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Forum Post: Always Low Wages, More Pollution: Why Barack and Michelle Obama Relentlessly Shill for Walmart

Posted 9 years ago on June 1, 2014, 3 p.m. EST by LeoYo (5909)
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Always Low Wages, More Pollution: Why Barack and Michelle Obama Relentlessly Shill for Walmart

Sunday, 01 June 2014 12:21
By Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24068-always-low-wages-more-pollution-why-barack-and-michelle-obama-relentlessly-shill-for-walmart

Earlier this month President Obama visited a Bay Area Wal-Mart to praise the world's largest and most anti-union retailer for its supposed environmental responsibility. The fact is that Wal-Mart's maintenance of diesel-fueled supply chains between its stores and wherever on the planet wages are lowest and environmental restrictions are totally absent make it a major ongoing contributor to runaway climate change. The president's appearance therefore, was simply a hypocritical exercise in greenwashing for Wal-Mart.

Though it was an insult to working people and to many of his abject and fervent supporters, it should have been no surprise. It wasn't President Obama's first wet kiss to Wal-Mart and with almost three more years in office to go it won't be his last. Still the willingness of the Obama Administration to do the bidding of Wal-Mart shows just how hollow has become the pretense of elected black Democrats to representing the poor and oppressed.

There was a time when Democrats in the White House did not dare openly shill for the giant retailer. Hillary Clinton served on Wal-Mart's board of directors through most of the 1980s, while her husband Bill was governor of Arkansas. Even then, Wal-Mart was notorious for overworking and underpaying its workers, violating labor laws to thwart unions, and sopping up prodigious amounts of corporate welfare in the forms of tax breaks and subsidies of all kinds. Being in bed with those crooks wasn't just an embarrassment, it was a hypocritical affront to Democratic voters, so somewhere on the 1992 road to the White House, Hillary resigned from Wal-Mart's board. Similarly in 2007 with her husband on the way to the White House, Michelle Obama felt compelled to resign from the board of TreeHouse Foods, a major Wal-Mart vendor. “I won't shop there,” said presidential candidate Barack Obama when questioned about Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO labor forum.

Of course labor audiences in 2007 and 2008 were where Obama pledged to renegotiate NAFTA, and immediately raise the minimum wage as soon as he took office. The president never mentioned raising the minimum wage again till about 2012 when Republicans were safely in control of the House of Representatives, and instead of renegotiating NAFTA, President Obama is engaged in secret negotiations to extend it across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Evidently the Obama that promises is a different guy, and far less powerful, than the Obama that acts.

Safely in office, Michelle and Barack Obama have enthusiastically embraced Wal-Mart. The first lady allowed the unscrupulous retailer to leverage her personal image as an advocate of exercise and healthy eating in her “Let's Move” initiative, and spouting the company line that the best solution to urban “food deserts” is opening more Wal-Mart neighborhood grocery stores. Michelle Obama's many appearances at and pronouncements around Wal-Mart have done the retailer more good than she and Hillary could ever have done in another decade or two apiece on its board of directors.

Right now Wal-Mart is approaching 30% of the US retail grocery market, with far lower wages, fewer hours, skimpier benefits, and longer and dirtier supply chains than its major competitors. As I said a couple years ago in an article about Michelle Obama's cynical embrace of Wal-Mart:

Wal-Mart's business model of corrupting public officials, lying about job creation numbers, rampant sex and race discrimination, relentlessly low wage and benefit levels, and aspirations to monopoly control of local markets across the country make it a bad neighbor, a worse boss, an unfair competitor and sometimes a criminal enterprise.

Wal-Mart has been a leader in the corporate practice of weaponizing its charitable giving, turning it into a lever to open new markets in urban America, to neutralize and isolate opposition, and to curry favor with local political figures. Wal-Mart made it rain on selected charities and ministries in areas like Newark and Chicago when it needed to colonize those new markets. President Obama recognized this “achievement” in the corruption of Democratic party politics in March 2014 by nominating Wal-Mart's chief of charitable giving to head up his Office of Management and Budget.

