“Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little.”—“Rough Justice in America,” The Economist
Why are we seeing such an uptick in Americans being arrested for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room?
Mind you, we’re not talking tickets or fines or even warnings being issued to these so-called “lawbreakers.” We’re talking felony charges, handcuffs, police cars, mug shots, pat downs, jail cells and criminal records.
Consider what happened to Nicole Gainey, the Florida mom who was arrested and charged with child neglect for allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house.
For the so-called “crime” of allowing her son to play at the park unsupervised, Gainey was interrogated, arrested and handcuffed in front of her son, and transported to the local jail where she was physically searched, fingerprinted, photographed and held for seven hours and then forced to pay almost $4,000 in bond in order to return to her family. Gainey’s family and friends were subsequently questioned by the Dept. of Child Services. Gainey now faces a third-degree criminal felony charge that carries with it a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail.
For Denise Stewart, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether or not she had done anything wrong, was sufficient to get her arrested.
The 48-year-old New York grandmother was dragged half-naked out of her apartment and handcuffed after police mistakenly raided her home when responding to a domestic disturbance call. Although it turns out the 911 call came from a different apartment on a different floor, Stewart is still facing charges of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.
And then there are those equally unfortunate individuals who unknowingly break laws they never even knew existed. John Yates is such a person. A commercial fisherman, Yates was sentenced to 30 days in prison and three years of supervised release for throwing back into the water some small fish which did not meet the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission’s size restrictions. Incredibly, Yates was charged with violating a document shredding provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was intended to prevent another Enron scandal.
The list of individuals who have suffered similar injustices at the hands of a runaway legal system is growing, ranging from the orchid grower jailed for improper paperwork and the lobstermen charged with importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes to the former science teacher labeled a federal criminal for digging for arrowheads in his favorite campsite.
As awful as these incidents are, however, it’s not enough to simply write them off as part of the national trend towards overcriminalization—although it is certainly that. Thanks to an overabundance of 4,500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it.
Nor can we just chalk them up as yet another symptom of an overzealous police state in which militarized police attack first and ask questions later—although it is that, too.
Nor is the problem that we’re a crime-ridden society. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The number of violent crimes in the country is down substantially, the lowest rate in 40 years, while the number of Americans being jailed for nonviolent crimes, such as driving with a suspended license, are skyrocketing.
So what’s really behind this drive to label Americans as criminals?
As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail. When you dig down far enough, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being arrested are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons and equipment used by police, build and run the prisons, and profit from the cheap prison labor.
Talk about a financial incentive.
First, there’s the whole make-work scheme. In the absence of crime, in order to keep the police and their related agencies employed, occupied, and utilizing the many militarized “toys” passed along by the Department of Homeland Security, one must invent new crimes—overcriminalization—and new criminals to be spied on, targeted, tracked, raided, arrested, prosecuted and jailed. Enter the police state.
Second, there’s the profit-incentive for states to lock up large numbers of Americans in private prisons. Just as police departments have quotas for how many tickets are issued and arrests made per month—a number tied directly to revenue—states now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and the GEO Group, ostensibly as a way to save money, increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full. No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world.
But what do you do when you’ve contracted to keep your prisons full but crime rates are falling? Easy. You create new categories of crime and render otherwise law-abiding Americans criminals. Notice how we keep coming full circle back to the point where it’s average Americans like you and me being targeted and turned into enemies of the state?
That brings me to the third factor contributing to Americans being arrested, charged with outrageous “crimes,” and jailed: the Corporate State’s need for profit and cheap labor. Not content to just lock up millions of people, corporations have also turned prisoners into forced laborers.
According to professors Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, “All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.” Tens of thousands of inmates in U.S. prisons are making all sorts of products, from processing agricultural products like milk and beef, to packaging Starbucks coffee, to shrink-wrapping software for companies like Microsoft, to sewing lingerie for Victoria’s Secret.
What some Americans may not have realized, however, is that America’s economy has come to depend in large part on prison labor. “Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald’s uniforms are sewn by inmates. Other corporations—Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, Motorola, Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart—also benefit from prison labor.” The resulting prison labor industries, which rely on cheap, almost free labor, are doing as much to put the average American out of work as the outsourcing of jobs to China and India.
No wonder America is criminalizing mundane activities, arresting Americans for minor violations, and locking them up for long stretches of time. There’s a significant amount of money being made by the police, the courts, the prisons, and the corporations.
What we’re witnessing is the expansion of corrupt government power in the form of corporate partnerships which both increase the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix, with potentially deadly consequences.
