The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
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Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
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Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
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I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
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And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.

Criminal Minds S01E22 Quote

Does the West really care about development?

A great opinion piece. People of the developing world always forget that the developed Global North didn't "develop" without hampering the development of the Global South. Large & intelligent populations of the Global South were seen as dangerous for the Global North's ambitions of developing themselves & keep ruling the world.

As I have blogged earlier, Global North developed by mass murdering, looting, & effectively disabling the development of the Global South by constant interference through military & political means. They wanted an easy & cheap access to human & mineral resources of the Global South, which could only be achieved by effectively controlling the region through any means, necessary.

Those means included interfering in political matters to install their own strongmen, abuse human rights at their own will, create such conditions of non-development & violence in the Global South, just so people of those countries have to move out of those countries, & their human labour is used in the development of the Global North, instead of developing their own countries in the Global South.

Corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South were done with the full consent & acknowledgement of the leaders of the Global North. But, as we should already know that Global North is a hypocritical world; they cry the crocodile tears, decrying the corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South, but then turn around & approve those activities as long as they are helping them achieve their own objectives of looting their resources of the Global South.

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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/mar/05/does-west-care-development

When it comes to international affairs, western politicians love to celebrate their devotion to development. In her flagship speech on development as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton offered stories about US aid transforming the lives of poor people in Indonesia, Nicaragua and South Africa. Laurent Fabius, the minister of foreign affairs for France, recently hailed his country’s commitment to development in the former colonies of west Africa. And at last year’s UN sustainable development goals summit, David Cameron spoke proudly about Britain’s record of providing “stability and security” to poor countries.

But this narrative of western benevolence only works by relying on our collective amnesia. For a slightly less fairytale-like version of the west’s relationship with development, we need to rewind to the decades following the second world war.

After the end of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and with the brief cessation of US intervention in Latin America, developing countries were growing incomes and reducing poverty at a rapid pace. Beginning in the 1950s, countries like Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran drew on the Keynesian model of mixed economy that had been working so well in the west. They made strategic use of land reforms to help peasant farmers, labour laws to boost workers’ wages, tariffs to protect local businesses, and resource nationalisation to help fund public housing, healthcare, and education.

This approach – known as “developmentalism” – was built on the twin values of economic independence and social justice. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked quite well. According to economist Robert Pollin, developmentalist policies sustained high per capita income growth rates of 3.2% for at least 20 years – higher than at any other time during the whole 20th century. As a result, the gap between the west and the rest began to narrow for the first time in history. It was nothing short of a miracle.

One might think western states would be thrilled at this success, but they were not amused. The new policies meant that multinational companies no longer had the easy access to the cheap labour, raw materials and consumer markets to which they had become accustomed during the colonial era.

Western powers – specifically the US, Britain and France – were not willing to let this continue. Instead of supporting the developmentalist movement, they set out on a decades-long campaign to topple the elected governments that were leading it and to install strongmen friendly to their interests – a long and bloody history that has been almost entirely erased from our collective memory.

It began with Iran in 1953. The democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was rolling out a wide range of pro-poor reforms, part of which included wresting control of the country’s oil reserves from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Britain rejected this move, and responded swiftly. With the help of the CIA, Churchill deposed Mosaddegh in a coup d’etat and replaced him with an absolute monarch, Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, who reversed Mosaddegh’s reforms and went on to rule Iran with western support for 26 years.

The following year, the US did the very same thing in Guatemala. Jacobo Arbenz – the country’s second democratically-elected president – was redistributing unused portions of large private estates to landless Mayan peasants, with full compensation for the owners. But the American-based United Fruit Company took issue with this policy, and pushed Eisenhower to topple Arbenz. After the coup, Guatemala was ruled by US-backed dictatorships for 42 years, which presided over the massacre of more than 200,000 Mayans and one of the highest poverty rates in Latin America.

Brazil, too, was hit by a US-backed coup; they deposed President Goulart for his land reforms, corporate taxes, and other pro-poor policies that western companies disliked, and replaced him with a military dictatorship that lasted 21 years. President Sukarno of Indonesia was ousted for similar policies and replaced by a dictator, who – with British and US support – killed more than one million peasants, workers, and activists in one of the worst mass murders of the century, and went on to rule for 31 years. And then of course there was Chile: the US helped depose President Allende, the soft-spoken doctor who promised better wages, fairer rents, and social services for the poor, and replaced him with a dictator whose economic policies plunged some 45% of Chileans into poverty.

