Rise of the Warrior Cop … Evidence Says Culture Well Established in New Zealand Too.

I’m sadly succumbing to a theory, or rather, to the weight of history, that once the state gets to a certain size, and a certain penetration into our lives, it starts to subconsciously militarise its police against its own citizenry, who become cast as the enemy in a necessary Orwellian forever-war, and thus the justification for use of force and pan-population surveillance for no other purpose than the state's own continuation. We’re there, I think. By this ‘theoretical’ stage enough proles have been brain-washed into thinking in terms of a state theocracy to be obeyed in all things, or at least are reliant on the state for their living, therefore the government law enforcement agencies begin to leave a secular peace keeping role and take about them a religious fervour protecting mindlessly all things in the name of the state. Nihilism trumps philosophy; there’s no going back to a free, peaceful classical liberalism. Following so many of my other posts, it’s paradise lost, again.

When I see some of what is happening – much of it farcical, but deadly serious – in the United Police States of America, and cast my mind over recent happenings in New Zealand, the above conclusion is inescapable. The below quotations are from a piece largely behind the pay-wall at The Times:

 AT DAWN a dozen masked police officers, grenades strapped to their hips, smashed through the gates of the designated “crime zone” in rural Pennsylvania in an armoured car. 

A helicopter hovered 300ft overhead, packed with more officers ready to abseil down and swamp the enemy. 

Their target, Daniel Allgyer, an Amish farmer, was surrounded before he could reach for his deadliest weapon — a pitchfork. 

His crime: selling unpasteurised milk across the border to customers in the Washington suburbs, illegal under federal law. 

Fearful of being “Swatted” again, the farmer promised to desist. “These big guys in black, with weapons he had never seen before, terrified him,” said a friend. “Dan always thought the police were on his side, but they behaved like an occupying army.”

Funnily enough, by which I mean sadly, again, I’ve blogged before on this heavy-handed authoritarian approach to milk sales; in that post regarding milk sales in Australia. Apparently we must be saved from ourselves, even if that means the state intimidating, raiding, and locking up adults for wanting to drink unpasteurised milk. In some type of state-mad state-made parody, what is happening is the war on drugs is morphing into the war on milk, pets, and organic vegetables. The Times article continues:

Radley Balko, … author of a new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, says President Obama has revived funding schemes that encourage the police to militarise – plans that were abandoned by his predecessor, George W Bush.

“For some it’s now easier to get Pentagon military surplus … than conventional policing tools like up to date computers, so obviously police chiefs grab them,” Balko said. “Then they have to use them.” He said that many federal agencies were using powers originally granted for the war on drugs to launch armed assaults on organic farmers, firms that breach environmental laws and to clamp down on illegal immigrants.

The first move by Swat teams is to ‘clear’ buildings of people and their pets: they routinely shoot not just guard dogs but poodles, lapdogs and, in a raid in Missouri that netted a single marijuana cigarette, a family’s corgi.’

Sounds like too many ‘boys’ in the police force. And look at New Zealand. We already have the entire infrastructure of the surveillance state in place; the sanction first legislated via the Tax Administration Act. The broadening of that to total population surveillance happens very soon when National and its muppet, that ‘willing seller’ of our right to be left alone, Peter Dunne, put the GCSB Bill into law. And noting while I support the principle of intellectual property, there was yet that ridiculous show of inappropriate force called the raid on Kim Dotcom, and the more I read of Tame Iti and the Urewera raids, the more I grow uncomfortable with that whole episode also. But the Dotcom raid especially: from the very first when watching the news footage my mind leaped to boys and their toys having a great day out, even getting to fly in the choppers. Remembering that raid was essentially at the behest of the United Police States of America, there must have been many boys-own fantasies fulfilled in the months planning up to that one. The manner and over-reach of that raid was an insult, and a wake-up, to all of us. Again from the article:

In 2008 Swat officers raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, a Washington suburb, after a political rival posted a bag of marijuana to his house and tipped them off. During the raid they shot dead his two Labradors. The Washington Post called it ‘a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.’     

