Let’s review.

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely force their way into situations where they are hardly needed or wanted; they deliberately escalate confrontations in order to get control of the situation through superior belligerence; they routinely hurt people, use force first and ask questions later; and they invariably pass off even the most egregious violence against harmless or helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to to coerce compliance with their arbitrary commands, they have no trouble electrifying small children, pregnant women, 82 year old women who just want their social workers to leave them alone, alleged salad-bar thieves, 75 year old grandmothers guilty of blocking the line at a McDonald’s drive-through, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to beat a handcuffed woman bloody for demanding to use the phone, to slam a 13-year-old boy to the ground and choke him in order to arrest him for the crime of skateboarding in public, to rough up teenaged girls who don’t clean up enough spilled birthday cake or walk home too late at night, or to throw a quadriplegic man out of his wheelchair for not standing up on command. When they deal with non-police officers (the people that we call our friends and neighbors, and who the police contemptuously dismiss as civilians), they have been trained to assert full-spectrum dominance at every opportunity, and they are willing to end a tiresome argument with pain compliance techniques, which include pepper spraying lawyers who ask inconvenient questions, or using a 50,000-volt electric shock to disable an unarmed, retreating woman, or tackling a 17-year-old girl and tasering her while she lies helpless in her own bed, or shocking a man in front of his family and leaving him lying on the side of the highway (in order to make absolutely sure they could serve him with a dubious traffic ticket). It hardly matters if you cannot obey their commands because you are sound asleep in your own home. It hardly matters if you can’t move due to a medical condition, or can’t hear their bellowed orders because you’re deaf. It hardly even matters if you die. What cops can always count on is that, no matter how aggressively they escalate the confrontation in the name of control, no matter how quickly they resort to violence, and no matter how obviously innocent or helpless their victims are, they can always count on their bosses and their colleagues to repeat absolutely any lie and make absolutely any excuse in order to find that Official Procedures were followed. As long as Official Procedures were followed, of course, any form of brutality or violence is therefore passed off as OK by the boss cops, and the judgment will be dutifully repeated by fellow cops, by prosecutors, by judges, by much of the news media, and by the hordes of freelance howling cop-enablers who rush into any media forum they can find to publish excuses for any and every cop accused of brutality, while they also use absolutely any means necessary to smear, humiliate and blame any and every victim who ever comes forward.

Even if a cop arrests an assault victim for interfering with the Investigation of her own assault, and then forces her into a cell where she can be strip-searched, over her screams of protest, with male guards wrenching her arms and holding her down, we are informed that these gang rapists were Just Following Orders. Cops are also elaborately trained in the use and abuse of the legal system, and know very well which judges are most likely to absolve them of any wrongdoing. The completely unsurprising result is that violent cops hardly ever face any personal costs whatsoever for their actions: if anything happens at all, the worst of it is usually that they are given a paid vacation and an administrative reprimand, or at worst they may be fired. Even if they are fired, they are hardly ever face legal consequences for their violence, and if they do, the city government can be relied on to settle and force taxpayers to cover the tab. Even if they are sued, they are hardly ever arrested for their violence. And even if they are arrested, they are hardly ever convicted. It doesn’t even matter if they as much as confess in open court. With few exceptions, the best that most victims of police violence can realistically ever hope for by way of compensation is an Oops, our bad, and a Fuck you, civilian is what they are far more likely to get. No matter how many times these same things happen, again and again, and no matter how often they are repeated within the same police department—or even at the same shift in the same office—and no matter how widely they are repeated in so many different police departments across so many different cities and counties, every time the latest outrage comes up in the newsmedia, a cop mouthpiece can be expected to say, and the establishment media can be expected to dutifully report, that nobody should rush to judgment, that they should dismiss eye-witness testimony and even the evidence of their senses in order to give the cops every possible (and some impossible) benefit of the doubt, and that even if these cops did do something wrong, well, it’s just A Few More Bad Apples committing Yet Another Isolated Incident. If anyone so much as dares to suggest that something may be systemically wrong here, beyond what can be fixed by punishing a few bad cops, or through superficial reforms and sensitivity training, then they are dismissed by comfortable political Moderates as irresponsible crazies, while cops and their sycophants can be expected to respond with the usual fragile macho flash of crying about how they get no respect, while sanctimoniously bellowing about how they risk so much serving and protecting those who never asked for, and never freely agreed to, their service or their protection.

The result, which is completely predictable and completely outrageous, is that individual cops and entire police departments in America deliberately take on the posture of occupying paramilitary forces, with the express intent of spreading fear in what they regard as hostile territory, and that, on a daily basis, many cops routinely engage in rampant, intense, unchecked violence against anyone and everyone who happens to get in their way or look at them funny, no matter how many options the cops may have and no matter how harmless or helpless their victims may be. Thus, while investigating his neighbors, they will happily break into a suspect 60-year-old man’s home, while he is recovering from surgery, trash his house without a warrant or probable cause, rip a catheter out of his body, and leave him there to suffer without medical attention, even after they apparently found absolutely nothing to indicate his guilt:

HARTFORD, Conn. — A man alleges that police entered his home illegally and ripped a catheter from his body during a child pornography investigation that led to the arrest of two neighbors.