Some regions never even got a shot at developmentalism, western intervention was so swift. In Uganda, Britain raised the murderous Idi Amin to power, who crushed the progressive Common Man’s Charter before it could be implemented. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first elected leader, was assassinated by Belgium and the CIA when it became clear he would restrict foreign control over resource-rich Katanga province. Western powers installed Mobutu Sese Seko in his place, a cartoonishly corrupt dictator who commanded the country for nearly forty years with billions of dollars in US aid. Under Mobutu’s reign, per capita income collapsed by 2.2% each year; ordinary Congolese suffered poverty worse than that which they had known under Belgian colonial rule.

In west Africa, France refused to cede control over the region’s resources after the end of colonialism. Working through the secretive Françafrique network, they rigged the first elections in Cameroon and handpicked the president after poisoning his main opponent. In Gabon, they installed the dictatorship of Omar Bongo and kept him in power for 41 years in exchange for access to the country’s oil.

We could rehearse many, many more examples, all the way up to the recent western-backed coups in Haiti. It is tempting to see this as nothing but a list of crimes – albeit one that casts serious doubts on the west’s claims to promoting democracy and human rights abroad. But it is more than that. It reflects an organised effort on the part of western powers to destroy the developmentalist movement that flowered in the global south after colonialism. They simply would not tolerate development if it restricted their access to resources and markets.

The legacy of this history is that there is now greater inequality between the west and the rest than there was at the end of colonialism. And a soul-scorching 4.2 billion people remain in poverty today. No one has been brought to justice for the coups and assassinations that destroyed the global south’s most promising attempt at development and crushed popular dreams of independence. Probably no one ever will. But we need to acknowledge that they happened, and stop pretending that the US, France and Britain are benevolent champions of the poor.

How Prisons Ripoff and Exploit the Incarcerated (1/2)

Just astonishing to see the depravity of people; exploit anyone anywhere. As I always say in my blogs, that slavery has not been abolished from Western societies, it's been transformed in another format, & the world thinks that Western countries & the "White man" is so fair & honest.

This exploitation of prisoners is one of the major reasons that American governments keep harping that crime is increasing because they need to be tough on crime. They want so many restrictions on the general public that the general public needs to, eventually, get permission to even move an inch. The American government officials, who are in bed with people who are profiteering from this prison-industrial complex, want to pack prisons with latinos & African-Americans, just so, those people can be used, & abused, by the prison system, to help make obscene profits for the shareholders of the private prison owners. Of course, a country's GDP will increase & it will develop when the labour costs are virtually nil for producing products.

Prisons are supposed to be places where an individual, who has committed a crime, & needs to be punished, or sort of given a time-out from society, just so that person can think what he / she has done wrong to the society, & how he / she can become a better person. Instead of rehabilitating that criminal, the prison system of America is actually making those criminals even more hardened criminals. Prisons of third-world countries are in much more abysmal conditions, but, at least, the world knows about it & even the developing countries are transparent about it. Ironically, Americans tout their human rights record a little too much, considering how they treat their own citizens during their incarceration.

A decent person won't even treat an animal this bad in a "developed" country, but these actions are taking place, with official knowledge & assent, in the most powerful, & supposedly, "democratic" & "developed" country of the world. Wouldn't this be called corruption of the mind & body of the general public & their elected leaders? Wouldn't this be called injustice when a person is not given decent food & clothes when that person is wholly dependent on you, since he / she cannot earn a dime by himself / herself, due to the restrictions placed on him / her by society? Wouldn't this be called exploitation of the poor & needy when these people are put into prison system, & then taken advantage by being charged to call family, receive things from family, or never allowed to visit family at the time of their death?

Where's that so-called humanity of the "white man" or good, honest, Americans? As I always say, that the biggest lie the "white man" told to the world that he is fair, honest, & hardworking.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62BF1apkyY

EDDIE CONWAY, FMR. BLACK PANTHER, BALTIMORE CHAPTER: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Eddie Conway from Baltimore.

Today in the studio with me I have a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Please join me in welcoming Chris Hedges.

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE NATION INSTITUTE: Thank you, Eddie.

CONWAY: Okay. I have been talking to you earlier about the business of the prison-industrial complex and how it’s impacting the lives of prisoners and their families. And you shared that you had some experience. Can you share a little bit of that with me now?

