Of The Bullies, By The Bullies, and For The Bullies
(excerpt from chapter 5 of my book, "Occupying America: We Shall Overcome") © 2012 by Rev. Paul J. Bern all rights reserved
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 (this has since become a fact of life in the American
workplace as well). 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, as if such things were truly needed. They aren't.
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 urban 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 supposed to be 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....
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 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.
Or, buy the E-book ($2.99) at https://payhip.com/b/CV5h (also on Kindle or Nook).
Watch a short promo at http://youtu.be/Z20l9ohORN4
No comments:
Post a Comment