Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/28/ ... in-camden/

Sleepwalking in Camden

by LINH DINH

With 77,000 people, Camden has one public library left, and in a city where Walt Whitman spent 19 years and is buried, there are exactly two bookstores, a Barnes and Noble serving Rutgers Camden students, and, not too far away, La Unique African American Books and Cultural Center, with The Master Game, The New World Order, The Unseen Hand and Say It Like Obama in its window. Camden has no hotel, and only one downtown bar, The Sixth Street Lounge. Hank’s closed in 2010 after half a century in business. Now, if you can barely drink in the heart of any American city, no matter how tiny, you know it’s seriously messed up.

Just off downtown, there’s also Off Broadway, however. The first time I entered, four years ago, I noticed “NO PROFANITIES” on the wall, yet the very stern barkeep had this T-shirt on, “PRACTICE SAFE SEX. GO FUCK YOURSELF.” You’re finally home, I thought. On that occasion, I was able to make the acquaintance of Jamaal, a 65-year-old former math teacher. A jazz lover, he told me his favorite concert ever was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at NYC’s Blue Note. We talked about Mickey Roker, who used to be the house drummer at Philly’s Ortlieb’s. I once had a cassette of Roker keeping time behind Dizzy and Ray Brown, but it was erased by an embittered, life-hating middle-aged Korean art student I had lent the tape to. I should be awarded a peace prize, or some chintzy ribbon at least, for not strangling this motherfucker. A bottle of Rolling Rock in Off Broadway was, and still is, only $1.50. Jamaal informed me, “This place is all right. It has an older crowd. You can go home at the end of the night.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“Someone beats you up or shoots you.”

“I’d rather just go home.”

“Me too.”

In Camden, I had seen Wynton Marsalis at a free concert by the river. Like Baltimore, Camden has a safe tourist section, with a much smaller, grayer fish version of the celebrated aquarium. People who come to this protected enclave don’t need to see the real Camden, not that they want to. They can even arrive and leave via a ferry from Philly.

Lying outside Camden’s tiny bullet-free zone, the Walt Whitman House, on Martin Luther King Blvd, gets almost no visitors, not that Americans are flocking to pay homage to their writers. Even during its days, this “coop” or “shanty,” in Whitman’s own words, was called “the worst house and the worst situated,” and Camden was thriving back then, with its best decades still ahead. By the 1940’s, Camden would become an industrial powerhouse, with many factories employing blacks and whites, and the largest shipyard in the world.

“Yo, Chris Rock, I’m at the Walt Whitman House.”

“Run!”

In 2011, Ken Rose wanted to interview me by phone on July 4th, so I decided to do it in front of the Whitman House. On the day this country was born, I would not be in Philly, its birthplace, but Camden, its prototypical morgue. A habitually lawless government has no business celebrating the Constitution, and with this country being deliberately tortured and drown by its rulers, accompanied by flag-waving acquiescence of deranged voters, each 4th of July has turned into a sick and sad spectacle. Across the street was the Camden County Jail, and on the next block, ABC Bails Bond. Before Ken called, some guy shuffled up and said he was the caretaker of the Whitman home, but as we chattered, I soon realized he didn’t even know who Walt Whitman was. He referred to Whitman in the present tense, as in, “He owns this entire row, including the parking lot right here.” Predictably, he wanted me to give him some change.

Yes, some Camden folks will ask you for cash, but many will also offer you cigarettes, dope or sex. Here, illicit dealing is king. Also in 2011, I met Abdul, who was selling body oils, perfumes, knit hats and boxer’s shorts from a table set up in front of a fried chicken joint. After peddling stuff for 7 years, business was getting worse and worse, so Abdul was planning on moving to Senegal, where he had a wife. Years ago, he had been busted for drugs, a wrong conviction, he claimed, and locked up for 3 1/2 years. In prison, he converted to Islam. Released, he visited Senegal. As he walked into a Western Union, the lady behind the counter exclaimed, “You’re my husband! I saw you in a dream.”

His wife was 40-years old, and “doesn’t have a bad thought,” Abdul said. “She can’t be any better!” Since she didn’t want to come to the States, he would go to her. He was having a house built over there for $20,000. He sent her boxes of old clothes to sell. “American clothes are popular in Senegal,” he explained. “Even used clothes.”

“Where do you get old clothes? Where do you buy them?”

“I don’t buy them. I get them from my relatives!”

In 2012, I met another Black Muslim man, 38-ish, who also sold on the sidewalk, in his case socks from a wheeled cart. Across the street was the ruins of the Carnegie Library, so I said, “That was a beautiful building once!”

“I hear they’re gonna fix it up.”

“Really?! But the city is broke. Camden is broke.”

“Camden is broke?”

“Yeah, man, Camden is broke. Philly is broke. The whole country is broke! Didn’t you hear about all the cops they laid off?”

“They got money.” He then read from the inscription on the building. “Nineteen-O-four. Man, that building is old. How old is that? Thirty, forty years?”

“It was built in nineteen-O-four, so it’s over a hundred-years-old.”

“Really?”

He told me about a cop who had given him a ticket for selling on the street, “The judge will throw it out, though, because I was sitting in a restaurant when he busted me.”

“Yeah, but you’ll still have to waste your time in court. What an asshole! Doesn’t he have better things to do than to bust people trying to make a living? This city is so fucked up and he’s busting you, and you’re not hurting anybody.”

“There is a lot of complaints about this guy.”

“Is he an older guy?”

“No, a young cop, a young, white cop.”

Whoever this cop was, he’s gone, because Camden has laid off its entire police force. That’s right, all 270 cops who survived previous layoffs were let go in April of 2013, though 50 were immediately hired by the County Police that’s now in charge of keeping Camden, um, safe. Announcing this restructuring, the mayor said, “We cannot sit back and allow our children and families to experience another 2012.” Or another 2011, 2010 or 2009, etc., for year in, year out, this post-industrial city ranks as one of the deadliest in America. With its cops trimmed and shuffled, little has changed on Camden’s streets, though there’s a mobile observation tower across from the bus terminal. Inside that box is an anxious man with his head rotating nonstop, or a dozing schmuck, or no one at all, but you wouldn’t know, would you? An instant panopticon, it is sprouting up everywhere, from theme park parking lots to your next mass protest. The Guardian Angels also made a cameo appearance in Camden, but have wisely disappeared. Unarmed, they’d stand an excellent chance of being peeled off the sidewalk, then rolled, posthaste, into Cooper Hospital, Camden’s one world class institution. Come to Camden, where you can be cut up or expire with distinction! World class hands will stitch you up!

“Work here. Play here. Live here,” shout the LIVE CAMDEN billboards, but until recently Baltimore also declared itself, “The Greatest City in America,” and Milpitas, whom most people have never heard of, drapes banners all over its blink-and-miss downtown, trumpeting, “MILPITAS A Great American City.” Whatever. What is Juarez’ slogan, I wonder? Or Kabul’s? Speaking of Cooper, I must tell you about Paul Matthews Young, whom I met in 2012 at the Broadway train stop. On a plate glass window, this 50-ish man had taped his New Jersey ID, social security card and about eight sheets of paper showing his “Moneterial Earning Assessment.” It wasn’t clear what he was trying to convey, to whom, or if it was some kind of protest. When he told me had 18 children, I asked, “With how many women?”

