Dispatches from the police state
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates dropped a few interesting statistics on us today. I've copied and pasted the entire, rather brief, entry, but here's the link besides to the site and comment thread:There are roughly 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in America, more than any country in the world.
The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).
Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males. African-Americans--males and females--make up .6 percent of the entire world's population, but African-American males--alone--make up 8 percent of the entire world's prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners. But I kind of doubt it.
One final thought: If you released every black male in prison, our prison population would stand at 1.5 million, leaving us, still, with the second largest prison population in the world. Only China--a country with four times as many people--would have more (and barely--1.57 million). Russia would be a distant third with 890,000.
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How about some public support-- and support from elected officials-- for the execution of Scooter Libby, who outed a CIA operative-- a much greater offense, of course, than "endangering our national security" through exposing corruption by government officials? For that matter, how about the execution of Dick Cheney as well since it's evidently no longer necessary to be convicted of a crime, or even charged with one, to be worthy of government execution?
How about the execution of publishers and journalists at the New York Times, the Guardian, and other papers that first published WikiLeaks-related materials? WikiLeaks websites have published only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables that have been exposed, and nearly every one of them had already been published by these newspapers, each news outlet with an equally-global reach. Please, please, can we have more blood, please? The 58 more allied dead in Afghanistan during November only makes me thirsty for more.
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Quote of the day: "In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble." --Ron Paul
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All hail President Obama-- the courageous "pragmatist." But now explain to me how Obama breaking his campaign promise and caving to Republicans on $120 billion in tax cuts helps to protect Social Security from the very consistent and sophisticated efforts by the right wing to dismantle it. Safeguarding the social safety net and the future of every American would actually be the "pragmatic" approach.
It's a corporatist lie that Social Security teeters on insolvency. The program subtracts nothing from the Treasury and adds nothing to the national debt as it's completely funded by the payroll taxes of its eventual recipients into a targeted trust fund. There is currently a surplus in that trust fund of $2.6 trillion. So what does Obama do? He proposes more massive cuts in that payroll tax-- the only funding source for the trust fund.
Social Security has had absolutely no connection to America's debt for any of the program's 75 years. It's the continuing war on Iraq, the tripling of the number of soldiers in Afghanistan, and the crippling tax cuts for the wealthy that have gotten us into this financial mess. Now that mess is about to get decidedly worse, and it's the Social Security trust fund that stands to get gutted. It was one thing for Obama to choose not to mirror the actions of Franklin Roosevelt upon his ascent to the presidency during a time of economic depression. It's something else entirely now to actually destroy Roosevelt's legacy.
posted by CM @ 9:09 PM
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