Prick Licking Politicians In Washington DC And Their Medical Mafia Masters

Ask any of those corporate owned corporate servants if they will make the following statements. 

Do you think Americans will ever see they day when a political leader will admit that the American medical industry is the biggest thief the world has every known?"

Will there ever come a time when one of you slackers will say, "Italy does health care for 1/3 the cost the US yet Italy is is ranked number 2 for quality and the US is ranked 37th for quality?" 

Will one of you errand boys or girls ever turn on your corporate masters and call for the arrests and prosecutions of the corporate gangsters that you serve?

Will any of you have the integrity to go on the corporate controlled media and say, "Hey Rachel and Lawrence, there is no federal agency that oversees or regulates hospitals and the FDA is a revolving door? Will any of you gold brickers say that on the debate stage? 

Will any of you admit publicly that 70% of prescription and OTC medications are manufactured in foreign countries, mostly India and China?

The politician who does that will go down in history as America's greatest hero.

America has the worst and most expensive healthcare in the industrialized world. It's true so why won't any of you say it?

Make no mistake about it, Washington DC is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Medical Mafia. 

Related: 

MEDICAL MAFIA: Buyer Beware or Buyer Be Dead

The Medical Mafia - Whale

Expose The Medical Mafia Part 1 - YouTube

200 Women Accuse Trump Of Sexually Assaulting Them

Ok you filthy lying Trumptards, you need to shut you filthy lie holes and watch the video. Trump is a liar and you fuckers know it. There needs to be a bounty on you bastards. You know it, I know it and the world knows it. Don't be stupid. Shut your filthy fucking lie holes. If you are a Trump supporter you lie and you know you lie.

#metoo

Right-wing pastor says Trump supporters will 'hunt down' Democrats when he leaves office

Right-wing pastor says Trump supporters will 'hunt down' Democrats when he leaves office  Alex Woodward

President Donald Trump's supporters will "hunt down" Democrats and bring "violence to America" once the president leaves office, according to right-wing Christian pastor and conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles.

On his apocalyptic TruNews programme, captured by Right Wing Watch, Mr Wiles said the president's impeachment or "however he leaves" office will inspire "veterans, cowboys, mountain men" and "guys that know how to fight" to bring "violence to America" by hunting down Mr Trump's political enemies.

Co-host Edward Szall said "once the blood starts flowing, it's near impossible to stop".

Mr Wiles' threat follows an impeachment probe into the president's possible abuses of power in his dealings with Ukraine, as well as multiple witness testimonies that have contradicted Mr Trump's denial of wrongdoing.

The impeachment investigation has ignited a firestorm of protest among Republicans, who stormed into a committee hearing on Wednesday to demand that the impeachment process be "public".

Forty-seven Republicans currently serve in those investigative committees alongside Democrats.

Meanwhile, moments before a World Series game was set to begin, a longtime Major League Baseball umpire threatened to buy an AR-15 and join a civil war if Mr Trump is impeached. Rob Drake wrote his threat on Twitter, then deleted it.

"I will be buying an AR-15 tomorrow, because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL (sic) WAR!!! #MAGA2020," he wrote. "You can't do an impeachment inquiry from the basement of Capital(sic) Hill without even a vote! What is going on in this country?"

On TruNews, Mr Wiles added that "if they get away this, there's no country left. It's done. It's finished."

Rick Wiles | Right Wing Watch

The comments follow Mr Wiles' legacy of far-right conspiracy, anti-semitism and discrimination against LGBT people, from calling former President Barack Obama a "demon from hell" to calling Jews the "antichrist" and suggesting that 2017's devastating floods in Houston, Texas were God's punishment for the city's LGBT population.

In 2018, Mr Wiles predicted that a "leftist mob" led by CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow would decapitate Mr Trump and his family on the White House lawn.

Following Mr Trump's departure, the country will be "plunged into darkness" which Democrats brought "upon themselves because they won't back off," Mr Wiles said.

He added: "They won't let the people express their views. They voted for Donald Trump, they wanted Donald Trump, but they said, 'No, you're stupid, you're racist, you're bigots, we're not going to allow your vote to count.' And they've waged war against those people now for three years."