“None.”

“What do you mean none?!”

“I had them by myself.”

He said his 18 kids were born microscopic from the tip of his penis. The doctors at Cooper had something to do with this, but I couldn’t get him to explain fully the procedure beyond the fact that Paul had to pleasure himself quite energetically.

Hearing Paul’s story gave you that old, most generic notion? Now that you’ve got your cheap, discount sox made in China, you want some flesh also? Are you, by chance, versed in gonorrhea? You speak syphilis? Can you spell AIDS? It’s not so much a carnal need, you say, but simply an ethereal desire to assist, or rather, nudge up, the local economy? See her, that’s Angela. She looks about 14, but she might be as old as 17. Walking unsteadily, her eyes are practically closed, but she can see enough to tell that you’re not serious. She’ll keep walking because she has no time to lose. Each day, she can easily go through five or six bags of dope, plus some powder for variety, plus she has to eat, too, and maybe down a few cans of Steel Reserve to flush that lousy Chinese food, bought from Yuk’s, yes, that’s really the name, at 827 S. Broadway. I’m not making anything up. Why would I? No one knows anything about Angela, not even her best friend. Thirty-three-year-old Michelle regularly gives Angela food and dope, but Angela still won’t say nothing about herself, and don’t you give me that shit about her being too drugged to remember, because on one level or another, none of us ever forgets anything.

I won’t forget walking with Michelle when she said, “That’s my baby’s daddy,” and she pointed to some guy across the street. Squinting, the dude was probably thinking, “What’s my side piece doing with that Chink (or fuckhead, or asshole)?” You know, anything but “gentleman” or “Asian American,” per the New York Times stylistic guidelines. To think is already to compose, and thus to dissimulate and cover up, and to write is to further distort, nearly always, what we pretend to think, but writing, paradoxically, can be used to hint at the rawness beneath all this culture, this domestication, this farce, this composition. This half-assed expose almost never happens, however. Maybe it has never happened. Looking hazy, dude kept squinting as if he had a hard time recognizing his lay even.

“It’s Rashid’s birthday!” Michelle shouted.

“Huh? What?”

“Rashid! It’s Rashid’s birthday today!”

Showing no emotion, no smile, no grimace, dude gave Michelle one final squint, then kept walking.

“He doesn’t remember his son’s name?” I chuckled.

“No, he remembers. Lamon’s just a little out of it today.”

“How old is Rashid?”

“Eight! He’s eight-years-old!”

“And he stays with you?”

“No, with my mom.”

“So your mom is not so bad after all.”

“She might as well do something for him, since she didn’t do shit for me!”

Though Michelle is one-quarter Okinawan, it’s hard to see any Asianness on her white face. She was mostly raised by her Japanese grandma, but at 16, she moved to Camden. Already a coke head, she got hooked on heroin at 19, thanks to her junkie uncle. Unable to pay for her daily treat, she started to trick, “I’ve been raped and beaten. Look,” she opened her mouth, “these are dentures. I don’t like to go with young black guys. They’re fucked up! There are, like, nine guys who go around beating up girls.”

“Just for the hell of it?”

“Yeah, just for the hell of it. This is Camden!”

“So what are you going to do? What’s your next move?”

“I’d like to get into rehab, maybe go to Florida.”

“What’s in Florida?”

“I dunno. There’s a good rehab place in Florida. My sister told me about it. I need to get out of Camden, that’s for sure.”

Her pale arms showed purple needle marks, and so did the tops of her hands. Her veins have collapsed. A blue headed pin pierced her upper lip, a large hoop dangled from one ear, and her hair had been dyed a burnt siena or, more likely, was just a red wig. It was a very hot day, yet she was draped in a charcoal colored hoodie, and her faded blue tank top had been rendered lumpy by cheap, ill fitting bra. For someone living rough for so long, Michelle still appeared fresh, so I said, “You know, you don’t even look 33-years-old. You actually look younger!”

“You think so? I used to be beautiful.” She pulled two ID’s from her cloth sack, showed them to me.

Holding one up against her face, I pronounced, “No, I think you actually look better now, but you better get the fuck out of Camden soon.”

She smiled. Her dentures were newish, for they weren’t too yellow. Maybe she had just gotten punched? Michelle then volunteered that Lamon may be pissed because she had been seen with another guy.

“Some guy you like? Some guy you love?”

“It does get lonely out here… Hey, you want to hear something weird? Just last night, this one girl got so fucked up, she took her clothes off and ran down the street.”

The same night, 20-year-old De’quan Rodgers was shot dead, and another young man, 19-years-old, was found with multiple bullet wounds. About three hours before I chatted with Michelle, three more men were perforated. Shootings are nearly daily occurrences here, but a young naked woman running down the street is goofy enough to be remarked upon, if only for the next 24 hours or so.

All over town, there are RIP messages spray-painted onto walls, near where a loved one has died, whether targeted or hit by stray slugs. Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. You live and talk much shit until Jesus, Allah, Bruce Lee or Liberace text you, “Kum home, losr.” You strut about and blather beaucoup merde until Glock, SKS or Bersa Thunger tap you on the shoulder and whisper, “Hiya!” Even as you crawl on all fours, sightless and toothless, with your liver, spleen and entrails hanging out, it’s still too early to call it a night. Is it last call already? On a memorial for Izzy and Cunt, someone has scrawled, “Heaven is where we go but hell is where we live.” On shop windows and doors are flyers begging for information on Camden’s disappeared. Some have come to buy drugs, never to be seen again. Some were just strolling to the bodega or the Chinese joint’s bulletproof window. Yuk’s, it’s so yummy!

Sorry, man, all you wanted was a beer and here I am dragging you down with talks of bullets, blood, gurneys, scalpels, needles and more blood, so much blood, blood geysers, showers of blood, so let’s head straight into Off Broadway, without further delay. As if to negate the chaos outside, this dump has so many rules, dude, as in:

NO T-SHIRTS OR VEST

NO HATS TURNED AROUND BACKWARDS

NO SCARVES

NO HOODS OR SKI CAPS

NO BAGGY PANTS

ALL TEE-SHIRTS OF ANY COLOR

MUST HAVE LOGO’S THAT ARE VISIBLE

MUST BE NAVEL HIGH

LOGO MUST BE ON YOUR

CHEST OR BACK

PLEASE DO NOT YELL OR SHOUT

ACROSS THE BAR

THANK YOU

ATTENTION BAR PATRONS

PLEASE DO NOT STAND

ON CHAIR RAIL

PLEASE PLEASE ANYONE CAUGHT TOUCHING

TV WILL BAR YOURSELF PERMANENTLY

ANYONE TOUCHING APPLIANCES BARRED

YOURSELF NO EXCEPTIONS

EMPLOYESS HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHECK

BATHROOMS AT ALL TIME

And, of course:

BE AWARE

THESE PREMISES ARE UNDER 24 HOUR VIDEO

SURVEILLANCE INSIDE & OUT

Well, I’m glad I have a dress shirt on, and no pantaloons, and I’ll do my best not to get touchy feely with that television. Watching a news story of five guys stealing 17 Rolexes after smashing its display case, the barflies whoop with astonishment and delight, but they are blasé about a school shooting simulation. As I eat a sad cheesesteak, with its dispirited meat, cheese and bread, bits of conversation drift to me.

