Somewhere in Alabama, an all-male gang of elite cops from New Jersey spent some down-time from protecting and serving by getting off on sexy drunken displays of power and violence.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The Hoboken Police Department’s SWAT team has been disbanded, just days after officials learned of racy photos showing the unit’s commander and other officers cavorting with waitresses from a Hooters restaurant in Alabama.

Judging from the selection from the photo slide show, it seems that these photos involve more than just a trip to Hooters, and include some that are more explicit than just racy.

On the same day Hoboken’s new public safety director was sworn in, he gave the city’s police chief orders to disband the SWAT team and to order the lieutenant at the center of the controversy to desk duty.

After seeing the photos of Lt. Angelo Andriani and other members of the Hoboken police SWAT, newly appointed Public Safety Director Bill Bergin said he had to act decisively.

Bergin listed his reasons for disbanding the SWAT team in a phone interview with Newschannel 4’s Pei-Sze Cheng: The brazenness of the whole situation, because everything in the photographs, which I was shocked at, had Hoboken all over it, from the uniforms, to the police car, the bus that was involved.

Bergin ordered the police chief to disband the SWAT team and to have Andriani return from his extended vacation and assign him to desk duty immediately.

The photos were taken last year on a return trip from Louisiana, where the Hoboken officers helped with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

They show the waitresses holding shotguns and other weapons belonging to officers under Andriani’s command.

— WNBC (2007-11-16): N.J. SWAT Team Disbanded After Racy Hooters Photos Emerge

Elsewhere in New Jersey, another man in uniform, Anthony Senatore, used his power as a professional narc to extort sexual favors from a woman he’d pressured into becoming a drug informant. Then, after she tried to put a stop to it, he stalked her, forced his way into her house, and raped her. After his victim filed a lawsuit, Senatore was reassigned to a desk job. Although the boss cops and everybody else do concede that Senatore repeatedly exploited his position to coerce sex from the woman, the state A.G. has decided to sweep it under the rug and declined to prosecute on the rape charge. This, apparently, is what passes for having found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part in the eyes of the (male) mayor and the (male) police chief.

JACKSON — The state Attorney General has decided not to prosecute a police detective who is accused, in a civil lawsuit, of raping a drug informant in 2005 and impregnating her with a son who was born eight months later, township officials confirmed Wednesday. Advertisement

The lawsuit filed last year by the informant, identified only as Jane Doe, still is pending in federal court. However, Mayor Mark A. Seda said Wednesday that the attorney general’s decision exonerates Officer Anthony Senatore.

Apparently they found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part, Seda said, adding that Senatore remains on the Jackson force but is no longer a detective.

… According to the lawsuit, Senatore enlisted Jane Doe in April 2005 as a drug informant, in exchange for money and prosecutorial considerations for her children and estranged husband, all of whom have been investigated by the Jackson police.

But soon after Jane Doe became an informant, the detective’s behavior changed, according to the suit.

By means of intimidation, threat, harassment, coercion and/or promises of judicial and prosecutorial consideration for plaintiff and her family, Senatore repeatedly propositioned and solicited plaintiff for sexual relations from late April through July 2005, the suit alleges.

During that time, he had sex with her in her home, in police vehicles and in wooded locations in and around Jackson, according to the suit.

When Jane Doe tried to break off the relationship, Senatore’s deviant, predatory behavior intensified, culminating in a savagely brutal rape in her home on July 25, 2005, according to the suit. As a result of that rape, the plaintiff became pregnant and gave birth to a son March 26, 2006, according to the suit.

The suit accuses the township, the police department and then-Public Safety Director Samuel DiPasquale of permitting and encouraging police officers, including Senatore, to sexually harass and have sex with female informants, female defendants and other women they encountered while on duty.

In case you were curious, this is how seriously the boys in blue take their job of protecting you and me from all the weirdoes and creeps running around out there:

Shortly after the suit was filed, Senatore was removed from the detective bureau and placed on administrative duty where his only responsibilities included paperwork, the mayor said.

