Monday, December 08, 2014

american overseeing became illegitimate a loooong time ago....,


rollingstone |  He was on the street July 17, selling untaxed cigarettes one at a time — which, as inconsequential as it seems, happens to be a crime.

The press and the people who don't live in these places want you to focus only on the incidents in question. It was technically a crime! Annoying, but he should have complied! His fault for dying – and he was a fat guy with asthma besides!

But the real issue is almost always the hundreds of police interactions that take place before that single spotlight moment, the countless aggravations large and small that pump up the rage gland over time.

Over the last three years, while working on a book about the criminal justice gap that ended up being called The Divide, I spent a lot of time with people like Eric Garner. There's a shabby little courthouse at 346 Broadway in lower Manhattan that's set up as the place you go to be sentenced and fined for the kind of ticket Staten Island cops were probably planning on giving Garner.

I sat in that courtroom over and over again for weeks and listened to the stories. I met one guy, named Andre Finley, who kept showing up to court in an attempt to talk his way into jail as a way out of the $100 fine he'd got for riding a bike on a sidewalk in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He couldn't afford the hundred bucks. It took a year and multiple all-day court visits to clear up.

I met a woman who had to hire a sitter so she could spend all day in court waiting to be fined for drinking wine on her own front porch. And in the case of a Bed-Stuy bus driver named Andrew Brown, it was that old "obstructing traffic" saw: the same "offense" that first flagged Ferguson police to stop Michael Brown. 

In Andrew's case, police thought the sight of two black men standing in front of a project tower at 1 a.m. was suspicious and stopped them. In reality, Andrew was listening to music on headphones with a friend on his way home after a long shift driving a casino shuttle. When he balked at being stopped, just like Garner balked, cops wrote him up for "obstructing" a street completely empty of pedestrians, and the court demanded 50 bucks for his crime.

This policy of constantly badgering people for trifles generates bloodcurdling anger in "hot spot" neighborhoods with industrial efficiency. And then something like the Garner case happens and it all comes into relief. Six armed police officers tackling and killing a man for selling a 75-cent cigarette.
That was economic regulation turned lethal, a situation made all the more ridiculous by the fact that we no longer prosecute the countless serious economic crimes committed in this same city. A ferry ride away from Staten Island, on Wall Street, the pure unmolested freedom to fleece whoever you want is considered the sacred birthright of every rake with a briefcase.

If Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon had come up with the concept of selling loosies, they'd go to their graves defending it as free economic expression that "creates liquidity" and should never be regulated.

Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him.

4 comments:

makheru bradley said...

"Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes – if in other words he'd set up a bookmaking operation in which passersby could bet on whether people made their home mortgage payments or companies paid off their bonds – the police by virtue of a federal law called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act would have been barred from even approaching him." Absolutely outstanding point. We have to remember the rule of law is made by the heirs of people who stole an entire continent. As regards the Berkeley protest, would Mrs. Barkley dare to call people who loot champagne scumbags.

"At one point, a downtown Radio Shack was ransacked and later a Whole Foods on historic Telegraph Avenue was looted, with people stealing bottles of champagne and passing them around the crowd."

CNu said...

Whaddaya bet this Rolling Stone/UVA Rape hoax was a setup designed to undermine the credibility of Rolling Stone - now that Taibbi's back putting in yoeman's work?

Constructive_Feedback said...

I see that Brother CNu is taking a bit of the "Fruit From The Poisoned Social Justice Tree".

* The Police Cross The Line

* The Grand Jury sees it in a manner other than popular will

* The masses take to the street in protests

* As various interactions between police and protesters take place - VIOLATIONS of "Civil Rights" get published as evidence of the condition of America

**** Taking The "Moment Into A Movement" - we hear that there are similarities with protests "Hong Kong" and "Palestine"

BUT WAIT....... What happened to contrasts with the protests in Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia against "Western Imperialism" in their lands?

[quote]Taking it one step further, if Eric Garner had been selling naked credit default swaps instead of cigarettes[/quote]

Funny how those pesky little "Credit Default Swaps" that juiced up the mortgage lending industry 10 years ago have been replaced by other means as THE STAKEHOLDERS who seek to JUICE UP THE ECONOMY leverage similar tools for 'overleverage"

*NY Times - Sept 2014 SUBPRIME MORTGAGES ARE BACK http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/are-subprime-mortgages-coming-back.html?_r=0

*** The US Federal Reserve created $3.5 Trillion in FAKE MONEY between 2009 and 2014. If all of the nations under 'IMF Control' had the 'Keys To The Kingdom" to do the same thing - what we know today as "World Poverty" would be mitigated.

BigDonOne said...

Here's an excellent GRAPHIC VIDEO of perp with hands up being shot dead by 'overseers' ... http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/12/08/suspect-had-his-hands-up-when-officers-opened-fire-but-police-say-this-graphic-video-tells-the-whole-story/ BD would bet perp, who had just stabbed-to-death an innocent man, was high after exercising his Subrealistic human right to ingest WhateverTF substances one pleases....


One can only imagine how the liberal media and protesters would have spinned this incident if there was not solid audio/video proof of what actually happened....also might help to be fluent in the language of whatever country you choose to illegally cross the border into....

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...