Consciousness and Symbols

    From The Ramparts

Junious Ricardo Stanton

   

Picture of actual $100 bill from Confederate States of America

Consciousness and Symbols

 

            The murders in Charleston South Carolina have ripped the scab of US history off and laid bare the festering sores and oozing puss of the consciousness and psychopathology of white supremacy for the entire world to see. That dastardly act exposed the real America. With that act one of the symbols of white supremacy, the Confederate battle flag that flies over the capital of South Carolina has come under increased scrutiny. The rebel flag has long been a bone of contention and conflict between Africans in America and whites. For Black people, the flag represents one aspect of racial oppression, slavery, terrorism, murder and injustice. I say one aspect because on many occasions US terrorists like the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils also used the American flag as their rallying symbol!

From an accurate historical perspective, the Confederate battle flag is not the flag flown by the original Confederate States of America, the first seven states that separated from the Union: South Carolina (the first state to secede), Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  Later, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia withdrew from the Union and joined the Confederacy.

The Confederacy had several flags during its brief existence. The flag known as the rebel flag or the Confederate battle flag was not one of the series of Confederate flags adopted by the Confederate States of America. That battle flag was originally the flag of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia!

The rebel flag that flies over the South Carolina State capital was not an official symbol of the Confederate States of America! It became the symbol Southern resistance to the anti-apartheid movement also called “integration” during the twentieth century.  In recent years especially during the “Civil Rights” movement, that flag came to represent a consciousness of racial apartheid and animus, political subjugation, socio-economic caste and psychological terror. South Carolina US Senator Strom Thurman popularized that flag when he ran as a presidential candidate in 1948 as a Dixiecrat. During this time the Democrats controlled the South.

It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Southern whites abandoned the Democratic Party in mass and switched Republican. So in actuality the rebel flag is a modern symbol of white supremacy.

Now in light of the Charleston killings, defenders of that ethos are trying to obfuscate and revise American history. They are attempting to deflect the truth about the real meaning of the rebel flag. Since the killings I have read and seen articles and posts on YouTube claiming the War Between the States was not about slavery, that it was about “states rights”, tariffs and finance, that the rebel flag is merely a symbol of family history, tradition and regional pride! There were posts about Blacks owning slaves and African chiefs selling other Africans into slavery; anything to take the onus off of whites to prevent us from seeing not only the individual atrocities like Charleston South Carolina but the systemic holocausts white supremacy has wrought not only here in this country but around the world!

If there was ever any doubt about whether slavery was the central issue in the War Between the States, I’ve included a picture of a one hundred dollar bill from the Confederate States of America. Look at the images on the paper. This piece of evidence alone will reveal just how integral the institution of slavery was to the Confederate States of America and its economy. Yes there were issues of “states’ rights”, there were conflicting regional cultural practices and interests, differences in economic philosophy but never forget the fact both the North and South were united on racism and warmongering. Both the North and the South profited from slavery, it’s just the North’s economy was more diverse and did not depend mainly on agriculture as did the South. The Northern financial elites had a major grip on the flow of capital and more access to money than their Southern counterparts.

If you look at Western and modern world history you find Europeans love war. There is rarely a year that goes by they are not fighting, killing and plundering somewhere, even today. So from my perspective the issues of tariffs, the fugitive slave act, the expansion of slavery into the territories were just excuses for them to do what they love to do best, kill and maim each other and people of color.

Bloody Kansas between1853-1861 is an example where whites used violence to decide whether Kansas would be a “free” state or a “slave” State. Many define Bleeding Kansas as a precursor to the War Between the States. If that logic is correct then the War Between the States was about slavery!

Remember slavery was enshrined in the original US Constitution.  The original document that bound the former British colonies together was The Articles of Confederation. It said nothing about slavery from a policy standpoint and left it to the individual states to deal with the issue as they saw fit.  But delegates to a convention called in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation conspired to created a totally new document that would enshrine their class as the ruling elite in the more centralized government they created!  Since many of the delegates were slaveholders or profited from slavery in some form or other, slavery became a key issue in the new document called the Constitution of the Untied States of America.

 “A final major issue involving slavery confronted the delegates. Southern states wanted other states to return escaped slaves. The Articles of Confederation had not guaranteed this. But when Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, it a clause promising that slaves who escaped to the Northwest Territories would be returned to their owners. The delegates placed a similar fugitive slave clause in the Constitution. This was part of a deal with New England states. In exchange for the fugitive slave clause, the New England states got concessions on shipping and trade. These compromises on slavery had serious effects on the nation. The fugitive slave clause (enforced through legislation passed in 1793 and 1850) allowed escaped slaves to be chased into the North and caught. It also resulted in the illegal kidnapping and return to slavery of thousands of free blacks. The three-fifths compromise increased the South’s representation in Congress and the Electoral College. In 12 of the first 16 presidential elections, a Southern slave owner won. Extending the slave trade past 1800 brought many slaves to America. South Carolina alone imported 40,000 slaves between 1803 and 1808 (when Congress overwhelmingly voted to end the trade). So many slaves entered that slavery spilled into the Louisiana territory and took root.” The Constitution and Slavery http://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/the-constitution-and-slavery

Slavery (both European and African) was the driving force in both the colonial and US economies. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the US Constitution making it the law of the land! The roots of what we see/saw in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Ferguson Missouri, Baltimore Maryland and Charleston South Carolina recently go back to colonial America when the European monopoly trading companies and their administrators decided to augment their white slave labor force (indentured servants) with Africans. The profit motive “the top priority is the bottom line” of capitalism forged a brutal system that exploited the white bondsmen and African captives using them both as cheap labor. That tradition continued after the Revolutionary War and up until the War Between the States.

