Posts by GlenFord:
The New Movement: Are We There Yet?
December 4th, 2014By Glen Ford.
“This movement-in-the-making has no choice but to challenge the very legitimacy of the State and its armed organs of coercion.”
After decades of misleader-induced lethargy and quietude, Black America is finally in motion – or, at the very least, earnestly seeking ways to resist being plunged deeper into the abyss. The nascent “movement” is more like a pregnancy than a full-term child, and thus does not yet have a name beyond the focal point of “Ferguson.” Yet, it is kicking its way into the world robustly – even seismically – registering nearly two hundred demonstrations in the week following the non-indictment of killer cop Darren Wilson. This baby is reaching self-awareness in the womb of struggle, and will emerge screaming its own name at the top of its lungs.
Unlike its older siblings, Civil Rights and Black Power, this movement-in-the-making has no choice but to challenge the very legitimacy of the State and its armed organs of coercion and control: the police and, inevitably, the entire intelligence and national security apparatus of the ruling regime. Poor baby, but such is her fate.
A half century ago, when Civil Rights triumphed over official apartheid and Black Power strutted proudly across the landscape, a national white consensus quickly congealed around a project to contain the “Second Emancipation”: Mass Black Incarceration. The project began in high counterinsurgency drama with the launching of the first SWAT attack on the Black Panther Party headquarters in Los Angeles, in 1969. The initial blueprint and funding for the vast expansion and militarization of local police was established through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), a product of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the great “friend” of Black and poor people (and Vietnamese). The FBI’s COINTELPRO spooks, provocateurs and assassins shredded the ranks of Black radical leadership, killing scores and burying many more in their dungeons, while President Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs created the legal and physical infrastructure to put the Black America poor on permanent, nationwide lockdown. By 1970, Mass Black Incarceration had become a foundational organizing principle of U.S. domestic policy. Over the next four decades, the total prison and jail population would increase more than seven-fold, with Black and brown inmates becoming, for the first time, the overwhelming majority of inmates.
“By 1970, Mass Black Incarceration had become a foundational organizing principle of U.S. domestic policy.”
The Black Mass Incarceration State – or, as Michelle Alexander calls it, the New Jim Crow –penetrates and defiles every aspect of Black life. It killed Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Sean Bell and Oscar Grant and many thousands of other martyrs to police terror, stigmatized a whole race of survivors, and warped intra-Black social relationships beyond measure. Yet, even as two generations of Blacks were systematically dehumanized by a Mass Black Incarceration State that operated in near-identical fashion across the width and breadth of the country, the Black political class deepened its collaboration and identification with the ruling regime, reveling in their imagined and actual proximity and usefulness to Power. Black mayors and city councils functioned as cogs in the wheels of the people-crushing machine, dutifully sending millions of fellow African Americans into prisons and cemeteries, and then partying every September at the Congressional Black Caucus gala dinner, in Washington. Some of us at BAR call them the Black Misleadership Class, but that is far too kind.
In June of this year, the Congressional Black Caucus showed definitively that the bulk of the CBC are operatives of militarized racist oppression – that is, of the Mass Black Incarceration State. Eighty percent of the 40 full-voting members either opposed (27) or abstained from voting (5) for a bill that would have prohibited Pentagon transfers of weapons and gear to local and state police departments. These Black lawmakers paid for the army of occupation that patrols the streets of Ferguson and every other heavily Black city, and are fully culpable for the results. (See “The Treasonous 32: Four-Fifths of Black Caucus Help Cops Murder Their Constituents,” BAR Sept 10.)
Therefore, whatever this new Movement is to be called, it must find itself in opposition to the Black Misleadership Class and its constellations of collaborators in mass Black oppression, including – no, especially – the high profile Quislings of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The Nature of the Struggle
The movement that is now being born is unlike the Civil Rights struggle, which was, of necessity, a fight for full Black protection under the umbrella of bourgeois liberties afforded or implied by the U.S. Constitution. The Black Mass Incarceration State was created as a direct response to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. This “New Jim Crow” proved fantastically effective in containing the self-determinist imperatives of the Civil Rights Movement’s short-lived successor, Black Power, snuffing out its more radical political elements while diverting the energies of the newly upward mobile Black classes into collaboration with the supposedly “enlightened” corporate regime.
