NYTimes | One area where the United States indisputably leads the world is incarceration.
The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The U.S. prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.
Proportionally, the United States has four times as many prisoners as Israel, six times as many as Canada or China, eight times as many as Germany and 13 times as many as Japan.
With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.
There’s also a national election in the United States soon. This issue isn’t on the agenda. It’s almost never come up with Republican presidential candidates; one of the few exceptions was at a debate in September when the audience cheered the notion of executions in Texas.
Barack Obama, the first black president, rarely mentions this question or how it disproportionately affects minorities. More than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.
“We’ve had a race to incarcerate that has been driven by politics, racially coded, get-tough appeals,” said Michelle Alexander, a law professor at Ohio State University who wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
The escalating cost of the criminal-justice system is an important factor in the fiscal challenges around the United States. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, which is struggling to obey a court order requiring it to reduce its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 inmates.
Today, there are 140,000 convicts in California’s state prisons, who cost about $50,000 each per year. The state pays more on prisons than it does on higher education.
Yet the prisons are so crowded — as many as 54 inmates have to share one toilet — that Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted in the death of the pop star Michael Jackson, may be able to avoid most prison time. Fist tap Nana.
Time | Hillary Clinton called on Wednesday for broad criminal-justice reform
and renewed trust between police officers and communities, reflecting
the former First Lady’s evolution from supporting the policies
instituted by her husband two decades ago in a period of high crime
rates.
Clinton called for body cameras in every police department in the
country, as well as an end to an “era of mass incarceration.” Her speech
came two days after the funeral in Baltimore of Freddie Gray, a
25-year-old black man who died while in police custody, and amidst
ongoing civil unrest in that city.
“There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are
far more likely to be stopped by the police and charged with crimes and
given longer prison terms than their white counterparts,” Clinton said.
“There is something wrong when trust between law enforcement and the
communities they serve breaks down … We must urgently begin to rebuild
bonds of trust and respect among American between police and citizens.”
Clinton offered few specific policy plans in the speech, and didn’t
explain how police forces would pay for body cameras on all officers.
She spoke broadly about reducing jail sentences for low-level offenders
and the effects of imprisoning millions, particular African Americans.
“We don’t want to create another incarceration generation,” Clinton
said.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is probably the single greatest disappointment for me with 45's administration. His anti-drug stance is retrograde cover for reinstituting the prosecutorial savagery which resulted in mass incarceration over the past forty years. AG support for harsh or mandatory minimum sentences, coupled with the claim that it provides a vital service in making cases as leverage to flip people to inform on their associates, was the essential recipe for transforming America into the incarceration nation.
Even when it's used as prosecutors claim it is intended to convict ringleaders, the threat of harsh or mandatory minimum sentences to intimidate people into betraying their friends and family members is ethically suspect and legally corrupt. Claiming that it's used to dismantle illegal drug networks is at best historically suspect. In terms of practical results, this policy is has wreaked havoc and proven corrosive in terms of breaking down any pre-existing structures of social trust, community, and friendship that might have been built over time. The explicit message of this policy is that treachery and betrayal is an act worthy of reward. The worst punishment is reserved for those who demonstrate loyalty and integrity. Drug Warriors justify this policy by asserting that Drug Dealers are already lower than murderers or violent rapists, and thus have no integrity to preserve, because they deal Drugs. But that isn’t the worst of it. What’s really ethically indefensible is the difference between the way the policy is described by politicians and prosecutors to the general public, and the way that it’s actually employed.
Prosecutors routinely tout their use of the tactic as the use of informants to “bust up the ladder”- that is - to flip low-level retailers to snitch on the people above them in the hierarchy. That's what's always depicted in the movies and on the teevee crime procedurals. Using snitches this way, the prosecutor claims he is working his way toward the “kingpin” at the top of the hierarchy. The "kingpin" is finally made vulnerable to criminal conviction through informant testimony, or by having a snitch facilitate a transaction with government agents, as if there’s an ultimate "kingpin" whose conviction will lead to final victory in the Drug War.
This simple plot line may hold a deep psychological appeal to children, buybull buddies, or people addicted to purely fictional crime procedurals - but there's no practical or historical reason to believe it's ever really happened, ever. Too many cases show that drug selling organizations were dismantled in exactly the opposite manner. The "kingpin" is the one who gets caught right up front and then receives lenient sentencing for informing on all his subordinates.
Nicky Barnes is a name which comes to mind for buying leniency for himself and/or close relatives by ratting out everyone beneath him in his organization. Rayful Edmond is another prime example of the top-down snitching effect.
