Tri-County Sentry
Friday
AUGUST 29, 2014
Commentary Beyond the Rhetoric:
Dogs Get More Respect than Michael Brown
Shrinking Our Military will Guarantee a Major War
Julianne Malveaux
Harry C. Alford
The Obama Administration has a flawed theory: Use diplomacy to keep the peace; it is better relations with other nations that is the easiest and most effective way to maintain peace. That is dangerous thinking. It’s unrealistic! Nations attack the vulnerable and naïve and this proposed policy is going to drive us to the brink. They are proposing to set our military levels to pre-World War II levels. As you all know our weak military became an attractive target to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. They attacked us and every other economically viable nation. Over 40 million lives were lost as a result of that. It took us four long years before we were able to build up enough military strength to defeat them. If there is a next time we will not be able to recover as before. Modern technology and weapons of mass destruction are possessed by too many powers. The next major war will be fast and terribly deadly. This administration is setting us up for destruction. It will be the end of America as we know it. Is anybody listening? One senior Pentagon official has been quot-
ed, “You have to always keep your institution prepared, but you can’t carry a large land-war Defense Department when there is no large land war.” He has drunk the “Kool-Aid”. You don’t begin a war with a little military and start to build it up. It is too late and the “game” will be over quickly. The thinking during the Cold War was to keep a military large enough so that we could fight two large land wars at the same time. Well my friends the Cold War is about to return. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, believes our president is a punk. So far, he is correct as Putin does what he wants to do without fear. Iran and other rising military powers feel the same way. No longer do they fear America and that’s a big problem. They, despite Congress, have already started to shrink back military components. Over 1,000 majors and captains have been fired. This will result in a reduction of enlisted personnel by the tens of thousands. They are planning to cut pay and benefits such as grocery commissaries for military personnel with families. They want to shrink the $1.4 billion direct subsidy provided to military commissaries which will re-
duce inventory and increase the price of groceries for the families also. Our navy and air force will face reductions in strength accordingly. Also, we are going to slow the growth in military family housing. Going into the military and proudly serve our great nation is starting to become less and less attractive. The Marines say “a few good men”. Well it is about to get fewer and fewer. Let’s look at the nations that have total military strength over 1 million. Brazil has over 2 million personnel. China has nearly 4 million. North Korea has 7.6 million. India has 4.8 million. Iran has 2.4 million. Pakistan has 1.5 million. Russia has 3.2 million. South Korea has 2 million. Turkey has 1 million. Ukraine has 1.2 million. Vietnam has 5.5 million. The United States (us) has 2.2 million. That is kind of scary when the United States is out manned or matched by eight other nations. Even Iran has more personnel and is about to get a nuclear arsenal. 5 other nations already have a nuclear arsenal. WAR, See page 10B
Tired of Political Pitches, but not the Fight
It doesn’t matter if you are state legislator or an alderman, a journalist or a local leader. If you are in Ferguson, Mo., you won’t get any respect. You can be the uncle of a victim whose body was left to lie on the street for several hours and you will not be allowed to cover your young nephew. Not many would let dog lay uncovered for several hours. Young Black Michael Brown apparently got less consideration than a dog. The streets burst into flames, but Gov. Jay Nixon couldn’t make a statement until five days after Michael Brown was massacred. We know Michael Brown’s name; we know how he was treated, but Chief Thomas Jackson refused to release the shooting officer’s name until he was forced to by an enterprising Internet hacking group. The officer was supposedly entitled to privacy, however briefly, but Michael did not deserve enough privacy to have his bloody body covered after he was massacred. The police, armed with stun guns, pepper spray, SWAT teams and plastic bullets, were heavily armed to “contain” the protesting crowd. Who will contain the out-of-control so-called officers of the law? When is it all right to
of Obama in 2008. So, I am going to take a different approach. We should ignore the polls for right now. One thing that is clear in midterm elections is that turnout is generally down, which means that the advantage tends to go towards whoever is angrier. That is most frequently the party that is out of power. The second thing that is clear is that the margin of victory for any one will be close. In that sense, every vote really does count. The third thing that must be factored in, and relates to the polls, is that with the greater use of cell phones as exclusive phones for individuals, it has become more and more difficult for pollsters to get completely accurate reads of the public. What does this mean? Simply put, there is nothing inevitable about Republican victories, despite gerrymandering of election districts and voter suppression campaigns. Everything, and I mean everything will depend on turnout. Increasing the progressive electorate and ensuring that they get to the polls on November 4 will make a remarkable difference. In order for this to work, it is not enough to scare people as to the ramifica-
call a McDonald’s a site of trespassing, or to knock reporters around, fail to offer identification, and then get flippant about it? Charles Dooley, the St. Louis County Executive, gave a facetious news conference where he suggested, “We sit down and talk about it.” Let’s talk about the shooter’s police file. Let’s talk about the fully armed and unreasonable police officers. The St. Louis mayor spoke of “protecting the innocent.” Who is innocent? Certainly not the police officer who shot Michael Brown. The unarmed folks chanting “no justice, no peace,” are certainly innocent. With police officers clad in military gear and armed as fully as those who are fighting abroad, the governor said ‘Yesterday was yesterday.” He added, “I’m not looking backward, I’m looking forward.” In other words, he refuses to hold the officers accountable. “We want to get trust built,” says the governor. He seems to be totally clueless. How do you build trust when socalled officers of the law callously and lawlessly fire into peaceful crowds because they could? The governor needs to hold officers accountable before he calls for a “Kumbaya” moment.
