I'm Gettin A Little Fired Up

I’m gettin’ a little fired up about the Prison-Industrial Complex, continued.

Following up on this story, which broke in late February of this year, two judges have pleaded guilty for receiving $2.6 million dollars in kickbacks from a private prison company for sending nearly 5,000 juveniles to privately run detention centers for benign offenses.

The case is outrageous: public and private interests collude to condemn youth to social death and the myriad of life changing consequences of incarceration in order to reap financial profit from ordinary citizens whose taxes fund detention centers contracted out to private corporations by the state.

The fundamental immorality of this example lends itself to greater reflection on the motivation behind a criminal justice system in which punishment is viewed as a solution to criminal behavior.  In the United States, the most incarcerating country in the world, legislators rely on punishment as a tool for addressing crime despite the fact that police and prisons have virtually no effect on criminal behavior.  What rationale could possible motivate power-holders in our society to continue their crusade of incarceration despite decades of data that indicate harsh punishment does not reform criminals?

The answer once again comes down to the founding principle of our society: individual economic gain is the only means to achieve personal security.  Our system functions on an extrapolation of this idea to a society-wide scale in which entire populations are marginalized in order to cushion and further ensure the increased economic security of the privileged class.  Power-holders’ addition to wealth is becoming increasingly out of control, resulting in extraordinarily brutal and obvious tactics of oppression and exploitation, such as the incarceration of innocent youth for profit.

Imprisonment is one of many tools used to leverage social and economic domination on lower-class citizens in the United States.  Rather than address the systemic causes of crime- crippling poverty, inequality, marginalization and despair- power-holders leverage the conditions of oppression to further exploit lower-class citizens, condemning them to social death in order to reap direct profit (below minimum wage labor) and limit future potential agency by imposing legal restrictions on former inmates that restrict political power (voting rights) and social stigma that reduce economic mobility.

We have the power to re-imagine our world and create a society alternative to one in which many are exploited so few may prosper. 

We have the courage to recognize the humanity in every other person on earth and recognize our shared struggle.

We have the awareness to realize that the pursuit of financial security should not be equatable to the pursuit of happiness.

We have the opportunity to evolve together as human beings and create a community of trust in which we can all live happily and fulfilled.

This can be more than just a Fantasy ( - Breakbot).

I’m gettin’ a little fired up.

(catch the full article on the PIC here)

Modern Jim Crow: They Want to Make Voting Harder?

Over time, oppressors’ techniques of control have grown more refined and less explicit.  One hundred years ago, people of color were prevented from voting through blatant tactics of violence and physical intimidation.  Now that such public acts of violence and discrimination are considered unacceptable to the general public, power-holders have to devise more ingenious and subtle tactics to disenfranchise oppressed populations.

State legislatures are moving to pass laws reducing early voting periods, which generally account for between one-third to one-half of the votes cast depending on the state.  2008 poll data from states with legislature in motion to shorten the voting period indicates that a large percentage of black votes (more than half in North Carolina) were cast in the early election period.  Republican lawmakers pushing the legislation claim that their efforts will prevent voting fraud and save money, when in fact a shorter voting period would necessitate a larger number of voting stations and thus cost more money.

It is vital to spread awareness and open our eyes and the eyes of our brothers and sisters to these systemic methods of oppression so that we may see them for both what they are, and just how serious a seemingly insignificant partisan issue actually is.  Efforts to disenfranchise marginalized populations in our society seek to gain more power for those who already have too much, which translates into more exploitation of and control over the same marginalized population.  It should also mean more AGITATION on our part.

Spread the word and read the whole article here.

GET AGITATED!

Today is the second anniversary of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider who was shot to death as he left church.

“The Assassination of Dr. Tiller”, a documentary produced by MSNBC, examines the events leading up to the murder, and includes interviews with Dr. Tiller’s co-workers, and the family of the murderer.

How school reform damages poor children

This excellent article from Alfie Kohn analyzes the consequences of the different approaches to education for affluent students and students of color, and how ‘school reform’ is not teaching our most disenfranchised citizens how to think, but rather how to obey.

Not only is the teaching scripted, with students required to answer fact-based questions on command, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

Deborah Meier, the educator and author who has founded extraordinary schools in New York and Boston, points out that the very idea of “school” has radically different meanings for middle-class kids, who are “expected to have opinions,” and poor kids, who are expected to do what they’re told. Schools for the well-off are about inquiry and choices; schools for the poor are about drills and compliance. The two types of institutions “barely have any connection to each other,” she says.

Adds Kozol: “The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality,” while inner-city kids “are trained for nonreflective acquiescence.” (Work hard, be nice.) At one of the urban schools he visited, a teacher told him, “If there were middle-class white children here, the parents would rebel at this curriculum and stop it cold.”

Read more

kNOw More! - YES! Magazine

This is the first installment of a continuing series highlighting organizations, magazines and resources that empower readers with KNOWledge intended to agitate and inspire us to say “NO MORE!” to oppression, exploitation and corruption.

YES! Magazine is a unique online publication that not only identifies and outlines urgent social issues but has the courage to prescribe ‘practical actions’ to address these issues.  YES! empowers individuals “with the vision and tools to create a healthy planet and vibrant communities” by highlighting individuals and organizations that are striving for positive change.  Topics of focus include: peace & justice, the planet, new economy, people power, and happiness.

Visit their website, follow them on twitter, like them on facebook.

