On Prisons

 

With Obama being the first sitting president to visit a prison to talk about mass incarceration we must be careful how he and the white press - for that is whom he is really speaking for - confine the discussion why the United States is purportedly the biggest prison population in the world

The Establishment is a odd mix in and of itself, so it is redundant to note a figure like Newt Gingrich on the so-called Right and a personage like Van Jones on the so-called Left finding common cause around this issue of our prisons. We are assaulted with this narrative that "all sides" have come together and agree that the US prison population is a problem in need of resolution.

The Establishment always agree. There is nothing extraordinary here. What is extraordinary is the level of gullibility among some viewers.

The Establishment agree on a defense budget. The Establishment agree that Israel is "our" friend. When Rep Barbara Lee [D-Calif] voted to send more weapons of death to Israel after that white-settler state had killed a few thousand Palestinians in Gaza, she was acting as part of the Establishment. 

 

She not only had none of her leftist flourishes to offer as excuse but she also notably went into hiding from the left-wing press.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders votes to support Israel, and he has been heckled at events for doing so, to which he gets irate and flustered.

So, if anything, the Establishment agreeing on anything should not warm your heart but arouse you to pay closer attention, which is what I'm doing now.

 

The gullible eat the shit in their words and don't watch how these people in government vote.

If you believe the narrative coming out you'd think the country had stumbled mistakenly into this predicament of a swelling prison system. You'd think that it was the consequence of a competitive party system trying to better their opponent on getting tough on crime.

The subtext of this is supposed to convey they it was never intended to lock these masses of African, First Nation, and poor white people up for prolonged sentences: it was just a mistake.

So given this official narrative, that racist Arkansian, Bill Clinton, can credibly come out as offer his regret for signing Omnibus Crime Bills, sending tens of thousands into the dungeons.

What's a prison population for? I'm less interested that ours in the US is the biggest, because prisons function the same whether in the UK, China, France, or Equatorial Guinea.

Prisons house human beings the system cannot absorb.

Parts of the US and all of Australia were started as Convict Colonies, and this fact gives us a sense of prisons and what we really need to do to abolish them.

Britain sent the refuse of capitalism outside its borders. They had already filled up the system within its borders. Refuse of capitalism? Yes. In seeking primarily to maximize profit - not save the world or turn lights on, but rather make money - capitalism wants to deal with as few workers as possible and pay them as cheaply as it can manage. The technology sphere in the hands of capitalism will aid capitalism by finding ways to make workers - human beings - more and more superfluous. Refuse.

Technology is not in itself an evil. Writers who should have known better theorized technology would come to make our lives easier, would create a leisure class. These writers were living in a fantasy world and seemed unaffected by the sober writings that ran almost since the beginning of the so-called Industrial Age right up to, say, Huey Newton's discourses in the 1970's.

Capitalism has made people refuse to a system that has no use for them. It makes sense that one of the earliest populations to be affected by this in the US white settlement were freed Africans.

Since the slave system was demolished, the main problem this white-settler nation has had is what to do with Africans. It has been a running, enduring, persistent problem only solved by - that's correct - mass incarceration.

Discussion about the crimes committed is important because they are clearly racial in nature: in other words, they were crafted to target specific populations. But this present hand-wringing that maybe the sentences for this or that were too excessive or why or why not to mandatory minimums or we need to rethink how many strikes a convict might get is a big distraction from the Plot.

Capitalism wants a smooth, green golf course, and these surplus workers are weeds. It doesn't matter to the Establishment if it can get away with shooting them, gassing them, spraying Round-Up on them, lynching them, pulling them out by their roots, whatever.

It's important the prison problem be framed this way for two apparent reasons:

One, it points to the obvious solution, and it is not getting rid of three-strikes laws but a system that is profit-centered in the first place.

Two, it's important to look at the obvious solution because the Establishment will not come to this solution itself. I would not expect them to. So what are they going to do? What are they up to?

Another recent hand-wringing might give us a worrying clue.

Remember when that same phony Left-Right coalition lamented an over-extended military? They meant personnel, not weapons of death. They targeted personnel and bases, not missiles and cluster-bombs. At any rate, what was the result of this draw-down of the military? It was private contractors. It was a means for the government to lower government expenditures.

Private contractors, who replaced government employees, were like temps: they weren't government employees, not military service people, so any extraneous costs - like long-term medical - were eliminated.

The mission of empire never, ever changed. It has not changed. As with this post-Industrial move to privatize our public schools, local and state government, and right up to what I see as a move to make a great leap forward to privatize the prison system.

This is where we are headed.

Maintaining a large and, in my opinion, naturally revolutionary cadre, of prisoners has become a cost the austerity government does not want to bear. That is why the current preoccupation with our prisons, which is not about prisoners, never about workers.

That is why you will never hear as a cause for incarceration the de-industrialization of the country in favor of cheaper labor abroad and how this would naturally devastate an urban or rural community. The Establishment don't want you connecting any dots.

In the same vein, the Establishment for all its current bluster is not about to release this cadre - which I emphasize is probably the most revolutionary we have, less wedded to a bourgeois system and without bourgeois aspirations - into the streets. They are about to hand the prison system over to the same companies running our charter schools.

Dickens cannot be far behind.

The Greek Referendum

I'm holding my breath on this mistaken referendum in Greece. But I never take my eyes off the evil-doings of Western finance in every part of the world, especially resource-rich, yet impoverished Africa.

Greece was imposed with a Danish monarchy as the Ottoman Empire began its decline. The present Greek king, who is not Greek, is, as he should be, at home in London. Exiled. Yet he still maintains fantasies of returning to his "homeland" where he is not wanted.

Prince Philip, the British queen's husband, was supposedly a Greek prince. The former queen of Spain, Sofia, wife of the also unwanted Juan Carlos, was also a Greek princess. Juan Carlos was imposed on the Spanish people by Franco, and SYRIZA's counterpart in Spain, PODEMOS, wants to exile its monarchy too. In any case, neither Philip nor Sofia have an ounce of Greek blood but come from Denmark and Germany - Germany, which used to be called the stud farm for Europe's royals [because Europe had so recklessly intermarried, spawning some bizarre characters it needed to find some fresh, white blood].

During World War II German NAZI occupation, resistance movements spring up all over Europe. Perhaps the weakest of these, but most celebrated today, was in France. Why? Because the French loved Hitler and Nazism. But since Hitler lost, the ridiculed French resistance has become legendary.

Not so in Greece. The Greek Resistance was large and deep. It was so anti-fascist, so well organized, so well disciplined, so strong, so believing in civil society and democracy, so socialist and so deeply anti-colonial that it had to be liquidated by the British and a military government imposed, along with sustaining the Danish royals.

The Greek Resistance fighters caught on to this quickly and planned to euthanize Churchill as the sick dog he was.

SYRIZA, that anti-austerity, anti-capitalist political party, must know this history. Taking real power through an election is naive enough and comes with known difficulties: namely, you are given the tools and restrictions of a capitalist state to implement non-capitalist agenda.

But to trust a second referendum tomorrow without European imperialism intervening in the most bloodthirsty way, given the history, makes me hold my breath ...

if Europe will sleep soundly knowing that young Greeks are throwing themselves off ledges to end their suffering, you must know this same Europe will PUSH Africans off the same ledges.