Week of 12/08/2014

Kangaroo Court Injustice
– by David Matthews 2

There is nothing more infuriating to this commentator than to see injustice prevail.

Remember the end of the original “Robocop” movie? (Spoiler alert if you never saw it.)  Our cybernetic hero won.  He defeated all of the bad guys that originally killed him.  He destroyed the “prototype” police unit that was sent to stop him.  And then he burst into the boardroom of the big corporation, confronted the corporate executive that ordered it all, and not only convinced the CEO to fire him, but then was able to kill the “Big Bad Boss” to save the day.  Justice prevailed.

Then they did “Robocop 2”.  And how did that end?  Well, the cybernetic hero was able to somehow end a police strike, shut down a drug cartel, and eventually take down both the “successor” police unit that was supposed to replace him and the psychopath leader that tried to kill him.  But now the “Big Bad Boss” responsible for it all doesn’t get their just desert.  Because now the “Big Bad Boss” isn’t just a power-mad executive… now it’s a whole board of executives.  And they all get to ride off into the sunset in their stretch limousine.  Justice did not prevail in that instance.  But we were told to simply accept that.

This is why the sequel left this viewer with a bitter feeling; because justice was not served by the end of the movie.  The real perpetrators of the misery were free to keep committing crimes against civilization.

Fast-forward to today.

America is still reeling from two decisions made just a few weeks apart that prove there is no justice in this country.

The first was in Fergusson, when a grand jury refused to indict a white police officer for killing an unarmed black man in the middle of the street.  The initial news of the killing caused riots and nationwide protests and exposed the scary reality that the idea of the “Jackbooted Thug” is no longer just a metaphor, but a real one driving military vehicles courtesy of the Pentagon. 

The grand jury’s “no true bill” decision sparked even more riots and protests across the nation, and what surprised me was that the power in power gave a half-assed thought about this kind of reaction.  Seriously, people-in-power, did you actually expect the African-American community to simply accept the decision like the good little peons you treat us all as?

And, really, we all should have known this specific decision was coming, because the longer the grand jury process dragged on, the more likely they were trying to make the whole thing go away.  Justice delayed is justice denied.  Then came the “rumors” prior to that decision being made that the officer in question was going to be retired.  That’s another sign.  And then the coup-de-gras that he had just gotten married just within days of the decision should have been a screaming red flag that he was going to get away with his actions.

Then came the script.  The newspaper editorials regurgitated the script that declared the officer being “vindicated” and “cleared” when that was not the case at all.  That’s not even how the grand jury system works!  But the truth is irrelevant.  Facts are immaterial.  It’s the god-dammed almighty Orwellian script that matters, doesn’t it?  All hail the almighty government and the status quo it protects.  Bow down and give praise.

I have my doubts about some of the events as the officer in question described them.  The idea of a big guy somehow making his way through the window of a patrol vehicle to wrestle for an officer’s gun located on the far side of the officer’s body – assuming it was holstered at the time – is logistically questionable.  And I know this because I’m a big guy and I’ve owned and driven a police vehicle (albeit a “retired” one).

But then comes the second decision, this time challenging even common sense.

A New York City grand jury refused to bring charges against a white police officer for killing an unarmed black male.  But this time it wasn’t by a gun.  This time he was strangled by the officer, who came up behind him and put him in an apparent chokehold.  This is a move that the NYPD supposedly outlawed their officers using back in 1993!

What made this particular decision even more disgusting was that this killing was done on video!  There was actual video footage from start to finish of the officer putting the chokehold on the unarmed large male, forcing him to the ground, and keeping the chokehold on him even when he was trying to get out that he could not breathe.

This is evidence that you’re not supposed to be able to beat!  No amount of fiction is supposed to trump video.

And yet somehow the grand jury was able to ignore what they saw and allowed the officer to get away with murder.  Not only that, but they turned around and indicted the man who videotaped the whole thing!  Talk about shooting the messenger!  This is the kind of retaliation you would expect from third world warlord, not from one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world!

Now it would be painfully easy to say that this was simply a matter of race.  Both instances involved white officers and black victims.  But I suspect there’s more than just race behind these gross abuses of power and a systemic refusal to bring justice.

Remember the case I mentioned during the whole Ferguson fiasco of the Habersham County Deputies that lobbed a flash-bang grenade into a baby crib and severely scarred and burned the 19-month-old boy inside?  This past October, that county’s grand jury also refused to bring one single criminal charge against the officers involved.  They recklessly lobbed an explosive device into a baby crib, permanently scarred an infant, and saddled the parents with millions of dollars of medical costs, and not one single person will be held to account for it!

Let’s get brutally honest here… what we are facing is not a matter of race.  It is a matter of local governments operating like third world juntas – complete with taxpayer-funded military vehicles and military weapons – and using the grand jury system like a reverse Kangaroo Court to whitewash the criminal activities committed by their own.

