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The hyper-aggressive, highly weaponized and recent militarization of our immune to prosecution, agents of “order”, should be analyzed in light of their historical formation.

http://www.plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing
The birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. The institution of slavery and the control of minorities, however, were two of the more formidable historic features of American society shaping early policing. Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property.”

If you really look closely at their historic formation, it was primarily to deal with the growing disobedience in regions where the slave class outnumbered the non-slaves.

These militias were essentially replicated in the industrial north to deal with the growing disobedience of labor, who were organizing and striking.

Indeed, the recent militarization seems to be a bit of foreshadowing given the increasingly frequent protests here and around the world

The Nature of Police, the Role of the Left

In this debate, the Right claim that the police are working just fine, while the Left claim that changes are needed to get them working better. Both of them are united in preserving the role of police and keeping real people—neighborhoods, communities, and all the individuals affected by police—from becoming the protagonists in the conflicts that affect us. Similarly, we frequently hear leftists claim that “the prisons aren’t working,” exhibiting a willful ignorance as to the actual purpose of prisons. Sadly, for all their distortions and manipulations, the Right is being more honest. The police and the prisons both are working just fine. As per their design, they are working against us.

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The Tribunal further stated: ‘It is recognised that in a situation where patterns of crimes against humanity are perpetrated with impunity, and where direct and public incitement to genocide is manifest throughout society, it is very conceivable that individuals or the state may choose to exploit the conditions in order to perpetrate the crime of genocide.
It further noted: ‘We have have a genuine fear that in an environment of impunity and an absence of sanction for serious and repeated criminality, the lessons from Rwanda and other mass atrocities may once again go unheeded’.
– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/09/incitement-genocide-humanity#sthash.UyRByOjz.dpu

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Or how about some spoken word to make a little more clear

A little to hippy-progressive-ism for your taste, perhaps a short speech by an old Jewish academic will resonate a little better

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Excerpt”The case for Israel is made of four propositions that should always be presented in the correct escalating order.

We rock
They suck
You suck
Everything sucks

That’s it. Now you know everything that it took me a lifetime to learn. The rest is details; filling in the dotted lines.

You begin by saying how great Israel is. Israel want peace; Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; the desert blooms; kibutz; Israelis invented antibiotics, the wheel, the E minor scale; thanks to the occupation Palestinians no longer live in caves; Israel liberates Arab women; Israel has the most moral army in the world, etc.

This will win over 50% of your listeners immediately. Don’t worry about the factual content. This is about brand identity, not writing a PhD. Do you really think BP is ‘beyond petroleum’?

Then you go into the second point: They suck. Here you talk about the legal system of Saudi Arabia, gay rights in Iran, slave trade in the Sudan, Mohammad Atta, the burqa, Palestinians dancing after 9/11, Arafat’s facial hair, etc.

There is only one additional principle you need to understand here. It will separate you from the amateurs. You need to know your audience. If you’ve got a crowd already disposed to racist logic, go for it with everything you have. But if you get a liberal crowd, you need to sugar coat the racism a bit. Focus on women rights, human rights, religious tolerance, “clash of civilizations”, terrorism, they teach their children to hate, etc. Deep down your audience WANTS to enjoy racism and feel superior. They just need the proper encouragement so they can keep their sophisticated self-image. Give them what they crave and they’ll adore you! But be careful not to ‘mix n match,’ because it will cost you credibility.

When you’re done, there will always be dead-enders insisting that abuse of gays in Iran does not justify ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Take a deep breath, and pull the doomsday weapon: You suck!

You’re a Jew-hater, Arab-lover, anti-Semite, you’re a pinko, a commie, a dreamer, a naive, a self-hater, you have issues, your mother worked for the Nazis, Prince Bandar buys you cookies, you forgot you were responsible for the holocaust, etc. The more the merrier. By the time you end this barrage, only a handful would be left standing. For mopping them up, you use the ultimate postmodern wisdom: Everything sucks.

War, genocide, racism, oppression are everywhere. From the Roma in Italy to the Native-Americans in the U.S., the weak are victimized. Why pick on Israel? It’s the way of the world. Look! Right is only in question between equals in power; the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Ethics, schmethics. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Eat, drink! Carpe diem! The Palestinians would throw us into the sea if they could. Ha ha!

Trust me, that’s as far as words can go. If you followed this method faithfully, you’ve done your work. You should leave the few who are still unconvinced to the forces of order.”

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[quote=barnaby33]
I find that all the anti-Israel pushers out there are strangely silent on all of the other horrible conflicts in the world, but this one gets them going. Congo, South Sudan, Syria. Soft bigotry of low expectations, or just letting the availability of grisly images delivered effortlessly to your tv tug at your heart strings?

