American Horror Story by Laurie Penny

“America is great because America is good.”- Hillary Clinton.

“We dream of a brand new start-
But we dream in the dark, for the most part.”
—Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton.

When I was a child, I always half-suspected that America wasn’t real. It had to be made up. It was too good and too simple a story to make sense in the everyday world of bus stops and breakfast cereals and adults who invariably let you down

Living and sometimes working here as a grown-up has not changed my opinion. Right now, backstage at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, I can see the story being written in real time.

I’m writing this from the sopping wet-media refugee tent behind the perimeter, as the Star Spangled Banner echoes from a television screen somewhere out of sight. I’ve spent the past ten days having my eyes dazzled backstage at the biggest show on earth. The American political machine is trying to pilot its next season. Last week we had ten thousand terrifying Republicans going for a straight up tits-teeth-and-ammo exhibition, peddling fear and flag-waggery with a promise to rain down terrible vengeance on everything that irritates you. Like your immigrant neighbors. Like women who get above themselves. Like having to mind your manners.

This week it’s the Democrats, with their tired-looking cast-members repeating lines that sounded hokey the first time in between guest appearances by beloved celebrities all hoping the networks won’t cancel. They’ve got the script and they’ve got the stars, but they’re still trying to find the right narrative arc, because the American public’s disbelief is rapidly losing suspension. This is not politics, not as I know it at home. This is something else. This is pantomime.

There is a certain look that I’ve been sharing with other visiting foreign journalists this week and it is just that—a look, sometimes with the hands spread in a horrified half shrug, because sometimes there are just no words, even when there have to be, you know, because that’s how we make rent.

How to possibly express the choreographed insanity of this brassy, breadless circus? How are we meant to actually communicate like human beings when we are trapped here, sweating on the floor of the dream factory as they hand out buttons and baseball caps plastered with empty slogans? It reminds me, more than anything else, of a music festival, down to the overpriced snacks, the complicated entry system, the constant impression that the weather is trying to kill you, and the way that normal rules are suspended as we pretend, briefly, that another world is possible. Specifically, world where the political process is simple and unsaleable, and strong leaders can change things for the better. A world where hope is feasible and our votes matter and we all go, as Philip Larkin once said, down the long slide to happiness, endlessly.

This is not how it’s done in Britain. Have you seen our politicians? George Osborne looks like he’s lied for so long his two faces can’t stand to be on the same head anymore and are frantically pulling apart. Boris Johnson is what would happen if you took Donald Trump out of the oven too early and left him to rot on an English lawn.

Then there’s our conferences. In Britain, party conferences are square, airless affairs in seaside towns where squashed-looking people in suits eat warm quiche at the back of policy roundtables and protesters get rained on outside. I have been to a number of these things, and their version of putting on a show usually comes down to parties in a local restaurant with the occasional glass of free buck’s fizz and bitchy political correspondents smoking outside, hoping the Deputy Leader will put in an appearance, or maybe, if we’re lucky, Tony Robinson off Time Team.

In America, by contrast, party is a verb.

American politicians know that they are in showbusiness and generally have the terrifying teeth and hair to prove it, although a few of them get to be character actors. The conventions are the press matinee. Sequins, sparkles, wild promises, your favourite celebrities, pizza costs seven dollars a slice, the stadium is lit, balloons fall like platitudes from the rafters, the camera zooms in on the delegates weeping with joy.

It’s all designed to make you feel good. The question is -what kind of good do you want to feel?

Donald Trump makes you feel good like a line of cocaine or an adulterous orgasm makes you feel good. His puffed-up pridemongering appeals to the cowed, craving animal inside every citizen that wants to vote for cake today and fuck the other guy. Why? Because it feels good, and because so little else does.

But the Democrats? They make you feel good.

They make you feel worthy, and pure, and moral, or at least like you could be all those things if you tried. They make you feel like you’re a good person for trying. They make you feel like liberalism is a position that makes sense. Everyone wants to believe that they are a good person. Americans want to believe it more, perhaps, than the rest of us, because their nation has done and continues to do some very bad things both in the world and to its own people in the name of a dream that is still a nightmare for millions.

America is still, fundamentally, a nation of puritans. That’s why this convention feels, at every stage, like a cross between a rock concert and a church revival. America is soaked in the language and practice of religion and wants to believe in its own goodness—in right as well as might. The signs handed out to delegates on Day One of the DNC said “Love Trumps Hate”. On Day Two, they said “Do The Most Good”. Most of the taglines could have been lifted from the Bible—the Good News version, not the King James. The Democrats are still pushing the Gospels on a suspicious, skeptical congregation that’s starting to lose faith in the hereafter. The Republicans, meanwhile, have run rabid and are reading straight from Revelations.

Of course, like every story in the religious mode, American presidential politics is a fairytale.

It’s fairytale designed—like all fairytales—to tell lost, frightened children that darkness can be overcome if they are well-behaved and listen to their elders. It’s a fairytale not just because no nation has a monopoly on morality, but because nation states themselves have never been the vector of human goodness and never will be. America The Brave is a bedtime story, the kind you tell to scared kids who know full well that the monsters are real. But for a moment there, I still wanted Obama to tuck me in.

President Barack Obama is a man put on this earth to make incremental social change exciting. I saw him speak last night on a ten-foot television screen across a bar filled with tired reporters from all over the world, and I found myself remembering what it meant, in 2008, watching the lifestream from a filthy front room in Turnpike Lane, to believe—in that vague, childlike way—in hope. Hope without affect, a thing with feathers but no bones. I felt my heart twitch under my ribs. I felt proud to be an American citizen. It took me ten full minutes to remember that I wasn’t one.

This is not practical politics. This is pure pageantry, pure mythmaking in a nation that has always survived by singing a song of itself. A nation of three hundred million souls and half a billion guns torn apart by violence and uncertainty, held together by pomp and circumstance and precious little else. What is on show at the conventions is very different from the politics that exist, day to day, month to month, as a material force in people’s material lives. The conventions are a bubble universe where we all, press and public and PR people and random rain-soaked flunkies, try to float on suspension-strings of disbelief. We know we’re being lied to. Those complaining about the lies have missed the point.

