I have no idea if Bill Cosby is innocent or guilty of rape, just that he's innocent until proven guilty.
due process
“the regular administration of the law, according to which no citizen may be denied his or her legal rights and all laws must conform to fundamental, accepted legal principles, as the right of the accused to confront his or her accusers.
On Thursday, Mississippi is scheduled to execute the first woman, Michelle Byrom, 57, in the state since 1944, even though her son, Edward Byrom Jr., repeatedly confessed to the killing that she is slated to die for — evidence the jury did not hear because her defense attorneys--their first capital murder trial-- never admitted the confession letters into evidence. Ms. Byrom was a lifelong victim of abuse, both as a child and in the marriage that ended in her husband’s death. Not to mention, at the time of her husband's death, Ms. Byrom was in the hospital for double pneumonia while on mind-altering drugs.
“As I sat on my bed, tears of rage flowing, remembering my childhood my anger kept building and building, and I went to my car, got the 9mm, and walked to his room, peeked in, and he was asleep. I walked about 2 steps in the door, and screamed, and shut my eyes, when I heard him move, I started firing.” -- Edward Byrom JrDespite corroborating evidence supporting the son's confessions such as the gunpowder found on his hands, Byrom Jr. pinned the murder plot on his mother after prosecutors convinced him to take a plea deal in exchange for a reduced sentence.
“When they got me here, I gave them a bullshit story after another, trying to save my own ass, but when David Smith started questioning me, and told me what happened, I was so scared, confused, and high, I just started spitting the first thought out, which turned into this big conspiracy thing, for money, which was all BS, that's why I had so many different stories,"--Edward Byrom Jr.So authorities allege that Byrom Jr., his mother and his friend, Joey Gillis, colluded to kill Byrom Sr, in order for Michelle Byrom to collect on her husband’s life insurance policy. However, both Byrom Jr. and friend, Joey Gillis--accused of pulling the trigger despite the gun powder residue on Byrom Jr.'s hand-- walk free today.
“I have attempted to conjure up in my imagination a more egregious case of ineffective assistance of counsel during the sentencing phase of a capital case. I cannot."--Judge Jess DickinsonRead more...
In the documentary below, former Conservative MP, Michael Portillo pushes his body to the brink of death in an investigation into the science of execution. At the very beginning he states, "If the state's going to kill people, you want to do it as humanely as possible, I think most people agree on that." I'm not so sure. From my very limited perspective, I think the man who invented the lethal injection protocol, Dr. Jay Chapman's response, "My basic attitude is so they suffer a little pain, who cares?" might just be the attitude shared by most.
Of course, as I've stated repeatedly, I do not believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, but if the state insists upon executing people, the least they could do is spare the doomed individual as much pain as possible. As I have also stated many times before, I think the lethal injection protocol is, as they say in the film "torture disguised as a medical procedure." And that's whether they carry it with two or three drugs. I mean, just imagine not getting enough of the drug that is supposed to cause unconsciousness, before getting the paralyzing drug (most likely used for aesthetic reasons) that renders you unable to signal your distress, followed by a heart-stopping drug, which "feels like a fire traveling through the vein to the heart.” The chance of this occurring is extremely high because it is administered by ill-trained staff. After all, doctors and nurses are supposedly bound by the "Hippocratic Oath" or take a pledge to do no harm.
It's not just a lack of expertise that contribute to the controversy over lethal injection; it's the second drug in the cocktail: pancuronium bromide, the paralyzing agent Carol Weihrer, who has testified in 15 court cases against lethal injection, knows all too well the pain this drug can cause. During a routine eye operation, in which she was given anesthesia and then pancuronium bromide, the anesthesia failed to work, leaving her fully aware of the excruciating pain as the pancuronium bromide coursed through her veins, but unable to tell anyone or move. She said if felt like "ignited jet fuel going through your body feeling like you're absolutely on fire." Carol believes that most executed inmates go through the same experience as she did. She states that the anesthetic used in the lethal injection protocol is "short-acting, five minute version" and that that lethal injection "takes between 10-12 minutes on a good day." In other words, the inmate is put out for a couple of minutes, and then conscious, thus feels the pancuronium bromide painfully charge through their veins without being able to alert anyone and dies from suffocation before their heart is stopped.
