Truthout - 23 January 2012

Chris Hedges | The Corporate State Will Be Broken
Chris Hedges, Truthdig: "Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick-Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on 'Jersey Shore.' The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters."
Read the Article

Protesters Demand Tougher Robo-Signing Settlement for Banks Making Record Executive Payouts
Mike Ludwig, Truthout: "Federal officials this week are moving to finalize a settlement with banks over the 'robo-signing' scandal, and activists say several banks accused of processing fraudulent foreclosure documents in recent years made a record $144 billion in payouts to employees in 2011."
Read the Article

Inside ALEC: Naked Contempt for the Press and Public in Scottsdale
Beau Hodai, PRWatch: "Mr. Hodai had a history at the conference - not a very pleasant history. He was considered to be a persona non grata ..."
Read the Article

CIA Officer Indicted for Leaking Classified Information to Journalists Gave Exclusive Interview to Truthout Two Years Ago
Jason Leopold, Truthout: "On Monday morning, the Justice Department announced that it had indicted former CIA officer John Kiriakou for allegedly leaking classified information to journalists and lying to the CIA's Publications Review Board."
Read the Article and Watch the Video

How Can Communities Defend Themselves From Corporate Interests?
Rose Aguilar, Truthout: "Why isn't activism working? It's not for lack of trying, says self-described recovering environmental attorney Thomas Linzey.... In the new book, 'Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community,' Linzey and Anneke Campbell, an environmental justice documentary filmmaker, argue that it's time to stop begging the government and corporations to cause less harm. It's time to replace corporate minority decision-making with community self-government."
Read the Article and Listen to the Podcast

Dean Baker | The Surefire Way to End Online Piracy: End Copyright
Dean Baker, Truthout: "The opponents of [the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)] were able to use the web and various social media venues to educate the public about the specifics of the bill. The resulting flood of emails, phone calls and letters caused the bill's Congressional sponsors to cut and run. While this revolt against the entertainment industry's effort to rein in the web was inspiring, there is a real issue at stake."
Read the Article

Our Dangerous Devotion to Eyewitness Testimony
Patricia J. Williams, The Nation: "'Human beings are not very good at identifying people they saw only once for a relatively short period of time,' writes Cornell law professor Michael Dorf. 'The studies reveal error rates of as high as fifty percent - a frightening statistic given that many convictions may be based largely or solely on such testimony.'"
Read the Article

For Giffords, House Comeback Is One Too Many
Jennifer Steinhauer, The New York Times News Service: "For months, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt last year, signaled that returning to Congress, something she desperately longed to do, was in the realm of the possible.... But Ms. Giffords, a moderate Democrat from Arizona whose remarkable comeback stirred the nation, decided in recent days that she could not continue her recovery and still serve as a member of Congress."
Read the Article

On the News With Thom Hartmann: USDA Moves Forward With Plans to Privatize Poultry Inspection, and More
In today's On the News segment: Newt Gingrich scapegoated the poor and minorities on his way to a crushing victory over Mitt Romney in South Carolina Saturday, Republicans signal they may again hold payroll tax cut hostage in exchange for Keystone XL, EU sanctions heighten tension with Iran, and more.
Watch the Video and Read the Transcript

Blacks Face Bias in Bankruptcy, Study Suggests
Tara Siegel Bernard, The New York Times News Service: "Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to wind up in the more onerous and costly form of consumer bankruptcy as they try to dig out from their debts, a new study has found. The disparity persisted even when the researchers adjusted for income, homeownership, assets and education. The evidence suggested that lawyers were disproportionately steering blacks into a process that was not as good for them financially ..."
Read the Article

Righteous Abortion: How Conservative Christianity Promotes What It Claims to Hate
Valerie Tarico, Away Point: "U.S. rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion far exceed any other country with similar economic development. So does our rate of religiosity."
Read the Article

Shale-Shocked: Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement
Ellen Cantarow, TomDispatch: "This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it.... But for once, this story isn't about tragedy. It's about a resistance movement that has arisen to challenge some of the most powerful corporations in history."
Read the Article

Best-Selling Author Thomas Frank Reads From His New Book, "Pity the Billionaire"
Thomas Frank writes about the importance of the raw need to raise one's voice against things like the glorification of the free market as the very essence of freedom itself despite, as Frank believes, the issue that "free market theory had proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud."
Read the Article and Listen to the Audio

