The Lonely American by Chris Hedges

Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee. A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport.

“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.

But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.

The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.

“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.”

Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for it.

“We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,” he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this past weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them. We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid Googles ‘Ferrari—racing—sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But it’s not working the way it should.”

Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement, or what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness and alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.

Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.

The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.

The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free—is mistaken for reality.

Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”

Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded to new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public, to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into intelligible utterance and convincing action.”

“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study, the masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.” Heiden, forced to flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind, propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine to make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”

Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin  called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”

“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest, merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin wrote. “It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities, guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects, who had no direct union more among themselves.”

Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted. We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.

                                                                     ***********
OneLove

:::MME:::

Earth's Mass Extinction Event #6

The latest evidence shows with a high degree of confidence that we are currently undergoing Earth’s 6th Mass Extinction Event.

Do a Google search on earth’s most massive extinction events in which a significant chunk of its species disappeared off the face of the earth. You will most often find that 5 such events have been identified throughout earth’s history, the most famous being the extinction 60+ million years ago that wiped out the Dinosaurs (except the birds of course).

For years now there’s been talk and studies that show that we are in another such period of time in history, sometimes called the Holocene Extinction. These studies have been criticized however for assumptions that were seen as exaggerating the extent of the crisis.

A new paper recently published, “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction” concludes that our fears are justified.

They used a conservative estimate for the amount of extinctions that occur when there is no mass extinction currently happening. This is essentially the business-as-usual extinctions that are always happening. This is called the Baseline extinction rate and this number is critical because anything near this figure could clearly not be considered a mass extinction. The baseline used for this study was 2 E/MSY which means: 2 extinctions for 10,000 vertebrate species every 100 years.

As described in the paper:

“That background extinction rate was empirically determined using the exceptionally good fossil records of mammals, combining extinction counts from paleontological databases and published literature on the fossil, subfossil, and historical records”
This number was twice as large as previous estimates and therefore provides “a stringent test for assessing whether current modern extinction rates indicate that a mass extinction event is under way”.


Even with such a conservative baseline estimate, the researchers conclude that the vertebrate loss of the past 100 years is 15 to 114 times greater than this new baseline. That means that the extinctions we have experienced the past century would normally take 800 to 10,000 years to happen if we were in a baseline period. This loss of life has been linked to our destruction of natural habitats and climate change caused by our carbon emissions.

CO-Author Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies Biology Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment said:

“Our paper is the icing on the cake. It shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the 6th great mass extinction event”

If this isn’t bad enough for you then you’re in luck, it’s actually worse. This isn’t just about not being able to go to the zoo and see a panda. Many species will not completely die out but they will have their populations ravaged to such a degree that the so-called “natural services” that they provide for us will no longer be an option. These services are not trivial unless you consider things like many types of food and the climate trivial. Just look at what’s happening with honey bees for a great example.

If Paul’s last quote didn’t get your attention, perhaps this will:

“We are now moving into another one of these events that could easily…easily ruin the lives of everybody on the planet”

Is all hope lost? No, there’s always nanotech….kidding

The researchers recommend a major initiative for habitat and wildlife conservation but they warn that the “window of opportunity is rapidly closing.”

Given our track record, we may need to soon consider permanently adding #6 to that list.

                                                                   **************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Poet's Nook: "Lost Voices" by Darius Simpson & Scout Bostley

..whoa...

  OneLove

:::MME:::

‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning’ by Claudia Rankine

Mamie Till Mobley at the funeral of her son, Emmett Till, in Chicago in September 1955.

A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son, before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country. We both laughed. Perhaps our black humor had to do with understanding that getting out was neither an option nor the real desire. This is it, our life. Here we work, hold citizenship, pensions, health insurance, family, friends and on and on. She couldn’t, she didn’t leave. Years after his birth, whenever her son steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever. Added to the natural fears of every parent facing the randomness of life is this other knowledge of the ways in which institutional racism works in our country. Ours was the laughter of vulnerability, fear, recognition and an absurd stuckness.

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

Eleven days after I was born, on Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. Now, 52 years later, six black women and three black men have been shot to death while at a Bible-study meeting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. They were killed by a homegrown terrorist, self-identifed as a white supremacist, who might also be a “disturbed young man” (as various news outlets have described him). It has been reported that a black woman and her 5-year-old granddaughter survived the shooting by playing dead. They are two of the three survivors of the attack. The white family of the suspect says that for them this is a difficult time. This is indisputable. But for African-American families, this living in a state of mourning and fear remains commonplace.

The spectacle of the shooting suggests an event out of time, as if the killing of black people with white-supremacist justification interrupts anything other than regular television programming. But Dylann Storm Roof did not create himself from nothing. He has grown up with the rhetoric and orientation of racism. He has seen white men like Benjamin F. Haskell, Thomas Gleason and Michael Jacques plead guilty to, or be convicted of, burning Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., just hours after President Obama was elected. Every racist statement he has made he could have heard all his life. He, along with the rest of us, has been living with slain black bodies.

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?

In 1955, when Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River and placed for burial in a nailed-shut pine box, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, demanded his body be transported from Mississippi, where Till had been visiting relatives, to his home in Chicago. Once the Chicago funeral home received the body, she made a decision that would create a new pathway for how to think about a lynched body. She requested an open coffin and allowed photographs to be taken and published of her dead son’s disfigured body.

