Liberty and Justice for All?

With more than two million people behind bars, the United States has the world's largest prison population, a 500% increase over the last 40 years.  Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. In fact, crime rates have decreased. The U.S. also has the second-highest rate of incarceration and that doesn't include the more than six million, or almost 3% of the voting population, who are disenfranchised due to past convictions, “felony disenfranchisement.”    Nor does it include over 23 million widely stigmatized people, the "vast underground army of released felons — adult men and women convicted of serious criminal offenses for which they have been punished with prison time or probation, and who now form part of the general population.

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Links:

Prison Policy Initiative

The Sentencing Project

Lawsuit reveals how tech companies profit off the prison-industrial complex

The end of American prison visits: jails end face-to-face contact – and families suffer

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War on Drugs and The Prison Industrial Complex

“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

CCA houses over 80,000 inmates in
more than 60 facilities across the US.

In 1971, President Nixon declared an all out "War on Drugs" under the guise of benefiting the population by halting the trafficking in drugs in the United States, when, in fact, the motivations for starting this "war" were rooted in racism, greed, "empire building", and maintaining/gaining power and control. The proof is its success in meeting its true goals.  Because 42 years later, well over one million  non-violent offenders are incarcerated and   3,278 non-violent offenders are serving life without parole, not to mention, there are more drugs circulating than ever before. How is that proof?  Well, follow the money...and the drugs, legal and illegal.

The only people experiencing consequences from this "war" are the poor, not the ones who profit/benefit most from the drug trade: the banksters who launder the money and profit immensely!

Then  President Reagan’s Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986  fueled the prison boom, bringing in a lot more profit because it allowed privately owned corporations to build and operate prisons.  Today, it's a $50 billion industry, with prison quotas that push lawmakers to fill 90% of the beds! Not only that, the criminalization of Americans is profitable to these corporations because they equip them with essentially free labor...slave labor.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group [previously Wackenhut], the two largest private prison companies in this country, push for criminal justice legislation, including mandatory minimum sentences such as California’s three-strikes law “that increase the number of inmates who enter and stay in prison.” ITPI reported that CCA and GEO Group have also contributed to legislation like "Arizona Senate Bill 1070, requiring law enforcement to arrest anyone who cannot prove they entered the country legally when asked.”

Tulia Texas is a prime example. Undercover narcotics officer, Tom Coleman arrested 46 people - nearly all of them black - on charges of being cocaine dealers, sending many of them to prison for a total of 750 years. as part of a $500 million effort to fight the war on drugs in rural America

As the following documentary points out, one of the main achievments of the "War on Drugs" is "profiting from the felonization of sick people.



Links:

Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

School to Prison Pipeline

Ill-Gotten Gains, The Rockefeller War on Drugs

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Over 20 Petty Crimes that Landed People in Jail For Life Without Parole

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:

• Possessing a crack pipe
• Possessing a bottle cap containing a trace amount of heroin (too minute to be weighed)
• Having traces of cocaine in clothes pockets that were invisible to the naked eye but detected in lab tests
• Having a single crack rock at home
• Possessing 32 grams of marijuana (worth about $380 in California) with intent to distribute
• Passing out several grams of LSD at a Grateful Dead show
• Acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 worth of marijuana to an undercover cop
• Selling a single crack rock
• Verbally negotiating another man's sale of two small pieces of fake crack to an undercover cop
• Attempting to cash a stolen check
• Possessing stolen scrap metal (the offender was a junk dealer)—10 valves and one elbow pipe
• Possessing stolen wrenches
• Siphoning gasoline from a truck
• Stealing tools from a shed and a welding machine from a front yard
• Shoplifting three belts from a department store
• Shoplifting several digital cameras
• Shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store
• Taking a television, circular saw, and power converter from a vacant house
• Breaking into a closed liquor store in the middle of the night
• Making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car
• Being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm
• Taking an abusive stepfather's gun from their shared home

The data examined by the ACLU comes from the federal prison system and nine state penal systems that responded to open records requests. In other words, the true number of nonviolent offenders serving life without parole is much higher.

