Chinese paramilitaries practicing Segway-based crowd control techniques.
Policing
Are They There Yet?
It’s a canard of the liberal left in the USA that the country is on the verge of fascism, but it’s been 8 years now and an observer might reasonably ask, “When do they stop teetering on the verge and tip right over the cliff?”
When this sort of thing is starting to become such an everyday occurrence it’s not even notable any more, I’d suggest:
Police Raid Berwyn Heights Mayor’s Home, Kill His 2 Dogs
By Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page B01A police SWAT team raided the home of the mayor in the Prince George’s County town of Berwyn Heights on Tuesday, shooting and killing his two dogs, after he brought in a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered to his doorstep, police said.
Yes. Delivered by undercover cops.
Mayor Cheye Calvo was not arrested in the raid, which was carried out about 7 p.m. by the Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and county police narcotics officers. Prince George’s police spokesman Henry Tippett said yesterday that all the residents of the house — Calvo, his wife and his mother-in-law — are “persons of interest” in the case.
The package was addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, said law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Tippett said police are working to determine for whom the drugs were meant.
Calvo said yesterday that he did not know how the drugs wound up on his doorstep. He works part time as the mayor and serves as director of expansion for the SEED Foundation, a well-known national nonprofit group that runs urban public boarding schools.
“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo said. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”
Calvo described a chaotic scene, in which he — wearing only underwear and socks — and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours. They were surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood, Calvo said.
Here’s some more backstory on the shootings and much more here on the corruption and brutality of Maryland cops. They don’t have a great record.
The dogs were pets, labradors to be precise, hardly the most agressive of animals, and they were running away from paramilitaries invading their space. They weren’t shot because they were a threat, but purely to terrify and intimidate the mayor and his family.
These are classic School of The Americas terror tactics and exactly the kind of thing that was done in Chile, Argentina or any number of Central American puppet states to intimidate and harass elected officials who might threaten the military or police with accountability for their political and financial misdeeds.
Prince George’s County has a reputation for brutal, dirty cops but it’s hardly alone in that. It appears that America’s police and security forces have been turned into a unaccountable collection of virtually private paramilitaries, weapons to be used by the corrupt rich against the very people that are paying for that corruption.
When heavily armed police trained to be amoral, murderous thugs are then given free rein to profit from bribery and the ludicrous ‘war on drugs’, how then can anyone we be surprised when they use those same weapons to stop anything and anyone that might cut into those profits? It’s not as though anyone in government gives a damn that the US is way over that fascist cliff and accelerating. In the dying days of the GOP it’s everybody for themselves and the devil take the hindmost. If I was an as yet uncorrupted local politician I’d be buying myself a shotgun or two. Or several.
This Is How They Do It
There’s more than one way of suppressing dissent… Spyblog, on the evisceration by spin of the Home Affairs Select Committee report on the surveillance society:
What actual use to the public, are Select Committees of the House of Commons, and the Reports which they publish ?
The Labour Government invariably cherry picks a quotation from the summary of such a Report, especially if it was written by a Labour Chairman of the Committee e.g. Government Response to the Home Affairs Committee: A Surveillance Society? (.pdf) leaped on the phrase ,
We reject crude characterisations of our society as a surveillance society in which all collection and means of collecting information about citizens are networked and centralised in the service of the state.
This allowed the Government to claim:
The Government welcomes the committee’s rejection of the characterisation that we live in a surveillance society where the state is engaged in a centralised network of collecting and analysing information on the individual.
Anyone actually reading though the detail of the Report, will see that it actually supports the premise that the UK is already a Surveillance Society.
Boris The Giant-Killer
Boris Johnson as Nemesis? It could happen. Anxious emails are even now winging their way round London discussing the hows, wheres and who bys of the firing of this blog’s all-time favourite plod, London Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Ian Blair.
All I can say is about bloody time, whoever it is that finally wields the axe.
You’d think there’d’ve been enough to cost Blair his job already; there’s the sickening cheerleading for Tony Blair and the War On Terror, to begin with, and the pushing of authoritarian and antidemocratic laws and turning London into a miniature police state which contradictory though it seems is almost completely lawless in some areas and for some people.
Then there’s the blatant political manoeuvreings. Then there’s the two undetected bombings and then, then there’s the extrajudicial murder of the innocent electrician Jean De Menesez – though the officers responsible were promoted. Now there’s the accusations of out and out racism by one of his own closest senior officers.
So far Sir Ian has walked away from every accusation of wrongdoing. He may have been besmirched but all his powers and privileges remain intact. He remains a member in good standing of the great, good and constitutionally corrupt and retains the support of the media.
But it’s always the little things that catch you out, and an accusation of dishonest financial dealings might prove Blair’s final downfall:
The Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair will face questioning this week after it emerged a company owned by a close friend and skiing partner was awarded multi-million-pound police contracts.
The company, Impact Plus, first secured lucrative police technology contracts in 2002 when it was owned by Andy Miller, whose friendship with Sir Ian stretches back over the past 30 years.
A Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) spokesman said: “The MPA internal audit is aware of concerns about single tenders concerning Impact Plus and Hitachi Consulting and is currently researching the matter.” While he is not under investigation, Sir Ian is likely to face questions over the contracts when he next appears before the MPA.
The contracts at the centre of the conflict of interest claims ran between 2002 and 2008 and were worth more than £3m in total. Sir Ian, deputy commissioner in 2002, chaired the panel which handed Impact Plus an initial £150,000 consultancy contract.
Sir Ian has denied any wrongdoing in relation to the contracts and yesterday released a letter written in November 2002 to the Treasurer of the MPA stating that Impact Plus was owned and run by a friend of his. He said: “I was open and straightforward in informing both the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] and MPA about my friendship with Andy Miller prior to any contract being awarded. I strongly reject any suggestion that I have behaved inappropriately in any way and consider I have acted with absolute probity in these matters. I also wish to make it clear that former Impact Plus employee Martin Samphire, who now works for Hitachi, is not a personal friend of mine.”
No wonder the two Blairs, Ian and Tony, got on so well. They have exactly the same public service ethos. In fact Sir Ian is so closely tied into New Labour’s 11 years of corruption incompetence and callous authoritarianism as to be inextricable from it. Let them all go down together, even if it is to the Tories, (who’ll be as bad if not worse) if only for the pleasure of watching them fall.
My only complaint about Sir Ian’s potential departure is that he’ll probably go straight to a nice, comfy, fat index-linked pension. Not sure I call that nemesis at all.
Comment Of The Day
Comes from the Guardian, to Polly Toynbee’s column on New Labour’s welfare reforms:
stillthinking
Jul 22 08, 10:18am (about 2 hours ago)
My brother (now 45) has chronic schizophrenia (inherited not drug induced). He is best cared for in the stress free environment of the family home. His interpersonal skills and levels of paranoia means he is best away from groups of people and their demands such as at work. He looks odd, is utterly naive and vulnerable and his personal grooming isn’t great. He would not last 5 minutes. Any changes to his routine trigger severe migraine and violent sickness. There is also the damping effect and other side effects of his miscellaneous necessary medication. He is tired, dopey and grumpy. When the doctors try messing with his medication to achieve a lighter touch he spirals downwards again.
I think there is more though because he also seems to be a little limited in intelligence (he was in several remedial classes as a child) and EEG for his headaches which he even had back then. My mother reports being told that it showed ‘a shadow on his brain’ though nothing more was ever said about this. He writes like a child. It pains me to say all this of my own brother.
I have watched him twice descend into complete psychosis and at other times hover on the edges. Seeing him forcibly hospitalised was a horrific experience. This is distressing in the extreme for him and for our family. I cried simply writing this at the prospect of him being put through this process of re-assessment which will unleash the terrors on him and potentially push him into another massive psychotic breakdown. So to those commentators advocating these measures go on get all muscular and tough about these so-called fraudulent long-term Incapacity Benefit claimants for this is the impact you will have on our family. Hope they will all be happy.
When interviewed on Channel 4 news, David Freud, a banker, who came up with the estimates for those he thought should not be on IB, could not give a convincing account of how he had arrived at the figures when repeatedly pressed. They were simply back of the envelope estimates. He seemed to be saying that he had taken the increase in the number of people on IB and the decrease in the number of people claiming unemployment benefit and read this directly across without any further evidence.
Hope the media commentators who affect to know what’s best for others can live with their consciences knowing the enormous harm that is about to be perpetrated on people like my brother.
This will totally finish my mother off. She is nearly 70 and also caring for her husband who is in the first stages of dementia. She will have to negotiate the system for/with him as well as deal with his inevitable mental health deterioration as a result of this extra pressure and she is just not up to it. He is a poor communicator, will not be able to take in what people are saying to him and is incredibly suggestible. The best thing for him is to be kept gently stable and shielded from unnecessary stress.
THE most important thing for managing my brother is to get him to take his medication and to see the professionals involved in his case. Start bombarding him with another set of professionals pressurising him -any professional asking him questions is a pressure- and you can see the problem here.
The terrible distress that is about to be visited on our family seems to be accepted as some kind of necessary collateral damage. I would suggest that there should be some facility to seek an exemption negotiated by their carers and professionals from the routine quizzing of people like my brother.
I have been staggered at the amount of vitriol towards benefit claimants out there on the comment boards. It is quite frightening.
Indeed it is frightening. But the commenters are merely following the lead of that nice young Mr Purnell, who wants to turn the poor disabled and mentally ill into slave labour for the state.
Anyone who has a disabling physical condition, even with a job, is teetering over a chasm of poverty, as they are only working at the whim of their employer and tend to be dependent on complicated, fragile and expensive support systems. Those who can’t work are only one housing benefit screwup or gas bill from complete and utter disaster. For an nunqualified operative of a private company to overrule your own doctor’s advice and withdraw your income with no effective avenue of appeal – that virtually guarantees disaster.