The grand jury is not some alternative court system.  It is a tool of the prosecutor.  In other words, it is a tool of the government.  It is supposed to be used to gauge how strong the prosecutor’s case would be, and to give the pretense that whatever case the prosecutor makes is not “personal”.  But it is the prosecutor’s show from start to finish.  They decide what evidence the grand jury gets to consider.  They set the parameters for the grand jury.  And in over 99% of the time, the prosecutor gets the indictment that they want.  It is the reason why there is the old saying that a grand jury could indict a ham sandwich.

So to have three separate grand juries from three different parts of the country issue “no true bills” involving gross abuses of government power that left people dead or maimed should be a statistical impossibility… unless they were designed to further aid and abet the criminal actions.

Failure to indict is not the same as an acquittal in an actual court of law.  It is not a vindication.  It is a sign of incompetence by the prosecutor.  If they can’t get what they want in a rigged procedure designed to rubber-stamp their intentions, then it is because they did not want it in the first place.

Damned be the editors and talking heads that further try to aid and abet these criminal agents of the government that pretend to “educate” the masses that are already angry by these decisions.  Damned be the overpaid personalities that scream bloody murder when professional athletes show silent and peaceful support for those protesting the aiding and abetting of these criminal acts.  Not only do they all fail American civics, they fail American history!  America itself would not have existed if not for people standing up against the gross abuses of government.

Even worse is that people expect the federal government to somehow step up and do what the local governments refused to do.  This is the same federal government and the same prosecutors that aided and abetted the biggest criminals in this country, the “Too Big to Fail” banks!  Do you honestly expect Attorney General Eric Holder, who brokered sweetheart deals for banking criminals, to suddenly channel the ghost of Robert Kennedy?  Keep dreaming.

No, justice was not served in Fergusson or in New York City or in Habersham County.  Injustice rules the day.  And injustice will continue to rule the day as long as those in power refuse to do the right thing and are not held to account for their actions.  Be mad about that!  Be angry!  But more importantly, use that rage to hold those accountable, because it is clear that the system will refuse to on its own.

Week of 12/01/2014

Has The Bloom Finally Fallen Off The Black Friday Rose?
– by David Matthews 2

I had a rather strange experience this weekend; one that I know other people experienced as well.

This past weekend was the dreaded Thanksgiving Weekend.  The weekend of “Black Friday”, where people mob the local stores for Holiday sales, and the stores are all-too-eager to take their money.

A time of chaos and cacophony.  A time when parking spaces are at a premium and thieves are everywhere.  A time when you don’t want to be there unless you really have to, and then you have to get out of there as fast as you can.

That’s the way it’s always been, right?  That all comes with the “magic” of Black Friday, where the almighty dollar rules with an iron fist and the almighty ever-precious business world can make their money for the year.

But… a funny thing happened this year.

I had to go to the local Super-Wal-Mart for groceries.  I had a simple plan of attack.  Go in, get a space as close to the store as possible, get just what we needed to get, and then get out of there quickly as possible.

But when I showed up, I was able to get a regular parking spot very close to the entranceway.  I was able to get a cart.  My mom was able to get a powered scooter.  And we walked in to find it… quiet!

No, really, it was quiet!

There was no cacophony.  No screaming children.  No crying children.  No temper tantrums.  No whiny ads for birth control with their incessant mantra of “I want a toy!”  No sleigh bells.  Everything was… quiet.

I had to check my watch.  Yes, it was still the middle of the afternoon on the day after “Black Friday”.

Oh, there were plenty of deals in the isles.   Overstocked Blu-Ray movies at severely discounted rates.  Seasonal items for sale.  Food, and plenty of it.  The shelves were stocked.  The checkout isles were open.

What was missing were the overflowing throngs of people.

I talk to some other folks and find that this wasn’t just a fluke.  That the store had plenty of parking spaces on Black Friday as well.  And it wasn’t just this store.  Other stores also had lackluster attendance.

Now, folks, I realize that this is far from scientific.  This is just my observation and the random observations of others that I’ve picked up.  And I would suspect that any “official” numbers would “magically” tell a different story.  But I have to wonder….

Has it finally happened?  Has the bloom finally fallen off the financial rose we call “Black Friday”?

I’m not saying that people aren’t showing up on Thanksgiving night like the idiots they are, waiting for those infamous and sometimes literal “door-buster sales”.  They are.  Oh, they are. 

But let’s get brutally honest here… I suspect, and I dare hope, that the rest of us are slowly wising up and defying the almighty script that says that we have to rush to the store and spend like maniacs after we’ve stuffed ourselves with turkey and… well, stuffing.  That we “have” to go into debt to buy as much stuff as we can for the almighty ever-commercialized Christmas so Big Corporate and the ever-precious “small businesses” can make their money for the year.  That is, after all, how the term “Black Friday” came about in the first place.  It’s the time when businesses supposedly go from being in red-letter debt to black-letter profit.