HEDGES: Yeah. Well, I’ve been teaching in prisons in New Jersey for a long time, almost ten years. And what I’ve watched over the last decade–and it’s probably something you saw when you were incarcerated–is how they increasingly prey on the prisoners and their families to make money. And that occurs by turning commissaries over to private corporations. And because it’s a captive market, they can charge anything they want. So, for instance, we got commissary prices from 1996. We compared them with prices today. And we’re talking about basic staples–toothpaste. We were talking earlier about noodles. What people don’t know is most prisoners live on those noodles that they have to heat up. Price increases as high as over 100 percent, almost everything at least over 50 percent, and yet what they earned has remained the same. So the minimum wage–I’m talking for eight hours of work. And in many of these prisons we have for-profit corporations exploiting prison labor, the neo-slavery under the 13th Amendment, which permits prisoners to work for far below reasonable wages. So their minimum wage is $1.30 for eight hours of work, which is roughly $28 a month. But their commissary prices–and we’re talking about things that they need–deodorant, toothpaste–have risen by over 100 percent.

The other way that they exploit the people under the system of mass incarceration is turning phones over to private corporations. So in New Jersey it’s $0.15 a minute, plus the premium that you have to pay in order to put the money on your account, the surcharge tax that the state puts on all commissary items of 10 percent. So if you have a $0.05 comb–this is an actual example–it costs you $0.06. And then the removal of items that people who, when they were incarcerated, used to get–jackets, blankets–they used to give you two blankets; now they give you one. They don’t give you thermals anymore; you have to buy them from the commissary. And, most importantly, shoes.

CONWAY: Well, I’m just–you know, because I personally have experienced that myself in terms of seeing young guys in the population that are just arriving in the last two, three years no longer get the things that we used to get when we came in the prison. So I see guys walking around in the dead of the winter without coats and without, actually, boots. They’re running around in summer tennis shoes and stuff. Why? What’s this cutback? I thought that the prison-industrial complex was making a lot of money. Why is this happening?

HEDGES: Well, because it forces those who are incarcerated to go to the commissary and buy the item. So let’s talk about shoes. And I don’t know what your experience was, but this is how it is in New Jersey. You’re not issued shoes anymore. You have to buy them. You pay $45. Now, remember, these people are making $28 a month. And we haven’t even spoken about the fines. So a lot of those people get into the system and they owe thousands of dollars of fines, which are chipped out of their monthly salary. So, for instance, one of the students that I teach, who was incarcerated when he was 14–he’s now 39–still owes $6,000 of fines. So if they want to buy a pair of Reeboks, it costs–if they don’t have the $45–and most people don’t get–80-plus percent do not get money from the outside on a monthly basis. They may get over the holidays or something, but they’re kind of on their own. If they can’t afford the $45 Reeboks or the boots, they sell these sneakers with cardboard soles. It’s like something out of Dickens that as soon as you got out into the yard, they’re shredded. Because many of these prisons are quite old, they need the thermals.

And then we haven’t even spoken about bereavement, so that if you want to visit with a dying member of your immediate family, a mother or father or whatever, you can do so for 15 minutes, either a deathbed visit or you can go for viewing, but you have to pay for the guards to accompany you, which is $800. And that immediately–. So what I have seen over the last few years–.

CONWAY: Woah. Woah. Let me just [incompr.] this. That’s happening in New Jersey. In Maryland, they don’t even allow you to do that anymore. They actually cut that out completely.

HEDGES: You mean the bereavement visits?

CONWAY: Yeah, the bereavement visits. And that’s very harmful to the prisoner, because you don’t get a chance to kind of, like, make your peace with that person that you love who’s departed. So you end up suffering that loss and no way of figuring out how to grieve, right? But go ahead. I’m just curious.

HEDGES: Well, it’s just all the ways they have found mechanisms to economically exploit prisoners and their families. It used to be that you could send up to 50 pounds, I think it was, a year of goods like sneakers and stuff, which they’ve now abolished. And that, of course, makes it harder, because now the prisoner has to buy the items from this kind of in-house Walmart. And it also hurts the families, who are unable to feel, in a way, that they can care for their sons or their daughters or their husbands or wives or whatever.

But what I find most disturbing is there seems to be every year some new mechanism to squeeze more money out of the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. And I think that probably is something you saw within the system as well.

