Monday, October 01, 2007

GOP Occupied America: Does the GOP "Vision Thing" Include Blackwater Patrolling America's Cities, Innocent People Awaiting Death?

The sorry state of "criminal justice" in Texas is a predictor of nightmare years ahead unless the US wakes up! Just as GOP policies have consistently made terrorism worse, crime in Texas has gotten worse over the back to back regimes of George W. Bush and his successor, Rick Perry, called Governor Goodhair by the late columnist, Molly Ivins.

The horrible state of criminal justice in Texas is a predictor of criminal justice in a fascist America, where outsourcing replaces responsible, accountable government. The GOP likes outsourcing. It's an easy way to shirk civic responsibilities and reward cronies.

Much of the Texas prison system is outsourced to private firms. It is but a small step to contracting Blackwater to patrol US urban centers. Forces from Blackwater, DynCorp, and Wackenhut were deployed in New Orleans. Capping several years of rumor, the Department of Homeland Security moved forward toward the planned construction of "emergency detention facilities" --concentration camps in locations throughout the US. A no-bid contract of some 385 million dollars was awarded to Halliburton. Other contracts went to KBR. As to be expected, the camps will be "activated" in the event of a terrorist attack or a declared "national emergency".
In the duplicitous “War on Terror,” mercenary armies like DynCorp, Blackwater USA, KBR, Custer Battles, and Aegis plunder Iraq and other victims of Pax Americana, operating with no rules of engagement and near-total legal immunity, usually earning at least four times the salaries of enlisted U.S. soldiers.

A Sept. 21 London Independent investigation labeled the $120 billion sector “arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy,” with operations in 50 countries, adding, “None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq have been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the U.S. does not keep records.”

--Private contractors threaten U.S. democracy, Rice Thresher

A day after the United States Supreme Court halted an execution in Texas, that medieval state made public plans to murder more people in the name of state and justice including one this week.
Though several other states are halting lethal injections until it is clear whether they are constitutional, Texas is taking a different course, risking a confrontation with the court.

“The Supreme Court’s decision to stay convicted murderer Carlton Turner’s execution will not necessarily result in an abrupt halt to Texas executions,” said Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas. “State and federal courts will continue to address each scheduled execution on a case-by-case basis.”

--Texas Planning New Execution Despite Ruling, New York Times

This latest outrage points up an interesting and apparent correlation between Bush's failed "war on terrorism" and the equally failed "war on crime" in Texas.

I recently provoked the ire of the Heritage Foundation by stating and proving --to the foundation's chagrin --the simple truth: Terrorism is Worse Under GOP Regimes. More than enough stats make an equally compelling case about crime: crime is always worse under GOP regimes. That this should turn out to be the case may have something to do with the fact that since 1980, unemployment is always worse under GOP regimes.
Job Growth Per Year Under Most Recent Presidents

Johnson 3.8%
Carter 3.1
Clinton 2.4
Kennedy 2.3
Nixon 2.3
Reagan 2.1
Bush 0.6

Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics Survey.
I don't believe in GOP coincidence theories. There are reasons for the sorry state of nation and state. Among those reasons are, generally, GOP incompetence, criminality, and endemic dishonesty. Let's put it in perspective.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999.2 With only 5% of the world's population, the US holds a quarter of the world's prisoners In the 1990s alone, more persons were added to prisons and jails than in any other decade on record.

...

In a continued examination of those states that lead the national trend in increasing levels of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute turns a focus on the state of Texas. The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system. Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.

--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

The back to back GOP regimes of Bush/Perry have been disastrous. The state itself has become become an environmental disaster where the deteriorating air quality is linked to increased incidences of respiratory diseases. The GOP played politics with the education of children, perpetrating a deliberate fraud called the "Houston Miracle". It would become the blueprint for "No Child Left Behind", a scam involving phony test scores and book cooking. It was an educational "Enron".

When nominated to serve in Bush’s cabinet, many marveled at Paige’s triumphs as Houston’s superintendent of public schools in Houston from 1994 to 2000. Usually near the top of Paige’s list of accomplishments was his success in dramatically bringing down dropout rates in one of the nation’s largest school districts.

There was one funny thing about those dramatically curtailed dropout rates, though. They weren’t true.

In Paige’s last year as Houston’s superintendent, the school district reported an incredibly low dropout rate of 1.5%. That was better than any comparably-sized school district in America. The problem, however, is that the district, which was under Paige’s supervision, cooked the books and failed to count thousands of students who dropped out and didn’t return.