"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."

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Profitable Punishment: Prisoners Making Obscene Profits for Corporate America

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."

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The Genocidal Results of the War on Drugs for Unimaginable Profits.

Many people think that genocide means the complete extermination of a race or people. The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as not only “killing members of the group,” but also, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” Hence, from the results we've seen--only the tip of the iceberg--it can be ascertained that the "War on Drugs" is an international effort to destroy what the global power elites deem as "undesirable" elements.  If the poor person--usually of color--is not murdered, he's sent to prison on possession charges, therefore, ruined...his ability to make a living from that point on  rendered practically impossible.

The American War on Drugs, as well as the Mexican War on Drugs, and all other wars-on-drugs have been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color--according to the justice department, white people are 5 times more likely to be found with drugs but black are 10 times more likely to go to jail-- even though people of all colors and economic status use and sell illegal drugs. Rather than eradicating drugs, the narco-economy has grown so powerful that human lives are often considered the price of doing business.

Nevertheless, we're led to believe that the evils that haunt the oppressed in America, and everywhere else, are the fault of the oppressed. Nothing can be further from the truth. If you dig deep enough--beyond the commercial media--you will find hard evidence that shows the governments of the U.S. and Europe, through various agencies, like that of intelligence agencies, no doubt, provide direct and indirect support for the drug cartels, not to mention other oppressive mechanisms (prison industrial complex). 

But the government(s) certainly put on a good show in an effort to act as if they're not part of this huge criminal enterprise. For instance, today, the US is supposedly outraged over the release, "from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent." However, the US government’s complicity in Caro Quintero’s narco-trafficking business, and, even in the Camarena’s gruesome murder, is ignored.

In 1985, Mexico’s intelligence service, the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS in its Spanish initials and the CIA were not only working in unison according to Charles Bowden who wrote the book, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family , but were in league with Mexico’s narco-traffickers. The DFS was disbanded in 1985, and integrated into Mexico’s version of the CIA, called CISEN (Spanish initials). CISEN still works in unison with US agencies and officials, including the CIA.

“Camarena brushes off Jordan’s alarm by noting that DFS is trained by the CIA and is functionally a unit in their mysterious work. And he says they are also functionally “the eyes and ears of the cartels.”

See 1991 letter from Gary Hart to U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

“In March of 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and met with Mr. Bill Holen of my Senate Staff. During the initial meeting, Mr. Plumlee raised certain allegations concerning U.S. foreign and military policy toward Nicaragua and the use of covert activities by U.S. Intelligence agencies.

… Mr. Plumlee also stated that Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador were providing U.S. military personnel access to secret landing field and various staging areas scattered throughout Central America.

He specifically cited the Mexican government’s direct knowledge of illegal arms shipments and narcotic smuggling activities that were taking place out of a civilian ranch in the Veracruz area which were under the control and sponsorship of Rafael Caro-Quintero and the Luis Jorge Ochoa branch of the Medellin Escobar Cartel.

… Mr. Plumlee raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua. …

More recently, just last year HSBC Bank was caught red-handed laundering billions of dollars for multiple Mexican drug cartels. What happened? Eric Holder declined to prosecute. In fact, HSBC was let off the hook entirely until someone in the media caught wind of the story. In the end, HSBC settled for what amounted to a minor fine. Wachovia Bank, now Wells Fargo, is another recent example of an institution caught red handed laundering untold millions of drug profits. Once again, the tip of the iceberg because most of these illustrious institutions do not get caught.

“Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” as tens of thousands of Mexicans were killed in an exponentially violent drug war.

In a nutshell, no jail time for these organized criminals at the top of the food chain who brought down the world economy, only, secret bailouts, which Wells Fargo received, $159 Billion, in 2010, revealed when the Fed was partially audited and that was one of the smaller bailouts. If that doesn't tell you whose side the government's on, nothing will.

