DdC

Which justice system do we get?
DWR: Pete Guither

Glenn Greenwald is one of the most important writers in America today, and if you don’t follow him regularly, you’re missing out. Although politically he’s often considered on the “Left,” the civil liberties issues he covers are, like the drug war, not so much “Right” vs. “Left” as they are right vs. wrong. He believes in liberty and justice for all and will take on anyone who perverts that standard, regardless of the letter following their name.

He had a post a few days ago discussing The two-tiered justice system – “the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system.”

It’s quite compelling, and in a companion video, filmed by the ACLU of Massachusetts, he takes you down the path that has created this two-tiered system, from the pardon of Richard Nixon all the way to the telecom immunity, the lack of torture investigations, and the lack of prosecutions in the financial crisis…



And when you juxtipose that full scale immunity with the fact that America has the world’s largest and most oppressive penal state, where ordinary Americans are subjected to the harshest punishment for the pettiest and most trivial of crimes — that don’t really trigger imprisonment anywhere else — and the incredibly harsh conditions of those prisons, what we really have is exactly what the founders said was the most threatening to freedom, which is, not equal treatment under the law, but a completely distinct and separate justice system based on one’s status and power.

We cannot forget that the drug war is specifically tied to that two-tiered justice system. We cannot be a truly free nation if people who commit torture are given a free pass while those who grow cannabis are sent away for decades.



Concepts that need to be staked through the heart and placed six feet underground

Central America – another victim of the U.S. drug war



A multi-tiered justice system
Servetus: April 17, 2011

A multi-tiered justice system is a better description of American policies than ‘two-tiered’. People are always treated differently by the law based on who they are.

Adults get different treatment compared to children or teenagers. Men are treated differently from women. Celebrities get special toleration, including lawyer dream teams if the charges are serious enough. White collar versus blue collar crime and the punishments it engenders have been an issue forever. Then there are the race issues and slavery and so forth.

Unequal treatment under the law predates Ford’s pardon of Nixon by a long shot. One example is the 1934 Business Plot where none of the conspirators were charged due to an alleged lack of evidence. The Business Plot included Prescott Bush as one of the proto-fascist American businessmen attempting to overthrow FDR and the U.S. government. In another example, the Haymarket Square killings are famous for having made a legal distinction between corporatists and union laborers: one goes free, the other lies bleeding to death on a street from bullet wounds.

Juridical progress is achieved in many of these cases when legal disparities are reduced or eliminated. As the Greenwald article suggests, legal disparities for Americans are currently increasing as each opportunity for their expansion is encountered. Legal progress is in retreat. Drug laws have played a major role in jacking up the stakes. Stark zombie conformists are rewarded, the upper classes presume noblesse oblige, while those under lesser circumstances, guilty of little more than having adventurous, freed minds, are punished. This is the essential nature of oppression.



november.org

Federal Good Time Making the News
Wall Street Journal reviews documents
"—Increasing the amount of time deducted from prison terms for good behavior, which would immediately qualify some 4,000 federal convicts for release, and another 4,000 over the next 10 years." Read the article and commentary at the Wall St. Journal.

Fairness in that Sentencing Act
Washington Post has a February 2011 Editorial in support of crack retroactivity.

The US Sentencing Commission closed public commentary on proposed amendments on March 21, 2011. Read the Commission's Analysis of the Impact of the Fair Sentencing Act if made retroactive (2011).


The Exile Nation Project
A film by Charles Shaw and an oral History of the War on Drugs & The American Criminal Justice System Featuring: Christian Parenti, Eric Sterling, Mark Kleiman, Ph.D, Sanho Tree, Judge James P. Gray, Ethan Nadelmann, Anthony Papa, John Sinclair, Nora Callahan, Chuck Armsbury, Amy Povah Ralston, Lynette Shaw, Scott Imler, Kyle Kazan, Julie Holland, M.D., Aaron Blackledge, M.D., Randolph Hencken, Stephen Dubov, Steve Costello, Dorothy Johnson-Speight, Alexis Wilson Briggs, Dimitri Mobengo Mugianis ...and more.

CN BC: Grandmother Arrested In Drug Raid

Woman starts her 10-year prison sentence
A 25-year-old mother of four arrives at Taft correctional facility to serve her time for selling $31 of marijuana


Patricia Spottedcrow carries her mattress and belongings to her dorm-style building inside Dr. Eddie Warrior Correctional Center on the first day of her incarceration at the facility. Spottedcrow received a 10-year prison sentence for selling a small amount of marijuana to a police informant with her children present in Kingfisher, Okla. Spottedcrow, a mother of four, had no prior criminal record.