White and Black resistance to the colonial administrators abuses (Beacon’s Rebellion and others) forced the colonial governors to make concessions to the poor whites/indentured servants so they would not side with Native Americans and Africans against the elites. They used divide and rule to undermine Black and White unity. They “freed” the indentured servants, allowed them to call themselves “white” then gave them a modicum of “rights”, privileges and mobility they denied Native Americans and Africans.

Those divide and rule tactics have allowed the ruling elites to still remain in power and control from colonial times, through the transition to the United States to the present. This is why incidents like Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston happen! Don’t fall for the okey doke. The rebel flag is not the central issue. It is only a piece of material. The real issue is the consciousness and values behind it! As vile as what that flag represents is, taking it down is only a symbolic concession as long as the consciousness of white supremacy, white skin privilege and domination remain.

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The Charleston Shootings In Historical Perspective

From The Ramparts

Junious Ricardo Stanton

Charleston South Carolina in Historical Perspective

 

“There’s a long history to the Emanuel African Methodist Espiscopal Church in Charleston, S.C., — affectionately known as ‘Mother Emanuel’ where nine churchgoers were allegedly shot and killed by 21-year-old Dylann Roof on Wednesday night in what authorities are calling a hate crime. In fact, this church has become a revered symbol of black resistance to slavery and racism.” Denmark Vesey and The History of Charleston’s “Mother Emanuel” Church,  Kat Chow http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/18/415465656/denmark-vesey-and-the-history-of-charleston-s-mother-emanuel-church

The nation is reeling from the church shooting that killed nine Black folks in a Charleston South Carolina Church on June 17^th during a Bible study session. Some of the details seem fishy to me, nevertheless I suggest we look at this incident within a much larger context, that of the United States as a violent European settler nation. Within this context and the broader view of slavery, racial animus and oppression it’s not unusual that an incident like this happened.

Charles Town South Carolina was settled in 1670 (later renamed Charleston in 1783) by English immigrants mostly from Barbados. The Trans Atlantic Slave trade was already well established in Barbados in 1670 and the English settlers depended on African labor to reap huge profits in the Caribbean and North America especially when Europeans proved too weak to survive the grueling heat and pace especially on the Caribbean sugar plantations and North American rice fields. Africans were imported to enrich the colonial trading companies and their administrators. Charles Town (Charleston) became the hub of the slave trade in the North American British colonies especially for rice cultivation. “The first English-speaking settlement in South Carolina was established on the coast in 1670. For the first thirty years the colonists had little success, but by about 1700 they discovered that rice, imported from Asia, grew well in the inland valley swamps of the Low Country. Throughout the 1700s the economy of South Carolina was based overwhelmingly on the cultivation of rice. This product brought consistently high prices in England, and the colony prospered and expanded. Rice agriculture has been called ‘the best opportunity for industrial profit which 18th century America afforded.’ South Carolina became one of the richest of the North American Colonies; and Charlestown (now Charleston), its capital and principal port, one of the wealthiest and most fashionable cities in early America. Later, because of the extraordinary success in South Carolina, the rice plantation system was extended farther south into coastal Georgia, where it also prospered.” The Gullah, Rice, Slavery and the Sierra Leone-American Connection Joseph A. Opala http://www.yale.edu/glc/gullah/02.htm

Charleston was a slave center and bustling seaport town that became rich and prosperous off the free labor of African people. Almost half of all the Africans brought to the North American British colonies prior to the Revolutionary War came through the port of Charleston! Charleston also had a large free Black population. “Although Charleston before 1864 is sometimes characterized by the dichotomy between black and white – free and slave – there were from very early times ‘free persons of color’ or free blacks. The first census, in 1790, found 8,089 white persons, 7,684 slaves, and 586 free blacks in Charleston. This tells us that very early in Charleston’s history free blacks constituted nearly 3.6% of the city’s population. By 1861 free blacks comprised 7.8% of Charleston’s population. Although these 3,441 persons formed a small community by Northern standards, of the ten largest Southern cities, only Baltimore, New Orleans, and Washington contained larger free black communities prior to the Civil War. Although there were free blacks in the countryside, the economic and social opportunities were slim in comparison to those presented by the cities. That’s why in 1850, about 40% of all free persons of color in South Carolina lived in Charleston and 89% of all free blacks in Charleston County lived in the city”. http://www.sciway.net/hist/chicora/freepersons.html