Visit the narcosphere. It reports real information about the drug wars.



Links:

Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide:  The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), pp xi-xiii, 3-10.

More Fast and Furious Guns Surface at Crimes in Mexico

Ex-Border Patrol Agents Warn: Politicians Helping Cartels in U.S.

“Transnational criminal enterprises have annually invested millions of dollars to create and staff international drug and human smuggling networks inside the United States; thus it is no surprise that they continue to accelerate their efforts to get trusted representatives in place as a means to guarantee continued success,” the Border Patrol agents wrote.

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It's "Always Nigger Season" Even When the President is Black

Or I might add especially when the President is black. At least when 'W' did something horribly  racist and criminal, as he often did, there were loud voices protesting  in opposition. But when Obama does the same thing, it’s considered good leadership. President Obama received 95% of the black vote. In return, African Americans received a check that came back stamped: insufficient funds. He tells African Americans to stop whining and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps while his actions set these same people up to fail and keep them trapped by his support of legislation--specifically, in this case, by actively trying to maintain racially discriminatory prison sentences--that further empowers and emboldens the New Jim Crow Lulled to sleep by the rhetoric of color-blindness and the appearance of great racial progress, most of us are blind this new form, or should I say, formless invisible institutional racism.

In UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. CORNELIUS DEMORRIS BLEWETT (12-5226) and JARREOUS JAMONE BLEWITT (12-5582),, "a crack cocaine case brought by two currently incarcerated defendants seeking retroactive relief from racially discriminatory mandatory minimum sentences imposed on them in 2005," President Obama quietly tried to enforce racially biased federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed" by the  2010 Fair Sentencing Act. The Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to make sure thousands of people--almost all of them poor and most of them black--remain locked in prison despite a total lack of justification.

Crack cocaine and powder cocaine are "pharmacologically identical," the only difference being who consumes these pharmacologically identical substances: crack cocaine, the drug of mostly poor black folk, and powder cocaine, the drug of wealthier white folk. To be sure, young African American males are the most disposable, yet at the same time, profitable--for the for-profit prison industry--demographic in this prison nation. Not only do the private prisons prosper, corporations can put these people to work for a few cents an hour, not to mention, these human-beings are excluded from poverty statistics and unemployment data thus masking the severity of issues more than they already are.

Although Black people make up only 34% of crack users, they are 85% of those convicted on crack charges. As early as 2011, 30,000 people were serving time for crack charges in federal prison, 85% of them Black.

“…persistent bias occurred with respect to the contemporary enforcement of drug laws where, in the 1990s and early 2000s, blacks constituted a minority of regular users of crack cocaine but more than 80 percent of crack defendants.” -- Harvard Professor William J. Stuntz

As legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues, "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." One such strategy is through targeting black men and women (often mothers) through the "War on Drugs," decimating communities of color.

“There are more African American adults under correctional  control today, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. As of 2004, more black men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the 15th amendment was ratified explicitly prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis or race....During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests, circumvented the 15th amendment and operated to deny African Americans the right to vote. A black child born today has less of a chance of being raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. This is due in large part to the mass incarceration of black men....The mass incarceration of black men take them out of the dating pool at the years they would be most likely to commit to a partner, to a family.  But, what's worse is that by branding them criminals and felons at early ages, often before they're even old enough to vote, they're rendered permanently unemployable in the legal job market, virtually guaranteeing that most will cycle in and out of prison, sometimes, for the rest of their lives. 
[...]
Today, in many states, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplish what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not. This does not effect some small segment of the African American community. To the contrary, in many large urban areas, more than half of working age African American men now have criminal records and thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. In some cities--Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago (80%), DC--the statistics are far worse." -- Michelle Anderson, highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State

The incarceration rate has quintupled over the last 30 years, from a prison population of 300,000 in the early 1970s to well over 2 million! During this same period of time that the incarceration rates increased exponentially, crime rates have fluctuated, leading most sociologists and criminologists to admit that incarceration rates and crime rates have moved independently of one another.