This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits is now the prevailing form of organization in American society today. We are not a nation dominated by corporations, nor are we a nation dominated by government. We are a nation dominated by corporations and government together, in partnership, against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms.
If it sounds at all conspiratorial, the idea that a government would jail its citizens so corporations can make a profit, then you don’t know your history very well. It has been well documented that Nazi Germany forced inmates into concentration camps such as Auschwitz to provide cheap labor to BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other major German chemical and pharmaceutical companies, much of it to produce products for European countries.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, whether what we are experiencing right now is fascism, American style, or Auschwitz revisited?
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book “The Freedom Wars” (TRI Press) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
9/7: On Expanding Minds, hosts Maja D’Aoust and Erik Davis have a conversation with Andy Sharp of English Heretic about death, Horror films, Hiroshima, psychogeography, and his latest release, The Underworld Service.
9/8: R.U. Sirius joins hosts Chris Dancy and Klint Finley to discuss technology transhumanism, and the current social/political climate among other topics.
9/9: Peter Null interviews Professor Andrew Kolin, a professor of political science at Hilbert College in Hamburg and Kevin Carson, researcher at the Center for a Stateless Society, on militarization of police, centralization of power, war and the military-industrial complex.
9/11: Christopher Knowles joins Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio to examine how Gnosticism connects to alternative cultures, politics and humanity’s existential crisis.
9/12: On New World Next Week, James Corbett and James Evan Pilato report on 9/11 terror hysteria, Obama’s private CFR event with Sandy Berger (9/11 document thief) and the cryptocurrency/anti-surveillance potential of a new off-the-grid communications technology.
7/12: Host Douglas Lain has a freewheeling discussion with Steven Michalkow connecting an odd episode of Columbo with psychoanalysis, theology, philosophy, surrealism, “The Prisoner” TV series and beyond:
7/13: On Expanding Minds, author Mitch Horowitz discusses the history of positive thinking, William James and the modern skeptic movement among other related topics:
7/14: On The Progressive Commentary Hour retired US Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson discusses parallels between the build up to war with Syria and build up to the invasion of Iraq followed by Dr. Douglas Hall, Executive Director of National Priorities Project, who discusses the backwards priorities of the federal budget.
7/15: Guillermo Jimenez and Danny Benavides tackle the immigration issue and the escalating “humanitarian crisis” along the US-Mexico border on Traces of Reality Radio:
Since 2011 the US has not only continued “losing” its war on drugs while militarizing so called anti-drug police forces throughout Central America (not unlike the secret dirty wars of yesteryear), during this exact same time period murderous violence in Central America has skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, since 2011 simultaneous effects from US foreign policy in the region have only promoted more drug trafficking as well as child trafficking in the form of the massive proliferation of children from Central America (currently 73% from Central America while just 25% are now coming from Mexico) crossing the Mexican border into the US unaccompanied by adults. Just five years ago these percentages were nearly reversed when only 17% of unaccompanied minors originated in Central America and 82% were from Mexico. These four co-occurring developments, the US militarization of the region, nonstop increasing flow of drugs into US, the intensifying, out of control drug cartel-gang violence and influx of young children pouring into the US are all interconnected and intentionally driven by US foreign policy. Either by calculated design or minimally by complicity, America has thousands and thousands of children crossing our border.
None of these phenomena deviate in the least from the oligarch-US-EU-NATO global agenda to destabilize all nations throughout every region on earth through a unified, consistent policy of militarization and globalization that in turn lead directly to political destabilization, racial and class warfare, economic impoverishment, increased violence, war, civil breakdown and ultimate societal and national collapse. This then further creates undermining crises conditions ripe for predatory world bank-IMF loans that cause national bankruptcy and extreme economic hardship accompanied by a full frontal assault unimpeded by transnational corporations to systematically move in for the kill, raping, pillaging, plundering and privatizing every nation on the planet.
The agenda to “balkanize” as in the West’s 1990’s model of breaking up Yugoslavia into 13 small ineffectual, defenseless pieces is currently being executed in Iraq with the formation of three separate states controlled by the Kurds in the north and the Sunni and Shiite sections dividing the rest of the country. Again, this formulaic divide and conquer strategy has proven 100% effective in weakening each nation and region’s sovereignty and autonomy that in turn facilitate and maximize exploitation, ensuring ultimate materialization of the oligarchs’ New World Order agenda.
