America is seen as the dominant capitalist country in the world, and it follows that, by being the prison capital of the world. America had, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2010 – about 0.7% of adults in the U.S. resident population. This is way more than Russia and more than China, which is a country with a quarter of the earth's population. The American prison population really started to rocket into stratospheric regions from the 1980's onward. It now has more people caged up than all of the other developed countries put together. It is also supposed to be a country based on justice and freedom but still manages to pass sentences 100 years or more on people. Though violent crime had fallen in America between 1992 and 2003, life sentences have risen dramatically by 83% during the same period. The year 2012 saw 43 executions in America, a total of 1,320 since 1976. The prison system has been called a crime against humanity, the death penalty is no more and no less than authoritarian state murder.
Land of Freedom, leader of the free democratic world? Cage capital of the world!!!
On December 31st, at least 60 people responded to the call for a noise demo outside the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in downtown Manhattan. The crowd easily filled the street in front of the institution and an aural ruckus filled the air from noisemakers, voices, air horns, a variety of drums, and even a proper brass trumpet.
Anti-prison and anti-police chants from the crowd accompanied a banner reading "BURN THE PRISON SOCIETY." Rebels in the street cheered on the caged and excluded as they banged on their windows, flicked lights on and off, and gave other signals of life from within an otherwise deadening, lifeless building. We moved back and forth around the building to be sure everyone could hear our screams and tried to be as close as possible to the cell of anarchist hacker Jeremy Hammond as we chanted his name. Let's make 2013 a terrifying year for capitalists and state operatives the world over and a joyous year for those seeking the triumph of life over death. OUR PASSION FOR FREEDOM IS STRONGER THAN THEIR PRISONS FOR THE ANNIHILATION OF PRISON AND THE PRISON-SOCIETY
One feature of Western foreign policy is that other countries can't create democracy without the might of the Western military and Western government intervention. The powers that be preach this idiotic message that for democracy to spread anywhere in the world, it needs the fire power of the West, of course ignoring the fact that we don't have democracy here. People across the world can't do that for themselves, the ordinary people of Pakistan and Yemen can't have democracy unless we go in with our drones and special forces. The West's big lie is that by its war on terror, it is spreading democracy, when in fact they are creating chaos in an attempt at permanent domination.
Who knows how many die from these attacks, since they are carried out secretly by the CIA. And civilian casualties are falsely minimized by counting every male of military age an enemy combatant. I guess “Kill-them-all” is the policy at hand. Hundreds of non-combatants have died, including a good many little girls and boys. Obviously, this didn’t just start with Obama. Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world and territorially home to several ancient cultures, was artificially created in 1947 by the British Empire. From the beginning, the country has been dominated by a right-wing military, backed first by Great Britain and then the United States. Since the 1980s war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, Pakistan’s state apparatus has been mixed up with the Islamic fundamentalists in both countries. In fact, the Taliban was nurtured and funded by the United States in Afghanistan. So much for the myth that the U.S. brings secular democracy and women’s equality to the Middle East. Only the people themselves can do that, and they are trying desperately. Before she was attacked, Malala said, “If the new generation is not given pens, they will be given guns by the terrorists. We must raise our voice.” Forty-four years ago (1968) Pakistanis, with women in the forefront, launched a stunning revolution. They forced a dictator to abdicate and ran society for 139 days. Workers occupied factories, peasants seized land, and students took over the schools and colleges. This can happen again and I have no doubt that Malala Yousafzai, and other determined young women and men like her, will be a part of that struggle.
This video shows the extent the corporate world invests in keeping the prison system expanding and why. Though this was an America report, this is also a growing industry in the UK with the government trying hard to get more corporate bodies to use prison labour as a cheap form of slave labour. In a corporate world, if it is profitable to keep people in prison the system will put greater resources behind that goal of getting more people behind bars. The usual right-wing cry of "tough on crime", longer mandatory sentences, all point to more people behind bars, more captive cheap labour. Ah well, that's capitalism for you.
Just another story that adds to the evidence that cops are psychopaths. Recently in this country we had a blind man shot by police taser as the cop thought his white stick was a Samurai sword. How's that for observational skills?
