NY Heroes Get Away With Murdering Eric Garner

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The Grand Jury decision not to indict an NYPD officer for choking Eric Garner to death is a shocking travesty of justice, but why were police harassing Garner in the first place?

The answer; He violated New York City’s ridiculous cigarette tax laws. Eric Garner was summarily executed for avoiding taxes.

Garner was tackled by several cops and put in an illegal chokehold by Officer Daniel Pantaleo during an incident in Staten Island earlier this summer. Video footage clearly shows that Garner was not resisting arrest and was not acting aggressively towards the officers. The 43-year-old father of six begged for his life, telling officers he couldn’t breathe, before dying moments later in what the medical examiner’s office ruled a homicide caused by the chokehold.

Garner was choked to death for the crime of selling untaxed cigarettes, so-called “loosies”. His fatal encounter with the NYPD would not even have occurred if not for New York’s punitively insane cigarette tax, which levies an additional state tax of $4.35 per pack in addition to a further city tax of $1.50 per pack, driving an underground economy which accounts for over half of all cigarettes consumed in New York State.

Cigarette smuggling has increased 59 per cent since 2006 in response to a 190 percent hike in cigarette tax during that same period.

“Garner chose to participate in the booming underground cigarette market as a smuggler. Since 2009, he had been arrested eight times for selling loosies, which are popular among people who can’t afford a full pack because of the excessive taxes,” writes Lawrence J. McQuillan, noting that NYPD chief Philip Banks issued an order to crack down on vendors of smuggled cigarettes just days before Garner died.

In November 2013, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill which increased “enforcement on vendors who attempt to evade taxes.”

“These events confirm that police are ultimately the enforcers of the tax code, and every vote for higher taxes gives police increased authority to exert more force on citizens in more situations. Higher excise taxes inevitably lead to more violent clashes between police and smugglers,” concludes McQuillan.

The responsibility for Garner’s death should not be shifted away from Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who clearly should have been put on trial for manslaughter, but the entire situation would not have arose in the first place if not for New York’s obsession with high taxes.

 

27 COMMENTS

  1. We Stopped Dreaming – Neil deGrasse Tyson

    I do hope some individuals get to the moon as free explorers. And then beyond.

    This infantile notion of it being “Our Dream” to go to the moon was a slave’s wishful rationalization anyway.

    The geographical plantation honchos became fearful after Sputnik and they marshalled the economic and technological resources and further militarized the national economy to attain their unified goal.

    And that goal was reached. Gloriously so. Now those same honchos can call up 317 million captive humans at will and make them pursue any number of goals that serve their purposes.

    Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country. Especially ask not what it will mean to have no real organizational capacity to resist the organizers any longer in any significant way.

  2. One can form an outstandlingly well-functioning ethics just on the collected works of Henry Louis Mencken. No miracles and esotericism required:
    – –

    The human race detests thrift as it detests intelligence. The man who accumulates more than he needs and saves the surplus is disliked by all who either can’t or won’t follow his example, and that means the great majority of his fellow men. He makes them ashamed of themselves and they resent it.

    Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.

    The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

    Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

    The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

    Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.

    “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

    …the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man – that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense – has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading…

    Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

    School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not. His parents, unless they are infantile in mind, tend to be bored by his lessons and labors, and are unable to conceal the fact from his sharp eyes. His first teachers he views simply as disagreeable policemen; his later ones he usually sets down, quite accurately, as asses.

    The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.

    Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.

    The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.

    Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

    I hate sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

    The universe is run idiotically, and its only certain product is sorrow. But there are yet men who, by their generally pleasant spirits, by their extraordinary capacity for making and keeping friends, yet manage to cheat, in some measure, the common destiny of mankind, which is to be doomed like the beasts to perish.
    – – –

    Mencken’s Creed

    I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind, that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

    I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

    I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.

    I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

    I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech.

    I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

    I believe in the reality of progress.

    I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

    • Let me amend that slightly. Most liberals are Clovers, but not all Clovers are liberals. Many of them are ‘law and order’ conservatives. One more reason not to expect either political party to save us from the gunvermin.

      • I’ve stated this before, but once more: I loathe “law and order” conservatives the most. Liberals are at least consistent in their “greater good” collectivism and authority-snuggling. But to see these “freedom loving” flag-humping dweezils flicking their tongues up the buttholes of “our troops” and orgasming at the site of a uniform makes me almost violently ill.

  3. So the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, the video clearly showed the murdering thug using an admittedly illegal chokehold and even with those admissions of fault by the PTB the so-called “grand” jury still doesn’t bring charges.
    Wow, that just sets a precedent for the costumed parasites to murder us mundanes with impunity. I think Jean’s on the right track, time to push back with as much force as necessary to end this BS; my 12 gauge is cleaned and ready.

    • Agreed, Mike.

      It has reached the point that any of us can state with damned good reason that we fear law enforcement. Not merely our “safety” but our very lives are at risk.