Of course the Democrats are lying to you, and of course that hurts more than the brazen untruthiness of Trump and his trashcan-fire rhetoric. What did you expect? What’s happening is here is more than just lies. What speaker after party-faithful speaker is doing, as they take the stage with the rosy-cheeks of actors carved in wood and worked by levers, is telling stories. Functionally, it’s the same thing, but telling stories is a larger and stranger thing than lying, in the way that war is a larger and stranger thing than murder.

Lying is wrong, but party politics is a project of public mythmaking and manipulation so enormous that it crushes the concept of falsehood. In the writer’s room of US politics, the scriptwriters have move beyond lies to the management of truth, the creation of a master story that can explain all the other stories, sweep them up, make us want to turn the page, knowing we can never truly choose our own adventure.

So here it is. Here’s the story the Democrats are selling. They cannot persuade America, or the world, that liberalism is plausible, that change will come in a way that makes a meaningful difference to millions of lives; what they are offering, in practical terms, is the vestige of democracy against the certainty of dictatorship. They are offering things not getting quite so much worse quite so fast. That’s a hard sell. Here’s how they’re going to spin it. Here’s the question on the table for American voters that will decide the fate of the world in the next decade.

What sort of person are you? Would you rather feel good, or do good? Can you swallow your pride, humble yourself and vote for the lesser evil?

People need something to believe in. Believing you can be a better person isn’t the worst option of the many on offer right now. Particularly as belief is, in its own way, a sort of magic. You can believe things so hard and so desperately that they come halfway true.

Hillary Clinton is not offering you a vision of a better future. She is offering you a vision of yourself as a better person, a person who can turn their face away from swivel-eyed, silent-screaming evil, a person who can vote to humble themselves like good parishoners before the altar of liberal equivocation and the drag-end of the American dream. As visions go, it’s viscerally disappointing. I know you wanted more. We all did. But the alternative is fear in the dark, and a horror story whose win conditions can only be negotiated downwards.

When I was a child, I thought America was made up. Now I know it for sure. I’ve been to the haunted house where hundreds of millions of ordinary people scream in dark corners for a story worth believing, clinging to what W.H. Auden called the “euphoric dream” of everyday redemption — “Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night, who have never been happy or good.”

America has never been happy, or good. But if it stops believing that it can be, the whole damn world is going to suffer.

Musings

“How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but ‘regrettably necessary’ holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at least the 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same."

-- Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Michael Eric Dyson vs. Eddie Glaude

Michael Eric Dyson vs. Eddie Glaude on Race, Hillary Clinton and the Legacy of Obama's Presidency

Bill O'Reilly Claims Enslaved Africans Who Built White House Were "Well Fed"; Dyson & Glaude Respond

Quite a spirited & informed debate between two of America's leading public intellectuals. I can see both side of their respective claims so there is no clear winner as such.

There is much to think about here...

OneLove

The Lie We Live

Have a blessed Sunday.

 OneLove

Carl Sagan: We Are One Planet

A stirring speech by the legendary cosmologist Carl Sagan, on the evolution of human consciousness. Decades old but still highly applicable today.

OneLove

What Does It Mean to Be Wrong For So Long? Reflections on Black Reality and White Delusion by Tim Wise

Although there was no such thing as polling back then, I suspect that if you had asked a representative sample of Londoners in the early 1770s whether or not the American colonists were getting a fair shake from King George, most would have said yes. It is doubtful they would have thought much about any supposed grievances that were at that very moment fueling the rise of a revolutionary movement, soon to burst onto the scene. Loyal to the system of which they were a part, and believing that system fair, they might well have wondered what all the fuss was about.

Whenever we benefit from a system as it is, taking that system for granted becomes second nature. We don’t see what others who are harmed by that system see, because we don’t have to. There’s no mystery here and very little that is controversial, at least in theory; as such, it should be apparent that most Brits in the mid-18th century would have found the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to be foolish upstarts and trouble-makers. And no doubt, looking back at what would have been the dominant British view at that time, most Americans would probably feel smug in asserting the absurdity of such a perspective in retrospect. Even most Brits would likely acknowledge the fatuousness of their ancestors’ denials and unwillingness to see the colonists’ point. It’s always easier to admit one was wrong many generations after the error has occurred.

So too, in what became the United States, most slaveowners never questioned the legitimacy of their system, and most whites — including those who didn’t own slaves — neither joined the abolitionist movement nor supported it. Indeed, most whites have been implacably aligned with white supremacy for the entirety of our nation’s history, only condemning even its most blatant iterations (like slavery and indigenous genocide) many generations after the formal manifestations of those had ended, and when doing so took no more courage than crossing the street.

That may sound harsh. It may be difficult to hear. But just because truth isn’t pleasing to one’s ears doesn’t mean it’s any less accurate. And the fact is — and it is at the heart of our current troubles — most white Americans have never believed that it was necessary for blacks to agitate for their rights and liberties (or their lives)—at least not at the time that particular agitation was happening. Just as Londoners wouldn’t have seen the unfairness directed at the American colonists (and let’s be clear, what King George did to white colonists was nothing compared to what those white colonists did to Africans and indigenous persons), so too, most whites have never been able to see the unfairness of the system vis-a-vis black people in the moment. Oh sure, fifty years later, we can look back and view Dr. King as a secular saint and talk about how great the civil rights movement was, and then we can contrast it with that “horrible, awful” Black Lives Matter movement, as Bill O’Reilly recently did. But when Dr. King and the movement were actually doing the things for which we remember them, most white folks stood in firm opposition, saw no need for their actions, and believed they were more “divisive” than unifying.

Sound familiar?

In other words, white America has never believed there was a problem with racism worth fighting over; or at least, if there were, black folks were “going about it the wrong way.” Needless to say, when a group of people has been so splendidly wrong for so distressingly long, the odds of them suddenly getting it right are pretty slim. A group of people who believed things were fine fifty years ago hasn’t earned the right to be taken seriously today; indeed, they have forfeited the right to be considered even remotely competent when it comes to discerning the basic contours of social reality

Just to make clear how deluded or disinterested in racial justice most white folks have been, even during times when, in retrospect, racial oppression was obvious, consider the following:

In 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed, two years before the Voting Rights Act, and five years before the Fair Housing Act, nearly two in three whites told Gallup pollsters that blacks were treated equally in their communities. This, in the same year that Medgar Evers was shot down dead in his driveway in Jackson, Bull Connor plowed tanks through the black community and hosed down children in Birmingham, four young black girls were murdered at the 16th Street Baptist Church there, and George Wallace declared, “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation ‘fahevah’”—a statement that then elicited letters of support from whites all across the nation and not only in the south.