One example:
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| Angel Diaz |
“Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."--Abraham Lincoln, U.S. President. 18 Dec. 1840
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| CCA houses over 80,000 inmates in more than 60 facilities across the US. |
Update:: Dennis McGuire surpassed the projected five minutes--experiencing the "agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after [executioners] intravenously inject him with the execution drugs"--before he loses consciousness and expires--his lawyers said it would take to die, It took 15 minutes for him to die, as he "gasped, snorted and snored during a prolonged execution" from "air hunger" on January 16, 2014, when the state used the controversial, never-before-tried lethal injection after supplies of the state's previous drug dried up.
“The 53-year-old's attorneys had argued against using intravenous doses of the sedative Midazolam and the painkiller Hydromorphone, claiming the combination would cause 'air hunger' - where someone experiences immense terror and agony as they strain for breath during the execution."[...]
“He was then still for five minutes before emitting a loud snort as if snoring and continued to make this noise for several minutes. His stomach rose and fell several times as he repeatedly opened and shut his mouth, making what the Columbus Dispatch described as 'deep, rattling sounds.'Why can we put a dog/cat to death in less than 10 seconds but can't seem to do it when it involves putting a human-being to death. The answer is we can but the sequence of the "lethal cocktail" that enters the body is designed to provide the condemned with a feeling of terror, otherwise why not just inject a general anesthetic followed by whatever it is that stops the heart immediately?
His family sobbed as they watched him slowly die. At one point, his daughter exclaimed 'Oh my God' as she observed her father's final moments.
A coughing sound was Dennis McGuire's last apparent movement, at 10:43 a.m. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes later. McGuire as first injected with the drugs at 10:29 a.m."
“Ohio and other death penalty states have been struggling to keep executions going because supplies of pentobarbital traditionally used in a three-drug mix have all passed their sell-by dates thanks to its Danish manufacturer prohibiting its sale to US prison services. The European Union has also threatened to restrict sales of Propofol, a leading anaesthetic used in hospitals, were US death chambers to use it instead."I feel my whole body burning.
As of last year, according to the report A Living Death Sentence: Sentenced to Die Behind Bars For WHAT? released by the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 3,200 people were serving life in prison without parole for non-violent crimes. Of the 3,278 prisoners--mostly racial minorities--doing life for nonviolent crimes, 63% were sentenced by federal courts; the rest are in nine state prison systems. Most of these cases were sentenced under mandatory minimum guidelines, for which judges had no choice but to dole out a life without parole sentence. People got life without parole for things like:
"For 3,278 people, it was nonviolent offenses like stealing a $159 jacket or serving as a middleman in the sale of $10 of marijuana. An estimated 65% of them are Black. Many of them were struggling with mental illness, drug dependency or financial desperation when they committed their crimes. None of them will ever come home to their parents and children. And taxpayers are spending billions to keep them behind bars.At the very least, 3,728 will die in prison for nonviolent offenses, costing the US nearly $2 billion. The ACLU makes recommendations for reform. It calls on the states and federal government to eliminate laws that mandate or allow life without parole for nonviolent crimes, and strongly urges state governors, as well as the Obama administration, to commute such disproportionate punishments. "Life without parole sentences for nonviolent offenses defy common sense," it concludes, and "are grotesquely out of proportion to the conduct they seek to punish."
Across the nation, thousands of new prisons are being built as the multi-billion dollar Prison Industrial Complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in America, and when you consider that most prisoners are in jail for non-violent offenses, and that their only "crime" is disobeying the government's arbitrary system of "laws", the fact that corporate America profits so obscenely must raise the question of who the criminals really are.
From Unmasking the Prison Industrial Complex Part 1: The High Profits of Prison Labor:
“The research that went into this post revealed harsh realities about the state of our country and it's deeply rooted capitalist mentality. Story after story, it was clear that real Americans were suffering in ways that simply did not have to be. It was obvious that the prison industrial complex was created and perpetuated in a way that is unprecedented. Stories such as, US Technologies, an Austin, Texas based company, who closed their doors and laid off hundreds of employees only to ship their jobs, not overseas, but to the nearest Austin, Texas Prison, where inmates work for cents a day. Many companies have begun using prison labor, such as Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret and Boeing. You may have had firsthand experience dealing with the hardest of criminals if you have ever called TWA to book a flight. That’s right folks; TWA uses prison inmates to book flights. Even federal prisons have gotten a piece of the action, a company under the trade name Unicor uses prisoners to make everything from lawn furniture to congressional desks. Their web site proudly displays “where the government shops first.” For private corporations, prison labor is pure gold. With prison labor there are no unions, no strikes, no insurance benefits, and no rights! This is even backed up by the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. State Corrections agencies are even advertising their prisoners to corporations by asking them questions such as: “Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the cost of employee benefits? Getting hit by overseas competition? Then the Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you.”