Wal-Mart was even allowed, along with McDonalds and other large, low-wage employers, to shape the drafting of regulations governing Obamacare, in ways that exempted the retailer from having to ensure large numbers of its workers for the first several years.

The fiction that elected Democrats represent poor and working people and stand for safeguarding the environment is just that – a fiction. There is a new neoliberal paradigm that allows Democrats to mumble a few words about raising the minimum wage when the other party controls Congress, that claims the moment they took office was the day the oceans stopped rising. If these were curable bugs in the political system, votes and advocacy would wake enough people up to change them. But what if they're not bugs in the system at all. What if these are its core and immutable features? What then? Isn't it time to step outside their two-party, capitalist box, to dream and begin to build something else?

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

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[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Covert US Military Training Goes to Africa

Sunday, 01 June 2014 11:40
By William R. Polk, Consortium News | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24065-covert-us-military-training-goes-to-africa

New US plans for training security forces in four African countries recall similar programs around the world, which often ended in the hand-picked trainees slaughtering civilians or staging military coups.

With everyone’s attention focused on the European elections or President Barack Obama’s speech at West Point or the Ukraine, a story by Eric Schmitt in The New York Times on Tuesday may not have caught your attention. I believe, however, that it provides an insight into some of the major problems of American foreign policy.

What Mr. Schmitt reports is that the U.S. has set up covert programs to train and equip native teams patterned on their instructors, the U.S. Army Delta Force, in several African countries. The program was advocated by Michael A. Sheehan who formerly was in charge of special operations planning in the Department of Defense and is now, according to Mr. Schmitt, holder of the “distinguished chair at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.”

Mr. Schmitt quotes him as saying, “Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing.” So far allocated to this effort, Mr. Schmitt writes, is $70 million, and the initial efforts will be in Libya, Niger, Mali and Mauritania.

How to do this, according to the senior U.S. officer in Africa, Major General Patrick J. Donahue II, is complex: “You have to make sure of who you’re training. It can’t be the standard, ‘Has the guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ but also, what are his allegiances? Is he true to the country or is he still bound to his militia?”

So let me comment on these remarks, on the ideas behind the program, its justification and the history of such efforts. I begin with a few bits of history. (Disclosure: I am in the final stages of a book that aims to tell the whole history, but the whole history is of course much too long for this note.)

Without much of the rhetoric of Mr. Sheehan and General Donahue and on a broader scale, we have undertaken similar programs in a number of countries over the last half century. Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, Egypt, Iraq, Thailand, Chad, Angola to name just a few. The results do not add up to a success almost anywhere.

Perhaps the worst (at least for America’s reputation) were Chad where the man we trained, equipped and supported, Hissène Habré, is reported to have killed about 40,000 of his fellow citizens. In Indonesia, General Suharto, with our blessing and with the special forces we also had trained and equipped, initially killed about 60,000 and ultimately caused the deaths of perhaps 200,000. In Mexico, the casualties have been smaller, but the graduates of our Special Forces program have become the most powerful drug cartel. They virtually hold the country at ransom.

Even when casualties were not the result, the military forces we helped to create and usually paid for carried out the more subtle mission of destroying public institutions. If our intention is to create stability, the promotion of a powerful military force is often not the way to do it. This is because the result of such emphasis on the military often renders it the only mobile, coherent and centrally directed organization in societies lacking in the balancing forces of an independent judiciary, reasonably open elections, a tradition of civil government and a more or less free press.

Our program in pre-1958 Iraq and in pre-1979 Iran certainly played a crucial role in the extension of authoritarian rule in those countries and in their violent reactions against us.

General Donahue suggests that we need to distinguish among the native soldiers we train and empower those who are “true to the country.” But how? We supported Hissène Habré so long that we must have known every detail of his life. He is now on trial as war criminal. General Suharto has never been charged (nor have those Americans who gave him a “green light”) for his brutal invasion of East Timor. Both probably believed that they met General Donahue’s definition of patriotism.