By 1965, the year in which Selma sheriff Jim Clark and his goons beat civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge, and Los Angeles police brutality towards black folks touched off the Watts uprising, the share of whites who said blacks were treated equally had risen to nearly 70 percent. In other words, most white Americans thought there was no real need for the Civil Rights Movement, as equal treatment had already been achieved. This is to say that most white folks were utterly deluded about the nation in which they lived.

Even before that, in 1962, 85 percent of whites said that black children had just as good a chance to get a good education as white children. This, despite the fact that most school systems still had not moved towards meaningful integration, let alone equalizing of resources, eight years after the decision in Brown v. Board. While the idea of equal educational opportunity in the early ’60s might strike us now as intrinsically absurd, most whites believed it was a reality, suggesting once again that white America had not even the most fleeting familiarity with their country.

As Paul Rosenberg noted in a Salon essay today, white America has long viewed anti-racist organizing as divisive, including at times when, looking backward, we would now mostly praise it.

So, for instance, in a Gallup Poll in 1961, six in ten of all Americans said they disapproved of the Freedom Riders: civil rights activists who engaged in direct action to desegregate bus lines throughout the south. Considering that black support for these actions was high — 92 percent of blacks said the movement and Dr. King were either moving at the right speed or too slowly in pushing for change — one can assume that white opposition to the Freedom Riders was probably more than 2:1. In the same poll, most whites expressed opposition to sit-ins or any other form of direct action to break the back of segregation, claiming that such actions would do more harm than good when it came to bringing about change. In other words, the American south was an apartheid colony, and most white folks opposed the people who were trying to do something about it. That is to say, white people sided with white supremacy.

In June of 1963, shortly before the March on Washington, 60 percent of Americans (and no doubt more than 70 percent of whites, given high black support for the movement), said that civil rights demonstrations were more a hindrance to black advancement than a help. In other words, most white people believed they knew black folks’ needs better than actual black people did. That is to say, most white people actively manifested a paternalistic, white supremacist mindset and would have felt that Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which we so revere today, was little more than the overwrought rambling of a trouble-maker.

In 1964, despite the fact that the Voting Rights Act had yet to be passed and blacks were being kept from voting throughout the south, and despite the persistence of housing discrimination, which would not be addressed in the Fair Housing Act for four more years, three in four Americans, and likely well over 80 percent of whites, said blacks should stop protesting for their rights. In other words, most white folks didn’t care that African Americans were being denied one of the most basic rights of citizenship, voting, and that they could be routinely blocked from living in the neighborhood of their choice. In short, most whites again sided with white supremacy.

In 1966, 85 percent of whites told the Lou Harris polling group that civil rights demonstrations had done more harm than good for blacks, and the majority said that if they were in the same position as blacks, they would not think it justified to protest or demonstrate for their rights or opportunities. This, coming from the descendants of people who lost their shit over taxes on tea.

Another poll that year found that half of whites believed Dr. King was hurting the cause of civil rights, while only a bit more than a third thought he was helping, and in 1967 — before the Fair Housing Act, and when opportunities still were obviously not equal between whites and people of color — nearly 85 percent of all Americans (and likely well over 90 percent of whites) said blacks would be better off just “taking advantage of the opportunities they have already been given” as opposed to protesting. In other words, whites believed blacks should just work harder and stop complaining, even though housing discrimination was rampant and still legal; even though most school systems still had not moved to truly integrate, let alone equalize resources, and even though the Civil Rights Act had only been in place for three years—hardly long enough, even in theory, to end racial discrimination. In short, white folks have always wished black people would stop fighting for their rights, no matter how truncated those rights were at the time.

By 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup Survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good paying job—twice as many as said they would have a worse chance. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better chance for a good education than whites did, while only seventeen percent said they would have a worse opportunity (Newsweek/Gallup Organization, National Opinion Survey, August 19, 1969). In other words, even before the 1970s, whites were already convinced that things were equal, or even that we were the real victims of discrimination, enjoying even less opportunity than African Americans did. That is to say, perceptions of white victimhood were already brewing, within the first few years after the fall of formal white supremacy.
What can one say about a group of people so utterly divorced from reality at one of the most blatantly unjust periods in American history? At a time when images of racial injustice were beamed into their living rooms every night? At the height of one of the greatest freedom movements in history? What can be said of a people who can stare at those images, and hear the words spoken by black people fighting for their lives, their rights and their dignity — as those people are beaten and killed and jailed — and turn away, or deny that what they are seeing and hearing is real? What can be said about people who despite being otherwise functional — able to hold down jobs, raise children, remember to wash their hands after using the bathroom, and feed their dogs — were so indelibly incapable of understanding the nature of the system under which they lived?

I know one thing that can be said for certain: we needn’t trust the judgment of such a people as this, on any matter of social importance. And when these same persons’ children and grandchildren, fifty years later manifest the same unwillingness to see, we must reject them too. We must insist that their skills for discernment and their moral calibration are both lacking. Because that denial is a form of white supremacy, handed down intergenerationally no less so than our DNA is handed down.

The bottom line is this: If at every juncture of American history, black folks have said “we have a problem,” and they have been right every time — while most whites have said all is well, and have been wrong just as often — what but a staggering amount of racist hubris would allow us to think that it was black folks who were suddenly misjudging the problem, and we who had at long last become keen observers of social reality?

White America has always believed things were fine when it came to race, and we have always been wrong. And this denial, by now, is a genuine character flaw, rather than just a mere annoyance. And unless we in the white community who have learned to listen to people of color and actually believe that they know their lives better than we do speak up and challenge those in our community who cling to their innocence like a kidney patient clings to dialysis, the future will be one of ever increasing acrimony.

Because until white lies are confronted — lies about our country’s history and its contemporary reality — black lives will continue to be endangered. And the prospects for multiracial democracy will be grim.

