For the last couple days the Republican National Convention has been playing in the background on the radio, and I’m hearing absolutely nothing hopeful or honest coming out of Tampa. I’m sure my reaction will be the same when the Democrats meet next week in Charlotte. The Republicans’ failure to treat Ron Paul’s delegates with respect and fairness underscores just how phony these choreographed performances really are.
These elaborate and costly affairs have always papered over the essential truth of the matter: that freedom has long since slipped through the fingers of us Americans, like a last sip of water at a desert oasis many miles behind us.
Left wing, right wing, liberal or conservative, blue or red—it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all an illusion. Whichever party prevails, the end result is exactly the same. The obedient masses will always be controlled by the Big Money, now and forever more.
The process of control begins in the schools where children are conditioned to be malleable and compliant. In the schools of the poor, discipline is zero-tolerant and enforced heavy-handedly by law enforcement officers stationed in the halls. In the schools of the rich, zero-tolerance is enforced by the parents and students themselves through rather more elegant methods of control. (Remember, it was at Cranbrook Academy that a homophobic young Mitt Romney gave my nonconformist friend a haircut and never did get in trouble for it.)
Either way, we are taught at an early age to be intolerant of individuality and mindlessly obedient to the authority of our social “betters”—which, of course, is defined by money and the power it confers.
The process of control continues in the ranks of the military and corporations, where people are used (and used up) until they are no longer of value to the institutional aims of their overseers. In the broader society, a wide range of normal human activities have been criminalized to the point that you can be thrown into jail for just about anything you do that rubs the authoritarians the wrong way. (Remember the guy in Phoenix who was jailed for holding prayer meetings in his home.)
If you are indigent and taken to court in America for any reason, you may as well kiss your ass goodbye. It is more likely than not that society will determine that your “highest and best value” is to serve as a slave laborer in one of America’s burgeoning prison industry facilities—corporate America’s latest scheme for avoiding the real costs of outsourcing American jobs to offshore markets.
If you are not indigent and toe the line at work, you will probably be left alone as long as you pay your taxes, do not draw attention to yourself, and spend most of your earnings at Target, Wal-Mart, and other temples of consumerism. If you carry an unpaid balance on your credit cards and make only the minimum monthly payments, you can avoid being labeled a “deadbeat” by the banks. (“Deadbeats” are those who pay off their charges every month and thereby avoid paying the banks’ confiscatory fees and interest.)
The “American Dream” is attainable mainly to those sleepy folks who allow themselves to be molded into the kinds of geeky guys in bow ties (or glamour gals in gaudy baubles) who show up at national political conventions in silly hats.
Not for me, thank you. I am awake and not dreaming.
If we are to achieve our cherished American Ideals, we must ignore authority, be self-responsible, take matters into our own hands, and create Freedom, Justice, and the American Way any way we can, starting in our own lives and families. You’ve gotta be wide awake to do this.
Wake up, sleepyheads.
The politicos and their money masters don’t care about you.
۞
Groove of the Day
Listen to Prince Albert Hunt’s Texas Ramblers performing “Wake Up Jacob”
Okay, so don’t just take my word for it…
This opinion piece appeared a couple days ago in The Wall Street Journal.
Some of my conclusions are apparently entering the mainstream…
Opinion
The Prison Economy May Be Our Only Economy
By Jeff Nielson 08/27/12 – 11:21 AM EDT
VANCOUVER (Silver Gold Bull) — Back in March I wrote “The U.S. Prison Cell Economy”. At that point I was speaking in metaphorical terms. However, as Bloomberg reveals to us in a recent article, the U.S. “prison economy” is a very literal concept.
Every month, year after year, U.S. homebuilders start construction on 50% to 100% more units than they sell. Yet, the propaganda machine claims inventories of U.S. new homes have been plummeting.
In my article I stated a simple conclusion: Either the official U.S. housing numbers were total fabrications or more than half of these “housing starts” were units that did not require a “sale” to an individual owner in order for the builder to be paid.
In attempting to come up with an answer to this riddle I could only formulate one possibility: All of these phantom “housing starts” were, in fact, prison cells.
This conclusion should hardly be surprising to informed readers. The U.S. warehouses more of its own population in prisons than any other Western nation by a vast margin. Canada is a distant second, and then there is a further drop once we move past North American “incarceration mania.” Furthermore, the Corporate Media has been gushing over the fantastic growth curves of U.S. private prison corporations.
Nonetheless, it would undoubtedly be greatly disturbing to the vast majority of (under-informed) Americans to learn their own government is secretly and rapidly expanding the “maximum occupancy” of its entire (increasingly private) prison system.
Want to “compete” with Chinese and Indian labor in the U.S. but you can’t find workers willing to work for 1/10th their (previous) wages? Just lock ‘em up and force them to do that labor for even less. What will be the secret to Corporate America’s “success” in the 21st century? Chain gangs.