The post-Sixties Mass Black Incarceration order became steadily harsher with U.S. capitalism’s rejection of the social contract with labor, finance capital’s rise to political hegemony, and the quickening cascade of global capitalist crises. After 1980, the pace of general Black economic and social progress slowed to a crawl or, in some indices, halts entirely, soon accompanied by a renewed War on Drugs (crack) and another round of draconian penal legislation and prison building. This slide into hell for the masses of Black folks had no effect on the political behavior of the Black Misleadership Class, which continued to revel in its Oprahs, the growing ranks of Black generals and corporate executives, and every trophy awarded to Black movie stars. In 1986, half the Congressional Black Caucus voted for 100-to-1 penalties for crack cocaine versus the powdered kind. It was no great leap at all when, 28 years later, four out of five CBC members voted to continue arming local cops as if they were Marines preparing to assault Fallujah.
“There will be an entrenched, organized class of Black people deeply connected to Power who will attempt to thwart and betray the movement at every critical juncture.”
Given that the “traditional” civil rights organizations have always acted in close concert with their state and national legislative Black caucuses, the CBC’s behavior is a good measure of the political stance of the larger Black Misleadership Class in relation to the rest of Black America. The lesson of history is clear: the selfish, grasping classes that were propelled into leadership of Black America by the opportunities opened to them by the mass-based Civil Rights Movement, and whose hold on leadership was further strengthened by the State’s decimation of Black radicals and the diversion (and perversion) of popular Black Power sentiments into Democratic Party politics, will not play any positive role in the new movement directed against the State’s police. This, alone, sets the nascent movement apart from its predecessors, in that there will be an entrenched, organized class of Black people deeply connected to Power who will attempt to thwart and betray the movement at every critical juncture.
An Anti-Police Movement
Most importantly, this movement is fundamentally different than the Civil Rights struggle because it is directed against the police, the embodiment of the State’s monopoly on the use of force. Inevitably, it challenges the legitimacy of the American State – the same government that is currently led by a Black man and which has overseen the militarization of police and the relentless enhancement of the Black Mass Incarceration State for nearly a half-century.
Under these circumstances, some level of violence is inevitable – the police will make sure of that, and Black youth will demand payback. Moreover, although it is necessary and right to pursue reforms, especially to establish the most thoroughgoing community control of the hiring, firing, and tactical and strategic direction of local police, reactionary white majorities in state legislatures are likely to stymie such reforms at every turn. In the final analysis, cities will almost certainly have to be rendered ungovernable before the State will accede to substantive people-power demands – which was why Ferguson posed such a threat to power, and such a strong appeal to those who desperately need a fundamental change in power relationships in Black America.
“Some level of violence is inevitable – the police will make sure of that, and Black youth will demand payback.”
The movement-in-the-making has been inexorably propelled by the objective facts of Black urban life to the same political juncture that confronted the newly formed Black Panther Party for Self Defense, in late 1966. This does not mean that the new movement will have to take the same path, but it must confront much the same quandaries, against a far more powerful national security state. The comparison is inescapable, for the simple reason that the “police army of occupation” that the Panther Party struggled against is the same one that killed Michael Brown and the rest of the current era’s victims – only far bigger and better armed, backed by an incredibly pervasive intelligence apparatus. The circumstances of struggle will be more difficult than any other that Black people and their allies have faced since Reconstruction was sold out by northern capital in 1877. However, the alternative is continuation of the Black Mass Incarceration State, buttressed by a lawless gendarmerie – a regime that has led to African Americans making up one out of every eight prison inmates on the planet.
In this vortex of struggle, the newborn movement will name itself, and choose its own leaders.