Chris Hedges: The Algebra of Revolution

Well worth the time to listen & learn from this remarkable journalist, activist, author, and Presbyterian minister.

 Let's go!

 OneLove

Historian: "You Can't Disconnect History of the 2nd Amendment From the History of White Supremacy"

                                              Dr Gerald Horne Interview 

Check out some of his other enlightening interviews here.

OneLove

Revolution Undermined: On Bernie Sanders’s Endorsement of Hillary Clinton by Dr. Jill Stein

I join millions of Americans who see Hillary Clinton’s campaign as the opposite of what they and Bernie Sanders have fought for. Despite her penchant for flip flopping rhetoric, Hillary Clinton has spent decades consistently serving the causes of Wall Street, war and the Walmart economy.

The policies she fought for – along with her husband and political partner, Bill Clinton – have been foundations of the economic disaster most Americans are still struggling with: the abuses of deregulated Wall Street, rigged corporate trade agreements, racist mass incarceration, and the destruction of the social safety net for poor women and children. The consistent efforts of the Democratic Party to minimize, sideline, and sabotage the Sanders campaign are a wake up call that we can’t have a revolutionary campaign inside a counter-revolutionary party.

Sadly, Sanders is one of a long line of true reformers that have been undermined by the Democratic Party. The eventual suppression of the Sanders campaign was virtually guaranteed from the beginning with super-delegates and super Tuesdays, that were created after George McGovern’s nomination to prevent grassroots campaigns from winning the nomination again.

Sanders, a life-long independent who has advocated for building an independent democratic socialist party similar to Canada’s New Democratic Party, has said that his decision to run as a Democrat was based on pragmatism, but there is nothing pragmatic about supporting a party that for decades has consistently sold out the progressive majority to the billionaire class. This false pragmatism is not the path to revolutionary change but rather an incrementalism that keeps us trapped, voting for lesser evil again and again.

Each time a progressive challenger like Sanders, Dennis Kucinich or Jesse Jackson has inspired hope for real change, the Democratic Party has sabotaged them while marching to the right, becoming more corporatist and militarist with each election cycle.

Millions are realizing that if we want to fix the rigged economy, the rigged racial injustice system, the rigged health care system, toxic fossil fuel energy and all the other systems failing us, we must fix the rigged political system, and that will not happen through the rigged Democratic Party.

Right now we have a real chance to change our rigged political system, and we must not squander this opportunity by pledging allegiance to a corrupt political insider who the majority of Americans do not like, trust or believe in.

What is most disappointing is that Sanders has refused invitations to speak to the Green Party, a truly democratic national party that has long championed the progressive stands that lifted the Sanders campaign to the top of national polls.

Fortunately, this November voters across America will still have the choice to cast a revolutionary vote to cancel student debt, achieve full employment and stop the climate meltdown through a Green New Deal, provide universal healthcare with Medicare for All, provide a welcoming path to citizenship, end mass incarceration and create a foreign policy based on international law and human rights. We need to commit to improving the lives of all Americans, not just the wealthy and special interests.

As the Sanders campaign’s dominance of national polls has shown, our positions are shared by a majority of voters, and with the Green Party on the ballot in November the majority can vote for what they want and get it. Together we can beat both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the two most unpopular and least trusted presidential candidates in American history.

I call on the tens of millions inspired by Bernie Sanders’ call for political revolution, the 60% of Americans who want a new major party, and the independents who outnumber both Democrats and Republicans to reject the self-defeating strategy of voting for the lesser evil and join our fight for the greater good.

I ask the rising independent majority to demand our inclusion in the Presidential debates, for as Sanders proved, in fair debates we can rally the majority of Americans behind a plan for an America and a world that works for all of us.

I congratulate Bernie Sanders on running an impressive campaign within an undemocratic primary, and I thank Bernie for showing clearly how a grassroots campaign, armed only with a progressive vision and small contributions from real people, can win over the majority of Americans. Let’s keep the revolution going and build it into the powerful force for transformative change that it is becoming. Together we are unstoppable.

Listen to Jill Stein discuss Trump, Hillary, Sanders and the criminality of US politics on the latest episode of the CounterPunch Radio podcast.

Jesse Williams Speaks About "State-sponsored Violence"

Whoa! He breaks it down!

OneLove

Merchants of Doubt

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Merchants of Doubt looks at the well established Public Relations tactic of saturating the media with shills who present themselves as independent scientific authorities on issues in order to cast doubt in the public mind. The film looks at how this tactic, that was originally developed by the tobacco industry to obfuscate the health risks of smoking, has since come to cloud other issues such as the pervasiveness of toxic chemicals, flame retardants, asbestos, certain pharmaceutical drugs and now, climate change. Using the icon of a magician, Merchants of Doubt explores the analogy between these tactics and the methods used by magicians to distract their audiences from observing how illusions are performed. For example, with the tobacco industry, the shills successfully delayed government regulation until long after the health risks from smoking was unequivocally proven. Likewise with manufacturers of flame retardants, who worked to protect their sales after the toxic effects and pervasiveness of the chemicals were discovered. This is all made analogous to the ongoing use of these very same tactics to forestall governmental action in regards to global climate change today.

Your "reality" has been manipulated to serve those who are truly the scum of the Earth. It's waaaay past your wake up call.

OneLove

Marc Lamont Hill & Mychal Denzel Smith React to Police Killings of Alton Sterling & Philando Castile

Marc Lamont Hill is a journalist, Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College and author of "Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond" and Mychal Denzel Smith, contributing writer for The Nation magazine. His new book is called, "Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education."

Check out Pt. 1 of this illuminating discussion: 

Letting Go of the World: A Conversation with Josh Fox

This documentary may very well change your life. After viewing it on HBO today, I felt the need to do something for our Mother--nature. Take a look at the trailer and check it out on HBO on July 13th @ 12PM

Self-Awareness and the Apocalypse by Derrick Jensen

We have become Death, destroyer of worlds. We are driven by our insane—and insatiable because impossible—quest for validation of our self-perceived superiority. We are driven to destroy all that is alive and free and beautiful and wondrous and meaningful and is not made by or dependent upon us, not under our control.