Now we see apparent (corporate) confirmation of this new Prison Economy taking shape in the U.S. When one retailer moves into a particular market, we see that as “filling a niche.” However, when a plethora of retailers congregate in that same market, we see a “growth sector.”
The phony numbers produced on U.S. retail sales cannot hide the fact that month after month U.S. retailers are selling fewer goods (they simply cost more because of soaring inflation). This is due to the fact that (in real dollars) U.S. wages have fallen by more than 50% over the past 40 years.
With costs also soaring (because of the aforementioned inflation), profit margins are collapsing. The U.S. retail sector is dying. Seeing “the writing on the wall,” more and more U.S. retailers are focusing on the only remaining “growth market” in U.S. retail that doesn’t involve exclusively servicing the rich: the ever-growing U.S. prison population.
Bloomberg was writing about only one segment of the prison population market: music downloads (and players). It lamented that one of the problems for Corporate America as it tries to cash in on this growing market is: “Corrections facilities generally forbid devices that can be turned into weapons, be used to communicate freely with the outside world, or conceal contraband.”
Talk about cramping the ability of these capitalists to make a buck on this “captive market”!
More searching uncovered a much more general article about the “retail boom” in selling products to inmates. A NY Times writer named Pamela LiCalzi O’Connell, wrote a piece titled “New Economy; For consumer goods producers, it is not so bad to be behind bars”.
The writer’s own bias is clear when she notes callously about the millions of Americans being warehoused in prisons that “to some, these figures are a national embarrassment. To others, they represent a marketing opportunity.” Nonetheless, the article has several very interesting factoids within.
After obtaining information from a company called Koss, which markets headphones, the writer notes that:
…[I]t is one of the few companies willing to talk about how it markets to the segment.
“This business is very quiet, very tight-lipped,” Mr. Koss said. “We sell through a group of closely held companies that specialize in getting merchandise into the prison stores. This is a lucrative business — both for the manufacturers and the distributors — so there is a reluctance to talk about it for fear of attracting competition.”
One of Koss’s distributors confirmed that assessment. “We don’t like exposure,” said Tom Thomas, president of Union Supply.
So we know that the U.S. Prison Economy is both very lucrative and very secretive. However, what makes this NY Times article especially fascinating (chilling?) is the date: May 14, 2001. That was six months before the U.S. changed forever, degenerating into a fascist enclave where “rights” are now always subordinate to “security.”
As part of that security, information is now heavily suppressed in our “free and open societies.”
Try to find information on the total number of private prisons being constructed in the U.S., the total number already built, and the total population size that these mushrooming facilities will be able to warehouse. Remember that all the good folks at Homeland Security have to do is to wave their magic wand and call these facilities “detention centers”, and suddenly it’s verboten to even mention them — as part of “national security.”
When the NY Times article came out back in 2001, it noted that: “…During the 12-month period ended June 30, 1999 [the most recent data available at that time], the Federal prison population rose 9.9 percent, the largest yearly gain ever reported. The incarceration rate has tripled since 1980.”
Note that what the Times writes about was before the explosion in private prison/detention center construction in the U.S. even began. Trying to get accurate current numbers on the U.S. prison population is becoming increasingly difficult.
The Times reported, “More than 1.3 million inmates under the jurisdiction of state and Federal prison authorities in 1999, according to the Justice Department.” The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics notes only 1.6 million inmates under state/federal “jurisdiction” in 2010, but this conveniently omits 750,000 additional prisoners in the U.S. being warehoused in jails all across the country (also using 2010 data) — the “revolving door” that leads into the prison system.
Note that while the U.S. government claimed to only be holding 1.6 million prisoners as of 2010, that back in 2006 CNN stated “there are more than two million inmates serving time” in the U.S. — as part of its article on what was already a “$37 billion economy bulging with business opportunity.”
Even more alarming, it will no longer be possible to obtain precise numbers on the U.S.’s inmate population in the future. Thanks to the “indefinite detention” law enthusiastically supported by both halves of the Two-Party Dictatorship, habeas corpus is dead in the U.S., the only independent means of verifying how many people (in total) are being incarcerated by the U.S. government.
The number of prison facilities in the U.S. (of one form or another) is exploding, but we have no idea by exactly how much. The U.S.’s mammoth incarceration population continues to grow, but we no longer know by how much. We do know that this is very, very “good for business” — but few of the Oligarchs want to talk about precisely how good it is.
In 2001, the NY Times told us that the U.S. Prison Economy was the “New Economy.” In 2012, it’s now the Growing Economy (and the only part of the U.S. economy still growing). How much longer before it’s simply the only economy?