And in Mali, our carefully trained officers of the Special Forces answered what they thought was both patriotic and religious duty by joining the insurgency against the government we (and we thought they) supported. We have a poor record of defining other peoples’ patriotism.

And, in the interest of more urgent objectives, we have been willing to support and fund almost anyone as long as we think he might be of value. General Manuel Noriega, our man in Panama, went on to spend 22 years in an American prison after we invaded his country and fought the soldiers we had trained.

Indeed, we have a poor record of even knowing who the people we train are. After the Turkish army carried out one of its coups in the 1960s, when I was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East, I asked the appropriate branch of the Defense Department who were the new leaders, all of whom had been trained in America, often several times during the years. The answer was that no one knew. Even in army records, they were just Americanized nicknames.

And, more generally, our sensitivity to the aspirations, hopes and fears of other people is notoriously crude or totally lacking. Growing out of the Cold War, we thought of many of them as simply our proxies or our enemies.

Thus, we found Chad not as a place with a certain population but just as a piece of the Libyan puzzle, and today we think of Mali in the same way. Now we are talking to training “carefully selected” Syrian insurgents to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Do we have any sense of what they will overthrow him for?

Beyond these, what might be considered “tactical” issues are “strategic,” legal and even moral considerations. I leave aside the legal and moral issues — such as what justification we have to determine the fate of other peoples — as they do not seem very persuasive among our leaders.

But just focus on the long-term or even middle-term results of the new policy: the most obvious is that we meddle in and take some responsibility for the politics of an array of countries in which we have little direct interest. And often with the obvious danger of a deeper, more expensive and more painful result. We are close to this commitment in Syria.

Less obvious is that our activities, no matter how carefully differentiated, will be seen to add up to an overall policy of militarism, support of oppressive dictatorships, and opposition to popular forces. They also meld into a policy of opposition to the religion of over a billion people, Islam. And they do so at great expense to our expressed desires to enable people everywhere, including at home, to live healthier, safer and decent lives.

I end with a prediction: in practically every country where Mr. Sheehan’s and General Donahue’s program is employed, it will later be seen to have led to a military coup d’etat.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

[-] 2 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Boko Haram a Blessing for Imperialism in Africa: US Training Death Squads

Monday, 02 June 2014 09:26
By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24072-boko-haram-a-blessing-for-imperialism-in-africa-us-training-death-squads

"NATO's aggression against Libya begat the sub-Saharan chaos that justified the French and U.S. occupation of Mali and Niger."

Militarily, Africa is fast becoming an American continent. Barack Obama, who has been president for all but the first year of AFRICOM’s existence, has succeeded in integrating U.S. fighting units, bases, training regimens, equipment and financing into the military structures of all but a handful of African nations. The great pan-Africanist and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of a militarily united Africa has been all but realized – with Americans and Europeans in charge. Under the guise of “humanitarian” intervention, Obama has vastly expanded Bill Clinton and George Bush’s African footprints, so that only a few patches on the continental map lie outside Washington’s sphere of operations. Eritrea and Zimbabwe are the notable exceptions – and, therefore, future targets.

Africa is occupied territory. The African Union doesn’t even pretend to be in charge of its own nominal peace-keeping missions, which are little more than opportunities for African militaries to get paid for doing the West’s bidding. China and Brazil may be garnering the lion’s share of trade with Africa, but the men with the guns are loyal to AFRICOM – the sugar daddy to the continent’s military class. U.S. troops now sleep in African barracks, brothers in arms with African officers who can determine who will sleep next week in the presidential mansion.

The pace of U.S. penetration of West Africa has quickened dramatically since 2011, when Obama bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government out of existence, setting a flood of jihadists and weapons streaming east to Syria and south to destabilize the nations of the Sahel. Chaos ensued – beautiful chaos, if you are a U.S. military planner seeking justification for ever-larger missions. NATO’s aggression against Libya begat the sub-Saharan chaos that justified the French and U.S. occupation of Mali and Niger. Hyperactive North African jihadists, empowered by American bombs, weapons and money, trained and outfitted their brethren on the continent, including elements of Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The Hausa-speaking Islamic warriors then bequeathed AFRICOM a priceless gift: nearly 300 schoolgirls in need of rescuing, perfect fodder for “humanitarian” intervention.