CONWAY: Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that they turned–the state, the state of Maryland, actually was responsible for supplying all the items in the commissary. So toothpaste, deodorant, food, something to drink, that kind of stuff, they turned all of that commercial stuff over to a company that–it’s out of Ohio, I believe, called Keefe. And that company operates commissaries in several states, including Florida. And they were up, in fact, for a class-action suit because of the way they changed the prices.

And one example is the envelopes. We used to get a pack of 50 envelopes for $0.99. They would come in a box. If you want to write, you would buy a box of envelopes, and it would last you for 50 letters. What Keefe took over, you could only get single envelopes, and they cost $0.10 apiece, so that the price of that 50 envelopes turned into $5 just automatically and you did not have a choice. You either buy from them or you didn’t send out any mail. And they did that time and time again with the basic foodstuff that they knew we needed to eat. They upped the price 200, 300 percent. You know. So yeah, that, and the state of Maryland in turn gets a fee for that.

HEDGES: Right.

CONWAY: You know. So just like they get a fee from the phone company that, as you were saying, exploits the families and the prisoners because if a prisoner calls home and the person accepts the phone call, it’s extra money for accepting that phone call above and beyond what it would be if it was [incompr.]

HEDGES: Well, and they have to put money on the account, and they have to pay a fee. So if you’re putting–I can’t remember the exact figure, but if you’re putting $10 on the account, you’re paying $3 or $4 just for the privilege of putting the $10 on.

And then we get the whole issue of privatizing the way money is sent into the prison. So it used to be that you could send a money order or something in and you could put it on a prisoner’s account. Now it is all done through a company in Florida, where, again, if you want to put $20 on the account, you’re charged quite a draconian fee. And, again, I don’t have figures right in front of me, but again, I think it’s up to $5. And that $5 evaporates, at least from your pocket, into the pocket of the for-profit company that’s handling this. So this has been a kind of momentum that we’ve seen internally within the prison system. I think it reflects the kind of predatory nature of unregulated capitalism throughout the society, because those corporations, which are in essence kind of squeezing all of us, will squeeze the defenseless. And that’s what prisoners are, in essence, a captive society. They will squeeze the defenseless in ways that are just inhuman, because they can.

CONWAY: And let’s look at it from the other side, because while I was in the prison system, they made chairs, they made clothes, they trained dogs. There’s all kinds of industries or, obviously, the license tags. There’s–.

HEDGES: Military industries. Kevlar.

CONWAY: Yeah. Yeah. So while they’re squeezing the prisoners and fleecing the population for whatever pennies they can get, aren’t they making a tremendous amount of money by using that slave labor to produce stuff? I mean, what’s–.

HEDGES: It’s neo-slavery, which under the 13th Amendment is legal. You can force people under the 13th Amendment to work without adequate wages as part of your punishment, in essence. And so we have seen, along with this exploitation, a growth of for-profit industries, private companies that are going in there and exploiting the prison labor. So, on the one hand, they’re using the prison labor to make profit, and on the other hand they’re taking that underpaid–you know, I mean, we can’t even call it underpaid when you’re making $1.30 for an eight-hour day. They’re taking that. And they’re taking what little money they have. And that’s not a new phenomenon for African Americans. It replicates precisely what sharecroppers went through, where they had to borrow to buy the seed and often the farm implements and pay the rent. And by the end, especially if the crop didn’t do well, they can work a whole season and end up in debt. So now you’re seeing people released from the prison system and they owe money to the state. And if they can’t pay that money, they get picked up again.

CONWAY: Yeah. You know. And there’s something–even as you were talking, there was another aspect that I was thinking of. Early on, several decades ago, I can clearly remember that there was this huge campaign to stop prisons from being built in certain neighborhoods, in certain counties, and there was a desperation. The population was exploding in the prison system, and the state needed places in which to build prisons, and they went to different counties and whatnot, and they could not get authorization to build prisons. And so at some point they start de-industrializing America and jobs disappeared, not only just out of the black community, but jobs disappeared out of the rural communities. And then, all of a sudden, in all of these counties, there were requests like put a prison here. And when you talk about that economic slavery thing, just remind me of Hagerstown and it reminds me of Cumberland. And in Cumberland, Maryland, there’s a massive prison complex up there now, and it’s the source of jobs and economics in that region. And inside those prisons is population from the urban centers, a black–the population is mainly black, the guard forces mainly white, and it’s an economic arrangement similar to slavery that you were saying.

