Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the bankerWho? Who? Who?
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need warWho own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a n-word
Who is so great ain't nobody biggerWho own this city
Who own the air
Who own the waterWho own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouthWho live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
State-administered violence is all that lies between the corporate state and widespread unrest. The power elites know it. They also know that as this unrest begins to define the white underclass, the legal and physical shackles perfected for poor people of color can easily be expanded. Rights in America have become privileges. And the corporate state has created legal mechanisms, including the loss of our right to privacy, to remove these privileges the instant it feels threatened.
Liberals' rhetoric of compassion is as destructive as conservatives' call for law and order. The liberal stances are patronizing. They reduce structural and economic oppression to personal and psychological problems, as if we can solve police murder by training and empowering "good" people, supporting families or rewriting regulations. As long as our discussion of police violence ignores the social functions of police and prisons, the elites have nothing to fear. The police, in the end, are not the problem. They, like the military, are the foot soldiers for the corporate leviathan.
The corporate state needs to create the illusion that the courts and the police are impartial and just. Once this illusion is cemented into the public consciousness, victims can be blamed for their oppression. Institutionalized murder becomes acceptable. Police violence becomes part of the cost of keeping us safe. The oppressed have no legitimacy or voice.
The corporate state is interested only in fostering these illusions. Reforms will be, as they have been in the past, cosmetic. What advances have we made since police murdered Michael Brown two years ago in Ferguson? Have the some 200 civilian review boards across the country, most of them toothless and ineffectual, prevented police from gunning down people in our streets or brought the killers to justice? Police have killed over 700 people this year. The illusions of reform are used to alter public consciousness rather than the machinery of corporate power. These illusions are created to reassure us that those that are arrested, beaten, killed or sent away to prison for decades deserve their fate. Yes, the state may admit, there is an abuse committed here or an injustice committed there, but the system itself, the state insists, is fundamentally fair and just. This is a lie the elites go to tremendous lengths to disseminate.
The corporate state is counting on counter-violence against police, which is inevitable, and further acts of domestic terrorism, which also are inevitable. Acts of violence directed against the state are used by the organs of state propaganda, including the corporate press, to foster a culture of fear, to deify the police and to demonize the oppressed in our inner cities and in the Middle East. All criticism of excessive state violence, once these illusions dominate the society, will be condemned as disloyal and unpatriotic. The corporate state, until it is destroyed, will do what it is designed to do -- kill with impunity.
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