Mobley’s refusal to keep private grief private allowed a body that meant nothing to the criminal-justice system to stand as evidence. By placing both herself and her son’s corpse in positions of refusal relative to the etiquette of grief, she “disidentified” with the tradition of the lynched figure left out in public view as a warning to the black community, thereby using the lynching tradition against itself. The spectacle of the black body, in her hands, publicized the injustice mapped onto her son’s corpse. “Let the people see what I see,” she said, adding, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me.”

It’s very unlikely that her belief in a national mourning was fully realized, but her desire to make mourning enter our day-to-day world was a new kind of logic. In refusing to look away from the flesh of our domestic murders, by insisting we look with her upon the dead, she reframed mourning as a method of acknowledgment that helped energize the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s.

The decision not to release photos of the crime scene in Charleston, perhaps out of deference to the families of the dead, doesn’t forestall our mourning. But in doing so, the bodies that demonstrate all too tragically that “black skin is not a weapon” (as one protest poster read last year) are turned into an abstraction. It’s one thing to imagine nine black bodies bleeding out on a church floor, and another thing to see it. The lack of visual evidence remains in contrast to what we saw in Ferguson, where the police, in their refusal to move Michael Brown’s body, perhaps unknowingly continued where Till’s mother left off.

After Brown was shot six times, twice in the head, his body was left facedown in the street by the police officers. Whatever their reasoning, by not moving Brown’s corpse for four hours after his shooting, the police made mourning his death part of what it meant to take in the details of his story. No one could consider the facts of Michael Brown’s interaction with the Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson without also thinking of the bullet-riddled body bleeding on the asphalt. It would be a mistake to presume that everyone who saw the image mourned Brown, but once exposed to it, a person had to decide whether his dead black body mattered enough to be mourned. (Another option, of course, is that it becomes a spectacle for white pornography: the dead body as an object that satisfies an illicit desire. Perhaps this is where Dylann Storm Roof stepped in.)

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experiences of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens.

The American tendency to normalize situations by centralizing whiteness was consciously or unconsciously demonstrated again when certain whites, like the president of Smith College, sought to alter the language of “Black Lives Matter” to “All Lives Matter.” What on its surface was intended to be interpreted as a humanist move — “aren’t we all just people here?” — didn’t take into account a system inured to black corpses in our public spaces. When the judge in the Charleston bond hearing for Dylann Storm Roof called for support of Roof’s family, it was also a subtle shift away from valuing the black body in our time of deep despair.

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It’s in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.

The Black Lives Matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. Mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives. Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us. Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of black bodies as property and subsequently three-fifths human continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it. In the words of playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” And, as my friend the critic and poet Fred Moten has written: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” This other world, that world, would presumably be one where black living matters. But we can’t get there without fully recognizing what is here.

Dylann Storm Roof’s unmediated hatred of black people; Black Lives Matter; citizens’ videotaping the killings of blacks; the Ferguson Police Department leaving Brown’s body in the street — all these actions support Mamie Till Mobley’s belief that we need to see or hear the truth. We need the truth of how the bodies died to interrupt the course of normal life. But if keeping the dead at the forefront of our consciousness is crucial for our body politic, what of the families of the dead? How must it feel to a family member for the deceased to be more important as evidence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest?

Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, was kept away from her son’s body because it was evidence. She was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, when as a slave she would have had no legal claim to her offspring. McSpadden learned of her new identity as a mother of a dead son from bystanders: “There were some girls down there had recorded the whole thing,” she told reporters. One girl, she said, “showed me a picture on her phone. She said, ‘Isn’t that your son?’ I just bawled even harder. Just to see that, my son lying there lifeless, for no apparent reason.” Circling the perimeter around her son’s body, McSpadden tried to disperse the crowd: “All I want them to do is pick up my baby.”

McSpadden, unlike Mamie Till Mobley, seemed to have little desire to expose her son’s corpse to the media. Her son was not an orphan body for everyone to look upon. She wanted him covered and removed from sight. He belonged to her, her baby. After Brown’s corpse was finally taken away, two weeks passed before his family was able to see him. This loss of control and authority might explain why after Brown’s death, McSpadden was supposedly in the precarious position of accosting vendors selling T-shirts that demanded justice for Michael Brown that used her son’s name. Not only were the procedures around her son’s corpse out of her hands; his name had been commoditized and assimilated into our modes of capitalism.

Some of McSpadden’s neighbors in Ferguson also wanted to create distance between themselves and the public life of Brown’s death. They did not need a constant reminder of the ways black bodies don’t matter to law-enforcement officers in their neighborhood. By the request of the community, the original makeshift memorial — with flowers, pictures, notes and teddy bears — was finally removed by Brown’s father on what would have been his birthday and replaced by an official plaque installed on the sidewalk next to where Brown died. The permanent reminder can be engaged or stepped over, depending on the pedestrian’s desires.

