The repressive Protect and Serve Act of 2018

03 June 2018

Congress wants to further repress the Black Lives Matter movement

This, by making it a federal offense to knowingly cause, or attempt to cause, serious bodily injury to a law enforcement officer.

Apparently, the 50 states' already harsh treatment of people who have allegedly attacked police is not enough. So, with teary-eyed White Fear in mind, the Senate version of essentially the same bill reportedly tacks on the idea that injuring the cop would become a hate crime.

So, tell me, who's the bad guy again?

Even as a long-time former cop, I agree with the 28 human rights groups that wrote Congress that:

This bill is being contemplated at a time when our country is in the throes of a national policing crisis, with a never-ending stream of police shootings of unarmed African Americans captured on video.

Creating a new, yet superfluous, crime for offenses committed against law enforcement is a particularly disconnected and non-responsive policy choice.

Rather than focusing on policies that address issues of police excessive force, biased policing, and other police practices that have failed these communities, the Protect and Serve Act’s aim is to further criminalize.

This bill will be received as yet another attack on these communities and threatens to exacerbate what is already a discriminatory system of mass incarceration in this country.

Continuing to undermine police-community relations in this manner sows seeds of division, which ultimately threatens public safety and undermines the work of law enforcement.

Congress, that selection of mostly rapacious weasels — including most of the Congressional Black Caucus — is again doing what is parasitically easy, rather than right.

The moral? — We are spiraling into Stalinist-like lunacy

A too evident (minority) strain of police cowardice, combined with open season on African Americans, has produced Congress' call for still more Blue on Black repression.

Chris Hedges' recent words about our rotted culture are appropriate:

It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion.

All the harbingers of collapse are visible:

crumbling infrastructure;

chronic underemployment and unemployment;

the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police;

political paralysis and stagnation;

an economy built on the scaffolding of debt;

nihilistic mass shootings . . . ;

opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year;

an epidemic of suicides;

unsustainable military expansion;

gambling as . . . tool of economic development and . . . revenue;

the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique;

censorship;

the physical diminishing of public institutions . . .

the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert . . . us . . . .

We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death.

A population that rallies around the worst attributes of this nation's deadly corruptions — rather than around its ideals as applied to all people — is a public that does not deserve to be associated with Liberty or God.

Power corrupts. We have in-your-face evidence for that proposition, wherever we turn. And yet our government, and a subservient public, continue to feed logs to Totalitarian Despotism's all-consuming fire.

Gore Vidal's statement is intellectually (though not morally) pertinent:

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since.

PeteFree.com

The repressive Protect and Serve Act of 2018