Examining the stories of prisoners documented by FAMM and the Marshall Project shows cases where the heaviest time landed on the people at the bottom - people who literally had no one available to betray, no “substantial information” to provide to aid prosecutors. So all the time landed on the lowest underlings.. This is fine from the perspective of the harsh prosecutions system, because that System requires someone as a sacrifice to keep the numbers looking good and providing the image of an effective law enforcement campaign. (not to mention the profit motivation for the private for-profit prison-industrial complex itself)
People have been subjected to mandatory minimum sentences simply as a result of having once provided their residence or business as the location for a drug transaction. Mandatory minimums have been handed down for driving buyers and/or sellers to and from a transaction. One instance of driving a buyer to the home of a seller is formally an overt act in furtherance of an illegal drug sale, and therefore all that’s required to convict someone of one count of “felony drug conspiracy.”
Strictly speaking, millions of Americans have committed at least one felony in their lives. Anyone who’s gotten far enough into illegal drug use to purchase their own stash of weed and have acquaintances involved in the same activity has done the above at least once. From the prosecutor's perspective, conspiracy is conspiracy, no matter how minor.
Driving a friend over to a dealer’s apartment to buy a $15 bag of weed is taking part in a drug sales conspiracy, and conspiracy is a felony. Of course rendezvous like these take place daily in the underground marketplace. Most of the time the risk of getting arrested is negligible. In the event that someone is swept up in a raid and busted for that participation, felony conspiracy offers a lever for the prosecutor seeking people to snitch for them. This, notwithstanding the fact that someone who simply drives their friend over to a house and waits outside in the car while they do a deal may have no information of value to bargain with.
Meanwhile, those same ball-busting prosecutors reward those who have risen high enough in the hierarchy of a drug conspiracy to have detailed knowledge of its working and who can offer critical testimony against their companions with reduced sentences, comfortable confinement settings, or witness protection.
MIT | Since 2014, viral images of Black people being
killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna
Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the
American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020,
nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of
George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest
social movement in the history of the United States.2 Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives.3 And others have called for abolishing the police altogether.4
Here is the article in which Harvard profs call for greatest expansion of militarized police surveillance bureaucracy in Western history. Below I discuss the flagrant ethical and intellectual problems and how elite academia can be so dangerous. https://t.co/Cq1fFCdWR2
It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious
crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too
heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor,
Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and
over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since
emancipation.5
The American criminal legal system is unjust and
inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the
problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by
an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on
long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this
country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer
employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically
opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing
roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of
people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it
backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between
policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed
world. We call this the “First World Balance.”
We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration.
This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the
book. In the spirit of conversation and debate, in this essay we err
deliberately on the side of comprehensiveness rather than argumentative
rigor. One of us is a social scientist, and the other is a philosopher
and legal scholar. Our primary goal for this research project, and
especially in this essay, is not to convince readers that we are
correct—but rather to encourage a more explicit discussion of the
empirical and normative bases of some pressing debates about the
American criminal legal system. Even if our answers prove unsound, we
hope that the combination of empirical social science and analytic moral
and political philosophy we contribute can help illuminate what
alternative answers to those questions might have to look like to be
sound. In fact, because much of this essay (and the underlying book
project) strikes a pessimistic tone, we would be quite happy to be wrong
about much of what we argue here.
In the first part of this essay, we outline five
comparative facts that contradict much of the prevailing way of thinking
about what is distinctive about the American criminal legal system. In
the second part, we draw out the normative implications of those facts
and make the case for the First World Balance.
In some policy areas, including health care, military affairs and the economy, the most consequential political decisions are made in the nation’s capital. But in the criminal justice system, states, cities and counties are the central players. For every federal law enforcement agent, about a half-dozen state highway patrol officers, county sheriffs and city police patrol the streets. Similarly, less than one-seventh of the country’s prison inmates are in federal facilities.
Because the federal prison system is so small, even dramatic congressional reforms in federal criminal penalties would have only a modest impact on the level of incarceration in the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was thus making an empty promise when he pledged to reduce the number of prisoners in the United States below that of China: Not even granting presidential pardons to every single federal prisoner would achieve this goal.
WaPo | Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure
activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal
drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion.
In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty
important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense.
Yet
despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug
use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this
hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally
urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the
problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight
recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal
prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the
world’s leading imprisoner.
The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize
other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which
in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social
outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product
without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point
to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel
alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic
trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are
gang- and drug-related homicides.
But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
. As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low
rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If
you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you
with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at
the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more
murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are
emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption.
Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such
places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong
offense.
Democracy Now | A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
JUAN GONZALEZ: President Obama’s election a year and a half ago continues to be lauded for ushering in a new era of colorblindness. The very fact of his presidency is regarded by some as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow. Yet, today there are more African Americans under correctional control, whether in prison or jail, on probation or on parole, than there were enslaved in 1850. And more African American men are disenfranchised now because of felon disenfranchisement laws than in 1870.