In order to be away from the site of the murder of her son, Tamir Rice, Samaria moved out of her Cleveland home and into a homeless shelter. (Her family eventually relocated her.) “The whole world has seen the same video like I’ve seen,” she said about Tamir’s being shot by a police officer. The video, which was played and replayed in the media, documented the two seconds it took the police to arrive and shoot; the two seconds that marked the end of her son’s life and that became a document to be examined by everyone. It’s possible this shared scrutiny explains why the police held his 12-year-old body for six months after his death. Everyone could see what the police would have to explain away. The justice system wasn’t able to do it, and a judge found probable cause to charge the officer who shot Rice with murder. Meanwhile, for Samaria Rice, her unburied son’s memory made her neighborhood unbearable.

Regardless of the wishes of these mothers — mothers of men like Brown, John Crawford III or Eric Garner, and also mothers of women and girls like Rekia Boyd and Aiyana Stanley-Jones, each of whom was killed by the police — their children’s deaths will remain within the public discourse. For those who believe the same behavior that got them killed if exhibited by a white man or boy would not have ended his life, the subsequent failure to indict or convict the police officers involved in these various cases requires that public mourning continue and remain present indefinitely. “I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Toni Morrison said in April. She went on to say: “I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’ I will say yes.” Morrison is right to suggest that this action would signal change, but the real change needs to be a rerouting of interior belief. It’s an individual challenge that needs to happen before any action by a political justice system would signify true societal change.

The Charleston murders alerted us to the reality that a system so steeped in anti-black racism means that on any given day it can be open season on any black person — old or young, man, woman or child. There exists no equivalent reality for white Americans. The Confederate battle flag continues to fly at South Carolina’s statehouse as a reminder of a history marked by lynched black bodies. We can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrific killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. History’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

A sustained state of national mourning for black lives is called for in order to point to the undeniability of their devaluation. The hope is that recognition will break a momentum that laws haven’t altered. Susie Jackson; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Ethel Lee Lance; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr.; the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney; Cynthia Hurd; Tywanza Sanders and Myra Thompson were murdered because they were black. It’s extraordinary how ordinary our grief sits inside this fact. One friend said, “I am so afraid, every day.” Her son’s childhood feels impossible, because he will have to be — has to be — so much more careful. Our mourning, this mourning, is in time with our lives. There is no life outside of our reality here. Is this something that can be seen and known by parents of white children? This is the question that nags me. National mourning, as advocated by Black Lives Matter, is a mode of intervention and interruption that might itself be assimilated into the category of public annoyance. This is altogether possible; but also possible is the recognition that it’s a lack of feeling for another that is our problem. Grief, then, for these deceased others might align some of us, for the first time, with the living.


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OneLove

:::MME:::

The Future: Building on Communities of Dissent

See the full speech here.   How do we build on communities of dissent? While a college student, I remember reading a book by internationally renowned thinker and activist, A. Sivanandan, entitled "Communities of Resistance". This book of critical essays rocked my world & was one of many books that guided me on a journey of political awakening.   

Sivanandan is one of the UK’s key thinkers on racism, imperialism, black identity and political struggle. His grounded vision has proved important both in the academy and the community for over four decades. This  short clip – a passionate plea to build communities of dissent around the social injustices caused by neoliberalism – is based on his recorded postscript to a recent conference he was unable to attend due to illness. His words are a call to resist the darkness that surrounds us..

OneLove 

 :::MME:::    

Wilmore vs Fox 'News'

The Nightly Show
Get More: The Nightly Show Full Episodes,The Nightly Show on Facebook,The Nightly Show Video Archive

Fox News should be rebranded as The Magic Hour. I mean these guys pull the news right out of their asses hoping people won't smell something putrid. Sadly, if not tragically, a lot of white folks believe this shit. When your business is the denial of reality, the only thing to do when that reality hits you over the head with a club is to change the subject entirely. The above clip was a master class in sophistry and one Wilmore wouldn't let go on unnoticed. Brilliant!   

 OneLove 

 :::MME:::          

Pope Francis Versus Vampire Capitalism by Robert Hennelly

 

Leave it to Pope Francis, a Jesuit trained as a chemist, who has only one lung, to breath new life into a tired global environmental debate.

It has been droning on for so long now that it has become background noise, easily drowned out in the din of the 24-hour news cycle. While the glaciers melt, and close to 2,500 people in India are killed by a heat wave that produced a 118 degree ambient air temperature, we’d much rather dissect the twists and turns of “Game of Thrones” in our air conditioned parallel universe. The brutality of a make-believe place is so much easier to cope with than confronting the cruelty that defines so much of our own real world.

What’s so powerful about the Pope’s Encyclical [3] on climate change is that it does not flinch from doing so. Pope Francis challenges wealthy nations, who use the lion’s share of the earth’s fossil fuels, to take responsibility for the ecological impact of their consumption by becoming mindful of the collateral damage it does to planet’s atmosphere and the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. These are populations already feeling the impacts of global warming.

Several weeks ago, today’s Encyclical was presaged by Pope Francis’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which convened an inter-disciplinary conference of over 60 of the planet’s top scientists and thinkers under the banner, “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. the Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity.” [4] An open letter from the conference participants on the Pontifical Academy of Sciences website linked the trend of growing global income inequality and the planet’s continued reliance on fossil fuels, predicting that if current trends continue, we will see “unprecedented climate changes and ecosystem destruction that will severely impact us all.”

