Thursday, February 23, 2012

#OWS Update: Stop Racist Mass Incarceration & Prisons For Profits Meanwhile Consumers Getting Robbed, Ripped-Off & Screwed By Investors and Oil Companies

#OWS Updates:
* Speculators and oil companies ripping off US citizens with artificially over inflated prices for gas and Oil.
* Occupy Movement targets the Mass Incarceration of American Citizens
The Privatization of Prisons
The Three strikes rule
The War on Drugs
The institutionalization of racism in the US Justice System.
The "New Jim-Crow"
The racist Death Penalty

In the above mentioned corporations and investors make billions and so have no motive for changing the way things are the status quo except to do whatever increases their profits.
So president Obama is not about to commit political suicide by pushing for real substantive change or legislation to reduce this profiteering or its racist motives.
If anything Obama has helped to make the situation even worse than it was.
Obama is not going to turn his back on his friends or biggest election campaign-funders that is the people on Wall Street , the Lobbyists and corporations for whom he like other US presidents appears to be working. The only minority Obama really cares about is the 1% .

Speculators and Oil Companies robbing the public by inflating oil and gasoline prices using the Iranian situation to their advantage.
Meanwhile experts say there is no oil or gas shortage or crisis yet oil companies and Wall Street with the help of the Obama administration and the elites ie the 1% are profiteering as usual.
Even if there is a shooting war with Iran we can be assured that the War Profiteers will use the situation to make out like bandits as they have been doing with the situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya.
So one wonders if in fact these wars are engineered by these war profiteers who have no sense of shame. Halliburton and other corporations screwed the American people out of billions of dollars in their various scams they ran in Iraq. For instance in Iraq for a small load of laundry corporations charged the US government and pentagon $99 when in fact the individual soldier could have done their own laundry for less than $5 or the Military could have employed its own soldiers and personnel to do the laundry.
A similar scam by Bush and Cheney's friends was the privatization of just about every need the military in Iraq had from employing private firms to deal with essentials such as serving meals, construction work ,setting up water prurification systems and sewage treatment plants that is for the military. And yet the military still employs its own engineers who could have done these jobs instead were either left completely idle or used for guard duty. The Iraq war became a very lucrative business transaction and even now Obama refuses to seriously investigate allegations of war profiteering . So it is no wonder that these private corporations can't wait for another war.
This sort of fraud should anger American citizens but instead they prefer basically not to hear about it.
In the same way much of the American public believes the government and corporations only do what they need to even though this is not the case.
This sort of government and corporate fraud does not fit into the American Myths about their country their governments and corporations so they deny such fraud and deception .

See: Once Again, Speculators Behind Sharply Rising Oil and Gasoline Prices | Truthout Feb. 22,2012

#OWS

 Occupy movement has become involved in protesting the governments policy of Mass Incarceration and a legal system which is now due to privatization of prisons profit oriented.
So if a corporation makes more money for incarcerating more people and for longer periods of time then the whole system becomes driven by profits and not by Justice.
But don't hold your breath waiting for Obama to do anything about it beyond maybe a speech or two.
President Obama may use the construction of a Black History Museum but he's not going to criticize the Racist American Justice system which incarcerates a disproportion of Black citizens. Nor is Obama going to question publicly the unjust Three Strikes rule or the insane disastrous anti-drug war even though this so called war is just another excuse for putting mainly poor blacks and Hispanics in Jail . This has been highlighted by NYPDs draconian use of "stop and Frisk" policy carried out almost exclusively against non-whites.
Obama himself has taken part in blaming the victims for example telling Black American men they are failing to do their job in looking after their families or telling blacks to clean up the litter and such in their neighborhoods as if littering is the cause of crime in black neighborhoods.
So Obama at times appears as deluded as other members of the 1% elitist including their enablers in the upper middle class .

Occupy for Prisoners Comes Out Against Mass Incarceration by: Yana Kunichoff, Truthout ,Feb. 22,2012

In the United States, more than 2.2 million people sit behind bars, according to the Justice Policy Institute. Some of the most oft-cited statistics are that more people are incarcerated today than in China or Stalin's Russia, giving America the dubious honor of being the largest jailer.

But behind the shocking statistics are harsh sentencing laws and lucrative contracts for private prison firms that continue to drive the mass incarceration system, say the protesters at Occupy for Prisons, and they are calling for a fundamental change to the system.

"Softer sheets and fluffier pillows will not do for change," said Yasmin Nair, an academic and writer in Chicago, with the group Gender Just. "Prison has become a way to increase systemic injustice."

The protests call for an end to a variety of ills that activists see in the system: three strikes bills, which mandate the harshest prison term for anyone with three criminal convictions; solitary confinement; overcrowding; the death penalty; jail time for drug offenses; adult sentencing for children; and for-profit prisons, among other issues.

"In several different places around the country, Occupiers have organically taken up this work," said Brit Schulte, an activists with Occupy Chicago and the Campaign to End the Death Penalty.

Occupy's movement against injustice in the banking system, and the massive profits of corporations, are exactly what Occupy for Prisoners is pushing for, said Schulte.

Wells Fargo, a target of Occupy events in the past, has heavily invested in the private prison industry and owns 3.5 million shares in the second-largest private prison operator in the country, GEO Group, as Truthout previously reported.

Meanwhile, prisons make "enormous amounts of profit off the backs of black and brown people in our country," said Schulte. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the maximum wage for prisoners working at UNICOR, the federal agency that employs prisoners, is $1.15 an hour. The minimum wage for prisoners is $0.23.

The current prison population falls sharply along racial lines - African-Americans only make up 12 percent of the US population, while they make up about 40 percent of the prison population.

In fact, "there are more African Americans under correctional control today - in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began," points out Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness."

and so it goes,
GORD.


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