costs weighed on results.
‘Chunk of Gold’
“People are focused on Bank of America getting beyond its legacy issues, and this happens to be a nice chunk of gold they have that can help them get there,” said Jonathan Hatcher, a credit strategist at Jefferies & Co. in New York.
Potential buyers of the CCB stake may include sovereign wealth funds, particularly if the bank needs to sell all its holdings, said Charles W. Peabody, an analyst at Portales Partners LLC with a “buy” rating on Bank of America. The company would raise about $10 billion in regulatory capital if it sold all its CCB stock, he said.
Under former CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America paid $3 billion for a 9.9 percent CCB stake in 2005 before the Chinese bank’s IPO. The U.S. lender later exercised an option to buy an additional 11 percent, paying $9.2 billion.
The firm sold its initial stake in CCB in May 2009, reaping a pretax gain of $7.3 billion, as loan losses mounted amid the recession. Last year, the bank sold rights to buy 1.79 billion CCB shares to Temasek, Singapore’s state investment company.
Foreign Investors
Investors including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc have trimmed about $20 billion in holdings in Chinese lenders since 2009. Chinese regulators consider a single foreign holding of at least 5 percent with a lockup period of at least three years a strategic investment.
A lockup on 12.4 billion Hong Kong-listed Agricultural Bank of China Ltd. (1288) shares held by investors including Standard Chartered Plc (STAN) and Qatar Investment Authority expires next month. The Chinese bank’s listing raised $22.1 billion in the world’s largest initial public offering in July 2010.
Kuwait Investment Authority, which owns 1.9 billion Agricultural Bank shares, said in May it won’t sell its stake when the lockup ends, according to managing director Bader Al- Saad.
‘Overhang’
Agricultural Bank shares, which have gained 23 percent since listing, fell 1.3 percent to HK$3.94 in Hong Kong today.
“The overhang on lockup expiration, slower economic growth and tighter regulatory requirements are all uncertainties driving investors away from China banking shares,” said Patrick Pong, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Mirae Asset Securities HK Ltd., who rates CCB “hold”.
The central bank this week raised lenders’ reserve requirements to a record to drain cash from the economy after inflation rose to the highest in almost three years in May. The banking regulator is seeking to impose higher capital adequacy ratios on lenders and have them assign more risk-weighting to property and local government financing vehicles loans.
At Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (601398) Ltd., the world’s largest lender by market value, Goldman Sachs is the largest foreign investor with 10.1 billion shares held at the end of last year, according to ICBC’s annual report.
To contact the reporters on this story: Hugh Son in New York at hson1@bloomberg.net; Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net
The New FBI Powers
“The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.” ~ John Lennon (1966)
“When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
Listen closely and what you will hear, beneath the babble of political chatter and other mindless political noises distracting you from what’s really going on, are the dying squeals of the Fourth Amendment. It dies a little more with every no-knock raid that is carried out by a SWAT team, every phone call eavesdropped on by FBI agents, and every piece of legislation passed that further undermines the right of every American to be free from governmental intrusions into their private affairs.
Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner are exchanging political niceties on the golf course, Congress is doing their utmost to be as ineffective as possible, and the Tea Party — once thought to be an alternative to politics as usual — is clowning around with candidates who, upon election, have proven to be no better than their predecessors and just as untrustworthy when it comes to protecting our rights and our interests. Yet no matter how hard Americans work to insulate themselves from the harsh realities of life today — endless wars, crippling debt, sustained unemployment, a growing homeless population, rising food and gas prices, morally bankrupt and corrupt politicians, plummeting literacy rates, and on and on — there can be no ignoring the steady drumbeat of the police state marching in lockstep with our government.
Incredibly, with little outcry from the populace, the lengths to which the government will go in its quest for total control have become more extreme with every passing day. Now comes the news that the FBI intends to grant to its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers that include relaxing restrictions on a low-level category of investigations termed “assessments.” This allows FBI agents to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect individuals, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing. (Incredibly, during the four-month period running from December 2008 to March 2009, the FBI initiated close to 12,000 assessments of individuals and organizations, and that was before the rules were further relaxed.)
This latest relaxing of the rules, justified as a way to cut down on cumbersome record-keeping, will allow the FBI significant new powers to search law enforcement and private databases, go through household trash, and deploy surveillance teams, with even fewer checks against abuse. The point, of course, is that if agents aren’t required to maintain a paper trail documenting their activities, there can be no way to hold the government accountable for subsequent abuses.
