Wednesday, June 3, 2020

With God On Their Side

Has anything ever encapsulated US history better than the sight of Donald Trump fomenting violence while holding an upside-down Bible against a backdrop of flash grenades and assault troops?

The Bible, which had been carefully nestled within Ivanka Trump's $1500 designer handbag for the fascistic fashion parade from the Rose Garden to St. John's Episcopal Church on Monday night, amazingly did not erupt into flames once it became weaponized in Trump's hammy fist.





Nor did Washington's Pius XII shrine spontaneously combust in outrage when Trump desecrated that site the following day in an oafish appeal to the Opus Dei Catholic side of his reactionary base. Perhaps it's because, as just-released Vatican documents disclose, the pope was both aware of and complicit in Hitler's extermination of the Jews. The pope learned of the Holocaust fully three years before the rest of the world, but kept silent.


Not to be outdone by Trump in the great American tradition of complicity and the co-optation of religion to hide the Seven Deadly Sins that define our brutal and oligarchic form of government, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wielded her own Bible in response to the president's serial heresies, lamely chiding him to start acting out the traditional presidential role of Healer in Chief.





Seeming to channel children's author and fellow San Franciscan Lemony Snicket, Pelosi bemoaned the series of unfortunate events which, for her, culminated in the atrocity of Trump holding a Bible. She advised him to tone down the divisive rhetoric. But she herself was as silent as a Pope in World War Two about the ongoing protests and police brutality in the streets of America. She would not be cowed into finally advocating Medicare for All and a universal basic income as a way of quelling the near-universal public anger against the establishment of which she is an all-powerful part.


She noted, quoting Ecclesiastes, that there is a time to love and a time to heal. You could almost hear the refrains of Turn, Turn, Turn wafting in the air. But combined with her utter lack of response to the economic and social pain of the protesters themselves, it was just more of the same Turn of the Screw.


Not to be outdone in the religious co-optation department, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden followed up his own churchy advice that rioting, stressed-out cops should aim to shoot those hordes of mythical knife-branding criminals in the legs rather than the hearts. He virtuously suggested that next time, Trump should actually open the Bible and learn something. He did not suggest that US police departments open up the Bill of Rights for their own refresher courses in law and morality.


That's because Joe Biden, author of the 1994 Crime Bill, has always been totally copacetic with cops. Barack Obama himself gushed on more than one occasion that Cop-dom has never had a better or truer friend than Joe Biden. It was Biden who restored billions of dollars of funding to the federal COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program as part of the 2009 stimulus package - at the very same time that the administration was helping Wall Street to throw five million citizens out of their homes. It was Biden who spearheaded the 2012 policy requiring that grants must be used by police departments to hire military veterans - to give them a chance to continue "serving our country" - rather than, say, to protect the citizenry - once they're done fighting "over there."


The COPS legislation, written by Biden in tandem with the crime bill, began funneling billions of dollars to police departments to hire more cops under the rubric of "community policing" and "proactive community engagement."  But as Radley Balko writes in Rise of the Warrior Cop:

"The problem was that there was no universal definition of community policing.... Street sweeps, occupation-like control of neighborhoods, SWAT raids and aggressive anti-gang policies. These police activities are aggressive, often violent, and usually a net loss for civil liberties, but they are proactive.
When (President) Clinton, Biden and other politicians touted the COPs program, they did so with language that evoked the Peace Corps (though both Clinton and Biden supported policies that promoted militarization.) Although Clinton described the goal of COPS as '(building) bonds of trust and understanding, it wasn't clear if he or any other politician really believed this. The majority of the COPS grants was given to simply hire more  police officers. The program said little about how those officers would be used, or what sort of attitude they should bring to the job....
"And so as the COPS program threw billions at police departments under the pretense of hiring whistling, baton-twirling Officer Friendlies to walk neighborhood beats, rescue kittens, and maybe guest-umpire the occasional Little League game, many police agencies were actually using the money to militarize."
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is largely one of style over substance, The George W. Bush administration drastically cut funding to the COPS program, because its language wasn't as tough and brutal as they liked. When Obama came into office, the funding was duly restored. When Trump came into the office, the funding was duly slashed once again. If Biden comes into office in 2021, watch for the language of touchy-feely community to gloss over more cop killings of minorities, more deadly no-knock raids, more hiring of PTSD-riddled veterans of our endless wars. He'll sell it as a vast improvement over Trump's calling out the troops before they even get a chance to jump seamlessly from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines to trade their fatigues for a blue uniform and a badge.