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“Operation Afro-Dilution”: Michigan’s Plan to Flood Detroit with Upscale Immigrants
February 9th, 2014By Glen Ford.
It is the general consensus among white people that Detroit’s problem is, too many Blacks. Michigan’s governor has a solution: flood the city with upscale green card holders. “An infusion of global migrants would enable Detroit’s corporate masters to market the metropolis as a ‘cosmopolitan’ urban cocktail, as opposed to the nation’s largest ‘Chocolate City.’”
“Corporate ethnic manipulators like Snyder want to indoctrinate a new crop of immigrants to the inherent inferiority of Black Americans, whose cities must be saved by culturally superior foreigners.”
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is a crude and vicious racist who verbalizes what most white people believe, but won’t say in mixed company: What’s wrong with Detroit, is an excess of Black people. Snyder proposes to bring 50,000 immigrants to Detroit over five years on special EB-2 visas, on the theory that the newcomers’ entrepreneurial zeal will have transformative effects on the city. Starting with an initial 5,000 immigrants, “Snyder’s List” would expand to 15,000 in the final year, with Detroit accounting for more than a third of the nation’s total EB-2 authorization. Call it “Operation Afro-Dilution.”
Gov. Snyder is a Republican, a political breed known to recoil at the prospect of the USA overrun by foreigners of the darker kind. However, Snyder’s specially summoned migrants would be flooding into territory inhabited mainly by an even more despised demographic: African Americans, who make up 82 percent of Detroit’s 700,000 people. The current Black concentration is far too thick to attract sufficient white families to effect a profound racial transformation in the near term. Consider this: If a rise in a town’s Black population to 20 or 25 percent is enough to push many whites past the “tipping point” into flight, how low do African American numbers have to get before a city definitively “tips” the other way.
An infusion of global migrants would enable Detroit’s corporate masters to market the metropolis as a “cosmopolitan” urban cocktail, as opposed to the nation’s largest “Chocolate City.” In the language of White-Speak, that’s definitely an upgrade, a boost in marketable assets, all around – which is what late-stage, finance-dominated capitalism is all about.
“The current Black concentration is far too thick to attract sufficient white families to effect a profound racial transformation in the near term.”
But, Gov. Synder is going to have to compete for his share of immigrant “pioneers” (as white American settlers in ghetto locales once described themselves). Other too-Black Midwestern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis and Dayton, Ohio, have the same idea, attaching a premium to immigrants of a certain type (educated, relatively affluent).
Back in the post-Civil War era of breakneck U.S. industrialization, European immigrants didn’t even have to speak English to rate a sign-on bonus, free transportation across the Atlantic and company-built housing near their new jobs in American cities. For others, there was free land, confiscated from newly dead Indians. English-speaking African Americans, many of whom had been artisans and industrial workers under slavery, were turned away from factory and homestead. Black folks’ assigned “place” was at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, wherever that happened to be at the time. Nothing has changed, in that regard – except that modern white society determinedly denies that segregation is its favored way of life. Where that not true, of course, Detroit would not be 82 percent Black.
Black folks know full well that Snyder’s immigration scheme is designed to dilute Black numbers and, eventually, make Detroit a more attractive place for native white habitation. But, in mixed company, politically conscious Blacks are careful not to appear jingoistic, like the other Ugly Americans. Rev. Charles Williams II of the National Action Network told the New York Times that “he believed Detroit, as well as other Midwestern states, should be pro-immigration. ‘However,’ he said, ‘I will say, on the other end of this, I think it’s a little ambitious for Governor Snyder to put together a plan to induce more population when still we have to work on double-digit unemployment and high poverty that’s already in our city right now.” That’s putting it mildly. Thirty-eight percent of Detroiters live below the poverty line, the vast majority of them Black.
“Other too-Black Midwestern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis and Dayton, Ohio, have the same idea.”
