Hospitals & Asylums
The Bar Between
Wisdom and Wealth HA-19-1-13
By Anthony J. Sanders
An Act
To (1) pardon Rod Blagovich; (2) pay FEMA
disaster relief and late fees for Superstorm Sandy; (3) account for
incarceration as evidence of mental disability for the purpose of DI and SSI
eligibility; (4) release harmless offenders to their post-conviction college degree,
including bar certification for Bachelor of Law granted in civil-law nations and
(4) reduce the United States penal population below the normal international
legal limit of 250 detainees per 100,000 residents by 2020,
Be the Democratic-Republican (DR) prison
slavery parties Dissolved, until the District of Columbia prison population,
last reported to be the highest density in the world at 1,500 per 100,000, is
brought within the reasonable legal norm of 500 detainees per 100,000 residents
in the capitol under this Amendment of Judicial Delinquency (JD) Book 6 of Hospitals &
Asylums (HA) vacated by Freedmen's Hospital that served the
black community in the District of Columbia for more than a century. First
established in 1862 on the grounds of the Camp Barker, 13th and R Streets, NW,
Freedmen's Hospital and Asylum cared for freed, disabled, and aged blacks. In 1863, the Hospital & Asylum was placed
under Dr. Alexander Augusta (1825-1890), the first African-American to head a
hospital. The hospital and museum is now
cared for by Howard University. Referred, to a post-conviction degree program;
nearly 100 percent effective in preventing recidivism.
4.
The Pardon of Rod Blagojevich
Table
1: Changes to OASDI if SSA paid for SSI 2012(retroactive)-2020
Table
2:
State by State Detention, Need and Cost
Estimate for Community Beds & SSI
Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on January
15, 1929; MLK Day is a bank holiday celebrated on the third Monday in the month
of January, the 21st day of 2013.
In his final book, Where Do We Go
From Here Chaos or Community? published the year of his death on April 4,
1968 he wrote: We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are
entering the area of human rights. The Constitution assured the right to vote,
but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right
to an adequate income, or the right to high-quality education and health
care. And yet in an industrialized
nation it is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, an
adequate education and enough money to provide the basic necessities for one’s
family and urged exploration of a guaranteed annual income (King & Harding
’68, ‘10: xvi). Without King or Kennedy to
say, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind”,
Johnson’s war on poverty, with his Texas roots and real war in Vietnam, failed (Schenkkan ’12: 2), and the simple story of
America is: the rich are getting richer, the richest of the rich are getting
still richer, the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous and the middle
class is being hollowed out. The incomes of the middle class are stagnating or
falling and the difference between them and the truly rich is increasing. Over the
last three decades those with low wages (in the bottom 90 percent) have seen a
growth of only around 25 percent in their wages, while those in the top 1
percent have seen an increase of almost 150 percent and the top 0.1 percent of
more than 300 percent. Even after the wealthy lost some of their wealth as
stock prices declined in the Great Recession the wealthiest 1 percent of
households had 225 times the wealth of the typical American, almost double the
ratio in 1962 and 1983. America has been
extraordinarily influential in spreading ideas of equality, of human rights, of
democracy, of the market as self-interest. However, as democracies grow in many
other parts of the world, an economic and political system that leaves most
citizens behind, as ours has been doing, will not be seen as a system to
emulate (Stiglitz ’11: 8, 144). From 1970 to
2005, the Nation’s prison population increased by 700 percent. It could be said that the United States government has not progressed since
the Social Security Amendments of 1974 created the Supplemental Security Income
(SSI).
In 1879 Henry George wrote In Progress and Poverty: “The fact is
that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends
knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is
not done to secure a living. It is not
the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by
animal necessities. It is the work of
men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or
drink, or wear, or display. In a state
of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously
increased. Two conditions are
indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a
consistently progressive measure. First,
it must be pegged to the median income of society, not at the lowest levels of
income. To guarantee an income at the
floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society
poverty conditions. Second, the
guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total
social income grows. Were it permitted
to remain static under growth conditions the recipients would suffer a relative
decline. If periodic reviews disclose
that the whole national income has risen, then the guarantee income would have
to adjusted upward by the same percentage.
Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur,
nullifying the gains of security and stability. The program would benefit all
the poor, including the two-thirds of them who are white. John Kenneth Galbraith estimated that $20
billion a year would effect a guaranteed income, which he describes as not much
more than we will spend the next fiscal year to rescue freedom and democracy
and religious liberty as these are defined by experts in Vietnam. The curse of poverty has no justification in
our age. It is socially as cruel and
blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate
each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to
consume the abundant animal life around them.
The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and
immediate abolition of poverty (King ’68: 173, 174, 175). The 2010
Census found there were 46.2 million people living below the poverty line, the
highest number in the 52 years the Bureau has published the statistic and at
15.1 percent the highest percent living in poverty since 1993 (Tavernise ’11) up
from 12.5 percent in 2007. At the very
bottom, by 2011 the number of American families in extreme poverty – living on
two dollars a day per person or less, the measure of poverty used by the World
Bank for developing countries- had doubled since 1996 to 1.5 million (Stiglitz
’12: 16). The United States has the highest number of children growing up in
poverty in any industrialized nation, 20-25 percent, significantly higher than
the general population, Netherlands is next with around 10 percent child
poverty. Guaranteeing 50 million Americans a
$1,000 a month income floor would not cost more than $600 billion, a doubling
of annual social security expenditures, that might be satisfactorily paid for
by the removal the social security contribution cap $110,000 (2013), estimated
at $250 billion.
Pervasive and persistent poverty and long-term
underinvestment in public education and other social expenditures give rise to
high levels of crime and a large fraction of the population in prison. While violent
crime statistics are better than they were at their nadir in 1991, they remain
high and residents of many poor and not so poor neighborhoods still feel the
risk of physical assault. It’s expensive
to keep 2.3 million people in prison.
The U.S. incarceration rate of 730 per 100,000 people or almost 1 in 100
adults) is the world’ highest and some nine to ten times that of many European
countries. Some U.S. states spend as
much on their prisons as they do on their universities. If the entire prison population of nearly 2.3
million was counted, the unemployment rate would be well above 9 percent
(Stiglitz ’12: 15). Our national
imprisonment rate had been essentially constant throughout the first
three-quarters of the twentieth century at roughly 100 (plus or minus 20) per
100,000 population. It was only in the
mid-1970s that it began increasing steadily and rapidly year after year so that
today it is over 700 per 100,000. The
incarceration rate is significantly higher in the Red than in the Blue states. In the year 2000, the average incarceration
rate in the Red States was 712 per 100,000 as opposed to 487 in the Blue
States. The Red and Blue states differ
in their rates of lethally violent behavior, i.e. suicide and homicide,
including the legal form of the latter, capital punishment (the death
penalty). With respect to the suicide
rate, in 2000 the Red States had a rate of 13 per 100,000 and the Blue States
only 10. In 2004, the suicide rate in
Red States was 13.9 vs. the Blue State’s 10.2.
Homicide rates in the Red States were 5.7 in both 2000 and 2004 whereas
in the Blue States they were 4. And 4.0 in those years. The difference between
Red and Blue States in total lethal violence rates (suicide plus homicide) in
2000 was 18.7 vs. 14.2 and in 2004, 19.6 vs. 14.2. Between 1976 (when capital punishment was
reinstituted in the US after having been declared unconstitutional in 1972) and
2009, the Red States executed 1,177 people and the Blue States 54: a ratio of
more than 20 to 1. Of the 14 states with
the most executions, very one is a Red States (11 of them Southern
States). Of the 14 states with no death
penalty, 10 are Blue States. Of the 31
Red States in 2004, 27 have a death penalty. Among the only drugs we know of
that actually inhibit, and thus can be said to prevent, violence, two of them,
marijuana and heroin, have been declared illegal. The only prison program that
has been 100 percent effective in preventing recidivism, and that was gaining a
college degree while in prison – zero recidivism in the Indiana state prison
system, 0 percent at the Folsom State prison in California. The study discovered two recidivists over a
period of 30 years, less than a 1 percent recidivism rate, compared with the US
rate of 65 percent after only 3 years (Gilligan ’11: 172, 173, 132, 126, 127,
128, 130, 87, 90, 91). American society
has emphasized education more than European society. The purpose is to use education to make a
break between the occupation of the parents, and those of their children. The schools have been the historic routes of
social mobility. Whatever social
pathology may exist in Negro families is far exceeded by the social pathology
in the school system that refuses to accept a responsibility. The proliferating
bureaucracies in a complex industrial society tend to curtail democratic
rights. Those that affect the affluent
and powerful can be handled by appeals to the courts, which have power to
prohibit unwarranted decrees or decisions beyond the scope of proper
authority. The poor, however, are
helpless. In welfare, public housing and
education, arbitrary abuse of power cannot be arrested by means readily
available to the victimized. In most
cases the victim does not know he has legal redress and accepts the role of a
supplicant unprotected by rules, regulations and safeguards. In some cases, the issue is uncontrolled
political power; in others, the question is the relationship between
professionals and those they have a duty to service but too often humiliate or
neglect. The growth of human services should be rapid. It should be developed in a manner ensuring
the jobs generated will not primarily be for professionals with college and
postgraduate diplomas, but for people from the neighborhoods who can perform
important functions for their neighbors. Welfare clients actually receive only
50 percent of the benefits the law provides because they are consciously kept
ignorant of their rights. As individuals
they have no means of informing themselves or of asserting their right to withheld
benefits (King ’68: 203, 211, 209, 211).