A new book by legal scholar and civil rights advocate Michelle Alexander argues that although Jim Crow laws have been eliminated, the racial caste system it set up was not eradicated. It’s simply been redesigned, and now racial control functions through the criminal justice system.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now from Columbus, Ohio by Michelle Alexander, author of the new book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Her latest article exploring how the war on drugs gave birth to what she calls a permanent American undercaste is available at tomdispatch.com. She’s a former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. She now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
Michelle Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! Nearly half of America’s young black men are behind bars or have been labeled felons for life? That’s an astounding figure. Also, what does it mean in terms of their rights for the rest of their lives?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes, thanks largely to the war on drugs, a war that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. The war on drugs waged in these ghetto communities has managed to brand as felons millions of people of color for relatively minor, nonviolent drug offenses. And once branded a felon, they’re ushered into a permanent second-class status, not unlike the one we supposedly left behind. Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and my be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you mention that the—in the war on drugs, four out of five people arrested have actually been arrested for use of drugs, not for—or possession or use of drugs, not for the sale of drugs. Could you talk about how the—both political parties joined in this increasing incarceration around drug use?
MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s right. The war on drugs, contrary to popular belief, was not declared in response to rising drug crime. Actually, the war on drugs, the current drug war, was declared in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan at a time when drug crime was actually on the decline. A few years later, crack cocaine hit the streets in poor communities of color across America, and the Reagan administration hired staff to publicize crack babies, crack mothers, crack dealers in inner-city communities, in an effort to build public support and more funding, and ensure more funding, for the new war that had been declared. But the drug war had relatively little to do with drug crime, even from the outset.
The drug war was launched in response to racial politics, not drug crime. The drug war was part of the Republican Party’s grand strategy, often referred to as the Southern strategy, an effort to appear—appeal to poor and working-class white voters who were threatened by, felt vulnerable, threatened by the gains of the civil rights movement, particularly desegregation, busing and affirmative action. And the Republican Party found that it could get Democrats—white, you know, working-class poor Democrats—to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the Republican Party through racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare.
WaPo | Thiel’s secret financing
of multiple suits against Gawker was legal. But that shouldn’t erase
the squeamishness brought on by a billionaire leveraging his wealth to
obliterate a media outlet, all as part of a personal vendetta. (Thiel
did not respond to request for comment.)
But more about Gawker’s coverage may have rankled Thiel
than, as he put it, the website’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted
men.” Gawker’s tech-focused website Valleywag trained a skeptical and
often searing eye on Silicon Valley culture. It reported on what tech
titans said they were about and what they actually did.
Thiel was
a titan, so he was also a target. Thanks to the lawsuits he funded,
Gawker had to stop bothering him. If he gets his way again, any trace of
that troublesome writing may be erased. This starts to look an awful
lot like book-burning.
The good news is that ALL institutions are currently in play. Been
taking a deep dive with the youngest into questions about dopamine
hegemony and the science and engineering of money. Cryptocurrency and
cryptocurrency-speculation being all the rage at the moment among the
young, dumb, and “want something for nothing” set.
Am absolutely loving the open warfare erupting in the Impyrian
heights among the oligarchs and then licking down like lightning to
destroy errant peasants who attempt to fly too high. Ahhhh.., the petty
satisfactions of pedestrian schadenfreude.
Anyway, what we can all know and see for certain at this moment, is
that the NYC-DC establishment is going into a strong second-half push in
this destroy Trump game. Now that russiagate has failed, it’s down to
adultery and faux racism. All just window-dressing over the real game in
play – that game being control of the money pump. The Koch/Thiel/Mercer
block is not going to easily surrender to the status quo whigs, and the
whigs are fresh out of new tricks against their invigorated asymmetrical
elite political adversaries.
One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of Modern
Monetary Theory (MMT) is chartalism, an economic theory which argues
that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic
activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber’s
book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon
issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification
and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin.
In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite
anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to
the myth of barter.
However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities,
but rather from the sovereign’s desire to organize economic activity.
The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are
forced to use the state’s currency to pay their taxes, they can trust
that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities.
Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate
(sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to
borrow from “bond vigilantes” to spend. They themselves first spend the
money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its
usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only
constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the
availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be
mitigated by taxation.
These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not
being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and
redistribute income. Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation
from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice:
Meanwhile, smart black folk recognizing the game of musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic - FULLY REALIZE the ruthless screwing handed down to us by the DC-NYC establishment over the past 50 years, with the replacement negroe program, mass incarceration, and systematic demonization
chronicle | When I read about the downfall
of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after
an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate”
relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of
idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself
am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account
for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself
away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi. The next time I get in trouble, will my employer emulate the classy behavior of the Michigan Board of Regents and release troves of my own embarrassing emails for my enemies to savor and mock?
My
next thought: Who was the snitch? I knew none of the players, but my
inner Hercule Poirot went right to work, assembling likely suspects in
the drawing room of my imagination (betrayed spouse, disappointed
paramour, assorted foes and rivals, maligned underlings), cleverly
disarming them with my continental charm until the culprit was exposed —
most likely by the irrepressible look of creepy satisfaction playing
across his or her face. To bring down an apparently much loathed and
vastly overpaid university president, even for the stupidest of reasons:
what ecstasy!