An American worker, who once upon a time made $8/hour, loses his job when the company relocates overseas where workers are paid only $2/day. Unemployed, and alienated from society indifferent to his plight, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison, and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents/hour. This fictional story, unfortunately is true of many Americans, that have not been given many options. Prison is quickly becoming the new form of slavery, as the laws against crime disproportionately affect the African American Community."
"Why lock somebody up while you're locked up? You're trying to kill their spirit even more," says Michael Kemp, describing his six-month stay in solitary confinement at age 17.Read more...
Solitary confinement was once a punishment reserved for the most-hardened, incorrigible criminals. Today, it is standard practice for tens of thousands of juveniles in prisons and jails across America. Far from being limited to the most violent offenders, solitary confinement is now used against perpetrators of minor crimes and children who are forced to await their trials in total isolation. Often, these stays are prolonged, lasting months or even years at a time.
Widely condemned as cruel and unusual punishment, long-term isolation for juveniles continues because it's effectively hidden from the public. Research efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition have struggled to uncover even the most basic facts about how the United States punishes its most vulnerable inmates.
How can a practice be both widespread and hidden? State and federal governments have two effective ways to prevent the public from knowing how deep the problem goes.
The first has to do with the way prisons operate. Sealed off from most public scrutiny, and steeped in an insular culture of unaccountability, prisons are, by their very nature, excellent places to keep secrets. Even more concealed are the solitary-confinement cells, described by inmates as "prisons within prisons." With loose record-keeping and different standards used by different states, it's almost impossible to gather reliable nation-wide statistics.
The second method is to give the old, horrific punishment a new, unobjectionable name. Make the torture sound friendly, with fewer syllables and pleasant language. This way, even when abuse is discovered, it appears well-intentioned and humane.
So American prisons rarely punish children with prolonged solitary confinement. Instead, they administer seclusion and protective custody. Prison authorities don't have to admit that "administrative segregation" is used to discipline children. Just the opposite, actually. It's all being done "for their own protection."
Seclusion? Protecting children? Who could argue with that?
For starters, there is Juan Mendez, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. Americans are accustomed to the U.N. investigating incidents of prisoner abuse in other countries -- which Mendez has done in faraway places like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But increasingly, his inquiries are focused on American prisons.
Mendez spoke publicly about Bradley Manning's deplorable treatment in solitary confinement. Now he is calling on the United States to ban isolation for minors, which he considers, "cruel, unusual, and degrading punishment." It's a recommendation he shares with the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology.
The ACLU report, Growing Up Locked Down, is one of the few detailed, comprehensive examinations available. This devastating and detailed look at solitary confinement for minors has led to this online petition that will be presented to Attorney General Eric Holder in October 2013.
Because the prison system is so opaque, reform has been slow in coming. A congressional hearing on solitary confinement, chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) last year, heard testimony from mental health experts, questioned the director of federal prisons, and brought a replica of a solitary confinement cell onto the Senate floor. In recent years, seven states -- Maine, Connecticut, West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska -- have enacted laws to restrict the use of punitive isolation on young people. As awareness of the magnitude of the problem grows, more reforms are likely to follow.
If we believe that juveniles are inherently less responsible for their actions than adults - and more susceptible to rehabilitation - then it follows that their punishments should be less severe.
Given the severity of the punishment, prohibiting solitary confinement for young people is a first step. The greatest challenge remains demanding greater transparency from a prison system that wields total control over its most vulnerable inmates.
From the wrongfully convicted to outrageous sentences for victimless "crimes", to outright harassment by law enforcement, our prisons are overflowing with people denied justice. Unfortunately, corrupt judges and corrupt government officials are not the exception, they are the rule. In other words, this is not a case of a few bad apples, it's the result of not only an elitist and prohibitively expensive system of "justice" but also a for-profit incarceration system.