Americans need to learn to write legal briefs. Post-conviction education and opening State
bar certification to undergraduate Bachelor of the Law degrees are necessary measures
because our legal system is more than three times over a normal incarceration
rate and we ostensibly need lawyers to represent the rights of the mostly poor
and uneducated people who happen to be criminally accused of penal
offenses. People of higher status-income
have fewer qualms about breaking the rules, are more likely to be driven by
self-interest, more likely to cheat, (slave) and behave in other ways that
would generally be viewed as unethical (Stiglitz ’12: 314). Essentially, a lawyer is behind bars or drunk
on power. Not only is the law degree an
unnecessarily prestigious post-graduate degree in America, creating a
treacherously wide gap in age and social class with the common client, not
found in civil law nations where a Bachelor of the Law is certified to practice
by the state bar, but once these few honor scholars graduate they are quickly
employed by financial corporations and major political parties and there are
very few, if any, practicing lawyers in the United States, they are incompetent
bungling business executives, legislators, generals and Presidents in violation
of the separation of powers. Twenty-six
of America’s forty-four presidents have been lawyers, and 36 percent of the
legislators in the House have a background in law. Even if they are not narrowly pursuing what
is in the financial interests of lawyers, they may be “cognitively captured”
(Stiglitz ’12: 100). In many areas today, regulatory agencies are
responsibility for the oversight of a sector, however the problem is that
leaders in these sectors use their political influence to get people appointed
to the regulatory agencies who are sympathetic to their perspectives. Economists refer to this as “regulatory
capture”. Their incentives and those of
the industry are well aligned, even if their incentives are not well aligned
with those of the rest of society. If
those on the regulatory commission serve the sector well, they get well
rewarded in their post-government career. Sometimes, however, the capture is
not just motivated by money. Instead,
the mindset of regulators is captured by those whom they regulate. This is
called “cognitive capture”, and it is more of a sociological phenomenon
(Stiglitz ’12: 47, 48). Applying the
saying, “a lawyer is behind bars or drunk on power”, to the U.S. Supreme Court,
since the American judiciary became so wildly popular, leaves us with only two
cases (1) Blakely v. Washington No. 02-1632 (2004) that brings cause for the wholesale review and release of
prisoners who have been detained under excessive mandatory minimum sentencing
statutes or convicted without due process and called for the elimination of
mandatory minimum sentencing in both legislation and litigation and (2) Edmund
G. Brown Jr. Governor of California, et al v. Marciana & Plata et al No. 09–1233 (2011) whereby a three judge panel in
California ordered the largest release of prisoner in history under the Prison
Litigation Reform Act of 1995 18USCII(229)(C)§3626. After passing a $50 billion tax increase
beginning in 2012, the 2013 California budget is reported to be repaired
without significant spending cuts.
Reductions in the prison population is a
priority for the U.S., lawyers and judicial officers must focus on achieving
this monumental task and cease corrupting political and commercial power with
their negligence. The prison population
quintupled from 503,586 in 1980 (220 per 100,000) to 2,085,620 in 2004 (707 per
100,000). The U.S. has the most and
densest concentration of prisoners in the world comprising 24% of the 9 million
global prisoners, more than Russia, the runner up, and more than China. For the U.S. to achieve the legal limit of
250 detainees per 100,000 the total number of local jails and state and federal
prison beds must be limited to less than 740,000. One million is a good goal. Nearly 650,000 people are released from
prison to communities each year. Each
year the nation’s 3,200 jails release an excess of 10 million, 3% of the
population back into the community. Nearly
two thirds of released State prisoners are expected to re-arrested for a felony
or a serious misdemeanor within three years.
In 2005 7% of all prisoners were women, increasing 2.6% while male
prisoners rose 1.9%. Racial disparities
among prisoners persist, particularly in the 25-29 age group, 8.1% of black
men, about one in 13, were behind bars, compared with 2.6% of Hispanic men and
1.1% of white men. Martinez et al v.
Astrue No. Cal. No 08-CV-48735-CW of August 11,
2009, led to the passage of No Social Security Benefits for Prisoners Act of
2009, Public Law 111-115 which reinforced the prohibition of retroactive payments to individuals during
periods for which such individuals are prisoners, probation or parole
violators, or fugitive felons written in Eligibility
for SSI Benefits in Sec. 1611 of Title XVI of the Social Security Act 42USC(7)XVI§1382(E)(1)(A) and OASDI in Sec. 202
of Title II of the Social Security Act 42USC(7)II§402(x)(1)(a). When an individual is
released from a public institution they are due the reinstatement of their
benefits and if their conviction is ultimately overturned back payments to the
date their social security benefits were terminated under Bloom v. Social Security Administration (10th Cir.) No. 02-3362 (2003).
Because of the medical
negligence evident in California prisons the burden of proving disability for
SSI eligibility must be lightened to show that are unlikely to earn a
substantial gainful income outside of prison for a period of 12 months because
evidence of criminal conviction is adequate proof of mental disability, whether
or not they actually copped such a plea.
A sociologic study found that a criminal
record reduced the ratio of job application call-backs 2:1 for whites and 3:1
for blacks (Stiglitz ’12: 69, 70). Applications for SSI should be expedited in
monthly reports to the Social Security Administration under Sec. 1611 of Title XVI of the Social Security Act 42USC(7)XVI§1382 (E)(1)(H)(I)(i)(I) when the date of release has been finally determined. The majority of prisoners should receive SSI
the first month they are released. To
protect this investment from recidivism a post-conviction college degree shall
be a term of probation imposed upon their release under 18USC(227)§3563. There are about 15 million
recipients of disability insurance and SSI.
SSI is the benefit program for
people with qualifying disabilities who have not adequately contributed for 40
quarters to the system. Legislators need to be informed
that social security benefits are financed by FICA tax off-budget and reducing
benefits will not reduce the budget deficit.
The people will be amazed to learn that SSI is not paid by their 0.9%
matching DI contribution, or the OASDI fund which has accumulated more than
$2.6 trillion and is the largest asset under single management in the world,
but by the General Fund that has run a $1.3 trillion deficit for the past four
years. As a consequence of this greed the Social Security Administration (SSA) is an
abomination. The Commissioner must be
held principally responsible for the +/-$666 ($674) for three years without
Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) December 2008-2012 that caused the 99.9% of
the Great Recession. The Commissioner
not only needs to be removed from office for this misconduct but the Social
Security Amendment of 2001 that gave him and his predecessors six year terms
needs to be amended to provide for a more natural 2 year term, to maximize
political harmonization with the President and majority. SSA may choose to
appoint an Acting Commissioner. Through a combination of temporarily cushy tax
rate and miserly benefits for the disabled and poor SSA saved too much over the
past decade and after misbehaving in such a serious way must be penalized until
their assets have gone down to the $2.4 trillion they had when the IMF also
held $2.4 trillion right before the economic crisis. Resolved to increase
benefit payments without increasing taxation until OASDI has gone down to $2.4
trillion, the question is when will the United States wise up and require SSA
pay for SSI saving the General Fund $52 billion (base year FY 2012
retroactive?) plus normal 7% annual growth and what would be effect of measures
to (1) finance supervised release at an estimated 14% annual growth and (2)
eliminate poverty with revenues derived from removing the income cap on
contributions?
Changes to OASDI if SSA paid for SSI 2012(retroactive)-2020
(in
millions)
|
|
2011 |
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2015 |
|
Current
OASDI Balance |
2,677,900 |
2,735,200 |
2,776,300 |
2,818,800 |
2,861,900 |
|
OASDI
Net Increase at end of year |
69,000 |
57,300 |
41,100 |
42,400 |
43,100 |
|
SSI 7% annual growth from 2012 |
49,038 |
52,010 |
55,650 |
59,546 |
63,714 |
|
Revised
Net Increase |
n/a |
5,290 |
-14,550 |
-17,146 |
-20,614 |
|
Revised
OASDI Balance |
n/a |
n/a |
2,720,
650 |
2,703,504 |
2,682,890 |
|
SSI
14% annual growth from 2013 |
49,038 |
n/a |
59,291 |
67,592 |
77,055 |
|
Revised
Net Increase |
n/a |
n/a |
-18,191 |
-25,192 |
-33,955 |
|
Revised
OASDI Balance |
n/a |
n/a |
2,717,009 |
2,691,817 |
2,657,862 |
|
|
2016 |
2017 |
2018 |
2019 |
2020 |
|
Current
OASDI Balance |
2,908,100 |
2,957,800 |
3,006,800 |
3,043,700 |
3,061,000 |
|
OASDI
Net Increase at end of year |
46,200 |
49,700 |
48,900 |
36,900 |
17,300 |
|
SSI 7% annual growth from 2012 |
68,175 |
72,947 |
78,053 |
83,517 |
89,363 |
|
Revised
Net Increase |
-21,975 |
-23,247 |
-29,153 |
-46,617 |
-72,063 |
|
Revised
OASDI Balance |
2,660,915 |
2,637,668 |
2,608,515 |
2,561,898 |
2,489,835 |
|
SSI 14%
annual growth from 2013 |
87,843 |
100,141 |
114,160 |
130,143 |
148,
363 |
|
Revised
Net Increase |
-41,643 |
-50,441 |
-65,260 |
-93,243 |
-131,063 |
|
Revised
OASDI Balance |
2,616,219 |
2,565,778 |
2,500,518 |
2,407,275 |
2,276,212 |
Sources:
Federal Budget Balanced to
Prevent Debt from Exceeding 100% of GDP FY 2012. Hospitals & Asylums HA-13-7-12; 2012
Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors
Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds, Table IV.A.3 Operations of the
Combined OASI and DI Trust Funds 2007-21; 2012 Annual Report of the SSI
Program, Annual Report of the Advisory Council 2012 and Table C.1 SSI Federal
Payment in Current Dollars 1974-2012; The Revised OASDI Balance may not take
into account interest earnings wherefore it should be taken as a conservative
estimate.
With 1.1 million
applications approved out of 2.4 million applications and 7.7 million SSI
beneficiaries in 2010 mental disability for penal service would only double the
increase in costs by about 7% from 7% to 14% annually if done gradually aiming
for 250 to 500 detainees per 100,000 residents by 2020. Although some detainees are due disability
insurance many, many more have contributed very little to the system and are
due SSI. SSA, the Court and Congress
must of their own accord decide that evidence of penal service qualifies for
mental disability and release prisoners to their post-conviction college degree
for the enlightenment of the national prison population. Imprisonment is every bit as stressful as
receiving a disabling diagnosis according to the Holmes-Rahe Stress Scale, way
beyond bankruptcy, economic ruin. SSA
has long considered involuntary commitment in psychiatric hospitals as
qualifying for mental disability. SSI is
however currently paid for by the General Fund. OASDI assets are due penalty
for the cruelty and miserliness of the $666 for three years without COLA by
reducing assets from over $2.6 trillion to $2.4 by 2020 by
making SSA pay for SSI, but the ace in the hole – the elimination of the income
cap contributions – might bring in around $250 billion in new revenues annually
to SSA without raising taxes for anyone but the rich, that must be invested
directly in all those living below the poverty line with a healthy margin for
the Baby Boomers to retire. The
Democratic minority may have organized opposition to the idea of SSA paying for
SSI, but now that the ridiculous 2% OASI tax relief has been prohibited, and
the books straightened out HA-13-7-12, there is a good chance
that the Congress could hold SSA responsible for SSI in FY 2013 retroactive to
FY2012, reducing the deficit by as much as terminating tax relief for those
making over $450,000 and ensuring the solvency of this SSI program
expansion. The General Fund is so
insolvent they otherwise might need to sell special issue freedom bonds. SSA needs to pay for SSI and increase
spending. SSA can choose to release a
lot of detainees to post-conviction college degrees and bill the insolvent
General Fund for the increase in SSI costs until the day when they pay HA
$1,000 for the balanced budget which holds SSA responsible for SSI retroactive
to FY2012. That is the best way. To justify shifting the burden of SSI to SSA,
Congress will be compelled to quickly reduce the term of Commissioner to two
years, eliminate the income cap on contributions and there will be enough money
to make a serious effort to eliminate poverty in the United States by 2020
without raising the overall OASDI tax rate ever. Obama may be a “figurehead” without $1,000 to
buy the balanced federal budget from HA, but he is a black figurehead, and even
surrounded by the cruelest slavers European colonials could find in his
insanely non-idealistic and adversarial human resource hiring practice, he is a
lawyer, albeit from one of the most inferior law colleges in the world,
Harvard, the styrene alma mater, Americans elected a black lawyer to the White
House to inspire them and protect them while they free the slaves of the
Thirteenth Amendment, and to lead he must pardon Rod Blagojevich, pay for
compliance with the 250 detainee per 100,000 resident norm, by 2020.
