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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_society_of_captives_20141207
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans to launch a pilot program
in New York City to place body cameras on police officers and conduct
training seminars to help them reduce their adrenaline rushes and
abusive language, along with the establishment of a less stringent
marijuana policy, are merely cosmetic reforms. The killing of Eric
Garner in Staten Island was, after all, captured on video.
These proposed reforms, like those out of Washington, D.C., fail to
address the underlying cause of poverty, state-sponsored murder and the
obscene explosion of mass incarceration—the rise of the corporate state
and the death of our democracy. Mass acts of civil disobedience, now
being carried out across the country, are the only mechanism left that offers hope for systematic legal and judicial reform. We must defy the corporate state, not work with it.
The legal system no longer functions to
protect ordinary Americans. It serves our oligarchic, corporate elites.
These elites have committed $26 billion in financial fraud.
They loot the U.S. Treasury, escape taxation, drive down wages, break
unions, pillage pension funds, gut regulation and oversight, destroy
public institutions including public schools and social assistance
programs, wage endless and illegal wars to swell the profits of arms
merchants, and—yes—authorize police to murder unarmed black men.
Police and national intelligence and
security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the
population and serve as the corporate elite’s brutal enforcers, are
omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror,
to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the
legislative bodies give us back our rights—which they have no intention
of doing—things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We
live in a post-constitutional era.
Corporations have captured every major institution, including the
judicial, legislative and executive branches of government, and deformed
them to exclusively serve the demands of the market. They have, in the
process, demolished civil society. Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation”
warned that without heavy government regulation and oversight,
unfettered and unregulated capitalism degenerates into a Mafia
capitalism and a Mafia political system. A self-regulating market,
Polanyi writes, turns human beings and the natural environment into
commodities. This ensures the destruction of both society and the
natural environment. The ecosystem and human beings become objects whose
worth is determined solely by the market. They are exploited until
exhaustion or collapse occurs. A society that no longer recognizes that
the natural world and life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value
beyond monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies
cannibalize themselves. This is what we are undergoing. Literally.
As in every totalitarian state, the first
victims are the vulnerable, and in the United States this means poor
people of color. In the name of the “war on drugs” or the necessity of
enforcing immigration laws, those trapped in our urban internal colonies
are effectively stripped of their rights. Police, who arrest some 13
million people a year—1.6 million of them on drug charges and half of those on marijuana counts—were
empowered by the “war on drugs” to carry out random searches and sweeps
with no probable cause. They take DNA samples from many whom they
arrest to build a nationwide database that includes both the guilty and
the innocent. And they charge each of the sampled arrestees $50 for DNA
processing. They confiscate cash, cars, homes and other possessions
based on allegations of illegal drug activity and use the proceeds to
swell police budgets. They impose fines in poor neighborhoods for absurd
offenses—riding a bicycle on a sidewalk or not having an ID—to fleece
the poor or, if they cannot pay, toss them into jail. And before
deporting undocumented workers the state levels fines, often in the
thousands of dollars, on those being held by the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency in order to empty their pockets before they
are shipped out. Prisoners locked in cages often spend decades
attempting to pay off thousands of dollars, sometimes tens of thousands,
in court fines from the paltry $28 a month they earn in prison jobs;
the government, to make sure it gets its money, automatically deducts a
percentage each month from their prison paychecks. It is a vast
extortion racket run against the poor by the corporate state, which also
makes sure that the interest rates of mortgages, car loans, student
loans and credit card loans are set at predatory levels.
Since 1980 the United States has
constructed the world’s largest prison system, populated with 2.3
million inmates, 25 percent of the world’s prison population. Police, to
keep the system filled with bodies, have had most legal constraints on
their behavior removed. They serve as judge and jury on the streets of
American cities. Such expansion of police powers is “a long step down
the totalitarian path,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
warned in 1968. The police, who are often little more than predatory,
armed gangs in inner-city neighborhoods, arbitrarily decide who lives,
who dies and who spends years in prison. They rarely fight crime or
protect the citizen. They round up human beings like cattle to meet
arrest quotas, the prerequisite for receiving federal cash in the “drug
war.” Because many crimes carry long mandatory sentences it is easy to
intimidate defendants into “pleading out” on lesser offenses. The
arrested are acutely aware they have no chance—97 percent of all federal
cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas
rather than trials. An editorial in The New York Times said that the
pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants
accept guilty pleas—an action that often includes waiving the right to
appeal to a higher court—is “closer to coercion” than to bargaining.