It’s interesting the shooting took place at the Emanuel AME Church one of the oldest Black churches in the South which was cofounded in 1816 by Denmark Vesey and other free Blacks. Vesey was the property of Captain Joseph Vesey a slave trader. Denmark Vesey was able to purchase his freedom for $600 when he won the Charleston  lottery prize of $1,500 in 1799. As a free man Vesey worked as a carpenter and was able to roam about hiring his services out. But Vesey wanted all his people to be free. He secretly organized a slave revolt in 1821 to overcome the brutal oppression many Africans endured during that era. By all accounts Vesey was a charismatic firebrand who openly chastised Blacks for bowing to whites.  He began organizing and setting his plans in motion in 1821. Vesey planned to lead a massive slave revolt by securing arms, taking the guardhouse, attacking whites burning the city and escaping to Haiti which was a free Black republic in the Caribbean.

Vesey’s plans were thwarted when details were told to the mayor and city officials by a Black man recruited by Vesey’s crew. The news sent shock waves of fear and revulsion within the white communities throughout the South. Vesey and thirty-five of his top cohorts were arrested and hanged. Thirty seven were shipped outside the United States. Even though most of the church leaders were not part of the plot the ravaging whites burned Emanuel AME Church to the ground!

Of course white’s view men like Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner as insane for wanting to be free and daring to plot killing whites to obtain their freedom. Over the years there have been battles to recognize and honor Vesey, in Charleston. Finally a marker and statue were erected in Charleston. It’s ironic the corporate mind control apparatus even mentions Vesey and the church following the June 17^th shooting.

The fact whites view Prosser, Vesey and Turner as crazy shows how psychotic they are because these men planned their revolts to escape the vicious brutality and dehumanization they experienced under the European slave system. Following each of these failed revolts, the whites went berserk killing, burning and attacking Blacks out of fear and revenge.

A major component of the slave experience was the constant violence meted out to break their spirits, to mentally and physically control them; every means was used to demean Africans in an effort to turn them into beasts of burden. Whites wanted docile, dispirited, compliant slaves who were convinced of their own inferiority and impotence and the superiority of Europeans. Any challenge to this mental colonization was met with swift and severe retaliation by whites! Laws were passed that demeaned and subjugated Blacks, institutions like the white church reinforced these attitudes and customs. The media of the day and all future media constantly demonized and dehumanized Africa and African people, we were taught, brainwashed and conditioned to despise and loath ourselves and to worship whites.

Denmark Vesey and men like him were considered crazy and dangerous; their actions resulted in violent retaliation by whites to maintain the status quo especially in South Carolina where Africans outnumbered whites. Whites always feared slave uprisings and Blacks doing to them what they had done to the Blacks! Today the Confederate flag waves over the state capital building. To most South Carolina whites the flag is a proud symbol of their heritage and traditions.  Part of the unstated tradition is violent oppression of Blacks and the long history of violence within America itself. Violence is real and it is an omnipresent theme in most US media whether television, motion pictures, video games or comic books. We cannot overlook this history and how it impacts all of us.

“A 2002 report by the US Secret Service and the US Department of Education, which examined 37 incidents of targeted school shootings and school attacks from 1974 to 2000 in this country, found that ‘over half of the attackers demonstrated some interest in violence through movies, video games, books, and other media.’ In a 2009 Policy Statement on Media Violence, the American Academy of Pediatrics said, ‘Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed.’ This year, the Media Violence Commission of the International Society for Research on Aggression (ISRA) in its report on media violence said, ‘Over the past 50 years, a large number of studies conducted around the world have shown that watching violent television, watching violent films, or playing violent video games increases the likelihood for aggressive behavior.’ According to the commission, more than 15 meta-analyses have been published examining the links between media violence and aggression. Anderson and colleagues,  for instance, published a comprehensive meta-analysis of violent video game effects and concluded that the ‘evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.’” Violence In The Media: What Effects On Behavior http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/child-adolescent-psychiatry/violence-media-what-effects-behavior

This is the social milieu that we all live in. It produced Dylann Storm Roof a twenty-one year old with a conflicting profile. Many of those who knew him said he “appeared normal”. Other accounts show he was stopped by police for acting strange and having drugs in his possession in a shopping mall. Now a “manifesto” has been found that taints Roof as a white supremacist determined to take action on his “new awakening” as a racist.

No one can say for sure this manifesto or the Website allegedly belonging to him are his or that they are authentic. Is Roof being set up? It wouldn’t be the first time. Think Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing or the nineteen highjackers whose identities were stolen by the real perpetrators of 9-11.