Here’s the bumper sticker take away: 55 percent of the available world’s energy is used by just 1 billion of the world’s 7.2 billion people. “Yet the negative impacts on the environment are being felt by 3 billion who have no access to energy,” the panel of experts asserted.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University was one of the panel’s participants. Sachs wrote recently that the group “included not only the world-leading climate scientists and Nobel laureates, but also senior representatives of the Protestant, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim faiths.” He continued: “Like Francis, religious leaders of all the world’s major religions are urging us to take wisdom from faith and climate science in order to fulfill our moral responsibilities to humanity and to the future of Earth. We should heed their call.”

The biggest challenge to the current world order posed by Pope Francis’s Encyclical is that it calls into question the basic way we measure our success and our accomplishment, the very yardsticks we use. “Problems have been exacerbated by the fact that economic activity is currently measured solely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and therefore does not record the degradation of Earth that accompanies it nor the abject inequities between countries and within each country,” concluded Pope Francis’s expert panel.

One of the nation’s leading global market analysts, who describes himself as a practicing Catholic, active in his local church, tells Salon that Pope Francis’s Encyclical is a major reset for a global institution that has been a principal beneficiary of capitalism. “It harnessed the revenue growth of capitalism to effectively finance a whole host of institutions around the world.” At the same time it found itself mired in scandals over its finances and the way it handled an epidemic of criminal sexual molestation by priests.

The devout Catholic analyst asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized by his employer to speak publicly about his religious convictions with the media. He says Pope Francis’s Climate Change encyclical “will not have an impact on the markets” in the short term ”but will add some marginal support for developing alternative energy” that reduces the planet’s global carbon foot print.

But he says it will be seismic in compelling a long over due “global conversation of, how do we even define prosperity? Is it just accumulating more dollars or do we have to factor in being accountable for our impact on the planet and all people that live on it?”

For the veteran Catholic market watcher, the Pope’s long term play is to the broader mass audience he’s reaching around the world to see their consumer choices as a way to force markets to factor in sustainability in their profit loss equation.

“If we live in the United States, do we really need tomatoes from New Zealand?,” he asked.

Historically, manufacturing and extraction industries like mining, as well as oil and gas production, could look at the pollution they generated in our air, water and land as so called cost externalities that in essence acted as a huge subsidy. The transaction was simple. The companies generated massive profits, some people got jobs, society got fuel and the earth got screwed.

Pope Francis’s climate change teaching should increase the pressure for internalizing the cost of production to include the impact of the toxic exhaust and discharges in a truly comprehensive cost benefit analysis that gives planetary well being as much standing as the bottom line.

Even before the Encyclical was released Pope Francis was getting major pushback from prominent Catholics like former Governor Jeb Bush, who converted. Bush likes his religious clerics to stay in the abstract world of soul saving and to avoid the nitty gritty of sorting out the inequities of the real world. The presidential contender was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I think religion ought to be about making us better people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.”

No doubt conservative free market Catholics will be upset the Pope is being so muscular in the world of the living. He is so much more useful to them when he focuses on the afterlife. This crowd wants religion to be a form of social control, not transformation. This is what got the liberation theologists in trouble, being so passionate and righteous about the here and now. It even got some of them killed.

What it all revolves around is how, in a world increasingly connected by mass communication, do you confront the issue of scarcity and planetary limits? We seem to have at least two approaches here: Deny it is a problem and contend if undermines America’s innate “optimism,” or do a head fake, insisting that you are really concerned about it, but continue to do business the same way.

Part of America’s problem here is that our country was founded by men who thought the natural world had no limits. Sitting on the East Coast in one of the 13 colonies, on a vast continent still unmapped, you could understand how they might think that. Back then it was the Catholic Church that sided with the powers that be, telling them they had God on their side, and the right to take as a slave the “non-believer” native Americans they encountered. It was this Doctrine of Christian Discovery that grew out of several Papal Bulls issued to insure European rulers respected each others claims as they divided up the “new world.”

Talk about evolution. Now almost 500 hundred years later, a Pope that leads that same church is trying something very different.....

                                                               *************************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Musings

   Dave Chapelle on Rachel  Dolezal:  “She’s highlighting the difference between personal feelings and what’s construct, as far as racism is concerned....I don’t know what her agenda is, but there’s an emotional context for black people when they see her and white people when they see her. There’s a lot of feelings that are going to  come out behind what’s happening with this lady.”  

 OneLove

  :::MME:::

Masculinity Is Killing Men: The Roots of Men and Trauma by Kali Holloway

“The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to 'be a man,'” —Joe Ehrmann, coach and former NFL player

If we are honest with ourselves, we have long known that masculinity kills men, in ways both myriad and measurable. While social constructions of femininity demand that women be thin, beautiful, accommodating, and some unattainable balance of virginal and fuckable, social constructions of masculinity demand that men constantly prove and re-prove the very fact that they are, well, men.

Both ideas are poisonous and potentially destructive, but statistically speaking, the number of addicted and afflicted men and their comparatively shorter lifespans proves masculinity is actually the more effective killer, getting the job done faster and in greater numbers. Masculinity’s death tolls are attributed to its more specific manifestations: alcoholism, workaholism and violence. Even when it does not literally kill, it causes a sort of spiritual death, leaving many men traumatized, dissociated and often unknowingly depressed. (These issues are heightened by race, class, sexuality and other marginalizing factors, but here let’s focus on early childhood and adolescent socialization overall.) To quote poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “tis not in death that men die most.” And for many men, the process begins long before manhood.