Let's face it. Law is only as good as our ability to enforce that law, and without a high-priced attorney, it's only the exceptional American who can find true justice without one. Even with a high-priced attorney, you are at his or her mercy, as we the people are not officers of the court, and therefore, lack subpoena power and knowledge of the inner-workings of the court.
Here are a few examples from Lawless America:
Tiarra Fain, from Virginia, served three years in jail and paid a $1700 fine for parking in a fire zone for 25 seconds, failing to produce her driver's license (driver's license suspended for not paying a speeding ticket), and giving a false name to the policeman because she borrowed her friend's car and she didn't want her friend's car impounded. At the time of sentencing, Tiarra was seven months pregnant. For this victimless "crime" she gave birth to her son shackled to a bed.
Daniel Weber's (from Iron County Utah) son was incarcerated for a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, contained in a child-proof bottle, that he used to treat his severe headaches. However, the police did not show up because they suspected marijuana; rather, the police traced his son's ip address to check on some computer equipment he bought online, which was out in the open for the police to see. Yet the police still insisted on searching his home, and that's when they found the small amount of raw marijuana. From there, Weber's son was accused of cultivating marijuana, despite the total lack of evidence.
Travis Braun, a small business owner (Edible Decorative Landscapes which teaches people how to grow food) from Iron County, Cedar City Utah, pulled out of a liquor store parking lot and after traveling five blocks was pulled over for supposedly failing to turn on his blinkers. Moreover, the cop told Travis he had no insurance. When Travis pulled out his insurance information, the cop made Travis do a field sobriety test. He passed five of the six points--took 11 steps instead of 9-- and had a 0.014 (one-tenth of a beer) reading from the breathalyzer test. Six cops kicked Travis in the face, tazed him twice, dislocating his L4 vertebrae, and basically beat the crap out of him (all of this is on video). At this point, Travis fell into an epileptic seizure. At the hospital, they arrested Travis for assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, DUI metabolite, and possession of marijuana...all false charges.
After he was bailed out of jail, he went through the law enforcement chain of command, and they all said they backed their police officers, 100% and will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law to which Travis responded that he would go to the newspapers and file a lawsuit. From that point on, Travis has endured outright harassment from the police. They even raided his house, based on a statement from an unverified source, blowing the back door off its hinges, and without finding one iota of evidence, claimed he was growing marijuana, manufacturing mushrooms, selling drugs, etc.
After he bailed out a second time, they dropped the charges, but sent the "case" to the feds. A few days later, the U.S. Marshall's showed up at his house and arrested him in front of his six kids for selling a weapon by a restricted person, a person he met only one time. Threatening him with ten years, he told them, fine, lets go to trial. He spent six months waiting in jail. One week before the trial, the feds dropped all charges for lack of evidence. The state picked it back up and refiled the charges.
Travis has been fighting these cases for four years now, yet he still hasn't been to court. Every time it's time to go to trial, they postpone it for one excuse or another. They even raided his attorney's house, then arresting him again on trumped up domestic abuse charges (he punched a hole in the wall on his way out after an argument). He spent another five months in jail.
Johnita M. DeMatteo's son, Joseph DeMatteo, deaf since birth, and a member of a biker group, was merely having a conversation (he can read lips) in a bar in Rome NY, when he was told to get out of the way. Being deaf, he did not hear the command, and was subsequently grabbed from the behind and thrown out. The police were called and he was arrested and sent to jail. The judge threatened that if he didn't accept the plea bargain he could get up to 15 years for merely being associated with a biker gang.
Sandy Fonzo's son committed suicide after being incarcerated in what became known as the "Kids for Cash" scandal.
Judge Mary Elizabeth Bullock on the corrupt judicial system.
Hans Sherrer, president of "Justice Denied" who works with the wrongfully convicted.
FBI statistics are becoming increasingly race neutral in their reportage, and for a good reason, they don't want you and I to know the truth: that, despite our Black president, racism did not disappear, it's alive and well, albeit, much more intelligent, a new invisible racism, if you will.