Forgive me for being cynical but there are things about this incident that don’t make sense. If Roof told the people in the church he had to shoot them to avenge Blacks “raping our women” why did he shoot six Black women? Where is there any evidence Black women rape white women?! He sat with them for an hour, he got a chance to see and hear them, and there were six women in the Bible study group, why didn’t he just shoot the men? The church Pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney was an activist pastor and a member of the South Carolina legislature. Pinckney was characterized as “passionate about human rights”. If Roof was going to do something about Blacks “taking over the country”, as he allegedly said, why didn’t he just shoot Pinckney and run?

Rev. Pinckney pressed for legislation to require police officers to wear body cameras, and was vocal at a rally following the death of Walter Scott who was shot in the back by a white North Charleston police officer. A video shot from a citizen’s cellphone showed the officer, Michael Slager, planted a taser near Scott’s body after he shot him, walked over to the body and handcuffed him without attempting to see if he needed medical attention. Pinkney was vocal about this case in the media and legislature.  Slager has since been charged with murder and is awaiting trial in the Charleston County jail, the same Charleston County jail is where Roof is now being held on murder charges.

The Slager case is a seminal case because as we have repeatedly seen in the US, police are not charged with murdering unarmed Black men even when there is video evidence.

Did Slager’s arrest affect Roof?  Was Roof really a lone killer? Was he a doped up, confused young man who was out of his mind on drugs? Is he a “Manchurian Candidate” patsy, part of a white supremacist cell being used to instigate racial conflict? Was he brainwashed via mind control entrainment techniques to kill an activist preacher who was on the rise as a political figure? It’s said Roof reloaded five times! Why didn’t people bum rush him or do something while he was reloading?!! Is this a sensationalized incident that will be used by the corporate mind control apparatus to turn public opinion in one direction or another, probably towards gun control?

I have no idea, all I know is the facts being presented in the corporate media don’t make sense. What I do suspect is Rev Pinckney was the target of a deliberate “hit”. Historically there is an ongoing thread of racial animus and violence in Charleston South Carolina that goes back hundreds of years and it’s raising its ugly head one more time.

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It’s How You Use Social Media That Counts

From The Ramparts

Junious Ricardo Stanton

 It’s How You Use Social Media That Counts

 

“Social media tools can lend themselves to many different—and contradictory—purposes. They can bring attention to injustice, communicate the logistics of demonstrations—and they can sell you just about any worthless new commodity on the planet. And while Twitter is a uniquely open platform to exchange ideas, argue, celebrate, commiserate and mobilize, a Twitter following does not take the place of an organization.” Barbara Ransby  http://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement

Social media has revolutionized the world. In many ways it is a prime example of what are called “disruptive technologies”: inventions, developments and products that radically change an industry, market or human behaviors whether positively or negatively. Social media and we can include the Internet in this category have altered the way we live. MySpace, Facebook, Ning, YouTube, Twitter and a host of other media platforms have changed the way we relate to each other, how we do business and how we perceive the world around us.

Many people base their self worth and importance on the number of Facebook “friends” they have.  In most instances these people are not their friends at all because they have little or no history or in person social contact with them outside of Facebook Twitter or Instagram.

The cellphone is another example of disruptive technology it is ubiquitous; people now eschew person to person engagement to spend time on their cellphones even when they are in close proximity to one another. I’ve been out in public and observed couples, families and groups and no one was talking to the other person or persons, they were all on their cellphones texting, scrolling down, playing games, taking selfies or talking to other people.  People base their perceived social status on the type of cellphone they own!

As advanced and convenient as social media is, in many ways it has retarded social interaction, genuine socialization and engagement. “While on the surface it appears social networking brings people together across the Internet, in a larger sense it may create social isolation, according to a BBC News report. As people spend increasing amounts of time on social networks, they experience less face-to-face interaction. Scientists have evaluated social isolation in many studies, and have determined that it can lead to a host of mental, psychological, emotional and physical problems including depression, anxiety, somatic complaints and many others. In fact, a University of Illinois at Chicago School of Medicine animal study showed social isolation impaired brain hormones, which is the likely reason socially isolated people experience tremendous levels of stress, aggression, anxiety and other mental issues.” http://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Negative_Impact_of_Social_Networking_Sites

Social media has popularized other technologies as well. For example High Definition cameras are now embedded in the cellphones, laptops and tablets. In many ways this has been a disruptive technology for digital camera manufacturers and photographers just as digital cameras were for the film and film processing industries and desktop publishing was for the printing and graphic design industry.

Thanks to cameras in cellphones we are able to document and chronicle our daily lives. If it weren’t for cellphones capturing images of police brutality it would go largely unreported. Perhaps this is why many municipalities and states are crafting laws making it illegal to film police officers in the line of duty. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-general-assembly-revives-recording-ban/  FYI, Ramsey Orta the man who filmed the NY police officers who choked Eric Garner was arrested and detained. http://truthinmedia.com/grand-jury-indicts-man-who-filmed-eric-garners-chokehold-death-by-nypd-on-gun-charges/

But there is also the very real issue of privacy. Social media is a gateway to spying, surveillance and profiling not just by the government and the police state but by their corporate masters. “According to e-Marketer, global social networking revenues will exceed $10 billion 2013. Most social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many others offer their services to members for free, yet still net significant income. In fact, according to Mashable Business, Facebook earned $1.6 billion in revenues in the first half of 2011, and was on pace to achieve more than $3 billion in revenues by year end. If the services are free, then, how do social networking websites earn such staggering sums of money? The answer is that you, the social network user, is the product these online giants sell to generate revenue. According to BBC News, social networking sites are uniquely positioned to make money by matching people to products. Since you generate content on a social networking site that indicates your interests, social and work background, and a great deal of other information about your personal preferences, the social networking sites can target advertisements specifically to you, a service for which advertisers are willing to pay significant amounts of money.