“Yes, there was this girl born without a rectum, and she’s alive still. They haven’t fixed her yet, but they will.”

“You never had possum hash?”

“No, I’m a city boy. I don’t know nothing about that. My cousins in North Carolina might, though.”

“Possum is sweet. It’s an all right meat. And muskrat is OK too. You ought to know what’s edible, and what’s not, because it might come in handy one day.”

“No, ma’am, I’m happy with my chicken and my steak, thank you. I don’t need no squirrel, no rabbit, no raccoon, no possum. Why should I bother about any of that, when I can just go to the store?”

Surrounded by rules, we aren’t any safer, for a dickhead or two can just come in to make everyone lie on the ground, then relieve us of wallets and purses. Most patrons are bunched up at the far end, however, so they’ll have a better chance to see what’s what should shit happens. (Sign on a Camden wall, “If you believe shit happens, park here.”) Several of these lushes are probably packing.

Three Beyonce tunes in a row tell me it’s time to get the fuck home. Soon I’ll stagger into the dusk, into a half feral city of aimless men and women dwelling in rotting row houses, abandoned shells shrouded by vines and shrubs, or tents, like those clustering by the freeway, across from the long-shuttered Sears and beyond a billboard pitching $5,000 Yurman watches to passing motorists. Living apart in a squalid tent down a dirt path blocked by plywood, branches and lumber, ex factory worker Beasto can choose between bacon, hot dog or pork chop, all stored unrefrigerated in a sack of rice, and all reeking, of course. Fifty-seven, he’s been away from Puerto Rico 43 years. Meanwhile, junkie Tina has left her tent, cleaned herself up and reconciled with her mom, so of course, of course, a cheerful respite, or recovery, if you will, is temporarily possible, within the larger framework of tempered hope, outright disappointment and, naturally, unmitigated horror. Staggering on, I will pass by Cooper, where wizardly doctors can give each of us a cleaner, fresher asshole, to pump up our always suspect vanity and confidence, or I might run into lovely Michelle or Angela, for they will still be out there. All night long, she’ll sleepwalk from one john to another, just so she can score and score, until she finally disappears.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

[American Dream]

Cross-posted from the "Revolt in America 2013" thread:


Stephanie McMillan - 50 Ways to Prepare for Revolution


The people of the United States are currently unprepared to seize a revolutionary moment. We must fix that.

How can we raise our levels of revolutionary consciousness, organization and struggle?

Raise consciousness

1) Raise consciousness with the purpose of building organization and raising the level of struggle.

2) Investigate before forming opinions. Research how the world and the system function.

3) Read foundational and historical works about revolution, by those who have participated in and led them.

4) Analyze the system’s current condition and trajectory.

5) Learn about the resistance, uprisings and revolutions going on in the world today.

6) Read the material that currently active groups are issuing and discussing.

7) Continuously develop, elaborate upon and refine principles, theories and strategies for our movement.

8. Raise our voices. Articulate revolutionary ideas, and give them a public presence.

9) Listen and speak in the spirit of mutual clarification.

10) Participate in discussion, to develop our ideas and hone our skills in expressing them, and to help others do so.

11) Figure out how to use all our various talents, positions, energy and resources as effectively as possible, to expose the system’s evil, irredeemable and unreformable nature.

12) Analyze and explain the many ways the system dominates and exploits.

13) Stand with the dominated, exploited, invaded, colonized, threatened and oppressed.

14) Display a revolutionary spirit and celebrate it in others.

15) Exercise patience in winning over reluctant potential allies and supporters.

16) Ridicule and discredit the enemy.

17) Create revolutionary culture. Make videos and art, speak, sing, and write blogs, books, comments, leaflets, rhymes, stories, and articles about the enemy s crimes and the people s resistance.

18) Exchange ideas locally, nationally and (within the law or safe channels) globally.

19) Encourage others to participate in the revolutionary process.

Organize

20) Organize as a way to raise consciousness more broadly and to build struggle.

21) Start with people we know.

22) If our friends discourage us, make new friends.

23) Network sensibly with people online. Find local people online who express similar ideas, and meet with them.

24) Find a group that we basically agree with. Work with it.

25) If there’s no local group we want to work with, start one.

26) Write a leaflet with contact info. Pass it out in public to find potential comrades.

27) When we meet people, assess our points of agreement. If we agree on basic essentials, decide how to work together. If not, say goodbye for now.

28) Build strong ties locally and nationally, and build solidarity globally.

29) Define allies according to overall outlook and goals.

30) Don’t let secondary differences prevent cooperation. Handle differences between allies non-antagonistically.

31) Do not tolerate oppressive (sexist, racist, homophobic etc.) dynamics within the movement. Confront their expression and put a stop to it.

32) Refrain from saying anything aloud, on the phone or electronically that we wouldn’t want to hear played back in court.

33) Keep illegal drugs away from our political life.

34) Research and practice good security culture.

35) Prioritize the wellbeing of our organizations over personal benefit.

36) Ready our ranks to seize on any breaks in the legitimacy of the system.

Struggle

37) Use struggle to spread revolutionary consciousness and build organization.

38) Collectively determine what we want, and declare our demands.

39) Act as far as possible within our capacity, not either beyond or below our capacity.

40) Continuously strive to expand and consolidate our capacity and strength.

41) Assert our rights and our responsibilities.

42) Bring our revolutionary perspective into struggles already occurring.

43) Defend, support, and encourage our allies.

44) As opportunities arise, weaken the enemy and its ability to rule.

45) Obey the small laws. Don t get taken out of the game for something unworthy.

46) For illegal acts, make sure you can trust your comrades with your life and the lives of everyone connected to you.

47) Avoid being distracted and diverted into symbolic action-for-action’s sake.

48) Don t expect the enemy to act against its nature. It has no mercy and can not be reasoned with.

49) Turn every attack by the enemy into an opportunity to speak out, organize, and grow more powerful.

50) Be willing to work hard. Be smart. Be brave. Remember we re all in this together.



URL: http://tmblr.co/ZZ-J-xoSXkKB

[American Dream]

Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination that affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood.

