Philadephia had the highest murder rate among the nation's 10 largest cities last year, and violent crime and property crime grew at a rate that exceeded the national average, up about 5.9 percent.
http://www.philly.com/...
Some criminologists say the statistics tell a tale of a nation cleaved along lines of populations.
Violent crime is up in cities with populations larger than 250,000, which have lost about 10 percent of their law enforcement resources since 2000, said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
In the rest of the country where police forces have not shrunk, he said, crime rates are steady. "I know people want their tax cuts, but a few hundred dollars in extra taxes seems small when you're staring down the barrel of a gun," said Fox.
This is happening because our priorities were elsewhere, funding a disastrous 'war of choice' all the while maintaining enormous tax cuts that benefitted the top one percent of our population while stressing out the other ninety-nine percent. Money is available for war and the rich, but not for the simple necessities of daily life. A cynic might call this an oligarchical arrangement, a deeper cynic, a Banana Republic.
I bet you won't find many Republicans or millionaires among the citizens of Philadelphia forced to patrol their own streets.
Hundreds of volunteer peacekeepers began patrolling some of the toughest streets in Philadelphia on Tuesday night. During the next few weeks, organizers hope to deploy thousands of men to report and deter crime.
But questions remain about how the unarmed volunteers will interact with neighbors and police, and whether the peacekeepers will be safe in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country.
http://www.npr.org/...
This is what being on the losing end of a class war looks like. Couple the disastrous effects of the conservative tax cuts on our infrastructure with our childish belief in the efficacy of violence, our 'war of choice' and our dangerously bloated Pentagon budget, and you have a nearly classic outline of imperial decline.
The choices that led to these consequence might have been different, however-- dramatically different -- had anyone bothered to talk seriously and honestly about what prosecuting a disastrous war combined with billions in tax cuts would mean for our citizenry. But those issues were never brought up--our journalists were cowed. Name a major news network that questioned the oncoming debacle of the Iraqi war--or mentioned the danger of warring while slashing federal revenue. It's not like there wasn't an abundance of evidence that the war and the tax cuts were both unnecessary and would bring disaster. Indeed, some of the major proponents of the war--Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice --had earlier in their careers advocated against any such intervention with Iraq. Others, like Donald Rumsfeld, had worked to arm and support Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran.
Why was none of this more broadly reported and debated? It was public record, afterall. You can find Dick Cheney's original position on Iraq here.
Dick Cheney more than a decade ago defended the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn't be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting "bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time, made the observations answering audience questions after a speech to the Discovery Institute in August 1992, nearly 18 months after U.S. forces routed the Iraqi army and liberated Kuwait.
Before 9/11, both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice insisted that Saddam Hussien was not a threat, recorded in multiple places.
Both Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.
In Cairo, on February 24 2001, Powell said: "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.
So why was none of this reported? I'll hazard a guess: it's not merely journalistic laziness. It's that nothing was perceived to be at stake by those who had the power to stop it, or report it. Nothing really of consequence so the feeling went, was going on. Indeed, the attitude from the beginning was that the Iraqi war would be trivial. That actually became a central argument for going to war: it would be "a walk in the park" as Paul Wolfowitz was reported to have said.
Even given the silly sanguinity of such a view, how can someone be so remote from the consequences of a bombardment on a civilian population as to call it a "walk in the park"...where, one must ask, is the moral imagination? A sense of empathy?
We like to believe we are a good people. Many of us are willing to make a sacrifice for the common good. This sacrifice can come in the form of financial sacrifice as well as the physical. Yet while our soldiers courageously do their 'duty'--and many of them die, doing it -- our upper class, that top one percent, refuse to give back a red cent to help fund our police, our levees or even their own war. Indeed, that class, both our politicians and the money behind them, seem cruelly remote from the lives of the middle class and poor who make up the vast majority of this nation.
This problem crosses party lines as well. Some of the most vociferous advocates for war--almost any war, it seems--can be found in the squalid membership of the DLC. Many of these luminaries also signed onto the violent and extremist PNAC pledge that advocates the general fomenting of war in the Middle East as a policy agenda. But it's not just that crowd. Let us remember we had a Democratic Secretary of State who once blithely commented "What's the point in having this superb military if we can't use it?" and even more callously noted that "it was a hard choice, but worth it" when confronted with the fact that over half a million Iraqi children would be killed by the Clinton era Iraqi sanctions regime.
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
--60 Minutes (5/12/96)
"It's worth it" naturally because we, ourselves, were not the Iraqi children dying for lack of simple penicillin, nor their parents. And we weren't allowed to witness the travesties of those actions carried out in our name because our major journalists apparently thought the suffering of others would not sell--casting their own callous moral calculus onto us. As a nation we come across as insular and ignorant because the individuals who represent us, like Madelaine Albright and George Bush--or FOX News or CNN, wax eloquent about 'sacrifice' and offer none themselves. D.C. Scribes and pundits take their callous words at face value because, again, no negative consequences have been visited upon them for their useless stenotyping. Our Patricians and pundits suffer nothing. They leave the fighting and dying mostly to the poor, the dispossesed and the "hired killers". No nationwide sacrifices are required, and certainly no individual sacrifices for the royal one percent.
Oh, please, you can hear the tremors and pleas from the board rooms of CNN and Fox, no press reports about the absence of sacrifice from all those new millionaires in the oil and armament industries. Please! Rather, offer up a few more happy bulletins on 'progress' in Iraq. This will no doubt serve to ensure the intrepid journalists place at their respective corporate troughs. After all, they need a place somewhere fitting their talents, if not in history, than in hell. We suffer the illusion that our actions have no negative consequences because we have for so long we been shielded from them by the sophistry of simpletons and their typists masquerading as journalists. And many of us have liked it that way, too.
But now, perhaps, we have entered the age of consequences. Our health care is a shambling black hole for corporate profit. We've lost a major US city to muddy water and snakes. Our bridges collapse, tunnels crumble. As usual, the streets of our major cities are unsafe, and now even our police are not paid, and local volunteers must patrol the night, just as neighborhood volunteers in Bagdhad give fair warning when an alien intrudes into their block. We are beginning to learn what it is to be the 'other' our press has so often ignored. Fearful, watchful, and insecure, with no faith in our press or our government. This is exactly the Hobbesian nightmare the loss of our civic sense portended some years ago, only now coming home to roost. The nativists and reactionaries want to blame the immigrants, but that is a silly canard. It wasn't the immigrants who cut your city's police budget, or destroyed your pension or shot your son in the face in Fallujah. No, the people to blame for this mess are closer at hand. In those beautiful mansions near the river, in those towers and secluded 'getaways' guarded by electronic eyes, in those black suvs with mirrors for windows, near those men in ties and shades talking into their cellphones with rushed clips of self importance.
Here's the thing to keep in mind: the deadly consequences of our avaricious and militaristic elite ultimately effect not just other countries, but every one of us. They have all the power, and to them, apparently we're not worth the money it takes to keep police on the street.
Chris Hedges summarizes it well from a recent essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.
The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.
It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.
It signals the twilight of our empire.
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