Of The
Bullies, By The Bullies, and For The Bullies
by Rev. Paul
J. Bern
(excerpt
from chapter 5 of his book, "Occupying
America: We Shall Overcome")
Perhaps the
most ominous sign regarding the true nature of economic
discrimination and class warfare against the middle class and the
poor, which invariably includes people of color, is that of bullying,
intimidation and similar forms of abuse directed at employees in the
workplace. Although I'm certain that everybody who reads this can
think of an example of having a really bad boss, the following
alarming example of abusive management in the third world is the best
(or worst) example I have found. The question is, could this “method”
of management be coming to America's shores next? Worse yet, is it
already here?
More
than a decade ago, shoe giant Nike came under fire for its use of
sweatshop labor in the production of its products. Most of the
criticism focused on its Indonesian workforce, where workers, largely
young women, were forced to labor under harsh conditions and abusive
supervisors. In 1997, filmmaker Michael Moore made Nike abuses a
subject of his film "The
Big One",
and met with
Nike CEO Phil Knight. Knight explained that the reason his company
was using low-wage labor in Indonesia is allegedly because "Americans
don't want
to make shoes".
At
the Taiwanese-operated Pou Chen Group factory in Sukabumi, Indonesia,
which makes Converse shoes for Nike, and PT Amara Footwear factory in
Jakarta, workers alleged that they are paid ultra-low wages,
regularly verbally and physically abused, and even fired for the act
of taking sick leave. The 10,000 mostly female workers at the
Taiwanese-operated Pou Chen plant make around 50 cents an hour.
That’s enough, for food and bunkhouse-type lodging, but little
else. Some workers interviewed by the AP in March and April described
being hit or scratched in the arm — one man until he bled.
An
internal Nike report released to the AP found that 'nearly two-thirds
of 168 factories making Converse products worldwide fail to meet
Nike's
own standards for contract manufacturers. Meanwhile, in 2010, Nike
CEO Mark Parker received an 84 percent hike in his annual
compensation, raking in $13.1 million, an amount many of the workers
in Sukabumi and Jakarta can only dream of.
If the top
1% has their way, these kinds of workplace abuses and sweatshop
conditions will be making their way to your workplace. Here in
Georgia where I live (plus several other states, mostly in the
Southeastern US) we have what are called “right to work” laws.
Basically what it means is that anyone can be terminated for any
reason, or sometimes for no reason at all. So no matter where you
work, there is always this cloud of uncertainty hanging overhead,
knowing that you can get canned without warning, even if you are
doing everything right. Imagine what Jesus would say about this if He
came back today! Would he be pleased? Absolutely not! So I would say
that being forced to work in what amounts to a hostile work
environment is just one more reason for us all to rise up against the
top 1% and take back all that they have stolen from us. Our dignity,
our human rights and our governmental, economic and political systems
will be taken and confiscated from the rich no matter how long it
takes.
The fact of
the matter is that this type of brute-force management has lately
spread from much of America's professional life over into our
personal lives, with the most obvious examples being the
militarization of our police departments combined with the lost cause
known as the “war on drugs”. In so doing, those who used to be
sworn to protect and to serve have become those who harass and
intimidate. They have become the lackeys of the top 1%, with some in
law enforcement chomping at the bit for an opportunity to lock up a
few people and bloody a few heads, if not worse. However, I also
believe that there is no small number in the law enforcement
community who realize that they are actually part of the 99%. When
they do, and especially when they realize that they are just pawns
for the 1%, they will join us in droves, coming over to our side
having realized that they were only being contemptuously used to
guard what the 1% has hoarded at the expense of all the rest of us,
including themselves.
The
police arms race has very clearly spread well beyond the urban
borders of the only cities to actually be targeted by foreign
terrorists. Now, police officers routinely walk the beat armed with
assault rifles and garbed in black full-battle uniforms. The extent
of this weapon “inflation” does not stop with high-powered
rifles, either. In recent years, police departments both large and
small have acquired bazookas, machine guns, and even armored vehicles
and tanks for use in domestic police work.
The
most serious consequence of the rapid militarization of American
police forces, however, is the subtle evolution in the mentality of
the "men
in blue" from
peace officer to soldier. This development is absolutely critical and
represents a fundamental change in the nature of law enforcement. The
primary mission of a police officer traditionally has been to keep
the peace. Those whom an officer suspects to have committed a crime
are treated
as
just that -- suspects.
Police officers are expected, under the rule of law, to protect the
civil liberties of all citizens, even the bad guys. For domestic law
enforcement, a suspect in custody remains innocent until proven
guilty. Moreover, police officers operate among a largely friendly
population and have traditionally been trained to solve problems
using a complex legal system; the deployment of lethal violence is an
absolute last resort.
Soldiers,
on the other hand, are trained to identify and kill the enemy. This
is a problem. Cops are increasingly seeing the citizens they’re
hired to protect as “the enemy.” This is in part how nonviolent
protesters end up tear-gassed and shot at. This is part of why
violence is so often the first resort of cops dealing with any sort
of tricky situation, rather than the last. The idea that we need our
cops to be the heavily armed soldiers of the streets
— instead
of, say, social workers and peacekeepers with the power to arrest —
leads to bad recruiting, bad training, unnecessary deaths, mass
distrust of the police by vulnerable communities, and the
contemptuous feeling of many cops that they themselves are above the
law.