2. Abolish Slavery
Again
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed
forever. The yearning for freedom
eventually manifests itself. The Bible
tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago
and cried, “Let my people go”. The
present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same
story. Ever since the birth of our
nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of
race. A self which proudly professes the
great principles democracy but which sadly practices the antithesis of
democracy. The backlash of today is
rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black
man landed in chains on the shores of this nation. The white backlash is an expression of the
same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of
commitment that have always characterize white America on the question of
race. For more than two hundred years
before the Declaration of Independence, Africa had been raped and plundered by
Britain and Europe, her native kingdoms disorganized, and her people and rulers
demoralized. For a hundred years
afterwards, the infamous trade continued in America virtually without
abatement, even after it had ceased to be legal on this continent. This ghastly blood traffic was so immense and
its profits so stupendous that the economies of several European nations owed
their growth and prosperity to it and New England rested heavily on it for its
development. It is important to understand
that the basis for the birth, growth and development of slavery in America was
primarily economic. By the beginning of
the seventeenth century, the British Empire had established colonies all along
the Atlantic seaboard, from Massachusetts to the West Indies, to serve as
producers of raw materials for British manufacturing, a market for goods
manufactured in Britain and a source of staple cargoes for British shipping
engaged in world trade. So the colonies
had to provide an abundance of rice, sugar, cotton and tobacco. In the first few years of the various
settlements along the East Coast, so-called indentured servants, mostly white,
were employed on plantations. But within
a generation the plantation operators were demanding outright and lifetime slavery
for the Africans they imported. Africans
were reduced to the status of property by law, and this status was enforced by
the most rigid and brutal police power of the existing governments. By 1650 slavery had been legally established
as a national institution. Land and slaves were the chief forms of private
property, property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and
determined politics (King ’68: 180, 72, 75, 76).
Thomas
Paine might have spared us both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, when he wrote
in 1775, ‘Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of God and
humanity it will go on. And when the
Almighty shall have blest us, and made us a people dependent only on him, then
may our first gratitude be shown by an act of continental legislation, which
shall put a stop to the importation of Negroes for sale, soften the hard fate
of those already here, and in time procure their freedom’. Common Sense sold half a million copies in the course of the
Revolution. John Adams, in particular, detested its subversive tone and its
implicit elevation of the common herd.
The later quarrels between Adams and Jefferson, which marked the early
years of the republic and supplied the benchmarks for all future ‘left’ versus
‘right’ disputes in American politics, were always, either openly or covertly,
arguments about Thomas Paine. But within
a few months the Continental Congress had decided on an irrevocable Declaration
of Independence and appointed a committee, which included Adams, Jefferson and
Franklin, to draft it. It was Jefferson
who was nominated to pull the threats together in one version, and it is
obvious that he had both read and approved of Common Sense. He even
inserted a paragraph denouncing the slave trade, which was cut out by the
Congress before the document was approved and published. When Paine published the first part of the
Rights of Man in 1791, it sold as many as 50,000 copies at once. On 21 May 1792 Prime Minister William Pitt issued
a “Royal Proclamation aimed at wicked and seditious writing’ and Paine received
a summons to appear in court and answer to the charge of seditious libel. Paine
was welcome in Calais, France as an honorary citizen and confirmed as the
town’s deputy to the National Convention although his French was rudimentary. In November 1792 the Convention met to decide
the fate of King Louis (Capet). Paine
objected to the execution. His argument,
‘Public torture and execution was the problem, not the answer. France has been the first country to abolish
monarchy let it also be the first abolish the punishment of death’. The author of the Rights of Man was arrested one night at Christmas 1793, just as he
was completing his work on the Age of Reason.
When the time for his execution came he was saved by an accident. The chalk mark on the door of his cell,
scheduling him for execution, was made by a stupid warder who put the chalk
mark on the wrong side of the door. On
28 July 1794 Robbespierre was himself put to death by guillotine. With President Monroe’s support Paine’s
release was only a few months away. He
was not immediately allowed to return to America but was restored his seat at
the National Convention (Hitchens ’06: 28, 29, 37, 38, 60, 63).
Negro life! Being Negro in America means being
scarred by a history of slavery and family disorganization. In Greece and Rome slaves preserved dignity
and a measure of family life. American
institutions of slavery, on the other hand, began with the breakup of families
on the coasts of Africa. Because the
middle passage was long and expensive, African families were torn apart in the
interest of selectivity. In the ships’
holds, black captives were packed in a space for each the size of a coffin on a
voyage often lasting two to six months.
If water ran short, or famine threatened, or a plague broke out, whole
cargoes of living and dead were thrown overboard. The sheer physical torture was sufficient to
murder millions of men, women, and children.
But even more incalculable was the psychological damage. Of those
families who survived the voyage, many more were ripped apart on the auction
block as soon as they reached American shores.
Against this ghastly background the Negro family began life in the
United States. On the plantation the
institution of legal marriage for slaves did not exist. The masters might direct mating, or if they
did not intervene, marriage occurred without sanctions. There were polygamous relationships, fragile
monogamous relationships, illegitimacies, abandonment and the repetitive
tearing apart of families as children, husbands or wives were sold to other
plantations. But these cruel conditions were not the whole story. Master and their sons used Negro women to
satisfy their spontaneous lust or, when more humane attitudes prevailed, as
concubines. In Virginia slaves were bred
for sale. This breeding program was one
answer to the legal halting of the slave traffic early in the nineteenth
century. The historian Kenneth Stampp,
in his remarkable book The Peculiar
Institution has a fascinating section on the psychological indoctrination
that is necessary from the master’s viewpoint to make a good slave, noting five
recurring aspects of this training. First, those who managed the slaves had to
maintain strict discipline. One master
said, “Unconditional submission is the only footing upon which slavery should
be placed”. Another said, “The slave
must know that his master is to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly,
that he is never, for a moment to exercise either his will or judgment in
opposition to a positive order”. Second,
the master felt that they had to implant in the bondsman a consciousness of
personal inferiority. This sense of
inferiority was deliberately extended to his past. The slave-owners were convinced that in order
to control the Negroes, the slaves “had to feel that African ancestry tainted
them, that their color was a badge of degradation”. The third step in the training process was to
awe the slaves with a sense of the master’s enormous power. It was necessary, various owners said, “to
make them stand in fear”. The fourth
aspect was the attempt to “persuade the bondsman to take an interest in the
master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct”. Thus the master’s criteria of what was good
and true and beautiful were to accepted unquestionably by the slaves. The final step, was “to impress Negroes with
their helplessness: to create in them a habit of perfect dependence upon their
masters” (King ’68: 110, 111, 112, 40).
Cotton Mather culled the Bible for passages to
give comfort to the plantation owners and merchants. He went so far as to set up some “Rules for
the Society of Negroes” in which, among other things, Negroes disobedient to
their masters were to be rebuked and denied attendance at church meetings, and
runaway slaves were to be brought back and severely punished. All of this, he reasoned, was in line with
the Apostle Paul’s injunction that servants should be obedient to their
masters. Academicians developed the
so-called Teutonic Origins theory, a doctrine of white supremacy surrounded by
the halo of academic responsibility.
When George Washington died he owned, or had on lease, more than 160
slaves. Generally we think of white
supremacist views has having their origins in the unlettered, underprivileged,
poorer-class whites. But the social
obstetricians who presided at the birth of the racist views in our country were
from the aristocracy: rich merchants, influential clergymen, men of medical
historians and political scientists from some of the leading universities of
the nation. Soon the doctrine of white
supremacy was imbedded in every textbook and preached in practically every
pulpit. In 1857 the system of slavery
was given its ultimate legal support by the Supreme Court of the United States
in the Dred Scott decision, which affirmed that the Negro had no rights that
the white man was bound to respect. On
January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
the Negro from the bondage of chattel slavery.
In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free. The significance of the Emancipation
Proclamation was described by Frederick Douglas in these words:
“Unquestionably, for weal or for woe the First of January is to be the most
memorable day in American Annals. The
Fourth of July was great, but the First of January, when we consider it in all
its relations and bearings, is incomparably greater. The one had respect to the mere political
birth of a nation, the last concerns the national life and character, and is to
determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all
high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened, forevermore. Four million newly liberate slaves found
themselves with no brad to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their
heads. It was like freeing a man who had
been unjustly imprisoned for years, and on discovering his innocence sending
him out with no bus fare to get home, no suit to cover his body, no financial
compensation to atone for his long period of incarceration and to help him get
a sound footing in society; sending him out with only the assertion “now you
are free” (King ’68: 77, 81, 79, 83, 84).
As a matter of historical fact President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation
Proclamation while wintering at Hospitals & Asylums (HA) Armed Forces
Retirement Home. There have been a
number of complaints in the media that the Emancipation Proclamation was too
short and contained some loopholes that did not free every slave. HA is back to finish the job.
For a brief period after the
Civil War ended in 1865, newly freed slaves enjoyed the right to vote, hold
office and have equal access to education, jobs and services for the first time
in the South. But their former masters
were not willing to give up their superior position in society. Within a decade, white Southerners, intent on
reestablishing segregation and depriving African-Americans of political power,
began campaigns of terror, led by the Ku Klux Klan, to force blacks into
abandoning their newfound rights. By the
late 1870s, white segregationists had regained political control over most
state governments in the South and had passed “Jim Crow” laws, which legalized
inequality between African Americans and whites in all areas of public
life. By 1880, less than 10 percent of
African Americans eligible to vote were registered to vote in the Southern
states, deterred by expensive poll taxes and bizarre literacy tests, which
required that they recite the Constitution from memory. African Americans were restricted to separate
– and vastly inferior schools.
Restaurants, movie theatres, public transportation and sports arenas had
separate seating, water fountains and bathrooms for blacks and whites. Some businesses banned blacks
altogether. Many jobs were restricted to
white applicants and African Americans received lower pay for doing the same
work as whites. All neighborhoods were
officially segregated. Always hovering
in the background was the threat of violence. Blacks had no legal protection;
Juries were all white, and prosecutors or police routinely intimidated
witnesses and defendants. Lynch mobs
often took the law into their own hands.