Changing U.S. population patterns dictate that Blacks strive for solidarity – or, at least, healthy political relations – with immigrant groups, especially Latinos. African Americans must resist being goaded into ethnic confrontations that profit only powerful corporations. However, Snyder and his ilk are attempting to use EB-2 immigrants – the bulk of whom are relatively privileged people from India, China, Mexico and the Philippines – as demographic weapons to break up African American population concentrations. In the process, they are implicitly defaming Blacks as the negative side of the human ledger – The Problem – and non-Blacks as The Solution. This is an assault that must be answered with full throated roar.
Snyder isn’t just preaching to white Americans, who are fully conversant in racially coded language; he is propagandizing the targeted immigrant populations, as well, telling them they are a better class of people than the current residents of Detroit. Snyder and his cohorts are essentially assigning the newcomers a racial mission: to bring their supposedly “superior” cultural attributes to uplift (and ultimately replace) an “inferior” Black social environment.
Now that western Europeans no longer view the U.S. as a Promised Land, the American mythologists must tailor the Founding Lies to a darker audience. Gov. Snyder updates the old Ellis Island story to fit the current influx from the global East and South. “Isn’t that how we made our country great, through immigrants?” said Mr. Snyder, hawking his plan for Detroit. No, that’s not how it happened. The United States was made rich by Black slaves, whose pre-Civil War value exceeded all other national “assets” except the land, itself – which was, of course, stolen from the Native Americans. The descendants of European immigrants, from the Mayflower to the 20th century’s vaunted Melting Pot, somehow imagine they are God’s gift to the continent – to the planet! – but their most important contributions to the enrichment of the New World were smallpox-infected blankets and chains.
“Snyder and his ilk are attempting to use EB-2 immigrants as demographic weapons to break up African American population concentrations.”
Corporate ethnic manipulators like Snyder want to indoctrinate a new crop of immigrants to the inherent inferiority of Black Americans, whose cities must be saved by culturally superior foreigners. This is how U.S. rulers prepare for the year 2043, when the U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country – by inculcating the newcomers with the same racist worldview as the previous white overlords.
Gov. Snyder bragged that he could achieve ethnic cleansing on the cheap. “Here’s a non-cash way to significantly accelerate the comeback of Detroit” – meaning, he has no intention of spending any money on the existing Detroit population. However, the week before, Snyder announced that he was asking the state legislature to provide $350 million to shore up the city’s retiree pension plan and save the art collection. Snyder and Republican lawmakers have long waged a starvation campaign against Detroit, depriving the city of revenue sharing and other funds in order to accelerate its fiscal collapse. Now that the local electorate has been disenfranchised (as has a majority of the state’s Black population), and total corporate dominion appears imminent, Snyder turns the money faucet back on. Should corporate plans sour (see Tom Stephens, “Judge Rhodes to Detroit: Don’t Pay the Banksters,” in this issue of BAR), then the screws will be tightened.
If, by dint of sheer human will, or just the fact of not having anywhere to else go, Black folks can maintain a super-majority in Detroit, that will be a great victory. When someone is trying to kill you, to live is to triumph.
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How Complacency, Complicity of Black Misleadership Class Led to Supreme Court Evisceration of the Voting Rights Act
October 6th, 2013Posted by Glen Ford: By Bruce A. Dixon.
Did the Supreme Court kneecapping of the Voting Rights Act have to happen? Could black leadership have seen it coming and prevented it? Why didn’t they, and what can we do now?
Yesterday’s June 25 Supreme Court ruling tearing the guts out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should be a surprise to nobody. As recently as 2009, Chief Justice John Roberts telegraphed his specific intent to kneecap the Voting Rights Act by invalidating its enforcement formula.
“Things have changed in the South. Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity. Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels…”
Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act rested on the history of open and legal Jim Crow in the south persisting right up until the 1960s, along with the enormous disparities between black and white voter registration and turnout. In 1965 for example, only 7% of African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote, compared to 70% of whites.
By the early 1980s, when black registration and turnout in Chicago for the first time surpassed that of whites, enabling the election of that city’s first black mayor, it might have dawned on some that the rationale for the Voting Rights Act stood on increasingly shaky ground. If and when black voter participation reached similar levels nationwide, the victory of voting rights would have to be consolidated, put beyond the reach of succeeding Congresses, judges and executives. The only way to do that is by amending the US Constitution to make the vote a constitutional right.