So for now the grant of en banc review puts Blewett relief for Sixth Circuit prisoners on hold. Why?  Is  the Department of Justice afraid of re-hearing thousands of old cases?  If so, can't President Obama just commute all of the pre-Fair-Sentencing-Act minimums to their equivalent minimums under the new law? Or is the reason for en banc review far more nefarious?

Links:

How the mass incarceration of black men harms black women.


Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling by Sabrina Jones and Marc Mauer

Stop the Drug War

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Lawless America: Justice Denied.

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.

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Counter Intelligence and the Deep State

The deep state can be defined as the secret structure that steers defense and foreign policy behind the facade of democracy. It’s.all of the ways the affluent—private wealth--influence policy, placing themselves above the law. The deep state in America is more complicated than it is in other countries. It is the complex of power exerted off camera by people who are not elected, who are not part of the Constitution or the bureauocracy, but who have real power and assert themselves in American politics.


Counter-Intelligence: II - The Deep State from S DN on Vimeo.

Some highlights:

War on Drugs:

Wherever you declare a war on drugs, you get more drugs, not less drugs.

In Columbia, ten years after President Bush declared a war on drugs,  the amount of cocaine production increased more than three times the amount before his declaration.

A US Senate staff report has estimated that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through US banks.

The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes ‘the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade’.

According to US Justice Department records obtained by the Guardian, one bank alone, Wachovia, which is now part of Wells Fargo, laundered $383 billion drug dollars between May 2004 and May 2007

The “crime” of drug possession accounts for one in four persons imprisoned in the US. According to some estimates, drugs and/or drug related crimes account for over half of all criminal offenses.

Today, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 38 seconds. More people are arrested for marijuana possession than for all violent crime combined.

Prison profit

It’s no secret that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With only 5% of the global population, the US holds one quarter of the world’s prisoners. The expanding prison industrial complex, which has grown 350% over the last 15 years, has a vested interest in keeping people locked up.  This complex has been lobbying Congress hard to pass legislation that would imprison more people. Yes, the true criminals are pushing for the criminalization of very minor behavior, most of it, victimless.

Wells Fargo, who received $37 million in bailout money—that we know about-- is the main investor in four private prisons.

The Octopus:

Danny Casolaro called it "the Octopus", a vast, interlocking network of criminal conspiracy that reaches into every branch and agency of the U.S. government, According to Casolero, the Iran-Contra affair, Iran hostage crisis, and all funds channeled through BCCI, charged with everything from money laundering to fraud has a common thread: PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) and the Inslaw affair, when a court ruled the Reagan justice department stole valuable law enforcement software from the Inslaw corporation.

Cosolaro’s theory is that righ-winged zealots sold the software for profit. The money went to Iranian officials who supposedly delayed the release of Iranian hostages back in 1981, the so-called October surprise and later went to the back training funding of the contras.

Just days before his death, Casolaro told friends he was close to breaking the story that consumed him the past year: the political conspiracy of the century that implicated US justice offcials.  All of the Casolaro’s papers and documents disappeared.

Mafia

September 10 1931 - On orders of Charles Luciano and Frank Costello, boss of all bosses Salvatore Maranzano is murdered in his headquarters on Park Avenue in Manhattan by gangsters disguised as police officers. That same day, several of Maranzano's lieutenants, including James Marino, are killed by unknown gunmen including outside a Bronx neighborhood barbershop. The bodies of Maranzano allies Samuel Monaco and Louis Russo would later be recovered from Newark Bay; both corpses would show signs of torture. These events may or may not have been the basis for the beginning of the alleged "Night of the Sicilian Vespers" in which many old world Sicilian-born mafiosi are killed throughout the country by the Luciano-Lansky faction in the aftermath of the Castellammarese War.