The emotionally damaging “masculinization” of boys starts even before boyhood, in infancy. Psychologist Terry Real, in his 1998 book I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, highlights numerous studies which find that parents often unconsciously begin projecting a kind of innate “manliness”—and thus, a diminished need for comfort, protection and affection—onto baby boys as young as newborns. This, despite the fact that gendered behaviors are absent in babies; male infants actually behave in ways our society defines as “feminine.” As Real explains, “[l]ittle boys and little girls start off... equally emotional, expressive, and dependent, equally desirous of physical affection. At the youngest ages, both boys and girls are more like a stereotypical girl. If any differences exist, little boys are, in fact, slightly more sensitive and expressive than little girls. They cry more easily, seem more easily frustrated, appear more upset when a caregiver leaves the room.”

Yet both mothers and fathers imagine inherent sex-related differences between baby girls and boys. Even when researchers controlled for babies’ “weight, length, alertness, and strength,” parents overwhelmingly reported that baby girls were more delicate and “softer” than baby boys; they imagined baby boys to be bigger and generally “stronger.” When a group of 204 adults was shown video of the same baby crying and given differing information about the baby’s sex, they judged the “female” baby to be scared, while the “male” baby was described as “angry.”

Intuitively, these differences in perception create correlating differences in the kind of parental caregiving newborn boys receive. In the words of the researchers themselves, “it would seem reasonable to assume that a child who is thought to be afraid is held and cuddled more than a child who is thought to be angry.” That theory is bolstered by other studies Real cites, which consistently find that “from the moment of birth, boys are spoken to less than girls, comforted less, nurtured less.” To put it bluntly, we begin emotionally shortchanging boys right out of the gate, at the most vulnerable point in their lives. 

It’s a pattern that continues throughout childhood and into adolescence. Real cites a study that found both mothers and fathers emphasized “achievement and competition in their sons,” and taught them to “control their emotions”—another way of saying boys are tacitly instructed to ignore or downplay their emotional needs and wants. Similarly, parents of both sexes are more punitive toward their sons, presumably working under the assumption that boys “can take it.” Beverly I. Fagot, the late researcher and author of The Influence of Sex of Child on Parental Reactions to Toddler Children, found that parents gave positive reinforcement to all children when they exhibited “same-sex preferred” behaviors (as opposed to “cross-sex preferred”). Parents who said they “accepted sex equity” nonetheless offered more positive responses to little boys when they played with blocks, and offered negative feedback to girls when they engaged in sporty behavior. And while independent play—away from parents—and “independent accomplishments” were encouraged in boys, girls received more positive feedback when they asked for help. As a rule, these parents were unaware of the active role they played in socializing their children in accordance with gender norms. Fagot notes that all stated they treated sons and daughters the same, without regard to sex, a claim sharply contradicted by study findings.

Undeniably, these kinds of lessons impart deeply damaging messages to both girls and boys, and have lifelong and observable consequences. But whereas, as Terry Real says, “girls are allowed to maintain emotional expressiveness and cultivate connection,” boys are not only told they should suppress their emotions, but that their manliness essentially depends on them doing so. Despite its logic-empty premise, our society has fully bought into the notion that the relationship between maleness and masculinity is somehow incidental and precarious, and embraced the myth that “boys must be turned into men...that boys, unlike girls, must achieve masculinity.”

Little boys internalize this concept early; when I spoke to Real, he indicated that research suggests they begin to hide their feelings from as young as 3 to 5 years old. “It doesn't mean that they have fewer emotions. But they're already learning the game—that it's not a good idea to express them,” Real says. Boys, conventional wisdom holds, are made men not by merely aging into manhood, but through the crushing socialization just described. But Real points out what should be obvious about cisgender boys: “[they] do not need to be turned into males. They are males. Boys do not need to develop their masculinity.”

It is impossible to downplay the concurrent influence of images and messages about masculinity embedded in our media. TV shows and movies inform kids—and all of us, really—not so much about who men (and women) are, but who they should be. While much of the scholarship about gender depictions in media has come from feminists deconstructing the endless damaging representations of women, there’s been far less research specifically about media-perpetuated constructions of masculinity. But certainly, we all recognize the traits that are valued among men in film, television, videogames, comic books, and more: strength, valor, independence, the ability to provide and protect.

While depictions of men have grown more complicated, nuanced and human over time (we’re long past the days of “Father Knows Best” and “Superman” archetypes), certain “masculine” qualities remain valued over others. As Amanda D. Lotz writes in her 2014 book, Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century, though depictions of men in media have become more diverse, “storytelling has nevertheless performed significant ideological work by consistently supporting...male characters it constructs as heroic or admirable, while denigrating others. So although television series may have displayed a range of men and masculinities, they also circumscribed a 'preferred' or 'best' masculinity through attributes that were consistently idealized.”

We are all familiar with these recurring characters. They are fearless action heroes; prostitute-fucking psychopaths in Grand Theft Auto; shlubby, housework-averse sitcom dads with inexplicably beautiful wives; bumbling stoner twentysomethings who still manage to “nail” the hot girl in the end; and still, the impenetrable Superman. Even sensitive, loveable everyguy Paul Rudd somehow "mans up" before the credits roll in his films. Here, it seems important to mention a National Coalition on Television Violence study which finds that on average, 18-year-old American males have already witnessed some 26,000 murders on television, “almost all of them committed by men.” Couple those numbers with violence in film and other media, and the numbers are likely astronomical.

