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[–] Easybee 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

Fantastic article; I'm glad I took the time to read it.

I find it interesting that the roots at the beginning of this article were triggered by police brutality -- before any of this militarisation began. It seems some things have not changed.

A lot of people in these comments are talking about the racial motives, but I see these as largely auxiliary. The central theme is the oppression of the poor to create the employment pool needed for capitalism to succeed. Racism is a cultural context in the US that was systematically exploited as a TOOL to divide the working classes and prevent labour disruption.

What we really see is the perpetuation and expansion of inhumane treatment of the vast majority of Americans (regardless of race) to secure ever-increasing wealth for the already wealthy.

That is to say that the US has chosen greed over humanity. Until US culture decides that there are ethics more important than greed, this oppression will continue and worsen.

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[–] CrypticMetaphr ago 

I'm also of the opinion that a lot of the problems we see in the US are more class motivated that race motivated. It just so happens that in a lot of cases, the minority population and the poor population have a lot of overlap. Everyone wants to boil the issue down to one catchy word, like racism or money or whatever, but there's almost never one single reason why a person or system ends up doing something. Yes its racism, yes its greed, yes its a system that wants to keep poor people poor and make rich people rich, but its also the availability of military equipment to police, quotas on arrests and tickets which means they're going to go harder on/have a bigger presence in places that are more likely to have crime (poor, black/hispanic communities), increasing hostility towards the police which in turns makes the police defensive which in turn makes people hostile, propaganda aimed at making middle class people hate and blame poor people for their problems, confirmation bias that makes police officers more hostile towards minorities, the list goes on.