This parallel process is unfolding in both Latin America and the US. The CIA controls and manages global drug smuggling from the Afghan poppy fields to the coca plantations run by Central-South American-Mexican drug cartels that supply and feed the constant demand for illicit drugs into both North America as well as Europe. Worldwide drug distribution operates under the convenient cover of the tax funded US war on drugs just like the tax funded US war on terror. They are designed to continue on indefinitely as the long as the US government is able to persist in getting away with this global theft, death and destruction on such an unparalleled, unprecedented, monumental scale.
Ever since the Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980’s when CIA got caught red-handed running drugs for guns during the Reagan years, and financing, arming, and training death squad commandos throughout Central America, the US government has always played an integral and active role in covert drug smuggling operations generating over the decades trillions in drug money revenue laundered through the central banking cabal. San Jose Mercury journalist Gary Webb exposed their “Dark Alliance” operations and paid for it with his life in December 2004. That is how powerful and heavily invested the US government is through its CIA cover in the international drug trade.
The fact remains that to this day, the CIA meets regularly with informants and representatives from selected Latin American drug cartels, making deals to gain incriminating information on rival cartels while assuring favored ones a free pass of drugs entering North America (an example is using the Sinaloa cartel to get to the Juarez cartel). Numerous inside US government officials including current Secretary of State (then Senator) John Kerry, and both CIA as well as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) whistleblowers, corroborated further by various Mexican government officials and high ranking cartel players all admit how the CIA manages the highly lucrative international drug smuggling business. In fact, El Universal reports that more than 2,000 US officials that include Border Patrol agents, police officers among other agency officials are currently being investigated this year for their ties to organized crime, proving widespread grand scale corruption. Thus, despite common knowledge that the so called war on drugs is a complete and utter failure as defined by its abysmal record in actual interdiction and cutoff of any drug flow into America, with inside US assistance, the prolonged war on drugs has only steadily increased the narco supply during the four plus decades since Nixon declared war on drugs way back in 1971.
That is why President Obama calling upon Congress last week to implement the same policy toward unaccompanied children from Central America as those from Mexico is a hypocritically disingenuous way to sweep what he himself calls “a humanitarian crisis” swiftly and conveniently under the rug by making their deportation instantaneous after a brief Border Patrol interview. Obama knows full well why since last October 52,000 kids mostly from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have been showing up at our doorstep in droves in recent months. In a joint press conference with the Costa Rican president during a brief visit to the Central American country in May 2013, President Obama made the statement:
“But we also have to recognize that problems like narco-trafficking arise in part when a country is vulnerable because of poverty, because of institutions that are not working for the people, because young people don’t see a brighter future ahead.”
Obama understands the plain and simple truth very well – Central America’s weak and corrupt governments that the US supports cannot protect the children from the rampant murder and rape that befall this young, most defenseless population. Desperate parents wanting to protect their children from death are sending them to seek political asylum even in such poor neighboring nations as Nicaragua as well as Belize, Mexico, Panama and Costa Rica also in record numbers (rising by 712 percent). The spiked violence in their own countries has them not just swarming to the US but seeking safety in any and all surrounding nations throughout the region. Their arrival in America has nothing to do with sponging off US social services or gaining an economic advantage as some would have the American public believe.
With 52,000 already in the US, a projected 90,000 children are expected for the fiscal 2014 year. Because the bulk of the migrant kids have been apprehended at the eastern Mexico-Texas Rio Grande border, quickly overwhelming the facilities there, busloads and planeloads of thousands of children have been transported to Arizona and most recently California. Initial reports from the facility in Nogales, Arizona raised humanitarian issues of overcrowding. The Border Patrol has not allowed media inside the facility. Vehement protests in Murrieta, California where the three California planeloads were originally scheduled had to be re-routed to San Diego. Many of the children in these groups now in San Diego already have adult sponsors or family members. Others will need local housing.
Meanwhile, during the last decade that the US has funded the militarization of Latin American security forces, violence in Mexico and Central America has increased exponentially, at times committed by the security forces themselves, not just by the criminal thugs from drug cartels. Human rights violations perpetrated by both the cartels as well as the government security forces are reminiscent of the dirty secret civil wars of the 1980’s. In short, US funded militarization dating back to the Bush regime has only inflicted substantial collateral damage on the civilian populations and neither diminished the drug cartel empires nor diminished the flow of drug trafficking into the US. Under Obama’s watch, well over $2.5 billion US tax dollars were allocated for beefing up Latin American security forces. The bottom line is that the corrupt governments from Mexico and Central America are too often colluding with the drug cartels, which in turn do business covertly with various US governmental agencies. The result – enormous US tax waste, financial malfeasance, increasingly unsafe drug war zones in Latin America and uninterrupted drug flow passage into North America.