~~Derrick Jensen

Many human supremacists love to talk about the “mirror test” of self-awareness, in which you put a mirror in front of some nonhuman to see if the nonhuman recognizes itself, in which case it is declared to be self-aware (though not as self-aware as we, of course!). Very few nonhumans pass this test, which is I’m sure one reason the test is so beloved by so many human supremacists. I’m sure it’s also a reason this test is sometimes called the “gold standard” of indicating whether some creature is “self-aware.”

The test is fraught with problems. First, there’s our old friend tautology: humans conceptualized the experiment presuming that humans are self-aware and nonhumans are not, and then devised a test humans can pass and nonhumans cannot. Great job. My understanding of my nonhuman neighbors is so much greater now.

Next, there’s our old friend anthropomorphization: the presumption that the self-awareness of others must match the form of our own self-awareness, and further that it must match one specific chosen form of self-awareness. Can there not reasonably be said to be other ways to be self-aware? I know that for myself, I am at least on occasion self-aware even when not looking at a mirror. Imagine that! And I think we can say that humans were probably still self-aware before the mirror’s invention. Or what about the self-awareness of a caterpillar who knows she has a parasite egg in her and that she must eat certain foods or she will die. Do you know when you have parasite eggs in you? If not, then gosh, you must not be self-aware. Or what about the self-awareness of plants who know how to change the taste of their leaves? Can you change the taste of your flesh to make yourself less palatable to predators? To this latter you can reply, “Yes, that’s why I eat at McDonald’s.”

And of course there are lots of beings whose primary experience of the world is not visual. How well could you pass a self-awareness test that involves you being able to hear and respond to your own echolocation signals? What? You say you can’t hear your own echolocation signals? That’s a sure sign of a lack of self-awareness.

For crying out loud, anyone who feels hungry is self-aware, obviously, or they wouldn’t know they’re hungry. Anyone who attempts in any way to stop pain or discomfort or to continue to receive pleasure is self-aware, or they wouldn’t know the state they’re trying to change or perpetuate.

Ah, the human supremacists insist, we understand that the tiger is aware of its hunger, but is the tiger aware that it is aware of its hunger? That’s the question. To which I ask, are the human supremacists aware of their own hunger? Are they aware of the violation imperative that drives this culture? Are they aware that they’ve indentured themselves to authoritarian technics and that they are no longer fully human, that they are, to use the Buddhist term, hungry ghosts: undead and unliving spirits of the greedy, “who, as punishment for their mortal vices, have been cursed with an insatiable hunger”?

And then there’s the presumption that the behavior of captive animals (or plants) tells us something about either their interior lives or what their personalities, relationships, or lives are like when they’re free. The behavior of captive beings tells us about the behavior of imprisoned and (by definition) abused beings.

If you take a lizard from his home, put him in a cage, and present him with a mirror, what the fuck do you want him to do with it?

Let’s turn this around and see how you feel about it. You’re sitting in your home, minding your own business, when suddenly several unbelievably ugly creatures burst in. They throw a net over you and begin dragging you out the door. Members of your family rush to save you, and the unbelievably ugly creatures kill them with casual swats. You see one member of your family huddling in a corner, making sounds of terror you didn’t know humans could make. Another casual swat and the sounds stop. The net is hauled outside, and you’re put into some sort of container. You feel the container being lifted. It takes what seems like hours for you to realize that what you’ve read about in the tabloids and bad science fiction novels has happened to you: you’ve been abducted by aliens. The aliens take you to their ship, and over the next days and weeks and endless months they perform tests on you. Do you think your behavior will be the same on their ship as it was in your home, with your family? Do you think your behavior will ever again be the same? And what if these aliens put something in your room, some thing you’d never seen before they brought you to this terrible place. Here, in this alien prison, you’ve seen them preening before it, and making gawdawful faces at it—at least you think those are their faces—and now they’re staring at you—at least you think they’re staring, and you think those are eyes. You look at this thing more closely. They evidently see—perceive is probably a better word, since you don’t think those are eyes after all—themselves in it, but frankly their senses must be different than yours, because you don’t see what’s so great about it. Frankly it’s creepy. But then again, so is everything about this place. . . .

Because you failed to respond as they wished to this new device the aliens put into your cage, the aliens decide—quite rightly, according to their evidence and their belief system—that all you humanbeast-machines (as one of their philosophers puts it) lack self-awareness.

At some point the aliens realize how important vision is to you, and that you see with your eyes. So in order to further their understanding of human behavior, and of course in order to get further grants, they surgically blind you. Sitting in the eternal dark of your cage in some unfathomably huge complex, unimaginably far from your home and from those you love—those who may be still alive among those you love—for some reason you remember an article you read years ago. It was about mice who love to sing, and about what happened to these mice, about how they were put in cages, about what scientists did to them then. Day after day—or at least you think it’s day after day, since in your cell and in your own private darkness there is never any natural indication of the passage of time—you obsess about this article. But for the life of you, you can’t figure out why it is so important to you.

At last to the biggest problem with the mirror test of self-awareness, which is that I find it both extraordinary and all-too-expected that members of this culture have the gall to look down on anyone as lacking self-awareness. Most humans in this culture—particularly human supremacists, or rather supremacists of any sort—fail the mirror self-awareness test spectacularly. Oh sure, most of us can use a mirror well enough to comb our hair or make sure we don’t have boogers hanging out of our noses, and most of us can recognize ourselves well enough in the mirror to become anxious about our looks, but I don’t think an ability to use a mirror to comb one’s hair necessarily implies self-awareness on any sort of significant level.

Especially when you’re killing the planet.

When we look in the mirror, what do we see?

We see God’s image on Earth or the pinnacle of evolution. We see the greatest gift the universe has ever given itself. We see the bringers of the light of consciousness to the universe. We see the universe knowing itself. We see those whose responsibility it is to bring this light of consciousness everywhere. When we look at our technics, we see only our own brilliance.

When others look at us, however, they see something completely different. They see those who have become Death, destroyer of worlds. They see those who invent machines to outsource Death, and to outsource and facilitate the destruction of worlds. They see those who lack the self-awareness to perceive, much less comprehend, that they have become Death, destroyer of worlds. They see those who lack the perceptiveness or honesty to acknowledge that they are murdering the planet.