The IMF versus the Arab spring

Rich piece from Austin Mackell at the Guardian UK setting the scene for another shock doctrine style invasion- watch and learn as the IMF takes advantage of this vulnerable moment of transition and instability in Egypt and panders to elites with the promise of massive loans in exchange for privatization and deregulation, oppressing the people and civil society while empowering elites.

Beginning in the 1990s, IMF-led structural adjustment programmes saw the privatisation of the bulk of the Egyptian textile industry and the slashing of its workforce from half a million to a quarter-million. What’s more, the workers who were left faced – like the rest of Egypt – stagnant wages as the price of living rocketed. Though you wouldn’t know it from western coverage, the long and gallant struggle of these workers, particularly the strike of textile workers of Mahalla el-Kubra, is credited by many Egyptian activists as a crucial step on the Egyptian people’s path towards revolution.

This failure to appreciate the revolutions as a rebellion not just against local dictators, but against the global neo-liberal programme they were implementing with such gusto in their countries, is largely a product of how we on the western left have been unwitting orientalists, and allowed the racist “clash of civilisations” narrative to define our perceptions of the Middle East. We have failed to see the people of the region as natural allies in a common struggle.

It is this blindness that makes the revolutions appear as instantaneous explosions, like switches suddenly flicked, rather than as events in a continuum. A good place to start the story, if you want it to make sense, would be the Egyptian bread riots of 1977, which came following an initial round of economic liberalisation (which was as much a part of Sadat’s change of cold war allegiances as his salute to the Israeli flag in Jerusalem). It should not have surprised us that as people’s struggle to survive grew more and more grinding following the IMF-led reforms of the subsequent decades they would rise up once more.

Nor should we surprised at the moneyed fightback, which will no doubt be attempted. During this transition period, forces like the IMF will seek to lock in and enlarge the neoliberal project before there is an accountable government to complain about it.

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It

Even with thousands of years of human history and civilization behind us, so few people seem to realize that violence, more than not producing anything beneficial, will always, always destroy.  Is this is a lesson that must be learned with every generation?

Guernica recently conducted a somewhat tense interview with Noam Chomsky in November 2009 that is worth a read:

Guernica: One thing that never changes in your work is the meditation on the devastating effects ofU.S. foreign policy. Here in the U.S., we endlessly tell ourselves, and our leaders especially do this, that “we’re good.” No matter the results, our intentions are good.

Noam Chomsky: Systems of power don’t have good intentions. You’ll occasionally in history find a benevolent dictator or a king who has the interests of the people at heart. But fundamentally, structures of power are not moral agents. We don’t look for good intentions. Of course, they all profess good intentions. But of course that’s also true of Hitler.

Guernica: Are “structures of power” amoral or immoral?

Noam Chomsky: Structures of power are amoral. The CEO, say, of the American Petroleum Institute may care a lot about whether his grandchildren will have a decent world to live in. But as CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, he’s going to try to make that impossible by doing what they’re doing right now, in fact. Working out ways to try to duplicate the success of the insurance industry in undermining any kind of health reform. They’ve already announced, “We’re gonna try to learn from [the health insurance industry’s] tactics and block any kind of energy or environmental bill.” Now he knows (he’s not an idiot) that could lead to a serious catastrophe which could undermine the prospects for the life of his grandchildren whom he cares a lot about. But as the director of a petroleum institute, he can’t consider that. If he did, he’d no longer have that position.

Guernica: You write about how corporations have these super-human rights and that investors and by-laws force them to take every advantage to maximize profits. But what you just said about structures of power being amoral, it seems to me that your work is actually asking them to be moral, no?

Noam Chomsky: I’m not addressing CEOs of corporations or President Obama or anything like that. I’m addressing people, saying, “Look, you’ve got a lot of opportunities. You can effect changes, which will change the actions of structures of power, which will in fact dissolve the structures of power.”

Guernica: What are those changes you mention above that can dissolve the structures of power?

Noam Chomsky: Consider the systematic dismantling of industrial capacity, say GM plants, destroying the workforce and communities, while Obama’s transportation secretary is abroad seeking to use federal stimulus money to contract with Spanish firms to provide high-speed transport—which could be produced by converting the plants that are being dismantled, by the skilled workforce being abandoned. It might require takeover of the facilities by “stakeholders”—workforce and community. There’s no economic principle that bars that, and it could happen with sufficient consciousness and popular support.

Catch the full interview here.

FTW:

Guernica: So what are you recommending?

Noam Chomsky: I think decisions should be made in an entirely different manner for entirely different ends. Should producing more goods and consuming more goods be the highest value in life? That’s not obvious, by any means.

Guernica: And what would be?

Noam Chomsky: Living decent lives, in an environment that provides for people’s essential needs, offers them opportunities to become creative, active, to work together in solidarity, [and lead] more happy, creative lives. That’s a more important goal, I think.

From 5 May 2011

Truthout: Obama Administration Plans Corporate Tax Cut in Year of Record Profits

As nationwide budget protests continue this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is prepared to unveil the Obama administration’s plan to lower the top corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to less than 30 percent, and as low as 26 percent.

In order to pay for the cuts, the proposal calls for closing loopholes and slashing exemptions. Politico reports that Geithner has already begun meeting privately with CEOs, academics, labor unions, and liberal and conservative think tanks, and his aides say he is “encouraged by the response.”

Part of that optimism stems from the fact that Democrats and Republicans are both allies of the business world.

Read More

READ NOAM

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.