With American nobility humbled, mayor candidates size up appeals to keep things as they are.
By David Tulis / NoogaRadio 92.7 FM
Mayor Berke makes a farewell speech today lauding his two terms in office and his many accomplishments.
“Over the course of two successful terms as mayor,” he says in an email this morning, “Andy Berke has worked diligently to break down the barriers that have kept people in our city from living the lives they want. Since 2013, his administration’s unprecedented investments in infrastructure, early childcare, digital equity, economic development, neighborhood revitalization, and public safety have empowered people and positioned our city for even more success moving forward.”
People are blocked from “living the lives they want” less because of barriers put there by other people, other citizens, than by barriers and interventions put there by city government itself.
These “interventions” range from long, steady chronic aches to intense, hot throbbing pricks of pain imposed on the people who reside in the city.
Both extremes originate here: In commercial government.
Commercial government is that which humbles continually what is fair to call the American nobility, the common working man and woman and their families. Commercial government is that corporatist, debt-oriented, law-enforcement and “public safety”-oriented agenda that operates against the people in lock-step.
Two signal city council votes OK’d by Mayor Berke is the ban on the use of the Internet to get short-term vocational rental business to your house or rental if you live east of Missionary Ridge and a ban on dockless scooters downtown to benefit office workers, students and the poor.
Harder to see are abuses of police power in officers’ “enforcement” of laws that do not specifically authorize them to act. The largest two areas of “public safety” are the drug war, launched by the federal government, and misuse of the state motor carrier and trucking law to apply its provisions upon people who are not motor carriers and not involved in trucking.
By harassing people in the second abuse, they enhance their credibility and profit in the first — that being the drug war. The abuse of the trucking law is a giant tree trunk, with one of its biggest supporting roots is abuse of the warrantless arrest law, a statute that carves exceptions to the constitutional ban on warrantless arrest.
No candidate appears to have an interest in ending these positive, angry and continuing abuses that the poor and African-Americans suffer the most. All the people are aggrieved, but aliens and strangers, and orphans and widows the most.
Because the people under notice by this investigative reporter for 2,000 days have done nothing to arrest these wrongs, the evils are more generalized by Mayor Berke and other local authorities under the supposed CV-19 state of emergency.
During the George Floyd protests, had I been a protester and not a reporter, I would have carried a sign bearing these words.
Power – authority = tyranny.
Mayor Berke leaves office well illustrated by the wrongs he leaves in place against the American commoner, the nobility as projected under our constitution. Will the next mayor take up the office, hold the job four years, and depart with things unchanged?