While many users feel their personal data is safe on social networking sites because they have set high levels of security settings, research suggests this is not the case. According to a 2010 Northeastern University and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems study, researchers created an algorithm to discover an individual’s personal attributes by examining the one thing that most people leave public even when all other privacy settings are place: their friend list. Using the algorithm, researchers were able to infer many personal traits merely from friend lists, including educational level, university attended, hometown and other private data.” Negative Impact of Social Networking Sites http://socialnetworking.lovetoknow.com/Negative_Impact_of_Social_Networking_Sites

We need to be very discriminating about how we use and what we post on social media especially young people. Putting too much information, too many images, photos, videos can be potentially dangerous and damaging personally and professionally. Today many governments, colleges and companies hire people to scrutinize social media as part of their background check, acceptance, pre-employment or security processes.  More and more instances and incidents of cyber bullying and harassment are occurring. Several people have committed suicide due to social bullying and harassment on the Internet and social media. Cyber bullying is a global phenomenon something parents, educators, youth workers and mentors should not take lightly. http://cyberbullying.us

Some people think something going viral on social media is a social movement in and of itself, it’s not! Real movements require: objectives, strategies, action, organizers, exhorters and people on the ground developing relationships and trust.  “Many of our sisters and brothers are masterful users, but social media does not have magical powers. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are tools like any other invention. The printing press revolutionized movement-building and revolution-making. So did the radio, telephone, television, personal computer, cell phone and a whole variety of media. Social media tools can lend themselves to many different—and contradictory—purposes. They can bring attention to injustice, communicate the logistics of demonstrations—and they can sell you just about any worthless new commodity on the planet. And while Twitter is a uniquely open platform to exchange ideas, argue, celebrate, commiserate and mobilize, a Twitter following does not take the place of an organization.” Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement Barbara Ransby  http://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement

Some people seem obsessed with selfies and group photos to the point that’s all they do at events and functions! Whatever happened to talking to and meeting new people being engaged in life?  I’m all for technology it all depends upon how it is used. In many cases modern technology has become a double edged sword or a Trojan horse.

While social media helps heighten awareness to current events and issues like the Oscar Grant, Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown murders by police and can promote events and help market products and people, on the other hand too much time and energy are spent on trivial and nonproductive activities.

Many people are addicted to social media to the point they spend hours and hours on it and exhibit symptoms of addiction. http://www.helpguide.org/articles/addiction/internet-and-computer-addiction.htm Life is for living, do not allow technology, gadgets, gizmos and social media to dictate your life dominate your being and existence or enslave you. Use them wisely, the operative word is wisely.  Be the master not the slave.

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Criminalizing The Poor

From The Rampart

Junious Ricardo Stanton

 Criminalizing the Poor

 

“If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.” It is Expensive to Be Poor Barbara Ehrenreich http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/

 

The veneer of the Untied States as the bastion of opportunity and the fanciful Horatio Alger rags to riches narrative is being replaced by an increasingly rigid system based upon wealth and color. The U.S. economy despite what the corporate mind control apparatus says is stagnant at least for working class folks and more and more working class people are falling into poverty and they can’t get up.

Today in America it is devastating to be poor. Not only are the poor denigrated and stigmatized, they are being criminalized in such a way it will make it even more difficult to get back on their feet and  move out of their impoverished circumstances into a better and possibly higher socio-economic state and status. A report by the Institute for Policy Studies called The Poor Get Prison The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty by Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf concluded by saying,  “We are a nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system. We criminalize life-sustaining activities of people too poor to afford shelter. We incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. And we institute policies that virtually bar them for life from participating in society once they have done their time. We have allowed the resurgence of debtors’ prisons. We’ve created a second tier public education system for poor children and black and Latino children that disproportionally criminalizes their behavior and sets them early onto the path of incarceration and lack of access to assistance and opportunity.”

