By Chris Hedges

December 02, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -  The police forces in impoverished urban communities, equipped with military-grade weapons and empowered to harass and kill largely at will, along with mass incarceration, are the principal tools for the social control of the poor. There is little pretense of justice and even less of protection and safety. The corporate state and our oligarchic rulers fear a backlash from those they abandoned in deindustrialized enclaves across the country, what Malcolm X called our “internal colonies.” The daily brutality and terror keep the poor, especially poor people of color, in bondage. On average, more than 1,100 people, or one every eight hours, almost all unarmed, are killed every year by police in the United States. These killings are not accidents. They are not the results of a failed system. The system works exactly as it is designed to work. And until the system of corporate power is destroyed, nothing will change for the poor, or the rest of Americans.

Every police reform going back decades, including due process, Miranda rights and protocols for filing charges, has only resulted in increased police power and resources. Our national conversation on race and crime, which refuses to confront the economic, social and political systems of exploitation and white supremacy, has been a whitewash. The vast pools of the unemployed and underemployed, especially among people of color, are part of the design of predatory corporate capitalism. And so are the institutions, especially the police, the courts, the jails and the prisons, tasked with maintaining social control of those the system has cast aside.

The elites are acutely aware that without police terror and the U.S. prison system, which holds 25% of the world’s prison population, there would be intense social unrest. Outrage over the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Eric Garner in New York City, Walter Scott in Charleston, S.C., Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Laquan McDonald in Chicago—fanned by video recordings or social media exposure—may have led to the rise of groups such as Black Lives Matter but it has done nothing, and will do nothing, to curb police abuse. More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minority members as police officers, a better probation service, equitable fines and special units to investigate police abuse are public relations gimmicks. No one in power has any intention of loosening the vise. Authorities are too afraid of what might happen.

Tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the loss of industrial, unionized jobs with sustainable incomes, and the collapse of public institutions have decimated city and county budgets. Police departments are used to make up lost revenue through the constant imposition of fines on the poor, often for manufactured crimes such as blocking pedestrian traffic (which means standing on a sidewalk), drinking from an open container or selling tax-free cigarettes. Arrests and consequent fines for such violations are called “quality of life” actions. Poverty has forced many, especially the young, to derive an income from the illegal economy. The lack of work in the legitimate economy and the bottomless need for governmental revenue have turned policing into a sustained war on the underclass. It was in this war that Garner, attempting to provide for his family by selling tax-free cigarettes, became a repeated target of police harassment and was eventually choked to death by police officers on July 17, 2014, in Staten Island.

Matt Taibbi’s book “I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street” uses the killing of Garner to expose the architecture of state repression. None of this repression and abuse, as Taibbi illustrates, is accidental, and none of it will be fixed until the social, political and economic injustices perpetrated upon the poor by corporate power are reversed. [Click here to see Hedges interview Taibbi.]