By the 1950s, the South was still a segregated society, and African
Americans had almost no political power to change these laws and customs. In the national political party structure,
race as an issue cut across party lines:
The Democratic Party had both liberal members in the North and segregationist
members in the South. Northern
Republicans were liberal on racial issues, but other Republicans form the
Midwest and West were not. Attempts to
change federal laws often failed because of these political party
alliances. In addition, a significant
number of Southern senators used their powerful committee chairmanships to
block legislation to override the Jim Crow laws. And then there was the filibuster rule in the
Senate, which allowed unlimited debate unless two-thirds of the Senate approved
moving a bill to a majority vote. Even
in extreme cases where bills did manage to get to the Senate floor, the threat
of unlimited debate prevent most civil rights legislation from ever being voted
on (Schenkkan ’12: 4).
After World War II, exemplary
Negro service in the military, the migration of
large numbers of African Americans to the north and the discrediting
example of racism in Nazi Germany combined to create more favorable conditions
to challenge segregation in the South
African American civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Urban League, led by Dr Martin Luther
King Jr., Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, Stokely Carmichael and Whitney Young,
began to tackle different aspects of discrimination and soon began to challenge
segregation laws and inequality. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case,
the NAACP brought a legal challenge against segregation in the public schools
in Topeka, Kansas, to the Supreme Court – and won. The next year, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa
Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested after she refused to give up her bus
seat to ta white man. In response, a
young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. mounted a year-long, ultimately
successful boycott against the Montgomery bus system. Based on the nonviolent campaign by Mohandas
Gandhi, the civil rights groups called attention to injustice by peaceful
protests. In 1960, college students,
angry at restaurants refusing them service, began to conduct peaceful “sit-ins”
at lunch counters in Nashville, Greensboro and Atlanta. They were met with violence from some white
citizens and arrests by police. In 196,
CORE organized the Freedom Riders to integrate interstate travel. Black and white riders refused to sit in
separate sections on buses as they roe through the Southern states. In Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama, riders were
brutally beaten and some of the buss were burned. In 1963, in Birmingham, King and SCLC began a
campaign of marches and demonstrations to end segregation in public
places. After a year-long campaign in
which they were blasted with fire hoses and subjected to attacks by dogs and
police ,the SCLC finally forced the integration of Birmingham. The American public, shocked by television
footage of the violence, began to favor ending Southern segregation. But by 1964 the most basic civil rights for
African Americans in the South were still not secured (Schenkkan ’12: 4, 5).
In November 1963, when Lyndon
Johnson took office, the nation was poised at a crossroads. The Democratic Party controlled the House,
the Senate and the Supreme Court, all of which were disposed to favor civil
rights reform. King’s campaign in
Birmingham had exposed the violence that kept African Americans from gaining
full civil rights. Polls showed the
American public favoring reform, but gains by the civil rights movement were
proceeding slowly, city by city, state by state. Real progress could only be finally achieved
by federal laws that would overrule the Jim Crow segregation laws in all the
Southern states. Lyndon Johnson used his
background as Senate Majority Leader and his consummate political skills to
force the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress against intense opposition
from Southern state politicians.
Ultimately, the passage of the Act in July 1964, and then the passage of
the 1965 Voting Rights At, changed the South forever. The Civil Rights Act outlawed all state laws
that maintained segregation. This meant
the end of white and “colored” drinking fountains and bathrooms, segregated
restaurants, libraries and universities.
The Voting Rights Act outlawed all state laws and practices that
prevented African Americans form registering to vote, like the poll taxes,
literacy requirements and intimidation.
Most importantly, the law contained provisions that forced states to
comply. A procedure called pre-clearance
identified counties in the United States that had not achieved minimum levels
of minority voter registration and required local authorities to clear any new
voter rules with the Department of Justice.
Within a few years, African American voter registration throughout the
South greatly increased and the bulwarks of institutionalized racism in the
South disappeared. Today, black voter
registration in the South is equal to that of whites. Mississippi, once a bastion of institutional
inequality, stands as an example of change.
In 1965 only 7 percent of blacks of voting age were registered. Today, 76 percent are (Schenkken ’68: 5).
Johnson dedicated himself to
civil rights and had to deal with Hoover’s smear campaign against King. J. Edgar Hoover is a unique personality in
American politics. After becoming the
founding director of the FBI in 1924, he ruled the agency like a private
fiefdom for nearly 50 years. He was
obsessed with control and with people’s sex lives – to the point of amassing
300,000 personal files on the sexual proclivities of Americans who were
unrelated to any criminal investigation.
It is widely accepted that Hoover used these files to assure political
clout. For instance, he compiled files
on John F. Kennedy’s many sexual affairs and on several of LBJ’s. Hoover was most obsessed with investigating
Communism. In 1956, he originated the
Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which conducted surveillance on
thousands of people, mostly ordinary American citizens who were not part of any
spy activity. But in the 1960s, Hoover’s
focus turned to the civil rights movement, which he equated with Communist
conspiracy. He began what can only be
called a personal vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference after King criticized FBI policies in the
South. Hoover blackmailed New York
Herald Tribune columnist Joseph Alsop into printing false stories about King
having Communist associations. In 1964,
Hoover blackmailed SCLC bookkeeper James Harrison into giving him King’s travel
plans so he could illegally bug King’s hotel rooms. As a result, Hoover obtained key information
about such civil rights campaigns as Freedom Summer and also about King’s
sexual affairs. Hoover anonymously sent
a box of tape recordings of King’s infidelities to his home with a note
encouraging him to commit suicide. By
mistake, Coretta King opened the box and was the first to hear the
recordings. Some speculate that Hoover’s
obsession with King was based on racism or personal jealousy. Others, like authors Anthony Summers and Rick
Geary, contend that Hoover’s obsession with other’s personal lives stemmed from
his long personal relationship with assistant FBI director, Clyde Tolson, and
that his condemnation of King was a sad projection of his own internal
conflicts. In any case, Hoover’s clout was
such that his misuse of the FBIs powers was checked only by his death in 1972
(Schenkken ’12: 2, 4, 5).
During Lyndon Johnson’s
presidency, he would pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act
of 1965 and the Great Society programs that would do more to alleviate poverty
in American than any other legislation in American history. Johnson’s ambition was born of poverty in
rural Texas. His father, a struggling
businessman, passed on to him the values of business acumen and entrepreneurial
spirit. His father was also elected to
the legislature, and Johnson observed firsthand the intrigues behind the
processes of government. His mother on
the other hand, tried to impress upon him the values of idealism and
progressive thinking. After graduating
from college in 1930, Johnson taught poor Mexican children in the small town of
Cotulla, Texas. LBJ signed the Higher
Education Act of 1965. 6 Johnson’s ambition led him to seek elected office, and
he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1937. He became an assiduous acolyte of the
powerful, particularly House Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Franklin
Roosevelt. He soon showed that he could
be extremely effective politically. One
of his big achievements was getting the Rural Electrification Administration to
finally bring power to the hill country of Texas, which alleviated
poverty. In his first election to the
Senate in 1948, a huge controversy erupted over the final election tally: After
a primary election against three Democratic candidates and then a runoff
election that had to be decided by a special committee vote, Lyndon Johnson
emerged the winner by just 87 votes.
There were charges of fraud, but they came to nothing. Still, he was sardonically tagged
“Landslide Lyndon” thereafter. During the 1950s, Johnson worked his way up
to the position of Majority Leader of the Senate through a series of expedient
political moves and by attaching himself to key mentor figure, particularly
Richard Russell, one of the most powerful men in the Senate. Russell was an ardent if diplomatic
segregationist and the leader of the conservative collation that had
effectively prevented the passage of any new federal laws that would override
state segregation laws in the South.
Through Russell’s influence, Johnson became Senate Majority Leader in
1955 (Schenkken ’12: 6).
But all along Johnson had a
higher ambition: to be president of the United States. Toward this end, he also courted liberal
member of the Senate, like Hubert Humphrey, and tried to win their confidence
by passing legislation supportive of their goals, whenever possible. Although Johnson rarely spoke out on the
particular issue of civil rights, he was responsible for the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first piece of civil rights legislation passed
since Reconstruction. He managed to
achieve both goodwill from Senate liberals for undertaking to pass what was
primarily a voting rights bill and approval from Senate segregationists for
greatly weakening it. In the end, though,
liberals felt that under Johnson’s Senate leadership, the bill was so
watered-down that it was useless in enforcing any civil rights legislation in
the South. Author Nick Kotz in Judgment
Days quotes NAACP head Roy Wilkins on Johnson’s gutting of the bill, likening
it to “soup made from the bones of an emaciated chicken which had died from
starvation”. His techniques of
persuasion, known as “the Johnson treatment” were legendary. From his pockets poured clippings, memos,
statistics. In the Democratic primary
process of 1960, Johnson had lost the presidential nomination to John F.
Kennedy. Although he considered Kennedy
a lightweight and felt enormous resentment, he nevertheless accepted the vice
presidential slot on the ticket. The
experience was apparently humiliating; Johnson felt isolated form the avenues
of power that he had controlled as Senate Majority Leader, and the Kennedy
brothers seemed to keep their distance from him, whether out of political
rivalry or personal dislike. When John F.
Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, few in the civil rights movement and
in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party held out hope that Johnson would
avidly pursue the goals of the civil rights movement. But people knew little about who Lyndon Johnson
was outside of the political arena and what he might do with the full powers of
the presidency at his disposal. There
was another side to Johnson little evidenced in his political career except in
his general support for Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Those close to Johnson could see two
different impulses: to better the lot of America’s disadvantaged and to pursue
a pragmatic path of personal political success.
Looking back, his place in history is as a civil rights champion
(Schenkken ’12: 6, 7).
Just as an ambivalent nation freed the slaves
a century ago with no plan or program to make their freedom meaningful, the
still ambivalent nation in 1954 declared school segregation unconstitutional
with no plan or program to make integration real. Just as the Congress passed a civil rights
bill in 1968 and refused to enforce it, the Congress passed a civil rights bill
in 1964 and to this day has failed to enforce it in all its dimensions. Just as the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870
proclaimed Negro suffrage, only to permit its de facto withdrawal in half the
nation, so in 1965 the Voting Rights Law was passed and then permitted to
languish with only fractional and halfhearted implementation. The civil rights measures of the 1960s
engraved solemn rights in the legal literature (King ’68: 86). When the war against poverty came into being
in 1964, it seemed to herald a new day of compassion. It was the bold assertion that the nation
would no longer stand complacently by while millions of its citizens smothered
in poverty in the midst of opulence.
What is needed on the part of white America is a committed altruism
which recognizes the truth. True
altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to
empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for
someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone.
Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need – his pain, agony and
burdens. I doubt if the problems of our
teeming ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority,
through genuine empathy comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negroes’
daily life. Jews progress(ed) because
they possessed a tradition of education combined with social and political
action. The Jewish family enthroned
education and sacrificed to get it. The
result was far more than abstract learning.
Uniting social action with educational competence, Jews became
enormously effective in political life.
Those Jews who became lawyers, businessmen, writers, entertainers, union
leaders and medical men did not vanish into the pursuits of their trade
exclusively. They lived an active life
in political circles, learning the techniques and arts of politics. Nor was it
only the rich who were involved in social and political action. Millions of Jews for half a century remained
relatively poor, but they were far from passive in social and political areas. They lived in homes in which politics was a
household word. They were deeply
involved in radical parties liberal parties and conservative parties, they
formed many of them. Jews sank into
despair and escapism even when discrimination assailed the spirit and corroded
initiative. Their life raft in the sea
of discouragement was social action (King ’68: 107, 163). Since the beginning of the 21st
century Zion came to violate humanitarian law and the number of American Jews
declined from 6 million to 3 million, rising to 5 million in support of the two
State solution – (all that is needed is a Palestinian Supreme Court).
Negro population is burgeoning in major cities
as tides of migrants flow into them in search of employment and
opportunity. These new migrants have
substantially higher birth rates than characterize the white population. The two trends, along with the exodus of the
white population to the suburbs, are producing fast-gathering Negro majorities
in the large cities. The changing
composition of the cities must be seen in the light of their political
significance. Particularly in the North,
the large cities substantially determine the political destiny of states. These states, in turn, hold the dominating
electoral votes in presidential contests. The future of the Democratic Party,
which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessed
without taking to account which way the Negro vote turns. The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for
large city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great
corporations but in the teeming ghettos.
Its 1963 disaster with Goldwater, in which fewer than 6 percent of
Negroes voted Republican, indicates that the illustrious ghost of Abraham
Lincoln is not sufficient for winning Negro confidence, not so long as the
party fails to shrink the influence of its ultra-right wing. The future of the deep structural changes we
seek will not be found in the decaying political machines. It lies in the new alliances of Negroes,
Puerto Ricans, labor, liberals, certain church and middle-class elements. It is noteworthy that the largest single
civil rights action ever conducted was the New York school boycott, when nearly
half a million Negroes and Puerto Ricans united in a demonstration that emptied
segregated schools (King ’68: 154, 155, 159).
Today the Republican Party is viewed as having conservative economic and social
agendas and the Democratic party is seen as having liberal economic and social
agendas. But in the early 1960s the
Democratic Party also has a Southern wing that was extremely conservative on
issues like race and the Republican Party had a wing that was very liberal on
social issues. In 1948 the Democratic
convention adopted a pro-civil rights plank.
The Southern conservatives walked out, nominating Strom Thurmond for
president of their “Dixiecrat” Party.
They returned to the Democratic fold after the election, but this break
foreshadowed their eventual defection to the Republican Party and the liberal
slant of the Democratic Party today. The
Republican National Convention in 1964 featured a similar split between the
moderates of the party, headed by Nelson Rockefeller, and the conservatives,
headed by Barry Goldwater. Although
Goldwater lost the 1964 election, his policies later became the cornerstone of
the Republican Party (Schenkken ’12: 3).
The political battle is not just fought over getting supporters
and getting them to vote. It’s also
fought over not allowing those who disagree with you to vote – return to the
mindset of two centuries ago, when the voting franchise was severely
restricted. In the UK, until the Reform
Act of 1832, only large property owners or people of considerable wealth could
vote. The elites didn’t trust what might
happen if voting rights were extended.
In the Jim Crow South at the end of the nineteenth century, white
politicians devised poll taxes that were designed to disenfranchise the former
slaves and their descendants, who wouldn’t have the wherewithal to pay. Those taxes, combined with literacy tests and
sometimes violence and terror, succeeded in substantially lowering electoral
turnouts and in increasing the Democratic vote share. In Ecuador, before 1979 only the literate
could vote, and the ruling elite made sure that the indigenous people didn’t
have sufficient education to qualify.
Elites fear they will lose their position of power and privilege, and
even their wealth, if they extended the voting franchise (King ’68: 129). Many of the disenfranchisement has been
targeted at the poor. In the 1930s pauper
exclusion laws disenfranchised jobless men and women who were receiving relief
(Stiglitz ’12: 130). When a man is able
to make his way through the maze of handicaps and get just one foot out of the
jungle of poverty and exploitation, he is subject to the whims of the political
and economic giants of the city, which move in impersonally to crush the little
flower of success that has just begun to bloom (King ’68: 124).
More than 20 million people took to the
streets on the first Earth Day (22 April 1970).
It was the largest demonstration in American history. Many
African American political and civil rights leaders were concerned that the
environmental movement shifted national attention and discourse away from the
civil rights movement. When newly
elected African American politicians were interviewed in 1970 by the national media
on the topic of the environmental movement, they did not hesitate to express
their disdain and disappointment over the country’s sudden embrace and focus on
environmental issues so soon after the assassination of leading civil rights
leaders and deaths of political activists.
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected
to Congress, held a slightly different opinion about the relationship between
economic and environmental enfranchisement, “It will do black Americans absolutely
no good to be politically and economically enfranchised into a system that
systematically denies human values and destroys the environment that sustains
life. By affirming and fighting for the
values that are life sustaining, black politicians can become the vanguard of
the forces that save this country, if it is to be saved” (Egan & Crane ’09:
208). In 1920 there were more than 900,000 farms
operated by African-Americans in the United States. Today, there are only 18,000 black people who
name farming as their primary occupation.
Black farmers cultivate less than half a percent of the country’s
farmland. From the 1960s to 1990s about
115,000 black farmers left the profession.
By the last decade of the twentieth century, the typical African American
farmer who remained on the land was sixty years old. By the end of the 1980s there were fewer than
two thousand African American farmers under the age of twenty-five in the
entire United States. For black farmers
in the twentieth century who outlasted the upheaval of the Great Migration,
there were more subtle forces that drove them off their land. In 1982 a bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights issued a report called “The Decline of Black Farming in America” that
attempted to understand why black farmers were leaving the profession at two
and a half times greater than that of whites.
The committee found that one important reason was that black farmers
were small farmers. The average
commercial farm owned by a black man in the South was 128 acres. The average farm of a white landowner was 428
acres. Almost all the technological
innovations that the United States government had subsidized over the previous
decades were geared toward increasing the productivity of large farms, and not
to making small farms sustainable. By
the late 1970s payments for participating small farmers were as low as
$365. Farms with more than 2,500 acres,
on the other hand, received as much as $36,000 a year. These policies allowed larger farms to borrow
and invest capital in more land and improved technology, resulting in increased
production on their part and providing for an “increasing disadvantage for
small farmers”. The USDA has
acknowledged that these income-support programs could be contributing to the
loss of small farms. Then, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan closed the USDA
Civil Rights Office and the US stopped responding to claims of
discrimination. In 1984 to 1985 the
agency lent $1.3 billion to farmers in order to buy land. Sixteen thousand farmers received these
loans. Only 209 of them were black
(Allen ’12: 237, 6, 101, 103). By 2011
there were so few black farmers the USDA afforded protestors a settlement for
racial discrimination in agricultural subsidies.
Two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed
hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep
in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of
the cities and the dusty roads of the villages.
Today the question on the agenda must read: why should there be hunger
and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the
resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic
necessities of life? Even deserts can be
irrigated and topsoil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for
there are 25 million square miles of tillable land on earth, of which we are
using less than seven million. We have
amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food and the
versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources, the deficit is in
human will. There is need now for a
general strategy of support. Sketchy aid
here and there will not suffice, nor will it sustain economic growth. There must be a sustained effort extending
through many years. The wealthy nations
of the world must promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for
Asia, Africa and South America. If they
would allocate just 2 percent of their gross national product annually for a
period of ten or twenty years for the development of the underdeveloped
nations, mankind would go a long way toward conquering the ancient enemy,
poverty. Truth is found neither in
traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Capitalism fails to see the truth in
collectivism. Communism fails to see the
truth in individualism. The good and
just society is neither the thesis of capitals nor the antithesis of
Communisms, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of
individualism and collectivism. We still have a choice today: nonviolent
coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and
community (King ’68: 187, 189, 197, 202). A one percent FICA tax on wages, 0.5
percent employee and 0.5% employer, for international development (ID) would be
a sufficient resolution of the Millennium Development Goals for 2015 to bring
the 1 percent 2020 international income tax into focus.
There are moments in history when people all
over the world seem to rise up, to say that something is wrong, to ask for
change. 2011 may prove to such a
moment. A youth uprising that began in
Tunisia, a little country on the coast of North Africa, spread to nearby Egypt,
then to other countries of the Middle East, taking down such long-established
dictators as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. Soon the people of Spain and Greece, the
United Kingdom and the United States, and other countries around the world, had
their own reasons to be in the streets.
The political grievances in the Middle East were very different from
those in the West, there were some shared themes. There was a common understanding that in many
ways the economic and political system had failed and that both were
fundamentally unfair. The name chosen by the young Spanish protesters in their
movement that began on May 15 was “los indignados” the indignant or
outraged. They were outraged that so
many would suffer so much – exemplified by a youth unemployment rate in excess
of 40 percent since the beginning of the crisis in 2008 – as a result of the
misdeeds of those in the financial sector.
In the United States the “Occupy Wall Street” movement echoed the same
refrain. The unfairness of a situation
in which so many lost their homes and their jobs while the bankers enjoyed
large bonuses was grating. But the US
protests went beyond a focus on Wall Street to the broader inequities in
American society. Their slogan became “the
99 percent”. The protesters who took
this slogan echoed the title of an article I wrote for the magazine Vanity
Fair, “Of the 1%, for the 1%, by the 1%”, which described the enormous increase
in inequality in the United States and a political system that seemed to give
disproportionate voice to those on the top (Stiglitz ’11: ix, x, xi). Banks
have been repeatedly bailed out. The
Mexican bailout of 1995, the Indonesian, Thai and Korean bailouts of 1997-98,
the Russian bailout of 1998, the Argentinean bailout of 2000, these and others
were all really bank bailouts, though thy carried the name of the country where
banks had lent excessively. Then, in
2008-09, the U.S. government was engaged in yet another bailout, this one the
most massive ever, and without any discipline by firing executives (as the UK
did) or making shareholders and bondholders take a hit – they don’t pay any
insurance premiums and are not generally considered insured like depositors
(Stiglitz ’12: 161, 171). Inequality in dividends is greater than that in wages
and salaries, and the inequality in capital gains is greater than that in any
other form of income, so giving a tax break to capital gains is, in effects
giving a tax break to the very rich. The
bottom 90 percent of the population gets less than 10 percent of all capital
gains. Under 7 percent of households
earning less than $100,000 receive any capital gains in come and for these
households capital gains and dividend income combined make up an average of 1.4
percent of their total income. Salaries
and wages accounted for only 8.8 percent of the income of the top 400, capital
gains for 57 percent, and interest and dividends for 16 percent – so 73 percent
of their income was subject to low rates.