The disproportionate number or percentage of African Americans that are mass incarcerated (prisons are criminogenic--breeders of crime), murdered as a result of the "war on drugs", extra-judicially executed (killing by police/security guards--non self-defense--that happens without trial or any due process), not to mention the doubled rate of unemployment and lack of opportunity is clearly a systematic attack on the Black community. This does not bode well for future generations.
There is no centralized database that documents killings by police, extrajudicial or otherwise, so Kali Akuno of the Malcolom X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and his colleagues, combed through all the mainstream media and police reports from 2012, cross referencing the names, race, factors and circumstances surrounding their deaths, and then following up on leads, concluding in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report: A Curriculum for Operation Ghetto Storm: Report on the 2012 Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes that every 28 hours, a Black person--primarily Black males between the ages of 18 and 30--is executed by law enforcement. At the very least, without due process, 313 Black people were killed in 2012, most of whom were unarmed. Please note that this does not include the number of Latinos.
“The United States government is intent on creating more and more laws and practices that target Black, oppressed, and impoverished communities. The aim is social control to maintain the status quo, and they will go to whatever extent necessary, including extrajudicial killings and acts of genocide, to achieve this aim." -- Kali Akuno, organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement..The government structuring of underground economies, in particular, the drug/sex trade, and its international circuit of capital underlies and perpetuates the ongoing attack on Black America, which relies on police brutality, police brutality that is rooted in the American system itself, a system based on violence, inequality, racism, white privilege, and profit-seeking exploitation.
“What does this do? This message -- this is a very skillful message used by racists to make the whites who aren’t racists think that the rate of crime in the Black community is so high. This keeps the Black community in the image of a criminal. It makes it appear that anyone is the Black community is a criminal. And as soon as this impression is given, then it makes it possible, or paves the way to set up a police-type state in the Black community, getting the full approval of the white public when the police come in, use all kind of brutal measures to suppress Black people, crush their skulls, sic dogs on them, and things of that type. And the whites go along with it. Because they think that everybody over there’s a criminal anyway. This is what --the press does this. -- Malcolm X”Read more...
“They accuse us of what they themselves are guilty of. This is what the criminal always does. They’ll bomb you, then accuse you of bombing yourself. They’ll crush your skull then accuse you of attacking him. This what the racists have always done -- the criminal, the one who has criminal processes developed to a science. Their practice is a criminal action. And then use the press to make you victim -- look like the victim is the criminal, and the criminal is the victim.” -- Malcolm X
"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "- George Orwell, Politics and the English LanguageToday, after listening to Talk of the Nation (TOTN), on the decline of crime rates, any doubts I had about NPR being as much an inaccurate, misleading and run of the mill propaganda outlet as Fox News, are gone.
It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate - for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation.Could it be that this "decline" in crime may have something to do with the fact that the thugs are now in charge? And isn't it funny how NPR covers the so-called declining crime rate; however, totally failed to cover the NYPD police thugs, including the pepper spraying of several young women standing on the sidewalk while penned in by orange netting, during Occupy Wall Street. You see how that works. The thugs are the law.
Everything in Nazi Germany was clean and orderly; there were no slums; the trains ran on time. By 1938, the crime rate was at an all-time low because repeat offenders were being sent to a concentration camp after they had completed their second sentence. Anyone who did not have a permanent address and some visible means of support was hauled off the Dachau and put to work.Once again, we can thank Ronald Reagan for it is he who repealed the Fairness Doctrine. Read more...
How is it possible for a jury to render a fair and impartial verdict when some of the evidence is sealed? How does one even know that evidence is sealed? After all, it's a little hard to know what you don't know.
Consider the Casey Anthony trial. Are you aware that evidence - the release of the photographs of Caylee that were seized from the Anthony home and some search warrants and affidavits - is still under seal?
So, why were photos of Caylee Anthony sealed?
Casey Anthony: What REALLY Happened to Caylee and Why Truth Matters by Wendy Murphy, Charles Whitfield, Barbara Whitfield
Links:
10 Fascinating Sealed and Secret Documents
Secret Files on Jack the Ripper Case Will Not Be Released to Public
Nightmare on Suburban Street - Some interesting information on Casey’s cell phone calls and pings.
After all, as the New York Times claimed, the election of President Obama into the White House, swept "away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive". Really? Then, why are the African Americans suffering more than any other group of people at this time? Remember, many of the white supremacy members said they voted for Obama to send the country into a tailspin...foment a race war. One former member, Tim Zaal, said, "The faster this country falls, the sooner white revolution will arise."
