My family lives about a mile from Saturday's carnage. I am familiar with the scene and have driven past that corner a hundred times. Its a neighborhood littered with fast food joints, liquer stores and store-front churches.
The killing of what is now four Oakland Police Officers and the death of their assailant are symptoms of the complete and utter failure of not just criminal justice policy but capitalism itself.
This crisis will not be addressed or resolved with the change from Conservative to Liberal President.
The loss of a family member goes deep and there is much tragedy surrounding Saturday’s events.
However, one small question has not been taken up by the media. Why did not one of the four police officers live in our city of Oakland. They each lived 10 or 20 miles from Oakland. We can only assume that they were hostile to living in Oakland but okay to policing Oakland. This is not why these men were killed, but it is a part of the whole problem, a small but relevant part.
There so many factors that led to the death of five people on Saturday. Individual so-called morality has nothing to do with it. All of the hallmarks of modern US capitalism flowed into this scene of bloody carnage. The continued unresolved problem of poverty in Oakland; the racist segregation of neighborhoods; the overcrowded prison system; the continuous dismantling of public education and then there is the absence in America of political opposition to capitalism.
The big business media will toy with all the superficial causesof Saturday's event to the extent that they even attempt to look at the causes of this event. But they cannot conclude what must be concluded: that this will happen again because capitalism itself has created this environment in its struggle to divide and rule over the population of this country.
No comments:
Post a Comment