Truest statement of the week II

In the wake of events in Ferguson, Missouri, the Obama administration has been exposed as the biggest supplier – more like “pusher” – of military equipment to local and state police departments in the nation’s history. The president’s operatives have displayed remarkable creativity in finding ways to shovel record quantities of weapons, vehicles and gear into the hands of cops, who seem increasingly anxious to prove their killing skills. More than a year before Michael Brown was extrajudicially executed on the street at high noon, the Huffington Post’s Radley Balko described how Obama has left no rock unturned nor federal agency untapped in his quest to transform every police department into a military unit, ready in an instant to do battle with – whom?
We know whom: Black people, mainly young and male, America’s public enemy number one ever since the white settler nation began running out of natives to kill. No sooner had official apartheid ended, in the Sixties, than white society demanded the imposition of what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow – a mass Black Incarceration State capable of waging constant, preemptive counterinsurgency warfare against an entire people. The Black Panther Party was right all along: in Black America, the police are an occupation army. Obama, like his predecessors, has simply been taking care of the troops.


-- Glen Ford, "The Treasonous 32: Four-Fifths of Black Caucus Help Cops Murder Their Constituents" (Black Agenda Report).