HEDGES: Right. Of course. Well, the students that I teach often refer to prison as being a plantation, having the dynamics of a plantation, including which is something writers like Richard Wright, Baldwin, and others talk about, understanding the demeanor by which you can comport yourself in front of the guards who are all-powerful. And when you get up to these communities–and Mumia Abu-Jamal is up in Frackville, Pennsylvania. And when you go into the prison, you will see on the list of the corrections officers who work in the prison three, four, maybe up to eight of the last names, because their brother’s in there, their cousin’s in there, maybe even their spouse is in there.

CONWAY: Their sons.

HEDGES: Their son’s in there. It’s–.

CONWAY: And daughters.

HEDGES: And daughters. It’s the only business going. And I think what’s so heartbreaking–I’ve driven up and see Mumia a couple of times–is those buses that leave at about midnight or one in the morning from places like Newark or wherever or Philly, you know, bringing the families and bringing the kids. And we haven’t even spoken about how visitors are treated.

"Education Costs" by Deb Milbrath

"Education Costs" - Deb Milbrath, Cartoon Movement

Privately educated still take most top jobs

Although, this article is highlighting a report on British education system & the resultant employment prospects from the private institutions of that education system, this can easily be extended to everywhere around the world.

Private schools, colleges, & universities in US & Canada are similarly regarded as producing highly talented individuals, who then are employed in top jobs. Although, there are no private universities in Canada, yet, but the cost of education in public universities is skyrocketing, & obtaining that education is becoming a luxury for many. The pricier the degree, the more respect it earns from the industry.

It's the same case in developing countries, like Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, India, Pakistan, etc. Private education system has merely become the profit-making tool for a few industrialists. Public education system has been eroded or the industry sector doesn't favour the graduates of those. Graduates of private education system are highly regarded in the industry, & even there, the more expensive the degree (i.e. IBA & LUMS), the more respect the grad earns, & hence, obtaining that top spot in the industry becomes that much easier.

Of course, this disparity will continue on, even if the private education system starts taking in students on the basis of merit. The reason being that the graduates of these top private schools have strong alumni networks in the top tiers of industry, who pull their fellow graduates up, while leaving behind the graduates of public education system. This "networking" will continue on. Coupled this networking issue in the developed world with the not-so-strong financial situation of the immigrants there, & you can see that immigrants & their children do not make it to the top tiers of the industry in the developed world.

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https://www.rt.com/uk/333491-private-education-top-jobs/

Individuals educated at private schools continue to land the majority of top jobs in leading fields, including law, politics, journalism and the arts ... .

Results published by the Sutton Trust ... show that while the previous decade has shown “small signs” of narrowing inequality levels, often more than 70% of top jobs are given to those who were privately educated.

Only 7% of British youngsters attend private school, but the study showed that 74% of judges and 71% of high ranking military officers attended fee-paying schools.

In journalism, 51% of top print writers were privately educated, as well as 61% of doctors.

Respectively, only 12% of military chiefs were educated in comprehensive schools, and 22% of doctors attended grammar schools. Only one-fifth of leading journalists had a state education.

In politics the gap has narrowed, the report found, with 32% of MPs having attended a private school. But when examining the Tory cabinet, some 50% of the ministers went to independent schools, compared to 13% in Labour’s shadow cabinet.

The report also examined the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge universities among top ranking positions, and found that alumni from the famous academic institutions were more likely to take high positions.

In law, Oxbridge graduates make up 74% of the top positions, with 54% of journalists having also attended the two universities.

Some 47% of the Conservative cabinet also attended Oxford or Cambridge, more than 10% higher than the shadow cabinet, which features 32% Oxbridge graduates.

The arts is also not exempt from the privately educated/Oxbridge bubble, with award-winning actors and actresses 50% more likely to have had a private education than pop stars. A total of 42% of BAFTA winners were awarded to fee-paying school attendees.

Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said the report showed a need for more social mobility.

“Our research shows that your chances of reaching the top in so many areas of British life are very much greater if you went to an independent school.

“As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success.

“The key to improving social mobility at the top is to open up independent schools to all pupils based on merit not money... as well as support for highly able students in state schools.”

Identity and Collective Denial - Lia Tarachansky on RAI (3/3)

Nothing much to say for this piece of the interview. I only wanted to put this interview here to show how much Israel is a racist society, devoid of any & all social mobility among people. There are many Jewish groups in Israel, who are treated just like caste system in India, and at the same time, Israel needs Palestine & this ongoing conflict with Palestine to keep itself alive.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS36Io_3LOA

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: How does it get to that point? What is it about–where, in terms of the evolution of the Israeli identity, does this absolute overt racism come from? ...

LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: As an Israeli Jew, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Also, literally, I’ve been robbed of my anonymity on many fronts. And there’s a lot of it that creeps into your life.

But the way I understand it is, like, it’s a combination of two things. I think what you’re seeing on the streets today in Israel, with the constant street-level violence and racism and attacks on anyone who questions anything, attacks on leftists, attacks on Palestinians, that it is the natural conclusion of the Zionist idea coming to its most screeching, screaming peak in having to defend itself. And this is part of the ethnocracy we’re talking about. This is the natural conclusion.

What is Zionism? Zionism is the idea that the Jews have a homeland in historic Palestine, in the ancient land of Canaan. That’s spiritual Zionism. Practical political Zionism means that the Jews have more right to be on this land, and then they must be a Jewish majority on this land. How do you do that in a place that was never empty, in a place that, first of all, was already home to competing national movements, that was already engaged in very rich and ancient culture, both from the Ottoman Empire and the Arab invasions, and was–this place is the crossroads of human migration. How do you come to this place, which is in the middle, between Asia, Europe, and Africa, and you say, no more, here’s our walls, and we’re building a wall with Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt, and no one but Jews can get in? As I’m sure you know, there’s no immigration to Israel unless you’re a Jew. You can’t immigrate, you can’t come in. It’s a state for Jews and only Jews, and we will eventually get rid of anyone who is not a Jew. That is political Zionism today.

And the disparity between understanding that this is what it is here in North America as I’m touring my film and I’m realizing how few people understand what it is and the reality on the ground, this idea playing itself out to its screeching peak, is–the disparity is astounding and playing itself out is incredibly violent and intense. And so, today, if I was to talk to you on the bus or I was out walking down the street with you and I was saying all these things, there’s a very good idea that we would be beaten by the time we get to the end of the street, because there is now so much threat to that idea surviving. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is colossal disappointment over the so-called peace process finally completely dying. There was a little bit of hope with Obama, Kerry, a little bit of hope with George Mitchell. It was kind of like no one really believed that they would do anything. A lot of people said, well, at least something’s happening. America, having taken the side of Israel on all of the peace negotiations, having put all its capital on the side of the Israeli negotiators, all of its weapons on the side of Israel’s negotiators, and then sat in the middle calling itself the unbiased mitigator in this negotiation, which we’re doomed to end, gave us a false sense of hope. It has built endless institutions in Palestine. It built a government called the Palestinian Authority. It gave that Palestinian Authority billions in donations. And it’s based on hot air and nothing else.

And that thing finally collapsing now, over the last year, and the taking root of nonviolent movements, effective nonviolent movements, such as the fight of the Palestinian political prisoners with ongoing hunger strikes, such as the boycott movement and the antifascist movement inside of Israel, and the most important of which, the rising of national identity amongst Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel, and the linking of these three peoples irregardless of who are their leaderships, this is the most important element in the picture.

So the total disappointment with the peace process and the collapse of hope that the conflict will ever end gave rise to a new kind of wave of understanding the conflict is never going to end. The generals and the capitalists that are sitting over there and are making money off the war don’t give a shit about us. Israel saw a huge social justice movement that we’ve covered here on The Real News for two years. That social justice came and fell, and nothing changed except there was a huge change in the public identity, in the public, the way people see Israel, and the way that the people see that their fight is not just with the Palestinians, it’s also with the government, and it’s also with each other. It has further segregated us inside Israel.

And so all these things together burst out. And ... people look at this war that happened this summer, this attack on Gaza, and they say, oh, it was really the worst attack on Gaza so far. They were right. But this attack was not just this summer. What happened this summer was, yes, 51 days of war, but it actually started not even with the teenagers getting kidnapped; it started with the Palestinian hunger strikers in the beginning of the year.

What we were seeing in January a year ago is that the African refugees were rising up, demanding freedom, because they were being shipped off to a massive prison in the south of the country, something very similar to a concentration camp for African refugees. So they were rising up demanding freedom. The Palestinian hunger strikers went on a hunger strike and were very close to getting achievements with that hunger strike. Hamas was on the verge of signing unity with Fatah, which would’ve been the last thing that would’ve saved it. And this was when we went to war.