The argument for putting the right to vote in a constitutional amendment was best made by Frank Watson and Jesse Jackson Jr. in their 2001 book Toward a More Perfect Union. A constitutional voting rights amendment, specifying a citizen’s right to vote, they explained, would have far reaching consequences. It would require the establishment of a uniform standard of who could register and how registration takes place, along with standards for how voting machines are procured, allocated and operated, and how votes are counted. A constitutional right to vote would provide easy grounds for removing corporate money and the contributions of wealthy individuals from political campaigns, ending felony disenfranchisement, banning gerrymandering, voter caging, discriminatory voter ID laws, and a thousand other ruses and schemes employed to keep minorities and the poor away from the polls and to minimize the effect of their votes when these are cast.
The Black Political Class Looks the Other Way
Amending the US Constitution however, is hard work, not for the lazy or faint of heart. It requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 state legislatures, a herculean task unthinkable without the creation of a powerful grassroots movement, the like of which black leaders no longer knew how to build. On the positive side, opponents of such an amendment would be stuck having to explain why the right to vote should NOT be a constitutional right. But the negatives won.
The black political class instead crossed its fingers, complacently pretended the partial victory of the Voting Rights Act was “settled law,” and concentrated on boosting their own and each others’ illustrious careers, and ceaselessly commemorating the victories of the sixties, since beyond those careers there was little indeed to show.
I worked with Barack Obama in a 1992 Project Vote Illinois registration drive that signed up 130,000 new voters and flogged them out to the polls. President Clinton signed a Motor Voter registration law to make voter registration easier in the brief period he had a congressional majority, but dozens of state governments dominated by Republicans including northern states like Illinois refused to implement it. By the late 1990s states like Florida were deploying legal barriers to the conduct of similar registration drives, such as levying huge fines on volunteer registrars for clerical errors and making mistakes on registration forms felonies. A decade later, the kinds of successful voter registration drives we conducted in Illinois in the 80s and 90s were legally impossible in much of the United States, thanks to nearly identical legislation introduced in state after state. A coordinated assault on voting rights was clearly underway. Alarm bells should have been ringing from one end of the black political class to the other, but the black political class was too lazy to hear them.
Senator Barack Obama on the Judiciary Committee
Barack Obama, whose first political act was the successful 1992 voter registration drive in Illinois, reached the US Senate in the 2004 election. It was the same year Florida officials repeated everything they’d done four years earlier to reduce the black vote, and the same year county officials in Ohio sent new and functional voting machines to their white suburban constituents, and old and defective ones to minority areas. Black voters had to stand in line 10 hours for a chance to vote.
A freshman senator, Barack Obama was assigned right away to the Foreign Affairs and Judiciary Committees, prestigious assignments coveted by senators of many years’ seniority. The Judiciary Committee interviews, questions, and passes or rejects all presidential nominations to the US Supreme Court. While Obama sat on that committee, the nominations of Samuel Alito for associate justice and John Roberts for chief justice were considered.
It was no secret that both Alito and Roberts were committed right wing extremists, and associated with the Federalist Society, a fraternity of lawyers founded in 1982 dedicated to repealing social security, the New Deal, antitrust law, the FDA, consumer protections and civil rights legislation of all sorts, basically civilized and civilizing reform passed in the 20th century. Though the Federalist Society does not disclose its membership, Roberts appeared in their 1997-98 leadership directory, and after his ascent to the high court, Alito has been an honored guest at more than one Federalist Society event.
As a former president of the Harvard Law Review, Senator Obama was intimately familiar with the goals and objectives of the Federalist Society. Grassroots Democratic activists besieged Senators Obama and Kerry, both on the Judiciary Committee, to vote against Alito and Roberts, if need be to lead a filibuster against them.