In 1942, US Naval intelligence made deals with Luciano to protect the docks from German saboteurs since the mob was in control of the labor on the docks. In turn, the mafia was assisted by Patton who got the foothold in Italy by coming up into the mountains instead of going down into the cities  You see, since Mussolini regarded the mafia as a rival, and had broken up crime syndicates and executed mob bosses, he was no friend of the mob. The cities were controlled by Mussolin who chased the old mob up into the hills, so Patton approached through the mountains, bringing with him a scarf with LL Lucky Luciano as a symbol to Don Calogero Vizzini who was a head of the Italian mob. They rode through the towns who wanted revenge against Mussolini. Then they released hit men from the prisons and replaced those in political offices throughout Siciily .

The link between intelligence and mafia didn’t end there.

On November 21, 1993, 60 Minutes revealed the government was involved in running drugs. The CIA had joined the Venezuelan National guard in drug smuggling: a  ton of pure cocaine worth millions of dollars. Moreover, for more than 30 years, the federal government had been protecting drug dealers.

Thomas Drake, Bradley Manning, Jeffrey Sterling, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Jin Woo-Kim, James F. Hitselberger, and John Kiriakou were all charged under the Espionage Act during the Obama administration in its first term.

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Criminalizing Poverty: Debtor's Prison For the 99%.

Today, it was reported that the unemployment rate declined even as those not in the labor force grew by over 660,000 to 90 million.  However, the real unemployment rate is 23%. if you include, "estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994," and "short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment."

No jobs, stagnant wages, soaring food prices, soaring food stamps, millions of underwater home owners and millions of homes in shadow inventory, etc., but, despite all this "the economic recovery is on track" according to the mainstream news. The simple truth is the dream of a new home, a new car, secure retirement and nice vacations is just that, a dream. The new more attainable dream is a frugal lifestyle demanding sacrifice and hardships, simply to ensure survival, that is, without ending up in debtor's prison,.

No, this isn't 1830. It's 2013, and thousands of Americans are sent to jail because they can't afford to pay their bills.  That's right, courts and judges in states across the U.S. are incarcerating people for not being able to pay debts such as traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees.

At the same time that the economy worsens, and poverty increases, the financial and legal penalties for being poor in America are only getting worse. Apparently, people are supposed to earn money despite the fact that jobs were shipped overseas decades ago to ensure corporate profits by the same sadistic class of people who plundered the wealth of the people. Well, they need a scapegoat, and who better than those who cannot protect themselves: the poor. Meanwhile, the plundering class is squirreling away trillions in offshore accounts.

Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. But it is legal in one-third of the states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Washington. However, it doesn't really seem to matter if it's legal or not; Ohio's not listed, yet, "several courts in Ohio are illegally jailing people because they are too poor to pay their debts and often deny defendants a hearing to determine if they're financially capable of paying what they owe, according to an investigation released Thursday by the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union."

Links:

Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA)

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The Lawless America Revolution

Lawless America is a project created by William M. Windsor, and GRIP -- Government Reform & Integrity Platform dedicated to exposing dishonesty and corruption in government while presenting ways to battle this epidemic. Mr. Windsor ventured out, by himself, and interviewed thousands of people on a 173 day road trip throughout the United States. These stories are, plain and simple, horror stories of unbelievable accounts of judicial and government corruption. But as unbelievable as they sound, they're true. Most provide evidence, not to mention Mr. Windsor thoroughly checks out each person interviewed.

Ultimately, Mr. Windsor plans to edit the countless hours of the footage he's taken down to a two-hour film and enter it in the Sundance Film Festival. But his most important goal is to deliver the videos of testimony he's already produced to Congress the first weekend in February 2013.

Meet Me in DC. February 5-6, 2013.