[/quote]

I, for one, don’t think what goes on in the congo is relevant to the ongoing 60 year ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Do you think what goes on in the Congo justifies Palestinian ethnic cleansing?

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is no different, in essence, from the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous peoples who inhabited North America who were also dehumanized by the European settlers which, as with the Zionists, was a prerequisite for the massive crimes they were about to commit.

One may argue that at the time the North American continent was being settled, our species had not come to realize the inhumanity inherent in such actions but those zionists who dispossessed the Palestinians in 1948, destroyed 500 of their villages, and forced over 750,000 of them to flee, have no such excuses. They had established their intent to do those very things years before the Nazi holocaust and thus neither they nor the state they worship have a moral leg to stand on.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/
The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

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The Israeli zionist state and it’s very ironic ‘final solution’ to the Palestinian ‘problem’.

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/31/5955077/israeli-support-for-the-gaza-war-is-basically-unanimous

Quote
The results are staggering. An average of 95 percent of Israeli respondents say they think the operation is “completely” or “moderately” justified. About 80 percent say it is “completely” justified. For some perspective, about 72 percent of Americans supported the 2003 Iraq invasion when it was launched.

That support may have increased in part because Israelis came to believe the IDF had increased its level of force to what they wanted. Just before the ground war, when the campaign was largely air strikes, a majority of Israelis believed the IDF wasn’t using enough force. Afterwards, the majority flipped to saying Israel was using the right amount. That’s despite the fact that IDF casualties went up significantly after the ground phase began.

Only a country in the process of moral collapse can stand over this, sitting on a hill, laughing as civilians are shredded by American ordinance.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/5959635/heres-the-full-text-of-the-deleted-time-of-israel-post-backing

Quote
I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

95 percent of Israelis support the Gaza war
http://www.vox.com
Israelis’ biggest criticism of the Gaza war is that the government isn’t using enough force.
Like

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[quote=SK in CV]Is energy of any kind being rationed?[/quote]

Yes the ratioing mechanism is called a price point.

At the Fair Energy summit today, hosted by The Independent and Policy Review Intelligence, Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, will remind energy companies about new rules which mean they will have to be more open about the reason why electricity and gas bills are increasing. He says companies are exaggerating the expense of the Government’s energy efficiency measures.

His comments will follow the shocking claim from the Government’s Fuel Poverty Advisory Group that 300,000 homes will be pushed into fuel poverty by Christmas. A household is considered to be in fuel poverty if it needs to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on fuel for adequate heating.

The group also warns that unless the Government tackles the problem of people being forced to choose between heating and eating, nine million households could fall into fuel poverty by 2016. It is estimated that six million households

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis

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DOOM is the operative ethic

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The power elite are not stupid. They are well aware of the converging crises(the same guys that fund AGW skeptic think tanks understand that it is a problem[otherwise the military would not be preparing for it]but need to maximize profit or somebody else will) and instability of the current world order. Then again, so where the Roman elite but that did nothing to change their behavior. Civilizations collapse because they refuse to adapt and extreme hubris comes with the fall.

It’s just a matter of time before social forces force a change – for better or worse.

———————————-

Modern capitalism has reached the end of its rope. It cannot survive as a system,” Wallerstein said. “And what we are seeing is the structural crisis of the system. The structural crisis goes on for a long time. It really started more or less in the 1970s and will go on for another 20, 30, 40 years. It is not a crisis of a year or of a short moment, it is the major structural unfolding of a system. And we are in transition to another system and, in fact, the real political struggle that is going on in the world that most people refuse to recognize is not about capitalism – should we have or should we not have it – but about what should replace it.”

Immanuel Wallerstein also explained there are two different views on what should replace capitalism.

“I would like a more relatively democratic, more relatively egalitarian world – that is one view,” he said. “We never had that in the history of the world, but it is possible. The other view is that you have a very unequal, polarizing, exploitative system. It does not have to be capitalism. Capitalism is that. But you can do that in many other ways, some of which may be far worse than capitalism.”

And he shared with RT what he thinks of the political struggle unfolding around the world.

“It is technically called a bifurcation of a system,” he said. “Its roots are in many ways the impossibility of continuing the basic principle of capitalism which is seized as the accumulation of capital. And that’s the whole point of capitalism as a system. And it has worked in some ways marvelously well for 500 years. It has been an extremely successful system in what it was trying to do but it has undone itself as all systems do”.

“What happens in a bifurcation is that at some point, the thing tilts and we get into a new, relatively stable situation – the crisis is over, we are in a new system.”