A study by the National Poverty Center called the Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist concluded that poverty was the result of systemic disparities over a period of time and that one metric of poverty often impacted others creating a cyclical effect which made it difficult for a person living in poverty to extricate him or herself from being poor.  Some of their findings were: “Racial disparities in poverty result from cumulative disadvantage over the life course, as the effects of hardship in one domain spill over into other domains. In the U.S., one of every three African American children and one of every four Latino children live in poverty— two times higher than the rate for white children. Whites report better overall health than blacks, Latinos, and Asians, even after controlling for poverty, education, and unemployment. The collateral consequences of felony conviction—such as bans on entering many occupations, on voting, jury service, and receiving federal college loans and grants—harm both ex-offenders and their communities. Residents of a predominately black or Hispanic neighborhood have access to roughly half as many social services as those in predominately white neighborhoods.” http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief16/PolicyBrief16.pdf

The United States’ level of wealth inequality is staggering.  Now it is worsening every year. “The overall wealth pie has grown but almost all of the gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent of households. The top 1 percent of households currently have more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. While real wages have fallen for half of U.S. workers, compensation to top managers and CEOs has skyrocketed. Inequality in wages is at an all time high. During the last twenty-five years, three out of four U.S. wage-earners have lost ground on the job. In real terms this means that people’s wages have not kept up with inflation or that workers have lost some portion of the benefits they previously had. Instead of having a pension or 100 percent health care coverage, many workers now have no retirement security or pay some or all of their health care costs. Many workers are now temporary or part time workers with no benefits. Some have lost their jobs and have not been able to find a comparable paying job or any job at all.” Economic Apartheid In America A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity. Revised and Updated  2005 By Chuck Collins and Felice Yeskel page 6.

To make matters worse the U.S. is increasingly making it a crime to be poor. Go Online and find the Institute for Policy Studies report The Poor Get Prison http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf it documents how local state and federal policies are placing a heavy and unfair burden on poor people. Black and Brown people have always been targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system but now figures reveal that the sordid U.S history of racial animus, bias and this prejudice is embedded into the very fabric of every institution in this nation. Employment discrimination and difficulties for Black and Latino communities to establish their own banking and financial institutions makes in almost impossible to create a viable economic infrastructure so many turn to the street hustle which includes petty crime and the drug trade.

Policy makers decided to wage a war on drugs but it was the small time street level dealers who were profiled and targeted rather than the large scale traffickers probably because the large drug traffickers (like the US CIA and Too Big To Fail Banks like Wacovia) were in cahoots with the law and public policy makers.  “Public policies labeled the ‘War on Drugs’ of the 1980s and 1990s largely targeted minorities—a fact recognized by politicians and policymakers, and documented by research. In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that by choosing policies focused on prohibition of drugs “we are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities”. Researcher Michael Tonry noted that, ‘[a]nyone with knowledge of drug trafficking patterns and of police arrest policies and incentives could have foreseen that the enemy troops in the War on Drugs would consist largely of young, inner-city, minority males. Since the mid- 1980s, the War on Drugs has produced legislative initiatives by politicians attempting to demonstrate that public safety is a priority. However, evidence suggests that by 1989 drug use was in decline, except among poor urban minorities. Apparently, the proponents of using the tough criminal sanctions rather than other strategies (e.g., those linked to public health) to curtail drug use in these communities knew, or chose to ignore, that it would disproportionately affect young blacks and Hispanics and their communities. The federal statutes relating to crack prescribe a five-year mandatory prison term for possession of five grams of crack cocaine; but under the same law, possession of five hundred grams of powder cocaine is required for the same five-year prison term. In 1999, 85 percent of those serving long sentences for crack cocaine under this law were African American. The tougher policy for crack was based on the belief that it was more addictive and a greater threat to public safety. Economic competition in illicit street crack markets produced significant violence in poor communities, but not crack addiction. Powder cocaine markets, however, were concentrated indoors in wealthier communities, thereby avoiding the violence but not the addiction. Policies emphasizing the criminal rather than the public health aspects of the use and trafficking of illegal drugs over the past two decades, coupled with more aggressive policing against street crack markets in poor urban communities contributed to widening racial disparities in the criminal justice system and produced consequences of crisis proportions in the black community, especially for young black males. Increases in drug arrests combined with an increased use of incarceration for punishment for drug offenses during the 1990s had a particularly severe effect on minority youth. Drug arrests for juveniles (10 to 17 age group) in the 1980 to 1993 period fell 28 percent for whites but increased by 231 percent for blacks. In 1980, black and white rates for juvenile drug arrests were similar; by 1993 black rates were more than four times the white rate (Figure 1), and 46 percent of all juvenile drug arrests were black youth”  Race Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System American Sociological Association Department of Research and Development http://www.asanet.org/images/press/docs/pdf/ASARaceCrime.pdf.

It’s not just drug dealers who feel the brunt of “the system” that keeps poor folks in a never ending spiral of lack and disadvantage. The whole system is stacked against the poor to the point if you get down and out and become homeless you are treated like a leper and a criminal. In a tanking economy where only the super rich are doing well, one unanticipated medical episode, a major home repair bill, accident or family crisis can be financially catastrophic.  To add insult to injury often it is those kinds of situations that cause people to enter the social welfare or “justice” systems and experience their callousness and antipathy.

