THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOYS &
GIRLS IN CONGRESS GATHER ROUND TO UNLEASH THE WHOLESALE LOOTING OF THEIR BANKSTER
PAYMASTERS EVEN MORE….
BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS AROUND THE CORNER WAITING!
After eight years of the
Dodd-Frank bank “reform,” the American financial oligarchy exercises its
dictatorship over society and the government more firmly than ever. This
unaccountable elite will not tolerate even the most minimal limits on its
ability to plunder the economy for its own personal gain.
This was not because of
difficulties in
securing indictments or convictions. On the
contrary, Attorney
General Eric Holder told a
Senate committee in March of 2013 that the
Obama
administration chose not to prosecute
the big banks or their CEOs because to do
so
might “have a negative impact on the
national economy."
Survivors Guide to
Prison: The American
nightmare
By Joanne
Laurier
22 June 2018
Directed by Matthew
Cooke; narrated
by Cooke and Susan Sarandon
“I got what I asked
for—the first two symbols that were waiting to meet me were precisely the two
most revolting objects on earth: a church and a prison.”—Paul Nizan, Aden
Arabie
The American prison and
criminal justice system is a collective nightmare that in and of itself makes a
mockery of US government claims to be intervening on behalf of “democratic
rights” or “human rights” anywhere on the planet.
According to the Prison
Policy Initiative in 2017: “The American criminal justice system holds more
than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901
juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country
jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil
commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.”
The US has the highest
incarceration rate in the world—with less than 5 percent of the global
population, it holds approximately 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Its
incarceration rate is some three and a half times the European one.
This situation rightly
alarms and outrages great numbers of people, including artists who want to
expose this reality to the wider public. The US penal system is so inhuman that
Matthew Cooke’s documentary, Survivors Guide to Prison, takes the
form of bleakly ironic advice to those who get entangled in the prison web,
with semi-serious pointers as to how to survive it. Along these lines, the film
is divided into segments such as “How to handle an out-of-control police
officer,” “How to handle an interrogation,” and “How to survive county jail,”
the latter apparently being some of the very worst of the worst.
Narrated by Cooke and
actress Susan Sarandon, the movie also features a host of other celebrities
including actors Danny Trejo, Danny Glover, Cynthia Nixon and Patricia
Arquette, and music producer Quincy Jones. It dramatically opens with a number
of the luminaries expounding on the present state of affairs.
Danny Trejo: “This
country is home to the largest prison population in the world.”
Matthew Cooke: “We
put more people in prison than in China and in Russia.”
Patricia Arquette:“One third of all
females incarcerated globally are locked up here.”
Danny Trejo:“Thirteen million
Americans are arrested every year.”
Matthew Cooke: “Put
that in perspective— imagine all of Los Angeles and all of New
York City arrested every year. … With record
poverty, drug use and countless non-violent social issues left to our police
officers to solve—guns,Tasers, hand cuffs—we have a national crisis on our
hands…But how many Americans are so dangerous that they need to be locked up in
a cage?”
Danny Trejo: “Citizens,
the media, inde pe ndents are all barred from
recording or documenting anything that’s going on inside prisons .”
Survivors Guide to
Prison focuses
in particular on the cases of Reggie Cole and Bruce Lisker, whose stories are
told in fragments throughout the film. Both were innocent men who spent decades
behind bars.
Cole, an African
American, was 16 when he was arrested in 1994 and subsequently convicted of
murder, largely based on the false testimony of an alleged eyewitness. An
endearing man, Cole coined the word “petranoid,” i.e., being petrified and
paranoid simultaneously, to describe his own condition. Cole was exonerated and
eventually released in May 2010.
Lisker, who is white,
was 17 when he was arrested, tried and convicted for the March 1984 murder of
his own mother. He served more than 26 years of a 16-years-to-life sentence in
California prisons, including San Quentin, and was released in 2009. The Cole
and Lisker stories are heartbreaking. Both point to the role of the police and
prosecution as systematic organizers of frame-ups.
Prosecutorial immunity
(the Supreme Court-enshrined legal protection prosecutors have in initiating a
prosecution and presenting the government’s case, no matter how false and
malicious the case proves to be) is another gem of the American legal system, incentivizing
the obtaining of convictions at any cost.
Justin Brooks of the
California Innocence Project notes that “It’s a joke the resources prosecutors
have over defense attorneys. Prosecutors have the police force as
investigators.” Prosecutors have a higher than 90 percent conviction rate.
Cooke’s movie also
points out that an estimated 50 percent of those incarcerated have some kind of
mental health problem, in part the product of the closure of state psychiatric
hospitals and other austerity measures. “Who are the crazy ones?” ask the
filmmakers.
On the other hand, the
prison system is a cash cow for a layer of businessmen and women: for example,
companies that charge prisoners for making phone calls (at exorbitant rates)
alone rake in $2 billion annually. The bail bond industry is another $2 billion
racket.
But there’s a special
place in Hades for those who run the forced labor institutions known as private
prisons. Over 1 million people work for—literally—pennies in prisons that
subcontract to Fortune 500 companies, such as Chevron, Bank of America and
AT&T, along with the military. Private prisons are paid billions by the
federal and state governments to stockpile prisoners and it is in their
interest to fill the beds or claim they are filled. One half of detained
immigrants are being held in private prisons for indefinite periods of
time—often years, with no right to legal representation or medical care.
Survivors Guide acknowledges that “if
you’re rich and guilty you have a much better chance than if you’re poor and
innocent.”