Read more

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Trump impeachment sees highest support ever in new poll

MY OP ED: 

Hitler did not orchestrate the holocaust all by himself and I am convinced if the Jews could go back in time they would preemptively kill shit talking Nazis. We can blame Trump until we are blue in the face for the mess we are in but until we wake up to the fact that Trump, like Hitler is merely a symptom of the depravity of large groups of depraved people we will continue to miss the point and end up like the millions of holocaust victims which included 6 million Jews and millions of others. 

Keep a list of every right wing shit talker you know so when the time comes you can either turn them in or if need be you can put their lights out before they harm innocent people.

If you would like to pay Sick Rick and his mad dogs a visit you can find him at 9045 Americana Way Vero Beach Florida or at 2355 82nd Avenue Vero Beach Florida. Just remember to turn the other cheek. Look how well that worked out for the Jews and the early Christians who were fed to the lions in the Roman Coliseum or the 80 million Hindus who were died at the hands of Muslims. Be peaceful because violence never solved anything accept when police charge into gunfire and kill a gunman who is shooting up a school, or violence used against Southern slavery supporting traitors leading to the ending of slavery is the savage South or ending the holocaust or defeating ISIS, Hamas, or creating America. Just because the purge of Nazis in Germany after WW-2 cured and fascists in Italy cured those those countries of evil, it doesn't mean it will work here. Just accept the fascism and then whine about it. Look how well that strategy worked worked for the victims of the genocides of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.  Great is your reward in heaven. Caveat: Only if you are a Christian who hates Jews, LGBTQ folks, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Sikhs, or anyone else who does not roll around on the floor, babble in tongues is born again and a first rate hypocrite and liar will you be saved from eternal damnation.

In all seriousness, if you follow this loon Rick Wiles and somebody bashes your brains in with a baseball bat, you earned every bone smashing skull fracturing blow. 

Rudy Giuliani Is In Deep Shit And He Knows It!

Former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah said there’s a sure sign that Rudy Giuliani, personal attorney to President Donald Trump, knows he’s in serious trouble. 

“He’s apparently been declining to go on TV and give interviews,” Rocah, former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, said on MSNBC on Thursday. “When I saw that, I thought Giuliani actually knows that there’s real trouble.”

Rocah added:

“We’ve talked for two years about Giuliani can’t stay off of television and doing interviews and admitting things left and right. So he’s finally quiet, which tells me that he knows he’s in some hot water here.”

Earlier in the day, former U.S. attorneys Barbara McQuade and Joyce Vance published a column as a “thought experiment” that outlined three charges Giuliani could face based on the public record: conspiracy to interfere with the fair administration of elections, conspiracy to commit bribery and contempt of Congress. 

According to The New York Times, Giuliani is a “person of interest” in two federal investigations.  

• This article originally appeared on HuffPost.

Two More Trump Thugs Sentenced To Four Years In Prison

2 Proud Boys Sentenced To 4 Years In Prison Over Gang Assault In New York

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Two members of the extremist street gang known as the Proud Boys were sentenced Tuesday to four years in a New York prison after attacking protesters outside a GOP event in Manhattan last year.

Maxwell Hare, 27, and John Kinsman, 32, were two of 10 Proud Boys arrested in the assault caught on camera in October 2018. Prosecutors slapped them with charges of attempted gang assault, attempted assault and rioting, declaring them the most vicious assailants that night. Their four-year sentence will include another five years of supervised release, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed to HuffPost.

The heavier sentences are a huge blow to the Proud Boys, who have been able to host semi-regular street brawls with few to no consequences in cities outside of New York. In Portland, Oregon, for example, they continue to organize violent fascist rallies despite admitting on camera that they host these events to spur fights, waste city resources and then blame anti-fascist protesters when the dust settles.

Kinsman and Hare’s crew tried a similar tactic in this case, claiming that they acted in self-defense when they beat down protesters outside the Metropolitan Republican Club after an event hosted by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. But video evidence — shot by reporter Sandi Bachom — proved otherwise, and Manhattan prosecutors never bought the line. They eventually charged the Proud Boys as what they are: a gang.

“As violent extremism rises in America, a Manhattan jury has declared in one voice that New Yorkers will not tolerate mob violence in our own backyard,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement after the convictions in August.

Justice Mark Dwyer, who presided over the case, also connected the Proud Boys and McInnes, who has repeatedly tried to distance himself from his gang as its members face charges and get involved in scandals related to the violence they commit.