--bell hooks

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

"Sakhi Saturation"
by Khushboo Gulati/kalisherni ~April 2013

queer desis
ajeeb
pyaar wrapped with gupt, secrets tucked away
goddess friend sister warrior partner love


http://kalisherni.tumblr.com/post/54398 ... kalisherni

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/03/ ... th-philly/

Postcard from the End of America

A View from South Philly

by LINH DINH

South Philly’s Friendly Lounge is close enough to my door, I can crawl out of there in a brown out state of mind and still end up on my steps, curled up, if not in bed. The other day I went there to show the bartender, Don, what I had written about Camden, since Don was born in Camden, and his son, Dominic, works for ABC Bonds in Camden. Bail bonding is, without a doubt, Camden’s most steady commerce and one of its largest employers. If you want to open a small business in Camden, don’t think food or retail, no fashion boutique or sushi boat lounge, think bail bonding or, perhaps, a funeral home, though be forewarned that many corpses go unclaimed there, meaning they won’t get dressed up in your sparklingly new memorial chapel, but are simply burnt.

Before I could even say “Yuengling” to Don, however, I heard “Yo” from George. This was George Chan, 64, retired insurance executive living in a Blue Bell country club. (I’ve modified George’s last name, to protect his privacy, and also that of his famous son.) So what was this globe-trotting, four-rounds-of-golf-a-week multi-millionaire doing in this bums’ hangout? The Friendly Lounge was once even a skanky strip joint, but the down-an-outers here didn’t tip enough, and there wasn’t even a brass pole, so the G-strings were quickly tossed into the trash can, and we haven’t seen any perfunctory or inspirational flashing since. Well, not really. I can’t really remember. Felix Giordano, whose family has lived in this neighborhood for three generations, sums up the Friendly Lounge this way in his one Yelp review, “as a reguler, i would appreciate it if all the pbr drinking hipsters would stay the fuck out of this bar.as they have ruined all the other dive bars in this area of south philly for me.thank you for understanding.now fuck off.”

I live in the Italian Market. My landlord is from Calabria. Two doors from me is probably a Mexican whorehouse, for I see too many anxious young men ducking in there after dark, and occasionally also women who dress like, well, prostitutes, though it’s getting harder to tell these days, for the street walker look has gone mainstream. Ditto, the gangsta aura. It’s no longer surprising to see even a third grader march down the street decked out like a hooker or a gang banger, with drive by shooting and prison stories to relate.

A block from me, there’s this tiny barber shop that has two haircutters, its Chinese owner plus a Mexican lady who handles Spanish speaking patrons. They split the proceed 60/40, with less for the house. This sort of flexibility typifies the Third World, where petty regulations and rigid norms, whether commercial or social, are much less common. That’s why poorer countries can appear so chaotic to a more domesticated, more programmed and more properly dressed (according to Gap or Benetton, etc.) visitor. In Saigon, I saw a male pedicab driver wear a female hat, not because he was a cross-dresser or wanted to make a fashion statement, but, most likely, simply because it was handy. His wife probably didn’t need her flowery headwear that day. A while ago, a Vietnamese-born Philly street vendor even made it onto the news for selling panty hoses at his fruit salad stand. Nearly all of his customers were already women, he figured. Hence, panty hoses.

Soon enough, your neighborhood will resemble mine, for the United States is becoming ever more Third World economically and socially, but this, the Italian Market, is hardly a benchmark. We’ll go further, much further. Outside its richest, gated enclaves protected by armed guards and, surely, combat robots and drones, the US will devolve into a society of rooming houses, day laborers and peddlers, not to mention street urchins and part-time prostitutes. You too will live down the street from a jumpin’ whorehouse. To buy a mess of pig’s knuckles, you too will elbow somebody out of the way. Already, I’ve overheard a neighborhood Italian fart grumble, “Shit, this place is becoming like Chihuahua,” but one can retort that it’s not all that different than Naples, really, minus the much better pizza and architecture. The first time I showed up in Napoli, I thought, “Good grief! Was I born here? This place is almost as crazy, dirty and exciting as Saigon!”

In my neighborhood, you can buy a ten pound bag of chicken wings, a live duck, goat meat, not bad chorizo or a decent hunk of pecorino. Jojo, from Ghana and owner of a variety store, sighs, “I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s getting bad. Where is the money?!” But native-born Molly still chirped, “It’s OK, I don’t see any difference,” even as she switched from selling used books to health food, then back to yellowing books. People march right by her boxes out front offering free record albums and junk paperbacks. Running past a newly open taqueria, a bunch of junior high kids scream, “USA! USA!” The Presbyterian church offers services in English, Indonesian and Vietnamese.

OK, OK, let’s get back to the Friendly Lounge, for I need a beer and a shot. Felix probably composed the above review drunk, lying on the floor, since the Friendly Lounge really is friendly, though perhaps a bit cornered at the moment. Another regular writes, “Please, God, keep all the hipsters and assorted trendy douche bags away. Let them stay above Carpenter and be happy over there. In your mercy, let the Friendly remain just as it is.” In any case, what was millionaire George doing in there?

Let’s meet George, then. Though loaded now, George had a modest beginning. Born in China, he was raised in Hong Kong, and came to the US at 19 to attend the University of Iowa, majoring in math and business. Graduating in 1972, he was hired by an insurance company in Des Moines, with a starting salary of $9,000 a year, before taxes. Here’s where George’s story becomes curious, and instructive. Instead of leaving work at 5PM, like all the other new hires, and head to the bar to relax and socialize with them, George routinely stayed until 8PM, to learn more about the business while doing extra work, unpaid. This quickly earned George a reputation as a nerd, dork or even a brown nose, but when the first promotion came six months later, guess who had separated himself from the rest of the pack?

“They were all white, you see, so as the only minority of any kind, I had to cover my ass. I couldn’t take any chances.”

So what we have here is a kind of initiative stoked by anxiety, if not outright fear. This anxiety also led George to become bizarrely frugal, to the point of living outside instead of a $100 a month apartment. He bought a sturdy yet cheap tent and pitched it in the camping area of a public park. He had a hibachi grill to cook hot dogs and an occasional steak. The public bathroom was right there, and as for bathing or doing his bits of laundry, George used the recreational pond late at night or very early in the morning. Three months later, however, George was caught in flagrante by a park ranger, “What are you doing with that soap, son?! You’re going to kill my fish!”

Now, our homeless are also camping on public land and bathing in our creeks, but this was 1972, and George wasn’t homeless, but a fully employed white collar guy, on his way up, yet George wasn’t sure, for he saw himself at the bottom of the totem pole, in the corporate world and society, so he needed to stash away every extra buck. By the time George was 30, however, he had become a general manager, and the only non-white executive in that entire company, and at 35-years-old, he was made vice president.

George traces his success to being aggressive, though he often says “aggression,” as in, “You need aggression to be successful. No one is going to give you anything. Whatever you’re selling, you need to knock on every door, because no one’s going to knock your door.” Obviously, George doesn’t buy into the better mouse trap proposition.

