Mel Packer: Manifesto on Violence

We are being inundated by media and government condemnation of the “violence” committed in Ferguson in response to the Grand Jury’s failure to indict Darren Wilson for murdering Michael Brown.

However, there is no worse violence than that committed by an economic system that forces people into poverty,

• that treats people of color like “expendable” beings while claiming to be “post-racial”,
• that denies good public education to most of our youth,
• that looks the other way while women, gays, transgendered folk are brutalized,
• that denies a future and hope to college students so deep in debt that they are forced into minimum wage jobs with no hope of ever getting above water,
• that allows corporations to collect tax subsidies while doing away with or moving jobs to low-wage areas of the world,
• that permits bankers and hedge funds to manipulate stock prices to benefit only CEO bonuses and obscene profits,
• that looks the other way while banks break the law without punishment but jails working people for stealing food,
• that supports the rape of the earth to extract fossil fuels that will ultimately destroy that very earth,
• that kills thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other nations too numerous to list just to prop up US defense contractors who line the pockets of our elected “leaders”, and ultimately threatens the lives and futures of all of us who are not part of the tiny .001% that controls the world’s economy.

And you want me to condemn the acts of desperate people who express their frustration in the only way they now see as bringing attention to injustice? Sorry, the violence of the state against all of us is the only violence I am willing to condemn. Now and forever.

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