Baltimore,
Police Violence and Economic Justice
by ROB URIE
“We
need more police, we need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat
offenders. The ‘three-strikes-and-you’re-out’ for violent offenders has to be
part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long
as it takes to keep them off the streets.”
Hillary
Clinton 1994
The
Economic Backdrop
American politics
is the realm of Immaculate Conception where actual policies and accumulated
history disappear behind a veil of personal characteristics and unrelated
acts. The (mis)leadership class pretends that ruling class machinations— trade
agreements, financial deregulation, imperial wars, surveillance and policing
have no bearing on social outcomes. American cities bear the imprint of these
policies plus the residuals of slavery, genocide and the particulars of
Western capitalism that have embedded history into current social relations.
This is to argue that the individualist explanation of Western history may be
interesting for those so-inclined, but it fails as description in every
conceivable dimension.
Freddie Gray. Original Image source: cnn.com |
Political
explanations of public policies like trade agreements and financial
deregulation put a political face on fundamentally economic arrangements. When
Bill and Hillary Clinton instituted the ‘tough-on-crime’
policies that so exacerbated mass incarceration there was a political
explanation— pandering to White suburban voters’ manufactured fears of a Black
urban underclass to garner votes, but the policies tied closely to American
economic history as well. From slavery to convict leasing to urban
dispossession, racial repression has produced economic value that has been
expropriated. The Clinton’s neoliberal trade policies exacerbated the urban
industrial exodus while deregulation of finance ‘monetized’ Black wealth for
the taking. Seemingly unrelated ‘political’ policies often have economic
explanations.
Economic history
ties America’s cities to political and economic hierarchy through the
dimensions of this hierarchy. Washington to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New
York was the land route North for Southern Blacks fleeing slavery. This was
also one of the routes to industrial jobs following WWII. Sequential
(engineered) oil crises in the 1970s roiled industrial America. In the late
1970s and early 1980s Federal Reserve policies decimated the industrial
economy by increasing the value of the U.S. dollar. Bill Clinton passed NAFTA
(North American Free Trade Agreement) and his deregulation of Wall Street
provided the money needed to finance the relocation of a large portion of the
U.S. industrial base overseas. None of these policies were crafted by the inner-city
residents.
Modern day
Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago have neighborhoods left behind by
policy decisions that decimated the economic bases that once supported them.
When there were jobs people worked. When the jobs left people either stopped
working or found other, less remunerative work in the service sector. The
housing boom and bust monetized inner-city houses until the bubble burst.
Rather than forcing Wall Street to clean up the mess inner city residents were
left with their former wealth in the hands of bankers and an economy that
imploded in the Great Recession. While this story is full of malefactors, Bill
Clinton has major policy responsibility for mass incarceration, for neoliberal
trade deals and for bank deregulation.
The bankers who destroyed Baltimore discuss their bonuses with Congress. Image source: google images. |
The
Murder of Freddie Gray
The wholly
implausible storyline that Freddie Gray severed
his own spine being put out by the Baltimore police is a Rorschach test
for social accountability. The political strategy of officialdom is to peel
away those who will accept any explanation in favor of police actions, no
matter how implausible, to marginalize protestors. That a significant portion
of the population, both Black and White, wants to believe that the police
always act in good faith illustrates a preconception that will only be
effectively challenged through political estrangement. The fabrication adds insult
to Freddie Gray’s murder and as such, to the conduct that the Baltimore police
department needs to be held to account for. Freddie Gray was murdered in
police custody. Technocratic explanations of the particulars only serve to
obscure this basic truth.
When videotape
revealed the brutal
beating the Los Angeles police inflicted on Rodney King the defense was
able to convince a jury and a substantial portion of America that Mr. King had
assaulted the police ‘batons’ with his head. One might wonder how graphic
footage of a group of cops beating Rodney King within an inch of his life in
plain public view could be construed otherwise. The tactic used was similar to
the comments from officialdom, including the Black (mis)leadership class,
toward protestors in Baltimore. Mr. King was alleged to have been in an angel
dust rage that made him impervious to pain and to rational thought— he was an
‘out-of-control’ Black man. Likewise the protestors in Baltimore were deemed
irrational ‘thugs,’ criminals with no legitimate right to political action.
Graph (1) above: the official storyline has unknown forces producing intractable poverty in American cities when many of the forces are quite visible. Mass incarceration is racially targeted and causes wholesale immiseration by precluding meaningful employment. Wall Street’s subprime lending fiasco racially targeted neighborhoods and emptied them of residents as local wealth was transferred to the bank accounts of the already wealthy. It is paradoxical that public discussion of ‘looting’ in Baltimore has focused on angry citizens without deep discussion of what they are angry about. Home foreclosures in Baltimore (Graph (1) above) have followed the national housing boom – bust because Wall Street made predatory mortgage loans targeting neighborhoods of color. Rather than charging bankers with making fraudulent, predatory loans the citizens of Baltimore were forced to bear the consequences of banker malfeasance. Source: Baltimore Homeownership Preservation Coalition.