Andrew Glover, 60, of New Britain filed a notice with the city Thursday that he intends to pursue a federal civil rights lawsuit. He accused the officers of inflicting severe injuries as he was recovering from intestinal surgery in February.

Glover’s lawyer, Paul Spinella, said police entered Glover’s apartment Jan. 30 and Feb. 28. Glover wasn’t involved in child pornography, has not been charged and has no criminal record, Spinella said.

The poor guy, Spinella said. They ripped the catheter off his person. They assaulted the guy. He’s got major problems as a result of this. He’s a mess now.

Lt. James Wardwell, a police spokesman, said Friday that the department had not received the intent-to-sue notice and would not comment. A message was left for the city’s corporation counsel.

Glover has two years to file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court.

Spinella said officers tossed Glover’s apartment during a search Jan. 30. In February, he said, Glover returned home from the hospital after his surgery to find officers searching his apartment again. That’s when they assaulted Glover and left him alone in the apartment without calling for medical help, Spinella said.

The police didn’t have search warrants, Spinella said.

—Associated Press (2008-05-09): Connecticut Man Says Cops Broke Into His Home and Ripped Out His Catheter

Meanwhile, in Kamloops, British Columbia, in order to subdue a frail 82 year old man, on an oxygen tank, who had undergone heart bypass surgery, who could not hurt anyone outside the reach of a small knife, cops were willing to blast him three times in the chest with a 50,000-volt electric shock while he lay helpless in his hospital bed. Because they had work to get done that night:

An elderly man in Kamloops, B.C., was zapped three times on the torso by a police stun gun while lying on his hospital bed, CBC News has learned.

Frank Lasser, 82, appeared fragile Thursday when he showed the Taser marks on his body and talked about the ordeal he went through Saturday.

They [police] should have known I had bypass surgery, Lasser told CBC News.

Lasser has had heart surgery and needs to carry an apparatus to supply oxygen at all times. He was in the Royal Inland Hospital Saturday due to pneumonia but has since been released.

RCMP said nurses called police after Lasser became delirious and pulled a knife out of his pocket.

Lasser told CBC News that he sometimes becomes delusional when he can’t breathe properly. He said he couldn’t explain why he refused to let go of the knife even after the Mounties arrived. I was laying on the bed by then and the corporal came in, or the sergeant, I forget which it was, and said to the guys, OK, get him because we got more important work to do on the street tonight, Lasser said.

And then, bang, bang, bang, three times with the laser, and I tell you, I never want that again.

Kamloops RCMP said Thursday that officers had no other option but to deploy the conducted energy weapon when Lasser refused to drop his knife.

—CBC News (2008-05-09): RCMP subdue hospitalized man, 82, with Taser

In Philadelphia, a police commissioner says that, while On the surface, it certainly does not look good, people should not rush to judgment over an aerial video which clearly shows a swarm of Philadelphia police officers dragging suspects out of a car, then repeatedly beating and kicking them while they lay handcuffed and held down on the ground. Remind me again of how the good guys who do this are morally any different from the Bloods or the Crips?

The reason that you should suspend your judgment on this vicious gang beat-down of helpless, restrained suspects by a huge crowd of the Gangsters in Blue is that The video is the video … We have no audio. You don’t know what was going on at that moment when the officers approached the vehicle. There will be an investigation and we will move on.

Well. I am sure that after The Matter Is Investigated, and nothing of any consequence happens to these dangerous, heavily armed, tightly-organized gangs of batterers, the Philadelphia Police Department and city government sure will move on, with business as usual, and not a damn thing will change. Besides which, think of how hard the poor cops have it when a fellow cop was killed on the job not long ago. Because those trained professionals who, at every opportunity, sanctimoniously inform us of all the risks that they voluntarily take on For Our Own Good, cannot possibly be expected to do their jobs without beating the shit out of helpless captives if it should ever happen that one of them is hurt or killed. This is how these dedicated public servants serve and protect the public: by hurting innocent or helpless people under their power, by taking out the stress and risks of their own chosen profession on members of the public who pose no threat to them, and then by lying, dissembling, making excuses, and crying about it if anyone should happen to take issue with this reign of terror being carried on by peace officers in the name of Public Safety. Cops are here to protect you. Cops are here to protect the hell out of you, whether you want it or not, and you had better not get in the way.