George married an Iowa school teacher, later divorced her, but their son, 24-year-old Sam, is now a YouTube singing sensation, with a worldwide audience. This, after graduating Magna Cum Laude from Yale, majoring in classical Greek. Money is also rolling in for Sam. Besides selling songs on iTunes, Sam gets $1,600 per tweet when he mentions certain brands. Finding all social media to be a huge waste of time, I’m not on FaceBook or twitter, but of course no one is paying me a nickel to endorse anything. I don’t even like the concept of advertising, don’t care for networking, so of course my bills are ignored as I sit here tinkering with my stupid mouse trap. I can barely give my words away, which is fine, actually, for these are my own foolish words, not slogans, jingles, jingoism or sales pitches dumped into my (uninsured) mouth by the bossman. I don’t need to shoehorn what I think into any mold, for a “progressive” cookie cutter, a la Common Dreams or Guardian, is just as deadly as a conservative strait jacket, for they keep you ballin’ on the same weed infested court with its broken backboard and bent hoop. Supporting my verbiage, readers do PayPal me 5, 20, 50 or 100 bucks, and for that I thank them. George would laugh at my small time racket, for in his world view, “Most people are Indians, while some are chiefs. Not everyone can or even want to be a chief.”

I’ve found that chief types often talk in clichés. Take the President of the United States, for example. All of his statements are catch phrases and slogans glued together by clichés, and since he is also a politician (not to be confused with a statesman, mind you), every breath of his is also a spin, fudge or shameless, transparent lie. Chiefs don’t get ahead through subtle yet well-anchored language, but through relentless aggression and a fierce fixation on their goals.

George clearly wanted to be a chief, and he has managed to retire at 55, with a swank home in a gated community, plus a spacious Upper East Side condo. His new girlfriend is a Hong Kong executive for Hitachi, “She’s very smart, maybe even as smart as me, but still very traditional. I told her right from the beginning, I don’t want you to show me up when we’re together. We’re not equal. I don’t want an equal woman.”

George must be on top, you see, for he’s a chief, though once a week, he’ll hobnob with us Indians at the Friendly Lounge, for this dive bar happens to be near his favorite Oriental supermarket, where he goes to buy not just noodles and bok choy, but pig intestines, chicken feet and all the funkier stuff you won’t find in blue blood Blue Bell. In person, George is genuinely personable and down to earth. It also doesn’t hurt that he buys drinks for just about everyone. “Nine out of ten silver spooners are assholes,” he shared. Then, “My son is not letting his success goes to his head. He still drives the car I bought him, a regular Toyota, and he dresses like a regular kid. He was raised right.” The monomania that has allowed George to succeed does rear itself as self absorption, however. I’m not even sure he remembers my name.

Now, I’m not telling George’s story as a Horatio Algers allegory, but mostly to point out the weird and even illegal resourcefulness anxious, uncertain or desperate people will resort to, as in driving a gypsy cab, converting a kitchen into a restaurant, a garage into a hair salon, or peddling T-shirts or sodas without a vending license outside a baseball stadium. It can also means bizarre living arrangements. George got weird on this way up, but many of us will get freaky on our way down. In this worsening economy, how many of us are dwelling in storage units, I wonder? Recently, a New Jersey mother was discovered living with her two sons in a 5’ x 10’ unlit unit, and last year in Utah, five 10’ x 10’ units were found to be inhabited, with a three-year-old child in one. Entire families dwelled in these tiny sheds, with some even furnished with a television and microwave oven. They pissed into bottles.

Most of these stories never make it to the news, but from a self-storage forum, I also found these:

5/1/12—“When I first started in storage 4 years ago, I found 1 woman living in her unit. She was immediately given 48 hours to vacate the premises. I spoke with her that day. She had been living in the space for over a year. The nights that she didn’t sleep in the unit, she was sleeping in a porta-potty near her job! She would use the restroom outside our office to wash up as soon as we opened in the mornings. She didn’t have a car to sleep in. She rode around on a bike.”

5/3/12—“We have had several instances in the past 4 years of people trying to live out of their units […] We have a rule at our complex that states no tenant can be inside of their unit with their door fully down. Outside doors can be half way down if the weather is bad to prevent wind or rain entering the unit, but by having this rule we can tell people we suspect of sleeping in their unit that they MUST have their door open at all times.”

10/7/12—“My new assistant told me they thought this guy was living there, but werent sure/old manager didn’t care […] I would check the security system and find him walking around the building. I also had an issue with him being in the bathroom for 2-3 hours straight. Finally I confronted him. I brought him a copy of his lease and informed him of the rules he was violating. I was planning on this being a warning, but he threatened to shoot me, so the police were involved and he was promptly evicted.”

10/15/12—“My wife and I both have had this happen over the 5 years of running self storage facility. It was worse in the Dallas area where they offered electricity lights inside the units. […] They will always come in after you close and leave before you open. It is necessary not to let them stay on the property. We lock our rest room after hours to discourage this. Also if a unit had a smell of urine around it then someone close by is probably living in a unit there. They seem to not go far from their unit.”

Think about that for a second, a woman with a job sleeping all night in a porta-potty! First of, it’s safer than lying outside, since she had a door she could lock, and it’s also warmer, but of course, the smell, but stench and squalor are no strangers to those at the very bottom, for the dirtiest works are often their lots. The poor already handle everyone else’s shit. They clean rich people’s unclean areas and sometimes must kiss them. In Savannah, an ex prostitute told me about a judge who liked to have his balls meticulously washed by his hired lady. Drunk, we then sang, “I like to have my balls washed, y’all. I like to have my balls washed, y’all.” OK, OK, it’s not that funny, but it was hilarious then.

To escape the cold, many Americans also sleep in dumpsters. It sounds like an urban legend, but in the last three years, news stories have recorded dumpster sleeping Americans being crushed or run over by garbage trucks in Allentown, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Oklahoma City and Terre Haute. In New York, Americans dwell in subway tunnels, and in Las Vegas, in the drainage system.

We have an unprecedented number of empty houses and apartments, yet more of us are sprawled outside than ever, but this is inevitable since home prices are deliberately pumped up, again, with wages deliberately tamped down. Still, you have to stash all of these old or broken bodies somewhere. In their wisdom and mercy, our ruling classes will soon relax their laws to allow for storage unit apartments and dumpster condos, all made available with an adjustable rate mortgage from your nearest mega bank.

A future ad: Foreclosed dumpster. Great location behind busy Burger King. Lots of free, half eaten food. Ragged and grizzled neighbors, though not unfriendly. Move in now with only 3% down!

Another: Slot on time-share bed. Choose from Midnight-8AM, 8AM-4PM or 4PM to midnight. Undiseased applicants only. Bathroom not included.