… Senatore is now back in circulation as a patrolman, though, because the police department is short staffed, Seda said. He did not know whether the officer will be reinstated to the detective bureau.

But don’t worry. They are seriously concerned about how this predator’s pattern of bullying, sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and rape against a woman substantially under his legally-backed power — which they dignify as a relationship with an informant — will adversely affect their P.R., and maybe a court case. Senatore may be back patrolling the streets, but hey, they might consider adding a couple of clauses to their internal policies.

When an officer’s character is in question, it puts us at risk, Seda said. We didn’t want to give any criminal a loophole to get out of charges.

… With the Attorney General’s investigation complete, the town and the police department are looking into how Senatore was able to take advantage of his job and engage in a relationship with an informant [sic], Seda said.

That’s certainly something we wouldn’t want to see happen again, the mayor said. We’re looking at our policy internally to see what we can do to prevent that.

— Fraidy Reiss, Asbury Park Press (2007-11-08): Detective won’t be prosecuted; Detective won’t be prosecuted

(Stories via Lindsay Beyerstein 2007-11-17 and ACLU Blog 2007-11-17.)

Left libertarians, like all libertarians, believe that all State control of industry and all State ownership of natural resources should be abolished. In that sense, libertarian Leftists advocate complete and absolute privatization of, well, everything. Governments, or quasi-governmental public monopolies, have no business building or running roads, bridges, railroads, airports, parks, housing, libraries, post offices, television stations, electric lines, power plants, water works, oil rigs, gas pipelines, or anything else of the sort. (Those of us who are anarchists add that governments have no business building or running fire departments, police stations, courts, armies, or anything else of the sort, because governments — which are necessarily coercive and necessarily elitist — have no business existing or doing anything at all.)

It’s hard enough to sell this idea to our fellow Leftists, just on the merits. State Leftists have a long-standing and healthy skepticism towards the more utopian claims that are sometimes made about how businesses might act on the free market; meanwhile, they have a long-standing and very unhealthy naïveté towards the utopian claims that are often made on behalf of government bureaucracies under an electoral form of government. But setting the substantive issues aside, there’s another major roadblock for us to confront, just from the use of language.

There is something called privatization which has been a hot topic in Leftist circles for the past 15-20 years. It has been a big deal in Eastern Europe, in third world countries under the influence of the IMF, and in some cases in the United States, too. Naomi Klein has a new book on the topic, which has attracted some notice. Klein’s book focuses on the role that natural and artificial crises play in establishing the conditions for what she calls privatization. But privatization, as understood by the IMF, the neoliberal governments, and the robber baron corporations, is a very different beast from privatization as understood by free market radicals. What consistent libertarians advocate is the devolution of all wealth to the people who created it, and the reconstruction of all industry on the principle of free association and voluntary mutual exchange. But the IMF and Naomi Klein both seem to agree on the idea that privatization includes reforms like the following:

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Blackwater or DynCorp for private mercenaries to fight government wars. This has become increasingly popular as a way for the U.S. to wage small and large wars over the past 15 years; I think it was largely pioneered through the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress international free trade in unauthorized drugs, and is currently heavily used by the U.S. in Colombia, the Balkans, and Iraq.

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Wackenhut for government-funded but privately managed prisons, police forces, firefighters, etc. This has also become increasingly popular in the U.S. over the past 15 years; in the case of prisons, at least, it was largely inspired by the increasing number of people imprisoned by the U.S. government for using unauthorized drugs or selling them to willing customers.

• Government auctions or sweetheart contracts in which nationalized monopoly firms — oil companies, water works, power companies, and the like — are sold off to corporations, with the profits going into the State treasury, and usually with some form of legally-enforced monopoly left intact after privatization. One of the most notorious cases is the cannibalistic bonanza that Boris Yeltsin and a select class of politically-connected Oligarchs helped themselves to after the implosion of Soviet Communism. Throughout the third world, similar auction or contract schemes are suggested or demanded as a condition for the national government to receive a line of tax-funded credit from the member states of the International Monetary Fund.

