From The Ramparts

                                                    From The Ramparts

                                                 Junious Ricardo Stanton

                                                     Police State USA

            "For numerous decades the United States has engaged in both high intensive and low intensive counterinsurgency and counterterrorism wars around the globe. But now in the twenty-first century all those same black ops wars have come home to roost right here in the land of the not-so-free. To police state USA all American citizens are the potential enemy. It’s also fair to say that the police in countless jails and prisons have unlawfully beaten and killed thousands of US citizens while in police custody over the years. Sadly, this form of murder in covert black sites where inmates are literally tortured to death takes police state brutality and slaughter to a whole new unprecedented level. And of course those of color and poor are most often the victims. Two years ago it was reported that a black man is killed by police every 28 hours. And with the deaths spiking last year, it’s more apt to be closer to every 24 hours now." Totalitarian Rule in America: False Flags, Secret Prisons, Extrajudicial Assassinations, Media Censorship, The Rounding Up of Alleged “Terrorists” by Joachim Hagopian  http://www.globalresearch.ca/totalitarian-rule-in-america-false-flags-secret-prisons-media-censorship-the-rounding-up-of-alleged-terrorists/5434238

            Three weeks ago I had the pleasure of serving as a moderator for a panel discussion on the Chicago City police  Homan Square detention site where over seven thousand mostly Black and Brown people were illegally detained, often beaten, tortured and held incommunicado from their family and attorneys for days and weeks at a time. The panel consisted of former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Catherine Austin Fitts a former Wall Street investment banker managing partner for Dillion Reed, former Assistant Secretary for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and myself. You can listen to the audio of the discussion on my Soundcloud Internet radio program Akoben which stream at https://soundcloud.com/junious-ricardo-stanton/akoben-12-17-15-catherine-austin-fitts-cynthia-mckinney-junious-ricardo-stanton-solari-report and/or my Digital Underground  On Demand Internet radio program on the Harambee Radio Network http://www.harambeeradio.com click the On Demand Icon and go to 12-20-2015 The Digital Underground Solari Report Catherine Austin Fitts.  We had a robust discussion on the implications of Homan Square and the escalating police state.

            The sad part about this it took a British newspaper The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square to do a multi-month investigative report on Homan Square before people in Chicago and the US even became aware this type of third world, banana republic police state brutality was going on! That has to be one of the top censored stories of 2015!

            Thanks to the distractions and diversions of the corporate mind control apparatus most of us sleep walk through life failing to see what is going on before us or worse pretending not to know what is going on around us.  But many of us know in our heart of hearts the US has always been a paramilitary police state for Native Americans, Africans in America and other people of color. This is a crucial element in this nation's ongoing history of violence, racism/xenophobia and domination that was inextricably woven into the fabric and sinew of both our consciousness and the socio-political reality.

            Every day we hear more and more reports about police shooting white folks, police and federal agents raiding white homes dressed in storm trooper outfits using lethal force on the wrong people the elderly and babies and taking their property via ever escalating "civil asset forfeiture" programs where the feds, state, county and local municipality can confiscate (steal) your property without ever officially charging you with a crime or any wrong doing!!

            That's right in the so called land of the free home of the brave, land of "civil rights" and the sacrosanct notion of property rights, now the state can steal your stuff without cause! And Philadelphia under a Black mayor, Black police commissioner and sheriff  is one of the most egregious cities when it comes to taking our stuff.

            "Under Pennsylvania state law, civil forfeiture depends on preponderance of the evidence. This is a weaker burden of proof than beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the standard used for criminal cases. Little wonder the state earned a D from the Institute for Justice in Policing for Profit, a survey of civil asset forfeiture laws. Some cities in the Keystone State abuse civil forfeiture more than others. City Paper compared Philadelphia County, the largest county in the state, with Allegheny County, which is the second-largest and includes Pittsburgh. Allegheny County had around 200 civil forfeiture cases since 2008. But in just 2011 alone Philadelphia County had 6,500. Incredibly, the City Paper notes that “Los Angeles County, with a population more than six-and-a-half times Philadelphia’s, also successfully sued to keep just $1.2 million in seized assets,” i.e., a fifth of what Philadelphia County seized. http://ij.org/action-post/seize-first-ask-questions-later-philadelphia-police-take-over-6-million-a-year-in-civil-asset-forfeiture/

            Nationwide the statistics are even more egregious. "Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly$4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals." Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014  Investment Watch Nov. 17, 2015

            The United States always has been a armed police state for Black folks but now it is turning on the average white family which is why they are buying guns and stocking up on ammunition. White fear of government gun bans and confiscation is responsible for a massive uptick in gun sales.  "Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country, according to Jurgen Brauer, a professor at Georgia Regents University. These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check. The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits." What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism, Politics, and Calls for Restrictions by GREGOR AISCH and JOSH KELLER DEC. 10, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/10/us/gun-sales-terrorism-obama-restrictions.html

            The ruling class tries to keep us comatose, fearful and docile lest we wake up, rise up and take action against the decadent and crumbling social order. But their plans are backfiring on them as more and more people in the US confess they are more afraid of their government than external terrorist threats. Which is why gun sales are at an all time high with white citizens looking at the police with a distrustful eye. They wonder why the police need all this military equipment when crime is down and why the heavy handed responses to natural disasters, shootings and demonstrations?

            The ruling class propagates a self-serving narrative that the police and military are the good guys holding up American exceptionalism and they are above reproach. But the reality says otherwise.  "But besides direct contradictions to the logic behind institutional myths of heroic cops and dangerous bad guys, what are the implications of this FBI report? First, that police are schizophrenic in their belief that they are in danger (this fear is proven in the recent Ferguson protests and presence of the National Guard). The overzealous militarization of local cops is enough to prove that they might as well be hiding under blankies from the American populace in spite of the fact that violent crime has been dropping for decades. However, considering how well cops are armed and how efficiently the justice system protects them from prosecution for their crimes, they prove to be paranoid. 27 police officers in a country with over 300 million people died last year. Law enforcement deaths-by-murder are included in the 49,851 “assaults” against officers, which means that .05 (half a percent) died as a result of alleged attacks. Crime against cops has dropped to a 50 year low. It’s more dangerous to drive a car than be a cop (this is bolstered by the fact that the number of cops who died in car accidents almost equals the total number of cops murdered 23 to 27). Second, militarization is working for the police. It is not working for the rest of us. Though there is little reliable, official data about the number of people police kill every year, tenuous reports claim it is around 400. This is already almost 15 times more than police who are intentionally killed. However, the 400 figure is a result of 17,000 local police agencies being allowed to self-report. The numbers could be far higher." FBI Report Accidently Exposes the Severity of the Police State http://theantimedia.org/fbi-report-accidentally-exposes-the-severity-of-the-police-state/

            Illegal detentions, physical abuse, asset forfeiture abuse and theft are tips of the iceberg. The US is a police state and has always been one because the European colonists had to keep a weary eye on the indigenous people whose lands they were stealing, the European convicts and indentured servants they were abusing and working to death and the Africans they imported to do the dirty work to enrich the trading companies and later the rich land owners.

            Modern America is a fascist police security state where ordinary citizens are spied upon, targeted for government revenue generating campaigns (like in Ferguson and Philadelphia), where growing numbers of local debtors prisons abound and a national gulag system are used for social control where free or cheap prison labor is used to enrich the state and corporations who run the prisons and prisoner labor manufactures various corporate products. Welcome to Police State USA.

                                                                -30-