These new powers, detailed in a forthcoming edition of the FBI’s operations manual, extend the agency’s reach into the lives of average Americans and effectively transform the citizenry into a nation of suspects, reversing the burden of proof so that we are now all guilty until proven innocent. Thus, no longer do agents need evidence of possible criminal or terrorist activity in order to launch an investigation. Now, they can “proactively” look into people and groups, searching databases without making a record about it, conducting lie detector tests and searching people’s trash.
Moreover, as FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni revealed, agents want to be able to use the information found in a subject’s trash to pressure that person to assist in a government investigation. Under the new guidelines, surveillance squads can also be deployed repeatedly to follow “targets,” agents can infiltrate organizations for longer periods of time before certain undisclosed “rules” kick in, and public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars can be investigated without the need for extra supervision.
All of this has been sanctioned by the Obama administration, which, as the New York Times aptly notes, “has long been bumbling along in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to sacrificing Americans’ basic rights and liberties under the false flag of fighting terrorism” and now “seems ready to lurch even farther down that dismal road than George W. Bush did.” In fact, this steady erosion of our rights started long before Bush came into office. Indeed, it has little to do with political affiliation and everything to do with an entrenched bureaucratic mindset — call it the “Establishment,” if you like — that, in its quest to amass and retain power, seeks to function autonomously and independent of the Constitution.
What we are witnessing is a coup d’etat that is aimed at overthrowing our representative government and replacing it with one that outwardly may appear to embrace democratic ideals but inwardly is nothing more than an authoritarian regime. And the Establishment is counting on the fact that Americans will gullibly continue to trust the government and turn a blind eye to its power grabs and abuses.
The relationship between the American people and their government was once defined by a social contract (the U.S. Constitution) that was predicated on a mutual respect for the rule of law and a clear understanding that government exists to serve the people and not the other way around. That is no longer the case. Having ceded to the government all manner of control over our lives, renouncing our claims to such things as privacy in exchange for the phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being trapped in a prison of our own making.
The Kind Of “Public Service” We Can Do Without
In a column for the Huffington Post on Monday, June 13, 2011, Columbia University’s Steven Cohen asserts that “every American should be frightened by the profound and intensifying attack on government and public service.” Cohen submits a vision of the United States very close to an antithesis of the one that actually exists, his alternative universe being a place where the state has been trivialized in favor of “the free market.”
Cohen’s utopia would apparently be a place where the government and giant corporations work hand in glove, their alliance driven by a vaguely parental “passion for public service.” His major assumptions, then, are twofold: That public services cannot be provided but through hierarchy and violent monopolization, and that violent monopolists have every interest in serving the public. Well, on both counts, Cohen couldn’t be more wrong.
He writes that “[c]apitalists are starting to understand that mass poverty and unemployment is politically destabilizing,” but they have always understood this. Because the economic system of Big Business and Big Government has been so deftly efficient at bleeding working people dry, the ruling class has found it expedient to assemble a welfare framework.
Their bureaucracy for “public assistance,” though, whatever its appearance, is grounded not in the humanity or benevolence of the elite, but in their shrewd calculations. As in Tolstoy’s famous parable, the farmers are eventually “afraid that the cows may cease to yield milk,” and so “they invent various means of improving the condition of these cows.”
For the total state’s “helping professions,” public service consists in condescendingly rounding up and corralling those that need to be “helped,” so that their lives can be strictly regimented and overseen. The absolute best thing that the state could do for the poor — the one thing that would truly change their posture on a fundamental level — is the one that is never broached in “respectable,” mainstream debate. Under no circumstances is it considered that we might, returning to Tolstoy’s allegorical farm, “take down the fence and grant the cows their natural freedom.”
As a practical matter, the “proper balance” between commercial interests on the one hand and the state on the other has been no balance at all. Whereas “balance” implies a trade-off between two poles or sides of a scale, the interests of state and corporate power are one and the same. Indeed, to suggest even that they can be differentiated in the prevailing economic system is absurd, ignoring the pervasive coercion that runs through it at every level.
Cohen’s version of “public service” is no more than a mantra invoked to glorify the sweeping, anti-competitive affronts against a true free market that the state institutes to profit the rich. The state-corporate projects Cohen fawningly praises are the sorts of things that require eminent domain land-grabs for new Pfizer complexes; his darling infrastructure investments are the ruin of the spontaneous order of a market freed from state intervention — the kind of market that could open doors for America’s least fortunate.