Among the questions prompted by Schlissel’s
termination is whether higher education has, on the whole, become a
hotbed of craven snitches. From everything I’ve heard and experienced,
the answer is yes.
First let us pause to consider our terms: Was
Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are
generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was
certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a
lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define
snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or
nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional
mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges,
or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for
social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of
academic and intellectual freedom.
This last is a variant of the
“social-justice snitch,” a burgeoning category composed of those who
want to defund the police and reform the criminal-justice system but are
nevertheless happy to feed the maws of a frequently unprocedural and
(many say) racist campus-justice system. There are, to be sure,
right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors
whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected. What’s not is
the so-called campus left failing to notice the degree to which the
“carceral turn” in American higher ed — the prosecutorial ethos, the
resources reallocated to regulation and punishment — shares a certain
cultural logic with the rise of mass incarceration and over-policing in
off-campus America. Or that the zeal for policing intellectual borders
has certain resonances with the signature tactics of Trumpian America,
for which unpoliced borders are equally intolerable. But what care
social-justice types about fostering the carceral university if those
with suspect politics can be flattened, even — fingers crossed! —
expelled, or left unemployed and penurious?
Americans once famously disliked snitches. Witness the
parade of Hollywood liberals who refused to stand or applaud when the
director Elia Kazan, who’d named names to the House Committee on
Un-American Activities in 1952, received an honorary Academy Award in
1999. According to Kazan’s autobiography, he named only those who’d
already been named or were about to be, and he’d long since come to
despise the cultural despotism of the American Communist Party. But
he’ll still go down in history with “snitch” attached to his name. If
only he’d labored in today’s academe! He’d be lionized for it.
The
carceral campus provides a haven for that formerly reviled personality
type, the jailhouse snitch, around whom so many classic prison dramas
revolved. The Big House (1930) established the category and
delivered a message for the ages: Snitches get stitches. When the
privileged 24-year-old Kent (Robert Montgomery), in for carelessly
killing someone while driving drunk, starts ratting out his fellow
inmates, things don’t turn out well for him. In the film’s moral
universe, only snivelers snitch. Or as the seen-it-all warden opines:
“Prison does not give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one, it
brings it out.”
tomdispatch | Today, more than 38 million
people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth,
that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the
coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story
anyway: the official measure
of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household
expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not
to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The
world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66
years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s
food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of
government as well as the contours of the American political and moral
imagination.
Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside
Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies
released an audit of America.
Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and
economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s
Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things,
measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food,
clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor -- or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)
As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons
of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only
emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and
racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years
of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen”
gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s
welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both
parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become
the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, "poor" has become a curse
word.
It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the
U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The
inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration
of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in
such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the
reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to
that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24
million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two
million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.
Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are
likely to prove a grotestque underestimate in the coronaviral world we
now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we
couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social
theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.
Counterpunch | I will never forget an encounter I had back in the ‘90s with
then-Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. I was working as the house
photographer for Widener University, which is just south of the Philly
airport and just north of the Delaware line. Biden was then working hard
in the Senate to fund more cops and prisons. He came to Widener to
speak on the topic, and I was assigned to photograph him. After taking a
few shots, I decided to stay to listen to the man and his pitch for the
Drug War, something that personally interested me, beyond my job as a
flak photographer.
I forget exactly what the beloved working-class senator from the
corporate state of Delaware said. But it didn’t sit right with me. I had
been spending my vacation time as a photographer in places like El
Salvador and Nicaragua, in the middle of the Reagan Wars. I’d also been
photographing addicts on the street through a needle exchange program in
inner city Philadelphia and had been reading on Harm Reduction
research. Later, I become aware, from a book by Ted Gest called Crime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order,
that when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Democrats were
freaked out: they feared they were finished politically.
According to
Gest, it was Joe Biden who saved the day by saying, “‘Give me the crime
issue and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election.’” Crime
bills were the way for Democrats to stay in the political game.
“How did so much crime legislation pass during the partisan 1980s?”
Gest asks. “A key element was important personal relationships in the
Capital, especially between Biden and the new Senate Judiciary Committee
chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.” This is the famous racist
Dixiecrat who, following the Nixon Strategy, had changed his party
affiliation to Republican, keeping his Senate seniority. It was the
beginning of a fruitful political friendship — “fruitful” that is, if
you were a politician willing to pander and fuel the Drug War fears of
the time. The result was money for more cops and more prisons. It was
part and parcel with what Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim
Crow,” where the stigma of being a felon replaced the old stigma of being a nigger. Bill Clinton went on to pursue a similar strategy to stay in the political game.
It was thus that I encountered Senator Biden in a Widener University
auditorium shilling for the Drug War. I was in the second row and raised
my hand. Biden called on me, stepping toward me as I stood up. We were
maybe ten feet apart. My question focused on why he seemed to dismiss
addressing the demand problem in the United Stares. I mentioned Harm
Reduction. The important word I used was decriminalization. My
point was why couldn’t we try something other than using the military
and police and prisons to address our very real drug problem?
