DISINFO– Wondering how much it costs to buy off the police department? In June of 2011, JP Morgan Chase gave the New York City Police Foundation the largest donation in its history. How the police show their gratitude will presumably determine whether they receive similar donations from companies in the future.
Via Naked Capitalism:
No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:
JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”
Now readers can point out that this gift is bupkis relative to the budget of the police department, which is close to $4 billion. But looking at it on a mathematical basis likely misses the incentives at work. Dimon is one of the most powerful and connected corporate leaders in Gotham City. If he thinks the police donation was worthwhile, he might encourage other bank and big company CEOs to make large donations.
And what sort of benefits might JPM get? The police might be extra protective of your interests. Today, OccupyWallStreet decided to march across the Brooklyn Bridge (a proud New York tradition) to Chase Manhattan Plaza in Brooklyn. Reports in the media indicate that the police at first seemed to be encouraging the protestors not only to cross the bridge, but were walking in front of the crowd, seemingly escorting them across. Over 700 of the marchers were arrested, and the media has a rather amusing “he said, she said” account, with OccupyWallStreet claiming entrapment and the cops batting their baby blues and trying to look innocent.
We simply don’t know whether the police would have behaved one iota differently in the absence of the JP Morgan donation. But it raises the troubling perspective that they might have.
© 2011 Disinfo
Check out Media Roots photos from Occupy Wall Street.
Photo by Flickr user Sasha Y Kimel
No, the 99% does NOT include cops. Cops are only included because the 1% hired them. Cops are NOT there to protect the citizens, but rather who pays them the most.
I made an error with the following paragraph in my prior post.
“It’s not called this, but it seems to be quasi-bribe money ; and it very possibly is that, buying off the police for their oppression of the population in order to protect racketeers like JPMorgan Chase in a big example of being.”
Forget the trailing part, “in a big example of being”. I had something in mind when writing those words, but not this wording, which doesn’t make any sense, or if it at all does, then it makes very very little sense. And what I had in mind isn’t necessary, so only this trimming of the paragraph is necessary ; to not seem like a goofball who doesn’t know how to intelligibly write.
I made some other typographical errors, but will only mention the above one for this post.
The article read last year about police department corruption being much worse and more pervasive across the USA than previously thought and reported may’ve possible been a ProjectCensored.org piece, but I’m not sure. It’s a likely website for such information though.
Btw, when submitting or trying to submit a comment and the security code has expired, the page refreshes and the writer’s or commentator’s text is erased. That erasure can surely be eliminated. Plenty of websites allowing comments will also refresh the page when the security code entered has expired, but without erasing the person’s text. I fortunately use CTRL+A and then CTRL+C to copy the entire text before clicking SEND, to avoid losing my text.
With a little other reading about this huge monetary donation given to the NYPD we can learn that the donation was made in early June, if not in May, 2011, rather than within the past several weeks.
That, however, doesn’t make it any better, for it’ld only mean that the money certainly wasn’t donated only because of OccupyWallStreet, which some of the huge donation is surely used for providing police “security” in case demonstrators unusually get out of hand, say. As far as I know, all of the demonstrations held in the US over the past decade have been peacefully conducted, but ya never know if and when these peaceful people might suddenly become violent, right? Well, it’s not a question that’d worry me, but the poverty-stricken NYPD need funds for applying police state brutality and oppression, ya see. It apparently is very costly to oppress large numbers of people, so the NYPD apparently was low on funds and JPMorgan Chase came to the financial rescue. Poor NYPD. I feel so sorry for them and their (so-called) poverty. Financial woes truly aren’t fun and the guys need a lot of funds for oppressing the population.
Give’em a hand? We can all count me out, for I certainly will.
I am not expert in these topic areas, but it seems very wrong to me that the police forces, which are government forces, would be allowed to receive large, if any at all for that matter, donations from private parties. The funding should be through taxpayer dollars, only ; unless, and only f.e., the government invested tax revenues, made plenty of interest, and then used both taxes and the interest to fund all government functions, say.
Donations from private parties should be immediately treated as too greatly risking conflict of interest situations and no one serving in government, at any rank, in any area of work, should ignore conflict of interest problems or corruption.
It’s not called this, but it seems to be quasi-bribe money ; and it very possibly is that, buying off the police for their oppression of the population in order to protect racketeers like JPMorgan Chase in a big example of being.
I definitely don’t yet see how this kind of funding of police can be considered truly legitimate under US law, or anywhere else.
Perhaps I’ve seen too many “movies”, that is, read too much and viewed too many videos ; like, ya know, former NYPD officer Frank Serpico, some of whose relatives created a website in his deserved honour, http://www.frankserpico.com, which is presently undergoing construction or, and surely, reconstruction, for I visited the site several years ago and learned that there are articles there authored by him about his historical NYPD experience when, and based on his description of the shooting event, it definitely looks like he was internally set up to be, the internal plotters hoped, assassinated or killed. But he’s not the only person I’ll mention, for there are former CIA operations officers John Stockwell, Phil Agee and Ralph McGehee, among three leading CIA ops people to have spoken out ; Michael Levine, formerly an officer of the DEA ; Michael C. Ruppert, a former LAPD detective or certainly officer ; John Perkins, author of “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” and subsequently related books on US empire, economic, … empire ; former USMC Major General Smedley Butler ; of course the renowned documentarian John Pilger ; and surely other people, some of whom I may possibly have learned about, already, but while these named persons are the ones presently coming to mind for what I’m saying. They, with the exception of John Pilger, all worked for law enforcement, CIA ops, and Wall Street, so those with these inside or internal experiences therefore have internal, inside knowledge and spoke out about it, risking their lives in the process.
I read an article last year that said that police departments, so law enforcement, is much more pervasively corrupt in the USA than had previously been reported and thought, too.
So, I don’t like the idea of rich corporations or businesses giving large donations for government services that are meant to be used to serve the general population. There’s far too much risk of conflict of interest, and it would be due to explicit or subtle bribery in the case of JPMC giving huge donations for public police forces.
Let JPMC form its own security, but for only protecting JPMC properties ; not the public streets, which only government and citizens should be allowed to provide security for.
Jesus of Nazareth said to be very careful to maintain SEPARATION of Church and State, and he was unquestionably right about this necessity ; but, we have an even worse or bigger problem in or with separating Big Corp. USA from The People’s government.
Anyway, I won’t say JPMC gave the $4.6bn due to OccupyWallStreet, but also don’t support the government permitting such donations to be received and used by government agencies, departments, and so on. SEPARATION is required, I believe ; until someone can explain in a satisfactory way that it’s okay for such donations to be made, received and used in this manner. I’m not expecting any satisfactory explanations that’ld lead to altering my view of this, but guess it might be possible ; remotely.