Nobody had to ask twice that Obama “Do something!”

The heads of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon were summoned to Paris (pretending it was their idea) where they declared “total war” on Boko Haram, as “observers” from the U.S., France, Britain and the European Union (Africa’s past and future stakeholders) looked on. French President Francois Hollande said “a global and regional action plan” would come out of the conference.

“The heads of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon were summoned to Paris where they declared ‘total war’ on Boko Haram.”

Of course, the five African states have neither the money, training, equipment nor intelligence gathering capacity for such a plan. It will be a Euro-American plan for the defense and security of West Africa – against other Africans. Immediately, the U.S. sent 80 troops to Chad (whose military has long been a mercenary asset of France) to open up a new drone base, joining previously existing U.S. drone fields in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Seychelles Islands, Djibouti (home to a huge French and American base), and CIA sites that need not be disclosed.

The new West African security grouping became an instant imprint of NATO, an appendage to be shaped by imperial military planners to confront enemies chosen by Washington and Paris.

What a miracle of humanitarian military momentum! The girls had only been missing for a month, and might not be rescued alive, but five neighboring African countries – one of them the biggest economy on the continent – had already been dragooned into a NATO-dominated military alliance with other subordinate African states.

It soon turned out that AFRICOM already had a special relationship with the Nigerian military that was not announced until after the schoolgirls’ abduction. AFRICOM will train a battalion of Nigerian Rangers in counterinsurgency warfare, the first time that the Command has provided “full spectrum” training to Africans on such a scale.

With the American public in a “Save our girls” interventionist frame of mind, operations that were secret suddenly became public. The New York Times reveals that the U.S. has been running a secret program to train counterterrorism battalions for Niger and Mauritania. Elite Green Berets and Delta Force killers are instructing handpicked commandos in counterinsurgency in Mali, as well. The identity of one Times source leaves little doubt that the previously secret operations are designed to blanket the region with U.S. trained death squads. Michael Sheehan was until last year in charge of Special Operations at the Pentagon – Death Squads Central – where he pushed for more Special Ops trainers for African armies. Sheehan now holds the “distinguished chair” at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. In the 1980s, he was a Special Forces commander in Latin America – which can only mean death squads.

“AFRICOM will train a battalion of Nigerian Rangers in counterinsurgency warfare.”

U.S. Army Special Forces have always been political killers, most often operating with the CIA. The Phoenix Program, in Vietnam, which murdered between 26,000 and 41,000 people and tortured many more, was a CIA-Special Forces war crime. From 1975 to deep into the 80s, the CIA and its Special Forces muscle provided technical support and weapons to killers for Operation Condor, the death squads run by a consortium of military governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, believed responsible for 60,000 murders. Sheehan was probably involved in Operation Condor and its Central American component, Operation Charly, and has perfected the art of political murder, ever since. If he is happy and feeling vindicated by events in Africa, then U.S.-trained death squads are about to proliferate in that part of the world.

There is no question that Obama is enamored of Special Ops, since small unit murders by professional killers at midnight look less like war – and can, if convenient, be blamed on (other) “terrorists.” However, history – recent history – proves the U.S. can get away with almost limitless carnage in Africa. Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, backed by U.S. forces on land, air and sea, resulted in “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa” at the time, “worse than Darfur,” according to UN observers, with hundreds of thousands dead. The U.S. then withheld food aid to starve out Somali Shabaab fighters, leading to even more catastrophic loss of life. But, most Americans are oblivious to such crimes against Black humanity.