I might as well have said something about his children. He knew I was
there as some kind of working PR person, and he lit into me with
vicious glee. He turned to address the audience, avoiding both me and my
question.
“This fellow thinks he’s smart. He cleverly uses the term
‘decriminalization’ — when he really means legalization. He wants to
make drugs legal, folks.” He went on some more. All the time I wanted
to say: “Listen — SIR! — would you answer my question.”
It was personal. But it made the man’s huge investment in the Drug War very clear. He knew very well that decriminalization and
all the very reasonable Harm Reduction research was the Achilles heel
of the Drug War. If the well-respected Ted Gest is correct, the Drug War
virtually made Joe Biden’s political career; working with Strom
Thurmond to put away black people made him who he is today. Is this
unfair to Joe Biden? No doubt, his bi-partisan cooperation with Thurmond
to some degree mitigated the South Carolina senator’s Old South racism.
It did nothing, however, to ease up the trend that led to the mass
incarceration of African Americans; and some would add it did nothing to
mitigate the current dysfunctional national bruise caused by the
ideological struggle between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives
Matter movements.
We all know Joe Biden’s well-nourished public persona as the working
man’s politician, the guy all of us want to sit down and have a beer
with. The fact is, I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with
Joe. I’d ask him to answer the question he parried away in that
auditorium. What do we have to do now to undo what you and your
bi-partisan allies created back in the ’80s? We all may have the
opportunity to ask him these questions, since it feels like he’s running
for 2020. But let’s hope the Democrats get their act together and do
better than running good ol’ Joe.
theatlantic | A lot of factors have contributed to
American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the
power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s
left?
That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,
by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following
decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or
less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that
wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political
influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white)
lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s
whims.
Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the
dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers
with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in
fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling
it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320
million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled
workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.” Temin
then divides workers into groups that can trace their family line in
the U.S. back to before 1970 (when productivity growth began to outpace
wage growth) and groups that immigrated later, and notes that race plays
a pretty big role in how both groups fare in the American economy. “In
the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the
FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located
almost entirely in the low-wage sector,” he writes. “In the group of
recent immigrants, Asians predominantly entered the FTE sector, while
Latino immigrants joined African Americans in the low-wage sector.”
After
divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of
strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between
them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial
prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes
precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE
workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically
pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and
business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some
groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in
the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass
incarceration, housing segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin
writes.
NYTimes | Who
is to apologize for bias in policing in general, and generations of
racially biased criminal justice, both of which have contributed to mass
incarceration?
This isn’t only about where the apologies should begin, but where they should end.
Sure,
we can search for ways to rationalize behaviors and responses, talking
about personal choices, culture, crime and family structures, but those
discussions mustn’t be — can’t be — separated from the context of
history and the confines of institutional structures.
Lift
that rock and all sorts of uncomfortable things come crawling out — a
privilege made possible by plunder and oppression, intergenerational
transfers of hopelessness bred by intergenerational societal exclusions —
truly ugly things.
We
have to decide what racial conciliation should look like in this
country. Does it look like avoidance and go-along-to-get-along
obsequiousness, or does it look like justice and acknowledgment of both
the personal parts we play and the noxious structural bias enveloping
us?
How is mutual understanding achieved without mutual respect being given and blame taken?
How do we reconcile ourselves to one another without the failures of the systems that govern us being laid bare before us?
It
seems to me, in the New York standoff, that the mayor owes no apology
for fighting to overturn stop-and-frisk, disclosing that he talked to
his son about encounters with police officers, or being compassionate to
protesters. That is the man New Yorkers elected.
This,
to my mind, is an attack on him as an agent of change. It is a battle
to see which arm has the most muscle: the one that wants to deny bias,
explicit or implicit, in the exercise of its power while simultaneously
clinging to that bias; or the one committed to questioning the power and
acknowledging the bias. Eventually, we will have to wrestle with the
question of which of those forces must win for us to be true and whole.
slate | When I started the book, after eight miserable years of George W.
Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade, I’d been driven pretty
far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you’d
think I’d have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and
researched, the more I went out and talked to people, I found that a
funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.
Which is not to say I was becoming a Republican. Because how could I?
At this point, the GOP’s rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too
long to recount. Pushing undemocratic voter ID laws, trotting out
candidates like Herman Cain, calling Barack Obama the “food stamp president” … if it has to do with race, you can count on Republicans being wrong early and often.
The pernicious effects of Republican attitude on race are plain to
see. But one of the more subtle consequences of the right’s willful
incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left
when it comes to race. Affirmative action is unfair to white people and the Democratic Party is a plantation—that’s
about as incisive as the rhetoric usually gets. Even when Republicans
have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some
government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own
argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational
outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently
about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really
astonishing to watch.