What do we tell our young men? Michael Brown had his hands up and he was still shot multiple times. Many of us who have Black teens and young men in our lives. We counsel them to be non-combative, non-confrontational, even humble, so they won’t be shot. But police officers should be punished or even fired if they can’t share their badge information. What do they have to hide? There is absolutely no accountability, with police officers being afforded more protection than a murder victim. During his August 14 press conference, the governor worked very hard to walk a tightrope as he maneuvered his way thorough a set of pointed questions. He talked about “healing,” about “conversation.” Here’s the conversation: A police officer killed Michael Brown while he had his hands up, in surrender mode. Witnesses say that even after Brown held his hands up, the police officers continued to shoot. BROWN, See page 10B
White Cops Kill at Least Two Blacks Each Week George E. Curry
Bill Fletcher, Jr. So, the midterm elections are fast approaching and, with every passing day, you are probably receiving an email and/or letter suggesting that the world will end if the Republicans take the Senate on November 4. If, like me, you are sick and tired of receiving such communications, you might be tending towards turning off and ignoring everything in connection with the elections. Don’t! I am not going to tell you how bad things will get if the Republicans capture the Senate. My guess is that you already know that. You may be denying it. You may say that things cannot get much worse. They actually can. Let me reassure you. I am not going to try to scare you into voting. I actually do not think that such an approach works. It becomes the equivalent of yelling that the sky is falling. The bottom line is that there is a rabid right-wing, represented by today’s Republican Party, that wants to reverse the victories of the 20th century. You know that already. You know that they have been playing the race card since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in 1968, and have gone into overdrive since the election
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tions of Republican victories, e.g., impeachment; cuts; war with Iran. If people get scarred enough they may just go into their cocoons and hope that everything comes out in the wash. No, we actually have to be inspired. Therefore, in addition to making sure that the Caligula wing of the political elite does not win total control, we have to be actively supporting candidates who are standing on the side of the regular person. We need to be standing with those who support voting rights; who support tolerance for religion and orientation; who are for racial and gender equality; and those against the USA engaging in one war after another. The great labor leader Mother Jones coined the phrase: “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” I will borrow from her and suggest: “Don’t panic; vote!” This is not a time to let anyone turn us around. Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a racial justice, labor and global justice activist and writer. Follow him on Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.
Occasionally, police officers behave in such as dastardly manner that it captures international attention. There was the 1997 famous video of four White LAPD officers taking turns clubbing and kicking Rodney King nearly beyond recognition after a high-speed automobile chase. In 1999, on the opposite coast, an unarmed, 23-year-old Amadou Diallo was killed after four policemen fired 41 times into his Bronx, N.Y. apartment, striking him 19 times. In New Orleans, Robert Davis, a retired elementary school teacher, was returning to his hometown after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to inspect the damaged family home. He went to the French Quarters to purchase some cigarettes. Four White officers, who suspected him of public drunkenness, accused Davis of resisting arrest and began beating him. An Associated Press producer filmed a video that showed no indication of resistance. Timothy Thomas, 19, was shot to death in Cincinnati in 2001 by Patrolman Stephen Roach. The officer said he thought Thomas was armed – he wasn’t. The shooting touched off the largest urban unrest in the U.S. since the L.A. uprising a decade earlier. And the list doesn’t stop
there: Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, Frank Jude, Jonathan Ferrell, Kathryn Johnson, Kendrec McDade, Timothy Standsbury, Jr., Kenneth Chamberlain and so many more. Three more names were added to the list in the past month: Eric Garner of Staten Island, N.Y.; Ezell Ford of Los Angeles, and now Michael Brown, the 18-year-old unarmed victim in Ferguson, Mo. Police kill African Americans more frequently than you may realize. According to stats compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice, an unarmed African American died at the hands of an armed White police officer at the rate of nearly two per week from 2005 to 2012. Over that 8-year-period, 400 police killings were reported per year. White officers killed a Black person, on average, 96 times per year. Of those, 18 percent of the African Americans killed were under the age of 21, compared to 8.7 percent of Whites. As bad as those figures are, they grossly understate the problem. The FBI statistics are based on the voluntary reporting of local law enforcement jurisdictions. Currently, approximately 750 of 17,000 law enforcement agencies reg-
ularly report their figures to the FBI. That means if the ratio holds true for all 17,000 agencies, the annual 96 Black deaths at the hands of White cops could be as high 2,170 a year or almost 42 (41.73) per week – nearly six per day (5.94). To be conservative, let’s presume that the death rate for the non-reporting law enforcement agencies is only half of those now reporting. That would still be approximately three Blacks killed by a White police officer every day. According to Officer Down Memorial Page, which catalogues the deaths of all law enforcement officials, 416 cops were deliberately killed in the line of duty from 2005 to 2012, an average of 52 a year from 2005 to 2012. Using the most conservative data, Blacks are almost twice as likely to be killed by police as cops are likely to be murdered in the line of duty. In most of the high-profile cases of police killing unarmed Blacks, there was no justification for the use of deadly force. COPS, See page 11B