The result of all this—the early denial of boy’s feelings, and our collective insistence that they follow suit—is that boys are effectively cut off from their feelings and emotions, their deepest and most vulnerable selves. Historian Stephanie Coontz has labeled this effect the “masculine mystique.” It leaves little boys, and later, men, emotionally disembodied, afraid to show weakness and often unable to fully access, recognize or cope with their feelings.


In his book, Why Men Can’t Feel, Marvin Allen states, “[T]hese messages encourage boys to be competitive, focus on external success, rely on their intellect, withstand physical pain, and repress their vulnerable emotions. When boys violate the code, it is not uncommon for them to be teased, shamed, or ridiculed.” The cliche about men not being in touch with their emotions says nothing about inherent markers of maleness. It instead identifies behavioral outcomes that have been rigorously taught, often by well-meaning parents and society at large. As Terry Real said when I spoke to him, this process of disconnecting boys from their “feminine” —or more accurately, “human”—emotional selves is deeply harmful. “Every step...is injurious,” says Real. “It's traumatic. It's traumatic to be forced to advocate half of your own humanity.”

That trauma makes itself plain in the ways men attempt to sublimate feelings of emotional need and vulnerability. While women tend to internalize pain, men instead act it out, against themselves and others. As Real told me, women “blame themselves, they feel bad, they know they feel bad, they'd like to get out of it. Boys and men tend to externalize stress. We act it out and often don't see our part in it. It’s the opposite of self-blame; it's more like feeling like an angry victim.” The National Alliance on Mental Illness states that across race and ethnicity, women are twice as likely to experience depression as men. But Real believes men’s acting-out behaviors primarily serve to mask their depression, which goes largely unrecognized and undiagnosed.

Examples of these destructive behaviors range from the societally approved, such as workaholism, to the criminally punishable, such as drug addiction and violence. Men are twice as likely as women to suffer from rage disorders. According to the Centers for Disease Control, men are more likely to drink to excess than women, leading to “higher rates of alcohol-related deaths and hospitalizations.” (Possibly because men under the influence are also more likely to engage in other risky behaviors, such as “driv[ing] fast or without a safety belt.”) Boys are more likely to have used drugs by the age of 12 than girls, which leads to a higher likelihood of drug abuse in men than in women later in life. American men are more likely to kill (committing 90.5 percent of all murders) and be killed (comprising 76.8 percent of murder victims). This extends to themselves, according to studies: “males take their own lives at nearly four times the rate of females and comprise approximately 80 percent of all suicides.” (Interestingly, suicide attempts among women are estimated to be three to four times higher than that of their male counterparts.) And according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, men make up more than 93 percent of prisoners.

The damaging effects of the aforementioned emotional severing even plays a role in the lifespan gender gap. As Terry Real explains:

"Men’s willingness to downplay weakness and pain is so great that it has been named as a factor in their shorter lifespan. The 10 years of difference in longevity between men and women turns out to have little to do with genes. Men die early because they do not take care of themselves. Men wait longer to acknowledge that they are sick, take longer to get help, and once they get treatment do not comply with it as well as women do."

Masculinity is both difficult to achieve and impossible to maintain, a fact that Real notes is evident in the phrase “fragile male ego.” Because men’s self-esteem often rests on so shaky a construct, the effort to preserve it can be all-consuming. Avoiding the shame that’s left when it is peeled away can drive some men to dangerous ends. This is not to absolve people of responsibility for their actions, but it does drive home the forces that underlie and inform behaviors we often attribute solely to individual issues, ignoring their root causes.

James Gilligan, former director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School, has written numerous books on the subject of male violence and its source. In a 2013 interview with MenAlive, a men’s health blog, Gilligan spoke of his study findings, stating, “I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo that ‘loss of face’—no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death.”

Too often, men who are suffering do so alone, believing that revealing their personal pain is tantamount to failing at their masculinity. “As a society, we have more respect for the walking wounded,” Terry Real writes, “those who deny their difficulties, than we have for those who 'let' their conditions 'get to them.'" And yet, the cost, both human and in real dollars, of not recognizing men’s trauma is far greater than attending to those wounds, or avoiding creating them in the first place. It’s critical that we begin taking more seriously what we do to little boys, how we do it, and the high emotional cost exacted by masculinity, which turns emotionally whole little boys into emotionally debilitated adult men.

When masculinity is defined by absence, when it sits, as it does, on the absurd and fallacious idea that the only way to be a man is to not acknowledge a key part of yourself, the consequences are both vicious and soul crushing. The resulting displacement and dissociation leaves men yet more vulnerable, susceptible, and in need of crutches to help allay the pain created by our demands of manliness. As Terry Real writes, “A depressed woman’s internalization of pain weakens her and hampers her capacity for direct communication. A depressed man’s tendency to extrude pain...may render him psychologically dangerous.”

We have set an unfair and unachievable standard, and in trying to live up to it, many men are slowly killing themselves. We have to move far beyond our outdated ideas of masculinity, and get past our very ideas about what being a man is. We have to start seeing men as innately so, with no need to prove who they are, to themselves or anyone else. 