• Yet Another Damn Account schemes for converting government pension systems from a welfare model to a forced savings model, in which workers are forced to put part of their paycheck into a special, government-created retirement account, where it can be invested according to government-crafted formulas in one of a limited number of government-approved investment vehicles offered by a tightly regulated cartel of government-approved uncompetitive investment brokers. This kind of government retirement plan is supposedly the centerpiece of privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, and has repeatedly been advocated by George W. Bush and other Republican politicians in the United States.

Klein and other state Leftists very claim that these government privatization schemes are closely associated with Right-wing authoritarian repression, up to and including secret police, death squads, and beating, torturing, or disappearing innocent people for exercising their rights of free speech or free association in labor unions or dissident groups.

And they are right. Those police state tactics aren’t compatible with any kind of free market, but then, neither are any of the government auctions, government contracting, government loans, and government regulatory schemes that Klein and her comrades present as examples of privatization. They are examples of government-backed corporate kleptocracy. The problem is that the oligarchs, the robber barons, and their hirelings dishonestly present these schemes — one and all of them involving massive government intervention and government plunder from ordinary working people — as if they were free market reforms. And Klein and her comrades usually believe them; the worst sorts of robber baron state capitalism are routinely presented as if they were arguments against the free market, even though pervasive government monopoly, government regulation, government confiscation, government contracting, and government finance have nothing even remotely to do with free markets.

I’d like to suggest that this confusion needs to be exposed, and combated. In order to combat it, we may very well need to mint some new language. As far as I know, privatization was coined by analogy with nationalization; if nationalization was the seizure of industry or resources by government, then privatization was the reversal of that process, devolving the industry or the resources into private hands. It is clear that the kind of government outsourcing and kleptocratic monopolies that Klein et al condemn don’t match up very well with the term. On the other hand, the term has been abused and perverted so long that it may not be very useful to us anymore, either.

So here’s my proposal for linguistic reform. What we advocate is the devolution of state-confiscated wealth and state-confiscated industries back to civil society. In some cases, that might mean transferring an industry or a resource to private proprietorship (if, for example, you can find the person or the people from whom a nationalized factory was originally seized, the just thing to do would be to turn the factory back over to them). But in most cases, it could just as easily mean any number of other ways to devolve property back to the people:

1. Some resources should be ceded to the joint ownership of those who habitually use them. For example, who should own your neighborhood streets? Answer: you and your neighbors should own the streets that you live on. For the government to seize your tax money and your land and use it to build neighborhood roads, and then to sell them out from under you to some unrelated third party who doesn’t live on them, doesn’t habitually use them, etc., would be theft.

2. Government industries and lands where an original private owner cannot be found could, and probably should, be devolved to the co-operative ownership of the people who work in them or on them. The factories to the workers; the soil to those who till it.

3. Some universally-used utilities (water works, regional power companies, perhaps highways) which were created by tax money might be ceded to the joint ownership of all the citizens of the area they serve. (This is somewhat similar to the Czechoslovakian model of privatization, in which government industries were converted into joint-stock companies, and every citizen was given so many shares.)

4. Some resources (many parks, perhaps) might be ceded to the unorganized public — that is, they would become public property in Roderick’s sense, rather than in the sense of government control.

Now, given the diversity of cases, and all of the different ways in which government might justly devolve property from State control to civil society, privatization is really too limiting a term. So instead let’s call what we want the socialization of the means of production.

As for the IMF / Blackwater model of privatization, again, the word doesn’t fit the situation very well, and we need something new in order to help mark the distinction. Whereas what we want could rightly be called socialization, I think that the government outsourcing, government-backed monopoly capitalism, and government goon squads, might more accurately be described as privateering.