The DA’s office confirmed that Dwyer called the Proud Boys McInnes’ “soldiers” in court, as first reported on Twitter by reporter Ali Winston. 

After the sentencing, McInnes doubled down on Telegram, saying the two men were “defending themselves,” and blamed the work of various extremism reporters ― including two at HuffPost ― for their sentences. In reality, McInnes helped arrange their surrender, The New York Times reported.

Eight other Proud Boys were convicted on various charges in connection with the street brawl, including disorderly conduct and riot, and their sentences ranged from five days of community service to 10 months in jail.

The all-male Proud Boys organization — which describes its members as “Western chauvinists” — has been characterized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for spreading white nationalism, misogyny and Islamophobia.

Though they resent the characterization of their ranks as violent, HuffPost revealed in May that the Proud Boys spend months before their rallies plotting optics and tactics to attack protesters and get away without charges.

Certain American men, Trump Supporters are dying 'deaths of despair'

Since Obama Fixed the economy, evidence of economic growth and prosperity in the U.S. is hard to miss. In spite of Trump the stock market has been booming for more than 10 years and the unemployment rate is at a low 3.5%.

But the U.S. is also the only rich country in the world where the mortality rate has been going up, not down. Much of that trend is driven by men without college degrees in America’s Trump Country, according to Brookings.

“Significant sectors of our society are dying prematurely from preventable deaths (deaths of despair) and almost 20% of prime aged males are out of the labor force,” according to a recent Brookings report, “Geography of Desperation in America.”

“What’s interesting is that Hispanics and blacks who started off at lower levels of life expectancy, they have continued to make progress. They’re not in the deaths of despair category for the most part,” Brookings Institution’s senior fellow Carol Graham told Yahoo Finance, adding that “The entire trend is driven by premature mortality among less-than-college-educated whites, mainly in the middle-aged years. That’s a pretty big marker that something’s really wrong.”

‘Deaths of despair’

Despair and lower levels of well-being have played a key role in fueling the deaths of more than 1 million Americans from suicide, or health complications from drug or alcohol abuse from 2006 to 2015, Brookings found in its report, “Understanding the role of despair in America’s opioid crisis.”

The highest mortality rates are most prevalent in America’s heartland, in states such as Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, Brookings found. Those regions are precisely the places where the manufacturing and coal mining jobs that used to provide predominantly men without college degrees a lower-middle-class existence as blue-collar workers have disappeared.

“We uncovered those death patterns,” Graham says. “What struck me is that poor African-Americans were three times as likely to be optimistic about the future as poor whites,” Graham said. “The metric that really stands out is not sort of happy, unhappy. Happy today doesn’t matter a whole lot. It’s hope for the future or lack thereof that’s really linked with premature mortality.”

MATEWAN, WV - MARCH 31: People listen to Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) speak with coal miners at a Town Hall meeting on March 31, 2017 in Matewan, West Virginia. Manchin has announced that he will vote for President Donald Trump's U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

America’s heartland has the highest concentration of states with the weakest optimism levels among whites. Lack of hope, worry, reported pain, reliance on disability insurance, and deaths of despair are prevalent across these places, according to Brookings.

“We find particularly high levels of misery among prime aged males out of the labor force,” the report says.

A Brookings report published in 2017 had similar findings: Whites without a college degree had mortality rates below that of blacks in 1999. But by 2015, the mortality rates for this same group rose 30% higher than blacks. Other research has shown that an increase in educational attainment is associated with a lower mortality rate for both white women and men.

“Women and blacks became more optimistic over time, beginning in the 1970’s when gender and civil rights improved,” Graham wrote in the report. “The one group that experienced drops in optimism around the same time were less-than-college-educated white males, not coincidentally when the decline in manufacturing began.” but they are too stupid to know that Trump has his products manufactures in china

The geography of life optimism and worry in the U.S. Source: Brookings

The despair and opioid crisis are also contributing to the decline in workforce participation among prime-aged males who are more likely to live in counties suffering from manufacturing declines and higher rates of opioid prescriptions, according to Graham.