"We hope to have at least one constituent for every member of Congress to hand-deliver the 50+ hours of Congressional testimony filmed by Lawless America from over 1,000 people filmed during the Road Trip....This is going to be a truly special event. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of victims of government and judicial corruption will be in Washington DC. There has never been a larger group of whistleblowers to let their voices be heard. We will be presenting over 50 hours of testimony to Congress, part of over 2,000 hours of interviews conducted by Bill Windsor for Lawless America."

Here are a few stories that, in my humble opinion, are so compelling they should be considered required viewing.

Mind-blowing accounts of Child "Protective" Services and Family Court corruption:



Here (below) is the amazing story of Dr. Elizabeth Rohr of Dallas Texas, who, as someone commented: "Elizabeth's story sounds like the book of Job in the Bible" due to her well-connected monster ex-husband and the very corrupt Texas system of "justice."



See also: Another Family Blames Dawson State Jail For Inmate Death Dawson State Jail, where Dr. Rohr was incarcerated, is a low security facility for people convicted of non-violent crimes run by Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison management company that has a contract with the State of Texas. As Dr. Rohr stated in her testimony, inmates are treated like cattle, or worse.

Dawson State Jail Intolerable Conditions - more first hand accounts at the "house of horrors". Remember, these non-violent inmates are extraordinarily profitable for the prison industrial complex.

These are just...heartbreaking.

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No Society in History Has Imprisoned More of its Citizens Than Land of the Free

1. Three “strikes” and you get life in jail. Even for trivial crimes, Leandro Andrade is serving 2 consecutive life sentences for shoplifting 9 video tapes with a value of $153
2a. 1% of Americans are in jail (2.3million)
2b On a per capita bases this equates to twice as many in South Africans, more than 3 times Iran and 6 times China’s prison population.
3. No society in history has imprisoned as many people as America.
4. 1 in 30 men aged 20 – 34 in in prison.
5.1 in 9 black males are in prison.
6. There are more 17 year old black males in prison than in college.
7. 5% of the world are American…25% of all prisoners are American.
8. America prohibits importing goods made through forced labor or prisoners...YET...American prisons produce 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet proof vests,
9. 93% of domestically used paints, 36% of home appliances, 21% of office furniture, which allows America to compete with factories in Mexico.
10. You get solitary confinement if you refuse to work!
11. Thus America has successfully reinvented the slave trade

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How America Treats Prisoners Says More About America Than it Does About the Prisoners.

I'm convinced the United States of America will never be a police state -officially, that is- despite the fact that not only do we have the highest incarceration rate on the planet, we're one of the only nations in the world that continues the widespread use solitary confinement - a form of torture when it spans more than 15 days.  The arbitrary and biased processes for establishing who is placed in solitary, not to mention the total lack of oversight and regulation  makes this practice even more alarming.

Based on available data that does not include juveniles or immigrants over  80,000 prisoners, in 44 states  are in solitary confinement in the United States on any given day.

Since the 1980s, departments of corrections have sharply increased the use of segregation as a discipline and management tool. In effect, segregation is a secondary sentence imposed by the correctional facility—one that follows long after and usually is unrelated to the conviction for which the person is incarcerated. The consequences of holding an individual in these conditions over time may include new or exacerbated mental health disturbances, assaultive and other antisocial behaviors, and chronic and acute health disorders. In fact, studies show that prisoners who are released from segregation directly to the community reoffend at higher rates than general-population prisoners. Policy changes that will reduce the use and long-term impact of segregation will benefit not only the staff and prisoners in these units but also ultimately the well-being of facilities, systems, and the community.

"For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us." -- Oscar Wilde, 1897 about his time in solitary confinement

One must ask why America's incarceration rate is so high when the cost to imprison one American for one year is more than the cost of one year at Princeton. Solitary confinement is even more costly for obvious reasons.

"I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.." - Charles Dickens on solitary confinement

Links:

Lifetime Lockdown: How Isolation Conditions Impact Prisoner Reentry

Extreme Solitary Confinement - No Human Contact for 28 Years

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Inmates Replacing American Workers.