"Could it be that the nomination of Obama finally sparks a sense of unity in white voters? I would propose that this threat of black rule may very well be the thing that finally scares some sense back into complacent whites." -- Neo-Nazi, with the pen name, "LastOfMyKind"For instance, under Mayor Bloomberg, the NYPD’s practice of “stop and frisk” - — practice of officers stopping city residents on the street and searching them- increased to 600,000 stops performed last year. "87% of those stopped last year were black or Hispanic, a number disproportionate to their share of the population. And just 7 percent of the stops resulted in arrests, meaning the vast majority of those stopped committed no crime. The NYPD argues the practice reduces crime, but it has been coming under increasingly intense criticism in recent months".
I've always envisioned God as a Louie B. Mayer type, the world, His MGM studios. Only in God's studio, the "stars" have the freedom to improvise. There are no scripts...or at least, the stars are unaware, if they should exist.
Anyway, once upon a time, billions of years ago, God was feeling lonely and bored so he created the world and populated it with all sorts of organisms, from simple to the most complex. These multifaceted organisms entertained him for a while; however, something was missing...an emotional richness, a certain kind of creative intelligence...a paradoxical complexity that these creations seemed to lack. Not to say He didn't love these things, He most certainly did, but they were a little too predictable...too sensible.
Then, while perched upon a a celestial body of hot gases, it came to Him.
"I'll create a form of life in my own image. I will etch each one with my signature, and give this being a mind and the full spectrum of emotions all his or her own. This entity will be conscious of its own existence, conscious of its own mortality, and unlike anything I've ever created, this being will have the ability to transcend its instincts, if he so chooses, either to ascend to a higher plane of existence, or descend to lower planes.
This will most assuredly produce a great mix of irony, drama, tragedy, and unfortunately, sometimes, horror. But the saving grace in this mix will be joy, the triumph of this creation's spirit, and of course, comedy, albeit, sometimes very dark comedy."
In an aggressive bid to entice prospective “sex tourists,” the Department of Homeland Security last year launched an undercover web site that purported to arrange trips from the U.S. to Canada, where clients could engage in sexual activity with minors, The Smoking Gun has learned.What is it they say about cockroaches? For every one you see, there are thousands.
The next time you enjoy the sight of a hummingbird in a garden, you might want to look twice–because it could be the government’s new avian-inspired drone. Dubbed “Nano Hummingbird,” this camera-toting, remote-controlled surveillance tool is the latest gadget to fly out the doors of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency).
It seems that there's just no escape from 'Big Brother' seeing into our lives.Oh, and no need to worry about TARP funds, the TARP police are on the job. That is, after they get upgrades to their fleet of police cars.
Now police in Miami, Florida, have unveiled their latest crime-fighting tool that is literally an 'eye in the sky'.
Huh? You mean the mild-mannered auditors who mind the taxpayer money in the $700-plus billion TARP program? What do they need police car upgrades for?Yes, just what we need, another law enforcement outfit to run amok.
It may come as a surprise to people in the financial industry — it certainly did to me — but TARP's inspector general (SIGTARP) is not just a financial watchdog. Under its outgoing leader, Neil Barofsky, it has quietly built itself into a full-fledged financial law enforcement agency.
Five felonies - rape, murder, arson, theft and suicide - existed upon our nation's founding. And all of those felonies contained a violent or dangerous component.
Today, the "felon class" is exploding with up to as many as 15 to 20 million ex-felons in America, many convicted for the most innocuous of behaviors. This system of countless victimless crime laws - of which drug possession laws are the most used - empowers and authorizes law enforcement to accuse and apprehend people without recourse. The result of this type of structure of police authority, against which civilians have little recourse is a form of "friendly" fascism. That is, it emerges from within established governing structures, rather than from beyond those structures, as we saw in the European despotic right-wing seizure of power.
Keep in mind that the majority of us are already - although unaware - felons, lucky enough to have escaped capture by the felons in power...so far, anyway. However, even if you have not achieved felon status yourself, you are, directly impacted by the enormous and costly system of mass incarceration in America today. Not only does over-felonization practically guarantee massive unemployment (felons are not hired), it gradually erodes the rights and liberties of a population to the point of complete annihilation.