U.S. ally Ethiopia commits genocide against ethnic Somalis in its Ogaden region with absolute impunity, and bars the international media from the region. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama – each of them with help from Susan Rice – have collectively killed six million Congolese since 1996. The greatest genocide since World War Two was the premeditated result of the chaos deliberately imposed on mineral-rich Congo by the U.S. and its henchmen in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Paul Kagame, the current leader of Rwanda, shot down a plane with two presidents aboard in 1994, sparking the mass killings that brought Kagame to power and started neighboring Congo on the road to hell. America celebrates Kagame as a hero, although the Tutsi tribal dictator sends death squads all over the world to snuff out those who oppose him.

“The U.S. can get away with almost limitless carnage in Africa.”

Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, a friend of the U.S. since Ronald Reagan, committed genocidal acts against his rivals from the Acholi tribe, throwing them into concentration camps. Joseph Kony was one of these Acholis, who apparently went crazy. Kony hasn’t been a threat to Uganda or any other country in the region for years, but President Obama used a supposed sighting of remnants of his Lords Resistance Army to send 100 Green Berets to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. Just last month, Obama sent 150 more troops and four aircraft to central Africa, again claiming that Kony was lurking, somewhere.

Actually, the American troops were deployed near South Sudan, which the U.S, Britain and Israel had destabilized for decades in an effort to split it off from the larger nation of Sudan. South Sudan became independent, but it remained unstable – not a nation, but a place with oil that the U.S. coveted. Many tens of thousands more are certain to die in fighting in South Sudan, but few Americans will blame their own country.

As the carnage in Congo demonstrates, whole populations can be made to disappear in Africa without most people in the West noticing. The death squads the Americans are training in Nigeria, Niger, Mauretania and Mali, and those that will soon be stalking victims in Cameroon and Benin, will not be limited to hunting Boko Haram. Death squads are, by definition, destabilizing; they poison the political and social environment beyond repair, as Central Americans who lived through the 80s can attest.

Yet, that is U.S. imperialism’s preferred method of conquest in the non-white world. It’s what the Americans actually do, when folks demand that they “Do something.”

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

[-] 2 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Woman Gives Birth in Solitary Confinement as Jailers Ignore Cries for Help

Sunday, 01 June 2014 10:30
By Crystal Shepeard, Care2 | Report

http://truth-out.org/news/item/24062-woman-gives-birth-in-solitary-confinement-as-jailers-ignore-cries-for-help

Nicole Guerrero is one of the more than 200,000 women currently incarcerated due to minor drug offenses and property crimes. Like many of these women, Guerrero was pregnant when she was sent to jail. Delivering a baby in prison is traumatic and can include being handcuffed and shackled during labor and delivery.

Guerrero’s experience was downright horrific.

On June 2, 2012, Nicole Guerrero was arrested for drug possession by police in Wichita Falls, Texas. Nine days later, she was seen by an OB/GYN and informed that she was 34 weeks pregnant. After a checkup that consisted of measuring her stomach and listening to the baby’s heartbeat, she was told the baby was fine, given iron pills and a prescription to treat a vaginal infection.

What happened over twelve hours the following week has resulted in a lawsuit against Wichita County, the sheriff, a private prison healthcare firm, and a nurse with an expired license.

At 6:30 p.m. on June 11, 2012, Guerrero complained of lower back pain, cramps, and vaginal discharge which included blood. She was taken to the nurse’s station where the nurse checked the baby’s heartbeat, said everything was fine and gave Guerrero the prescribed medication. Guerrero was sent back to her cell. For the next nine hours, she suffered severe lower back pain and contractions. Screaming in agony, she requested help at 11:00 p.m. via the medical alert button. Her cries for help would be ignored for another four-and-a-half hours.

She was finally taken to the nurse’s station again at 3:30 am. She showed them the sanitary napkins that were now filled with blood. Nurse LaDonna Anderson told her it was just the medication “getting the infection out.” Guerrero was told she was not in labor, placed in “the cage,” a solitary cell that was dirty and had nothing but a mat, and told to take deep breaths. Detention officers continued to ignore her obvious labor, laughing at her distress.