But the fact is that a lot of liberals hold on to some really bad
ideas about race too. Some of the arguments they keep trotting out
amount to little more than unexamined platitudes, riddled with holes.
Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school
cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is
growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of
young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to
Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged
with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around
in circles?
The left has been ceded a monopoly on caring about black people, and
monopolies are dangerous. They create ossified institutions, paralyzed
by groupthink and incapable of self-reflection. To the extent that
liberals are willing to be self-critical, it’s generally to flagellate
themselves for not being liberal enough, for failing to stand
fast with the old, accepted orthodoxies. Monopolies also lead to
arrogance and entitlement, and the left is nothing if not arrogant when
it comes to constantly and loudly asserting its place as the One True
Friend of Black America. And yet, as good as liberal policies on race
sound in speeches, many of them don’t hold up in the real world.
There is no shortage of people ready to pounce on every instance of
Republican racial insanity, but there is also no expectation that those
Republicans will reform any time soon. It is therefore imperative that
at least some Democrats begin to shift the discussion to what is wrong
with themselves. With the right being derelict, the left assumes
stewardship of our new multiracial America by default. So there is an
added responsibility to get it right, to purge outdated orthodoxies,
admit past mistakes, and find real solutions that work.
bostonreview | Wakanda is a fictional nation in Africa, a marvel beyond all marvels.
Its stupendous wealth and technological advancement reaches beyond
anything the folks in MIT’s labs could dream of. The source of all this
wonder is vibranium, a substance miraculous in ways that the movie does
not bother to explain. But so far as we understand, it is a potent
energy source as well as an unmatched raw material. A meteor rich in
vibranium, which crashed ages ago into the land that would become
Wakanda, made Wakanda so powerful that the terrors of colonialism and
imperialism passed it by. Using technology to hide its good fortune, the
country plays the part of a poor, third-world African nation. In
reality, it thrives, and its isolationist policies protect it from
anti-black racism. The Wakandans understand events in the outside world
and know that they are spared. This triumphant lore—the vibranium and
the Wakandans’ secret history and superiority—are more than imaginative
window-dressing. They go to the heart of the mistaken perception that BlackPanther is a movie about black liberation.
We learn that N’Jobu was sent to the United States as one of
Wakanda’s War Dogs, a division of spies that the reclusive nation
dispatches to keep tabs on a world it refuses to engage. This is
precisely N’Jobu’s problem. In the United States, he learns of the
racism black Americans face, including mass incarceration and police
brutality. He soon understands that his people have the power to help
all black people, and he plots to develop weapons using vibranium to
even the odds for black Americans. This is radical stuff; the Black
Panthers (the political party, that is) taken to a level of potentially
revolutionary efficacy. T’Chaka, however, insists N’Jobu has betrayed
the people of Wakanda. He has no intention of helping any black people
anywhere; for him and most Wakandans, it is Wakanda First. N’Jobu
threatens an aide to T’Chaka, who then kills N’Jobu. The murder leaves
Killmonger orphaned. However, Killmonger has learned of Wakanda from
his father, N’Jobu. Living in poverty in Oakland, he grows to become a
deadly soldier to make good on his father’s radical aim to use Wakanda’s
power to liberate black people everywhere, by force if necessary.
By now viewers have two radical imaginings in front of them: an
immensely rich and flourishing advanced African nation that is sealed
off from white colonialism and supremacy; and a few black Wakandans with
a vision of global black solidarity who are determined to use Wakanda’s
privilege to emancipate all black people.
These imaginings could be made to reconcile, but the movie’s director
and writer (with Joe Cole), Ryan Coogler, makes viewers choose.
Killmonger makes his way to Wakanda and challenges T’Challa’s claim to
the throne through traditional rites of combat. Killmonger decisively
defeats T’Challa and moves to ship weapons globally to start the
revolution. In the course of Killmonger’s swift rise to power, however,
Coogler muddies his motivation. Killmonger is the revolutionary willing
to take what he wants by any means necessary, but he lacks any coherent
political philosophy. Rather than the enlightened radical, he comes
across as the black thug from Oakland hell bent on killing for
killing’s sake—indeed, his body is marked with a scar for every kill he
has made. The abundant evidence of his efficacy does not establish
Killmonger as a hero or villain so much as a receptacle for tropes of
inner-city gangsterism.
In the end, all comes down to a contest between T’Challa and
Killmonger that can only be read one way: in a world marked by racism, a
man of African nobility must fight his own blood relative whose goal is
the global liberation of blacks. In a fight that takes a shocking turn,
T’Challa lands a fatal blow to Killmonger, lodging a spear in his
chest. As the movie uplifts the African noble at the expense of the
black American man, every crass principle of modern black respectability
politics is upheld.
In 2018, a world home to both the Movement for Black Lives and a
president who identifies white supremacists as fine people, we are given
a movie about black empowerment where the only redeemed blacks are
African nobles. They safeguard virtue and goodness against the
threat not of white Americans or Europeans, but a black American man,
the most dangerous person in the world.