How can this be? In the land of the free...home of the brave?
Well, in a overly simplistic nutshell, at the beginning of the 20 century, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that justice is the result of "due process". This started the transformation of our court system from one that defined justice as substantive to one that defined justice as procedural (whether the rules were followed in the handling of the case, rather than whether or not the outcome was true or accurate).
"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Who benefits? Almost everyone at the top in one way or another, but especially prosecutors, as they can inflate their felony conviction rates and convince the electorate they are doing a great job keeping the public safe. Always, under the guise of keeping We, the
The drive for power and profit has replaced conscience across the broad spectrum of our society: from law to politics to critical industries such as banking, health care, and telecommunications. As we enter the 21st century, the ramifications of this pathological mindset are beginning to manifest; the prison industrial complex, one of its chief "accomplishments". This ever increasing appetite for imprisonment has positioned us as the world's largest jailer, with more than 7.3 million in jail, prison, parole or probation. We spend much more on incarcerating people than we do educating them.
On July 26, 2010, Laurence Tribe, Senior Counsel for the United States Department of Justice, Access to Justice Initiative, delivered a speech at the Annual Conference of Chief Justices. He challenged them to fix access to justice systemic deficiencies in order to halt the disintegration of our state justice systems before they become indistinguishable from courts of third world nations.
"Ours is supposed to be a system that levels the playing field by meting out justice without regard to wealth or class or race, a system that lives up to the promise emblazoned in marble on our Supreme Court, “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.” But as you know all too well, far too many of our citizens find instead a system in which the deck is stacked in favor of those who already have the most: in favor of the wealthy and against those already disadvantaged or victimized by the more powerful. There’s no reason to mince words: Not only the poor but members of the shrinking middle class find a system that is confusing, difficult to navigate, challenging to the point of inaccessibility for anybody who can’t afford the best lawyers, and ridiculously expensive for those in a position to pay the going rate.Links:
Consider the Burger family in Michigan, a state that permits non-judicial foreclosure. The Burgers bought a four-bedroom bungalow in 1997 for just
under $39,000. In January 2009, they inadvertently sent a money order that was 7 cents short of what they owed, and they were late making February’s payment as well. They caught up by April, which was amazing considering that they lost their 10-month-old daughter in a household accident that same month. According to the family, the bank sought to foreclose anyway, giving them a choice: Pay $8,390 to reinstate the mortgage or lose their home. The Burgers didn’t have the money, couldn’t afford a lawyer, and given Michigan’s laws weren’t afforded any court intervention or oversight, so they lost the only house that their four living children, all 12 years old and younger, had ever known. -- Laurence Tribe
The United States has decided to treat prisons as a growth industry. Prisons have become the new company town, in a nation where most of the factory jobs left long ago, casualties of globalization and the race to find the lowest worldwide labor costs. They are built in mostly rural White areas, and over the years these communities courted these prisons, whether state-operated or privatized, for the jobs they promised to bring to these depressed communities.Read more...
Every factory requires raw materials. The raw materials for the prison-as-factory are Blacks and Latinos, and poor Whites—uneducated, in many cases illiterate, and unskilled casualties of a system that has programmed their failure through a cradle-to-prison pipeline. The criminalization of youth of color, systemic poverty, failed public schools and the wholesale denial of opportunity is fundamental to this pipeline.
In order to ensure a steady stream of Black, Brown and poor White bodies, these raw materials, into the factory, you must maintain the right policies. So, in the Jim Crow segregated South, the powers that be decided to keep Blacks in their place and eviscerate their political power, to maintain a system of slavery after slavery had been supposedly abolished. Through the Black Codes, the Southern establishment criminalized certain behaviors that were associated with the Black community. Certain offenses such as “mischief,” “insulting gestures” “cruel treatment to animals,” and the “vending of spiritous or intoxicating liquors” applied only to African Americans. In addition, it was illegal for Blacks to cohabit with Whites (which carried a life sentence) or keep firearms. Kangaroo courts were utilized to fill the prisons with Black men, who were farmed out for their labor and summarily, forever, denied the right to vote.