                                                                        **************

OneLove

:::MME::::

Hip Hop, the 'War on Drugs' and the Prison Industrial Complex

 I was a fan of Hip Hop music from its very beginning. I thought --& still think - that it was/is an excellent platform for raising social consciousness while your body rocked to the beat. But my oh my, how the times have changed. The socially conscious elements of Hip Hop have been forced underground by unseen forces who have misdirected this powerful art form from consciousness to callousness. We went from -

"I hear Brenda's got a baby
But, Brenda's barely got a brain
A damn shame
The girl can hardly spell her name
(That's not our problem, that's up to Brenda's family)

Well let me show ya how it affects the whole community

(2PAC from "Brenda's Got A Baby")

to this - 

This one for my niggas
And bitches bout that money, (Cash Out)
Gotta love, Chesire Bridge
Them bad hoes at Onyx
I don't fuck with no snitches
So don't tell me who telling
This one for them colleges
Them bad hoes at Spelman
Shout out to them freshmen
On Instagram straight flexin'
Popped a molly, I'm sweatin', woo

(Trinidad James from "All Gold Everything")

What is really behind this disturbing trend?

Freeway Rick Ross believes that Hip Hop is being used as a government weapon. The former drug kingpin turned activist says that the government has “taken hip-hop and made it glorious to be a drug dealer.” According to Ross:

The message that it tells our kids is that if you go out, sell drugs, then you can become a great rock star… and never go to prison. That’s a false message to be giving people who feel hopeless.

On the surface, the idea that the US government is even aware of hip hop, let alone interested in using it to further some kind of agenda, seems outlandish. The government could care less about hip hop music. Right?

But as it turns out, our government has been using art and artists to achieve political goals for a long time.

Art as a Weapon

You don’t have to look far to find examples of governmental manipulation of popular art.

Recently a federal agency called USAID made headlines when they were caught trying to infiltrate Cuba’s underground hip hop scene. Their plan was to:

…recruit dozens of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives but really aimed at stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government.

The idea that a US government agency used hip hop as a “covert weapon in the US government’s hapless attempts to unseat Cuba’s communist government” was news to many people. But, this wasn’t the first time the government had used art in the service of war. It turns out, we have a long history of using art as a weapon.

For decades during the Cold War, it was rumored that artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning were “part of a secret CIA program… aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.” Although the CIA was using them as part of an anti-communist program:

The artists themselves were completely unaware that their work was being used as propaganda. On what agents called a “long leash,” they participated in several exhibitions secretly organized by the CIA

Donald Jameson, the CIA operative who confirmed the operations, explained that the CIA chose to promote American abstract expressionism:

Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US.

Programs like this began in the 1950s when “the CIA’s International Organizations Division was set up, aimed at promoting anti-Communist cultural projects abroad.” And as the Cuban hip hop operation indicates, government agencies are still using these tactics to this day.

The Prison Industrial Complex

Both of the previous programs were designed to subvert perceived enemies of the state. But Ross’s allegations are different because they suggest this type of subversion is being used against American citizens.

Ross believes that “the hip hop lifestyle doesn’t lead to riches, but to prison.” But who benefits from people being locked up?

Enter the prison industrial complex.

Most people are not aware that some prisons are a for-profit ventures run by private corporations. And, they can be very profitable. A prison workforce offers:

• Wages from $0.23 cents to $1.15 an hour
• No union
• No sick leave
• No over time
• No risk of turnover

With those conditions, it’s easy to be competitive.

Take Federal Prison Industries aka UNICOR. UNICOR is ” is a wholly owned United States government corporation created in 1934 that uses penal labor from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to produce goods and services.” But many people believe that it’s ability to leverage prison labor has made it too competitive, hurting private sector businesses by reducing their ability to compete:

Business owners are crying foul over the number of clothing contracts — including those for military uniforms — awarded to Federal Prison Industries, also known as UNICOR.
UNICOR has earned a bevy of Army clothing contracts recently. It manufactures the Army’s Improved Physical Fitness Uniform, and from 2007 to 2011 the company produced about 40 percent of the Army Combat Uniform.
Offering these contracts to a company that employs U.S. inmates at federal prisons across the country for an average wage of 23 cents per hour has often had a negative effect on American small business owners.

Even worse, UNICOR is often able to win the contracts without facing any competition at all.  Retired Air Force Col. Kurt Wilson, executive vice president of business development and government affairs for American Apparel, said, “The way the law is — Federal Prison Industries gets first dibs and contracts up to a certain percentage before they have to compete against us.”

And the kicker – despite having vastly reduced labor rates, UNICOR’s products are not any cheaper. In fact, their products can cost up to 15% MORE than other manufacturers. Virtual slave labor. Incredible margins. Billions in no-bind contracts. Sounds like someone is getting paid.

And then you have the people managing the jails.

The Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA,  is a company that:

…owns and manages private prisons and detention centers and operates others on a concession basis. The company is the largest private corrections company in the United States and manages more than 67 facilities with a designed capacity of 92,500 beds. CCA, incorporated in 1983 by three businessmen with experience in government and corrections

The CCA recently earmarked $250 million dollars for buying and managing additional correctional facilities. However, their terms for purchasing a facility included some interesting stipulations. Most notably, they required that they receive a 20 year contract, a minimum rated occupancy of 1000 beds and a guaranteed 90% occupancy rate.