Incredibly in the face of glaring evidence of policy failure and the bloodbath spillage of increasing violence and terror in Mexico and Central America that is the direct result, the State Department’s head of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, William Brownfield, recently told the Associated Press that “the bloodshed tends to occur and increase when these trafficking organizations…come under some degree of pressure.” More boldface government lies in a feeble and vain effort to justify US caused death and destruction.
Current immigration laws distinguish between the policy for handling unaccompanied Mexican children at the US border and unaccompanied children from other nations. Standing protocol has children from Mexico interviewed by a Border Patrol agent to discern if grounds for potential political asylum are present. If the interviewer concludes that conditions are not met, the child is then deported back to Mexico immediately. Last week Obama requested that Congress make the policy for handling the children from Central America the same as Mexico’s, which would rescind current existing laws voted into place during the Bush administration specifically designed to protect potential asylum seeking youth from other countries. After taking lots of flack and criticism for his rigidly harsh and hypocritical stand all week, today Obama backed down away from that hard-line position. Instead, the White House announced today that the current children in federal custody from Central America will be processed under existing law and given due process that ensures the children will be granted opportunity for an immigration hearing that might lead to legal asylum. However in a seemingly hollow, face saving gesture, it was also announced today that “most of the children will be deported.” And Obama aims still to expedite legislation for removal of all future undocumented children at the border regardless of their national origin or danger at home.
Also $2 billion in additional emergency funding was requested this week to deal with the growing crisis. The funding will be allocated for more immigration judges along with legal aid and detainment facilities to provide adequate housing and care for the children.
Public announcements in Central America are already being aired on television in attempt to dissuade parents from sending their children to the US. Yet that may be a hard sell when parents observe their children already in the US being allowed to stay in America, especially when other family members already are living in America.
Many Americans who have never experienced the dangerously dire conditions that families in Central American nations face every single day cannot possibly grasp how parents can be so “coldhearted” as to ship their children away. But it is all relative. Their option of trying to keep their kids safe in their own country is simply weaker than the calculated risk involved in sending them 1500 miles or more north to America to face an unknown, uncertain future there.
Two reputable investigations found that a high percentage of the children meet the necessary criteria to qualify for political asylum. The United Nations agency, the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), assessed 404 young people who left Latin America and found that 58 percent of the minors were seeking international asylum because their own nations failed to protect them. A 2012 report from the Vera Institute determined that at least 40 percent warranted consideration for asylum. With the worsening conditions in Central America just in the last two years, that percentage would undoubtedly be higher now. A look at current life conditions in the children’s homelands of these three “Northern Triangle” Central American nations might shed light to explain why parents in desperation are so willing to send their offspring to far away foreign lands.
Displacement of families in Central America due to systematic criminal violence and extortion by drug cartels and local gangs are extremely commonplace. So is murder. The murder rates in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have skyrocketed, largely due to oppressive national security forces as well as highly organized street gangs and very powerful drug cartels. All are murdering innocent people at will. In Mexico alone since 2006, the war on drugs has killed150,000 people. Known as the murder capital of the world, Honduras has 85 to 91 killings per 100,000 people and a daily rate of 19 murders a day. Out of the 52,000 unaccompanied children at the border since last October, over 15,000 are from Honduras.
After the military coup in 2009, trafficking gangs diverted their weapons and narco-routes from South America through Honduras into Mexico. An estimated three-quarters of all US-bound cocaine passes through Honduras. Two out of three people in the country live in poverty. The two transnational gangs imported from California prisons – Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs compete in turf wars and control the cities. Gang members recruit children as young as kindergarteners. They will kill those young people who refuse to become members and will target “girlfriends” that are customarily raped by one or more members. Because 40% of the Honduran population is under 15 years of age, they are extremely vulnerable to being forced into violent and destructive gang life. This is the primary reason why parents send their children away seeking refuge in other safer countries.