Well, as a person who spends a great deal of time volunteering for local Democratic candidates, and as Chair of the local Democratic party and former school board member (elected position), I disagree with some of your comments, Dan. I, too, find the GOP party platform and their convention (what I hear about it) offensive. And I certainly don’t agree with everything all the Democrats are doing. But as a woman with a womb, who has a daughter with a womb, I think there is a great deal at stake in this country. Abortion is legal, yet we’ve seen the Republicans make it harder and harder to access this legal health procedure over the years, especially for poor women. Now they want to make it illegal, even in cases of rape and incest (that is what Ron Paul and his son believe, as well, and although Paul says he will leave it to the states; however, it is the President who nominates court appointees).
I think if Romney is elected, this country is handing the reins over to the wealthy elite, and basically saying they don’t give a crap about women’s rights, gay rights, the elderly and and the needy. A vote for a third party candidate is, in my opinion, saying the same thing, because we all know this country at this time only has two viable parties. So while I completely agree that Obama and many Democrats have not done much if anything to improve the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs, splitting the Democratic party is only going to get a Republican elected, just like in 2000. And if you think having Republicans in office is going to make the prison or drug war situation better, there is no sense in me saying any more.
Thank you, Ann, for your comment AND for for your service to the commonweal.
In our differences of views, one can see why I have removed myself from the outer world and why you remain in it. Yet these differences, I think, are “tactical” in nature. We disagree in the “hows” of things.
From our commonalities, however, I think it is clear that we agree in the “whys”. There is more coherence in our “strategic” objectives than there is not. Just as I would encourage someone with different religious/spiritual beliefs to keep doing what they’re doing, I encourage you to keep doing what you’re doing. I respect you for it.
All roads lead to God. Our separate earthly paths lead to the same destination, too. God save us all from those who insist we live by their lights and not by our own!
My apologies for coming on so strong. Probably from being in the thick of things. Partisanship is not pretty, and I try to look for common ground, but sometimes I just get into a funk. It’s important to remember the basics, as you say. Love, compassion, hope…. We have much in common.
No need whatsoever for apologies, Ann. We can disagree in this “space” of ours, and even raise our voices if need be (though that was not the case in this instance), and remain fast friends.
I respectfully disagree with your conclusions about the political system, Dan. I think it makes a huge difference who will win this election. Look at the crowd at the Republican convention. These are some of the palest people I’ve ever seen who cheer for a program that the founding fathers never intended!!! The Republican platform and the candidates do not represent the best of America. I think the Democrats attempt to do so. Why? because they acknowledge that this country is committed both to freedom and
equality. The Democrats argue for a health care system that achieves both access and quality, for a political system in which the commitment to voting is expansive, a rights program that is expansive for political, social, and civil rights, and a tax system that is progressive. You and your clients have experienced terrible injustices in the American legal system. But I truly believe that in general today’s Democrats and not today’s Republicans believe that we are “all in this together” and that we can still make a difference in the political process. Some Republicans and some Democrats (recall Jimmy Carter) stress that the “people are good” and the system is flawed. Well, sometimes the people are not good and we need government regulators to help achieve honesty and fairness. My African American neighbor who lived through segregation in the South will tell you that the people are sometimes not good and we needed a Supreme Court in 1954 and the Johnson programs of the mid 60s to “force” people to be good. Anyway, you admirably work very hard to achieve your goals, and I understand some of your deep frustrations. . But have friends who have lived their lives as either government bureaucrats or leaders in the public sector who have been thoroughly engaged in the political process — and all of our lives are better for their efforts.
Mary, I hope you’re right, but I am afraid you are not. Yet as my mentor always used to say, “The important thing is not who is right, but what is right.” I would be only too happy to admit I am wrong–life, the economy, and politics would sure be a helluva lot less bumpy and painful if I were!
Great post, Dan, and I appreicate your passionate perspective, Ann (it’s one I share – particularly in agreement with your closing paragraph,
“I think if Romney is elected, this country is handing the reins over to the wealthy elite, and basically saying they don’t give a crap about women’s rights, gay rights, the elderly and and the needy. A vote for a third party candidate is, in my opinion, saying the same thing, because we all know this country at this time only has two viable parties. So while I completely agree that Obama and many Democrats have not done much if anything to improve the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs, splitting the Democratic party is only going to get a Republican elected, just like in 2000. And if you think having Republicans in office is going to make the prison or drug war situation better, there is no sense in me saying any more.”)
I am deeply concerned about what will happen to boost the hard-right agenda if Romney / Ryan win in November. While I hold some disappointment about Obama, I also think he’s had a damn-near impossible situation with the divisions in Congress and with Republican and tea-party-fueled obstructionism of anything he proposes.
At the core of it, I am deeply distressed by a national political ethos that celebrates and solidifes the entrenched positions at the expense of truth, nuance, civil discourse. My personal struggle is about what’s *my* appropriate response when all the rhetoric (on both sides!) is about attack and blame. Especially when there is so much at stake.