Why Oklahoma leads the nation
For 14 of the past 15 years, Oklahoma has locked up more women per capita than any other state. More than 65 percent of the women in prison were convicted of nonviolent crimes and more than 85 percent leave behind children, whose care becomes the responsibility of a family member or the state. Taxpayers also pay a high price, as the cost of the operating the state's prison system has increased from $188 million in 1995 to more than $450 million. A bill to address the issue has passed the state House and is headed to the state Senate.

Stealing America: Vote By Vote

Did You Know?Felon Loss of Voting Rights

Did you know that nearly 1 in 40 people in the US voting population are barred from voting due to criminal convictions? Read about it on felonvoting.procon.o rg, part of the ProCon.org family.

Slavery: Another Fine Product Still Made in the USA!
SLAVERY IS STILL LEGAL in the USA. Contrary to what we may learn in school, the American Civil War did not see the complete abolition of slavery in 1865. The 13th Amendment to their constitution reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime..."

Great numbers of newly freed blacks were quickly 'convicted' and forced to work without pay in state prisons. For those unfortunates all that happened was that ownership of slaves transferred from private parties to the state. Today, with the advent of private, profit-making prisons and prison factories slavery still exists and is moving back to the private sector.

UNICOR operates 90 prison factories and is rapidly expanding. San Quentin inmates enter computer data for the Bank of America. Prisoners in New Mexico take hotel reservations by phone. Hawaiian convicts pack golf balls and at Folsom they manufacture stainless steel vats for beer brewers. The list goes on and on.

Slave Labor Means Big Bucks For U.S. Corporations
At the same time, the United States blasts China for the the use of prison slave labor, engaging in the same practice itself. Prison labor is a pot of gold. No strikes, union organizing, health benefits, unemployment insurance or workers' compensation to pay. As if exploiting the labor of prison inmates was not bad enough, it is legal in the United States to use slave labor. The 13th Amendment of the Constitution states that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States."

YouTube Comedian Gets Two Months In Prison
After Appearing To Sing Dirty Sex Song To Kids

mpp.org

"Marijuana is the drug that should most clearly be brought into a system of regulation and taxation. It is less dangerous than drugs like alcohol and tobacco as far as addiction and death. Regulation and taxation would provide greater control over purity, potency labeling, health warnings and age restrictions then the ineffective current 'war on marijuana' approach."
— Ralph Nader


Medical Marijuana Journey for Justice, Ohio,1997

Angela Davis on the Prison Abolishment Movement



The Prison Abolishment Movement
Angela Davis - DN-2010 * vodpod archive



Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

YouTube - Angela Davis discusses Prison Industrial Complex
Angela Davis discusses Prison Industrial Complex



Perfectly legal by David Cay Johnston
The covert campaign to rig our tax system
to benefit the super rich-- and cheat everybody else.

The Wrecking Crew, on How Conservatives Rule
“Fantastic misgovernment of the kind we have seen is not an accident, nor is it the work of a few bad individuals. It is the consequence of triumph by a particular philosophy of government, by a movement that understands the liberal state as a perversion and considers the market the ideal nexus of human society. This movement is friendly to industry not just by force of campaign contributions but by conviction.”



Authoritarians
"A tiny portion of the population controls the lion's share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse.

The ruling class is the politically active component of the owning class, the top captains of finance and policy who set the standards for investment and concentration of capital at home and abroad...

Their overall economic domination and their campaign contributions, media monopoly, high-paid lobbyists, and public relations experts regularly predetermine who will be treated as major political candidates and which policy parameters will prevail... Though relatively few in number they get the most of what there is to get. Their wealth serves their power, and their power serves their wealth."
~ Michael Parenti

Quotations by Michael Parenti

Books for Michael Parenti google

Books by Michael Parenti thirdworldtraveler

Blackshirts & Reds: rational fascism & the overthrow of communism

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
~ Michael Parenti



A People's History of the United States By Howard Zinn

Bushit Rumcheney Cocktail:Fascist Nationalism and MKULTRA

The Drug Czar is Required by Law to Lie
Most people know that the “drug czar” — the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) — is an advocate for the government position regarding the drug war. But not everyone knows that he and his office are mandated to tell lies as part of their Congressional authorization.

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”
- G.K. Chesterton

Kompressor

__________________
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought. -H. Bergson

DdC