El Salvador suffered from a US induced civil war from 1980 to 1992. Infamous death squads financed, armed and trained by US Special Operations forces murdered nearly 40,000 people. As a result, two million Salvadorans reside in the US, the third largest Hispanic group behind Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. This is another reason many families in El Salvador with relatives in the US are sending their children to America. And with the US policy re-militarizing El Salvador’s national security forces ostensibly to fight drug cartels and gangs, a reactivation of the ruthless killing of citizens en masse once again has become the norm. Elizabeth Kennedy, a Fulbright researcher working in the country, has stated that the current homicide rates are even more than during the civil war, and that assault, rape, disappearance and extortion are at higher rates than ever before. El Salvador murder rate ranks at number two in the world behind Honduras. Nearly 11,500 youth from El Salvador comprise the 52,000 children apprehended at the border.
Guatemala sustained a civil war from 1960 to 1996. For multiple generations war, violence and rape are all Guatemalans have known. Ethnic cleansing of Mayan Indians and mass murder over such a prolonged period has given rise to a lawless drug trafficking operation that is an organized crime syndicate. In 2012 this small nation incurred nearly 100 murders a week. Rape and teenage pregnancy are among the highest in the Northern Triangle. Nearly 13,000 of the 52,000 migrant children are from Guatemala.
Another high risk for children in central America is falling victims to human trafficking, prostitution, and child slavery that have become a major global problem. The regional crime syndicates not only traffic drugs but humans as well. Just from all these horrific, highly disturbing Central American statistics, young family members seeking safety and escape in other countries appears not only understandable but a prudent decision as well.
Extracted from the UN Commissioner report, 17-year old Alfonso offers the following compelling testimony:
“The problem was that where I studied there were lots of M-18 gang members, and where I lived was under control of the other gang, the MS-13. The M-18 gang thought I belonged to the MS-13. They had killed the two police officers who protected our school. They waited for me outside the school. It was a Friday, the week before Easter, and I was headed home. The gang told me that if I returned to school, I wouldn’t make it home alive. The gang had killed two kids I went to school with, and I thought I might be the next one. After that, I couldn’t even leave my neighborhood. They prohibited me. I know someone whom the gangs threatened this way. He didn’t take their threats seriously. They killed him in the park. He was wearing his school uniform. If I hadn’t had these problems, I wouldn’t have come here.”
Unfortunately the issue of so many children converging at the US border has been politicized (like everything else in Washington) and used as a hot potato weapon against any chance of passing much needed, long overdue immigration reform. And during an election year when politicians play it safe and focus exclusively on getting reelected, what to do with unwanted kids at the border has put the nail in the coffin. No attempt to even deal with such a volatile and divisive issue will be forthcoming from Congress and status quo inactivity only buys more time of business as usual deportations that continue breaking up thousands of immigrant families.
Since 2009 Obama, Homeland Security and the Border Patrol have teamed up with local law enforcement agencies throughout the US and began an accelerated and unprecedented campaign of deporting parents as undocumented immigrants, ruthlessly ripping families apart, creating orphans of their children as legal US born citizens. Obama removes illegal immigrants at nine times the rate of just twenty years ago, far more than any other president. Two million of the undocumented have in fact been removed already. Regardless of how long a person may be residing in America, and regardless of having a family here, being a law biding, productive citizen, it makes no difference. Victims of the US militarized police state are only being sent back to militarized Latin American police states funded and largely created by the US where the deported are frequently persecuted, tortured and murdered. The hardship and tragedy brought down on so many hardworking, taxpaying families are anything but humane and compassionate. But then American Empire aggression has never been humane and compassionate.
Another oligarch plan is to homogenize all regions of the earth through massive migrant immigration globally. This systematic leveling of the so called playing field between the developed Western world (North America and Europe) and the developing Third World is simply part of the plan leading to the New World Order. Hence, the globalized aggressive attack and disintegration of the middle class around the world is designed to lower the standard of living in the West, homogenizing a destabilized worldwide lower standard of living that will facilitate maximum control over a desperate, struggling global population. With this bigger picture in mind, current policies promoting mass migrant immigration perceived by the likely majority in the host nation as unwanted guests and an additional burden, in effect stirs up tension and conflict between ethnicities and classes, acting as more evidence of the divide and conquer tactic. By design, the present humanitarian crisis at the US border is US made.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a masters degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing.
Related Podcast: Peter Dale Scott covers CIA drug trafficking and the Deep State on “Guns and Butter” (7/9/14):
6/25: On the C-Realm podcast, KMO interviews Ed Whitfield, Hannah Jones and Gar Alperovitz, covering topics ranging from appropriate and inappropriate uses of private property, responsible investing and social progress. The podcast concludes with a conversation with Alixa and Naima of Climbing Poetree, who critique the Drug War and deliver a couple of excellent poems.