Elizabeth Warren scares Wall street for good reason

• Bankrate: Nearly half of US isn’t prepareds for a recession as economic clouds gather
• Eric Trump: China is one of the reasons Donald Trump ran for president
• Jobs report: Here’s why you’re not earning more despite record low unemployment

General Mad Dog Mattis Puts The "Spurs: To Trump

I think the pretty much says it all. It's clear. Trump aka Cadet Bone Spurs hates our military and our war heroes.

Click here to hear war hero General Mattis dress down Cadet Bone Spurs.

What Should Be Done About Crooked Cops, Mayors and Judges

My Op Ed: Cops don't only harass, batter and kill minorities. They are equal opportunity thugs. Cops, especially the small town ones are completely out of control. Top police accountability auditor Earl David Worden has a saying, "Bad cops get good cops killed." and that is probably true. Other auditors respond to police abuse by saying that the cops are "earning the hate" and they most certainly are.

What are cops really? C.O.P. means constable on patrol but today's cops are not that. Cops are the enforcement wing of ruling class aka the corporate criminal elite, the plutocracy who own our government. They are the filthy rich bastards that we all would like to beat with a baseball bat.

Had the victim of this abuse and tyranny laid waste to the entire city government Rambo style, an honest jury would have found him innocent. Our founding fathers did not tolerate tyrants, who should we?

From the Washington Post

An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.

When body-camera footage of an aggressive or abusive police officer goes viral, the response from law enforcement groups is often to caution that we shouldn’t judge the entire system based on actions of a few bad apples. That’s fair enough. But what does it say about the system when the cops gets away with their bad behavior? What if, despite video footage clearly showing that the cops are in the wrong, sheriffs and police chiefs cover for them, anyway? What if local prosecutors do, too? What if even mayors and city attorneys get into the act?

Adam Finley had such an interaction with a bad cop. He was roughed up, sworn at and handcuffed. When he tried to file a complaint, he was hit with criminal charges. The local police chief turned Finley’s wife against him, which (according to both Finley and her) eventually ended their marriage. The fact that video of the incident should have vindicated him didn’t seem to matter.

Finley’s trouble — first reported by the Jonesboro Sun and Stan Morris at NEA Report — began in December 2016 in Walnut Ridge, Ark. It’s a small town of about 5,000 in the northeast part of the state — its charmingly humble claim to fame is that the Beatles once changed planes there. Officer Matthew Mercado of the Walnut Ridge Police Department pulled Finley over, near the railroad yard where Finley works. But Finley hadn’t committed any traffic infraction. Instead, Mercado apparently suspected that Finley didn’t really work for the railroad and therefore was trespassing, or perhaps engaged in some sort of criminal mischief.

The encounter quickly escalated. But as you can see in the video below, the escalation was entirely due to Mercado’s behavior, not Finley’s.

Mercado didn’t turn on the audio for his camera until about 30 seconds into the stop. During that time, the video shows Finley handing Mercado both his license and his employee ID from the railroad company. Mercado then asks Finley to get out of his truck. It’s here that Mercado then turns on his mic. He asks Finley, “What’s with the attitude?” Finley, who appears to have done nothing to indicate an “attitude,” replies, “Nothing.”

Mercado persists. “No, you have an attitude. What’s your problem?” Finley responds, “I don’t have no problem, I’m good.” Mercado again pushes. “I can pull you over if I want.” Finley says, “That’s fine.”

Later Mercado again expresses doubt about Finley’s employment — again, despite having Finley’s employee ID in his own hands. “It doesn’t look like you were working,” he says. As he says this, Finley takes a small step away from the truck. Mercado snaps, “If you get up on me again, we’re going to have problems.” Finley, clearly taken aback at the escalation, flashes a nervous smile. Mercado again ratchets up the tension. “I’m glad you think all of this is a joke, sir.” Finley shakes his head and again tells Mercado that he works for the railroad. Mercado again indicates that he doesn’t believe him.

Mercado then orders Finley to put his hands behind his back, and says he’s going to arrest him for “obstructing my operation.” Finley, clearly nervous, protests and tries to prove to Mercado that he works for the railroad by showing him some equipment in the back of his truck. At this point the stop turns violent. Mercado grabs Finley and throws him against the truck. Finley puts his hands behind his back. Mercado cuffs him and says, “You’re about ignorant.” He then again shoves Finley into the truck, this time with enough force to dislodge his own body camera, which falls to the ground.