At about 5:00 a.m., Guerrero’s water broke. As Nurse Anderson walked by on her way to check on the male inmates, Guerrero pleaded with her to help. Anderson said she would be right back. Guerrero was beginning to feel intense pressure. She removed her clothing and felt the baby’s head crowning. At that moment, a detention officer walked by and saw the baby’s head protruding out. Guerrero pushed immediately and delivered her daughter on the mat.

The detention officer held the baby, who was purple with the umbilical cord tied around her neck. At that moment, Nurse Anderson returned, removed the still attached umbilical cord from around the baby’s neck, and patted the unresponsive baby’s back for the next 20 minutes until the ambulance arrived. At no time did Anderson, whose nursing license had expired six month earlier, check the baby or administer any CPR.

When the EMTs arrived, they cut the umbilical cord and tried to revive the baby, and then took her to the hospital. Guerrero remained behind in the cell where she delivered the placenta. She was then transported to the same hospital.

Her daughter Myrah Arianna Guerrero was pronounced dead at 6:30 p.m.

Guerrero’s attorney detailed this harrowing account in a lawsuit filed in federal court last week. She is suing the county and the sheriff for unconstitutional confinement, a violation of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. She is also bringing a civil action against the private contractor, Correctional Healthcare Management, as well as the nurse, LaDonna Anderson, for breach of duty of care and medical malpractice. She also claims severe and likely permanent physical and psychological damage.

Guerrero is currently in jail serving sentences for drug charges and theft. She is due to be released in July, though no release date has been set.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

[-] 2 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Police Target Black Children

Sunday, 01 June 2014 10:50
By Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24063-police-target-black-children

Americans should take a long look in the mirror before criticizing other nations for human rights abuses. The law enforcement system in the United States ranks among the worst in the world in the cruel treatment meted out to its citizens. Even children in this country are not safe if they are black and unlucky enough to interact with the police. Of all the various ethnic and national groups in the United States, only black people have to worry that their child may be pushed through a glass window by officers of the law.

A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology demonstrated what black people have always known. Black children are dehumanized to such an extent that they aren’t perceived as children at all. They are assumed to be older, less innocent and inherently guilty of some wrong doing. Study co-author Matthew Jackson said, “With the average age overestimation for black boys exceeding four-and-a-half years, in some cases, black children may be viewed as adults when they are just 13 years old.” Two recent cases involving the New York City police department show the truth of these words and the perils black people face even in childhood.

Black girls are also at risk of police brutality, as a 15 year-old and a 16 year-old discovered in Brooklyn, New York on March 27, 2014. An altercation between police and a group of teens resulted in one of the unidentified girls being thrown to the ground and another being pushed through a window. There is video evidence of one of the girls with a very deep cut on her face. According to witnesses, the police were not content to push her through the glass and arrest her. They also delayed in providing her with needed medical attention.

In the Bronx, New York on May 17, 2014, a 14 year-old boy was also pushed through a window by police and came close to death. As first reported by the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Javier Payne was already under arrest and handcuffed when a police officer shoved him through a store window too. The police added insult to his injuries when they did not notify EMS of a pediatric emergency, instead calling in the case as if Payne were a drunken derelict. When paramedics finally arrived on the scene they pleaded for Payne to be uncuffed so that they might provide appropriate treatment.

Payne’s troubles didn’t end at the hospital where he was still under arrest. As previously reported in Black Agenda Report, the NYPD shackles prisoners to hospital beds and restricts family visits. Javier Payne’s status as a minor afforded him no consideration from this rule, and his mother was told that she could only see her 14 year-old son if she first received permission from the local precinct. These cases show in stark relief the indignities and the dangers every black American faces, regardless of age or gender.

It is easy to express outrage over individual cases but harder to sustain demands for change. Javier Payne’s case came to the attention of Rev. Al Sharpton, who invited the still recovering teenager to attend a press conference. The case certainly begs for media attention and legal action against the officer and the NYPD but Sharpton’s chicanery and role as “King Rat” should not be forgotten at such a critical juncture. Nor should he be allowed to use Payne’s case to get back into the good graces of a concerned community now that his services are no longer wanted at the lame duck White House.