I’m just sayin’.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist case for privatization
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical health care reform

Here’s some Halloween treats for radicals who have been working for alliance between left-friendly libertarians and anti-authoritarian Leftists. These are all articles that have appeared over the past week Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s anti-imperialist Left magazine CounterPunch:

• James Bovard (2007-10-27): Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-10-27): Ruling by Decree: The Fraud of the War on Terror

• Anthony Papa (2007-10-30): The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws: The Preppie Killer Could Spend More Time in Prison for a Cocaine Bust Than for the Murder of Jennifer Rubin

• Sheldon Richman (2007-10-31): President Busybody: Bush has Time to Run the World

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

One of the things that I’m especially pleased about with Hornberger’s article is that it’s not just a column covering some point of substantial pre-existing agreement between committed libertarians and committed Leftists (anti-imperialism, civil liberties, etc.). The article has that, and that kind of thing is very important and very valuable. But Hornberger’s article goes even further; not only is he crossing the bridges that are already there, but he is also building some new ones. One of Hornberger’s main analytical claims has to do with the way in which the bureaucratic State’s pervasive and byzantine regulation puts tremendous coercive power into the hands of the Stasi, and the way in which the State’s regulatory carrots and sticks serve to keep the interests of big business and the State firmly aligned:

First, as we have long pointed out, the real value of the regulated society is not any protection it provides to people. All that protection talk is just a sham. The real purpose of the regulated society is to keep the business and banking community in line — meaning in conformity with federal policy. The real purpose of the rules and regulations is to serve as a Damocles sword, ready to fall on any business or bank that refuses to go along with the feds.

… Of course, the feds would argue that the law is the law and that Nacchio broke it and therefore has to pay the price. That, of course, is not the point. The point is that in the regulated society, everyone breaks the law, one way or another, which then provides the feds with the option of prosecuting anyone they want whenever they want.

Consider, for example, the IRS code. Despite never-ending railing among political candidates about how complex the code is, the feds love the complexity. Why? Because they know that no one can ever file a perfect income-tax return and especially not wealthy and influential businessmen. If the feds looked hard enough, they could prosecute anyone they wanted at any time for income-tax violations.

It’s the same with insider-trading laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, hiring illegal aliens, or a multitude of other economic crimes. If they hadn’t gotten Nacchio on insider trading, they would have undoubtedly gone after him for other things. The point is, he refused to go along with illegality and wrongdoing, and they went after him for it.

To add insult to injury, President Bush and some of his federal cohorts in Congress are seeking to give civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly chose to become federal informers. They are trying to get Congress to pass a law that would prohibit the customers of the telephone companies from suing for the companies’ allegedly wrongful (and cowardly) misconduct.

In other words, become a federal informer and we’ll protect you. Refuse to do so, and we’ll send you to jail.

What is the difference between neighborhood captains in Castro’s Cuba, who report people’s activities to their government, and U.S. telephone companies who report people’s activities to their government? Don’t they all rationalize their conduct under the same warped sense of patriotism?

— Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

When libertarians challenge the regulatory State, well-intentioned Leftists will often point to all kinds of sharp dealing, exploitation, and irresponsible behavior that big business engaged in prior to the massive expansion of government regulation during the Progressive and New Deal eras. The case for this is often impressionistic and overstated, and usually glosses over the way in which byzantine State regulations allow for new kinds of market-cornering, agency-capturing, sharp dealing, and legal insulation from corporate responsibility. But too many conventional libertarians miss the point by responding with little more than apologia for big business. The right response is to point out that there is more than one way to deal with nasty business practices. The question is whether the means are going to be coercive or voluntary. Coercive solutions tend to deal with the problem from the top down, through a class of professional bureaucrats; voluntary methods tend to favor dealing with these problems from the bottom up, with you and your neighbors working together in grassroots efforts like fighting unions, organized boycotts, consumer associations, mutual aid societies, or watchdog pressure groups.