What is that worth? A really quick back of the napkin estimate suggests:

• Average Annual Cost to Incarcerate a Prisoner:  $31,286 per prisoner
• Minimum number of prisoners (at 90% occupancy and 1,000 beds): 900 prisoners
• Duration of the contract: 20 years
• Total Value: $563,148,000 

That’s a lot of cash.

For people wanting to take advantage of prison labor, but feeling left out, many states, like California, have Joint Venture programs in which private businesses can partner with the state to leverage DOC workers. The state of California itself is so reliant on prison labor it recently refused to obey court orders to parole non-violent offenders because they were afraid “prisons won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs.”

Add to that the lobbies representing the people that work for the system – groups like the prison guard unions – and you have a whole lot of people whose survival depends on prisons being kept full.

But how do you keep prisons full?

The War On Drugs

Back in the 80’s, when government began its War on Drugs:

…there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from The Sentencing Project, a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 — most of whom are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.

In 2013, Federal data showed that 51% of the federal prison population consisted of people who were imprisoned for possession, trafficking, or other drug related crimes.

Many people were also unaware that the privatization of prisons was a direct result of the war on drugs:

With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the “war on drugs” and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons

In addition to making the market for privatizing prison, the war on drugs made sure that federal and state prisons were full of non-violent offenders. But you can’t have a drug war without the drugs. So, despite the fact that they were doing a great job of filling the jails up, the government didn’t try too hard to stop the drugs from entering the country.

Consider the recent case of the Flores twins.

While part of a Chicago sting operation, the Flores twins – two high level narcotics traffickers turned DEA informants – imported TONS of narcotics into Chicago every month while still under DEA supervision. They would import the drugs from Mexico, sell the drugs to street level dealers, and then tell the DEA who they sold the drugs to. In turn, the DEA would arrest the dealers.

Although the operation resulted in arrests, its methodology was suspicious for a few reasons. First, even though many of the street dealers ended up in prison, the people who actually brought the drugs in – the Flores twins – were given given deals that included witness protection. More importantly, if the DEA really wanted to stop the flow of drugs, why didn’t they just arrest the Flores twins?

As it turned out, stopping the flow of drugs was not their top priority. What was? If the billion dollar forfeiture agreement that the Flores twins helped the feds secure is any indication, the prime motivation appears to be money.

Almost same thing happened to Freeway Rick Ross decades earlier.

In the 80’s, Ross was one of the largest distributors of crack cocaine in the United States. His empire, “once dubbed the Walmart of crack cocaine — expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest.” His supplier was a man named Danilo Blandon.

Like the Flores twins, Blandon imported vast amounts of drugs from South and Central America. Like the Flores twins, he worked with the DEA to bust the people that he sold them to. And like the Flores twins, Danilo Blandon got a deal in exchange for his cooperation.

However, Blandon’s story had an additional wrinkle: when Blandon was called to testify, he swore under oath that money he raised from selling drugs was being used by the CIA to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The allegations were stunning:

…a drug ring that sold millions of dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

This led to a 1987 investigation led by then Senator John Kerry which confirmed Blandon’s testimony:

The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the Contras appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war. Indeed senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.

This demonstrated a few things. One, that the government, despite claiming to be waging a war on drugs, allowed the mass importation of drugs into the country. Two, that parts of the government knowingly benefited from the sale of those drugs. And three, the people caught in the middle were an acceptable cost of doing business.

The Infiltration of Hip Hop

So, suppose you have a prison-industrial complex that profits from prisoners, and a government that profits from drugs. The only thing really missing would be a great advertising campaign to keep everything moving. Say hello to modern hip hop!

Not only does modern hip hop glorify crime, it glorifies violence, murder, selling drugs, and pretty much anything else that can get you locked up. Of course, it’s not sold that way. Instead, it is packaged as way for poor artists to escape all of those things. But in reality, it’s all a carefully constructed lie.

Just look at the two different “Rick Rosses”.

The Real Rick Ross – Freeway Rick Ross; the one who bought the coke, made the crack and sold the drugs – got busted and was sent to jail.

The Fake Rick Ross – the wannabe rapper and former correctional officer named William Leonard Roberts II; the fat ex-prison guard who stole Freeway Rick Ross’s entire identity – got rich.

Why?

Because modern hip hop artists are nothing more than spokespeople for the prison industrial complex. As one writer put it:

Every corporation is expected to grow at least 4% each quarter, many prisons are privately owned with stock being traded on the open market. If these corporations were to do commercials, jingles and promotions who would they hire?

Admittedly that’s a cynical view. But, when you consider the close ties between big media corporations and private prison industries:

• The #1 stock holder of Viacom and Time Warner is Blackrock
• The #3 stock holder of Viacom and Time Warner is Vanguard Group Incorporated
• The #1 stock holder of Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated
• The #2 stock holder of Corrections Corporation of America is Blackrock

… so maybe it’s not so cynical after all.

This generation of young people need to be aware of the sinister manipulations that go on behind the scenes. White folks use, abuse & sell more drugs than anyone else, but it is not them who dispropotionately fill our prisons. It's a set up.....

OneLove

:::MME:::