In telling form,
officialdom’s concern for property overshadowed care for the life of Freddie
Gray and the many other Black, Brown and poor White youth and men murdered by
the police. These misplaced priorities are thinly veiled socio-cide, concern
with what can be replaced in place of what can’t be. The rapid vilification of
protestors was accompanied by Immaculate Conception politics, denial of
responsibility for the circumstances being protested. However, made apparent
by events in Baltimore is that police murders only enter the American
consciousness when buildings and police cars burn. Assertions that peaceful
protests are the only legitimate form face the burden of history and official
hypocrisy. Moral suasion through peaceful protest assumes a capacity that
divergent class interests render improbable.
Democracy Now! illustrated
one such experiential divide when a Baltimore mother refused to join local
youth who had volunteered to clean a burned CVS store because, as she put it,
the police need to be made to understand that they can’t murder Black youth
with impunity. Left unexplored, and apparently unconsidered by the youth who
saw the local CVS outlet as ‘their’ store, is that through direct purchase and
their Caremark consulting business CVS has put hundreds of locally owned
pharmacies in inner city neighborhoods out of business and replaced them with
minimum wage jobs and extractive economic practices. Likewise, the Ace Cash
Express that was burned is a payday lender whose business model is to make
usurious loans in poorly banked communities under terms that lead to permanent
debt servitude.
State police or police state? Original image source: spaulforrest.com. |
National
Mis-Leadership Meets Local Mis-Leadership
When President
Obama called
protesters in Baltimore ‘criminals and thugs’ he neglected to mention the
class divisions that have as his major campaign contributors the Wall Street
bankers who engineered the housing boom – bust still devastating Baltimore and
whose subsidiaries are the payday lenders who destroy lives and neighborhoods
there. Some fair portion of these campaign contributors would have been
‘criminals’ if Mr.
Obama’s Justice Department had not shielded them from prosecution for
their crimes. The term ‘thugs’ is widely used as racist code for Black and
Brown youth and could be more appropriately applied to American drone
operators so regularly slaughtering wedding parties across the Middle East.
And the term most certainly applies to the police who murder Black and Brown
youth with alarming regularity and officially sanctioned impunity.
Much of the
reaction to events in Baltimore harkens to the late FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover’s quip that “justice
is incidental to law and order.” Implied is that justice may be set to the
side if order can be maintained through systematic injustice. The conceptual
problem is that, as with President Obama’s and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie
Rawlings-Blake’s slander of protestors as ‘thugs,’ class interests lie behind
class-based policing. Heavily armed, militarized police could storm Wall
Street (as metaphor for geographically dispersed finance) and corporate executive
suites kicking in doors, handcuffing everyone they meet and opening fire
on those who aren’t immediately compliant under the same theorized
justification they have for doing so in Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago,
Philadelphia or Los Angeles. That they don’t is evidence that neither law nor
justice is behind police actions in poor communities.
The economic crises
affecting communities of color in Baltimore and elsewhere tie directly to
government policies like trade agreements that benefit financiers, upper class
‘professionals,’ industrialists and the owners of capital. Official
indifference to the social consequences of industrial relocation has produced
economic dead zones in major cities since the 1960s. Wall Street’s predatory
mortgages decimated black wealth in cities like Baltimore and with it the
capacity for economic investment. Elite chides that citizens are destroying
their future prospects through rebellion provide cover for the economic forces
they control for their own benefit. In the last decade Wall Street has
destroyed more of urban America than citizen rebellions ever could.
The problem of the
economic capture of the mis-leadership class suggests that political
resolution is unlikely to come through the ballot box. Blacks have joined this
mis-leadership class with co-optation being the singular result. American
political economy is set up to perpetuate existing class relations with the
racial residual of history as a component. Martin King began addressing
economic justice with the understanding that it is a prerequisite to social
justice. He was murdered shortly thereafter. The interest in ‘property’ in the
face of the loss of life at police hands is clear indication of what drives
official concerns. Therein lies the political paradox— economics is the more
dangerous dimension of social injustice to address but it is also the most
necessary. The U.S. has subverted democratic movements and invaded countries
to prevent implementation of a minimum wage. But how is life possible without
a living wage?
Rob Urie is an
artist and political economist.
Weekend Edition May 1-3, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment. Peace, NB