As a senator, Biden was actually to the right of the Bush administration, never resting from his one-man crusade for COPS. From a 2007 press release from his Senate office:

My colleagues on the Judiciary Committee have unanimously approved this bill. Recently, the Brookings Institution strongly advocated for a reauthorization of the COPS program, calling it one of the most cost-effective options available for fighting crime. They can see what is plainly obvious crime is like cutting grass and if you stop mowing the lawn, one day you'll look outside and see a jungle. We're seeing very tall grass in our communities now, and we need to move this bill to the full Senate quickly, so can get local police agencies the help they so desperately need.
Biden effectively compared poor minority communities to wild overgrown jungles needing a severe mow-down. It is a prime example of the racist dog-whistle.

Not to be outdone, his Democratic primary challenger at the time, Barack Obama, traveled to New Orleans to advocate for his own "Katrina COPS" program to "empower" poor black residents of that destroyed city to install more police to occupy their neighborhoods. Not for nothing did he eventually choose Biden to be his vice president, a dog-whistle of reassurance to paranoid white voters in its own right. Like any other liberal God-sider worth his salt, Obama preached from within the sanctuary of a church for the hiring more cops to "restore the bonds of trust" between an occupying force and its targets.


More blatantly militant language and practice did eventually find their way into the COPS program, particularly the 2012 directive mandating that departments use the grant money to hire military veterans over even graduates with criminal justice degrees from four year universities. 


By the time Donald Trump assumed control of the government, one out of every five American cops was a true warrior, a veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan and any number of other battlefields and occupation zones both acknowledged and secret.

So even as a "bipartisan" Congress is currently going through the motions of taking away some of the tanks and grenade launchers and other surplus military hardware from the nations's police departments, they are not addressing the proliferation of trained killers in these departments.


A 2017 investigation by the Marshall Project revealed that veterans who work as police officers are more vulnerable to self-destructive behavior, including using alcohol and drugs, and attempting suicide.

Nearly all of the 33 police departments contacted by The Marshall Project declined to provide a list of officers who had served in the military, citing laws protecting personnel records, or saying the information was not stored in any central place. The Justice Department office that dispenses grants to hire cops and study policing said it has no interest in funding research into how military experience might influence police behavior.
 “I reject the notion that a returning veteran, who has seen combat, should cause concern for a police chief,” said Ronald L. Davis, who headed that office in the Obama administration. “I would even hire more if I could.”
Take a look out on the streets of America. It's a Hieronymus Bosch mural of a uniformed, untreated culture of PTSD sufferers with clubs on steroids in military Humvees.

And all our esteemed alleged leaders can do is praise the lord and pass the ammunition and place trillions of public dollars into the collection baskets of their oligarchic friends and donors.

Trump is far from the only miscreant who, wrapped in the flag and thumping a Bible, is bringing fascism to America. That process started a long time ago. 







17 comments:

Jay–Ottawa said...


Alleluia Alert! The thin blue line has finally seen the light. Pictures of COPS shaking hands with demonstrators, hugging them, kneeling in prayer beside them. From now on the Black Block will be able to sit things out. Praise the Lord.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/02/us/police-protesters-together/index.html

Annie said...

The cop/protester hugfest isn't solidarity, it's propaganda.

The Joker said...

Decent (for mainstream media) short article at The Guardian summarizing (with some links) some high-profile examples of New York police over-use of force. Of course, they don't go into the background, philosophy, and analysis of it all, as Radley Balko and you do, Karen.

"New York police take seconds to restore reputation for brutality.
Driving vehicles into protesters demanding justice for George Floyd earned the backing of the mayor, but of few others."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/04/new-york-police-brutality-protests-george-floyd

Interesting passage near the end:

"For Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer and prosecutor in Brooklyn and Queens who is now a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Monday night’s spectacle of looting along Fifth Avenue amounted to a collapse of policing in the city.

'This weekend, the job of police officer in New York became officially impossible when the police abolitionists won. They have created a model of zero tolerance towards force being used and any injuries being inflicted, and that’s absurd.' "

Interesting that O’Donnell frames it as being caused by police abolitionists. Far more likely is simple incompetence, dumb police tactics, or a deliberate, ideologically-motivated focus by the police on the political, anti-racism, anti-police-brutality protesters, to the detriment of protecting property from looters, a completely different group.

But, knowing that things often aren't what they seem, there's a more sinister possibility: that the police DELIBERATELY focused their resources so as to allow looting to occur.

As I've said previously, the middle class, especially, fears disorder. (The upper class not so much, because they know that governmental police forces will make it a priority to protect them, and if insufficient, they have or can have rent-a-cops as backup. If the shit really hits the fan, they can always fly off in their private jets). So there's nothing like a bit of permitted --- perhaps even engineered --- disorder, in order to have the large segment of the populace that is the middle-class clamoring for more and better-armed police and more brutality.

