Prison Profits

“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws…” -Corrections Corporation of America, in their annual report. Chris Hedges excoriates the company and its… Continue reading Prison Profits

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy. In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

-Ann Jones, writing from Afghanistan.

So given this extreme human suffering and repression imposed by the Saudi monarchy in multiple countries, what should the US – the Leader of the Free World and the self-proclaimed Deliverer of Freedom and Democracy – do? To Riedel, the answer is obvious: work even harder, do even more, to strengthen the Saudi regime as well as the neighboring tyrannies in order to crush the “Arab Awakenings” and ensure that democratic revolution cannot succeed in those nations.

-Greenwald skewers another

Life After Death

Egalitarians must work to take over the Democratic party as the Tea Party has recently taken over the Republicans. Action in the streets will lead the way, but we must have electoral strength to make our leaders follow through with the changes we demand.

The Department of Homeland Security flagged him as a potential threat when he posted an excited tweet to his pals about his forthcoming trip to Hollywood which read: ‘Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?’

Mr Bryan told security officials that ‘destroy’ is slang for party in the UK, but that was not enough to convince them.

The Daily Mail

“Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality. It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.”

-Harvard sociologist Martin K. Whyte, who may as well have been talking about Americans, as quoted in the New York Times.

How do you break through the inertia, fear of embarrassment, isolation and aversion to doing anything different that surrounds most middle-class Americans like a moat?

Gary Kamiya on the needed ad campaign to swell the ranks of Occupy Wall Street, and why the Situationists are the people for the job