Police in New York City are certainly not alone in their barbaric treatment of minors. All across the country black children as young as kindergarteners have been hand cuffed and arrested as if they are adults. Adults are killed for little or no reason and the police are rarely held to account. If there were true justice in the world a foreign power would declare a responsibility to protect black people from their government and demand that America’s leaders be tried before the international criminal court.

When politicians and pundits declare that country x is rife with human rights abuses we must first ask how that country compares to our own. No other is as big a jailer and no other allows the cruelty which is accepted here. Does Vladimir Putin preside over police departments that push teenagers through glass windows? Every year more than 1,000 Americans are shot by the police. Is the same statistic true in Russia? If that were so, the media would be sure to tell us all about it.

America leads the world in human rights abuses and that is because of racism. Two New York City teenagers faced this issue first hand, but they aren’t alone. There are so many like them, trying to live as children in a country which denies them that right.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

[-] 3 points by LeoYo (5909) 9 years ago

Our Militarized Police Tossed a Stun Grenade at a Baby

Monday, 02 June 2014 15:41
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24095-our-militarized-police-tossed-a-stun-grenade-at-a-baby

Right now, a 1-year-old toddler with severe burns is clinging to life in a Georgia hospital, after a SWAT team barged into the house where he and his family were staying, and mistakenly threw a flash-bang grenade into his crib.

This past Wednesday, members of the Cornelia, Georgia police department's SWAT team entered the house where the toddler and his family were staying, searching for an alleged drug dealer who they say was living in the home as well, and who was armed and dangerous.

Because the suspected drug dealer had previous weapons charges, the SWAT team members had a no-knock warrant, which meant they could enter the house without warning, and without checking to see if there were children inside the home.

Now, a little boy is struggling to survive.

Unfortunately, incidents like this are becoming all too common in America today.

That's because America's police forces have become like occupied armies, hyper-militarized for the benefit of our nation's military industrial complex.

All across our country, local cops are kicking in doors, SWAT teams are carrying weapons of war, and warrants are becoming things of the past.

Fortunately, there's a way to change all of this, restore sanity to local policing, and to put weapons of war back where they belong.

Back in 1994, the Clinton administration created something called the COPS program.

The federal Community Oriented Policing Services program provides resources for local police forces across America, intended to help those forces become more involved in their communities.

The goal of the program is to create more police officers like Madison, Wisconsin police officer Katie Adler.

Unlike regular patrol cops, Adler spends much of her time in crime-ridden at-risk neighborhoods, getting to know the people she serves, and building lasting relationships along the way. She is the perfect example of community policing.

Meanwhile, European countries have been relying on community policing for years.

Take Sweden for example.

Back in 1972, the Swedish government created a national center for research, development and coordination of policing, with the goal of fighting and reducing crime at its social and community levels.

And in 1992, local policing committees began popping up across Sweden. These committees, in 200+ communities across Sweden, work hand-in-hand with local police forces, community leaders, schools and other groups to improve living conditions and to reduce crime.

Unfortunately, funding for community policing back here in America has seen a steady decline since the COPS program was first introduced.

In 2010, $792 million was allotted in the form of federal grants under the COPS program for local police forces across the country; By 2012, that number had shrunken to just $199 million.

Now, there are fewer and fewer Officer Katie's, and more and more hyper-militarized local police forces, that are breaking down doors first, and asking questions later.

Rather than being viewed as community members, America's police forces are being increasingly viewed as occupying armies, and that needs to change.

Community policing needs to be a priority in our country once again. But the changes shouldn't stop there.

We also need to put weapons of war back in the hands of real military forces, like the National Guard, and pay our cops better while holding them to higher standards.

Only then can we make sure no more1-year-old toddlers are hanging on to life by a thread because a flash-bang grenade went off in their cribs.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

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