It would seem sadists and bullies are deliberately recruited as police officers these days and the citizenry at large is the enemy. In New Orleans, where citizens were victimized not only by the police—who organized roving gangs looting apartments and stealing cars—but also by federal bureaucrats and Blackwater security goons, the object is to send a message: if you resist, if you speak out against corruption and sadistic personalities and behavior, we’ll kick your ass. Of course, considering the militarization of the police around the country—and as we know, the job of the military is to wreck things and kill people—this sort of victimization of the populace should be expected. In many parts of the country, the police are trained to consider the populace at large as the enemy. How else to explain tasered old folks in wheelchairs and nine years olds handcuffed and hauled off like burly crack dealers?

It’s no mistake police departments recruit and hire former soldiers. Of course, far too many police recruiters are too stupid to know what the elite have in mind for us—increasing violence and desensitization to violence—and are simply hiring like-minded thugs into their ranks, violence-prone degenerates who were brainwashed by the military and are now unleashing their training and indoctrination (it’s fun to snipe Iraqi school kids from a distance and place bets on it) on their fellow citizens. As Chris White (a former Marine) writes, drill instructors attempted to convert him into a “killing machine… by removing my undesirable civilian traits, such as individuality and the inhibition against killing other human beings, and inserting Marine Corps traits, such as anti-individuality for the sake of a team work ethic, and, most importantly, the ability and even desire, to kill other human beings.”

[C]ivilians are molded into Marines through a logical, systematic process of intense mental and physical indoctrination. The goal of this is to produce troops capable of following orders with minimal agency of their own, efficiently enough to be utilized as a tool of the state, whether the Marine agrees with the orders or not. The latter part of this statement should beg the following questions: “If the war is just, why so much intense indoctrination? Shouldn’t the average patriotic citizen naturally exhibit enough willingness to fight for his/her country if they feel the need to support a war in the first place?” I recognize that in order for the military to function, a certain level of combat and physical training is necessary, but the vast majority of boot camp is dedicated to mental indoctrination aimed at control by superiors, which leaves open the question of whether our foreign policy is indeed justifiable enough to motivate people to fight when it is necessary.

In fact, White was told by a military recruiter “that I could do that [serve as a Marine] for four years and maybe gain the necessary credentials to become a police officer.” But why would a Marine, trained to kill people and wreck things—and systematically desensitized to the human cost of such behavior—be considered a likely candidate to become a police officer, who we are told (or once were) are employed to serve the interests of the community?

Is it possible the police—increasingly militarized, trained in SWAT-tactics, often toting automatic weapons instead of sidearms—are not serving our interests at all and are in fact serving the interests of the sociopaths who pass themselves off as our rulers? Is it simply coincidence Bush wants to use the military in response to natural disasters and hypothetical outbreaks of disease? Is it possible the government wants to inure us to the presence of the military in our neighborhoods and make sure we get accustomed to—even demand—cops who were six months or a year ago killing Iraqis and Afghan “insurgents”?

“In earlier eras it was possible for armed uprisings to overcome the numbers and force of the army and other defenders of ruling elites,” notes Brian Martin (Uprooting War, Freedom Press, 1984). “But for many decades it has been the case that such an uprising has no chance against the sophisticated weaponry used by military and police forces.”

It won’t be long now before conditions are ripe for an “uprising” on the part of average American citizens (many armed because they believe the Second Amendment means what it says) and the ruling elite—neolib globalists habituated to massive thievery and, to paraphrase the robber baron Jay Gould, accustomed to hiring “one half of the working class to kill the other half” (in the third world, this would be one half of the desperate poor killing the other half of the desperate poor)—will eventually get around to pillaging America (an act already well under way as once decently paid factory workers are now working at Wal-Mart because “free traders” have shipped their jobs to a labor gulag in China or some hell-hole in Asia).

Cops wear flak jackets, commando helmets, and tote assault-weapons because, the corporate media tells us incessantly, a new generation of criminals has “out-gunned” them. It’s common knowledge your average property criminal is not running around with a SMG II submachine gun or even a Glock pistol. “In truth, so-called ‘assault weapons’ account for a small percentage of police homicides. From 1975 through 1992, there were 1,534 police officers felon,’” explains David B. Kopel of the Second Amendment Project. “Police gun seizure data from around the nation finds that ‘assault weapons’ account for less than 2% of guns seized by the police; more typically, they account for less than 1%.” In other words, the police—increasingly recruited from the ranks of former soldiers trained to kill people and wreck things—have most of the heavy weapons, not a handful of criminals, most who are drug addicts terrorizing and robbing because they need a fix (and who wouldn’t be if we had sane drug and rehabilitation policies in this country).

It is a well-documented fact the CIA imported drugs into America over the last fifty years, thus earning the spook agency the moniker “the Cocaine Import Agency.” Not only does this illegal and immoral activity fund off-the-books covert operations (Iran-Contra is an infamous instance), it is also an example of the classic Hegelian dialectic: theses, antitheses, and synthesis. CIA creates a drug problem, allows the government to propose a “solution” (more police-state powers) and ends up destroying the Constitution and erecting a surveillance and police state (a contrivance not designed to stop drug abuse but rather to spy on and control the citizenry). So-called Islamic terrorism—which has supplanted the “drug and crime epidemic”—operates along the same lines.

Sure, the old man beaten by thuggish police in New Orleans may be considered racism—because he is black and the police (and FBI agents) are white—but if we take off on this predictable (and politically correct) route, the real issue will be obscured: militarized police are here to bark orders at us and beat the dickens out of us (and many of them like to beat people up, even kill them, thanks to their military training) if we don’t follow orders—for instance, take our mercury-laden vaccines, submit to be electronically chipped like a household pet, fork over DNA, or make the mistake of “looting” food and water after Bush has imposed martial law and a curfew because a virus 39,000 times more virulent than the average run-of-the-mill seasonal flu has escaped from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta—and on purpose, like anthrax “escaped” from a military lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Robert Davis will likely receive a pay-off and the police will be wrist-slapped—and we will go back to sleep, most of us believing the police are here to protect us. Increasingly, however, the police are not here to help or protect us—soldier-cops are here to impose order in the wake of some manufactured chaos engineered to usher in a brave new neoliberal future, where America is a slave colony, same as China and much of the rest of the world—where neolib policies have taken their hideous toll—is a slave colony.