Indeed, the top 400 taxpayers garner close to 5 percent of the country’s
entire dividends. They posted an average
of $153.7 million in gains each (a total of $61.5 billion in gains) in 2008,
$228.6 million each (for a total of $91.4 billion) in 2007. Lowering the tax on capital gains from the
ordinary rate of 35 percent to 15 percent thus gave each of these 400, on
average, a gift of $30 million in 2008 and $45 million in 2007, and it lowered
overall tax revenues by $12 billion in 2008 and $18 billion in 2007. The
overall tax rate in 2007 on the top 400 households was only 16.6 percent,
considerably lower than the 20.4 percent for taxpayers in general. While the
average tax rate has decreased little since 1979 – going from 22.2 percent to
20.4 percent, that of the top 1 percent has fallen by almost a quarter, from 37
percent to 29.5 percent (Stiglitz ’12: 72, 73).
The 2007-08 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed
case vast number of Americans adrift. A
half decade later, one out of six Americans who would like a full-time job
still couldn’t find one; some eight million families have been told to leave
their homes and millions more anticipate seeing foreclosure notices in the
not-too-distant future, still more saw their lifetime savings seemingly
evaporate. The top 1 percent earn a
fifth of national income and own a third of tangible wealth. From 2002 to 2007 the top 1 percent seized
more than 65 percent of the gain in total national income. After the recession, although the top 1
percent were initially hit hard by slumping stock prices, but they recovered reasonably
well and relatively fast and since the recession the top 1 percent of Americans
have gained 93 percent of the additional income created in the country in
2010. CEOs were successful in
maintaining their high pay, after a slight dip in 2008, the ratio of CEO annual
compensation to that of the typical worker by 2010 was back to what it had been
before the crisis, 243 to 1. The marked reduction in inequality in the period
between 1950 and 1970 was due partly to developments in the markets but even
more to government policies, such as the increased access to higher education
provided by the GI Bill and the highly progressive tax system enacted during
World War II. In the years after Reagan
the divide in market incomes increased while government initiatives were
dismantled, taxes at the top were lowered and social programs were cut back.
Brazil has had one of the highest levels of inequality in the world, but in the
1990s it realized the perils and has been striving, to improve the plight of
the poor and reduce gaps in income between rich and poor, America has allowed
inequality to grow and poverty to increase. (Stiglitz ’12: 1, 3, 5). When
Greece proposed to submit the tough austerity program that had been prepared to
a popular referendum, there arose a shout of horror from European officials and
the bankers. Greek citizens might reject
the proposal, and that might mean that the creditors would not be repaid.
Greece;, to secure its 2011 bailout by the European Union, was forced to pass
laws affecting not only the budget but also the health sector, the rights of
unions in collective bargaining and the minimum wage. In the United States the
current annual deficit is running close to $1.3 trillion, or 10 percent of the
GDP (Stiglitz ’12: 139, 141, 114). According
to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) federal debt exceeds 100 percent
of the GDP, but after minimal correction the 100 percent debt to GDP ratio is
permanently avoided, so the press was silent about Federal Budget Balanced to Prevent Debt from Exceeding 100% of GDP FY
2012 HA-13-7-12.
One measure to reduce is income inequality is
to effectively tax the rich. If the tax cuts were extended for the next decade,
the budgetary costs for 2011-20 would be $3.3 trillion. Of the 2012 budget deficit, around a fifth is
attributed to the Bush tax cuts. In 2012 the downturn accounted for almost
two-thirds of the deficit – 16 percent of the deficit was for measures to
stimulate the economy (the stimulus package that included tax cuts, aid to
stats and public investment); but almost half (48 percent) of the entire
deficit was a result of the underperformance of the economy which led to lower
tax revenues and higher expenditures on unemployment insurance, food stamps and
other social protection programs. These
shortfalls reflect the fact that the U.S. GDP in 2012 is predicted to be nearly
$900 billion short of its potential (Stiglitz ’12: 211). Federal finance is that incompetent. For instance, the Vice-President agreed to a
basic two-years extension of all the Bush tax cuts ($544 billion), the payroll
tax cut for a year ($112 in 2012), the Kyl-Lincoln estate tax plan (at least
$25 billion) and extension of unemployment insurance for 13 months ($56.5
billion). Businesses would save an estimated
$250 billion in taxes. In addition, the
highest rate on capital gains and dividends would remain at 15 percent for two
years (Woodward ’12: 75). These provisions have fallen out of favor and
are generally considered expensive unnecessary subsidies, a mistake. The 74 page Budget Control Act of 2011
guaranteed that Obama would get $2.4 trillion added to the debt ceiling. Nearly $2.4 trillion would be cut over 10
years, beginning in 2013. The house passed
the bill by a vote of 269 in favor with 174 Republicans joined by 95
Democrats. The Senate followed next with
a vote of 74-26 that included majorities from both parties, and the president
signed it. By law, some $2.4 trillion in spending cuts must begin in 2013,
starting with an increase in income and payroll taxes on those making over
$450,000 a year (Woodward ’12: 355, 356, 379) for those taxpayers,
in the top two tax rates would rise back to their pre-2001 levels, from 33% to
36% for the second bracket and 39.6% in the highest bracket (Geithner ’10: 150) HA-28-2-10, estimated
during negotiations to bring in an average of $80 billion annually, $800
billion over the decade, with a 24 percent deduction limit (Woodward ’12: 160). Congress
is therefore obligated to come up with twice that deficit reduction beginning
in 2012. Congress must be dissuaded from
boring the press with non-unanimous budgetary negotiations, and the Treasury
from selling bonds which seem unnecessary, are non-existential and clearly in
excess of the reasonable three percent limits of sustained growth in HA-28-2-10
and HA-13-7-12.
The other measure to reduce income inequality
is to pay benefits to the poor. Ordinary Americans have been hard hit by the
crisis and poorer Americans, who were just beginning to glimpse the American
dream, have done particularly badly.
Between 2005 and 2009 the typical African American household has lost 53
percent of its wealth, putting its assets at a mere 5 percent of the average
white American’s and the average Hispanic households has lost 66 percent of its
wealth. And even the net worth of the
typical white American household was down substantially, to $113,149 in 2009, a
16 percent loss of wealth from 2005. Young men who are less educated have a
harder time and those who have only graduated from high school have seen their
real incomes decline by more than a quarter in the last twenty-five years. While the unemployment rate among those with
a college degree or higher was only 4.2 percent those with less than a high
school diploma faced an unemployment rate three times higher, at 12.9
percent. The picture for recent high
school dropouts and even graduates not enrolled in college is far more dismal:
jobless rates of 42.7 percent and 33.4 percent, respectively. But even
households of individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher have not done
well, their median income fell by a tenth from 2000 to 2010. An increasing fraction of young adults are
living with their parents: some 19 percent of men between twenty-five and
thirty-four, up from 14 percent as recently as 2005. For women in this age group, the increase was
from 8 percent to 10 percent. In just
one year (2010) the number of couples who were living together without being
married jumped by 13 percent. The
fraction of those in poverty was 15.1 percent in 2010, up from 12.5 percent in
2007. And our discussion above should
have made clear how low the standard of living is of those at that
threshold. At the very bottom, by 2011
the number of American families in extreme poverty – living on two dollars a
day per person or less, the measure of poverty used by the World Bank for
developing countries- had doubled since 1996 to 1.5 million. We have the wealth and resources to eliminate
poverty: Medicare and Social Security have almost eliminated poverty among the
elderly. And other countries, not as
rich as the United States, have done a better job of reducing poverty and
inequality. It is particularly
disturbing that today almost a quarter of all children live in poverty. Only 58 percent of children born to the
bottom group make it out and when they do move up, they tend to move up only a
little. In Denmark 75 percent of
children born poor grow out of poverty, in Britain 70 percent. By the same
token, once one makes it to the top in the United States, one is more likely to
remain there (Stiglitz ’12: 13, 14, 75, 7, 15, 16, 17).
The Gini coefficient measures inequality. If income were shared equally among everyone
so the bottom 10 percent received 10 percent of the income and the bottom 20
percent 20 percent the Gini coefficient would be zero. There would be no inequality. On the other hand, if all the income went to
the top person, the Gini coefficient would be one, in some sense “perfect”
inequality. More-equal societies have Gini coefficients of .3 or below. These include Sweden, Norway and
Germany. The most unequal societies have
Gini coefficient of .5 or above. These
include some countries in Africa (notably South Africa with its history of
grotesque racial inequality) and Latin American long recognized for their divided
and often dysfunctional societies and policies.
In 1980 the U.S. Gini coefficient was just touching .4, today it’s
.47. According to UN data, we are
slightly more unequal than Iran and Turkey and much less equal than any country
in European Union. The UNDP has developed a standard measure of “human
development”, which aggregates measures of income, health and education. It then adjusts those numbers to reflect
inequality. Before adjustment for
inequality, the United States looked reasonably good in 2011, fourth, behind
Norway, Australia, and Netherlands. But
once account is taken of inequality, the United States ranked twenty-third,
behind all of the European countries.
All of the Scandinavian countries rank much higher than the U.S. and
each provides not only universal education but also health care to its
citizens. The mantra in the U.S. is that taxes to finance these benefits stifle
growth. However, over the period 2000 to 2010, high-taxing Sweden, grew far
faster than the U.S. the country’s average growth rates have exceeded those of
the U.S. – 2.31 percent a year versus 1.85 percent. While tax policies can
either let the rich get richer or restrain the growth of inequality,
expenditure programs can play an especially important role in preventing the
poor form becoming poorer. Social
Security has almost eliminated poverty among the elderly. The earned-income tax credit, which
supplements the income of poor working families, by itself lowers the poverty
rate by an estimated 2 percent. Housing subsidies,
food stamps, school lunch programs and universal children’s health insurance,
all have big effects in lowering poverty (Stiglitz ’12: 23, 22, 74). For
many years economists have agreed that US GDP statistics were artificially high
and did not reflect the per capita income of the average citizen. The US must moderate their prospects
for economic growth as a developed nations whose potential is limited by the
law of diminishing returns. A
more effective method of gauging prosperity is pre-tax, Gross National
Income. GNI figures are
however also misleading because they do not account for the cost of taxation
and work related expenses or why so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of
a few. The US Census Bureau
estimates that in 2004 the median family income was $44,334 and the average
family size was 2.59, yielding a per capita income of $17,117; average per
capita money income was estimated at $21,587 in 1999. In 2006, the average American
worker earned $29,544 (Waxman 2007). Income inequality, as
measured by the Gini co-efficient, has steadily increased since 1970, before
which time it flucuated between 0.35 and 0.38. Between 2000 and 2005 the Gini
inequality coefficient increased from 0.433 to 0.440. If the 0.02 growth rate of growth of
income inequality remains unchanged the Gini co-efficient would rise from 0.440
in 2005 to 0.500 in 2010. Using
the Gini co-efficient for 2005 the per capita GDP was $23,132 and the per
capita income was $19,480 HA-20-1-08.