The trend
toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before
9/11. It actually began in the early 1980s, as the Reagan
administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard
Nixon's declaration of a "war on drugs." Reagan declared
illicit drugs a threat to national security. In 1981 he and a
compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law
Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give
local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research,
and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police
officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the
military to share drug-war-related information with civilian police
and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing
drugs from entering the country.
A
bill passed in 1988 authorized the National Guard to aid local police
in drug interdiction, a law that resulted in National Guard troops
conducting drug raids on city streets and using helicopters to survey
rural areas for pot farms. In 1989, President George H. Bush enacted
a new policy creating regional task forces within the Pentagon to
work with local police agencies on anti-drug efforts. Since then, a
number of other bills and policies have carved out more ways for the
military and domestic police to cooperate in the government's ongoing
campaign to prevent Americans from getting high. Then-Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney declared in 1989, "The
detection and countering of the production, trafficking and use of
illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission of the
Department of Defense." The problem with
this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that
the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military's
job is to annihilate a foreign enemy, while cops are charged with
keeping the peace and with protecting the constitutional rights of
American citizens and residents. It's dangerous to conflate the two.
That distinction is why the U.S. Congress passed the Posse Comitatus
Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of
military troops in domestic policing.
The
September 11 attacks provided a new and seemingly urgent
justification for further militarization of America's police
departments: the need to protect the country from terrorism. Within
months of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, the
Office of National Drug Control Policy began laying the groundwork
with a series of ads tying recreational drug use to support for
terrorism. Terrorism became the new reason to arm American cops as if
they were soldiers, but drug offenders would still be their primary
targets. In a particularly egregious example comparable to going duck
hunting with a bazooka, the seven police officers who serve the town
of Jasper, Florida -- which has all of 2,000 people and hadn’t had
a murder in more than a decade -- were each given a military-grade
M-16 machine gun from the Pentagon transfer program, leading one
Florida paper to run the headline, “Three Stoplights, Seven M-16s.”
In 2006
alone, the Department of Defense distributed vehicles worth $15.4
million, aircraft worth $8.9 million, boats worth $6.7 million,
weapons worth $1 million and “other” items worth $110.6 million
to local police agencies. After 9/11, police departments in some
cities, including Washington, D.C., also switched to battle dress
uniforms (BDUs) instead the traditional police uniform. Critics say
even subtle changes like a more militarized uniform can change both
public perception of the police and how police see their own role in
the community. One such critic, retired police sergeant Bill Donelly,
wrote in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, "One
tends to throw caution to the wind when wearing ‘commando-chic’
regalia, a bulletproof vest with the word ‘POLICE’ emblazoned on
both sides, and when one is armed with high tech weaponry."
Departments in places like Indianapolis and some Chicago suburbs also
began acquiring machine guns from the military in the name of
fighting terror.
The
September 11 attacks enabled a new source of funding for
military-grade equipment in the Department of Homeland Security. In
recent years, the agency has given anti-terrorism grants to police
agencies across the country. The DHS grants are typically used to
purchase items such as the Lenco Bearcat, a modified armored
personnel carrier that sells for $200,000 to $300,000. The vehicle
has become something of a status symbol in some police departments,
who often put out press releases with photos of the purchase, along
with posing police officers clad in camouflage or battle dress
uniforms. The post-September 11 era has also seen the role of SWAT
teams and paramilitary police units expand to enforce nonviolent
crimes beyond even the drug war. The total number of SWAT deployments
per year in the U.S. may now top 60,000, or more than 160 per day.
SWAT teams have been used to break up neighborhood poker games, sent
into bars and fraternities suspected of allowing underage drinking,
and even to enforce alcohol and occupational licensing regulations.
Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting
innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are
fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.
Never mind the collateral damage! Earlier this year, the Department
of Education even sent its SWAT team to the home of someone suspected
of defrauding the federal student loan program. In so doing, the
inability to repay one's student loan has now become criminalized.
This is why we are occupying and will continue to occupy America.
Being poor and broke is not a crime. We the American people will not
stand idly by while poverty becomes criminalized. Enough is enough!
Class
warfare has been declared upon us all by the top 1%, and the main
assault against the remainder of us has already commenced. Starting
with the Occupy Movement in September 2011, and the 'We Are the 99%'
Movement at about the same time, the counterattack by the 99% against
the elitist 1% has begun in earnest. In so doing, although a second
American Civil War has been started by the wealthy elitists, it is we
the people – the 99% – who comprise the overwhelming majority of
America, and it is we who will finish it. In fact, this counterattack
has already begun, it's just that it wasn't that apparent at first.
It wasn't supposed to be. In the next chapter I will shed as much
light as I can on how this is occurring, and highlight a few methods
about how this can be accomplished in as peaceful a manner as
possible.