“I sometimes say this is the historicization of the old Greek philosophical distinction between determinism and free will,” he went on. “When the system is relatively stable, it is relatively determined as a system in which we have relatively limited free play. But when it is unstable, when it is going into structural crisis, free will comes into the picture. That is to say, our actions really matter in a way that they did not for 500 years.”

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[quote=zk]I’m just saying that I don’t think egalitarinaism of the type we had 8,000 years ago is possible now, and therefore shouldn’t be strived for.[/quote]

Not with capital accumulation as the main driver of social action

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To paraphrase buckminster fuller, the opposite of natural is impossible.

How we organize ourselves and socially relate today is an anomaly, historically speaking. A minor minor blip coming to an end. The spread of capitalist social relations was more imposed than organic, just ask the native americans. The question should not be what is natural, but what is healthy. Heck, genocide and slavery are “natural”.

What IS impossible is perpetual physical growth. Capitalist society can only survive by defying the laws of thermodynamics, through endlessly expanding growth, buying and using more of everything, every year and forever. Thus the cult of radical consumerism.

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[quote=livinincali] The problem is that this idea flies straight in the face of evolution, natural selection, or Darwinism. Mother earth or nature doesn’t reward fairness/equality it rewards evolution/innovation. .[/quote]

Complete and utter nonsense. The vast majority of human existence has been mostly egalitarian. Like 99%. Humans emerged as an egalitarian social species(dependent on others for survival with mostly equal distribution of resources) and nature rewarded this interdependent and egalitarian relationship. Like 3 million years as a hominid and 175000 years as homo sapien. The social relations that developed over the past 7000 years are an anomaly.

Biospheric interactions are inherently cooperative in nature, not supremely competitive… this is how a life manages to endure without snuffing everyone else out. Everything finds its unique niche in a functioning ecosystem, and the niches in their entirety are unique to the organisms that occupy them. And nature doesn’t have concentrated ownership of the means of production… EVERYTHING is the means of production for everything else, equally distributed. Output = input. No waste to speak of, contrary to our system.

The human social construct of private ownership of the means of production that is our current economic system, a man-made institution fully dependent on social support… (without the social organization of military, police, and courts [you don’t think these just magically appear, do you? And you don’t think they’ve been with us for our entire history as a species, do you?] to keep the land under private ownership and control, it would fall apart immediately) is not mirrored in the natural world.

Capitalism is not cooperative in a holistic sense as life is. It does not perpetuate life in a balanced and sustainable way. We are now seeing the central concepts of externalities at work(well those who wish to look), and what that means for eventual destruction of the framework in which our economic paradigm and institution operates.

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Yeah, sorry about the vulgar language. It was definitely inappropriate. Seriously Obama has been felating all the major capital centers. The other “reverse reality'” narrative is the notion that Obama is secretely anti-isreal. Polticians pandering to the Israel lobby is just another worm in the rotton american apple. The whole movie is grade A propaganda – its an infotoxin that pollutes our collective psyche .

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[quote=squat250][quote=Arraya]Obama sucks capital’s cock like a $2 whore. He dropped to his knees as soon as he got in office. This narrative is batshit crazy. I mean, its serious comic book stuff -which is why it is so popular with fundamentalist christians.[/quote]

like a $2 whore? that seems an inapt analogy. wouldn’t performance increase with pay? that’s the capitalist narrative. Did you mean more like a $2,000 whore?[/quote]

Good point counselor. Conceded – Obama is a high priced whore. He will be rewarded handsomely for his obediance.

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[quote=davelj]

I agree we’ve got too much debt, generally (as a society), and that these LBO shops (and the banks that enable them) are not helping things… [/quote]

This is systemic, too much debt – the process of capital accumulation and reproduction demands it. This contradiction, of needing ever more amounts of debt to keep the capitalist game going, while, at the same time,
having increasingly and systemically detrimental amounts of debt, will keep you guys arguing until final collapse. If the population is not going to take on debt, the government has to. The only other options are forced contraction via “auserity” or letting the market work and having a revolutionary deflationary collapse. We know the latter is not going to happen(not on purpose anyway). hehe – being a liquidation and bankruptcy expert, Rommey appears to be more quailified to be president for what is coming up. btw- RS and Taibbi concedes that the FDIC bailout did not cost tax payers money.

[quote=davelj]
but “reckless” should be judged in totality rather than one single, or even just a few, transactions.[/quote]

On second thought, I mostly agree with this. Taibbi was probably reaching a little bit to make that point at least with the information presented. Still, the story is enlightening in many ways. Bain was like an underwater homeowner that demanded a writedown or they they were going to strip all valueable assets and pocket the proceeds then burn the place to the ground(which apparently was uniquely contractual on this deal). Somebody slipped a mickey in the loan docs through “government intervention” that seemed to work out for Romney and Bain. How convenient, eh?

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