Tea Parties You May Have Missed

In September 2005, roughly a week after Hurricane Katrina ripped into the Gulf Coast, a group of New Orleans police officers discovered the burned shell of a car sitting on an earthen levee overlooking the bloated Mississippi River. Inside the scorched sedan, scattered across the back seat, lay black ashes and bones. Human bones. A charred skull, shards of rib, an arm bone, clumps of roasted flesh. Equipped with a digital camera, one cop clicked off a string of photos of the tableau. Eventually, the remains were stuffed into five red plastic bags and hauled to a temporary morgue in the tiny town of St. Gabriel, some seventy miles up the road from New Orleans, autopsy records show. At the St. Gabriel facility, a team of rescue workers and forensic pathologists gave the collection of body fragments a number — 06-00189— and began trying to answer a pair of intertwined questions: who was this man, and how did he die? Dr. Kevin Whaley, a forensic pathologist, had an immediate suspicion about the latter. "My first reaction was that it was a homicide," recalls Whaley, a Virginia state medical examiner who went to Louisiana as part of a federal disaster response team. "When I heard he was found in a burned car I thought that was a classic homicide scenario: you kill someone and burn the body to get rid of the evidence."

Not a bad lead in for a story but according to a recent documentary on Frontline it apparently happens all the time. And most recently in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s a sad story to be sure but this sort of thing always does end on the dark side of history.

This isn’t about national politics in the U.S., the Republican v. Democrat kind. It is at a very local level and something that is quite basic to any organized society. The subject is the protection of the individual from those who violate the law. The setting could be in the work place, in a business relationship or dealings with local or state governments. All of these examples have one thing in common: there is a victim and a perpetrator.

In most organized societies there are laws or standards of behavior that are deemed appropriate. These standards are usually based on a consensus. Killing another person is except in cases of war or self-defense is an extreme example of behavior that violates acceptable standards of conduct. In war, killing of others is sanctioned by the State. Self-defense is more of a judgment call.

Some but not all harmful actions that are self inflected are sometimes referred to as victimless crimes. I am not discussing any of these examples of inappropriate behavior here. Indeed what I want to focus on are crimes of the State, in the United States this would mean crimes committed by a state (any one of 50) or by a city or county entity. So in this discussion the perpetrator is a state, county or city and the victim is an individual. In the United States the individual is protected against crimes of state by its Constitution and its amendments. The form of government in the United States then is Federalism.

Acquiring this knowledge is usually part of elementary education. Historically many adults fail to understand its ramifications and in one instance this failure to understand the concept of Federalism lead to a Civil War. One might conclude that the U.S. Civil War has not yet ended. It is generally agreed that the U.S. President who played the most active role in waging and ending the U.S. Civil War was Abraham Lincoln. This is one would think common knowledge but again tens of millions of U.S. residents fail to grasp it.

Police departments are frequently the most serious perpetrators of crimes against individuals. Case studies exist for the Los Angeles Police Department, the New York Police Department; see for example to case of Frank Serpico, the Chicago Police Department and many others. The New Orleans Police Department is the topic of the Frontline documentary previously mentioned as well as in other references cited. Police department corruption isn’t limited to big cities incidentally. This is a subject I will develop in much greater detail at a later date.

In a Federal State like the United States the path of individual recourse against abusive local police departments are the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other Federal Law Enforcement agencies.

In the case of the New Orleans Police Department Federal indictments followed the Katrina related events previously cited.

The salient point in this discussion is that Federalism and the Federal Constitution are designed to protect the individual from abuses of authority as well as crimes of neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist organizations.

How does the Tea Party/Republican Party fit into this picture? Paul Krugman stated it best:

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination. More broadly, if Republicans regain power, they will surely do what they did during the Bush years: they won’t seriously try to address the economy’s troubles; they’ll just use those troubles as an excuse to push the usual agenda, including Social Security privatization. They’ll also surely try to repeal health reform, which would be another twofer, reducing economic security even as it increases long-term deficits. So I find myself almost envying the Japanese. Yes, their performance has been disappointing. But things could have been worse. And the case Democrats now need to make — the case the president finally began to make in Cleveland this week — is that if Republicans regain power, things will indeed be worse. Americans, understandably, are disappointed over, frustrated with and angry about the state of the economy; but disappointment is better than disaster.

Americans are without question the most uninformed, ignorant, unsophisticated, uneducated, uncultured – and primitive – people on the planet. To think they have the capability to choose their leaders and “govern” themselves is frightening. The problem these people face however is the fact they are knowingly in a rapidly declining minority in the U.S. population; white males and those they can influence to be exact.

U.S. Citizens immigrating from other continents and countries tend to be much more tolerant, progressive and liberal than Tea Party antecedents. The old “Tea Party” world is dying and its inhabitants know it; this is a major reason for their desperation mode political behavior we are now seeing.

Their life span though is near its end. Indeed the alternate reality in the demented imagination of these deniers of reason and rationality is a nightmare.

My advice is to be very careful about jumping into another person’s nightmare; you never know where you could end up and eventually everything does end.