A New Mexico police officer used a Taser gun on a 10-year-old boy to demonstrate what cops do to people who don’t follow orders, according to a complaint heard by a Sante Fe court Tuesday. Officer Chris Webb was attending “career day” at Tularosa New Mexico Intermediate School when he sent 50,000 volts of electricity into the child’s chest on the playground. The young boy blacked out and has, according to his legal representative, been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder ever since; the officer faces a civil suit. According to the complaint, Webb shot his Taser at the child (referred to only as “R.D.”) after he said he did not want to join fellow classmates in cleaning the officer’s patrol car. Courthouse News reported: “Defendant Webb responded by pointing his Taser at R.D. and saying, ‘Let me show you what happens to people who do not listen to the police.’” Webb then shot “two barbs into R.D.’s chest,” the complaint states. “Both barbs penetrated the boy’s shirt, causing the device to deliver 50,000 volts into the boy’s body. “Defendant Webb pulled the barbs out [of] the boy’s chest, causing scarring where the barbs had entered the boy’s skin that look like cigarette burns on the boy’s chest. “The boy, who weighed less than 100 lbs., blacked out.”Instead of calling emergency medical personnel, Officer Webb pulled out the barbs and took the boy to the school principal’s office,” the complaint states. Following the May 4 incident, Webb, who claims he accidentally discharged the Taser, was given only a three-day suspension.
You have to admit that the corporate world never misses a trick. Think of something bizarre like punishing people for transgressing some legislated ruling and the corporate world will turn it into a profit making enterprise. Prisons are big business in America and here in the UK our corporate fascist masters are driving the idea of corporate prisons to help feed their army of parasitical shareholders, profit from human misery, ah, that's capitalism.
In addition to the street-level violence, the police forces in the United States then help incarcerate more people at a rate seen no where else on earth. More people are imprisoned in the U.S. than in any other nation (both in total numbers AND per-capita). Millions of people get cycled through the U.S. prison-industrial complex every year. No nation on earth imprisons more people than the "land of the free."
America, the USA, is THE police state, and the extreme subjugation of millions of individuals is big business -- entire towns now spring up around large prisons (complete with motels for visiting relatives and services and shops for the prison employees), and that's on top of the economics involved with the court systems and police equipment.
Broad sections of the Anaheim working class are seething with anger at cops
Disneyland in Anaheim is emblematic of 'the American dream' - a make-believe world where 'good' always triumphs over 'evil' in the end, and childhood innocence lasts forever. Yet at the gates of this fairytale paradise, torrents of anger are being directed at police for the huge amounts of state killings in the area,
It just goes on and on like a world wide epidemic, across the world we get the picture that the police can kill with impunity, a government issued gun kills and it is law and order, protest the killing and it is violence to be crushed. This from Democracy Now:
Police in the California city of Anaheim are facing allegations of murder and brutality after fatally shooting two Latino men over the weekend and firing rubber bullets at crowds of protesters. On Saturday, Anaheim police shot and killed 24-year-old Manuel Diaz after he reportedly ran away from a group of officers who confronted him in the street. Diaz was unarmed. Hours after his death, a chaotic scene broke out when police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at a crowd of local residents protesting the shooting. Another Latino resident, Joel Acevedo, was shot dead by police the following day. Police say Acevedo was suspected in a car robbery, but the circumstances around his death remain unconfirmed. From Theresa Smith, who has worked with families to call for police accountability in Anaheim since 2009, when officers shot and killed her son, Cesar Cruz, a 35-year-old father of five. "Given the fact that this is the eighth officer-involved shooting within one year in the city of Anaheim ... the community is going to be very upset," Arellano says. "There’s a lot of angry residents, and rightfully so."
The ConEd lockout perfectly illustrates the irrationality of the profit system
In some ways it's hard to imagine a more stark illustration of capitalism's essential irrationality. New York City is currently sweltering through a heatwave, with temperatures in the mid- to late-30s centigrade. As a result, there has been a predictable summer surge in electricity usage, with people scrambling to
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