They see beings who care more about money than life.

They see beings who care more about power than life.

They see beings whose imagination is so impoverished that they cannot imagine living without industrially-generated electricity.

And they see beings whose empathy is so impoverished that they canimagine living without salmon, passenger pigeons, whales, snub-nosed sea snakes, ploughshares tortoises, and on and on.

They see those who when they even acknowledge the Death they cause, they see only how this Death will affect them and the economic systems they serve.

When others look at us, they see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they don’t even acknowledge—can no longer even conceptualize—that anyone else actually subjectively exists. It is impossible to be less empathetic than that. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they routinely torture those they perceive as below them on the insane Great Chain of Being, that hierarchy they had the lack of empathy and creativity to come up with in the first place. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that the males of the species now routinely rape the females of the species. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they have developed an economics, a politics, a science, an epistemology—an entire worldview—based on projecting this lack of empathy onto the real world, a worldview that makes a virtue and a fetish of this lack of empathy, that attempts to naturalize this lack of empathy, that attempts to pretend empathy doesn’t exist in the real world. They see those who have so destroyed their own empathy that they use the empathy of others—empathy they are all the while pretending does not exist—to kill these others. Recall the whalers who would intentionally wound but not kill one whale, then kill all others who came to help. Recall those who would do the same to the Carolina parakeets. They drove Carolina parakeets extinct. They are driving the world extinct.

When others besides human supremacists look at us, they see the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet.

When we look in the mirror we see the only creature who is fully intelligent, with a brain that is the “most complex phenomenon in the universe.”

When others look at us they see those who are stupid enough to put poisons on our own food, to poison our own drinking water. Those who are stupid enough to murder—sorry, reorganize—the planet that is our only home.

When we look in the mirror we see the only creature who is fully imbued with the ability to make choices.

If this is the case, and if actions speak louder than words, then we are evidently choosing to kill the planet.

R.D. Laing wrote, “At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that . . . no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from else where. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of this hellish and inhuman fatality?”¹

So, when others see us they see those who have enslaved themselves to their own creations, who are unable or unwilling to question these creations even when these creations are killing the entire planet. They see those who at one time had the ability to choose, but long ago surrendered that ability in exchange for the ability to leverage power and outsource killing.

Choices? Choices? We don’t need no stinking choices.

We just follow wherever the system leads.

When we look in the mirror we see the only source of meaning in the universe.

When others look at us they see destroyers of meaning, converters of forests to parking lots, prairies to monocultures, rivers to the industrial electricity without which we can’t imagine life. They see us as the destroyers of all complexity, the great simplifiers, making things simple so our simple minds can (still fail to) understand them.

When we look in the mirror we see ourselves as the creators of great art.

When others look at us they see the destroyers of art, the destroyers of beauty, the destroyers of bison and blue whales and monarch butterflies and old growth forests and prairies at dawn and oceans full of fish. What is more beautiful, the sound of a meadowlark or the sound of a highway? The sight of a river or a dam? The smell of a forest or a city? If you are in a city, look around: once this place, too, was wild and beautiful.

I recently watched a documentary on the U.S. invasions of Iraq. There were lots of photos of tanks and trucks and troops moving through the countryside. What impressed me most were the desert backdrops. You could look from horizon to horizon and not see a single plant.

Before this culture, that was cedar forest so thick that sunlight never touched the ground.

We have become Death, destroyer of worlds. We are driven by our insane—and insatiable because impossible—quest for validation of our self-perceived superiority. We are driven to destroy all that is alive and free and beautiful and wondrous and meaningful and is not made by or dependent upon us, not under our control.

Our failure at the mirror test of self-awareness reminds me of nothing so much as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central conceit of which is that as the main character becomes increasingly vile his countenance remains clear, but a portrait of him changes to reflect who he has become. When we look in the mirror, we continue to see a bright and beautiful and intelligent and wonderful being, but who we actually are has become dull and ugly and stupid and as vile as it is possible to be.

And we can’t see a fucking thing. We can say, with a clean (because completely eradicated) conscience, “I see no evidence of any inherent destructiveness in what we do or who we have become.”


This is an excerpt from Derrick Jensen’s new book, The Myth of Human Supremacy, published by Seven Stories Press.

Musings

In my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you're living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there's got to be a change, people in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change. And a better world has to be built and the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods. And I, for one, will join in with anyone -- don't care what color you are -- as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.

MALCOLM X, Oxford Union Debate, Dec. 3, 1964

The People vs The Police State

Take a look at the video below to get a deeper understanding of unequal policing these brave cops exposed in the above interview. Some very, very disturbing stuff here folks...We have to take back our democratic power!

A New Story for Humanity

See this thought-provoking documentary  here

OneLove

Put Away the Fireworks... You Don't Live in a Democracy Anymore by John Atcheson

Within the last 30 years, while we’ve chased bogeymen overseas and here at home, our Democracy has fallen. We have been taken over; defeated; our voices neutered; our freedoms trampled; our democracy vanquished.

No invading force accomplished this; no jackboots echoed across our republic; no alien flag was raised above our lands. Not a single shot was fired by our vaunted military to halt this takeover. No, this was a quiet coup, accomplished from within, and conducted in stealth.

In the cult film classic, The Usual Suspects, Roger "Verbal" Kint says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.” Just so, has the Oligarchy taken over the US.

Many of us continue with the delusion that we are free. We celebrate Independence Day. We vote. We express ourselves openly. We are not jailed for our opinions, at least not usually. We live where we want. We pursue the work we choose. We get our news from a “free” press. We engage in the pursuit of happiness.

And while all this seems true, we are not free. Our votes carry no weight. Our news is a hollow monoculture in which six corporations own 90% of the outlets with most of the rest controlled by elitists who can no longer relate to the average person; in which infotainment has replaced information; in which a modern day version of bread and circuses keeps us distracted from the increasingly grim reality we are everyday immersed in. The jobs open to us are becoming increasingly exploitative. And the pursuit of happiness is marred by a lack of choice, increasingly desperate economic straights for the majority of us, and a feeling of impotence as we watch the American dream shrink before our eyes.