Obama and Kerry said just enough encouraging words to get the pressure off themselves, then repudiated the idea of a filibuster altogether. When the nominees came before the committee, they passed up the opportunity to grill them on their Federalist Society associations and what this might tell about their expected rulings from the bench on civil rights and other questions, opting to ask softball questions instead. Obama’s decision on the Senate Judiciary Committee not to fight, filibuster or meaningfully oppose the advancement of neo-segregationist Federalist Society thugs Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court guaranteed the virtual nullification of the Voting Rights Act which has now occurred.
By the time Barack Obama got to the White House the coordinated assault on voting rights took the form of ALEC-introduced voter ID laws. The Justice Department was slow, at best, at contesting voter ID laws, and paid no attention at all to state laws that criminalized voter registration drives such as the one the president once headed in Illinois. The rest of the black political class, following their president’s lead, did the same, and the rest is tragic history.
The black political class, which was brought into existence by the voting rights act, has failed to protect its constituency, failed to protect even themselves. They possessed the moral high ground and the political initiative for a generation and squandered it through inattention and inaction. They spent more time celebrating the victories of the sixties than consolidating them, and we will all pay the price.
We can and must blame neo-segregationist Republican thugs in black robes for doing what they do.. That’s clear, cut and dry. But a large share of the blame in this week’s kneecapping of the Voting Rights Act also belongs to our lazy and complacent black political establishment, our black misleadership class, who lacked the vision to see this coming, or the courageous leadership to avoid it, or in most cases both.
It’s not too late to begin organizing for and demanding a constitutional right to vote, along with perhaps an amendment to take the rights of citizenship away from corporations. But we can’t expect any help from traditional black leadership on that one.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.
GA Prisoner Strike Continues a Second Day, Corporate Media Mostly Ignores Them, Corrections Officials Decline Comment
June 18th, 2013
By Glen Ford.
(An interesting article from 2011, dealing with media silence)
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
The peaceful strike begun by inmates of several Georgia state prisons continued for a second day on Friday, according to family members of some of the participants. Copyrighted news stories by AP, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and local TV stations in Macon and Atlanta quote state corrections who say several institutions were placed on lockdown beginning Thursday in anticipation of the inmate protest, on the initiative of wardens of those prisons.
GA Prisoner Strike Continues a Second Day, Corporate Media Mostly Ignores Them, Corrections Officials Decline Comment
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Offices of the wardens at Hay’s, Macon State, Telfair, and Augusta state all referred our inquiries to the Department of Corrections public affairs officer, who so far has declined to return our repeated calls.
The prisoner strike in Georgia is unique, sources among inmates and their families say, because it includes not just black prisoners, but Latinos and whites too, a departure from the usual sharp racial divisions that exist behind prison walls. Inmate families and other sources claim that when thousands of prisoners remained in their cells Thursday, authorities responded with violence and intimidation. Tactical officers rampaged through Telfair State Prison destroying inmate personal effects and severely beating at least six prisoners. Inmates in Macon State Prison say authorities cut the prisoners’ hot water, and at Telfair the administration shut off heat Thursday when daytime temperatures were in the 30s. Prisoners responded by screening their cells with blankets, keeping prison authorities from performing an accurate count, a crucial aspect of prison operations.
As of Friday, inmates at several prisons say they are committed to continuing the strike. “We are going to ride it,” the inmate press release quotes one, “till the wheels fall off. We want our human rights.”
The peaceful inmate strike is being led from within the prison. Some of those thought to be its leaders have been placed under close confinement.
The nine specific demands made by Georgia’s striking prisoners in two press releases pointedly reflect many of the systemic failures of the U.S. regime of mass incarceration, and the utter disconnection of U.S. prisons from any notions of protecting or serving the public interest. Prisoners are demanding, in their own words, decent living conditions, adequate medical care and nutrition, educational and self-improvement opportunities, just parole decisions, just parole decisions, an end to cruel and unusual punishments, and better access to their families.