Even in a comic-book movie, black American men are relegated to the
lowest rung of political regard. So low that the sole white leading
character in the movie, the CIA operative Everett Ross (Martin Freeman),
gets to be a hero who helps save Wakanda. A white man who trades in
secrets and deception is given a better turn than a black man whose
father was murdered by his own family and who is left by family and
nation to languish in poverty. That’s racist.
Several people helped me pull together some of the data points
mentioned in the magazine, notably the University of California
Berkeley's Rucker Johnson, who has done extensive work on the life outcomes of children who attend segregated schools, and Robert Bullard, who has amassed a frightening collection of research on the health hazards of living in minority communities.
I wanted to share a few more findings that we couldn't squeeze onto the
page in the magazine and then throw out some broader questions about why
all of these trends persist. First, a few more data points on what
segregation means today, even for middle-class minority families:
Census data from 2000, for example, showed that the average black household making more than $60,000 lived in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average white household earning less than $20,000.
A longitudinal study run from 1968-2005 found that the average black
child spent one-quarter of his or her childhood living in a high-poverty
neighborhood. For the average white child, that number is 3 percent.
The black child poverty rate in 1968 was 35 percent; it is the same today.
Minorities make up 56 percent of the population living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities.
Middle-income blacks (with household incomes between $50,000-$60,000) live in neighborhoods that are on average more polluted than the average neighborhood where white households making less than $10,000 live.
Segregation still matters because segregated neighborhoods are
associated with worse outcomes for health, educational attainment,
imprisonment, access to jobs and more. In the magazine, we tried to walk
through some of these consequences in terms of the economic growth of
whole metropolitan areas.
But one issue we did not get into is why such stark segregation persists, now two full generations after the civil rights era. NYU sociologist Patrick Sharkey discussed this question recently with Richard Florida, drawing on the findings of his recent book, Stuck in Place.
We often blame poor people for their own poverty, and blame whole
neighborhoods for the fact that government has systematically failed to
invest in them – as the comments on this story
recently reminded me. This narrative suggests that everyone would leave
segregated, high-poverty, polluted neighborhoods if they just had the
money to move out, and that people who don't live in such places arrived
where they are through their own hard work and responsibility.
That story, which focuses on the faults and skills of individual people, ignores the fact that we've arrived at this picture
of segregation for a lot of complicated, long-running, systemic reasons
that are so much bigger than individual families (and whether they have
dads or not). For decades, policies around who is eligible for home
loans, where we pave highways, and what kinds of houses can be built in
some communities have encouraged middle-class whites to leave the city
and move into the suburbs. At the same time, ill-fated government ideas
about public housing clustered low-income blacks in high-rise housing
projects. Mass incarceration further weakened minority communities.
And as Sharkey points out, in the midst of all this, the changing
economy also decimated the very same good industrial jobs that drew many
blacks to northern cities during the Great Migration in the first
place.
All of which is to say that the responsibility for lessening the
consequences of segregation does not solely fall on the people who
experience it.
Dale made me aware of a video in which Gonzalo Lira outgasses nonsense from his pie hole in sufficient volume and density so as to subvert the credibility of everything else he has here-to-date said about Ukraine. In this instance, he's so completely out of his depth and out of his mind talm'bout major riots coming to major American cities this spring in response to police violence. NOPE! Nyet! No way, no how! Nah Gah Happen....,
Ever since the Occupy Movement got b-slapped out of existence by a coordinated Federal clampdown, the Michael Brown uprisings, followed by the George Floyd uprisings, (A BLM/DNC Warren Buffet production) and finally the mass incarceration of every redneck peckerwood and his cousin who got caught up in January 6th Stop the Steal shenanigans - it has become conspicuously obvious to the casual observer that THE MAN is not fucking around and has not been for quite some time.
Everything else is - as they say - merely conversation.....,
TheIntercept | The recent wave of arrests are part and parcel of a “green scare,”
which began in the 1990s and has seen numerous environmental and animal
rights activists labeled and charged
as terrorists on a federal level consistently for no more than minor
property destruction. Yet the Atlanta cases mark the first use of a
state domestic terrorism statute against either an environmental or
anti-racist movement.
The 19 protesters are being charged under a Georgia law passed in 2017, which, according
to the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, was intended
to combat cases like the Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof’s massacre
of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the
Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.
“During legislative debate over this law, the concern was raised that
as written, the law was so broad that it could be used to prosecute
Black Lives Matter activists blocking the highway as terrorists. The
response was simply that prosecutors wouldn’t do that,” Kautz told me.
“There are similar laws passed in many other states, and we believe that
the existence of these laws on the books is a threat to democracy and
the right to protest.”
