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Ed. note: If you want to know what it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, all you hafta to do is be a
"Good American" in the post Kennedy-assassination era - with an emphasis on the days and weeks, and months
and years between December 13, 2000, when 5/9ths of the U.S. Supreme Court "selected" George W Bush to be
President of the United States, and the 40 months between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, and the 2005 Inauguration
of the Cheney-Bush White House to a second term.
Beauty Pageant in Prison World 
Is that real hair in those armpits or is it a pair of merkins? Let's say that on
our best day the US cleans house on the Republican culture of corruption in the United States. The
"globalization" scheme designed to wipe out America's middle class, and exploit workers around the
world, and have free reign over gutting environmental protections will also hafta be dismantled. No more
NAFTA, no more SHAFTA. No more GATT, no more WTO. No more institutionalized un-fairness; i.e., harm
brought down upon a nation's people that through taxation and governmental shell games, the people
themselves pay for, twice. First in paying the taxes they can't afford, and again when the evil their
taxes wrought comes back to haunt them again in every area of their lives.
Prison beauty pageants remind me of a Wagnerian musical concert at Auschwitz, performed by the inmates. Low wage prison labor, even to compete with the Chinese labor force should be outlawed. See how many non-violent prisoners would be released on the very first day of such an enactment. MORE    Thursday, 10MAR2005
Ed. note: Click
HERE to read an ongoing conclusion of the opening
statement...
 Today, on the theme of For the Social Good of the General Citizenry: Self-contained Concentration Camps and Gulags, see the Full Text of Human Rights Record of the US in 2004 published on the Official Communist Chinese Government website, and Beyond the God Pod by Silja J.A. Talvi. Also see Parole Reversal - a surprisingly simple fix for our dysfunctional prison system, by Bradford Plumer. Note that this "Parole Reversal" concept works against incarcerating nearly one half of the population of the United States. Thursday, 12FEB2005 
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism from Veterans for Peace
Ed. note: As in the
Wal-Mart Liberation Front, the "W" like the twisted cross extends beyond dubya-dubya III anymore.
What requires particular scrutiny in the understanding of what it felt like to be a Jew in Nazi
Germany in the 1930s are the post-inauguration months leading up to the US-Israeli military aggression
against the Islamic Republic of Iran - a neocon stepping stone that makes the world into a Zionist
state; not all that much different than what Adolf Hitler had envisioned for a Nazi world under the
banner of the Third Reich.
The neocon play book (the Project for a New American Century doctrine) is exactly the same, with the exact same goals and one ironic twist; instead of a Fascist world without Jews, the neocons make a Fascist world with Jerusalem as its capitol. The Arabs and the Muslims become to Zionist Israel what the Jews were to Nazi Germany. With the support of the American Zionists and the U.S. military, "The Crusades" are again unleashed on Islam worldwide. Under neocons domination, the land mass and real estate of the lower 48 is inching toward a wall-to-wall Escape From New York, Guantánamo or Pelican Bay-type penal colony, with the gross national product of the United States becoming Bush Dynasty-owned prisons and the prison industry. It is illegal in the United States to sell product made with prison labor in the United States. It is however quite legal to export prison-made products to the rest of the world - to compete with China, for example. Enter Wal-Mart, the Number One purchaser of goods from both China, and from the American Prison Industrial Complex. As the Arkansas-based Wal-Mart merges with and eventually buys out the Carlyle Group, they along with the Israeli neocon will be known as (the presently fictional) Manchurian Global [To be continued] 
 PNAC (neocon) Background The Good Germans By John S. Hatch Fear Can Turn Us All Into 'Good Germans' - We Must Resist It! By Harley Sorensen Ward Churchill: Are Americans the 'Good Germans'? "Americans need to pay more attention to the suffering they cause in the world..." Jeremy Rifkin's Bollywood Dream 
Ed. note: The creation of a
prison-industrial complex is one the most disturbing things going on. Note there is
no contradiction between the facts that prisons are both hugely expensive and very profitable. Just
like with military spending, the cost is public cost and the profits are private profits: it's yet
another way of funneling public money into the pockets of the rich few.
