Giroux: We celebrate violence in the name of security and violate every precept of human justice through an appeal to fear. This speaks clearly to a form of political repression and a toxic value system.
Without us the prisons, which are slave empires, cannot function. Prisons, at the same time, charge us a variety of fees, such as for our identification cards or wrist bracelets, and [impose] numerous fines, especially for possession of contraband. They charge us high phone and commissary prices. Prisons each year are taking larger and larger sums of money from the inmates and their families. The state gets from us millions of dollars in free labor and then imposes fees and fines. You have brothers that work in kitchens 12 to 15 hours a day and have done this for years and have never been paid.”
Kolhatkar: Such police responses to the burgeoning anti-brutality movement are part of a concerted campaign to maintain support for the status quo. That status quo has been in place since the end of slavery: Poor communities, especially communities of color, are expected to submit to the authority of the police state.
Hedges: “We have to shut down the system,” said Gale Muhammad, another speaker and the founder and CEO of Women Who Never Give Up. “All the companies that use prison labor have to be boycotted. And we can’t stop there. We have to boycott the vending machines in the prisons and the phone companies. We have to stop spending our money. Until we hit them in the pocket they won’t listen.”
Palast: It took six months for my investigations team, in coordination with Al-Jazeera America, to get its hands on the names of those tagged for the voting rights slaughter.
"Other Christians worked for abolition, so all this support for enslavement was not intrinsic to Christianity; it was a matter of a particular interpretation of Christianity. Slavery was widespread in the world, but Southern American plantation slavery was called the ‘peculiar institution’ for a reason– much slavery elsewhere was household slavery, as in most of the Muslim world. It was no fun to be someone’s property in a household either, but plantations (and this was true of Brazilian plantations as well) were particularly deadly, often killing the workers by age 40."
The decision not to indict Eric Garner's killer is just the latest story in a long history of violence against black men. What response can disrupt patterns set by centuries of racism? By Fania Davis Yes! Magazine December 3, 2014 Fania Davis. YES! photo by Lane Hartwell. I am among the millions who have experienced More
[youtube=http://youtu.be/ckr3y0PLiEc] democracynow Published on Nov 8, 2013 http://www.democracynow.org - For decades, members of many American Indian communities have called on the Washington Redskins football team to change its name, which is based on a racial slur. Now the pressure has reached a new heights. On Thursday night, nearly a thousand Native Americans and their allies protested outside More
The only cancer, in my opinion, is the prevailing culture . . . Dennis Trainor, Jr. July 15, 2013 Acronym TV I can’t say I was surprised at the verdict. Because, to apply the famous words of George Zimmerman, "these assholes always get away." There is a lot of blame to go around for More
The only cancer, in my opinion, is the prevailing culture . . . Dennis Trainor, Jr. July 15, 2013 Acronym TV I can’t say I was surprised at the verdict. Because, to apply the famous words of George Zimmerman, "these assholes always get away." There is a lot of blame to go around for More
Israeli Army Social Media Guru Poses as Obama in Brownface By B&B blog team - Thu, 2012-11-22 15:33- Boxes & Briefs english.al-akhbar.com Thanks for the Iron Dome, Darkie. You probably thought 'dome' meant mosque, Hussein Obama. Lol. For all its high-tech industries and self-promotion as a western-style democracy, Israeli public officials apparently still enjoy forms of entertainment More