There are always police informants who, to reduce their own sentences,
will tell a court anything demanded of them by the police. And, as we
saw after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and
after the killing of Garner, the word of police officers and
prosecutors, whose loyalty is to the police, is law.
A
Department of Defense program known as 1033, which was begun in the
1990s and which the National Defense Authorization Act allowed along
with federal homeland security grants to the states, has provided $4.3 billion in military equipment
to local police forces, either free or on permanent loan, the website
ProPublica reported. The militarization of the police, which includes
outfitting departments with heavy machine guns, ammunition magazines,
night vision equipment, aircraft and armored vehicles, has effectively
turned urban police, and increasingly rural police as well, into
quasi-military forces of occupation. “Police conduct up to 80,000 SWAT
raids a year in the US, up from 3,000 a year in the early ’80s,”
reporter Hanqing Chen wrote in ProPublica. The American Civil Liberties
Union, in Chen’s words, found that “almost 80 percent of SWAT team raids
are linked to search warrants to investigate potential criminal
suspects, not for high-stakes ‘hostage, barricade, or active shooter
scenarios.’ He went on to say, “The ACLU also noted that SWAT tactics
are used disproportionately against people of color.”
The bodies of the incarcerated poor fuel
our system of neo-slavery. In prisons across the country, including the
one in which I teach, private corporations profit from captive prison
labor. The incarcerated work eight-hour days for as little as a dollar a
day. Phone companies, food companies, private prisons and a host of
other corporations feed like jackals off those we hold behind bars. And
the lack of employment and the collapse of education and vocational
training in communities across the United States are part of the design.
This design—with its built-in allure from the illegal economy, the only
way for many of the poor to make a living—ensures rates of recidivism
of over 60 percent. There are millions of poor people for whom this
country is little more than a vast penal colony.
Lawyer Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,”
identifies what she calls a criminal “caste system.” This caste system
controls the lives of not only the 2.3 million people who are
incarcerated but also the 4.8 million people on probation or parole.
Millions more people are forced into “permanent second-class
citizenship” by their criminal records, which make employment, higher
education and public assistance difficult or impossible, Alexander says.
Totalitarian systems accrue to themselves
omnipotent power by first targeting and demonizing a defenseless
minority. Poor African-Americans, like Muslims, have been stigmatized by
elites and the mass media. The state, promising to combat the
“lawlessness” of the demonized minority, demands that authorities be
emancipated from the constraints of the law. Arguments like this one
were used to justify the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror.” But
once any segment of the population is stripped of equality before the
law, as poor people of color and Muslims have been, once police are
permitted under the law to become omnipotent, brutal and systematically
oppressive tactics are invariably employed against the wider society.
The corporate state has no intention of carrying out legal reforms to
curb the omnipotence of its organs of internal security. They were made
omnipotent on purpose.
“That’s what nobody gets, that the two
approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense, but side by
side they’re a dystopia, where common city courts become factories for
turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the
white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed
doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee,” Taibbi writes.
“And it’s evolved this way over time and for a thousand reasons, so
that almost nobody is aware of the whole picture, the two worlds so
separate that they’re barely visible to each other. The usual political
descriptors like ‘unfairness’ and ‘injustice’ don’t really apply. It’s
more like a breakdown into madness.”
Hannah Arendt
warned that once any segment of the population is denied rights, the
rule of law is destroyed. When laws do not apply equally to all they are
treated as “rights and privileges.” When the state is faced with
growing instability or unrest, these “privileges” are revoked. Elites
who feel increasingly threatened by the wider population do not “resist
the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them
with an omnipotent police,” Arendt writes.
This is what is taking place now. The
corporate state and its organs of internal security are illegitimate. We
are a society of captives.
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