The grassroots approach puts power into the hands of ordinary people, who enjoy a lot of choice over what causes to support, how to organize responses, when to participate, when to withdraw, and so on. The bureaucratic approach takes power out of the hands of ordinary people and puts it in the hands of professional lawyers and bureaucrats; it tries to fight the unaccountable power of Behemoth by building up the unaccountable power of Leviathan. But the State has its own reasons for doing what it does, and it’s extraordinarily hard, indeed practically impossible, to keep those reasons aligned with anything like ordinary people’s real interests or concerns. Business and government simply get involved in elaborate power plays, as each tries to convert departments of the other into a captured agency for their own purposes, variously using the tools of campaign contributions, front groups, astroturf, cronyism, tax breaks, tax revenue, regulation, prosecution, extortion, and other forms of mutual back-scratching and mutual terrorizing. This is exactly what happened with the government’s successful efforts to turn telecom companies into multibillion dollar snitches for the Securitate creeps; as usual, the end result is that they all get in it together against the rest of us. That’s not an unhappy accident; it’s the way it’s always going to be as long as State agencies can arrogate power that individual people cannot opt out of.

All power to the people; the bureaus can go to hell.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-10-09: State of grace

In the federal government’s ongoing efforts to salvage COINTELPRO from the dustbin of history, the House of Representatives recently passed H.R. 1955, a bill that would, if it also passes the Senate, create a new National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism and a Center of Excellence for the Study of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States (sic!), which would study the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism in the United States and methods that can be utilized by Federal, State, local, and tribal homeland security officials to mitigate violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism.

Here are the definitions for the unwieldy jargon used in the bill:

(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION–The term violent radicalization means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM–The term homegrown terrorism means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE–The term ideologically based violence means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.

Well, O.K., fine. If that is what the Center for Excellence &c. is going to study, then they may as well start with the worst offenders. May I suggest that they begin with studying the social, criminal, political, psychological, and economic roots of the extremist propaganda coming out of Office of National Drug Control Policy, which promotes the use of force or violence by armed narcs to promote the Drug Warriors’ political and social beliefs against the will of the civilian population? Or perhaps the Internal Revenue Service, which routinely engages in the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence to intimidate or coerce the civilian population of the United States, in furtherance of the United States government’s political objectives with respect to the war on Iraq, Social Security, corporate welfare, government schooling, the drug war, etc.? Or perhaps the Department of Defense, which has used repeated, massive, and merciless ideologically-based violence in order to promote the federal government’s ideology with respect to parliamentary government, nuclear disarmament, etc., etc., etc., in countries all over the world?

I fully expect that they will get right on it. After all, you’d hardly expect a double-standard from the State when it comes to ideologically-based violence.

(Story thanks to Stephanie McMillan 2007-10-28.)

A violent gang has recently been taken down in inner-city Chicago. Specifically, the city police recently decided to disband the Special Operations Section, a roaming squadron of over 100 cops which was created to fight inner-city gang crime and drug dealing. Problem is that the narcs themselves ended up running the most tightly organized, heavily armed, corrupt, and powerful racket in the neighborhood.

After weeks of worsening revelations about the Chicago Police Department’s elite Special Operations Section, a beleaguered interim superintendent finally pulled the plug Tuesday, disbanding the scandal-plagued unit and sending most of its officers back to more strictly supervised assignments.

The recent incidents of police misconduct, which include charges that SOS officers robbed and kidnapped people, and that one accused officer plotted to murder another, have been disheartening and demoralizing, especially for officers who serve honorably every day, interim Supt. Dana Starks said Tuesday at a news conference called to announce the abrupt disbanding of SOS.

… Once touted as one of the department’s most nimble and aggressive weapons for fighting street gangs, SOS has produced one black eye after another for the city and Daley’s administration over the last year, and especially in the last several weeks.