HERE are a collection of interesting articles on prison privatization and prison labor.
The end of a Constitutionl government and the Bill of Rights is handwriting on the wall. In the best of all possible worlds, the economy and diplomacy need fit hand-in-glove. Adam Weissmann wrote in How do you say "bipolarity" in Estonain, "The end of American economic and diplomatic hegemony is right around the corner." In drawing from the wisdom of Jeremy Rifkin's The European Dream, Weissmann indicates that Europeans have come far closer to achieving the social and economic goals for which Americans had been striving. The American dream, Rifkin argues, has become a reality - in Europe. With free healthcare, unemployment benefits, free universal education, and a strong currency with a vibrant economy, Europe has a higher standard of living than the United States." What killed the American Dream was a non-parliamentary kind of self-governing. The three-branch government evolved into a four-branch government with the lobby becoming a power unto itself that tossed checks and balances into the shitter. Through a kind of legal if not ethical baksheesh driven lobby, the "military industrial complex" corporations absorbed the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, leaving no voice in government of or for ordinary American workers. From the moment the "prison economy" was realized to be more profitable for the global corporations than a free market economy, America was doomed. A world economy without the U.S. as a major player causes the capitalists to look directly down the barrel of China, which just passed the U.S. as the number one consumer nation on earth, and India, not far from contender status. Also see the Adam Weissmann article for an assessment of the European Union as a viable and working number in the world economy. Short term indeed, but longer term and head above water than the U.S. Phasing out the conventional U.S. worker, and favoring prison labor allows the U.S. to compete with China and India on a level playing field, producing goods and services that can be exported right into the hearts of the Indian and Chinese marketplaces. Phasing out education in favor of incarceration tells the investor worldwide to look at barbed wire rather than books to succeed in American business. The global bean counters rejoice as Wal-Mart takes on the whole world with a kind of capitalism that neither Marx nor the Keynesians ever dreamed of in their worst (respective) nightmares. Controlling corporations and restoring democracy By Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray "Across the country, many local communities continue to organize in resistance to giant chain stores like Wal-Mart, predatory lenders, factory farms, private prisons, incinerators and landfills, the planting of genetically modified organisms, and nuclear power plants. Local communities are continuously organizing to strengthen local businesses, raise the living wage, resist predatory marketing in schools, cut off corporate welfare and protect essential services such as water from privatization. Local struggles are crucial for recruiting citizens to the broader struggle against corporate rule." MORE The people's business... The many constituencies concerned with the consequences of corporate power are indeed a diverse group, and although this diversity can be a source of strength, it also makes it difficult to clearly articulate a vision for the struggle. What principles, then, can unite us? One abiding faith that almost all of us share is that of citizen democracy: that citizens should be able to decide how they wish to live through democratic processes and that big corporations should not be able to tell citizens how to live their lives and run their communities. The most effective way to control corporations will be to restore citizen democracy and to reclaim the once widely accepted principle that corporations are but creatures of the state, chartered under the premise that they will serve the public good, and entitled to only those rights and privileges granted by citizen-controlled governments. Only by doing so will we be able to create the just and sustainable economy that we seek, an economy driven by the values of human life and community and democracy instead of the current suicide economy driven only by the relentless pursuit of financial profit at any cost. Therefore, we must work assiduously to challenge the dominant role of the corporation in our lives and in our politics. We must reestablish citizen sovereignty, and we must restore the corporations to their proper role as the servants of the people, not our masters. This is the people's business. MORE Have you thought of Leonard Peltier lately? Evert Hoogers - CUPW National Union Representative Initially, I considered this a curious title for a book about American Indian Movement (AIM) leader and North America's most prominent aboriginal political prisoner, now in his 29th year as "a houseguest in Hell" in Leavenworth Penitentiary, for, in Peltier's own words, "the crime of being an Indian". But it becomes readily clear that Arden is not presenting a book "about" Leonard Peltier or one that details the case for his innocence. Arden, a former journalist