Extrajudicial Execution of a Capitalist in New York

I was planning on taking a break from blogging for a couple of weeks, but things happen on which I want to comment. Lately those things have been mostly of a domestic nature, which was not the original intent of this humble blog. But, that's the way it is.

My thoughts on the Ferguson case are quite clear. I think Michael Brown was a giant thug--who happened to be black--who had robbed a convenience store, assaulted the Asian owner of that store, and then went on to assault a cop--who happened to be white--and try to take his gun. Brown paid for his arrogant and brutal stupidity with his life. The grand jury acted correctly in refusing to indict police officer Wilson despite the enormous pressure brought to bear by extrajudicial actors such as the Democrat-led lynch mob in the streets, the ever-more disgraceful Attorney General, our completely hopeless President, and the echo-chamber mass media. The system worked.

I now turn to the Eric Garner case in New York. I am not sure that the system worked in that case. According to the press--and that's all the info I have--we have a man by the name of Eric Garner, who happened to be black, killed in the process of being arrested by a gaggle of NYPD reenacting Swift's Lilliputians tying down Gulliver.

You can see in the video that Garner, a very large man, is being wrestled to the sidewalk by several much smaller cops, one of whom has a hold on his neck. I don't know if it was technically a "chokehold," but it did consist of the cop's arm across Garner's neck. He falls and you can hear him gasp, "I can't breathe!" Apparently his last words or close to them. It is also not clear that Garner was resisting arrest. I acknowledge that different people can look at the video and reach different conclusions; I, however, am not convinced that he was resisting.  To me, he looked confused and uncertain as to what the cops wanted him to do.

What bothers me a great deal is that Garner had not robbed or assaulted anybody, much less an armed cop. He was neither Michael Brown nor that other thug, Trayvon Martin. His crime? Selling loose cigarettes to passers-by, thereby, depriving the city of a few cents of tax revenue. He died for selling loose cigarettes; he died for not paying a few cents in taxes to the Progressive New York City Leviathan cum Tony Soprano.

Garner was a victim of progressivism's lethality, and shared that fate with millions of other persons around the world. That NYC, my old home town, can afford to send at least eight or nine vastly overpaid and over-equipped cops to bust and kill a guy for selling cigarettes tells us all we need to know about the state of progressive governance in our horribly misled, once great, and former Republic.