George was young and hopeful when he roughed it, but many of our urban campers and squatters have long seen their best days, just like our unmoored nation, destroyed not by foreign terrorists, saboteurs or spies, but methodically imploded from within. It is the 4th of July again. With each birthday, we become sadder, with less vigor or clearsightedness, only an unfocused or misdirected anger. Dread lurks behind each or our grin or drunken laugh. Racked by anxiety, we reassure ourselves that everything on television still looks more or less the same. As our flag turns sinister and becomes a worldwide symbol of violence and hypocrisy, we slap it on our heads, chests, crotches, buttocks and bumpers. Celebrating its permanent coupling with the never silent gun, we drape it on ourselves as if we’re already dead. As the flag gets gigantic, the country itself shrinks to nothing. Lift up that flag, lift it!, and see for yourself what’s left.


Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/meredith_stern/09mirabal4.html

Meredith Stern

Meredith Stern
Las Mariposas (4th edition)


Celebrating the lives of the Mirabal sisters who were organizers in the Dominican Republic fighting against the Trujillo dictatorship. This edition is on a lovely thin mulberry paper.

[American Dream]

When I first started working on citizenship, older people would say to me, “How can you even take the state seriously? The state is a monster of imperialism.” And I said, “I’m on the side of people’s survival, and if people’s optimism is attached to things like the state, I want to know what the state stands in for.” If we start seeing our objects of ambition and desire as stand-ins, as things that organize our attachment to life, we have a totally different understanding and a kind of generosity toward those objects. That’s why I started working on citizenship in the first place, not because I loved it, but because I saw that people saw it as a state where they could imagine being collective, and being willing to be collective in ways that were also inconvenient for them. So when LGBTQ people want what lots of people want - which is a relief from their loneliness and a social world that would be welcoming and not shaming - I can’t disrespect their objects, I just have to say, “is that all there is?” For me, it’s never about shaming people’s objects, it’s always about creating better and better objects. It’s always about creating better worlds, making it possible for us to think in more and different kinds of ways about how we relationally can move through life.

— Lauren Berlant, Interview

[American Dream]

The streets of the Old City of Hebron (West bank - Palestine):
the metal net installed to collect the garbage throw by jewish settlers
from their houses built on Palestinian ones.



http://palestina.tumblr.com/post/543539 ... ld-city-of

[American Dream]

“In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal, often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support, and build deep supportive structures with other queers. We are interested in resisting the heteronormative family structure in which people are expected to form a dyad, marry, have kids, and get all their needs met within that family structure. A lot of us see that as unhealthy, as a new technology of post-industrial late capitalism that is connected to alienating people from community and training them to think in terms of individuality, to value the smaller unit of the nuclear family rather than the extended family. Thus, questioning how the status and accompanying behavior norms are different for how we treat our friends versus our dates, and trying to bring those into balance, starts to support our work of creating chosen families and resisting the annihilation of community that capitalism seeks.”

--Dean Spade

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/05/ ... t-prisons/

The Battle Against Control Unit Prisons

by NANCY KURSHAN

In 1985 some colleagues and I in Chicago registered, with shock, the brutality of the US Penitentiary at Marion in southern Illinois and organized a program to alert the public (really, the movement) about what was going on. We would do just this, we told ourselves, and then get back to all the other movement work in which we were involved. Just this.

But the work, of course, would not be left alone. The inhumanity, brutality and torture by the United States demanded a humane response and we tried to provide that. Fifteen years later we were still fighting against prison brutality in general and control units or isolation units in particular. I have now written Out of Control: A 15 Year Battle to Abolish Control Unit Prisons, a book that can be ordered at Freedomarchives.org. Over those 15 years we sponsored perhaps a 100 demonstrations throughout the country, 200 major educational events, published a huge amount of literature, put forward theoretical insights into prisons and control units in particular and foreshadowed more recent formulations like those of Michelle Alexander in her very wonderful book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. (For the nuts and bolts of what we did, and how we organized, read my book or go to freedomarchives.org where an abridged version resides, filled with links to documents, audiovisuals, etc.)

In the course of those years, we made several predictions along the way and issued associated cautions. One way to to evaluate the power of an analysis is by its ability to predict. Our two primary predictions were: 1) that imprisonment would reach 1 million by 2000, fueled particularly by a rise in incarceration of people of color; 2) that control unit prisons would proliferate and serve as an anchor dragging the whole system in a more repressive direction. (In contrast the Bureau of Prisons, the BOP, insisted that control units would allow the overall system to run more openly.) We were unfortunately correct on all scores. Our prisons are a human rights disaster. In 1971, no prisoner lived under control unit conditions. Today, there are control units in virtually every state in the union, and whether they are called Control Units, Supermax, SHU (Secure Housing Unit), Administrative Maximum Facility ADX), Communication Management Unit (CMU), a skunk by any other name still stinks. On any given day, over 80,000 prisoners live under these torturous conditions.

HISTORY

Previous to 1963, the worst prison in the U.S. was Alcatraz, the island prison located in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was the place where the U.S. government sent the people it hated the most. Morton Sobell was incarcerated there, co-defendant of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed during the McCarthy era. Also interned there was Puerto Rican independence leader and political prisoner, Rafael Cancel Miranda. And of course many others, not all political prisoners.

In 1963 the BOP closed the federal penitentiary at Alcatraz as it had become too expensive to run and was outdated in every possible way. The replacement was USP Marion, located in southern Illinois. Marion then became, as Alcatraz had been, the end of the line of the federal prison system, the place where the US government would send those prisoners it hated the most – not at all the most violent prisoners but those the government wanted hidden from view. One of the corollaries of this was that many of the most resistant and politicized prisoners were sent to Marion. Both Alcatraz and now the new prison at
Marion, Illinois, ran relatively freely. That is, prisoners lived and worked with other prisoners. They ate in a communal dining hall. They had group recreation and religious services. On occasion, a prisoner would be put in solitary (thrown in the hole) in response to a perceived infraction. Today we are used to images of prisoners in solitary confinement, but back then it was not the rule.

In 1972, after guards severely beat a Mexican prisoner, the prisoners went on a work stoppage, refusing to participate in their work assignments. In response the feds locked down one wing of the prison, throwing all the prisoners in that unit into indefinite solitary confinement, in what was essentially the first “control unit.” One of the people locked down was Rafael Cancer Miranda, the well-known Puerto Rican nationalist, who was accused of being a leader of the strike.

In October of 1983, two prisoners at Marion (in fact, members of the Aryan Brotherhood) killed a guard, ironically in the control unit wing of the prison. There was no response in the rest of the prison, no rebellion, no peaceful work stoppage. Nonetheless, the BOP seized on the opportunity to lock down the entire prison, all 350 men. This was the first such control unit prison. The BOP claimed that this was a temporary measure but as the lockdown continued, some of us who had been monitoring the situation were not optimistic that this was a short term development. As 1983 continued into 1984 and then 1985 we grew more and more alarmed. We understood that this was a significant and new historical development, that we were seeing a restructuring of prison life as we knew it. We realized that the government was experimenting, not just on the prisoners, but on us as well. If these horrific conditions could win public acceptability, then control units would proliferate everywhere. In 1985 we issued a call for a conference in Chicago in October to commemorate two years of the lockdown and to better understand what the future held in store.

WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT PRISONS?