Over the course of the next several minutes, Mercado repeatedly uses profanity, lectures to Finley as if he were a child and claims that Finley is “hostile and aggressive.” Throughout all of this, Finley is remarkably calm, insisting over and over that he works for the railroad, and that he doesn’t understand why he was pulled over.

Mercado ultimately released Finley without arresting him, likely after finally realizing that Finley really did work for the railroad and had done nothing wrong. But before he does, he issued multiple threats and allegations. At one point he tells Finley, “The next time I tell you something, you’re going to ride lightning.” He’s referring here to a stun gun. Later he warns, “Don’t later on try to complain that I roughed you up or anything like that, because you know I should take your ass to jail.” He also falsely accuses Finley of “assaulting a peace officer.” For good measure, just before walking away, Mercado asks, “Did we learn anything today, Adam?” Finley responds, “Yeah. I learned a lot.” This is undoubtedly true.

But the lessons would keep coming. Finley and his wife later went to the Walnut Ridge Police Department to file a complaint. Instead of taking the complaint, suspected pedophiles and wife beaters Police Chief Chris Kirksey and Sgt. Matt Cook interrogated and scolded Finley. Cook then wrote Finley two citations for “refusal to submit” and “obstructing governmental operations.” Note that Mercado didn’t feel compelled to cite Finley. It was only after Finley attempted to file a complaint about Mercado’s behavior that Mercado’s supervisors hit him with two misdemeanors. (Note: The Walnut Ridge Police Department declined to comment, citing Finley’s lawsuit. A WRPD officer also relayed my request for comment to Kirksey, who also declined.)

At one point during the interaction, Finley left the room, leaving Kirksey alone with Finley’s wife, Heather. At one point after Adam Finley left, Kirksey said, “From what I saw, he’s lucky he isn’t going to jail.” Heather responded, “Who? Adam? For what?”

“Obstruction of justice.”

“What did he do?”

“He interfered with a law enforcement officer’s investigation … ”

“How did he do that?”

“… Well, when you watch the video, you’ll find out.”

Again, the video shows nothing of the kind. But authority figures can be incredibly persuasive. And there are few positions that project more authority than a chief of police. Perhaps that’s how Kirksey managed to turn Finley’s own wife against him. She said to Kirksey, “Well, there’s probably more to it than what he … I don’t know what he did, he gets a little … ”

“Does he get irate?”

“Mm-hm.”

At that point Finley returned, and the two stopped talking. The full exchange begins at about the 8:00 mark in the video below.

Both Adam and Heather Finley would later tell Morris that this exchange eventually ruined their marriage. They’re now divorced. “I’m sure they had their problems, like any marriage. But I think that was definitely the main thing that did it,” says Adam Finley’s attorney, Mark Rees.

Finley’s case then went to the office of Third Judicial District Prosecuting Attorney Henry Boyce, who assigned it to deputy prosecutor Ryan Cooper. Again, despite the video, Cooper moved forward with the charges against Finley. He took the case all the way to trial. In April 2017, an Arkansas judge acquitted Finley on both counts. Finley filed a civil rights lawsuit in April 2018. The city answered in May with a brief arguing that Finley hadn’t made an actionable claim, had missed the statute of limitations and had failed to sufficiently serve the officials he is suing.

When the lawsuit went public, local media outlets filed open-records requests for video of the traffic stop and any records related to it. Morris, a former newspaper reporter who runs what is essentially a one-man operation (NEA stands for Northeast Arkansas), had been particularly dogged in pursuing the story, filing multiple open-records requests, poring through the results on his Web-based program, then asking Walnut Ridge officials to answer for what he had found.

At one point, Morris said, Kirksey called him in to his office and pleaded with him not to publish anything about the incident. “He had Mercado in there with him,” Morris said in a telephone interview. “Mercado said he made a mistake by using the f-word and apologized. But they also told me that the video would show that Finley was wrong” — just as Kirksey had done with Finley’s wife.

When Morris finally saw the video, he felt deceived. “It definitely helped me understand what that meeting was really about,” he said. “I think they knew that this would be a big problem for them, and they tried to mislead me.”