From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System
A Special Project Report from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Juvenile Justice Research Class—Spring 2008 The University of Texas
The U S is one of the only countries in the world that sentences children under 18 to die in prison; in other words, life without parole (LWOP). Judges are required to impose LWOP for certain crimes, regardless of age, in some states. Children as young as seven can receive a mandatory sentence of LWOP in Florida and Pennsylvania.
As of November 2009, 194 countries have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including every member of the United Nations except Somalia and the United States. Somalia's cabinet ministers have announced plans to ratify the treaty.
The US is one of the only countries in the world that still uses solitary confinement; a method of punishment long ago determined to be cruel and unusual punishment by most of the world as long ago as 1913. Today, we have 80,000 people in solitary confinement, thousands of them children.
The United States is one of the only developed countries in the world that still uses the death penalty, which combines solitary confinement with execution for sometimes as long as 30-years. Death row inmates wait, isolated, in cells of just a few square feet, on an average of 13-years. The sentence is, in fact, two punishments in one, as "life" becomes nothing but a long, torturous, and lonely countdown to execution.
"The delay itself subjects death row inmates to decades of especially severe dehumanizing conditions of confinement," -- Justice John-Paul Stevens regarding his view of lengthy pre-execution waits in December of 2009.These practices set the United States apart from nearly all nations in both the developed and the developing world.
"...that punitive efforts [against banks and bankers] only hurts ordinary shareholders, and that the vilification of industries denigrates much of what made this country successful. [...]When we reduce the debate over responsibility and regulation to simplistic and inaccurate notions, such as Main Street vs. Wall Street, big business vs. small business or big banks vs. small banks, we are indiscriminately blaming the good and the bad ? This is simply another form of ignorance and prejudice."There's something fundamentally wrong with a justice system that allows those who are already empowered, to not only avoid punishment for egregious "crimes" against humanity, but in addition, to profit and gain even more advantage.
"This person understands how to control risk within a massive organization, manage political relationships across the political spectrum, and generate the right kind of public relations. When all is said and done, this banker runs a big bank and – here’s the danger – makes it even bigger. Jamie Dimon is by far the most dangerous American banker of this or any other recent generation." -- Simon JohnsonRead more...
The severity revolution in criminal justice, that began when former President Nixon launched the war on drugs, that escalated during the Reagan years, producing some of the "most prohibitive drug control laws ever" has very little to do with "law and order" and everything to do with profit. If you don't believe me, read the following:
We the people have spent well over $1 trillion (much more if you consider the government spending for all of the people directly and indirectly effected), yet the availability of drugs is similar to what it was when Nixon started this "war on drugs", and Reagan took it to a new level.
The conservatives, in their "tough on crime" law and order agenda, scapegoated Marijuana, making it their "symbol of the weakness and permissiveness of a liberal society." They cultivated a culture of fear over growing crime and the evils of marijuana amongst other drugs which gave rise to hundreds of new state, federal, and local laws, which, aside from creating a prison industrial complex, vastly expanded the government's power to seize and forfeit property. Because, during the 1980s, civil assets forfeiture was extended to drug trafficking and possession, and a host of other crimes, through the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, and the Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and many other such laws. In other words, the "war on drugs" enabled the Supreme Court to gradually erode our civil liberties. In fact, Newt Gingrich even introduced "legislation demanding either a life sentence or the death penalty for anyone caught bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into the United States."*
Meanwhile, as our prisons are bursting at the seams with non-violent offenders, back at the ranch, America's biggest banks are riding shotgun for Mexican drug smugglers by giving "international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations".
No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. 6,700 subpoenas later, Wachovia finally:
...admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.However, despite the fact that Wachovia was caught red-handed in the largest anti-money laundering law in U.S. history, Wachovia (acquired by Wells Fargo in 2008) entered into a settlement with federal prosecutors. In other words, they got away with mass murder...literally. This should come as no surprise as no U.S. bank has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act — or any other federal law for that matter.
"The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world. The U.S. incarceration rate – 753 per 100,000 people in 2008 – is now about 240 percent higher than it was in 1980.Read more...
We calculate that a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate of non-violent offenders would lower correctional expenditures by $16.9 billion per year and return the U.S. to about the same incarceration rate we had in 1993 (which was already high by historical standards). The large majority of these savings would accrue to financially squeezed state and local governments, amounting to about one-fourth of their annual corrections budgets. As a group, state governments could save $7.6 billion, while local governments could save $7.2 billion.
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