We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, August 14, 2014

The militarization of police agencies from Ferguson to the Middle East

Click here to access article by Roqayah Chamseddine, a Lebanese-American journalist and commentator, posted on Al Akhbar. 

The author provides quite a comprehensive study of the militarization of police agencies by providing a history of their development and their transnational operations. You may be surprised to learn in this article that police/military agencies throughout the Empire are learning and training together in order to control any opposition coming from the Ninety-Nine Percent which are often seen, and dealt with, as an enemy. Within the US, these militarized police agencies disproportionately target African-Americans and other minorities.
US police forces uphold white supremacy with their racist implementation of violence, where in places like Ogden, Utah, Black people “were 40 times more likely to be impacted by a SWAT raid than whites were,” according to the ACLU. These forces work towards the preservation of capitalism, and the police, as an institution, use elitism, violence and authoritarianism in order to preserve the state.
You may also be interested in Glenn Greenwald's views on this development within the US.
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