The Joker said...

So, Karen, how did you become acquainted with that "Moonshine Bandits" piece? I had never seen that, nor heard of the group, prior to your posting. I kept expecting to see the ghost of Leni Riefenstahl stroll across the screen at the end, but no, she/it didn't. Was that video used for military recruiting? Was it contracted for openly and expressely by the U.S. military for that purpose? Or perhaps more obscurely connected and funded, while being passed off as just a "patriotic", pro-military country music video?

Karen Garcia said...


Came across them in a Google search for lyrics of the original Praise the Lord tune.. If it isn't a military recruiting tool it should be. - the part about clutching rosary beads while killing people was real catchy,

Steve Beck said...

Pass me the Ammmo
Theres a storm on the horizon and
My adrenalines runnin wild
But I got my brothers standing next to me
So praise the lord and
Pass the ammo
Stars Stripes and Camo
Theres a price to be paid
To stay free
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to fight
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to cry
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to die
I do it for my family and
Do it for my pride
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to fight
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to cry
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to die
I do it for my family and
Do it for my pride
Laid up in this bunker
Rosary on my neck
I do this for my family and
The colors i respect
They forgetten those cowards took the towers down
You can bet I aint gonna hesitate to put em in the ground
Clutchin on my rifle
Ammo by my side
Clutchin on my bible
I do it…

Steve Beck said...

This is Amerika:
Theres a storm on the horizon and
My adrenalines runnin wild
But I got my brothers standing next to me
So praise the lord and
Pass the ammo
Stars Stripes and Camo
Theres a price to be paid
To stay free
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to fight
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to cry
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to die
I do it for my family and
Do it for my pride
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to fight
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to cry
Pass me the ammo aint afraid to die
I do it for my family and
Do it for my pride
Laid up in this bunker
Rosary on my neck
I do this for my family and
The colors i respect
They forgetten those cowards took the towers down
You can bet I aint gonna hesitate to put em in the ground
Clutchin on my rifle
Ammo by my side
Clutchin on my bible
I do it…

The Joker said...

The real "thin blue line" flag, illusions unmasked:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/ct1ani/comment/exi5f6q

Annie said...

Holy smokes! Top military brass are having fits over Trump using the military to crack down on protesters.

But are they actually worried about Trump threatening 'the Constitution', or rather worried about Trump threatening recruitment, retention, and morale of Black and other minority enlistees?

Better order up some more military fly-overs of sports stadiums!

The Joker said...

I presume most readers here have seen the videos of the Buffalo, NY cops shoving a 75-year-old man down, seriously injuring his head. These videos are of fairly good quality, as is the audio, and even the crack of the man's head hitting the cement can be heard.

Buffalo Police Said Protester With Head Wound “Tripped and Fell.” Video Shows They Lied.

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/buffalo-police-said-protester-head-wound-tripped-fell-video-shows-lied/

https://youtu.be/QSBZGv5wzK4

https://twitter.com/KatieGibasTV/status/1268702159295655938?s=20

From my relatively-privileged, slightly-upper-middle-class part of town, I used to say: The police need to be reined-in, they're a threat to democracy, to civil liberties, and sometimes to life itself.

Now I say: Fuck the pigs. Sure, prosecute the documented abuses. That should be a basic expectation in any nation that claims to have civil liberties. But it has become crystal clear that the well-documented abuses are just the tip of the iceberg, that there's something seriously wrong with modern police mentality and operations, and neither internal nor external mechanisms now exist, or are likely to come into being, to adequately reform them. They can't even be counted on to tell the truth about what they have done when they crack an old man's head open. So defund them; there's no other fix for the serious danger that they pose.

Jay–Ottawa said...


If we might come away with a general point from news reports, Karen's post and our commentaries, it's that an easy resort to force often gets out of hand.

Eugene O'Donnell, quoted above in a comment, defends police force with an all-or-nothing remark about 'police abolitionists.' How nuanced, professor. First, discredit the protesters, after which you won't have to work hard defending violent cops.

Of course we need police, or whatever we might call workers of a different mentality who really are trained to serve and protect. I've mentioned before the innovation developed in UK police organization. First, the Brits send out unarmed bobbies to assess the situation. Most of the time, calm is restored by that first Wave of police, none (or few) of whom are armed.

I suppose Wave One could still smash your skull against a wall or suffocate you with a knee, but it seems a cop is less likely to resort to violence when unarmed and trained in the reliance on other tactics. If and when things get out of hand for Wave One, they call up Wave Two, a form of SWAT team, which is well armed but also trained to rely on presence and negotiation before firearms.