with National Geographic, whose long-time activism in support of Leonard Peltier led to his work as editor of Peltier's Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance (St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 2000), describes Have You Thought of Leonard Peltier Lately? as "the artifacts of an ongoing struggle for one man's freedom and for the self respect of us all". While this "living memoir" focuses on the quest for Peltier's freedom, Arden sees this as "a key to freedom for tens of thousands of others in our runaway American 'prison industrial complex'". He links his involvement with indigenous issues to his Jewish roots -- the Jewish Holocaust and the 500 year Holocaust "against American Indian Peoples" involved in both cases the struggle "to survive as a people". "[M]y liberation", he explains, "is bound up with theirs, and with Leonard's". This is very much a companion piece to Prison Writings with contributions by Peltier (including a number of his paintings), memorial pieces and messages about and by key aboriginal leaders and Elders whose lives and struggles have intertwined with his, a review of the circumstances leading to the deaths of two FBI agents on Pine Ridge in 1975 and the subsequent FBI COINTELPRO operation framing Peltier for the murders and an often passionate account of the intervening years since his conviction. This includes a segment on the hopes, first raised by, and then brutally dashed by Bill Clinton in 2000 around presidential clemency for Peltier. Clinton "has the spine of a chocolate iclair", says Arden, proving it by succumbing to FBI pressure and "intimidation, pure and simple", releasing "that string of sleazy felons" and leaving Peltier imprisoned. Have You Thought of Leonard Peltier Lately? touches upon Peltier's flight to Canada and deportation to the U.S. in 1976 based on perjured testimony cooked up by the FBI and the failure of the Federal Justice Department to investigate. However, this book's pastiche covering the intervening years doesn't dwell on the work by aboriginal activists and Peltier supporters here to uncover and publicize the disgraceful role of the Canadian state in dismissing the evidence of Peltiers' innocence and FBI malfeasance during the deportation hearings. For Canadian readers of Arden's book, an added dimension to the "artifacts" of this struggle can be found in paying tribute to the continuing work of the Leonard Peltier Defence Committee Canada (LPDCC) and the coalition it continues to build under the leadership of the indefatigable First Nations activists Anne and Frank Dreaver. Despite the disappointment of Clinton's clemency denial, LPDC Canada has moved on to develop new strategies. I'm most familiar with the work Anne Dreaver has carried on to nurture a solidarity relationship within the labour movement, but the coalition brings together many activists from other sectors. Front and centre is a planned political lobby that will pressure the Federal Government to look at the 30-year record of injustice in Peltier's case and extend an olive branch to aboriginal people by issuing a diplomatic and humanitarian appeal to the U.S. to release Leonard Peltier now. This record covers both countries, notes Anne Dreaver, "and in the United States includes government admissions that there is no evidence against Leonard to warrant his conviction". Moving the Federal Government in this direction will be no easy task, because "there is an impossible conflict of interest and bias in the Department of Justice, since they also represent the United States government.and have from the beginning". Success for the 2005 Freedom Campaign will depend greatly on mobilizing the coalition LPDCC has worked to build. It is encouraging that the Ontario Federation of Labour has joined with the LPDCC to launch the campaign at a widely publicized "Benefit for Freedom" on March 4, 2005 in Toronto. From Leavenworth, Leonard Peltier ends his moving Forward to Arden's book with this challenge: "I'm still here. Now what are we going to do about it?" The LPDCC deserves the active support of all of us as it mobilizes its response. For further information on this book see the companion website www.haveyouthought.com. Prisons, Corporate Profits and the Drug War By Debra McCorkle "Before the Drug War was declared in the 1980s, our prison population was actually declining. Since then, we have been building new jails and even turned over the business to profit-making corporations. In America, throwing nonviolent offenders into jail is good business." "Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could." - William F. Buckley In October, the FBI reported that 755,186 people were arrested in 2003 on marijuana charges. This is a record number of arrests, of which a full 88% involved simple possession without additional sale or manufacturing charges. In contrast, there were only 597,026 arrests for all violent crimes combined. Do you feel safer knowing that the U.S. is vigilant in the war against stoners? The story gets worse - in June 2003, a Gainesville college student was spending the first of four weekends in jail for making a marijuana delivery. He was placed in a cell with 35 year old Randolph Jackson, who was being held on