Gary
Younge and Bernard
Harcourt have good pieces in the Guardian about the "new
normal" of America's militarized society, as exemplified by
armed occupation of Chicago by a staggering array of "security"
forces.
Younge
notes the bitter irony of the word "security" in a city
where the poor are being subjected to ever-increasing levels of
violence both from private predators and public "protectors":
The
dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this
weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more
striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through
security; in much of Chicago neither exists.
…
The murder rate in Chicago in the first
three months of this year increased by more than 50% compared with
the same period last year, giving it almost twice the murder rate
of New York. And the manner in which the city is policed gives
many as great a reason to fear those charged with protecting them
as the criminals. By the end of July last year police were
shooting people at the rate of six a month and killing one person
a fortnight.
This
violence, be it at the hands of the state or gangs, is both
compounded and underpinned by racial and economic disadvantage.
The poorer the neighbourhood the more violent, the wealthier the
safer. This is no coincidence. Much like the Nato summit – and
the G8 summit that preceded it – the system is set up not to
spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos
but to contain and punish it.
Younge
then gives us a few of the local fruits of this global system:
Chicago
illustrates how the developing world is everywhere, not least in
the heart of the developed. The mortality rate for black infants
in the city is on a par with the West Bank; black life expectancy
in Illinois is just below Egypt and just above Uzbekistan. More
than a quarter of Chicagoans have no health insurance, one in five
black male Chicagoans are unemployed and one in three live in
poverty. Latinos do not fare much better.
Harcourt,
meanwhile, focuses on the mechanics of the lockdown imposed on
Chicago:
As
one commentator suggests, Chicagoans are experiencing the "New
Military Urbanism in Nato-Occupied Chicago". The extensive
nature of these security measures (as reported by the US secret
service), road closures and pedestrian restrictions included
dozens of road closures (at least 7.5 miles of closed roads, by my
calculation) …
Eight-foot
tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter
and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as
well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement
agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out
in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at
the ready. Philadelphia Police Department is sending over
reinforcements to help out; Chicago has also asked for recruits
from police departments in Milwaukee and Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
NC. Meanwhile, F-16 warplanes "screamed through the skies as
part of a pre-summit defense exercise" and helicopters
hovered incessantly. ….
Plus,
the Chicago Police Department will be deploying its two, new,
expensive long-range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons –
which it bought at $20,000 a pop. These are the type of devices
that were used by the Pittsburgh police to deliver high-pitched
alarm tones during the G20 summit meeting there in 2009.
Then,
there is the "secret suburban Chicago" police control
center where "officials from more than 40 different agencies
sit side by side with a giant central screen before them," as
reported by the Chicago Sun Times. From the multi-agency command
center, all different types of federal, state and local law
enforcement can "view live video feeds from security cameras
that are already up and running throughout the city".
Harcourt
makes the telling point that Mayor Rahm Emanuel denied numerous
protest permits and imposed other restrictions on the grounds that
the expression of free speech by demonstrators would cause
"inconveniences to traffic and ordinary businesses" --
this, after closing off more than seven square miles of the city's
commercial area himself. He makes the even more telling point that
these hyper-draconian measures will, in many cases, stay in place
once the power-players have finished their meaningless
jaw-flapping and returned to their well-wadded entrenchments at
home:
Third,
and finally, all of this is, sadly, here to stay. Nato will come
and go, but the new anti-protest laws, the new riot-gear, the two
LRAD sound cannons, and all the normalization of this police state
… that will be with us for a long time.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment