Top photo, the injuries of Officer Ramos who had described his altercation with Kelly Thomas as “the right of his life.”
Bottom photo, Kelly Thomas.
(Source: stagstuff)
The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.
For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.
(Source: azspot)
What grades determine:
- Your ability to memorize mostly useless things
- Your ability to regurgitate information in the way others want you to
- Your ability to understand what adults want from you and give it to them
- Your tolerance for working on tasks you don’t find useful because others want you to do them or believe them to be helpful/socially acceptable
What grades do NOT determine:
- Your intelligence
- Your creativity
- Your emotional capabilities
- Your likeliness to succeed
- Whether you’re a good person
(Source: greaterandmoreterrible)
Jedi Mind Tricks - I Who Have Nothing (by orchardmusic)
“As I decay, demons prey above me like a vulture
Ability to endure contradiciton is a high sign of culture
Verbal sculptures, self defacing
It is not God or lunacy that I am facing
But the erasing of the purity and passion of my words
The herds of cattle babble on with talk of the absurd”
I was a young woman with an evolved mind who was not afraid of her beauty or her sexuality. For some people that’s uncomfortable. They didn’t understand how female and strong work together. Or young and wise. Or Black and divine.
—Lauryn Hill (via thechanelmuse)
(Source: 0penseason)
Kurds vs Turkish police
In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?
So much money has gone into armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 that the federal government could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over and had enough money left in the kitty to provide job training and housing for every one of the record 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City. It could have added in the growing population of 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia, my hometown, and still have had money to spare. Add disintegrating Detroit, Newark, and Camden to the list. Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too.
But why drone on? We all know that addressing acute social and economic issues here in the homeland was the road not taken. Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders. At the same time, defense contractors have proven endlessly inventive in adapting sales pitches originally honed for the military on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the desires of police on the streets of San Francisco and lower Manhattan. Oakland may not be Basra but (as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld liked to say) there are always the unknown unknowns: best be prepared.
All told, the federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks. To conclude, though, that “the police” have become increasingly militarized casts too narrow a net. The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilized and militarized right down to the university campus.
(Source: azspot)
“Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” said Javie Ssozi, an influential Ugandan blogger.
“Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.”
Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist specialising in peace and conflict reporting, said: “This paints a picture of Uganda six or seven years ago, that is totally not how it is today. It’s highly irresponsible”.
SPREAD THE WORD
(Source: simply-war)
Our research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men.
—
Human Rights Watch - “Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs” (via fuckyeahdrugpolicy)
sometimes i feel like the criminal justice system is the least talked about, yet most dangerous & harmful domestic institution. What sucks is that the system depends on Americans being so apathetic about the people they throw in jail that they can just ignore blatant wrong-doings and inconsistencies.
(via newwavefeminism)
America’s Role in Nazi Eugenics
Fancy a bit of history, just for a change ? Well did you know that America played a crucial role both in inspiring and funding Hitler’s efforts to create a ‘master race’ and all of the horrors that went along with that ? I didn’t.
Apparently prior to World War II the majority of Americans were uninterested in the plight of the Jews in Germany and many also supported the forced sterilization of the mentally incompetent, crippled or criminally-inclined. Some states banned interracial marriages as an effort to prevent the tainting of the races and thousands of Americans were forcefully sterilized, many after being labeled vaguely as ‘sexually wayward,’ ‘depressed,’ ‘deviant,’ or even just ‘bad girls.’
Although America didn’t invent eugenics it was certainly at the forefront of its application. Hitler told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. .. “I have studied with great interest,“.. he told a fellow Nazi, .. “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.“
But it went beyond America simply providing inspiration and an example. After funding a number of eugenics scientists in the USA, the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation then helped create the German eugenics program and even actively funded work by the infamous Josef Mengele before he went to Auschwitz.
This little-discussed link between America and Hitlers infamous ‘master race’ programs is something they don’t generally teach in schools. Excuse the admittedly sensational and largely irrelevant picture used to illustrate the post (I have a weakness for lurid old magazine art) but the subject itself is quite interesting I think and shines a rare light on a murky and little-known part of Americas history.
( Read the full article here) ( and in case you’re interested the image was from MAN’S EPIC, May 1966 - artist Mel Crair) (Also more on Eugenics here)MUST READ
Dregs One Releases Second Single off of Debut Album, ‘The Wake Up Call’
‘Letter to the President’ Calls Out Obama’s Failure to Address Pertinent Issues in the US and Abroad
Imagine if you had to deal with this sort of thing every day
The True Cost of U.S. Military EquipmentThe True Cost of U.S. Military Equipment
And then there are the true costs of war.