The units at the heart of the scandal were involved in street policing, rooting out gang and drug crimes in the roughest parts of Chicago.

… In August the Tribune revealed that the U.S. attorney’s office had joined the ongoing state probe that already had led to charges of robbery and kidnapping against seven officers in the unit.

Just weeks later, the FBI raided the home of Officer Jerome Finnigan, the alleged leader of the accused cops who was free on bail, and charged him with plotting to murder a former SOS officer who had begun aiding investigators.

Two days after the charges were announced, the Tribune published a video of SOS officers—including Finnigan— raiding a Southwest Side bar in 2004 and searching its patrons. The video contradicted the arrest reports and raised constitutional issues about the legality of the raid, in which arrest reports allegedly were falsified and victims said police robbed their homes while they were in custody.

At the end of last week, the department stripped three more officers of their police powers over the incident, and others were under investigation.

In joining the probe, federal investigators have focused not on the original alleged crimes, but on what commanders in SOS, and higher up in the department, may have known about the rogue activities. The Office of Professional Standards and the Internal Affairs Division had fielded numerous complaints about Finnigan and the other officers over the years but they were still on the street before prosecutors concluded their own investigation and brought charges.

… The SOS scandal has brought a growing chorus of questions about the quality of police oversight in the city. The scandal was part of the impetus behind Daley reorganizing the Office of Professional Standards during the summer. And aldermen are fighting the city over documents showing which officers have the most excessive force complaints, a list that is top-heavy with SOS officers.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

But wait, there’s more.

This isn’t the first time that an elite anti-gang unit in the Chicago police force turned out to be engaged in organized crime as much as the gangs it was supposedly combating. The same damn thing happened only seven years ago:

It is not the first time in recent history that a corruption scandal has led to the disbanding of a special unit. In 2000 the Gang Crimes Section was disbanded after federal authorities charged Officer Joseph Miedzianowski with using gang members to run his own drug distribution ring. The FBI called Miedzianowski, now serving life in prison, the most corrupt cop in Chicago history.

When Gang Crimes was disbanded many of the officers in the unit, including Finnigan, were assigned to SOS.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

So what do you suppose they are going to do now that SOS has been busted up?

Well, this is the government that we are talking about, and these are cops. Nobody in government ever gets fired, and nobody on the police force ever even gets blamed, unless and until they get indicted. So what’s going to happen is that are going to do the same goddamned thing that they did in 2000 and transfer the thugs from SOS over to yet another elite unit that does the same goddamned thing:

Some of the more than 100 SOS officers to be reassigned will join the Targeted Response Unit, which does similar work hunting guns and drugs in gang-infested areas. …

But SOS also included other specialized teams, including the SWAT team, marine, K-9, animal abuse and critical response units. Mounted patrol, a helicopter unit and officers trained to protect visiting dignitaries also were part of SOS. Those units are being reorganized into the newly named Special Functions Group, Starks said.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

Somehow I expect that in about seven years or so the city government will once again be shocked! shocked! to learn that corruption and violence have pervaded the Targeted Response Unit or the Special Functions Group, which will be disbanded forthwith in favor of yet another identical unit under a different name.

Oh, but there’s more still!

A lot of the other former SOS cops are going back onto street patrols. But guess where an undisclosed number of them are getting transferred:

Although he declined to give numbers, Starks also said he was moving some officers into the Internal Affairs Division to beef the department’s ability to investigate its own officers.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

I guess it takes a thief….

Meanwhile, the cops’ press flack, Monique Bond, is out to handle the PR problem. Look! It’s Yet Another Isolated Incident!

Officials also were trying to control the damage done to the department’s reputation.

… Not everyone in SOS is a bad officer. You can’t paint this with a broad stroke, she said.

— David Heinzmann and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune 2007-10-09: Cops disband elite unit

You could say exactly the same thing about the Bloods or the Crips. But so the fuck what?

(Story thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise 2007-10-10.)