After he sent his open-records request, city attorney Nancy Hall texted Morris to fill him in on some additional information about Finley — that he had been the subject of a protective order from his first wife. “I hadn’t asked for anything about that,” Morris said. “I thought it was completely irrelevant. They were trying to make him look violent.” He later learned that Hall was the personal attorney for Finley’s first wife during the divorce. “That seemed like a conflict of interest. I asked Finley about the order. I still didn’t think it was relevant. But he made a persuasive case that it was all a misunderstanding.”

Morris later obtained a copy of Mercado’s police report on the original traffic stop and noted a number of contradictions between the two. Among them:

• Mercado claimed that Finley wouldn’t hand over his driver’s license when he asked for it, and instead “he just waved it front of me.” The video shows Finley promptly handing over his license.
• Mercado claimed Finley at one point said “this is the stupidest s— ever.” That isn’t depicted anywhere in the audio. It’s possible that Finley said this at the outset of the traffic stop, before Mercado turns on his mic, but that seems inconsistent with Finley’s language and demeanor during the entire portion of the video for which there’s audio.
• Mercado claimed that Finley “made an aggressive step” toward him. The video doesn’t show anything of the kind.
• Mercado claimed that once he restrained Finley, he continued to look for evidence that Finley was an employee of the railroad company. But he had that evidence — Finley’s ID card — from the very first moments of the encounter.
• Mercado claimed that Finley drove his shoulder into him, which dislodged his body camera. The video seems to show that Mercado was the aggressor, and that his camera came loose when he threw Finley into the side of the truck.

Despite all of this, city officials continued to defend the stop and the criminal charges, both publicly and privately. Their main claim was that Finley had been aggressive and combative before Mercado activated his microphone, and that it was this behavior that escalated the situation. There are several reasons to be skeptical of that claim. First, only about 30 seconds transpire before Mercado activates his mic. Second, the silent footage of that 30 seconds doesn’t suggest that Finley was angry or uncooperative. Third, it seems odd that Finley would be aggressive and rude for the first half minute of the stop, then immediately become cooperative the moment Mercado turned on his mic. It also isn’t clear that he would have known when the mic was on or off. Finally, there should have been dashboard-camera footage of the entire incident, including that first 30 seconds. There wasn’t. Walnut Ridge Mayor Charles Snapp initially claimedthere was no dashboard camera in Mercado’s car. When photos indicated that it was outfitted with a camera, the city said they could not access footage because of dash-camera software changes.

Snapp did issue a verbal warning to Mercado, but only for using the “F-bomb” — as he put it — during the stop. The rest of Mercado’s actions apparently didn’t merit discipline. In April, Boyce, the head prosecutor, put out a press release defending the decision to charge Finley. Boyce pointed out that under Arkansas law, it’s illegal to resist an arrest, even if there was no legal justification for the arrest itself. That may be true, but it’s also true that a prosecutor has the discretion to decline to bring charges if doing so wouldn’t be in the interest of justice. Resisting an illegal arrest would seem to be the sort of scenario for which it would be appropriate to use that sort of discretion. An even more appropriate scenario would be one in which the arrestee wasn’t even resisting, as the video strongly suggests.

Nevertheless, Boyce declared in his press statement that “I have … reviewed the video of the incident that led to the citations being issued and feel that the evidence justified the recommendation Mr. Cooper made to the Chief of Police.” Hall, the city attorney, also said the city’s legal team would “make quick work” of the case and said, “It’s sad that this happened because we have such good, hard-working personnel within our department.”

Morris kept digging and discovered that roughly two years before the incident with Finley, Mercado had been arrested for battery, though he was acquitted. Moreover, before he was hired by the Walnut Ridge Police Department, he had left two different police agencies in Colorado in a span of less than three months. He had been on the job in Walnut Ridge for 11 days before he pulled Finley over.

Mercado resigned a couple of months after the incident with Finley, and he has since moved back to Colorado. Despite the timing, it isn’t clear if his resignation was forced or voluntary. His message seems to indicate he was looking for more pay, and he asked that he be reconsidered for law enforcement if Walnut Ridge followed up on a proposal to merge with a nearby town. Kirksey responded with an email praising Mercado’s service to the department.

When video of the stop was finally made public, reaction was quite a bit different than that of city officials. Commenters to Morris’s reports expressed outrage on behalf of Finley. The managing editor of the Jonesboro Sun sharply criticized city leaders in an opinion piece, and the police department said it was temporarily shutting down its Facebook page.