If what I suspect and hope is true, then there are several reasons why this is happening.  I really don’t think that it’s just a matter of us simply “wising up”.  That would require a level of comprehension that we haven’t displayed anyplace else that would really matter.  Like, you know, at the ballot box.  Or even when it comes to our cellphones.

I strongly suspect the first reason would be the creep of the start of “Black Friday” into being “Black Thursday”.  I remember back when the start of the holiday sales would be the normal start of the business day.  Then it became 6am.  Then 4am, 2am, and then midnight.  Then it crossed over into Thanksgiving evening, and now even Thanksgiving Day!

Yes, a lot of people are seriously questioning the “logic” of the decision to bleed the cult of commercialism into Thanksgiving itself.  But… not too loudly, right?  After all, the almighty script demands compliance, even if it’s under protest.  But even without debate, just forcing people to show up on Thursday for some stores means that they pretty much blow their financial wad then and not on the other days.

And, by the way, it should be noted that the almighty script has counter-attacked on the debate by accusing critics of “Black Friday” and “Black Thursday” of engaging in “classism”.  No joke.  To borrow from Inigo Montoya: “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Here’s another possible reason why “Black Friday” has gotten lighter… because the so-called “big deals” are really no big deals at all.

I was in that aforementioned Super-Wal-Mart the week previously and I noticed that they were selling Sony’s PlayStation 4 game system for $399.  Then a few days later, I open up their “Super-Deluxe Oversized Three-Tiered Black Friday Sales Spectacular Extravaganza” and saw that they had the PS4 system for the “low-low-insanely-low sale” of… $399.  A difference of absolutely nothing!  Nothing!  And this was just the game system itself!  Nothing else bundled in.

Speaking of… the reason why I was in that Super-Wal-Mart that week was because I was purchasing a laptop bundle that I saw in the store for $298.  It was the best deal that I had ever come across for a laptop, and I could not match it anywhere else either online or in another store.  There was no fanfare for that deal either.  They simply had it on the shelf with all of the other laptops for sale.  I bought it, took it home, and even cobbled this article together using it.

So, just out of laughs, I checked in online to see if that same bundled deal was any sweeter for Black Friday.  Not only was it not any sweeter, they didn’t even have it available anymore.  Good thing I decided to not wait for Thanksgiving, huh?  And that was just one practical example.

Yes, Big Corporate is playing con-games on the great unwashed, offering so-called “sales” that really aren’t and expecting us to simply lap them up and pat ourselves on the back for our supposed “hunter-gathering” skills.

The Internet is another big factor.  Not only do we have “Black Thursday” to go along with “Black Friday”, but we also have “Cyber Monday”, where people supposedly get great sales online.  It’s really not a new concept.  It’s been around for over a decade now.  But unlike the brick-and-mortar stores, the online shopper isn’t pressured to leap at any old sale.  They can (and do) shop around before hitting that “Cashier” button.  And the more stupidity we see on TV about “Black Friday” and now “Black Thursday”, the more reason we have to enjoy the weekend and wait until Monday when we can shop in our sweats instead of sweating it out in a mob.

And then there’s the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.  And, no, I don’t mean the fascistic GOP. 

I’m talking about the economy.

No, the economy is still not doing too well.  Historically-speaking, it took America over a decade and one world war to get us out of the Great Depression, and that was with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.  We’re still struggling to get out of the Great Recession of just a few years ago, and that is with Barack Obama’s Raw Deal shoved down our gullets.  He and his Washington Elite friends gave the 1% the gold and the 99% got the shaft. 

We can tell ourselves that things are getting better over and over again, and we can have the goddamned script tell us that things are getting better over and over again, but that doesn’t mean that things really are getting better.  We’re just having to make do with less and less and lying to ourselves about it.  And that doesn’t bode well for the almighty world of corporate consumerism, which still demands more and more with little in return, especially at this time of the year.

And in case you have any doubts about that, all you have to do is look at the recent plummeting price of oil to see that concern whispered about in the not-so-hallowed halls of Wall Street.  We can only lie to ourselves for so long.

All of these things do not bode well for the almighty Big Business, but that is actually a good thing.  If they can’t count on our mindless consumerism at this time of the year for them to make their money, then they will have to resort to the honest approach.  To treat us as an essential part of the financial equation instead of the one that they take for granted.  That means better prices, better quality, better deals, and fewer games and scams.

Or at least one could wish for it to happen like that.  This is, after all, the Holiday Season; a time of wishes and dreams and people who sometimes try to make those things come true.