Let’s check our weaponry: 93,000 machine guns, 533 planes and helicopters, 180,000 magazine cartridges, and 432 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles. Okay, let’s roll!
Only, this is not the US military. It’s your and my local police departments patrolling our cities. Remember “Officer Friendly,” the beat cops who were known as “peace officers”? The friendlies have largely been transformed into militarized forces, literally armed with and garbed in war gear and indoctrinated in military psychology, rather than the ethic of community policing.
Twenty years ago, Congress created the military transfer program, providing federal grants so chiefs of police and sheriffs could buy surplus firepower from the Pentagon. In a stunningly short time, our local police forces have become macho-military units, possessing an armory of Pentagon freebies ranging from 30-ton tanks to rifle silencers. They’ve gone from peacekeeping beats to over-the-top SWAT team aggression, unleashed on the citizenry tens of thousands of times a year, mainly for ordinary police work. For example, a gung-ho Florida SWAT team raided area barbershops in 2010 to stop the horror of “barbering without a license.” And masked police in Louisiana launched a military raid on a nightclub in order to perform a liquor law inspection.
Militarization is a dangerous and ultimately deadly perversion of the honorable purpose of policing – and it is literally out of control. The New York Times notes that 38 states have received silencers to use in surreptitious raids. A sheriff in a North Dakota rural county with only 11,000 people told a Times reporter that he saw no need for silencers. When it was pointed out that his department had received 40 of them from the Pentagon, he was baffled, saying: “I don’t recall approving them.”
“Officer Friendly, in a Tank? War Gear Flows to Local Police,” The New York Times, June 9, 2014.

Looping Big Money around democracy’s neck

The beauty of our country’s present system of government is that anyone is perfectly free to buy a member of Congress. And isn’t that what democracy is all about?
Take the Koch brothers. Of course, these multibillionaire industrialists prefer to buy everything in bulk, and they’ve spent millions of dollars to purchase controlling shares of a whole flock of Republican congress critters. In fact, they have spent so much on so many elections (from Congress all the way down to small-town school board races) that they’ve made themselves the poster boys of Big Money corruption. By huge margins, the public is demanding that Congress terminate the plutocratic infestation of our democratic system by Kochites.
How have the brothers responded? By buying another senator – this time a former-senator-turned-lobbyists. Don Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican, became a powerhouse Washington lobbyist shortly after he left the Senate in 2005. His lobby shop pulls in some $8 million a year to run favor-seeking chores for the likes of AT&T, Exxon Mobil, FED EX, General Motors, and Walmart. Now, Nickles is pulling the Koch’s plow, using his Capitol Hill contacts to try to defeat reforms that would shut-off the funnels of secret, unlimited amounts of corporate cash that the Koch network puts into our elections.
What we have here is a perfect example of Big Money looping full circle to strangle The People’s right to be self-governing. The Koch boys write huge checks to candidates and front groups to elect lawmakers who serve their interests. Some of those lawmakers, like Nickles, later slide into lucrative lobbying slots, getting paid a bundle by Koch & Company to fend off democratic, anti-corruption reforms. Thus, the Kochs can keep making bulk purchases of lawmakers… and the circle is drawn ever-tighter around democracy’s neck. To help pass a Constitutional amendment to ban this corrupt money, go to www.united4thepeople.org.
“The Koch Cycle of Endless Cash,” The New York Times, June 14, 2014.
“Nickles Group,” www.opensecrets.org, 2014.
“Koch group, unions battle over Colorado schools race,” www.politico.com, November 2, 2013.

Yet another political money scam

Attention shoppers: If you’re looking for a super buy, be sure to check out the “Family PAC.”
This is not a gross of toilet paper rolls packaged in plastic wrap but a newly-invented political money scam. It lets the rich families of congressional candidates dump gross amounts of money into their darlings’ campaigns, bypassing the $2,600 legal limit they can give as individuals.
Both Republicans and Democrats are using this FamilyPAC Loophole – another “gift” from the Supreme Court’s ridiculous decree that money is “speech.” By definition, that perversion of language and nature by the Court means that speech is not free, but a commodity to be purchased in bulk by those who have the most money.
For example, Gabriel Rothblatt, running for Congress as a Democrat in Florida, is being backed by a supposedly-independent PAC that, so far, has raised $225,000 to “speak” on his behalf. The law says that these “outside” campaigns cannot coordinate in any way with the candidates they support, and Rothblatt plays along with this joke by insisting that he has no idea where this PAC came from or what it’s doing. How strange, since every dime of the PAC’s funding came from Gabriel’s mom. He says that her financial backing and the speech she’s buying for him is a total surprise, for it never came up in family conversations.
Likewise, Republican senate wannabe Ben Sasse is backed by a Family PAC funded entirely by his rich granduncle, and GOP senate nominee Dan Sullivan in Alaska is supported by a PAC getting the bulk of its money from his family and their business associates.
Why would we want anyone in office who uses such a blatantly corrupt ploy then – with a big wink – insults us with the “I had no idea” lie? To help stop this money game, connect with www.mayday.us.
“The Custom-Made ‘SuperPAC,” The New York Times, August 4, 2014.