Perhaps seeing the public pressure building, the city placed Kirksey and Cook on administrative leave, albeit 16 months after their alleged infractions. Kirksey resigned last month, although here again, there was no public indication that his resignation was related to his handling of the Finley complaint. Cook is back on the job. Boyce and Cooper also remain on the job.

There’s an argument to be made here that the two officers who treated Finley most poorly have since resigned and therefore have been held accountable. But for accountability to work, for it to serve as a deterrent to bad behavior, there should be clear, articulated connection between the behavior and the punishment. Here, the reason for both resignations remains ambiguous.

It’s tempting to blow all this off as a single, insignificant incident in a small town. It isn’t Los Angeles’s Rampart, after all. Or Chicago’s systemized torture. But it also isn’t unique. There’s a steady stream of stories like this one. I was alerted to this particular story by a former police officer who now advocates criminal-justice reform. (He asked me not to use his name, for reasons that will be apparent in a moment.) I asked him: In his experience, how common is this sort of thing? His response:

This is very common in policing. Looking back on my career, I realize just how often I acted similarly and didn’t even realize it. It was subconscious. I was trained and subtly incentivized to do so. You intentionally create conflict and manufacture noncompliance in order to build your stop into an arrest situation. Because that’s what generations of law enforcers who have been steeped in a fear-based, comply or else, us-vs.-them mind-set do. They arrest people. Arrests are a primary measure of productivity and gives the appearance your department has solved a problem.

Most aggressive cops have honed this to an art. They are savvy, know exactly how to weaponize numerous petty laws, ordinances, use-of-force policy and procedure against citizens. This cop was off his game and clumsily went through the motions like a desperate door-to-door perfume salesman. Except when cops manufacture a “sale” like this, the “customer” ends up arrested, criminalized, emotionally and financially devastated, not to mention possibly physically beaten or worse. And the justice system will deem it legal, even when it isn’t.

As far as the police leadership and prosecutors, they knew exactly what they were doing. If someone makes a complaint, you find something, anything to charge them with.

Finley wasn’t shot, or choked to death, or found hanging in a jail cell. He didn’t suffer any permanent or lasting physical injury. Mercado didn’t even use racist or bigoted language. But Finley did everything he was supposed to. From the footage we can see and hear, he was polite, provided ID when it was asked of him and stepped out of the truck when ordered. Despite cooperating, he was treated poorly, detained and roughed up. When he then tried to file a complaint, he was harassed, and the chief of police attempted to turn his own wife against him — by citing video she hadn’t seen and that ultimately vindicated her husband. Yet even after viewing that video, city officials proceeded to prosecute. And even after the video was released, city officials maligned Finley in the press and insisted that the residents of Walnut Ridge believe the assertions of authority figures over the video evidence that contradicted them.

The “lesson” Finley learned here is pretty clear. Power usually wins. You can be as cooperative as possible, but if a police officer wants to dish out some abuse, he can. And he’ll probably get away with it. Try to hold him accountable if you’d like, but just know that doing so may come with a heavy price.

Once other public officials cover up for “bad apple” cops, the story is no longer about the bad apples. It’s about systemic failure. It’s about public servants willing to tolerate abuse because they’re more loyal to one another than to the public they serve. It’s difficult to say how someone in a position of authority — someone with the public trust — could view footage of the encounter between Mercado and Finley and proclaim they believe that the criminal charges against Finley were merited. Perhaps they were just lying. Or perhaps they were so blinded by deference to law enforcement, a fear of accountability or a knee-jerk defense of authority that they actually believe what they’re saying. I’m not sure which of those scenarios ought to worry us more.

Crooked Mayor Snapp can be reached by contacting the Walnut Ridge Administrative Office.

 300 W. Main Walnut Ridge, AR 72476

 Phone:  870-886-6638 Fax: 870-886-6147

Email- wrcityhall@att.net

The Ruling Class And Qualified Immunity As Explained By James Freeman

Regardless of your political stripe the fact remains that the filthy rich are above the law. James Freeman explains this in the following video. The question you need to ask yourselves is, "What would our founding fathers or France's Robespierre done about these tyrants and traitors?" I think you know the answer.