When every fucking week brings another story of a Few More Bad Apples causing Yet Another Isolated Incident, and the police department almost invariably doing everything in its power to conceal, excuse, or minimize the violence, even in defiance of the evidence of the senses and no matter how obviously harmless or helpless the victim may be, it beggars belief to keep on claiming that there is no systemic problem here, that cops ought to be given every benefit of the doubt, and that any blanket condemnation of American policing is a sign of hastiness and unfair prejudice. The plain fact is that what we have here is one of two things: either a professionalized system of control which tacitly permits and encourages cops to exercise this kind of rampant, repeated, intense, and unrepentant abuse against powerless people—or else a system which has clearly demonstrated that it can do nothing effectual to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.

(Via Scott Hagaman @ Scottish Nous 2008-05-10: Is Bad Cop Redundant Yet?, Mike Gogulski @ nostate.com 2008-05-09: Philadelphia police beating restrained suspects: video, Lindsay Beyerstein @ Majikthise 2008-05-09: Cops tase 82-year-old heart patient in bed, and Pam Spaulding 2008-05-09: Canada: 82-year old heart patient Tased in hospital bed.)

Further reading:

• GT 2008-02-06: Cops are here to protect you. (#2)
• GT 2008-02-18: Cops are here to protect you.

The most recent issue of the Boston Review has an interesting article from William Hogeland on Alexander Hamilton and his recently-acquired fan club among the court intellectuals of the Beltway Consensus — with Hamilton’s recent biographers and neo-conservativecreepy spendthrift fascist David Brooks at the fore. The article is almost entirely right-on; here’s one of the most important parts, on the political economy that was brought forth in the early Constitutional period, through the ministrations of the newly empowered central government:

David Brooks, for his part, embraces the thrust of Hamilton’s finance plan, writing that Congress’s decision to fund the federal debt at Hamilton’s urging formed the basis of the fluid capital markets that are today the engine of world capitalism. The quick-and-dirty textbook version is that Hamilton gave the country sound credit. What that means is rarely made explicit: the first treasury secretary found ways to support, at all costs, the federal bondholders whom he and Morris had been frustrated in supporting in the 1780s. In 1791 Hamilton finally got the U.S. Congress to commit to paying reliable interest on its debt instruments, halting both their face-value depreciation and the free-for-all speculation in them, making them articles of rational trade in high-finance marketplaces. (Following British models, Hamilton also used proceeds of the U.S. Post Office to create a sinking fund; such funds were dedicated to paying down each issuance of a public debt, making bonds reliable.) Hamilton’s idea, bold and creative, was to let the government get its hands on easy money by letting bondholders and traders grow American fortunes lending that money.

Brooks also associates Hamilton’s authorship of modern capitalism with what historians call assumption: Hamilton persuaded Congress to assume the states’ war debts in the federal one, thus swelling the federal obligation to massive proportions. But that idea wasn’t original with Hamilton, and by overlooking its history Brooks and other Hamiltonians obscure its purposes. Robert Morris too had wanted the Confederation Congress to assume state debts, placing all public debt in federal hands and making it so big that federal taxes would have to be levied to pay interest on it. That dream came true when the U.S. Congress, having agreed to assume state debts, ran up a deficit, as Hamilton was happy to report in December of 1790.

A new tax, Hamilton told Congress, was the only way to solvency. He proposed not only expanding duties on imports (the old, embattled impost had finally been passed in the first session) but far more significantly, he urged Congress to impose the first federal tax on an American product. Just as Morris had hoped, assumption of state debts had become the wedge for opening the purses of the people, enforcing domestic federal taxation to support federal bondholders. In fact, passing a federal domestic tax (on distilled liquor, a fact that has helped obscure its real purpose) was so important that in the first funding proposal he submitted to Congress Hamilton appended a fully drafted bill. It was characteristically Hamiltonian (and reminiscent of health-care-reform-era Hillary Clinton), replete with distilling and tax-policy minutiae and overwhelmingly, even patronizingly, thorough, with every loophole closed, every question pre-answered, every problem sure to be caused by Congress’s financial ineptitude solved. The bill was controversial, and Hamilton’s patience must have been tried when Congress, seeming to bumble, passed funding and assumption yet ignored the whiskey tax—the brilliant law that would pay for them. But he was becoming a politico. In reporting the deficit, he calmly referred Congress back to the tax law he’d already written for them almost a year earlier. They were politicos too. They passed it—now that they had to—almost unmodified.