The Georgia law is exceedingly broad. Domestic terrorism under the
statute includes the destruction or disabling of ill-defined “critical
infrastructure,” which can be publicly or privately owned, or “a state
or government facility” with the intention to “alter, change, or coerce
the policy of the government” or “affect the conduct of the government”
by use of “destructive devices.” What counts as critical infrastructure
here? A bank branch window? A police vehicle? Bulldozers deployed to
raze the forest? What is a destructive device? A rock? A firework? And
is not a huge swathe of activism the attempt to coerce a government to
change policies?
Police affidavits
on the arrest warrants of forest defenders facing domestic terror
charges include the following as alleged examples of terrorist activity:
“criminally trespassing on posted land,” “sleeping in the forest,”
“sleeping in a hammock with another defendant,” being “known members” of
“a prison abolitionist movement,” and aligning themselves with Defend
the Atlanta Forest by “occupying a tree house while wearing a gas mask
and camouflage clothing.”
It is for good reason that leftists, myself included, have
challenged the expansion of anti-terror laws in the wake of the January 6
Capitol riots or other
white supremacist attacks. Terrorism laws operate to name the state and
capital’s ideological enemies; they will be reliably used against
anti-capitalists, leftists, and Black liberationists more readily than
white supremacist extremists with deep ties to law enforcement and the
Republican right.
Since its passage in 2017, the Georgia domestic terrorism law has not
resulted in a single conviction. As such, there has been no occasion to
challenge the law’s questionable constitutionality. Chris Bruce, policy
director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “the statute establishes overly
broad, far-reaching limitations that restrict public dissent of the
government and criminalizes violators with severe and excessive
penalties.” He said of the forest defender terror charges that they are
“wholly inapposite at worst and flimsy at best.”
“The state is attempting to innovate new repressive prosecution, and I
think ultimately that will fail for them,” Sara, a 32-year-old service
worker who lives by the imperiled forest and has been part of Stop Cop
City since the movement began, told me.
HuffPo | Hillary Clinton will deliver a major speech on criminal justice
reform Wednesday, calling for fundamental changes to how the United
States punishes its citizens and an end to a system that
disproportionately targets black men.
Clinton is scheduled to keynote
the 18th Annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum at
Columbia University Wednesday morning. It will be her most significant
policy address since she launched her 2016 presidential bid this month.
Clinton
will lay out her vision for criminal justice reform, centering around
an "end to the era of mass incarceration," according to an aide who
provided a preview of her remarks. Those changes include addressing
probation and drug diversion programs, increasing support for mental
health and drug treatment and pursuing alternative punishments for
low-level offenders.
She also will call for body cameras for every police department in
order to increase transparency and accountability in a way that benefits
both officers and members of the public.
In a December speech to the Massachusetts Conference for Women, Clinton said the country needed to look at "hard truths" about racial injustice in the current system.
During a fundraising event in New York City Tuesday, Clinton addressed the tensions in Baltimore, which is still reeling from the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died after sustaining injuries while in police custody.
“It
is heartbreaking,” Clinton said. “The tragic death of another young
African-American man. The injuries to police officers. The burning of
peoples’ homes and small businesses. We have to restore order and
security. But then we have to take a hard look as to what we need to do
to reform our system.”
Clinton will also make additional comments about Baltimore on Wednesday.
Clinton's
rhetoric on criminal justice has changed significantly since the 1990s,
when she was first lady and when President Bill Clinton signed a
massive 1994 crime bill into law. At the time, many politicians in both
parties -- including Clinton herself -- were pushing for more prisons and stricter sentencing laws.
Independent | World leaders have called for an end to the criminalisation of drugs.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy's annual report advocates the removal of both civil and criminal penalties for drug use and possession.
Prohibition of drugs has had "little or no impact" on the rate of
drug use, the report says, with the number of drug users increasing by
almost 20 per cent between 2006 and 2013 to 246 million people.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy panel includes former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, British businessman Richard Branson and the former presidents of Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.
The report warns prohibition of drugs fuels mass incarceration and
executions in contravention of international law and drives human rights
abuses by those who supply drugs.
It cites examples of successful decriminalisation policies, offering
Portugal as the best example, which replaced criminal sanctions for drug
use with civil penalties and health interventions 15 years ago.
The Committee also denounces the "barbaric actions" of Philippino
President Rodrigo Duterte, who calls on the public to execute those
involved in the drugs trade. More than 3,600 people were killed during Mr Duterte's first 100 days in office as part of his brutal crackdown on drugs. Fist tap Big Don.
ips-dc | Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of
being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than
other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor
drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all
result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the
multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the “criminalization of poverty.”
In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public
assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to
systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance.
This form of criminalizing poverty — racial profiling or
the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access
public assistance — is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known
known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization
of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of
Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get
out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life
possible.
In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the
true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we
examine are:
the targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors,
and the resurgence of debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of people
unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees;
mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent
offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once
they have served their sentences;
excessive punishment of poor children that creates a “school-to-prison pipeline”;
increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the
homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping
in public when no shelter is available; and
confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through “civil asset forfeiture.”
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...