I have been asked by many people why would I choose to do work regarding prisons? My answer is simple. In high school and college I was part of the civil rights movement. I picketed Woolworths with CORE, raised money for SNCC workers in the South, heard Dr. King speak in D.C. and Malcolm X in Madison. I see work to abolish control units as a logical continuation of that anti-racist work.

Albert Hunt’s article in the NY Times on Nov. 20, 2011 entitled “A Country of Inmates“ reported that “With just a little more than 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the planet’s prisoners and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined.” Moreover, this mass imprisonment binge does not affect all sectors of the population equally. No, the prisons are overflowing disproportionately with Black and Latino prisoners. As Hunt wrote, “more than 60 percent of the United States’ prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population.” One in nine black children has a parent in jail! If it weren’t for the over-incarceration of people of color, the U.S. imprisonment rates would look similar to those of many a European country.

Although we concentrated on control units, we did so because we saw them as the capstone of a thoroughly racist prison system. Both mass incarceration and control units are united in terms of their underlying ideology. Both come out of a profoundly racist ideology that blames the victim and refuses to deal with the structural challenges and fault lines of our society. And of course, refuses to change the pitiful conditions inside our prisons.

We have never really dealt with the legacy of slavery. We have not dealt with the immigration challenge. We have not dealt with the lack of jobs at a living wage. We have not made room at the table. We have not dealt with how to “rehabilitate” people, especially since, as Malcolm said, they have never “been habilitated.” Rather we have met the challenge of a huge under-reported unemployment problem with an imprisonment binge. And the challenge of an anti-human prison system with control unit prisons.

Our prisons have no real plans for ‘rehabilitation.’ That would require a restructuring of society, a real jobs and education program–one that we need now more than ever but that is not on the horizon. In fact, the jobs program that we do have has been building more prisons and hiring more guards. The prisons are located long distances from the urban centers that most prisoners call home and offer jobs to a totally different sector of the population. The imprisonment binge has served to get largely young men of color off the streets, warehousing them to prevent any disruption that might come from millions of unemployed men of color out on the pavement.

SOCIAL CONTROL OF PEOPLE OF COLOR IN RESPONSE TO MOVEMENTS TOWARDS DEMOCRATIC INCLUSION OF THE 60s

Beyond racism, the more we studied together, the more we learned about imprisonment. The well-known criminologist William Nagel found that there is no relationship between the crime rate and the imprisonment rate, and no relationship between the crime rate and the number of Black people that live in a given state. But he found a strong relationship between the imprisonment rate and the proportion of Black people who live in a given state. In other words, people go to prison because they are Black not because of a rising crime rate. It became apparent to us that prisons are instruments of social control of people of color. Before the 1970s we did not have these huge imprisonment rates, nor did we have control unit prisons. In the 1960s Black people led the way in challenging injustice. They were a force to be reckoned with. When Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated, there was mass unrest with urban centers going up in flames around the country.

The Attica prison rebellion of 1971 was a watershed where prisoners stood up and said: “We are men. We are not beasts and will not be treated as such.” To a large extent, the rebellion was an expression within Attica of the Black liberation movement on the outside. When the tear gas and bullets cleared, 43 men were dead as a result of Rockefeller-ordered military assault. Control units try to prevent the kind of camaraderie and resistance from developing that was exhibited on the yard at Attica.

For almost 50 years prior to Attica, the U.S. incarceration rates were constant, and commensurate with those of Western Europe. In response to the movements of the 60s and early 70s, particularly civil rights and black liberation, in response to Attica and George Jackson and the California prison movement, imprisonment rates started to soar, and we saw the beginnings of what would become a mass imprisonment binge. It was no accident that control units began to emerge at the same time. Just as prisons control a population on the outside of prisons that was demanding human rights, control units control a rebellious prison population on the inside. The first control unit was opened at Marion in 1972, exactly in response to a peaceful work stoppage and a year after the incredible uprising at Attica.

In 1975 the right-wing ideologue and Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington wrote The Crisis of Democracy, a report for the Trilateral Commission, in which he argued that there was too much democracy and things needed to change. Well, things have changed. And now, thanks to both Republicans and Democrats, the leading ‘democracy’ in the world is also the largest incarceration nation.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS PROBLEM IN THE WORLD TODAY IS RIGHT HERE IN THE U.S.A.

So what is a control unit prison?

There are variations from prison to prison, but generally speaking, a control unit prison is one in which every prisoner is locked away in their own individual cage about 23 hours a day under conditions of severe sensory deprivation. The prisoner eats, sleeps and defecates in the windowless cell. Meals come through a slot in the door. In some cases the prisoner may be out of the cell a couple of times a week for exercise, but in other circumstances the exercise area is even more limited and is attached to the cell itself. Most control unit prisons have little access to education or any recreational outlets.

Usually, control units severely restrict the prisoner’s connection not just with other prisoners, but with family and friends in the outside world. At Marion, only family members could visit, upon approval, and only for a small number of visits per month. The amount of time allowed per visit was severely restricted, and there was no privacy whatsoever and no contact permitted between prisoner and visitor. Visiting took place over a plexiglass wall and through telephones. Guards were always within earshot. The prisoner had to be searched before and after, sometimes cavity searched. The visitor had to undergo a body search as well. The prisoners were brought to the visit in shackles.

Regarding the underlying dynamics, the intent is to make the prisoner feel that his or her life is completely out of control. That is not an unintended consequence. The purpose of the control unit is to make the person feel helpless, powerless and completely dependent upon the prison authorities. The intent is to strip the individual of any agency, any ability to direct his or her own life. A control unit institutionalizes solitary confinement as a way of exerting full control over as much of the prisoner’s life as possible.

There is no pretense that this is a temporary affair. Instead it is long-term, severe behavior modification, and it is the most vile, mind & spirit-deforming use of solitary confinement. Control units represent the darkest side of behavior modification. Inside a control unit, the prisoner usually has no idea how long he or she will be there. It is an indeterminate sentence, and usually the rules or guidelines for exiting are unclear at best and impossible to comprehend at worst. It is a hell without any apparent end. It is truly Kafkaesque and studies have shown that long-term solitary confinement drives many people crazy. As a social worker in the Chicago public schools for 20 years, and as a human being, I don’t believe this severe punishment helps people to change in any positive way. Human interaction is critical. The Quakers first instituted solitary confinement (they called isolation in a cell with a bible “doing penance,” hence “penitentiary”). They thought it would be a more humane alternative than physical punishment such as flogging, but they gave it up when they saw what effect it had on people.

Being sent to a control unit prison is tantamount to torture, as acknowledged by many human rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Amnesty International recently released its 2012 report, “The Edge of Endurance: Conditions in California’s Security Housing Units,” in which the conditions in two California prisons — Corcoran and Pelican Bay — are described as “cruel, degrading and inhuman” and a violation of international standards.

Prisoners are held under conditions that today are not considered ‘humane’ even for animals. This is an extreme abuse of state power.