So, since then, and if you were actually following what’s happening on the ground like we were on The Real News, that’s when the street-level violence started. And the war ended at the end of August, but the street-level violence never ended. In fact, it’s getting worse day to day to day. You know, a few weeks ago, a Palestinian bus driver, who drives an Israeli bus in an Israeli bus company called Egged, was beaten to death and hung in the bus that he was driving, because he’s Palestinian. This is one of the things.

Now, there’s no doubt in any Palestinian’s mind that I’ve met that he was beaten to death and hung. But the police was claiming that he killed himself, and most Israelis believe that he killed himself. And this sparked a wave of bus drivers rising up against insecurity on the job, demanding that the bus company either separate them from the people who get on the–the passengers, or get a security guard, because the Palestinian bus drivers in the Israeli bus come company were saying that they were experiencing daily racist attacks, daily racist assaults. And the company refused. And forty of them have quit. So a third of the Palestinian workers who worked in the Israeli bus company quit because of racism and violence.

That’s where we are today. So six months of endless street-level violence.

JAY: Are there internal factors that you can see amongst Jewish Israelis that will change things? I mean, like, I interviewed quite a few families who lost people in 9/11 in New York, and I was told at least half the families either joined or supported the Not In My Name campaign. They didn’t want revenge. There were saying, don’t start another war, this is not going to bring my loved ones back. And they started getting their head around the context of why it happened. And there’s other examples in the world, including Palestinians, who have lost children, but they get the context. They don’t just want blind revenge.

But one gets the feeling that in Israel there’s been kind of a tipping point where the majority, even a preponderance of people are saying, they’re out to kill us, let’s kill them first, kind of end the conversation.

TARACHANSKY: Yeah. The consensus in Israel has now gotten so bad that the general consensus debate’s between expel the rest of them or kill the rest of them.

JAY: It’s a real fascistization of public opinion.

TARACHANSKY: Well, we saw, during the war, protests where ... people holding up signs during the protest, reading “one nation, one army, one leader”.
...

So I think that in America, in North America, there’s a lot of this mentality of there’s a problem, what’s the solution. We are light years away from resolving the conflict. I think a lot of people here in North America think that we’ve always been in conflict. But if you look at the history of Israel-Palestine, the history of this specific geographical spot, conflict over the centuries has actually been an exception. Peace and coexistence has been the rule. And our conflict is only about 70 years old, and we’ve already gone through huge changes as societies. And so let’s think a little bit before we start talking about solutions.

But what I can tell you is that profound changes are happening inside Israeli society, putting aside the Palestinian conflict for a second or the conflict for the Palestinians. Israel ... is a very segregated society. You have the Russians here, you have the Ashkenazis there, you have the Mizrahim here, and then you have the Orthodox there, and Ethiopians here, and so on and so forth. And inside the Mizrahim you have the Persians, and then you have the Iraqis, and you have the Moroccans. And there’s very little mixing. Israel has almost zero social mobility. If you are born poor, you will die poor. You will not come out of the ghetto. And the media in Israel focuses on a couple of neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And that’s it. What happens outside of these communities, what happens of Haifa, what happens in Palestinian majority towns, what happens in poor peripheral Mizrahi neighborhoods–completely absent.

That doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. What is happening is that these segregated communities–and I think it’s a result of the social justice movement that was in 2011, 2012, when we saw the biggest protests in the country’s history, half a million people on the streets in Tel Aviv one night in a country of 7 million people. That’s a lot of people on the streets. As a result of that, people started looking around them, and for the first time identity politics is becoming something that is on the fore. So the Mizrahim are saying that–the Jews that came from Arab countries are saying, we’ve been oppressed all along for the Zionist Ashkenazi project. What about us? To the level of forcing the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, to apologize for Ashkenazi European condescendence towards the Mizrahim, something that would have been unimaginable. We’re seeing the Orthodox digging their heels further as new laws inspired by Yair Lapid’s party are forcing the Orthodox to go to the army, makes them more united and further in conflict with the society.

So a lot of these groups, for various complex reasons that we don’t have time to discuss here, are getting more insular and more against each other. And so this is–I think this is a very important change. It’s because for so many years, with the illusion of the peace process, we were not looking at the real problems inside Israel.

JAY: Well, I was going to say, somebody once told me, ... that if it wasn't for the external fight with the Palestinians, Israel would rip itself to shreds, especially the secular-Orthodox split.

TARACHANSKY: Yeah. And this is what we’re seeing. Israel is now ripping itself apart. And fascism is celebrating in the ruins.