As I have posted before, America is truly becoming an incarceration nation, as it funnels an ever-increasing number of human beings into slavery. Prisoners are even bundled up and sold as securities as each one is assigned a CUSIP (Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures) number, and traded on the market for profit.

The DOJ and NCIA funded the making of this video to recruit private sector companies to take their operations or expansions to prisoners to save money, lower overhead and avoid benefits to employees. Thousands of private sector jobs are lost through this federal program known as Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP).




Yes, the plutocrats want all the serfs under total control, and that is the reason that incarceration is the largest growth industry in the USA today.

Bob Evans, the man who posted this video, wrote the following on Deep Politics Forum.

I am Ex. Dir. of the Voters Legislative Transparency Project (VLTP) and uploaded this video to our YouTube channel. My hope was that others would spread the video and information to draw attention to this practice condoned by our government. The NCIA who produced the video with the cooperation of the DoJ, have scrubbed every link to this video used to recruit after I linked to it and sent it out to Union groups. I had a copy and finally managed to get the huge file uploaded to YouTube so others could see what is going on with inmates replacing American workers.
I co-authored the award winning Prison Industry article for the Nation magazine last year in the ALEC Exposed project: "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor"http://www.thenation.com/article/162...d-prison-labor and have been researching, writing and blogging about this subject for nearly 10 years.
I wanted to thank you for reposting this here on Deep Politics Forum and helping to expose how our jobs are being stolen and why our prisons are kept full with between 600,000 and 1 million prisoners working in more than 300 prison factories coast to coast.

Bob Sloan
Executive Director
VLTP, Inc.
Indianapolis, Indiana
www.vltp.net

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Land of the Free or Jim Crow Incarceration Nation?

The number of Americans in prison has risen eight-fold since 1970, despite the fact that crime rates have decreased.  How can that be?  Well,  today, over 2.3 million American citizens, mostly non-violent, are behind bars. Our nation has the largest prison population in the world - with only 5% of the global population, one-quarter of the entire world’s inmates are in the U.S. It is not the land of the free, if it ever was.  And now that the middle class is eroding, people who were once considered reasonably secure in their gated communities, are being thrown to the wolves, so to speak, ripe for picking.  According to FBI statistics, 35,948 Americans are arrested in the US, on a daily basis, most of them African American, and to be sure, the great majority, poor.

"More than two million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins...where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education were perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote....Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms....The New Jim Crow was born" - Michelle Alexander in "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (p. 58).

By criminalizing addiction, and militarizing state and local police forces, the "war on drugs" more than quadrupled our prison population in less than three decades. According to the Cato Institute, in 1997 alone, the Pentagon handed over more than 1.2 million pieces of military equipment to local police departments. The agency also "handled 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from over eleven thousand domestic police agencies in all fifty states." The Cato report also stated, "paramilitary units/SWAT teams were quickly formed in virtually every major city to fight the war on drugs."

So, with the advent of for profit prisons, there is a lobbying arm in state houses across the country and in DC  demanding harsher punishments for "crimes" that hardly constitute any great wickedness; iniquity; and or wrong.

Make no mistake. Not only is this about oppression of an ever-increasing sector of society, this is about creating huge profits for our corporation nation by funneling an ever-increasing number of human beings into slavery.  Private prisons keep only the low cost prisoners - forty cents an hour - because they use them as slave labor and send the harder to control prisoners back to the state prisons where the tax payers pay for it. All prisoners are assigned a CUSIP number, which earns even more profit for the corporation nation.

The private corporate court earns a percentage of the amount of money it collects in fines, and also receives kickbacks by placing citizens in prison or on probation. All prisoners are assigned a CUSIP number based on that prisoner’s STRAWMAN trust. This CUSIP # is then bundled up with other CUSIP numbers and sold as bundled securities on the securities markets. These are bundled persons. Prisoners are commodities for which the fruit of their labor is traded. This is why jails are overflowing, and why so many people get unsupervised probation for so many months. Probationary status is still a form of incarceration, and community service is often assigned. People on probation receive the CUSIP number as well, and are bundled just like the in-house prisoners.