Consider:

When 91% wanted to strengthen rules on clean air and protection of drinking water, Congress – led by the Republican majority – proposed weakening them;
When 90% wanted to protect public lands and parks; the Republicans proposed putting them on sale or otherwise privatizing them;
When 74% of Americans favored ending subsidies to big oil, Congress retained most of them;
At a time when the majority of citizens favored allowing tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to expire, the best Congress could do was to compromise on $400,000;
When 70% of Americans said climate change should be a high priority issue, Congress took no action;
Some 80% of Americans favor shoring up Social Security even if it means higher taxes and a similar number support retaining Medicare as is, but the Obama administration has twice offered cuts to both programs as part of a “grand bargain” and Republican budgets routinely seek to privatize them;
Or take this gem … more than 80% of Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street but the best we could get was weak-sister legislation that doesn’t even address too-big-to-fail or restore a Glass Steagall provision limiting the risks these big banks can take with your money. And even this slap-on-the-wrist legislation is being completely eviscerated as it is translated into regulations.
After Orlando, 92% of the people supported a bill expanding background checks to online purchases of guns, but Congress has been unable to pass it;
And when 85% of citizens supported a bill barring people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns, Congress couldn’t pass the it;

Dwell on these last two bits of political pornography for a moment: Congress denied the vast majority of the people’s perfectly reasonable – in fact, bare minimal – desire to keep assault rifles and weapons out of the hands of potential mass murders because a few special interests opposed it.

But it’s not simply a list of specific issues where the Oligarchy defeats the will of the people. Their victory has been complete.

Even as we spend tens of trillions on "Defense," ostensibly to protect our freedom, we quietly relinquished it; not to an invasion from without, but to a silent coup by the rich and powerful from within. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page pointed out, in their landmark study on the influence of money and special interests in politics:

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. (emphasis added).

They went on to note that “… the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” (my emphasis).

Take a moment to consider this, too. We the people have no say and almost zero influence in our governance. Forget about the land of the free and the home of the brave – we’ve become the land of the duped and the home of the indentured.

The system which enabled this coup is the pay-to-play politics that Trump and Clinton and virtually all politicians subscribe to.

This contention isn’t hyperbole; it can’t be written off to the excess exuberance of the young, or the unrealistic reveries of ideologues that the Establishment Media would have you believe. It’s data. It’s reality. And it’s the logical end-point of the pay-to-play PACster politics that reached its apogee with the Citizen’s United Decision.

It costs about $1.7 million dollars to win a seat in the House, and $10.5 million to win a Senate seat according to a to a study by maplight.org. Daily News reporter David Knowles spoke with Maplight president Daniel Newman for an article on a recent study they conducted, and Newman told him that no shortage of this money came from corporations. He went on to say:

“Most industries give money to members of Congress because it buys them access and influence. And now, with Citizens United, corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on these races. The result is that members of Congress are fearful about voting against corporate interests because there’s so much money at stake.”

Much of the rest of the money a candidate needs to run for Congress comes from uber-rich individuals such as the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and George Soros. They too, have an agenda, and it isn’t usually aligned with the interests or the wishes of the American people. Even liberal contributors like Soros, favor members of the establishment elite such as Clinton over “revolutionaries” like Sanders, who want to completely change the system that gives them influence.

This is why we can’t enact meaningful gun control legislation when the vast majority favor it; this is why we can’t enact effective climate change policies when majorities in both parties say they want to; this is why we let the people founder but bailed out the banks when they crashed the economy in 2008; this is why politicians from both Parties still favor job-wrecking trade agreements when most citizens from both Parties are against them; this is why the uber rich and corporations can easily discharge debt and renege on promises to their employees using bankruptcy laws, but students and the poor cannot; this is why we can’t break up the too-big-to-fail banks or reinstall Glass-Steagall or pass a tax on securities trading, again, even though the majority of Americans favor all of these measures. This is why we are engaged in never-ending wars nobody wants and that nobody can explain or justify at a cost of tens of trillions of dollars that the people don’t want to spend.

Quite simply, the United States is no longer a Democratic Republic; it is an Oligarchy.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Fourth of July by Chris Hedges

Tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans, like those in the visiting room of the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, drove often for hours on the Fourth of July weekend to visit relatives or friends who are locked in cages. Millions suffered the painful absence this weekend of a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son, a daughter or a friend. These people, mostly poor people of color, understand a dark truth about the cruelty and ultimate intentions of the corporate state. They know that “freedom,” “justice” and “liberty,” especially if you are poor, are empty slogans.

“We live in one of the most un-free systems on earth,” said the black revolutionary and author Mumia Abu-Jamal, whom I visited Saturday. “Mass incarceration is a reality endured by millions of people in prison and in the systems of repression that exist outside of prison. What does freedom mean to poor people who cannot walk freely down a street? What does freedom mean when they cannot find work? What does freedom mean when there is no justice in the courts? What does freedom mean when black people cannot attend a Bible study in a church without the fear of being murdered? Where is this American freedom they keep telling us about? I don’t see it. Black folks are more in danger, and being killed in even greater numbers, than during the reign of terror that was lynching and Jim Crow.”

Abu-Jamal, who is fighting off hepatitis Cthat the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and the privatized prison medical service refuse to treat, scoffed when I asked him about the differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump is the real face of the ugly American empire,” he said. “Yes, he ain’t pretty. He ain’t black. He ain’t a woman. He has a fake tan and orange hair. His rhetoric is cruder. But his ideas are the same. The two major political parties are the abject servants of Wall Street and American empire über alles. They each support militarism, at home and abroad. They each support the indiscriminant murder of civilians from drones. They each support the worldwide archipelago of secret prisons. They each support mass incarceration of poor people, the suspension of habeas corpus and torture. It is only their talk that is different. What is the difference between being beaten up by a black cop or a white cop? The only solution is to rise up to stop the cops from beatin’ our asses and shootin’ us in the streets, our homes and our cars. I can assure you voting for Hillary Clinton won’t make a damn bit of difference. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, once served as the unofficial armed wingof the Democratic Party. You can’t invest hope in an organization with a history like that.