Quite contrary to the fretful contentions of the Earth Institute’s Executive Director, neither an “attack on public service” nor even a faint disapproval of its underlying values is prevailing in Washington. The public-private collusion Cohen is so enamored of, rather than retrenching, has left room for “the free market” of his nightmares only at the narrowest margins of economic life. Market anarchism would restore peaceful trade and association to its proper place within society, turning social services over to the forces inherent in genuine community.
Having confused American state capitalism with the free market, Cohen accepts (completely uncritically) the asinine folk tale that, in our current economy, there is some kind of bright line dividing “the private and the public sectors.” He doesn’t seem to notice that, far from advocating anything remotely close to a true free market, the “capitalists” he refers to have persistently been at the forefront of calls for “the mix of public and private roles.”
Cohen’s program of faux “public service” has won the day — has allowed huge, bureaucratic corporations and government agencies to crowd out or completely preclude competitors and to dominate our lives. Instead of cheerleading for more of the same, genuine public service would mean unshackling voluntary cooperation and exchange, allowing communities themselves to decide how to help themselves.
Market anarchists contend that absent state monopolization — and its real-world effect of creating scarcities to enrich the well-connected — everything from utilities to aid for the poor would witness vast improvements. While Cohen would aggrandize the authoritarian institutions that have decimated the economy, market anarchists would empower individuals to work together to solve, rather than create, society’s problems.
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SWAT Teams & The Militarization Of U.S. Police Force
“He [a federal agent] had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there.” – Anthony Wright, victim of a Dept. of Education SWAT team raid
The militarization of American police – no doubt a blowback effect of the military empire – has become an unfortunate part of American life. In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense now see the need for their own paramilitary units. Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, to name just a few. These agencies have secured the services of fully armed agents – often in SWAT team attire – through a typical bureaucratic sleight-of-hand provision allowing for the creation of Offices of Inspectors General (OIG). Each OIG office is supposedly charged with not only auditing their particular agency’s actions but also uncovering possible misconduct, waste, fraud, theft, or certain types of criminal activity by individuals or groups related to the agency’s operation. At present, there are 73 such OIG offices in the federal government that, at times, perpetuate a police state aura about them.
For example, it was heavily armed agents from one such OIG office, working under the auspices of the Department of Education, who forced their way into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three children (ages 3, 7, and 11) in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home. This federal SWAT team raid, which is essentially what it was, on the home of Anthony Wright on Tuesday, June 7, 2011, was allegedly intended to ferret out information on Wright’s estranged wife, Michelle, who no longer lives with him and who was suspected of financial aid fraud (early news reports characterized the purpose of the raid as being over Michelle’s delinquent student loans). According to Wright, he was awakened at 6 am by the sound of agents battering down his door and, upon descending the stairs, was immediately subdued by police. One neighbor actually witnessed the team of armed agents surround the house and, after forcing entry, they “dragged [Wright] out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.”
This is not the first time a SWAT team has been employed in non-violent scenarios. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.
How did we allow ourselves to travel so far down the road to a police state? While we are now grappling with a power-hungry police state at the federal level, the militarization of domestic American law enforcement is largely the result of the militarization of local police forces, which are increasingly militaristic in their uniforms, weaponry, language, training, and tactics and have come to rely on SWAT teams in matters that once could have been satisfactorily performed by traditional civilian officers. Even so, this transformation of law enforcement at the local level could not have been possible without substantial assistance from on high.
Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams – which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s – have now become intrinsic parts of local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance. For example, in 1994, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense agreed to a memorandum of understanding that enabled the transfer of federal military technology to local police forces. Following the passage of the Defense Authorization Security Act of 1997, which was intended to accelerate the transfer of military equipment to domestic law enforcement departments, local police acquired military weaponry – gratuitously or at sharp discounts – at astonishing rates. Between 1997 and 1999, the agency created by the Defense Authorization Security Act conveyed 3.4 million orders of military equipment to over 11,000 local police agencies in all 50 states. Not only did this vast abundance of military weaponry contribute to a more militarized police force, but it also helped spur the creation of SWAT teams in jurisdictions across the country.
In one of the few quantitative studies on the subject, criminologist Peter Kraska found…
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