In the book "The New Jim Crow: : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" author, Michelle Alexander cites slavery, Jim Crown, and Mass Incarceration as "the three major racialized systems of control adapted in the United States to date." She makes the connection between the prison-industrial complex and the "war on drugs", and the disproportionately high number of African American incarcerated in state and federal prisoners. She argues that this system of mass incarceration "operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race." The War on Drugs, the book contends, has created "a lower caste of individuals who are permanently barred by law and custom from mainstream society."

In addition to decades of broad U.S. public and political support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher prison terms and to the Bush administration's anti-drug and strict-sentencing policies, Alexander points out how the Clinton administration legislated "Three Strikes and Your Out," and the five-year mandatory sentencing for drug offenses due to the use of Crack, which disproportionately targets blacks. Of course, these laws are discriminatory due to the fact that cocaine use in the white community is usually treated as a misdemeanor, which is ridiculous since you need cocaine to produce crack.

There is no doubt that the "War on Drugs", when created, was targeted toward African Americans in an effort to break up families, creating a new racial caste system that renders black males, especially, into non-citizens. They lose the right to vote, and are unable to get a job.  They're ineligible for public assistance such as housing and food stamps, unable to qualify for loans and/or grants for education, and, finally, unable to obtain licenses due to their felony status. Not to mention, the extremely narrow margin of hope when released. This creates a viscous circle that perpetuates itself by increasing homelessness and joblessness, forcing these men and women back into "crime" in order to survive, where the cycle starts all over again.

Moreover, children are left without fathers and mothers without husbands. Alexander writes,

"The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2002 that there are nearly 3 million more black adult women than men in black communities across the United States, a gender gap of 26 percent. In many areas, the gap is far worse, rising to more than 37 percent in places like New York City. The comparable disparity for whites in the United States is 8 percent. Although a million black men can be found in prisons and jails, public acknowledgment of the role of the criminal justice system in `disappearing' black men is surprisingly rare. Even in the black media-which is generally more willing to raise and tackle issues related to criminal justice-an eerie silence can often be found."

Furthermore, Alexander writes,

"More African American adults are under correctional control today- in prison or jail, on probation or parole- than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites. The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America." She also states, "African American (youth) were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes," because of "unconscious and conscious racial biases infecting decision making."

The bottom line is that, although this was initially designed for the Mass Incarceration of the non-white population, it has now morphed into a war on the entire poor population, growing larger everyday. Total exploitation of the down trodden.

Another excellent book on the subject is "Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire " by Robert Perkinson, which goes into great detail concerning the pernicious rise of America's "for-profit" prison system.

"...is a history of imprisonment, race, and politics from slavery to the present, with an emphasis on Texas, the most locked-down state in the nation. Sweeping in scope and exhaustively researched, it tries to answer some of the most vexing questions of our time: Why has the United States built the largest prison system in the world, unlike anything in the history of democratic governance, and why have racial disparities in criminal justice worsened over the past two generations, despite the landmark victories of the civil rights movement? Drawing on a decade of archival, legal, and legislative research, combined with scores of interviews, this book argues that the history of American criminal justice is a more southern story than most have acknowledged (the prison boom began and has remained most pervasive in the South) and that the politics of race and reaction have played a more prominent role in the expansion of incarceration than elevated crime rates. By drawing parallels between the development of segregation and convict leasing in the aftermath of Reconstruction and the rise of mass imprisonment in the wake of integration, Texas Tough contends that America’s imprisonment crisis has taken shape as the latest chapter in America’s tragic racial history and that a concerted nationwide effort will be required to move the country toward a more equitable and genuinely democratic future."

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons." -- James Bovard

"Criminal: a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation." -- Howard Scott

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