Pepper Spray at UC-Davis Goes Deeper than Just “Police Pigs” Doing Bad Things

24 November 2011

My ex-cop’s perspective

Video of the obviously unjustified police pepper spraying at the University of California at Davis raises social questions that merit thought.

As a former police Patrol supervisor (and a former UC-Davis student), I wonder about the anti-Constitutional insanity ran through the UC-Davis Police Department, when Lt. Pike stolidly walked to and fro, spraying non-violent protesters with oleoresin capsicum (essentially a derivative of cayenne-like peppers).

Were this an isolated incident, we could ignore its social importance. But Pike’s excessive use of force at Davis does not stand alone.

Admittedly, it is not the forceful overreaction itself that is so symbolically objectionable in this instance. After all, no armored vehicles ran over anyone. The campus police didn’t resort to shooting people for no good reason. And no one loosed biting dogs.

Instead, it is the curious (apparently) premeditated decision from the campus’ Chief of Police and perhaps the University’s probably incompetent Chancellor that raise eye-opening questions about the state of democracy in the United States.

Lt. Pike’s distinctively cavalierly casual authoritarian march inadvertently symbolized a lot of what is wrong with our society. This was not an “in the heat of the moment” police overreaction. This was “The Man” doing something he anticipated getting away with.

Why is it that “we” let obviously power-hungry clowns call the shots that dilute Freedom into the equivalent of sewer water?

Political liberal Paul Rosenberg juxtaposed two aspects of America’s alleged right to freedom of speech in an insightful way

Rosenberg’s thesis about the state of free speech in America is an important one:

For the 1%, "money is speech", an absurd proposition that effectively transforms democracy into plutocracy.

But for the 99%, actual speech, along with the closely-linked right of assembly, is subject to all sorts of restrictions as to "time, place and manner".

If you “got” the money, you can pretty much do whatever you want in buying democratic institutions.

However, if you lack a fat wallet or purse, you are told where, when, and how you can express your discontent — and then all without having any discernible effect on the allegedly democratic bodies that you’re hoping to influence.

That’s why the Occupy Movement is so outraged.

It’s as if the Rich-Guy Few can run the country to their benefit, but all the rest of us are powerless to prevent their avaricious ploys and the harm those do us.

How does Pike’s Pepper Puffing make this point? — Look at who’s still in charge

“Cayenne” Katehi (as I call her) is arguably so divorced from the real social meaning of education that she’s not genuinely competent to make sound decisions on its direction.

Paul Rosenberg observed that Chancellor Linda Katehi is a member of the top socioeconomic One Percent and “an overt supporter of police repression on campus.”

Citation

Rosenberg, Pepper spray nation, Al Jazeera (24 November 2011)

Is Rosenberg over the top in his criticism?

Perhaps a little. Without providing readers any context, Rosenberg stated that the Greece-born Chancellor Katehi supported a law that returned Greek police to Greek campuses, which in turn led to the violent repression of student opposition to Greece’s economic austerity measures.

Without more facts, that criticism seems a bit extreme to me.

But on the other hand, Rosenberg’s basic institutional criticisms of the University of California system are legitimate.

Where does “Cayenne” Linda stand in the socioeconomic hierarchy? — the Top One Percent

Rosenberg noted that Chancellor Katehi makes $400,000 in salary alone, not counting job benefits and income from various patents, or her husband’s UC-Davis salary. (Nepotism, we can infer, for the wealthy.)

In contrast, he said, California’s governor — who arguably has the much more demanding and important job — makes less than $175,000 annually.

Humorously (in the wry sense), Rosenburg mentions that Katehi’s salary was bumped upward by 27 percent at the same time that student fees were hiked upward 32 percent and the number of their class choices were reduced.

The inexplicable lack of correlation between the two trends is the key to understanding what’s going on.

The people who are in charge at Davis are the same subtle robbers who use the nation’s entire Bottom Ninety-Nine Percent as their feeding trough.

Who supervises “Cayenne” Katehi? — You got it, her cronies in the Top One Percent

Like journalist Robert Scheer, who wrote about New York Mayor Bloomberg’s suppression of the Occupy Movement, Rosenberg turns our attention to who the “powers that be” in the Davis context really are.

He selected just a few samples from the Regents of the University of California:

Russell Gould, a former Senior VP of Wachovia Bank; . . . Sherry Lansing, former Chair and CEO of Paramount Pictures.

Others include Richard C. Blum, president of his own investment firm and husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein; Eddie Island, former VP for McDonnell-Douglas; Norman Pattiz, founder and chair emeritus of Westwood One, America's largest radio network company.

What do these Fatter-than-Fat Cats care about in the University of California context?

Not education, thinks Rosenberg:

In short, rather than the university existing to serve the students, it's the other way round.

From the Board of Regents' point of view, the students are - above all else - a revenue stream to secure Wall Street funding. Hardly a surprise, really, when you consider the makeup of the Board.

Once a student at Davis myself, I tend to agree with Rosenberg’s statement.

The moral? — If we put robbers in charge, we’re gonna be robbed

There is very little that is attractive about greed, serfdom, and authoritarian repression.

Unrestrained capitalism might be an acceptable system were it successful in elevating the economic boats of most of the citizenry’s effort-makers. But it’s not.

Instead, as we’ve repeatedly seen historically, unmodified avarice elevates the boats of those who have the most at the expense of virtually everyone else. That’s not the American Dream.

It is either time to give these materialist pin-souls the boot, or to regulate them, so that they keep their excessively self-serving and greedy eyes on what is actually important to the overwhelmingly most of us.

PeteFree.com

Pepper Spray at UC-Davis Goes Deeper than Just “Police Pigs” Doing Bad Things