Quietly Radical Mission at Sundance: Supporting Native Filmmakers
Jamilah King, Colorlines.com: "'It's taken Hollywood a long time to realize that you can have a narrative fiction film that just happens to have native characters in it,' says Elise Marrubio, an associate professor of American Indian Studies at Augsburg College in Minneapolis."
Read the Article

Click here for more Truthout articles>

TRUTHOUT'S BUZZFLASH DAILY HEADLINES

One thing that the GOP doesn't bring up much anymore is crime.

In the '70s and '80s, crime was one of the biggest red-meat issues that the Republicans demagogued about. An infamous political ad about an inmate released in Governor Dukakis' prison probation program probably (along with some other missteps) lost him the presidency in 1988. It was simply known as getting "Wilie Hortoned," named after the offender (in the attack ad), who was singled out as an example of "liberalism" molly coddling violent criminals.

However, the Republicans can't talk about being soft on crime anymore, because the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. It's not just a penal system; it's an industry. And due to the aging of the population (young people commit most "crimes"), changing police practices and the locking up of so many poor people, crime in the United States is down - down dramatically.

A New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, "The Caging of America," shockingly notes:

Over all, there are now more people under "correctional supervision" in America - more than six million - than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

And the toll on minorities is devastating:

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today - perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system - in prison, on probation, or on parole - than were in slavery then.

Gopnik is appalled: "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."

The roots of violence are complex, but don't equate our incarceration system with just violent offenders. There is an extremely large percentage of American citizens in jail for nonviolent offenses, particularly relating to drugs - and particularly minorities in relation to drug "violations."

To what degree our propensity to hold the world's record for people behind bars is due to economic disparity is not an idle question. There aren't many wealthy people who end up behind bars, nor do rich areas evidence much crime for which people find themselves in prison, except for an occasional Bernie Madoff. Wealthy people tend to commit financial crimes - and if their breaking of the law does not involve millions of dollars, they tend to strike a plea bargain that doesn't require being put in a cell for years on end.

Just look at the lack of prosecution of Wall Street speculators and mortgage fraud financiers. But if you are poor and bounce a check three times, the taxpayer will pay some $20,000 or more a year to keep you confined by the state.

In reflecting upon how America arrived at this harsh, expansive prison system, Gopnik refers to one theory:

"American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations." White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow.

Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. "The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage," the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of "formal control" (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of "invisible control." Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system.

What if black males in impoverished circumstances - living in areas with opportunities for employment - were given jobs instead of jail sentences?

That's a question no political candidate for the presidency - Republican or Democrat - will ask aloud.

It too closely touches upon the truth: that we have economically abandoned large swathes of cities and rural areas, and that we have offered the inhabitants of those impoverished communities "boarding" in prison instead of work.

Even as the economy incrementally crawls toward improvement, the same people we have left behind in good times will continue to be left behind in bad.

Instead, at great economic cost to taxpayers, we will house them in penal institutions. After they fulfill their sentences, they will have an even slimmer chance at obtaining gainful employment.

We, as a society, have caged people of color and poor whites for our social caste convenience - and for that we have pitifully obtained No. 1 bragging rights in the world: top jailer on the planet.

Mark Karlin,
Editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout

Paul Krugman: Is Our Economy Healing?
Read the Article at The New York Times

The Obama Memos: The Making of a Post-Post-Partisan Presidency
Read the Article at The New Yorker

Wendell Potter: Park City Vantage Point Puts Tragedy of American Health Care in Vivid Relief
Read the Article at The Huffington Post

First Post-Mubarak Parliament Convenes
Read the Article at Bloomberg

Campus Cops Brutalize Peaceful Students Protesting Tuition Hikes at UC Riverside
Read the Article at AlterNet

A Win for Civil Rights: Supreme Court Rules That Warrants Are Needed in GPS Tracking
Read the Article at The Washington Post

Gone Too Far? Reproductive Politics in the Time of Obama
Read the Article at On the Issues Magazine

Click here for more BuzzFlash headlines

Support Truthout with a tax-deductible donation by clicking here.