“The black political elites, including Barack Obama, are powerless,” he went on. “They are emblems. They are not the voice of black America. They are like a ventriloquist’s dummy. They mouth the same words the white corporate masters mouth. They do not make white America uncomfortable. They do not name unpleasant truths. They never lifted their voices to denounce Bill Clinton’s decision to massively expandour system of mass incarceration. And they do not lift their voices now. They go right along with the repression. And they are well paid for it.”

Abu-Jamal, a journalist and author of books such as “Live From Death Row” and a former member of the Black Panther Party, is serving a life sentence in the killing of a Philadelphia police officer. Despite flagrant irregularities in his trial and evidence tampering, he was sentenced to death in 1982. His sentence was later commuted to life without parole. He spent 30 years on death row.

The prison’s visiting room, with a wall lined by vending machines that only the visitors were allowed to use, was crowded with families. Children played in groups or ran across the floor, darting in and out of rows of chairs.

A guard, seated on a raised platform, periodically bellowed through a loudspeaker. He recited every admonishment twice. “Children must be supervised by an adult. Children must be supervised by an adult.”

“… Like every prisoner must be supervised by a prison guard who is a racist and an idiot,” Abu-Jamal muttered when one announcement ended.

Abu-Jamal understands that radical change exacts a high price. It takes years, sometimes decades, to achieve. It requires dedication, self-sacrifice, unwavering belief in a new vision of society, a trenchant understanding of the mechanisms of power, a willingness to suffer persecution, go to jail and even, when the elites truly feel threatened, face the daily possibility of being murdered. No political revolution was ever achieved without these qualities and this acceptance of risks and steadfastness.

“Black people will probably vote for Clinton,” he said with resignation, “but this symbolizes the emptiness of hope. They fear Trump. They should look closely at the picturesfrom Trump’s third wedding. Hillary Clinton is in the front pew of the church. Hillary, Bill, Trump and Melania are shown embracing at Trump’s estate afterwards during the reception. These people are part of the same elite circle. They represent the same financial interests. They work for the same empire. They have grown rich from the system. The words they shout back and forth during political campaigns are meaningless. Trump or Clinton will deliver the same political result. They will serve, like Obama, corporate and military power. And if they were not willing to serve these centers of power they would not be allowed to run. Their job is to manufacture hope during election campaigns that ultimately end in betrayal. This is why they spend billions on elections. They need to feed the illusion that our voices matter, that we are participants in their closed systems of power.

“The liberals and the Democrats are in many ways more dangerous than the right wing,” he said. “Repression and neoliberalism are more effectively instituted by Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They sound reasonable. But because what they do is hidden it is more insidious and often more deadly.”

“Do not leave your trash in the cup holders. Do not leave your trash in the cup holders,” the loudspeaker blared.

Abu-Jamal looked toward the guards, all of whom were white.

“Bill Clinton developed a rural employment program called prisons,” he said. “Prisons are the economic lifebloodof these poor white communities. The only time these people have any contact with black people is when they put them in cells or escort them in shackles. Prisons are the gift William Jefferson Clinton gave to poor, rural whites that keeps on giving.

“The system is broken,” Abu-Jamal said. “It has to be torn up, root and branch. And this has to be done from the bottom up. If we keep electing and re-electing these puppets we will keep getting played. We have to form political parties that reflect our political ideas. We have to stop surrendering to false parties and politicians that do not represent us.”

He said he places his hopes in groups such as Black Lives Matter that have taken to the streets. He said that if he could he would be in the streets of Philadelphia, where he was raised, during the Democratic convention.

“This is our hour of protest,” he said. “We have to physically resist. We will reclaim our power when we say no, when we refuse to cooperate. We must, in everything we do, defy the architects of imperialism, neoliberalism and mass incarceration. We cannot enable, in any way, this system to perpetuate itself.

“It is time to raise holy hell,” he went on. “We need to demonstrate in the streets. We need to use megaphones. We need to hold teach-ins. We need to sell radical books. We need to make the streets our commons.”

Again the loudspeaker boomed: “Children must put away the toys they took out of the children’s room. Children must put away the toys they took out of the children’s room.”

Prisons, like the rest of the society, have been privatized. Prisoners are billed for an array of services and items that once were the responsibility of the state. Corporations, which make billions off the prison system, run phone services, food services, medical services and commissaries. They have established for-profit prisons and detention centers. Prices for basic services and necessities such as shoes have soared.

“Services that were once the responsibility of the state have been outsourced to corporations, as in the rest of society,” said Abu-Jamal, who works as a trash collector. “We are worth what we are able to pay. If we pay nothing, in their eyes, we are worth nothing.

“When [prisoners] fill out a sick call slip, a request for medical attention, we have to also sign a cash slip,” he said. “The medical visit costs five or 10 dollars. This may not sound like a lot. But a prison job only pays $30 a month. Prices are constantly going up. Wages in prisonshave remained the same since the 1980s. Most prisoners can only go to buy items from the commissary after begging their mothers, grandmothers or girlfriends for money.

“In February, Global Tel Link began selling electronic tablets in the prison for $150,” he said. “They charge 25 cents for an email and $1.80 to download a song. And you have to pay them in advance. The state pays Wexford Health Services $298 million a year to run the medical services. The more medical services are cut, the greater the profit. You go to medical and most of the time they tell you to go to the commissary to buy Tylenol or throat lozenges. If you fall in the yard and need a wheelchair they charge you $25. If you can’t sit up they charge you $75 for a motorized cart. They will not treat my hepatitis C, saying it is not advanced enough, but of course it is because the medicine is expensive. It costs between $87,000 and $95,000. A price like this exists solely to enrich pharmaceutical companies. I could get the same drug from India for a few thousand dollars. There is a guy in my block, Joseph Kish Sr., with stage four hepatitis C and cirrhosis. They have denied him treatment because, they said, he will get out soon. There is always a reason not to treat us. Prisons have replaced state psychiatric hospitals. MHM Correctional Services is paid $89 million a year to handle the mentally ill. It does little more than medicate them. And remember most guards, especially with overtime, make more money, about $100,000 a year, than a full professor at a university.

“They are doing to us on the inside what they are doing to us on the outside,” he said. “They are letting poor people die or killing them for profit. Things will get worse and worse until people can’t take it anymore. These corporations won’t stop. No one in the political class will make them stop. It is up to us.”