numerous sexual battery charges. Jackson held a ballpoint pen to the student's neck and raped him. There were no guards around to prevent the assault. The rape was reported by the student's family. Even worse - Weldon Angelos, a 24 year old father of two with no prior convictions, was sentenced to 55 years in prison for selling a pound and a half of marijuana to undercover federal agents. Thank you, mandatory minimums. Worst of all -- last September, Jonathan Magbie was sentenced to 10 days in a D.C. jail for possession of marijuana. Magbie was a 27 year old quadriplegic and a first-time offender. He needed round-the-clock care and a ventilator at night. His mother received a phone call on the fifth day of his incarceration informing her that her son had died from a lack of medical care. He had not been a threat to the public - what was the point of jailing a quadriplegic pot smoker, paralyzed from the neck down, for ten days without adequate medical supervision? His treatment was tantamount to a death sentence. The Magbie tragedy is fast becoming the hot topic in Drug War conversations. The United States -- we're Number One. In this case, we have the largest prison population on record in the world. With 2.03 million people in jail, we beat China and Russia both in sheer numbers (China trails behind with 1.51 million prisoners) as well as the rate (Russia is second with 606 per 100,000, while we keep 701 American citizens per 100,000 behind bars). Before the Drug War was declared in the 1980s, our prison population was actually declining. Since then, we have been building new jails and even turned over the business to profit-making corporations. In America , throwing nonviolent offenders into jail is good business. While we are locking up nonviolent drug offenders, let's keep them in jail longer for good measure. A study released in May showed that the average sentence for a drug offense is 82.4 months. Sexual offenders average 66.9 months; manslaughter, 26.8 months, and theft, 24.6 months. In addition, nonwhites are targeted for arrest and conviction in highly disproportionate numbers. Blacks arrested for drug use top 38 percent of all offenders, and 59 percent of all those convicted for drug possession are black. However, there is no evidence that blacks use drugs at higher rates than whites just that law enforcement tends to target inner city areas and poorer communities. Overall, 68 percent of all prison populations are nonwhite. In federal prisons, only three percent of the inmates are incarcerated for violent crimes. 60 percent are drug offenders. Now that we are a nation run by jail-happy racist rabid anti-drug corporate meanies, all we can do is keep filling up those shiny prisons and then hire out the prisoners to corporations at a low wage in order to do our work. Industries pay prisoners a minimum wage, then deduct their cost of housing, food, taxes and other expenses so that an offender averages $60 per month for working nine hour days. If two thirds of the prisoners are nonwhite, nonviolent and net two dollars a day for their labor, doesn¹t that sound a lot like slavery? I thought that slavery was abolished in this country over a century ago. But thanks to corporate darling prison builder Wackenhut and the government's Prison Industry Enhancement Program, big business becomes the rich plantation daddy profiting from the work of enslaved field hands. As long as profits are secure, the Drug War continues to provide a steady workforce by keeping prisons full. Around the world, governments are decriminalizing marijuana. Canada is looking at reducing simple possession of smaller quantities to a fine, similar to countries such as Italy, Spain and Belgium. As evidence grows regarding the efficacy of medical marijuana for treatment of a variety of ailments, government agencies such as the DEA will appear more and more ridiculous in their continuation of reefer hysteria - a concept based on false information and racist pretenses (testimony to Congress in 1937 by Harry Anslinger, the father of the Drug War: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S. and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.") Decriminalization and a curtailing of jail time for nonviolent offenders would take the profits out of prisons. Jailing pot smokers and sellers (over 37,000 incarcerated today) is a waste of time, money, and most of all, lives. Targeting ethnic groups is illegal and recreates a class system which the civil rights movement has been working to eradicate for decades. Marijuana has been demonized long enough. 775,186 pot arrests in 2003 tells us that the War on Drugs isn¹t working anyway. Let¹s quit using pot smokers and nonviolent drug offenders to fill up our prisons.
The creation of a
prison-industrial complex is one the most disturbing things going on. Note there is
no contradiction between the facts that prisons are both hugely expensive and very profitable. Just
like with military spending, the cost is public cost and the profits are private profits: it's yet
another way of funneling public money into the pockets of the rich few.
HERE are a collection of interesting articles on prison privatization and prison labor.
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