Wall Street fraud and speculation almost took down the US and global economies but not one bankster or hedge fund operator was indicted or went to jail.  Yet if you are a working class person and you fall on hard times, collection agency and police harassment, court and jail may be in your future.  Once in the system you can be nickel and dimed for fines and fees and if you are unable to pay you can end up in jail. Go to http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312455680/state-by-state-court-fees to see a state by state list of fees and fines many poor people are subjected to once they enter the system for even the most trifling reasons. Poor and homeless people are especially being targeted.  “Tonight, thousands of homeless people in the United States will face the possibility of arrest because they do not have a safe place to sleep. Thousands more could be arraigned for sitting or standing in the wrong place. While they must sleep rest their legs, homeless people live in cities where these and other life sustaining activities are against the law, even though shelters face a critical shortage of beds.

Criminalization laws can take many forms.  Most commonly, they outlaw sitting, sleeping in vehicles or outdoors, lying down, ‘hanging out,’ sharing food, and camping. What makes them even more insidious is that they can be difficult to detect. Curfews on public parks are often explained by municipalities as a way to deter drug-related crimes.  In reality, they are frequently a way to ensure that homeless people don’t use park benches as beds. By not having enough safe sleeping spaces, cities are forcing their homeless persons to live on the streets with virtually no other options, and then arresting them for doing so. These laws represent a gross violation of human rights, and have received a large amount of criticism from civil rights advocates around the country and the world…There has been a nationwide increase in criminalization laws since 2011, despite mounting evidence that criminalization is the most expensive and least effective way to deal with homelessness. As cities increasingly opt for these bad policies, there will eventually be no safe place left for homeless people. Instead, communities should focus on constructive alternatives to criminalization that actually work; policies like the ‘housing first’ strategy that provides housing and supportive services to homeless people and is also much less costly than the price of jail stays and emergency room visits.” No Safe Place: How Cities Are Making It Illegal to Be Homeless http://talkpoverty.org/2014/08/11/no-safe-place/

Things are getting so bad in the U.S.  it won’t be long before we’re living in a hi-tech version of Charles Dickens England where being poor is a crime in and of itself.

 

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The War Against the 99%

From The Ramparts

Junious Ricardo Stanton

                                             The War Against the 99%

   “Between 1607 and 1682, more than 90,000 European immigrants, ‘three-quarters of them chattel bond-labourers, were brought to Virginia and Maryland.’ Following the ‘establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672, a steady supply of African slaves was secured.’ Problems became paramount, however, as the lower classes tended to be very rebellious, which consisted of ‘an amalgam of indentured servants and slaves, of poor whites and blacks, of landless freemen and debtors.’ The lower classes were united in opposition to the elites oppressing them, regardless of background.” An Empire of Poverty: Race Punishment and Social Control by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Today’s social inequalities, disenfranchisement, depravity and social oppression have their roots in Colonial America. The break from the British colonial rule and the establishment of a new government did nothing to alter the racial or socio-economic dynamics in America. All that really happened was control passed from British blue bloods to Americans based in total on a slave economy that the new elites controlled!

We have been brainwashed to believe the “founding fathers” were noble men of vision who aspired to create a land of opportunity and freedom for all. Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact the ninety-nine men who created the constitutional form of government did so in direct negation of the original reason they were sent to Philadelphia which was merely to revise and amend the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin et al were in effect traitors who set out to hi-jack the process and make sure the rich controlled the country, setting themselves up as the new one per cent. “How can this be in a republic whose founding testament begins in part by saying the purpose of the federal government is to, ‘promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity?’ Language holds the key. Part of the answer to this question is to ask, when the Founders said, ‘We the People,’ who did they really mean? We know that they did not mean to include the human beings that even the authors of those great words held as possessions. Women were similarly excluded. In fact in the time of the founding of the American Republic, the franchise of citizenship was intimately tied to possessions; land, money and property. The reality is that the Founding Fathers were the One Percent of their day. This is proven in part after making some subjective judgments about the occupations up until 1787 of the members of the Constitutional Convention. As Brown writes the Founding Fathers were, ‘a group set apart.’ There was a degree of social distance between these men and the ordinary citizens of their day.” We The People vs The Original One Percent by Guy W Clinch https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/we-the-people-vs-the-original-one-percent/

US culture has always been fraught with bigotry, racism, economic cast, violence and social repression. When it comes to Africans in America no level or facet of society is exempt from racism, violence and inequity. We see blatant examples of this on a daily basis with the killings of unarmed males by police with seeming impunity. Our visionary and progressive leadership has always been under attack and subject to suppression in an attempt to keep us disorganized, impotent and ineffective. The ruling elites view us as their prime threat because of the horrific way they have treated us over the years. So it makes sense the education process we were allowed to participate in was designed to further the economic aims and social agenda of the ruling elites. “This unsound attitude of the ‘friends’ of the Negro is due to the persistence of the mediaeval idea of controlling underprivileged classes. Behind closed doors these ‘friends’ say you need to be careful in advancing Negroes to commanding positions unless it can  be determined beforehand that they will do what they are told to do.” The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson page 30.