The structure of that tax sharply qualifies assertions made by Brooks and others that Hamilton wanted government power to enhance opportunity, mobility, and democracy. The reasons Hamilton gave Congress for going beyond a foreign impost and imposing domestic taxation are telling, both for what he said and for what he left unsaid. In the same 1790 report Hamilton reminded Congress that merchants, naturally, paid import duties, and that since merchants had always been the class most committed to American nationhood, taxing them further would be onerous and disaffecting; hence the need for a new tax not on imports but on a domestic product. What he did not explicitly point out was that the merchant class was also the bondholding class: they’d long been nationalists because federal power—the very kind Hamilton was wielding now—had long seemed to be where their interest lay. Today we might expect investors to be content with steady, tax-free income (there was, of course, no income tax). For Hamilton, shoring up and concentrating bondholders’ wealth meant paying that income with funds drawn not from the small bondholding class but from a tax collected from the large class of people who would never own a bond. And he structured the tax around aspects of the distilling process itself, so that big-time distillers (industrialists, members of the bondholding class) would be charged a lower tax while small-time producers (people engaged in a wide variety of work as farmers and artisans, with whiskeymaking often their sole source of cash and credit) would be charged a substantially higher tax, in many cases a crushing one. It was no accident. The bill was modeled on a series of whiskey taxes passed by British governments. Driving small and occasional producers out of business served imperial economic aims of efficiency and consolidation. In the same year that Congress passed Hamilton’s whiskey tax, the Irish Parliament stopped merely dis-incentivizing small distilling, and made it illegal to operate a still of less than 500-gallon capacity.

Hamilton wanted to turn the country into an efficient global competitor. As he would argue before Congress in his famous 1791 Report on Manufactures (which was far less successful than his funding plan but just as eager to stun all comers with its depth of research on hemp, nails, hats—wool hats, fur hats, and also fur-and-wool hats—and so on), labor power should not be dissipated in small, generalist farms and one-man artisan shops but efficiently marshaled, stabilized, and deployed on commercial farms and in factory towns like the one he founded in Paterson, New Jersey. And of course he wanted to use federal power to achieve that national vision.

The effect of the whiskey tax was precisely to render American distilling efficient through consolidation bordering on cartelization: even as the tax threatened to ruin small producers, Hamilton busily restructured army buying practices to make it impossible for small distillers to sell to army commissaries. In western Pennsylvania, where small distillers had managed to gain an economic toehold, Hamilton went even further: he made the region’s richest, largest-scale distiller the federal tax collector. Paid both a federal salary and a commission on what he took from his less successful neighbors, and charged with enforcing the federal tax that directly benefited his business, this distiller/collector had close relatives—again, federally commissioned, correspondents of both Hamilton and Washington—in the commissary office of the local army post. Business was sewn up.

Brooks routinely characterizes Hamilton’s use of federal power as intended to spur competition and furnish opportunity. But the control of business near the Ohio headwaters by a government-connected family and its pals was a direct consequence of Hamilton’s policy, and it was anything but unintended. Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition, Brooks has written by way of praising Hamilton’s economic policies. Yet the rigging inherent in Hamilton’s tax aggravated ordinary people’s existing problems. Farmers and artisans who were losing their weak grip on economic well-being and falling into foreclosure, as federally connected commercial farmers, Eastern real-estate speculators, and entrepreneurs in brick, glass, iron, and other rising industries—the sort Hamilton always said he wanted to promote—bought up more and more of the best Western land. Descendants of the pioneers who had cleared the land found themselves working as day laborers in the factories of their creditors, which was anything but a bleak outcome by Hamilton’s reckoning.

Thus did the first federal domestic tax—linchpin to Hamilton’s finance plan, culmination of nationalists’ decade-long efforts to unite the country, first step in making the American economy a global competitor—operate regressively, comprehensively, and deliberately. Its avowed purpose of wealth concentration and industry consolidation was intended to restructure the country along the modern American lines now hymned by so many neo-Hamiltonians. Such extreme and systemic results can’t be what Jason Bordoff and others at the Hamilton Project mean to support by invoking Hamilton’s legacy. But it is what Morris meant by opening the people’s purses, and it’s what Congress made law, at Hamilton’s behest, in 1791.

In his June 8 column, Brooks pits his Hamiltonians against modern populists who want, he says, to fundamentally rewrite the rules and obstruct policies they see as benefiting only the rich. He would brand as populists the many former foot soldiers of the Revolution who rose up against the whiskey tax—the so-called whiskey rebels. To them, American independence now seemed to have been gained for the exclusive benefit of a military-industrial cartel run by and for the privileged and staffed by the well-connected. Western Pennsylvania populists wanted a fair shot at modern America too. They wanted access to cash and credit. They wanted to grow their businesses. They were not anti-tax. They were against taxes that straitjacket markets, restrict opportunity, reduce competition, punish small operators, cripple local economies, and offer government cronies bonanzas at the direct expense of other citizens. Most important, they were against what they called taxes that don’t operate in proportion to property.

At least that’s what they said they were against, in published resolutions, letters, and petitions. Brookhiser and Chernow caricature them as drunk hillbillies (Brookhiser) whom scholars study merely because they are colorful (Chernow). But the essential fact remains that, during the nation’s formative years, the explicit idea that an essential promise of republican democracy lies in fostering opportunities for economic advancement and upward mobility is found not in Hamilton’s funding plan, but in the resolutions of the ordinary people who became whiskey rebels.

So how have neo-Hamiltonians managed to remake Hamilton in their own image, diminishing his outrageous charisma and ruthless political intelligence in the process?

