🚀 go-pugleaf

<snip>
>This is horrible to hear. We are
>African Americans and this is
>a typical day in Philly. Our
>children spend all their lives
>running from police and false
>arrests. Will things ever change?
>Phyllis Love
>Center City
===================================================
Inertia affects society, culture and governments just as much as
it affects material objects.  Things never change by themselves.
Indeed, considerable momentum has built up in the United States
for ever more authoritarian, ever more incompetent, and
unfortunately, ever more brutal government at all levels under
the rubric of  �War on Drugs� and �Protecting the Children�
despite all constitutional safeguards.   When I was growing up in
the 50s the communists were the boogie men, today it is the child
pornographers and drug dealers.   In both cases attempts were
continually made to burn down the barn to get rid of the rats.
It is vital that the responsible citizens step back and ask which
are the greater dangers to society, the rats or the rabid and
monomaniacal rat exterminators.   In too many communities a
person now risks a police beating and arrest if they walk down
the street with their ball cap on backwards.

While the most visible and newsworthy manifestation is the
televised police beatings of suspects,  such abuses are not
limited to the black and lower socio-economic communities.  The
monitoring of all internal Internet communication by the FBI by
through their �Carnivore� project and external (to the US)
Internet communications by the CIA through their �Echelon�
project, and the frequently abused authority to confiscate a
person's assets on the mere suspicion of drug dealing are even
more egregious and dangerous.  There are too many cases of people
being stopped in airports and having their vacation funds
confiscated just because a police office doesn�t think that
people like them (too dark, talk �funny,� or too many vowels in
their names) should have so much money.

Our elected representative bear full responsibility for these
actions and situations as they keep funding the organizations and
agencies that engage in these activities.  Neither the
Philadelphia Police department, the CIA nor the FBI has an
independent source of revenue.  Appropriations must be passed
every year by the �elected representatives of the people.�   Thus
it is futile to attempt to work within the traditional political
system as you are simply dealing with a sock puppet on the right
hand of the establishment commonly called the Republican party or
a similar sock puppet on the left hand, publicly know as the
Democratic party.  

We have allowed a well intentioned drive toward �professionalism�
in these and many other law enforcement and justice agencies to
degenerate into �careerism� and the evolution of  an
�us-against-them elite� mind-set by their members.

An axiom that it is well to remember is �if you don�t get what
you want, you will get what you deserve,� and this applys to
every group no matter their skin color or creed.  

After watching and participating in 30 years of  effort to reform
and rejuvenate a number of existing public and private
organizations, I must conclude that this is largely impossible
and if a basic change is desired , these organizations must be
abolished and totally new organizations and agencies, with no
ties to the old, must be established.   Of course, these new
agencies will in time become as corrupt, elitist, parochial, and
isolated from the community as the ones they replaced, and so
must be replaced in their turn.

If you are truly serious about doing something about the problems
within your community including the problems of false arrest,
fabricated evidence, suborned testimony, police abuse (all of
which never seem to get the actual career criminals off the
streets, possibly because they are in the limousines) as well as
the use of zoning laws to prevent the establishment of viable
local economies composed of owner operated businesses under local
control, then the only effective course of action is to abolish
the root cause of the problem, that is the municipality of
Philadelphia and form a number of smaller communities controlled
by their residents.   The cry from the existing power elite /
establishment will go up that this is �impossible� and if not
impossible then  �highly irresponsible,� but the suburbs do
exactly this, the sun continues to shine, and life goes on.   

As you will effectively be ending an occupation by a foreign
power, I suggest that some sort of �De-Nazification� court be
established to consider the records and personalities of  all
individuals who will seek employment in the new agencies that
were employed by the current government to prevent the hiring of
known sociopaths and collaborators.   A major problem is that
many of the more technically competent will have to be
disqualified because of their demonstrated readiness to �follow
any order I am given.� 

George