It’s a fact that Georgia prisons skimp on medical care and nutrition behind the walls, and that in Georgia’s prisons recreational facilities are non-existent, and there are no educational programs available beyond GED, with the exception of a single program that trains inmates to be Baptist ministers. Inmates know that upon their release they will have no more education than they did when they went in, and will be legally excluded from Pell Grants and most kinds of educational assistance, they and their families potentially locked into a disadvantaged economic status for life.
Despite the single biggest predictor of successful reintegration into society being sustained contact with family and community, Georgia’s prison
authorities make visits and family contact needlessly difficult and expensive. Georgia no longer allows families to send funds via US postal money orders to inmates. It requires families to send money through J-Pay, a private company that rakes off nearly ten percent of all transfers. Telephone conversations between Georgia prisoners and their families are also a profit centers for another prison contractor, Global Tel-Link which extracts about $55 a month for a weekly 15 minute phone call from cash-strapped families. It’s hard to imagine why the state cannot operate reliable payment and phone systems for inmates and their families with public employees at lower cost, except that this would put contractors, who probably make hefty contributions to local politicians out of business.
Besides being big business, prisons are public policy. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but accounts for almost a quarter of its prisoners. African Americans are one eighth this nation’s population, but make up almost half the locked down. The nation’s prison population increased more than 450% in a generation beginning about 1981. It wasn’t about crime rates, because those went up, and then back down. It wasn’t about rates of drug use, since African Americans have the same rates of drug use as whites and Latinos. Since the 1980s, the nation has undertaken a well-documented policy of mass incarceration, focused primarily though not exclusively on African Americans.
The good news is that public policies are ultimately the responsibility of the public to alter, to change or do do away with. America’s policy of mass incarceration is overdue for real and sustained public scrutiny. A movement has to be built on both sides of the walls that will demand an end to the prison industry and to the American policy of mass incarceration. That movement will have to be outside the Republican and Democratic parties. Both are responsible for building this system, and both rely on it to sustain their careers. The best Democrats could do on the 100 to 1 crack to powder cocaine disparity this year, with a black president in the White House and thumping majorities in the House and Senate was to reduce it to 18 to 1, and then only by lengthening the sentences for powder cocaine. On this issue, Democrats and Republicans are part of the problem, not the solution.
As this article goes to print Saturday morning, it’s not known whether the strike will continue a third day. With prison officials not talking, and corporate media ignoring prisoners not just this week but every day, outlets like Black Agenda Report and the web site upon which you’re reading this are among the chief means inmates and their families have of communicating with the public. The prisoners are asking the public to continue to call the Georgia Department of Corrections, and the individual prisons listed below to express concern for the welfare of the prisoners.
Prison is about corruption, power and isolation. You can help break the isolation by calling the wardens’ offices at the following prisons. Prisons, naturally , are open Saturdays and Sundays too.
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Macon State Prison is 478-472-3900. |
Hays State Prison is at (706) 857-0400 |
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Telfair State prison is 229-868-7721 |
Baldwin State Prison is at (478) 445- 5218 |
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Valdosta State Prison is 229-333-7900 |
Smith State Prison is at (912) 654-5000 |
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The Georgia Department of Corrections is at http://www.dcor.state.ga.us and their phone number is 478-992-5246 |
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A Sunday update to this story will be posted at Black Agenda Report, about 9AM EST.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA. Dixon is a member of the state committee of the GA Green party.
The Big Nausea: Waking Up With an Obama-Ache
May 20th, 2013By Glen Ford.
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
Who will defend the indefensible Obama? Answer: There will be fewer and fewer Obamapologists, as each day passes. “For the monumentally dysfunctional Black Misleadership Class, the winding down of the Age of Obama is cause for frantic repositioning, and for the revising of their own histories.”
“Black folks have been forced to come to grips with the finality of Obama’s second term.”
The Obama Hangover has begun. The drunken delirium that descended on Black America after the pale Democratic caucuses of Iowa endorsed a brown-skinned corporatist just after New Years Day, 2008 – conveying white “viability” on a Great Black Hope – is definitively over. It’s the morning-after in Black America, a scene of economic and political ruin bathed in the searing daylight of Obama’s second term and umpteenth betrayal.