One way today’s Hamiltonians connect their hero’s economics to the American Dream is through the needle’s eye of his disadvantaged background and remarkable success. Hamilton came from nothing, Brooks wrote in his New York Times Magazine piece, and spent his political career trying to create a world in which as many people as possible could replicate his amazing success.” Or, as one of the PBS talking heads informs viewers, Hamilton believed that “if you worked hard, you should get ahead.

It’s more likely that Hamilton believed exceptional, bright boys like him should erupt like meteors across the night sky. Blending creative genius with an almost mad degree of thoroughness and tenacity, he strove to dominate everyone he encountered, a quality that brought enormous success but also marred his life and may have shortened it. The idea that Hamilton spent his career trying to create conditions for replicating such a rise seems fantastic. One searches his letters and public statements in vain for thoughtful reflection on ordinary families’ economic struggles or respect for their goals and hopes for their children’s betterment. He is unconcerned about using government power to encourage the rise of laborer’s descendants and would not have related upward mobility to democracy—a dirty word to Hamilton.

Brooks cites remarks from Report on Manufactures as evidence of Hamilton’s hope that people would advance socially by moving from agrarian scatteredness to industrial centralization. When all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community, Hamilton argued, each individual can find his proper element. He also defined as a goal of industrial policy to cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise. Where many founders were farmers and planters, Hamilton (like Franklin and Samuel Adams) was an urbanite, and he made an appealing case for the creative synergy to be found in cities. He certainly wanted people mobile enough to get off the farm, out of the artisan shop, and into the mill, and he had a forward-looking fondness, at once emotional and practical, of encouraging meritocracy over aristocracy in responsible government positions.

But it is a feat of intellectual acrobatics to ascribe to Hamilton, on the basis of these remarks, a broad policy of encouraging, much less sustaining, widespread upward social mobility through hard work among succeeding American generations. For Hamilton, the hard work/get ahead equation, which revivalists want to call a democratic legacy, applied only to the sort of people he deemed it wise to encourage. He had cogent national and financial reasons for carefully dismantling the few ways—which already involved manufacturing and selling—that people had of getting ahead. They involved consolidating land, money, opportunity, and power in the West, while obstructing both mobility and democracy. He was explicit about this.

Chernow, straining to detect Hamilton’s sympathy for the impossible difficulties faced by the debtor class, misreads a minor Federalist essay, number six. He suggests that Hamilton felt sorry for Daniel Shays, leader of a 1787 debtor uprising in Massachusetts, arguing that federal assumption of state debts was intended to relieve small-farming debtors. While it’s true that Hamilton objected to vacillations from leniency to aggressiveness in Massachusetts finance policy, his essay as a whole makes clear his disdain for the vaunting ambition and criminal tendencies of all such as Shays, on whom he lays personal blame for the anti-creditor movement sweeping the western part of the country, the real basis and wide scope of which Hamilton always impatiently declined to acknowledge.

To the extent that he thought about it at all, Hamilton wanted people to stop talking nonsense about their own economic aspirations and get ahead his way and his way alone, by becoming efficiently organized laborers and farm workers for the financiers and industrialists. If people wouldn’t do that, he’d make them.

—William Hogeland (2007), Inventing Alexander Hamilton, in Boston Review (November/December 2007)

(Via Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-11-08, Manuel Lora @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2007-11-08, and The Agitator 2007-11-08.)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies. They routinely force their way into places they have no business being, use violence first and ask questions later, and pass off even the most egregious forms of violence against helpless people as self-defense or as the necessary means to accomplish a completely unnecessary goal. In order to stay in control of the situation, they have no trouble electrifying small children, alleged salad-bar thieves, pregnant women possibly guilty of a minor traffic violation, or an already prone and helpless student who may have been guilty of using the computer lab without proper papers on hand. They are willing to pepper spray lawyers for asking inconvenient questions and to beat up teenaged girls for daring to give them lip over cleaning up spilled cake or being out too late at night. Whenever they are caught using harsh enough violence against someone who is so obviously innocent or helpless that the media takes notice, police administrators will wring their hands, say something noncommittal, make up some lies as possible excuses for the assault, promise an investigation, find that Official Procedures were followed, and then do nothing at all. Meanwhile a chorus of sado-fascist bully boys will reliably cheer the pigs and smear the victim in print media, talk shows, and the Internet. Both administrators and freelance police enablers freely employ the most tortured sorts of necessity excuses, in what seems to be a deliberate effort to obliterate any notion of restraints on the use of force in securing police objectives. Then they will sanctimoniously explain how cops need to be able to beat the hell out of you with impunity so that they can protect you.

For example, when the cops in Chicago aren’t too busy running elite criminal rackets, they have found another way to serve and protect the public: by forcing their way into an 82-year-old black woman’s apartment, and then grabbing a taser and serving and protecting the hell out her.

As shocking as it is that a Chicago Police officer Tasered an 82-year-old grandmother during a wellness check, it’s even more disheartening that so many of our readers believe the police action was appropriate.