Yeah. We’re there alright. What was the Dotcom raid other than Keystone Kops? So New Zealand organic farmers, you had better hold onto your private parts, or at least encrypt your private conversations, ‘they’re coming for ya’. Buggered if I know why, trafficking in vegetables or some damned thing, though I suspect it’s more because you dare to live your own lives, think for yourselves, you’re often a bit ‘out there’ aren’t you, a bit ‘alternative; definitely seditious. We can’t have difference in the bland, creamy and homogenous society, a GCSB spook in every computer and phone. What did you think this was? The free society?

And lock up your pets: the West isn't safe for them anymore; if we're not shooting them we're applying pain to them. Re that last, to Minister McClay who would not front up to the 'stop animal testing for party pills' protests yesterday: that's not good enough. In fact it was gutless, and I still want answers to my questions please.

Of Black Markets in Milk, & NZ’ers Urged to Take Farming Overseas:

See if you can spot the bull in the paddock from these two quotations?

From the Taranaki Daily News today:

A Government-commissioned report is urging dairy and sheep industry players to seize opportunities to farm overseas. [The report’s writer] acknowledged there were already New Zealanders … farming in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay, but few were operating at any scale.

Minister of Revenue, Peter Dunne, from Hansard:

I will take just a brief call at this point to acknowledge the work of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, in particular, in dealing with what I think is the second-largest tax bill to come to this Parliament, the Taxation (International Taxation, …) Bill. This is an 842-page job. It does not beat my previous effort of 3,500 pages, … I acknowledge the fact that the select committee had a monstrous job in working through some very important, complex legislation in order to get it to this stage. I note that Supplementary Order Paper 34, which I have tabled, is 50-odd pages, so it is nearly a bill in itself. All those things really go to point out how complicated our tax law is …

Oh yes, let’s all jump into the penalty system known as our, quoting the Minister, ‘monstrous’ and complex, international tax regime. Perhaps the boffins who wrote the report, which I definitely agree with, should first have a word with the boffins who’ve made our mish mash of international tax laws. When you have a contradiction like this, then the Minister, and government, needs to re-examine their premises, and in this case some fundamental ones on how our society is structured, which has led to such complex tax laws being required to fund the ‘monstrous’ size of our state, where in every budget delivered by Bill English, despite the rhetoric, the state spend continues to be bigger in dollar terms than the year before, and approaching 50% of the entire spend in our economy; a phenomenon which is currently destroying the economies of Europe and America.

And I write this with the somehow connected thought in my mind, a thought in the form of a joke, of watching the article about Australian farmers on TV 1’s current affairs show, Sunday, last night, who are partaking in the black market their government has created in selling raw milk.

Yes, I said milk. Australian regulation has created a black market in milk.

Said one such farmer who was raided by food safety officers and armed police, after an expensive multi-departmental sting operation on him daring to blatantly sell milk to hippies at a farmer’s market - ‘I kept trying to tell them,' he said, 'all these officers with guns; it’s just milk. This is a farmers’ market, and I’m just selling milk.’ His fine was A$184,000, and his last musing to the camera was whether it was perhaps heroin in his plastic bottles: but no, it was just raw milk. I guess he’s no longer thinking of taking his farming overseas: he’s probably just thinking of taking himself overseas. At least if he’s got any sense.

Now remember that 380 page food bill signed off in New Zealand last year, where Minister Wilkinson’s comment on the draconian powers being given to our food officers was, ‘well, they’ll not be used.’ If they’re not going to be used, then they shouldn’t have been given such draconian powers, at all. And yes, I know, raw milk could, in the rare case, kill you: but if an individual wants to take that choice, because such milk also has more nutrients, then that’s their choice. A society must operate on that basis, for there’s far more important principles at stake. The freedoms we should be able to take for granted in the West - freedom being the right to be left alone - sometimes involves the freedom to take risks and die stupidly, whether it be test piloting a new jet engine, or drinking raw milk, for without risk, there will be no innovation, and it’s by innovation from the entrepreneurial pursuit fostered by true capitalism, that we have the best standard of living from any generation before us in history, that has allowed us to live in the first world, where we can have the absurd problem of a black market in milk.

And don't go thinking we're alone: I said this was a Western problem - hattip Offsetting Behaviour have a look at this clip and wonder no longer why the West is falling over: