From Cairo to Ferguson a Shift in Consciousness is Creating Fear in the Power Elite

We need a change in consciousness, and there is plenty of evidence that such a change is underway. When I got out of the train station last night I stepped into one of the many Ferguson protests that occurred nationwide yesterday. I didn't see or hear any protesters, but there were lots of police, and they were guarding the entrances to the big downtown shopping malls. My feeling is that these protests are not going softly into the night; they are a continuation of the Occupy Wall Street movement for economic justice but with the added powerful message of racial equality, not to mention a critique of excessive state force.

Why it is a safe bet to say that these protests are not going away one merely has to think back three years. Occupy was zapped because there were still enough people who believed that Obama represented a progressive trend in politics that had to be defended; hence, when the main Zuccotti Park encampment was rolled up by Gotham's finest in November of 2011, energy shifted to the 2012 presidential campaign and defending Obama from GOP attacks. Obama marshaled some of the Occupy rhetoric and ended up trouncing a weak Republican standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.

Now, besides some Democratic Party apparatchiks, there is no wellspring of support for Obama's presidency. He has alienated the peace wing of the party; I don't believe his "too little, too late" immigration overhaul is anything more than a chess move to checkmate Republicans, and I think that Latinos sense this; finally, his dissembling, feckless treatment of the Ferguson protests have finally splintered his bedrock constituency, blacks.

This was clearly on display yesterday at Obama's White House summit on Ferguson. Mark Landler has an excellent summary of the event in "Obama Offers New Standards on Police Gear":

Among those in the White House meetings on Monday were Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia; the president of the National Urban League, Marc Morial; the Rev. Al Sharpton; and two civil rights leaders from Ferguson, Rasheen Aldridge and Brittany Packnett.

Besides the photo op, there were three items of substance that Obama announced yesterday: 1) a change in federal programs dispensing military hardware to local police departments; 2) federal funding for police body cameras; and 3) a creation of a task force to provide answers on how to improve policing.

But as it turns out the first item of substance is really not substantial at all. All Obama proposed was a change in reporting and an undefined training requirement:

WASHINGTON — President Obama, grappling with how to respond to the racial unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and a wave of anger at law enforcement officials across the country, said Monday that he would tighten standards on the provision of military-style equipment to local police departments and provide funds for police officers to wear cameras. 

But Mr. Obama stopped short of curtailing the transfer of military-grade gear to local law enforcement authorities and continued to put off a visit to Ferguson. Instead, the White House tried to channel the rage over the fatal police shooting of a black teenager there into a national debate about how to restore trust between the police and the public.

Administration officials said they concluded after a review that the vast majority of transfers of military-style equipment strengthened local policing, even after the police in Ferguson were criticized for heavy-handed use of such gear to quell protests last summer. But the officials said local authorities needed common standards in the types of hardware they requested and better training in how to use it.

All told, the changes were modest, and Mr. Obama himself was circumspect in remarks about Ferguson after an orchestrated day of meetings at the White House with civil rights and religious leaders, big-city mayors, and law enforcement officials. The president seemed eager to keep the focus not on what happened in Ferguson but on its broader lessons for the country.

***

Curtailing those transfers, experts said, would be a reversal of years of policy and would have scant support in Congress. The militarization of police has been part of a broader counterterrorism strategy of fortifying American cities, which took root after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has become a reliable source of federal largess for local authorities.

With no legislation likely, Mr. Obama has instead focused on standardizing regulations across the multiple federal agencies — primarily the Department of Homeland Security — that supply this equipment to cities and towns. He would also seek to improve training and require “after-action” reports for incidents involving federal equipment. 

The report, the White House said, found “a lack of consistency in how federal programs are structured, implemented and audited.” Criticism of the practices swelled after the police in full body armor, on heavily armed vehicles, confronted protesters in Ferguson with assault rifles.

*** 

To bolster local policing, the government also announced a $263 million program that will provide up to 50,000 body cameras for police. The video footage from these cameras could clarify disputed incidents like the deadly encounter between the teenager in Ferguson, Michael Brown, and the police officer, Darren Wilson.

