It's Not An Accident That Neither Policing Or BLM Is Transparent Or Accountable

 

About those "rulers of BLM" - Never forget that Obama is the poster child and his cousin Warren Buffett is the money behind Black Lives Matter. Once you understand these basic facts, you can transcend the useless idiocy of talking in terms of "left" and "right", communist, fascist, conservative, progressive, etc..., rather, you can maintain laser-focus on who is doing the behavior and what their concrete-specific objectives can be discovered to be.

There is, however, another version of events, in which the heartfelt dedication to racial justice is only the forward-facing side of a more complicated movement. Behind the street level activism and emotional outpouring is a calculated machinery built by establishment money and power that has seized on racial politics, in which some of the biggest capitalists in the world are financially backing a group of self-described “trained Marxists”—a label that Cullors enthusiastically applies to herself and the group’s other co-founders. These bedfellows, whose stories and fortunes are never publicly presented as related, are in reality intertwined under the umbrella of a fiscal sponsor named the International Development Exchange. A modestly endowed West Coast nonprofit with origins in the Peace Corps—which for decades supported local farmers, shepherds, and agricultural workers across the Global South—IDEX has, in the past six years, been transformed into two distinct new things: the infrastructure back end to the Black Lives Matter organization in the United States and also, at the very same time, an investment fund vehicle driven by recruited MBAs and finance experts seeking to leverage decades of on-the-ground grantee relationships for novel forms of potentially problematic lending instruments . And it did so with help from the family of one of the most famous American billionaires in history—the Oracle of Omaha himself.

About the police, as currently configured, these economic burdens have been determined to be obsolete and a decision has been taken to do away with their current barely governable configuration. Part of the War on Drugs was to keep cops from policing their own neighborhoods. Even if they live in the city they serve, they cannot work in the jurisdiction they live in, as it may create a conflict of interest. Police not knowing residents is policy, not accident.

Many police, firefighters/EMTs, and other city employees do not live in the cities that employ them. As the ratio of local residents working for a city steadily declines, so does the performance of that city’s government. It’s a terrible situation, made demonstrably worse by state laws that struck down residency requirements for city employees statewide, in contravention of home rule guarantees. State preemption of local control is destroying municipal governments throughout numerous states. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.

With the military, it seems odd that progressives are just now waking up to the idea that an all-volunteer force somehow may mysteriously end up with a disproportionate number of right-wing members. Maybe we have a similar phenomenon with police. So I would suggest a draft not only for the military but also for local police. Everyone at a young age should experience one or the other, or maybe both, for a few years. Then perhaps we could have informed discussions and dispense with most of the righteous ranting.

We should also dispassionately consider how dangerous a police officer’s job actually is – compared to a truck driver, carpenter, farmer and host of other jobs…. hint, you will find that a cops level of danger in their job does not make the top ten list. And as for stopping crime, the police are really, really bad at it. According to FBI stats, only 4% of major crimes reported to police end in someone being convicted of a crime and only half of all major crimes are reported. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.

If we are actually concerned with public safety, with crime control, with having a public institution who’s mandate is actually to serve and protect the citizenry, then we need to design a whole new system from the ground up. Trying to reform the policing system we have into doing what we want it to do is doomed to fail. We need to start with a system that is accountable to the populace it serves, and that is designed specifically to provide security to that populace. We should not waste another moment trying to reform a system that was designed for entirely different purposes than to protect and serve the public.

So all the soap opera and machismo pushed by cops – that their job is so tough and dangerous – reduces to mush when held to the light of evidence. Continuing in that vein, by and large, police officers are exceptionally well-paid for the minimal qualifications required to get the job. Moreover, there are the power and prestige attractions associated with being narratized as heroic first responders and all that folderal. When you take into consideration official overtime pay, and the pay available for moonlighting, policing is one of the few remaining occupations in which a certain demographic with nothing more than a high-school diploma can realistically achieve a 6 figure income. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.

This is why police have so little difficulty parting with the 6-8% annual vigorish to their “fraternal orders”. The fraternal lodges are the real command and control systems for police departments. The chief of police is typically a bureaucratic figurehead whose job it is to run interference with politicians – and to a limited degree – the public.

In the interest of supporting citations – I offer the following link - but recommend a google search on – fop brad lemon tow lot scandal

This is a wonderful mid-sized urban anecdote of most of the moving parts involved with the structure of power, prestige, and accountability in contemporary policing. Abusive policing is concentrated among a relatively small proportion of police officers. The majority of U.S. police probably spend their entire careers without any incidence of corruption or brutality.  The problem is that police abuse is protected, unconditionally, resulting in either no or disproportionately low consequences for their actions. What results is that some naturally violent or naturally corrupt people will seek out police careers because it allows them to fulfill these desires without consequence. Again, this is a matter of policy, not accident.

The Consequences of Catholicism for Political Theory

There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’, the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat. Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.

Catholicism has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.

Are corporations now deriving their "authoriteh" from the rump "professional" class mediocrities comprising the diversity-inclusion-equity clergy? Can the ecclesiastical congregation of diversity-inclusion-equity offer absolution? Or merely economic cancellation...,

Given the weakness of post-Catholic morality - the only pervasive corporate values I see nowadays boil down to Overton's Window of permitted discourse - and - expected prompt and unquestioning compliance on the part of economically captured consumers. The pretend ethics of diversity-inclusion-equity have been quickly and none too subtly supplemented by "trust the science" indoctrination and compliance. If our corporate feudal lords can only police what we say or have ever said, that only scratches the surface of intended moral orthodoxy. If they can police what we do in ways that extend down to our genomes, then the post-Catholic corporatism has transcended the wildest fantasies of the pre-reformation Holy Roman Church.

The government can't police your intentions or your expressions or your behaviors anywhere near as well as corporations with amorphous community standards and big data, algorithms, and inexpensive filipino and south asian comment moderators.

Did you happen to see Warren Buffett's cousin and the diversity commander-in-chief peddling some highly suspect "trust the science" theocracy just last sunday on teevee? When everything's said and done, if we can't persuade you to comply, we've got some community standard digital passports coming your way here shortly so that you can show and prove your true belief in a way that the penitents of old never previously had to do in their confessionals...,