The existence of the control unit also functions to control other prisoners who are in the general population. This is as important to the system as the impact on those actually in the control unit. The fear of imprisonment in this worst of all prisons is meant to scare all prisoners into tolerating intolerable conditions. The word ‘Marion’ was meant to strike cold fear into the hearts of prisoners throughout the federal prison system.


The people who are sent to control unit prisons are not different from those people in the general population of a maximum security prison in terms of the crimes for which they are incarcerated. Most have not been convicted of violent crimes. Many are political prisoners, jailhouse lawyers, and natural leaders.

DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL CONNECTION

In Out of Control I argue that CEML’s 15 years of work is “the story of one long determined effort against the very core of the greatest military empire that has ever existed on this planet” . . . and that “in this day of debate about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it is absolutely essential to realize that a direct line extends from U.S. control units to these so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ centers throughout the world.” The connection has always been there because we live under one system, and that system has a domestic side and an international side. But they are really just two sides of the same coin.

In Out of Control I discuss a 1962 Bureau of Prisons (BOP) meeting in Washington, DC between prison officials and social scientists. Billed as a management development program for prison wardens, it took place the same year the BOP opened Marion. Dr. Edgar Schein of MIT, a key player at that meeting, had written previously in a book entitled Coercive Persuasion about ‘brainwashing’ of Chinese Prisoners of War (POWs). In the meeting he presented the ideas in a paper entitled “Man Against Man”:

“In order to produce marked changes of attitude and/or behavior, it is necessary to weaken, undermine, or remove the supports of the old attitudes. Because most of these supports are the face-to-face confirmation of present behavior and attitudes, which are provided by those with whom close emotional ties exist, it is often necessary to break these emotional ties. This can be done either by removing the individual physically and preventing any communication with those whom he cares about, or by proving to him that those whom he respects are not worthy of it, and, indeed, should be actively mistrusted. . . I would like to have you think of brainwashing, not in terms of politics, ethics, and morals, but in terms of the deliberate changing of human behavior and attitudes by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captive populace lives.” (Berrigan, p.6)

Along with these theories, Schein put forward a set of ‘practical recommendations,’ that threw ethics and morals out the window. They included physical removal of prisoners to areas sufficiently isolated to effectively break or seriously weaken close emotional ties; segregation of all natural leaders; spying on prisoners, reporting back private material; exploitation of opportunists and informers; convincing prisoners they can trust no one; systematic withholding of mail; building a group conviction among prisoners that they have been abandoned by or are totally isolated from their social order; using techniques of character invalidation, i.e. humiliation, revilement and shouting to induce feelings of fear, guilt and suggestibility; coupled with sleeplessness, an exacting prison regimen and periodic interrogational interviews.

So-called ‘brainwashing’ strategies that involved physical as well as psychological abuse were being adopted from international arenas and applied inside U.S. prisons. Now, in 2011, similar strategies, honed in Marion and its progeny, are being employed around the world in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

LESSONS

The underlying ideology has to be challenged because if that doesn’t change, the rulers will tweak this or that to their conveniences, they may make some small changes, or even do the right thing at any given moment, for the wrong reason. But things will revert toward repression.

Understand that the whole criminal justice system, indeed the whole society, needs to be transformed. Fight to change the day-to-day conditions of prisoners but while educating people about the whole situation. Celebrate the small changes but never let them be enough.

Studies don’t necessarily change things. Pressure, both legal and activist, is essential. Hearings can be a step in the right direction but they can also be a smokescreen to lull people into believing something is being done. Or they can be a rubber stamp for some negative developments. For instance, the BOP has apparently just recently agreed to undergo a “comprehensive and independent assessment of its use of solitary confinement in the nation’s federal prisons.” The assessment will reportedly be oriented toward reducing the population of “segregated” prisoners. It is to be conducted by the National Institute of Corrections, an agency of the BOP! That is something to be watched, but skeptically.

Listen to prisoners. Trust what they tell you about prison conditions. Support their efforts to change their situation. Help their voices reach the outside world.

Work with everyone who is willing. We don’t have to all agree but we have to respect each other. Do not let the authorities demonize some activists and bestow accolades on others. That is the old divide and rule.

OPPORTUNITY

The time is right to build a powerful force to oppose these institutions of torture. The people who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War are sometimes referred to as “premature anti-fascists”. Perhaps the members of the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown were “premature anti-solitary” activists. But now is the time, now is the moment. Most importantly, prisoners are resisting. 12,000 California prisoners, in the summer of 2011, went on hunger strike in opposition to the conditions in control unit prisons. There is awakening consciousness that these institutions are tantamount to torture. Not a single editorial ever appeared in a significant mass media outlet opposing control units during our 15 years. Now the New York Times has opposed them. Additionally, the money to run these expensive institutions is running out. Illinois’ control unit prison, Tamms, that we fought to prevent from opening, has recently been closed by Governor Quinn. Senator Durbin has called for an investigation into solitary confinement. There are openings. But we cannot rely on politicians to do the right thing. We can work with politicians who are true allies, but we have to be out in the community talking to people, and out in the streets and in front of the prisons, formulating our demands and building a powerful movement.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the House of the Dead, said “That to understand a civilization, it is necessary to look within its prisons.” Mohandas Gandhi was once asked “What do you think of Western civilization? His answer was, “I think it would be a good idea.” So come on people. Let’s get on with it.

[American Dream]

Wall Street Journal Openly Calls for Pinochet "Solution" in Egypt

by Steven Argue

Photo: Popularly elected socialist president Salvador Allende speaking to supporters in Chile. He was elected in 1970 and overthrown in the U.S. backed coup of General Pinochet in 1973. Pinochet rounded-up thousands of leftists and labor leaders torturing, raping, and murdering them. The use of terror against the people was the only way Pinochet could re-install a pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist government on Chile.




On July 4th the Wall Street Journal, in an article titled. "After the Coup in Cairo, The U.S. shouldn't cut off aid to a new Egyptian government", said:.

"Egyptians would be lucky if their new ruling generals turn out to be in the mold of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who took power amid chaos but hired free-market reformers and midwifed a transition to democracy. If General Sisi merely tries to restore the old Mubarak order, he will eventually suffer Mr. Morsi's fate."

General Pinochet came to power in Chile in a CIA organized coup on September 11th, 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. After seizing power, Pinochet began a rampage of rape, torture, and murder of leftists and workers. Thousands of people were murdered after terrible torture. This CIA/Pinochet program of pacification was of course part of destroying all resistance to Pinochet’s capitalist tyranny. As a result of terror, Pinochet was then free to carry out a program of massive privatization that drastically hurt the working class and caused the economy to collapse. It was only after the re-nationalization of the banks and other emergency measures that the economy under Pinochet began to recover from Pinochet's free market policies.

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/0 ... 739470.php

[American Dream]

"Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women — in the face of tremendous resistance — as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought."

--Audre Lorde

[American Dream]

http://class-struggle-anarchism.tumblr. ... 4900126194