By late Tuesday, 7,967 people had responded to the Chicago Sun-Times Web site poll question:

Should cops have Tasered an 82-year-old?

Sixty-three percent responded no.

But 37 percent, or 2,940 people voted yes — Lillian Fletcher, the elderly and mentally-ill grandmother who was Tasered by police who burst into her home, should have been Tasered because she was wielding a hammer.

That’s scary.

Mind you, Fletcher had not broken any laws, police were not executing a search warrant, and the elderly woman had not been threatening neighbors with the hammer. In fact, she didn’t grab the hammer until officers forced their way into her garden apartment.

After the Tasering, Fletcher, who suffers from dementia and schizophrenia, was hospitalized for five days and may have to undergo surgery for fluid on the brain.

Instead of condemning the police action, many of the people who shot me an e-mail blamed the elderly woman’s family for the fiasco.

What about the family that left their mother home alone knowing she had all these issues, said Dave M. Put the blame where it really belongs: on the family. Why don’t you stop by and visit good old granny and when she starts swinging a hammer at you just take your beating and give her a hug.

Well, Dave M., I did visit Fletcher at her home on Monday night, and she didn’t pull out a hammer. You know why? I didn’t push my way into her home. I rang the doorbell. When she ushered me into her kitchen and invited me to sit, I sat. And when our chat was over, I put on my coat, said Good night and made sure she locked her door behind me.

In other words, I respected her space — something police didn’t do.

As for her family, they aren’t the triflin’ people some of you are depicting. In fact, if anyone is to blame for what’s happened, it would be the city’s Department of Aging.

Fletcher, who can be belligerent, told a caseworker to go away. But instead of leaving, the worker called the police, and officers treated Fletcher like she was a criminal.

—Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-07): Cops wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer

So Ms. Fletcher decides that she doesn’t want a nosy social worker in her apartment and tells her to go away. Said professional busybody calls the cops on her so that they can force their way into her apartment against her will. When these armed strangers come breaking through the door, she naturally tells them to get out and tries to protect herself. So they knock her down with an immobilizing and painful electric shock. and hurt her so badly that she has to spend five days in the hospital. Normally, if armed strangers went busting into an apartment against the tenant’s will and then protected themselves by tasering their outraged victim, it would be called breaking and entering and assault and battery. But because the armed strangers are cops, and because their victim could safely be dismissed by the powers that be as old and black and crazy, this is called a wellness check. Apparently, it was necessary to taser the old woman in order to save her.

Since this story first hit the Chicago media, Mayor Daley feels embarassed, but won’t say anything bad about the cops who did it. He assures us that The Matter Will Be Investigated. Meanwhile, Alderman Isaac Carothers, the chair of the city council committee dealing with police matters, has this to add:

It’s very unfortunate that it had to result to that, but I certainly understand. I’m pleased that they decided not to shoot her and they decided not to tackle her and that they didn’t use the night stick, which may have been options if someone is swinging a hammer at you.

—Quoted by Fran Spielman, Chicago Sun-Times (2007-11-08): Tasering grandma displeases Daley — But he avoids criticizing cops

Well, yes, at least the pigs didn’t shoot her while they were at it. That’s mighty white of them.

It remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to these cops. The Fraternal Order of Pigs, as usual, has their back. There’s an investigation going on by the so-called Office for Professional Standards. But somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if not a damn thing comes of it.

Which is precisely what happened in another case over in Pittsburgh, where a black 29-year-old man was tasered while he slept in his own home. He got in late and forgot to disarm a security device on the house, which issued a silent alarm to the police department. The cops showed up, found him asleep on the couch, surrounded him, jabbed a taser into his back, and shocked him while he was still asleep.

I felt a lot of voltage going through my body, Mr. Hicks said recalling the events of that late July weekend. That’s what woke me up.

Jumping to his feet, Mr. Hicks was aware of an intense sensation between the shoulder blades of his 150-pound body. It didn’t stop there. His whole body felt as if it were on fire.

When his eyes finally adjusted to the light, his heart skipped yet another beat. Two North Braddock police officers, Gerard Kraly and Lukas Laeuricia, were standing in his living room. To this day, Mr. Hicks still doesn’t know which is Kraly and which Laeuricia.

The shorter of the two officers did most of the talking. His mustached partner was a burly over-6-footer in his late 30s or early 40s. He held the Taser, the prongs of which were sticking in Mr. Hicks’ back.

The polite family newspaper version of what Mr. Hicks said in response to being electrified translates roughly as What’s going on here?

The shorter cop, whom Mr. Hicks remembers as blond, asked him to calm down.

The officer said that North Braddock police received a call from the security company monitoring Mr. Hicks’ home. They believed a break-in was in progress.

The cops had entered the home, turned on the light and found Mr. Hicks asleep on the sofa. If they identified themselves or ordered him to get up, Mr. Hicks said he did not hear it. He said he wasn’t aware of their presence until he was shot in the back with a Taser.