It would be easy to say that the Great Nausea of 2013 was occasioned by Obama’s blunt object assault on Social Security and the whole array of entitlements. However, the First Black President’s obituary is not written in his budget. The onset of post-Obamaism has more to do with the calendar than anything else. Since Election Day, November 6, Black folks have been forced to come to grips with the finality of Obama’s second term – the impending emergence from the dream. There is the sound of a finger snapping. “In a few moments, you will wake up.”
The awakening will be uneven and, for many, dreadful: a dreamscape dissolving into the rubble-strewn nightmare left by the Great Recession, a catastrophe that set African Americans back as much as two generations, but which was not subjectivelyexperienced as such by huge segments of the Black community. Instead, reality was subsumed by the mere presence of a Black person in the White House.
“The awakening will be uneven and, for many, dreadful.”
It was a narcotic effect so potent in Obama’s first term, African Americans imagined themselves to be better off than five and ten years before – when the truth was exactly the opposite. Black imaginations took flight amid the desolation. Studies by the Pew Research Center – substantially confirmed by other reputable pollsters over the course of Obama’s first term – showed that Blacks were the most optimistic constituency in the country regarding their personal and family prospects and those of African Americans as a group. Moreover, they believed that their condition was improved under the Obama presidency – coterminous with the debacle – when in fact Blacks had been hardest hit of all major U.S. populations. Meanwhile, every other ethnic constituency correctly understood that their economic situation had deteriorated.
Back in January of 2010, I wrote:
“ObamaL’aid is a mind-altering substance, a hallucinogen. It makes Black people see progress when they are actually facing disaster. Obama-on-the-brain also behaves like an opiate, blocking out pain. African Americans’ ability to apprehend political and economic danger is compromised by Obama-induced delusion, while the opiate effect prevents Blacks from knowing where and how badly they have been hurt. That’s a fatal combination.”
Although African Americans contributed 19 out of every 20 of their votes to Obama’s reelection, there was no escaping that this was the last act in the ritual. One cannot blame the people for having their Mardis Gras – even if it is a five-year bacchanal. However, it is unforgiveable for so-called “leaders” to allow the whole town to burn down during the festivities.
“There’s a lot of historical re-writing to do, if the poseurs are to include themselves in a movement from which they have been effectively absent for four years.”
For the monumentally dysfunctional Black Misleadership Class, the winding down of the Age of Obama is cause for frantic repositioning, and for the revising of their own histories. Black politicians and “movement” personalities who, for four years, could not bring themselves to articulate a single “demand” of the administration in power, now claim to be working on a “Black Agenda” – having discarded the old and unfinished Black historical agenda on peace and social justice in deference to the First Black President. Now that Obama’s days are numbered, these misleaders must hustle to readjust history to show that they have, indeed, been “on the case” since 2008, when the bottom fell out of the Black American economy. They must renew their peace and pan-Africanist credentials, having watched as Obama waged war against international order and deployed AFRICOM to militarily occupy the continent. There’s a lot of historical re-writing to do, if the poseurs are to include themselves in a movement from which they have been effectively absent for four years.
The clock is ticking on those who have put the political fortunes of a Black corporate schill in the White House above the interests of African Americans and the global human community. What will the misleaders do with their wagons when there is no Obama for them to circle around – or when he has totally discredited himself even among his most loyal constituency, as with his stance on entitlements?
Revisionism becomes the order of the day. Yesterday’s cheerleaders for Obama are now scrambling to find harmless niches of simulated protest from which they can rebuild their resumes as defenders of the people’s interests. Previously compliant members of the Congressional Black Caucus will decide that it’s time to regurgitate, rather than swallow, Obama’s “Satan Sandwiches.”
But some of us have kept a record, and kept the faith. And we will not forget who did what in the Age of Obama.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted atGlen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
http://blackagendareport.com/content/big-nausea-waking-obama-ache