In reality the education we were given was not designed for our edification but to advance the wealth of the ruling classes and to create a stratum of docile, brainwashed servile Black folks working against their own best interests to maintain a system that oppressed us. “In the first half of the 20^th century, the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation undertook joint projects aimed at constructing an education system for black Americans in the South as well as for black Africans in several British colonies. In 1911, the Phelps-Stokes Fund was chartered with the purpose of managing ‘the education of Negroes both in Africa and the United States.’ This restrictive educational system for black Americans had already been institutionalized, beginning with the ‘philanthropic’ endeavours of Wall Street bankers and northern industrialists and capitalists at several conferences in 1898. The education was constructed on the basis that, as one conference participant stated, ‘the white people are to be the leaders, to take the initiative, to have direct control in all matters pertaining to civilization and the highest interest of our beloved land. History demonstrates that the Caucasian will rule, and he ought to rule.’” An Empire of Poverty: Race, Punishment and Social Control  By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Social repression was and is the main force used to keep Blacks “in their place”.  The place we were originally consigned to was as a source of free or cheap labor. “Important to note has been the ways in which slaves were used as the main labour force, and thus blacks were identified and being sustained as a lower-class labour force. Following the Civil War, abolition of slavery and the Reconstruction Period, there were coordinated moves – a ‘compact’ – between the North and South in the United States, to devise a way of keeping blacks as a submissive labour force, and one which was confined to a new form of slavery: penal slavery. Thus, we see emerging in the 1870s and into the 20^th century, a rapid expansion of prisons, and with that, of southern penal systems using prisoners as forced labour. This new legal system, which was ‘far less rigid than slavery,’ had been referred to as ‘involuntary servitude,’ and, wrote one scholar, ‘was a fluid, flexible affair which alternated between free and forced labor in time to the rhythm of the southern labor market.’…The legal system was used to essentially criminalize black life, without making specific references to race, laws that were passed specifically targeted blacks in attempting to limit their mobility, the price of their labour, and to make several aspects of typical black southern life to be deemed ‘criminal.’ This process was paralleled in South Africa in the construction of the apartheid system.” ibid

With advancement of machinery and automation the need for free labor decreased and the ruling elites schemed to replace cheap Black labor with cheaper immigrant labor. Their aim was to continue to criminalize Black life since deportation was no longer an option (See the history of the American Colonization Society) incarceration and the prison industrial system was reenergized and expanded.

Today people of color Africans in America, Hispanics/Latinos make up the bulk of the US prison population. The goal seems to be to incarcerate and or kill as many  people of color as possible. Prisons are the new reservations (a disingenuous euphemism for concentration camp) for Blacks and Hispanics. In the United States more money is appropriated for prisons and “corrections” than for institutions of higher learning and education. This is by deliberate design!  But they also had to constrict the desire for education and advancement by Blacks. To do so meant restricting the number of Blacks in higher education. The ruling elite agenda is to gut social programs including public education and to restrict access to higher education.

In a 2007 report the Association of Pennsylvania Collage and University Faculties revealed the Commonwealth appropriated between $32,000 and $33,000 dollars for each prisoner vs a measly $4,352 per year per college student in their system of higher education.  This is why Cheyney University the oldest institution of higher learning for African Americans in this country is suffering, because of the lopsided policies and agenda of the state! This pattern is not just in Pennsylvania it is nation wide.

“The U.S. incarceration rate in 1980 was 220 for every 100,000 people, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Today, with more than 2 million people incarcerated, the rate has climbed to 743 per 100,000 people. Reason magazine’s Veronique de Rugy points out nonviolent drug offenders account for ‘roughly one-fourth of all inmates in the United States, up from less than 10 percent in 1980.’ In roughly the same period, state governments scaled back their financial support for public colleges by more than a third nationwide, between 1991 and 2008. And as states have chopped away at appropriations for their universities and cut need-based grant aid for students, the Government Accountability Office found both public and private schools are becoming increasingly reliant on what students pay in tuition and fees for funding. Last year, some students saw tuition increases as high as 40 percent.” Prison Drug War Spending Rockets While Higher Education Funding Declines http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/spending-on-prisons-higher-ed_n_1835889.html

We are witnessing an escalation of policies that criminalize poverty and mass incarceration.  These policies are promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, it is a bipartisan effort! This is not new, the ruling elites in Britain did it to the Irish, Welsh and Scots in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This is how they got their fodder to work in the colonies, this is what they did to Africans in America following the War Between the States and this is what the bogus War on Drugs was all about.

The ruling class wants to return to the so called gilded age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast income disparity/inequality, rigid social caste and deplorable socio-economic conditions. We are in the midst of a class war in the US. This is why they shut down the Occupy Wall Street movement so the ninety-nine per cent would not wake up to what the one per cent is doing to us. The next phase will be the ramping up of the police state similar to what we saw in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina before General Russel L. Honore took command and changed the mission, and what we witnessed in Ferguson Missouri and other places in recent months. We need to wake up and take action before its too late.

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