According to Mr. Hicks, the cops were skeptical. How do we know that you’re who you say you are? the shorter of the two cops asked.

At that point, the cop holding the Taser squeezed the trigger, sending Mr. Hicks into paroxysm of agony. It was not a short jolt like the first one he received. He fell to the floor. His screams woke the neighbors.

What do you want? Mr. Hicks asked. Please stop [shooting] me. The shorter cop helped him to his feet. Swaying unsteadily, he offered to show them his identification. They searched him and found his wallet. After inspecting it, they threw the wallet on the coffee table.

I told you I lived here and that I’m the legal resident, he shouted, believing he finally had justice, common decency and the angels of heaven on his side. A staff member at the African-American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania, Mr. Hicks counts himself on the side of the law-abiding citizen.

The cop with the Taser squeezed the trigger again, anyway. Mr. Hicks flapped his arms wildly, but didn’t fall. All he could do was scream loud enough to be heard all over the Mon Valley.

After removing the pellets from his bloody back, the cops handcuffed Mr. Hicks and led him out his front door to a police van. They did not read him his rights, Mr. Hicks says. The back of his shirt was soaked with warm, sticky blood.

Meanwhile, cops from six neighboring boroughs searched the house for other burglars.

Mr. Hicks’ mother, Arlene, arrived just as her son was being escorted out the door. She had Mr. Hicks’ 11-year-old daughter and a niece in tow. Why are you arresting my son? she asked. The taller of the two cops answered that he didn’t have to tell her anything.

When Mrs. Hicks persisted, he said her son was being arrested for being belligerent.

In the van, Mr. Hicks said he told the cops he needed medical attention. He says they told him he would wind up in county lockup if he insisted on it. Never mind, Mr. Hicks said.

Mr. Hicks sat in a holding cell until 5 a.m. The cops returned. We’re not filing charges, they told him. You’re free to go, but if you get into trouble in the next year, we will file charges.

Mr. Hicks staggered into the parking lot and began walking the 10 minutes to the Braddock hospital, refusing another officer’s offer of a ride home. He was examined and released that morning. Mr. Hicks filed a detailed police complaint the following Monday, but the case didn’t come to public attention until the New Pittsburgh Courier’s front-page story last week.

—Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2007-09-11): Tasered at his own home: the Shawn Hicks story

So once again, a gang of armed strangers break into a house in the name of protecting the people living in it from a suspected burglar. They taser first and ask questions later. They blast a completely innocent man — one of the people who they were supposedly showing up to protect — with a painful shock electricity while he is sleeping. While outnumbered, physically overmatched, and with a taser still jabbed in his back, he gets a bit upset, demands to know what is going on, and explains that he lives in the house they are supposedly protecting; they call him a liar and shock him again. After they find his wallet and confirm that he is, in fact, a legal occupant, they shock him again, arrest him for getting uppity, refuse him medical attention, and then give him a sanctimonious lecture not to get into any trouble. And because this gang of thugs were uniformed cops, and because the man they were protecting the hell out of could be dismissed as black and belligerent, precisely nothing has happened. There was no investigation at all until the media publicized the story months later. Last week the local D.A. announced that no charges would be filed against Gerard Kraly or Lukas Laeuricia. Another bunch of area cops Investigated the Matter and decided that there was no criminal matter to be pursued.

Shawn Hicks is planning to file a civil suit over the abuse. I hope that he sues the pigs personally and takes them for everything they’ve got. Unfortunately, if a suit is filed, what will probably happen is that the city government will settle the case out of court, then send the bill to a bunch of innocent taxpayers, while the thugs Kraly and Laeuricia will keep on terrorizing innocent people in the name of public safety.

If you’re baffled that cops could get away with these kind of outrages, it may help to remember that in a lot of American cities, there is no such thing as a civil police force anymore. What we have would be better described as thuggish paramilitary units occupying what they regard as hostile territory. Here as elsewhere, they are going to serve and protect us, whether we want them to or not, and if we don’t like it then they’ve got plenty of guns and clubs and cuffs and 50,000 volt human prods in order to make sure we get good and protected anyway.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-04: In five words or fewer #2: Michael McHale on the 50-shot police murder of Sean Bell
• GT 2006-05-11: Quidditative essence

For the most part, the New York Times’ story on the World Economic Forum beginning its proceedings in New York is just a gooey report on the men who had the air of money and power hobnobbing inside the Waldorf-Astoria, … like the start of summer camp. Now I really wonder if this sort of fluff reporting on a serious conference of the global economic and political elite is necessary. But, more to the point, the Times has decided to creatively reinvent history:

That has not prevented critics from painting the Forum in the darkest colors. The World Economic Forum will celebrate war in Afghanistan and the Middle East, attacks on civil liberties, and corporate tax cuts, proclaimed a group called A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) in its call for demonstrations which will get under way in earnest with marches on Saturday.