6/25: Catherine Austin Fitts discusses a wide array of issues (including: The Financial Coup d’Etat; Missing Money; Black Budget Funding of Private Corporate Projects; History and Organization of the Financial System since World War II; the Exchange Stabilization Fund Managed by the New York Fed; Digital Currencies and the Shadow Government) on the latest episode of Guns and Butter.
6/25: The author of “Confessions Of An Economic Hitman”, John Perkins, joins The Higherside Chats to talk about his newest book, “Hoodwinked” which traces how the tactics described in his earlier book has evolved since the 70′s and offers practical solutions to get society back on track.
6/25: On Red Ice Radio, host Henrik Palmgren has a conversation with David McGowan, author of “Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & The Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream”. They discuss the dark underbelly of the California counterculture scene of the late 60’s and early 70’s.
6/8: Hosts Mickey Huff and Peter Phillips discuss the ongoing situation in the Ukraine with Dr. Michael Parenti, Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, and former Congresswomen and Green Party Presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney on “the Project Censored Show”. All of them are contributors to a new book by Clarity Press edited by Stephen Lendman, “Flashpoint Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WWIII.”
6/9: On “the Progressive Commentary Hour”, host Gary Null interviews Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist and academician specializing in inflammatory bowel disease and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine or MMR. They discuss how the US government uses corporations and universities to support policies, silence top scientists, jeopardize public health and protect corporate profits.
6/10: On “the Higherside Chats”, Adam Gorightly and Vyzygoth joins host Greg Carlwood for a freewheeling but illuminating conversation about the suppressed history of the United States hidden beneath lies and disinformation most have been led to believe.
6/12: KMO talks with Vincent Horn of Buddhist Geeks on the lastest C-Realm podcast. They discuss the use of mindfulness techniques in technological society and its connection to DIY, Quanitifed Self and Maker movements. KMO wraps up with commentary on the nature of individualism and community.
Occupy activist Cecily McMillan, convicted on May 5 of second-degree felony assault of a New York cop whom she and witnesses claimed had grabbed her breast from behind, bruising it, stood her ground before her sentence was rendered, refusing the judge’s insistence that she should “take responsibility for her conduct.”
Risking the possibility that Judge Ronald Zwiebel might sentence her to the maximum seven years for the charge she was convicted of, McMillan would only apologize for what she termed “the accident” of involuntarily throwing back her elbow when grabbed by behind from someone she could not even see. Insisting to the judge that she lived in accordance to the “law of love,” she said, in her pre-sentencing statement, “Violence is not permitted. This being the law that I live by, I can say with certainty that I am innocent of the crime I have been convicted of… I cannot confess to a crime that I did not commit. I cannot throw away my dignity in return for my freedom.”
It was a bold and risky stand for the 25-year-old New School for Social Research graduate student to take, given the high sentencing stakes. In the end, though, the judge, — who during the trial had blocked her defense from presenting key evidence that she had acted in her own defense against being groped by a cop (for example the police officer’s record of brutality and corruption), while allowing the prosecution to present evidence and statements normally not considered permissible in a trial (such as presenting to the jury evidence about an arrest of McMillan that had not yet been tried or adjudicated) — sentenced her to only a short term in jail.
She still has a five-year felony probationary sentence, which leaves her a convicted felon, a serious impediment to employment, and one that could leave her subject to limitations on her freedom of movement for five years.
McMillan’s many supporters nonetheless hailed the short sentence, which could see her released in as little as 60 days, as a victory, one which many attributed to the massive outpouring of support she has received since her arrest, during her trial, and since especially since her conviction. That support has included a jailhouse visit by two members of Pussy Riot, who condemned her conviction and jailing, a letter of of support from the president of the New School, support from five members of the New York City Council (but so far not a word from New York City’s supposedly leftist and former activist Mayor Bill De Blasio), an online petition signed by over 167,000 people, and an unusual letter from nine of the 12 jurors in her case calling on the judge not to sentence her to any jail time.
McMillan’s attorney Martin Stolar, said he was “relieved” that her sentence was not two years, but also said that he had appealed the conviction to the state’s Court of Appeal.
The 5/14 episode of the “This Can’t Be Happening” podcast featuring McMillan’s attorney Martin Stolar and Lucy Parks, a member of her support team at JusticeforCecily.com, who provide more background about the case.
To mark the 15th anniversary of Columbine, featured below are a mindblowing trio of interviews with William K. Zabel from the Binnall of America podcast examining oddities surrounding the Columbine either ignored or suppressed by corporate media:
After the Crash 