      If they may – with legal impunity – visit lethal violence upon us, do we not have the right to anticipate this and take appropriate defensive measures?

      The pot boils faster….

      • @Eric- Not preemptively. That makes us interventionists, which we should not do. We only have a right to use violence when violence is actually used against us first. Can =/= has.

        • ” We only have a right to use violence when violence is actually used against us first.”
          True, but we can respond with a threat of violence to the threat of violence implicit in LEO action.

          • From a Biblical moral standpoint I’m still trying to figure out when, if ever, violence is justified. I know that Christianity is not a religion of violent revolution, and for good reason. It never works to change hearts and minds, for one thing.

            From basic libertarian principle though (NAP) it shouldn’t be criminal at all to warn police that if they use violence against you there will be reprecussions. But there’s a big difference between that and doing what Jerad Miller did, which was to shoot a cop while he was eating lunch at Cici’s. Christopher Cantwell tried to argue that that was justified. I think its clear that it wasn’t.

            • Hi David,

              The pressure is rising, and it will find an outlet. More and more people are simply getting fed up. Tired of being hassled by uniformed assholes, waking up every day to another gratuitous shooting and the endless hectoring talk of “heroes” and the bleating about “officer safety.”

              Speaking just for me: I’ve lost all respect and almost all sympathy for them. The “just doing their job” shit does not fly.

              Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

            • David, more people are wondering this now than ever. Take a look at this article. There’s a big push in Tx.(surreal, ain’t it?)to get rid of grand jury’s as has most of English type law counties have done from things such as this. Grits for Breakfast has a good article about it, wish I could find the damned thing. But here’s more copsucking a-holes involved in such. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/12/grand-jury-white-cops-diggles-jasper

              • Crap, I meant “countries” since the US is the only one still using grand juries. Counties is sort of correct too but ‘states” would be more accurate since this is making the rounds in each state of this country. Ah hell, it sucks and that fairly well sums it up.

  4. What troubles me the most about this story (especially in the wake of Ferguson) is the perspective articulated by Mayor de Blasio. Referring to his adopted African-American son, Dante, he said yesterday,

    “[my wife] and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face – we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”

    It sounds as though he’s talking about a force of nature or a wild animal; warning of the “dangers” he may face, and having to “train him. . . to take special care in any encounter.” This sort of language is what you hear people use to describe the hazards of grizzly bears or avalanches (as well as gangsters, terrorists and child predators).

    • “This sort of language is what you hear people use to describe the hazards of grizzly bears or avalanches (as well as gangsters, terrorists and child predators).”
      Well, the LEO’s (like the TSA) ARE gangsters, terrorists and child predators.

    • I actually, more or less, liked that video. Yes, I know Jon Stewart is a liberal, and I don’t agree with him on everything. But, as I saw Ron Paul point out awhile back in a video, he’s an honest liberal.

      • The big point that Jon missed is that even if no lethal violence is used, VIOLENCE is still going to be used to enforce tax law. Legal violence, yes, but still violence.

        From a left-wing perspective he probably did the best he could. He didn’t cite the ridiculous “officer safety” line, and he recognized that Garner was, in fact, murdered. I wish he would figure out, like we have, that taxation is armed robbery, every time.

      • I enjoy a lot of Stewart’s stuff. I consider him an epistemic authority. Which is to say, he’s an astute observer of how people and things really are. For millions of young people, he’s one of the most intelligent thinkers they encounter.

        If a guy can teach you something and make you laugh while he’s doing it, then I’d say he’s worth listening to.

        Jon Stewart – Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

        • Stewart strikes me as mensch – a basically decent guy. I like to think that he could be persuaded to abandon his liberalism if the violence underlying it was brought “front and center” and he had to face up to it.

  5. I wonder what the house slaves [Grand Jury] decided was the reason not to go further?

    Is it because, “Every arrest is Justified”?

    For a moment, as I read this, I knew what it was to live under The Crown, and how that Never went away. Especially after reading this:

    That Pesky Napoleonic Code

    http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/david-hathaway/that-pesky-napoleonic-code/

    The “New” American Way, is to submit, or die, when confronted by the upper caste.

    It’s not only, “New York’s obsession with high taxes” it’s All about Power and Control… and your masters Want It All.

    Set to Christmas music: ‘And. Won’t. You bow down?”

    • Oops, I meant to write, “For a moment, as I read this, I knew what it was LIKE TO live under The Crown”

      But of course, I’m prolly preaching to the choir.

      Tom Woods once wrote that it’s good to preach to The Choir.

      Myself, I hope somebody in the Hinterlands, “beyond, The Wall” is listening.

      It’s like I’m stranded on a remote planet, transmitting to earth… and all I get back is a Ping.

      • The only way for someone in the hinterlands to get the message, is to deliver it to their skull, directly, at about 2500 FPS.
        Most of the cattle don’t WANT to think, or know.

        So, need to forget about educating the herd.
        We need to collect the wolves through some back-room deals of our own.

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