At the New York W.E.F. summit, the world’s richest C.E.O.s will collaborate with the world’s most powerful politicians to set the global economic agenda, declared another group, Students for Global Justice.

Whether the protests reach the violence of last year’s meeting in Davos remains to be seen. Some of the opposition groups acknowledge that a clash with New York’s finest in the aftermath of Sept. 11 would not sit well with the public.

Now, it’s a bit irresponsible to spending only two dismissive paragraphs on the fact that there are, in fact, people who have serious problems with what goes at the WEF, while spending the rest of the front-page story gushing about how elite and idealistic it all is (for more responsible coverage, I suggest the Times’ recent in-depth article on anarchism, buried in the New York Region section). What concerns me a bit more, however, is that they are simply making shit up when they say that the protests at Davos last year had any violence to be reached.

In reality, last year’s protests in Davos featured 250 activists staging a peaceful march. In 2000, the worst violence was a few windows being broken at a McDonald’s. In 2001, the worst violence was snowballs being tossed at police barricades.

Well, I should take that back. There was violence at the 2001 protest. See, the Davos local authorities decided to ban any exercise of the right to peaceful public assembly, so protestors were met by over 1,000 Swiss security agents armed with batons and tear gas guns. The demonstrators’ peaceful march was turned back with police barricades and water cannons. But this isn’t exactly the sort of violence that the Times story was claiming had happened.

This is, unfortunately, part of a general press smear campaign against the globalization movement, which has invented protestor violence out of thin air in protests in Seattle, DC, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia… at all of these there was plenty of police violence against demonstrators but the virtually none initiated by protestors. In Seattle and DC, heavy tear gas bombardments were used; in Los Angeles I watched mounted cops stage dragoon attacks with batons on protestors who had done nothing other than run away from rampaging peace officers. And yet the New York Daily News compared protestors to the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and threatened them, You have a right to free speech, but try to disrupt this town, and you’ll get your anti-globalization butts kicked. Capish?

Sidebar: I’ve noticed that they’ve been awfully cagey about just how many women are at the invite-only WEF meeting; one article lumped in women amidst everyone else in the overwhelming minority at the WEF (third world leaders, human rights activists, union leaders, etc.). The Times’ editorial column said it was some 3,000 Davos Men, and a sprinkling of Davos Women. For all their apologia, it’s really hard to shade just how reactionary in constitution their Good Ol’ Boys meeting is.

For further reading

• For independent coverage of the World Economic Forum and surrounding protests, visit NYC Indymedia.
• For more on the demonstrations and alternatives to the WEF, check out Another World is Possible.
• GT 9/17/2001 Globalization Protestors Targeted in Post-9/11 Crackdown on Dissent
• GT 9/06/2001 Debate Over Reformist and Radical Approaches to Change
• GT 5/29/2001 WTO Protest videogame announced at E3

Salon.com Books publishes a trashy lovefest for Fight Club on the occasion of a convention in author Chuck Palahniuk’s honor at Edinboro College in Pennsylvania. In case anyone was still wondering whether Fight Club really is venomous Backlash purification-through-violence boy culture bullshit, this report will hopefully dash all doubts. What kind of enlightened critique of contemporary masculinity does Fight Club present?

In his presentation on Fight Club: Beating Men Out of Submission, Bowling Green State University graduate student Rafael Colon Gonzalez agrees: Tyler Durden’s role in creating fight club is to save these men who are controlled by capitalism. The violence that Tyler wants men to take hold of is normally only fed to them as spectators.

That’s right, boys: corporate capitalism turns us into passive women (We’re a generation of men raised by women; I’m not sure another woman is what we need, Tyler spews). Therefore, the way to revolution is to beat people into a bloody pulp. Meanwhile,

In Human Services and Their Failure as a Therapeutic Tool for Men, Oelke says that what makes men feel good about themselves is being able to look in the mirror and see a man they can respect — not a coward, not a slave, not a charlatan. This can only be achieved by the building of character. From a young age, little boys are taught that when they have a problem … they settle it like men. So they fight. This rite of passage has been taken away from today’s man, and we’re all suffering for it.

How shall I put this delicately? HORSE SHIT! We live in a culture where one out of every four women is beaten and/or sexually tortured by an intimate partner and over half of all people — women and men — suffer physical or sexual assaults. Almost universally this violence is committed by men. We have male cops that murder black people, male soldiers who torture fellow soldiers because they might be gay, male fraternity boys who gang rape women in order to prove their Brotherhood. And now you’re telling me that men are being emasculated, that we’re all suffering for it, and the way to liberate ourselves is to beat the shit out of each other? Take your Robert Bly and Cliff Notes Nietzsche, and go home. What we need is a world in which we don’t settle things like men and in which we no longer delude ourselves into thinking that men are liberated by exercising masculinity through brutality or sexual domination.