How does that work out? The number of fatal shootings by police in England and Wales from 2004/05 to 2018/19 was between zero and 6 per year. Put another way, over the past 15 years, the police of England and Wales killed on average 2.6 people a year. In the US the police shoot on average about 1000 civilians a year.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shootings-england-wales/

To be fair, the US population is 5.9 times larger than that of England and Wales (330 million vs 56 million). Let's divide 1000 deaths by 5.9. Thus, for every 3 individuals the English and Welch police kill per year, the US police kill on average 169 Americans. If US police adopted the Two-Wave tier of maintaining order, many fewer people might be killed by US police.

Instead of target practice, how about a few hours a week devoted to styles of negotiation or, dare I mention it, trained in the "force" of nonviolence. US cops might get good at nonviolence, especially if they have no sidearm to finish the job quickly. There might even develop a competition between Wave One and Wave Two. If UK system doesn't work, OK, call in the Second Wave to crack heads and sling lead.

The Joker said...

@Jay--Ottawa

Or, before even "wave one" of your force hierarchy, one could send out a "wave zero" -- of sex workers. (An interesting philosophical question would be whether they should be made government employees, "police officers", even!). Sex is basically the bonobo behavioral strategy to defuse tensions -- and it seems to work, they don't seem to need "wave two" of your force hierarchy!

The Joker said...

Interesting factoids re the two cops now charged with felony assault as a result of their pushing the 75 year old man down in Buffalo:

McCabe, 32 years old, was ex-army.

article is behind a paywall at Buffalo News, but excerpt shows up if you google "Torgalski millitary":

"Two Buffalo officers charged with felony assault for shoving protester
1 day ago · McCabe, 32, a U.S. Army veteran, wore a mask during his arraignment, which lasted about two minutes"

also, from: https://am1590theanswer.com/news/politics/prosecutors-2-buffalo-police-officers-charged-with-assault

is this:
"McCabe's lawyer, Tom Burton, said after the arraignment that prosecutors didn't have any grounds to bring felony charges. He said his client is a decorated military veteran with a clean record as a police officer."

As for Torgalski, from:
https://latestbios.com/usa/aaron-torgalski-bio-wiki-age/

"Torgalski, 39 years old, had an annual salary of $81,419"

I haven't seen mentioned any former military connection for him. But one way or another, for the kind of money Torgalski was pulling down, I'd expect, at least, better treatment of an old man.

Valerie Long Tweedie said...

Joker,

I share your concern about the Buffalo police. What I REALLY found astounding, frightening and revealing was all their buddies in the Emergency Response Team resigned in protest at their arrest. Most offensive was the group of police, firefighters and other sundry supporters applauding the bullies in uniform as they left their sentencing hearings. The curtain has been pulled back and the rot revealed - either they are closing ranks or they truly believe there is nothing wrong with attacking an unarmed, elderly man, lying about it and then walking right by him as he lay bleeding on the concrete.

My other comment has to do with the coroner who initially said George Floyd died of natural causes. Again, the curtain has been pulled back. Why hasn't this man/woman been fired?

What is sad is that there is a terrible culture of closing ranks in police departments in the U.S. - and Australia as well. Good cops, who speak out against their bully fellow officers - even those totally breaking the law - are treated so badly by the rest of the force for "telling tales out of school" and breaking rank that they usually have to resign due to the harassment and bullying at the hands of their fellow police.

I can really understand why the Minneapolis City Council is thinking of disbanding their entire police department and starting from scratch. How this will be accomplished is anyone's guess but I heard a great discussion on this issue today on the radio and apparently the Minneapolis police have tried a piece-meal approach and it hasn't worked. They know their police department is totally dysfunctional but they are at a loss as to what to do about it.

Seriously, I think the Buffalo City Council ought to consider a similar move.

If the Buffalo police can do this to an elderly white man approaching them, who was clearly no threat, in broad daylight, what will they do to a black man in a hoodie at night when there are no phone cameras to film their actions?

Valerie Long Tweedie said...

In keeping with the religious theme, Karen, here is a great link to a Common Dreams essay. It really made me laugh. Having grown up in a Baptist home and therefore, knowing my Bible, I have to applaud the author who seems to understand the teachings of Jesus far better than the Religious Right who seem to have skipped the Gospels in their Bible reading. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/05/what-christ-said

Karen, I just came across Robert Scheer's new blog. Just thought you might want to know. It appears to have all the writers who walked out of TruthDig. https://scheerpost.com/

Karen Garcia said...

Thanks, Valerie, I added Scheer's site to the "blog roll."

Check out the link to the Jimmy Dore interview with Chris Hedges, who despite rumors to the contrary, really does have a sense of humor.

valerie long tweedie said...

Yes, I heard that!