WArs Abroad-Wars At Home

WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME

Indispensable public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a long and important article situating the issue of mass incarceration within the historic African American experience of “unfreedom” and the evolving forms of social control deployed to enforce it.  Read it all (at the link below) if you can.  No excerpt can remotely do it justice.

 

TA-NEHISI COATES:

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

The United States now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants—and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants…  

The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not merely hail from poor communities—they hail from communities that have been imperiled across both the deep and immediate past, and continue to be imperiled today… For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm… Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state. Rates of incarceration were not that high—they didn’t need to be, because state social control of blacks was nearly total. Then, as African Americans migrated north, a police state grew up around them there, too. That early-20th-century rates of black imprisonment were lower in the South than in the North reveals how the carceral state functions as a system of control. Jim Crow applied the control in the South. Mass incarceration did it in the North. After the civil-rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and toppled Jim Crow laws, the South adopted the tactics of the North, and its rates of imprisonment surged far past the North’s. Mass incarceration became the national model of social control.    Much More!

 

Woman held in mental health facility because police didn't believe BMW was hers

A woman is suing New York City after she claims she was forced to spend eight days in a mental health facility and given a $13,000 (£8,500) bill because a police officer didn’t believe the BMW she was driving was hers.  Kamilah Brock, 32, who is a banker, said that police had initially pulled her over at a red light in Harlem and…  was then asked to get out of the car… Brock was then taken into custody and transported to the NYPD’s 30th precinct where she says she was held for several hours before being released without charges… She goes on to say that when she returned to claim the car, police said they didn’t believe she was the rightful owner of the vehicle… She was taken to Harlem hospital psychiatric ward, where she claims medical records obtained by her attorney, Michael Lamonsoff, show she was forced to take lithium and injected with powerful sedatives.   More

 

Ferguson "People's Report" Unveils Bold Plan To Achieve Racial Equity

A panel of activists, researchers, community members, and other volunteers on Monday unveiled a new report with 189 "calls to action" to address the scourge of racial inequity in and around St. Louis, Missouri, illuminated by a year of protests following the police shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown last August… the Ferguson Commission's venture has been particularly anticipated, due in part to its solicitation of local residents and activists, rather than outside experts, to identify the complex elements at the core of those systems—and how to break down and rebuild them within the affected communities.  The report, entitled "Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity" (pdf), candidly addresses race as an issue to be confronted and worked through… the commission outlined 189 proposals to tackle issues such as police brutality, racial profiling, criminalization of poverty, and barriers to equality in majority-black schools.   More

 

GREENWALD: Arrest of a 14-Year-Old the Fruits of Anti-Muslim Fearmongering

The U.S. government just formally renewed the “State of Emergency” it declared in the aftermath of 9/11 for the 14th time since that attack occurred, ensuring that the country remains in a state of permanent, endless war. , subjected to powers that are still classified as “extraordinary” even though they have become entirely normalized.   As a result of all of this, a minority group of close to 3 million people is routinely targeted with bigotry and legal persecution in the Home of the Free, while fear and hysteria reign supreme in the Land of the Brave.  What happened in Irving, Texas, yesterday to a 14-year-old Muslim high school freshman is far from the worst instance, but it is highly illustrative of the rotted fruit of this sustained climate of cultivated fear and demonization… You can’t have a government that has spent decades waging various forms of war against predominantly Muslim countries — bombing seven of them in the last six years alone — and then act surprised when a Muslim 14-year-old triggers vindictive fear and persecution because he makes a clock for school.   More

 

VIDEO: The Youth recounts what happened here

 

Trump Pledges to Investigate Muslim-Americans for “Terror Camps”

On Thursday, Trump in Rochester, NH, tried out a town hall format and took unfiltered oral questions from the audience.  And that his audience was full of people who are not entirely well became quickly apparent.

MAN: “We have a problem in this country. It’s called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”

TRUMP: “We need this question. This is the first question.”

MAN: “Anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”

TRUMP: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. You know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening. We’re going to be looking at that and many other things.”   More

 

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The best way to help working families and build a stronger economy for us all is to make sure that we have quality public schools for our children, affordable higher education, and a transportation system that lets people get to work and customers get to businesses. Without investment in these common goals, working families fall behind and our communities suffer. New revenue is necessary to improve our public schools, rebuild crumbling roads and bridges, make college affordable, and invest in fast and reliable public transportation.  To move forward, the campaign must gather 64,750 certified signatures in 2015 and get at least 50 votes in the state Legislature in two constitutional conventions before going to the ballot in 2018. To achieve these goals, the campaign is building a broad coalition that brings together leading organizations on transportation and education with business leaders and community, labor and faith organizations.

 

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Our proposed constitutional amendment would create an additional tax of four percentage points on annual income above one million dollars. The new revenue generated by this tax could only be spent on quality public education, affordable public colleges and universities, and for repair and maintenance of roads, bridges, and public transportation. To ensure that the tax continues to apply only to the highest income residents, who have the ability to pay more, the one million dollar threshold would be adjusted each year to reflect cost-of-living
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