Perhaps not as
astonishing as it may seem, journalist Shane Bauer, who was detained for two
years in Iran between 2009 and 2011, tells the camera: “Conditions are worse in
California prisons then they are in Iran… the average time spent in prisons is
more here than in Iran.”
Importantly, the
filmmakers insist that the precept of “innocent until proven guilty” is “a
shield against witch hunts,” a fact denied or dismissed by the reactionary
#MeToo zealots.
Survivors Guide to
Prison sheds
an informed and heartfelt light on an unspeakable social atrocity. In an
interview, director Cooke asserts that “I thought it was important to have a
black man, a white man, a brown man and women. Every color. I’m trying to show
that this affects everybody.”
The documentary is
assertive, affecting and straightforward in regard to the material it presents.
But as is the case with almost every film that emerges from the left-liberal
milieu (Michelle Alexander, an identity politics academic, is one of the
commentators in the movie, which also thanks Bernie Sanders in its credits),
its overall perspective is its very weakest element.
Does anyone seriously
believe that the horrific conditions described in Survivors Guide to
Prison are going to be altered by a little good-Samaritan tinkering?
The brutality of the prison system mirrors the harshness of social relations in
American capitalism, in particular, the extremely advanced, and ever worsening,
state of social inequality to which the filmmakers allude in passing.
Millions suffering in
prison and a handful gorging themselves are two details of the same vile
picture, a picture with unmistakably revolutionary implications.
Hundreds rally in Pittsburgh
to demand justice for unarmed teen killed by police
By
Samuel Davidson
22 June 2018
Hundreds of people rallied in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Thursday to
demand that the police officer who shot and killed unarmed African American
teenager Antwon Rose, Jr. during a traffic stop Tuesday evening be charged with
murder.
Rose, a 17-year-old Woodland Hills High School honor student, was
shot three times in the back as he ran from police after the car he was riding
in was pulled over in the borough of East Pittsburgh.
A video of the shooting taken by a resident shows the police
officer shooting Rose in the back as he ran away from the car. The officer
never called out for the youth to stop or fired a warning shot.
A rally outside the Allegheny County Courthouse on Thursday took
place one day after hundreds of people also rallied outside the East Pittsburgh
Police department’s headquarters. Late Thursday night dozens of protestors
marched onto the Parkway East freeway, backing up traffic for miles.
Sarah Murphy, who lives near the shooting and heard the shots that
killed Rose, spoke to the WSWS at the courthouse protest Thursday afternoon.
Pointing to her son, Murphy explained, “I want you to show him. So many of our
young people are being murdered in the streets and it is not right. We have
Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights [due process of law]. We have
rights which we should be able to use in the justice system, not just be gunned
down in the streets. That 17-year old son was a citizen, but he was not treated
as such.
“People of color, people who are poor, are the ones getting the
worst treatment. It is sad that it takes a 17-year old getting shot in the back
to get people out here and wake people up.”
Speaking on the fact that those murdered by the police are being
denied their constitutional rights when they are summarily executed by the
police, Murphy noted, “Maybe he made a mistake, and was in a wrong car but he
still has to be entitled to a day in court, not just shot down in the back like
he is some kind of animal. They definitely violated his rights that day.
“I live in the neighborhood and heard the gunshots. I witnessed
the cops riding around erratically while there are little babies on the street.
Speeding around at high speeds, not caring about the people on the streets.
None of us broke the law that day and even if we did, we still deserve our day
in court.”
“Not another person should be shot,” said Zoey who attended the
rally with his six-month old daughter. “We live in a country where people are
supposed to have justice and this is another terrible case where a young person
was killed. I don’t know what to say about it, it is just horrible.
“The police are being given the right to just kill anyone and they
get off by saying that they feared for their life. He was running from them, he
didn’t have a gun.”
The local media has focused on the allegation that the car Rose
was riding in fit the description of a car which the police were looking for
that was involved in a shooting in a nearby town. Police have also claimed that
they found two guns in the car.
These two elements are being pushed to justify Rose’s killing.
However, the driver of the car was not arrested which he would have been if the
guns were illegal or the car was the one for which police had been searching.
When police stop a car or randomly stop a person for no reason they
routinely claim that the person or vehicle matched the description of someone
they were looking for or that the car had made a minor infraction.
The Allegheny County Sheriff's Department, which has taken over
the investigation of the shooting, has not released the name of the officer who
shot and killed Rose. As is routine, the officer has been placed on paid leave
while the investigation takes place.
According to local press reports the officer had just been sworn
in that day as a member of the East Pittsburgh Police department and had been a
police officer working at three other nearby police departments including the
University of Pittsburgh. There has been no explanation of why he moved from
one department to another or what his record in those departments was.
The wave of police killings in the US continues at a rate of more
than three every day despite the popular protests that first erupted nationwide
after the 2014 murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Tamir Rice in
Cleveland, Ohio; and Eric Garner in New York City. According to a database
maintained by the Washington
Post, 491 people have been shot and killed by police so far in
2018, on track to top last year’s final death toll of 987.
These murders have been whitewashed by both Democrats and
Republicans with few killer cops ever being criminally indicted; in the few
cases where they are, most are found not guilty.
President Donald Trump has made clear that he supports the
stepped-up violence of the police against workers, youth and the poor and that
his Justice Department will not prosecute police officers or investigate police
departments, no matter what their crimes. For its part, the Obama
administration paid lip service to civil rights while siding with the police at
the Supreme Court and arming police departments with military hardware
including high-powered rifles and assault vehicles along with high-tech
surveillance tools.
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