As for forcing non-working people to do ‘community service’ – community service is a judicial punishment imposed for having committed a crime.
Privately employed, unaccountable know-nothings will be given the power to impose the same punishment – with no judicial process – for the crime of being sick, addicted, inadequate in some way, or just plain out of a job, whatever the reason. The mentally ill are already treated as criminals; regularly jailed physically or chemically rather than treated like human beings and stigmatised by the tabloids as dangerous unpredictables to be avoided and shunned and now the same is to be done to the poor and/or unemployed.
But why? Why would New Labour stigmatise and even criminalise poverty?
The government itself is almost as insecure as an Incapacity Benefit claimant itself, and one more bank crash away from total implosion. Aid to the poor is being cut just as it’s most needed and it’s not co-incidental. Brown and Darling certainly see the depth and severity of the coming recession, their public optimism notwithstanding; hence their desperation to cut, cut and cut some more. Knowing how bad things may get the government has certainly been planning for some time for civil disorder and mass movements of people (this from the organisers of the Jarrow march). That’s why there are all those spiffy new laws restricting protest and why the police have been given handy new toys to contain and control potentially rebellious crowds. Now comes the propaganda painting the unemployed as lesser humans. It’s easier to accept police use of their new toys on chav scum and lazy scroungers.
To have Labour, Labour mark you, the supposed champions of the poor and oppressed, cynically whipping up such hatred is sickening, though hardly unexpected, given the events of the last 11 years. The only comfort to be had is the hope that Parnell, Brown, Harman and all the rest of the jumped up town hall clerks in government will soon themselves be on the dole, picking litter for peanuts, with their tabloid friends joining them as the print industry collapses.
Oh yes, and just as a matter of interest and to show just how these things work, one of the people set to benefit from all this is the wife of the Australian prime minister. Yes, really.
Question: Which Australian company under fire for its shabby treatment of workers in Australia fled overseas and is now in hot water for under-cutting its competitors bids by escaping employment conditions designed to protect staff?
Answer: WorkDirections UK, part of Ingeus, the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.
Question: Which Australian company was found to have underpaid its workers by up to $4000 and was forced to repay them after shifting them from awards to common law contracts?
Answer: WorkDirections Australia, the Australian arm of the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.
Question: Which Australian company sacked 300-400 workers after failing to meet the standards required by the Australian Government for employment agencies?
Answer: WorkDirections Australia, etc, etc. Now, before Rudd’s chief of staff, David Epstein, the Sultan of Spin, the Master of Muck, and former chief ANiMaLS operative arcs up and unleashes the full force of the ALP’s mindless army of bloggers and Howard-haters, let it be noted that the latest confrontation between Rein’s company and its staff was revealed in the pages of The Guardian, the principal Labour daily in the UK.
The details were not revealed by anyone from the Coalition’s non-existent dirt unit, despite what Rudd’s deputy, the strident Julia Gillard, might honk, or shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan might insinuate, or mud-slinger extraordinaire Anthony Albanese might bray, nor in some crypto-fascist neo-con sheet bankrolled by aged nazi war criminals. The Guardian is a left-wing newspaper which still believes in class war, like some in the Left of the ALP, and no doubt published its story to highlight what it believes is an attack on workers and their conditions.
Rein’s company won six of 15 contracts worth more than 85 million ($A196,560,000) from the British Government under a scheme which aims to get disabled people off welfare. According to The Guardian: `’Unions and charities are furious that Mr Hain (the work and pensions secretary) has handed over the lion’s share of the first tranche of privatised services to the Ingeus group under a deal which will not include union recognition and will not safeguard jobs on the same conditions as in Whitehall.”
The competitors, mainly charities, factored in the costs of TUPE staff benefits – which cover employees when their employers are taken over – into their bids. Rein’s company had legal advice it did not need to provide those benefits and was able to undercut its competition. Charitably, and with an enviable display of the sportsmanship associated with thugs from the Graham Richardson school of “whatever it takes” right-wing Labor politics, Rein’s UK manager William Smith said the charities were `’whingers”. `’Frankly its their own fault. They should have bloody read the questions and answers documents.” Indeed. If they hadn’t been busily looking after the handicapped, widows and orphans, they may well have employed a firm of smart lawyers to look for such an edge.
Interestingly, The Guardian quoted angry and disappointed officials from two interested parties, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations and the Public and Commercial Services Union, in its article about Rudd’s wife’s company. Stephen Bubb, the volunteer groups’ representative, said he intended to ask the UK Government whether it had decided there was no future for voluntary organisations in delivering services. PCSU general secretary Mark Serwotka said: `’Not only has the voluntary sector been used as a Trojan horse by the private sector but the Government has handed a large chunk of work to a firm which is failing and mired in controversy in Australia. The Government is giving a green light to a company who we fear will try and circumvent TUPE regulations.”
Ingeus has been given nearly half of the British governments contracts for privatised benefits. There’s more on Pathways To Work and the theft of tax money that should have gone to the poor by a government who’s handing up to 120 billion quid of it to the Aussie PM’s wife, here.