***

The president also announced on Monday the formation of a task force to improve local policing. Leading the panel will be Charles H. Ramsey, the commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, and Laurie Robinson of George Mason University, a leading criminal law scholar.

Don't get your hopes up that the task force is anything other than a cosmetic effort by Obama because as Landler reports at the end of his story,

The White House also faced skepticism in its choice of Commissioner Ramsey as a co-chairman of the task force. During his tenure as police chief in the District of Columbia from 1998 to 2007, he was criticized for the mass arrest of people protesting International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. 

“We were just dumbfounded when we heard they had chosen Chief Ramsey,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, which brought suits against Mr. Ramsey in Washington. “You’d be hard pressed to find a more inappropriate choice.”

Obama is spent. He can't keep the indians on the rez anymore. We are at the beginning of a great conflict. The established political parties are absent legitimacy. There will be a tendency to reassert the legitimacy of the state by means of a display of force -- like the pools of police officers I saw guarding department stores last night. This will have the opposite effect, diminishing the government's legitimacy even more.

In the United States we are heading in the direction of what I have been calling the "Sisi option" -- a sunlighting of the Deep State, a public embrace by the power elite of a massive police state. Thailand is already there.

Apropos of this it is worthwhile to read the Gray Lady's unsigned editorial on Mubarak's release from prison, "In Egypt, a Verdict Turns Back the Clock":

The Egyptian court that threw out the murder charges against former President Hosni Mubarak may have closed the final chapter on the Arab Spring. After the country’s brief, flawed attempt at democracy, the army and its supporters put in place an even more authoritarian system than the Mubarak regime. 

Now, in a final insult to the hundreds of protesters who were killed in the 2011 uprising, Mr. Mubarak apparently will go free, and there will be no justice for those who died or accountability for the decades of human rights abuses by his government.

***

The public prosecutor could appeal the murder case to the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest criminal court. But, on Sunday, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army general who overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, seemed to rule that out. Meanwhile, Mr. Morsi and thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters still languish in prison. 

Mr. Sisi said Egypt must “look to the future” and “cannot ever go back.” It appears that the Obama administration feels the same way. In a bizarre response, a State Department spokeswoman offered diplomatic pablum when asked to comment on the verdict and referred queries to the Egyptian government.

*** 

Since Saturday, protests against the ruling have drawn hundreds of participants and involved numerous clashes with security forces. Two demonstrators were killed. While the demonstrations have been smaller than those in 2011, the venues — university campuses across the country — suggest that it may be harder for Mr. Sisi to erase the past than he thinks. Among other challenges, Egypt is struggling with a depressed economy, an insurgency in Sinai, and an Islamic State affiliate that late Sunday took responsibility for killing an American oil worker in Egypt’s Western Desert in August. 

Half of Egypt’s population is under the age of 25, and many of those young people were at the heart of the Arab Spring movement and its demands for jobs, education, housing and greater freedoms. 

Those aspirations won’t go away. And while Egyptians may want stability, repression and a lack of accountability will produce only more discontent. The Mubarak verdict is another shift away from long delayed hopes for a productive and just society.

The same goes for the United States.

**** 

Update on Missouri Governor Jay Nixon's call for a special session of the legislature to find ways to pay for the lengthy deployment of the national guard and state highway patrol. Turns out he doesn't need a special session -- which would have allowed for a spirited public debate on the wisdom and effectiveness of martial law; he can fund by fiat. According to Monica Davey, John Eligon, Jess Bidgood in "A Week Later, Protesters Remain Vocal on Ferguson, Partly With Silence":

Gov. Jay Nixon of Missouri said on Monday that there was no longer a need for a special legislative session, which he had called to authorize more money for Ferguson-related expenses by the National Guard and the State Highway Patrol. He and senior legislative leaders agreed that he could use his budget authority to cover the payments.

Ferguson vs. Hong Kong: U.S. More of a Police State Than China

We here in the Land of the Free fancy ourselves a "shining city upon the hill" (see Jesus' Sermon on the Mount; John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity"; Ronald Reagan's 1984 Republican National Convention acceptance speech). We like to imagine ourselves living in the most open of open societies; our institutions lawful and corruption-free; our democracy vibrant and fair.