Three themes resonated around the world: that
market weren’t working the way they were supposed to for they were obviously
neither efficient nor stable; that the political system hadn’t corrected the
market failures; and that the economic and political systems are fundamentally
unfair. The nature of the lives people can lead has been the object of attention
of social analysts over the ages.
However, much-used economic criteria of advancement, reflected in a mass
of readily produced statistics, have tended to focus specifically on the
enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience (for example the Gross national
product (GNP), and gross domestic product (GDP), which have been the focus of a
myriad of economic studies of progress).
The case for using instead direct indicators of the quality of life and
of the well-being and freedoms that human lives can bring has been increasingly
recognized. The relevance of disability in the understanding of the deprivation
in the world is often underestimated, and this can be one of the most important
arguments for paying attention to the capability perspective. People with physical or mental disability are
not only among the most deprived human beings in the world, they are also,
frequently enough, the most neglected.
The magnitude of the global problem of disability in the world is truly
gigantic. More than 600 million people –
about one in ten of all human beings – live with some form of significant
disability. More than 400 million of
them live in developing countries.
Furthermore, in the developing world, the disabled are quite often the
poorest of the poor in terms of income, but in addition their need for income
is greater than that of able-bodied people, since they require money and
assistance to try to live normal lives and to attempt to alleviate their
handicaps. The impairment of
income-earning ability, which can be called ‘the earning handicap’, tends to be
reinforced and much magnified in its effect by ‘the conversion handicap’ the
difficulty in converting incomes and resources into good living, precisely
because of disability. One of the
complications in evaluating states of health arises from the fact that the
person’s own understanding of their health may be limited by lack of medical
knowledge and by inadequate familiarity with comparative information. More generally, there is a conceptual contrast
between the ‘internal views of health based on the patient’s perception and
‘external’ views based on observations and examinations by trained doctors or
pathologists. While the two perspectives
can often be fruitfully combined (a good medical practitioner would be
interested in both) there can also be considerable tension between evaluations
based on the two different outlooks. The
external view has come under considerable criticism recently. These works bring out the importance of
seeing suffering as a central feature of illness. No mechanically observed medical statistic
can provide an adequate understanding of this dimension of bad health, since
pain, is a matter of self-perception. If
you feel pain, then you have pain, and if you do not feel pain, then no
external observer can sensibly reject the view that you do not have pain (Sen
’09: 274, 258, 284, 285). Lack of health
insurance is one factor contributing to poorer health especially among the
poor. The United States and South Africa
are the only industrialized nations in the world that do not have universal
health insurance systems and it is estimated that 51 million Americans are
uninsured up from 47 million before the crisis.
Life expectancy in the United States is 78 years, lower than Japan’s 83
years or Australia’s or Israel’s 82 years.
According to the World Bank, in 2009 the United States ranked fortieth
overall, just below Cuba. Infant and
maternal mortality in the United States is little better than in some
developing countries; for infant mortality, it is worse than Cuba, Belarus and
Malaysia, to name a few. Life expectancy at birth for blacks in 2009 was 74.3
compared with 78.6 for whites (Stiglitz ’12: 14, 69, 70). Racial health disparities might go away if
African-Americans with civilizational diseases would get effective medicines,
disability, retirement or employment and move to rural communities with healthy
cultures, eat organic foods and be a high performing athlete, with or without
their family. Negro families must not be
denied antibiotics or Sporonox (itracanazole) that cures pulmonary and
extrapulmonary aspergillosis caused by Aspergillus
niger sold to laboratories.
Consumers of anti-psychotic medicine who suffer from Parkinsonlike
extra-pyramidal symptoms in all antipsychotic medicine but Risperdal
(Risperidone) can be effectively treated with one dose of Symmetrel
(Amantadine), that also has antiviral properties and can be purchased online
without prescription from Generics-discount.com
4.
The Pardon of Rod Blagojevich
Rod Blagojevich was indicted by a
federal grand jury in April 2009. Most of the charges related to attempts
to sell the Senate seat vacated by then-President-elect Barack
Obama. On August 17, 2010, he was convicted on one of the 24 federal
charges, a charge of lying to the FBI, and the jury was hung on 23
other count. The defense did not call a
single witness, claiming that prosecutors did not prove their case. Because the
jury could not agree on the remaining charges, a mistrial was ordered for those
counts. Within fifteen minutes after the mistrial was declared,
the prosecution team announced that they would definitely pursue a retrial
on the twenty-three mistrial counts. A post-verdict court date was set for
August 23, 2010. Federal prosecutors
reduced the number of counts for Blagojevich's retrial, and on June 27,
2011, he was found guilty of 17 of the 20 remaining charges, not guilty on one,
and no verdict was rendered by the jury on two counts. He was found guilty
on all charges pertaining to the senate seat, as well as extortion relating to
state funds being directed towards a children's hospital and race track.
However, he was acquitted on a charge pertaining to the tollway extortion and
avoided a guilty verdict (by split decision) on attempting to extort Rahm
Emanuel. On Wednesday, December 7, 2011, Blagojevich was sentenced to 14
years in federal prison. He reported to prison on March 15, 2012
at Federal Correctional Institution, Englewood in Littleton,
Colorado. There is no parole in the Federal Prison System, however under
federal rules, Blagojevich will serve at least 85%, or 12 years of his sentence
after which time he may be eligible for early release (in 2024) based on good
behavior. Legal experts have gone on record as claiming a news conference
held by Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was in violation of the ethical
guidelines established by the Justice Department and has subsequently
resigned. Attorneys
for Rod Blagojevich, are now gearing up for an appeal of the former governor's conviction. It is not only within the power of the
President to pardon a federal prisoners under Article 2 Section 2 of the U.S.
Constitution and he must pardon Blagojevich because his former Governor is a
nonviolent offender, and the criminal negligence surrounding this morally
turpid conflict of interest troubles the budgets of both the Secretaries from
Illinois - Transportation (Republican) and Education (unqualified personal
associate) - whose majorly fraudulent budgets are stabilized to pay $75 billion
without the issuance of any new Treasury bonds, for Sandy relief HA-15-12-12. To please God the black lawyer must not only
free enough prisoners to get the American legal system within the 250 detainees
per 100,000 residents norm (international legal limit), but the judiciary
requires the leadership of the President to publicly free his former master
from slavery to reassure public servants and citizens they won’t be neglected
and abused in the service of Presidential freedom; properly stated – 250 (500
for now) detainee per 100,000 resident legal limit, violators will be denied
high office, States must abolish the death penalty and voter disenfranchisement
laws so slavers will not have a cruel and unusual advantage at the polls; for
the purpose of receiving SSI and to finance a halfway house system with SSI,
released offenders shall be considered mentally disabled by virtue of having
been released from a correctional institution so that they qualify on the basis
of program poverty guidelines alone, civil briefs written by non-lawyers must
be purchased at reasonable rates until such a time the state bar certifies the
Bachelor of Law degree thereby adopting a civil law system. All supervised release to a halfway house
system financed with SSI needs is a post-conviction college degree program, to
prevent recidivism.
Legislative
action to control guns has been subjected to gridlock because the Vice President
and Attorney General dishonorably fail to precisely recall Bushmaster assault
rifles of the sort used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting mocking
the federal delinquency to pay Sandy
relief HA-15-12-12. The
integrity of Obama’s administration is deeply compromised by his poor choice in
black Attorney General. During confirmation hearings,
Eric Holder admitted to “mistakes” in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc
Rich – mistakes that he claimed were “not typical” of his conduct. From this remark one can tell that Holder is
not a man with any conviction in freedom, the prison population has continued
to rise and to tell you the truth under Holder DoJ financing totally corrupts
local federal correspondence with gun violence.
Not that anyone writes the federal government anymore after having their
fears about lobbying corroborated. Caveat emptor - No one should trust us, and anyone who does is a fool. (Stiglitz
’12: 205). Without dismissing his
counsel under Psalm 1 it is not surprising the Obama administration comes under
penal sanctions for nearly all their actions, and negligent inaction, in every
department but Commerce, International Trade Representative, and Food and Drug
Administration (FDA). Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales was left in the dark about
Operation Fast and Furious and she has called for officials involved in the
operation to be extradited from the U.S. and sent to Mexico for
prosecution. President Barack Obama has
refused to take responsibility for Operation Fast and Furious. Obama maintains he has “full faith and
confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder and his handling of the scandal. In the end, Operation Fast and Furious was a
calculated and lethal decision to purposely place thousands of guns into the
hands of ruthless criminals. The
operation was a coordinated and planned effort not to track guns, but to arm
thugs south of the border for political gain.
The ATF
has become corrupt. Some people claim it
began after ATFs raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in
1993. Some say it was when government
was realigned and ATF was moved from the Treasury Department to the Department
of Justice in 2003. As a deputy attorney general in Janet Reno’s Clinton-era
Justice Department, Holder backed the assault weapons ban and defended the
department’s bungled attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in
1993. The same day President-elect Obama chose Holder as his attorney general,
he also nominated Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland
Security. Napolitano was not considered
controversial, and her confirmation proceeded smoothly. Holder’s nomination was a different story,
given his reputation as a fiercely partisan member of the Bill Clinton-era
Justice Department. Since 2006, 48,000 people had been murdered in the cartel wars in
Mexico. In 2009, 21,313 guns were
recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing.
Only 5,444, or 25 percent were sourced to U.S. gun dealers. Deputy
Attorney General Lanny Breuer of the Department of Justice Criminal Division,
after years of denial, finally admitted to knowing about the “gunwalking” at
the ATF. Breuer served in private
practice with Eric Holder and now serves as Holder’s number two man in the
Justice Department. Breuer also approved
detailed wiretap applications for Operation Fast and Furious in early 2010
(Paylich ’12: 3, 23, 32, 162). The
Mexican violence seems to have been halted now the U.S. connection has been
exposed and a new Mexican PRI President has been elected. The ATF has become corrupt and must be
reorganized to dissolve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and transfer functions to the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Alcohol, Tobacco and Marijiuana (ATM),
leaving a Bureau of Firearms and Explosives (BFE) to be transferred to U.S.
Customs (a.k.a. Homeland Security. A 2010 study, suggested that the marijuana market in America is probably
in the range of $40 billion a year, with the potential to grow to $100 billion
in the event of widespread legalization. Thus, it's smaller than the market for other legal
mind-altering substances such as beer ($99 billion), tobacco ($71 billion), or
hard liquor ($61 billion) -- but bigger than the market for wine ($27 billion)
(Smith ’12) or guns and ammunition $6
billion) (Sanburn ’12). Released
offenders must not be permitted to purchase or possess firearms, however
liberty interest in a democracy requires that they be permitted to vote, get an
education and income insurance, to secure their loyalty.
King suggests that the philosophy and strategy
of nonviolence becomes immediately a subject for study and for serious
experimentation in every field of human conflict. The United Nations is a gesture in the
direction of nonviolence on the world scale.
There, at least, states that oppose one another have sought to do so
with words instead of with weapons. But
true nonviolence is more than the absence of violence. It is the persistent and determined
application of peaceable power to offenses against the community. What lobbying and imploring could not do in
legislative halls, marching feet accomplished a thousand miles away. Nonviolent direct action had proved to be the
most effective generator of change that the movement had seen, and by 1965 all
civil rights organizations had embraced it as theirs. Power, properly understood is the ability to
achieve purpose. It is the strength
required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but
necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is
that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar
opposites. Love is identified with a
resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Beyond the pragmatic invalidity of violence
is its inability to appeal to conscience.
Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power. I would rather be a man of conviction than a
man of conformity. Occasionally in life
one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it
till the end. That is what I have found
in nonviolence. Humanity is waiting for
something other than blind imitations of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further,
if we want to turn over a new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must
begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence. It will not be Lord Acton’s image of power
that tends to corrupt or absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It will be power infused with love and
justice, that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, and lift us
from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. A dark, desperate, confused and sin-sick
world waits for this new kind of man and this new kind of power (King ’68: 193,
195, 180, 45, 18, 37, 61, 66, 68, 69). If someone has the power to make a
change that he or she can see will reduce injustice in the world, then there is
a strong social argument for doing just that.
Consider two different words – niti
and nyaya – both of which stand
for justice in classical Sanskrit. Among
the principal uses of the term niti
are organizational propriety and behavioural correctness. In contrast with niti, the term nyaya
stands for a comprehensive concept of realized justice. The roles of institutions, rules and
organization have to be assessed in the broader and more inclusive perspective
of nyaya, which is inescapably linked
with the world that actually emerges, not just the institutions or rules we
happen to have. Early Indian legal
theorists talked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya ‘justice in the world of fish’, where a big fish can
freely devour a small fish. We are
warned that avoiding matsyanyaya must
be an essential part of justice, and it is crucial to make sure that the
‘justice of the fish’ is not allowed to invade the world of human beings.
Perhaps the most far-reaching example of what is essential for an adequate
understanding of justice is John Rawls’ Theory of Justice that justice has to
be seen in terms of the demands of fairness whereby the following ‘principles
of justice’ will emerge in the original position with unanimous agreement: (a)
Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties
which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all. (b) Social and
economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions. First, they must be attached to offices and
positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and
second, they must be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of
society. It is important to note that the principles of justice include the
priority of liberty (the first principle) giving precedence to maximum liberty
for each person subject to similar liberty for all (Sen ’09: 205, 20, 53).
Let us love one
another: for love is of God:
And every one that
loveth is born of God, and
Knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not
God; for God is
love…If we love one another,
God dwelleth in us,
and his love is perfected in us
The First Epistle of
Saint John (King ’68: 201)
State by State
Detention, Need and Cost Estimate for Community Beds & SSI
|
Correction Agency |
Total
Prison Pop. in 2005 |
State
Prison Pop. |
Local
Jail Population |
per
00,000 |
Estimated Need for Community Beds/Houses |
Estimated Cost to SSI $700 mo./ $8,400 year (Millions) |
|
|
US Military |
25,000 |
|
|
|
0
yes |
|
|
|
179,220 |
N/a |
N/a |
58 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
40,561 |
25,418 |
15,143 |
890 |
34 |
29,168/1,167 |
20.4/245 |
|
|
4,678 |
4,613 |
65 |
705 |
0 |
3,019/120 |
2.1/25.2 |
|
|
47,974 |
32,495 |
15,479 |
808 |
22 |
33,131/1,325 |
23.2/278.3 |
|
|
18,693 |
12,568 |
6,125 |
673 |
27 |
11,749/470 |
8.3/99.1 |
|
|
246,317 |
164,179 |
82,138 |
682 |
11 |
156,025/6,241 |
109.2/1,310.4 |
|
|
33,955 |
20,317 |
13,638 |
728 |
1 |
22,295/892 |
15.6/187.3 |
|
|
19,087 |
N/a |
N/a |
544 |
1 |
10,315/413 |
7.2/86.6 |
|
|
6,916 |
N/a |
N/a |
820 |
14 |
4,808/192 |
3.4/40.3 |
|
|
3,552 |
N/a |
N/a |
645 |
0 |
2,175/87 |
1.5/18.3 |
|
|
148,521 |
84,901 |
63,620 |
835 |
60 |
104,054/4,162 |
72.9/874.4 |
|
|
92,647 |
47,682 |
44,965 |
1,021 |
39 |
69,962/2,799 |
48.9/587.2 |
|
|
5,705 |
N/a |
N/a |
447 |
0 |
2,614/101 |
1.8/21.8 |
|
|
11,206 |
7,419 |
3,787 |
784 |
1 |
7,633/305 |
5.3/64.1 |
|
|
64,735 |
44,669 |
20,066 |
507 |
12 |
32,814/1,313 |
23/275.5 |
|
|
39,959 |
22,392 |
17,567 |
637 |
16 |
24,277/971 |
17/204 |
|
|
12,215 |
8,578 |
3,637 |
412 |
0 |
4,803/192 |
3.4/40.3 |
|
|
15,972 |
9,068 |
6,904 |
582 |
0
yes |
9,111/365 |
6.4/76.4 |
|
|
30,034 |
13,273 |
16,761 |
720 |
2 |
19,605/784 |
13.7/164.6 |
|
|
51,458 |
19,591 |
31,867 |
1,138 |
27 |
40,154/1,606 |
28.1/337.7 |
|
|
3,608 |
2,063 |
1,545 |
273 |
0 |
303/12 |
0.2/2.4 |
|
|
35,601 |
23,215 |
12,386 |
636 |
5 |
21,606/864 |
15.1/181.2 |
|
|
22,778 |
10,159 |
12,619 |
356 |
0 |
6,782/271 |
4.8/57.1 |
|
|
67,132 |
49,014 |
18,118 |
663 |
0 |
41,818/1,673 |
33.2/398.4 |
|
|
15,422 |
8,399 |
7,023 |
300 |
0 |
2,570/102 |
1.8/21.8 |
|
|
27,902 |
16,480 |
11,422 |
955 |
6 |
20,597/824 |
14.4/172.8 |
|
|
41,461 |
31,000 |
10,461 |
715 |
66 |
26,964/1,079 |
18.8/226 |
|
|
4,923 |
2,658 |
2,265 |
526 |
2 |
2,583/103 |
1.8/21.8 |
|
|
7,406 |
4,308 |
3,098 |
421 |
3 |
3,008/120 |
2.1/25.2 |
|
|
18,265 |
11,155 |
7,110 |
756 |
11 |
12,225/489 |
8.5/102.5 |
|
|
4,184 |
2,456 |
1,728 |
319 |
0 |
905/36 |
0.6/7.6 |
|
|
46,411 |
28,790 |
17,621 |
532 |
0
yes |
24,601/984 |
17.2/206.6 |
|
|
15,081 |
6,567 |
8,514 |
782 |
1 |
10,260/410 |
7.2/86.2 |
|
|
92,769 |
63,234 |
29,535 |
482 |
0
yes |
44,652/1,786 |
31.3/375.5 |
|
|
53,854 |
36,683 |
17,171 |
620 |
39 |
32,139/1,286 |
22.5/269.6 |
|
|
2,288 |
1,344 |
944 |
359 |
0 |
695/28 |
0.5/5.8 |
|
|
65,123 |
44,270 |
19,853 |
559 |
19 |
35,998/1,440 |
25.2/302.4 |
|
|
32,593 |
23,008 |
9,585 |
919 |
79 |
23,727/949 |
16.6/199.3 |
|
|
19,318 |
12,769 |
6,549 |
531 |
2 |
10,223/409 |
7.2/85.9 |
|
|
75,507 |
41,052 |
34,455 |
607 |
3 |
44,409/1,776 |
31.1/373 |
|
|
3,364 |
N/a |
N/a |
313 |
0 yes |
677/27 |
0.47/5.7 |
|
|
35,298 |
23,072 |
12,226 |
830 |
35 |
24,666/987 |
17.3/207.2 |
|
|
4,827 |
3,395 |
1,432 |
622 |
0
yes |
2,887/115 |
2/24 |
|
|
43,678 |
19,445 |
24,233 |
732 |
1 |
28,761/1,150 |
20.1/241.9 |
|
|
223,195 |
156,661 |
66,534 |
976 |
355 |
166,024/6,641 |
116.2/1,394 |
|
|
11,514 |
4,775 |
6,739 |
466 |
6 |
5,337/214 |
3.7/44.8 |
|
|
1,975 |
N/a |
N/a |
317 |
0 |
417/17 |
0.3/3.5 |
|
|
57,444 |
31,020 |
26,424 |
759 |
94 |
38,523/1,541 |
26.9/322.8 |
|
|
29,225 |
16,532 |
12,693 |
465 |
4 |
13,512/541 |
9.5/114 |
|
|
8,043 |
3,966 |
4,077 |
443 |
0 |
3,504/140 |
2.5/29.4 |
|
|
36,154 |
21,850 |
14,304 |
653 |
0 |
22,313/893 |
15.6/187.4 |
|
|
3,515 |
1,964 |
1,551 |
690 |
1 |
2,242/90 |
1.6/18.8 |
|
|
US
Totals |
2,193,798 |
1,259,905 |
747,529 |
737 |
1002
as of |
1,449,633/ 57,985 |
1,050/12,600 |
Source: Sanders, Tony J. Book 6 Judicial Delinquency (JD).
Fig. 6.3 pp.866-868
A crust of bread and
a corner to sleep in,
A minute to smile
and an hour to weep in,
A pint of joy to a
peck of trouble,
And never a laugh
but the moans come double:
And that is life!
Paul Laurence Dunbar
(King ’68: 110)
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