Then there is a moment like yesterday's announcement by Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, that Missouri is in a state of emergency pending a decision by a grand jury on whether to indict the police officer who gunned down an unarmed black teenager in broad daylight in August. Monica Davey reports in "State of Emergency Declared in Missouri for Grand Jury’s Decision on Ferguson" that

FERGUSON, Mo. — Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency on Monday, allowing him to activate the Missouri National Guard in preparation for a grand jury decision on whether to indict a white police officer for shooting to death an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, three months ago. 

The declaration was certain to add to mounting tension here as people awaited the grand jury’s decision, which officials have said is expected in mid- to late November. Many here have said they expect the grand jury to decide against indicting the Ferguson officer, Darren Wilson, and they anticipate a show of anger and protest afterward. Some protesters said that calling up the Guard before a grand jury decision was a premature, antagonistic move that presumed that demonstrations would be violent.

Mr. Nixon called up the Guard in August during demonstrations that sometimes grew violent. Although the Guard’s role was limited to protecting a police command post, its presence drew vehement criticism from demonstrators, who said it was further indication of a military-style approach by the law enforcement authorities.

Compare this with a story (Chris Buckley and Alan Wong, "Hong Kong Clears an Area of Pro-Democracy Protesters") about the orderly removal of a slice of the Umbrella Movement encampment in the Admiralty District where the main Hong Kong government buildings are located:

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government moved to clear pro-democracy protesters from a small area in front of an office building on Tuesday morning in the first move against the demonstrators in weeks. The authorities met no resistance, with student protesters saying they would not oppose the court order. 

Dozens of bailiffs wearing black vests, backed by the police, supervised the removal of barricades in a small section of the main protest area around the Citic Tower after reading aloud a court injunction. They took hours to methodically clear metal barriers and the random items left from protesters who had been living there in tents for weeks, from books to undergarments. 

The operation’s timing was no surprise; it was announced ahead of time. Demonstrators had largely vacated the area, and the police, unlike in past operations against the movement, did not wear riot gear.

Imagine if Hong Kong's leader, CY Leung, had declared a state of emergency and requested troop support from mainland China when students failed in an attempt to occupy government buildings on September 28 which then ballooned into mass protests. The outrage in the West, both official and from the Fourth Estate, would have be volcanic; proof, we would have been lectured, that the People's Republic of China is a totalitarian state hungering to snap under its iron boot heel the supple neck of a democracy-loving, Western-oriented youth.

But when police in St. Louis County, Missouri responded with assault rifles, APCs, flash grenades, tear gas, and helicopters to protesters outraged by the murder of an unarmed teenager there is no parallel outcry.

Yes, the Gray Lady published some excellent stories on 1) the massive militarization of local police forces, and 2) the Jim Crowesque justice system that sees a traffic ticket turn into fines and jail time for mostly black men. Nowhere though was there a thoughtful think piece or unsigned editorial connecting the U.S. with the world.

In Hong Kong, there has been an active occupation of public spaces since September. Police have been reticent to engage the Umbrella Movement youth. In Ferguson, protests have continued since August, but the protesters have never been given any leeway; at one point, during the peak last summer, they were not allowed to stand still, nevermind erecting an encampment complete with barricades. Plus, protesters in Ferguson were faced with a mustering of the Missouri National Guard.

Now the Guard has been activated once again. At this point any kind of indictment of Darren Wilson would come as a shock. The prevailing wisdom is that there will be no indictment. In other words, it is permissible to blow away an unarmed youth. Clashes clearly are anticipated. The injustice is too glaring.

Protesters appear to be well organized. Over 50 groups on the ground. We could be looking at another Seattle WTO or anti-war mobilization in the run up to Bush's invasion of Iraq. The police and the Guard invariably overreact because at the core of their training is the idea to brook no challenge to their use of overwhelming force. (Here, from what I've seen, the Hong Kong police seem much better trained than your average U.S. peace officer.)

The question is what will the Michael Brown protest movement do when confronted with the overreaction. There is a golden opportunity to expand the movement and shut down, albeit for a moment, the police state.