As Cohen explained today, “As with Enron, [Houston’s] school system has kept a set of books that has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Some high schools reported absolutely no — that’s zero — dropouts. That these schools were in impoverished areas made the figures either preposterous or a miracle. The school system — not to mention George Bush — preferred to see a miracle.

--Rod Paige’s Houston ‘Miracle’, Carpetbagger Report

As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even its industrialized application of the death penalty just cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may be seeking a "final solution".
...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:

  • There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
  • According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.

  • The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
  • Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
  • If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
  • The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
  • The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.

    --An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system. For example, blacks represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.
  • While one out of every 20 Texas adults is under some form of criminal justice control, one out of 3 young black men (29% of the black male population between 21 and 29) are in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day.
  • One out of every four adult black men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice supervision.
  • Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at a rate seven times greater than whites. While there are 555 whites behind bars for every 100,000 in the Texas population, there are an astonishing 3862 African Americans behind bars for every 100,000 in the state. This is nearly 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks of 2366 per 100,000.
  • If Texas' black incarceration rate was applied to the United States, the number of blacks behind bars on a national level would increase by half a million. There are currently an estimated 824,900 African Americans in prison and jail in the US The new figure, 1,346,370, would increase the number of African Americans incarcerated in the US by 63%.

The GOP are consistent to the point of boring. Therefore, what the GOP has done to Texas is a clue to the effect Bush/GOP rule may have nationally, globally. The GOP modus operandi is premised as it is upon delusion, lies, spin, claptrap ideology and bullshit! Failing to wage an effective "war on terrorism" abroad, the GOP presides over rising crime rates at home, throughout the nation. Predictably, the GOP will blame the victims of GOP policies of disenfranchisement, elitism, and discrimination. The GOP will wage yet another "war on crime" though it is the GOP which is the biggest outlaw, just as Bush waged war on terrorism, though he is the world's biggest terrorist.
Five years of crime rates show that murders, robberies, rapes and other violent offenses last year were returning to the peak, set in 2002. Crime dropped dramatically after that, the figures show.

In 2006, an estimated 1,417,000 violent crimes were committed, a sharp increase from the 1,360,000 reported in 2004 and approaching the estimated 1,425,000 in 2002.

--New York Times, Violent Crime Reported Up 2% in 2006

Those stats confirm a trend of at least two years. Yet, Justice Department flack, Brian Roehrkasse, called the report "good news". I wonder how Roehrkasse felt about the FBI summary of 2006 indicating that robberies had increased 9.7 percent nationwide, arson 6.8 percent, murders 1.4 percent! It is the situation in Texas, Bush's so-called "homestate", where the effects of the GOP's medieval policies have fallen to Rick Perry.
Reflecting a surge in crime in Texas after the dislocations of Hurricane Katrina, Houston recorded a sharp increase in homicides, to 202 for the first half of 2006, up from 158 in the comparable prestorm period last year. Three Texas cities ranked among the nation’s top 10 in crimes per capita.

Homicides in Dallas were down to 101 from 106 but it still ranked as the nation’s most crime-ridden big city, with 3,985 overall crimes per 100,000 population, followed by Houston with 3,444. After Phoenix with 3,436, San Antonio was 4th with 3,422.

--An Analysis of Incarceration and Crime Trends in The Lone Star State

FBI statistics prove that since Bush seized the White House, crime rates have jumped. Violent crime increased at 2.5 percent in 2005, the highest rate in 15 years. Nevermind! Bush favored a 52 percent cut in law enforcement funding. That's not the worst of it. Bush and the GOP will never admit that GOP policies prove the utter failure, the moral paucity, the complete intellectual inadequacy of the GOP as a party, as an institution. Utterly predictable, the GOP will cite every fact proving their endemic failures as reasons to compound the problem. Having replaced ideas with propaganda, plans with platitudes, the GOP will simply roll out more of the same old GOP eyewash, claptrap, and bullshit!

We would call a doctor an idiot who tells you to just keep on doing whatever it is that's making you sick. Yet the GOP does that repeatedly, mistaking the illness for the cure and making it worse with greed and incompetence. Confronted with rising crime and swelling prisons, the GOP will propose even newer programs guaranteed to raise crime rates even as they enrich cronies which privatized prison systems, privatized Blackwater storm-troopers, a robotized surveillance system.

It is but a small step then to privatizing the state police or even the various metropolitan police departments. Blackwater, I am sure, would love to get the juicy contract, the license to kill and get paid for it. In that event, the march toward fascism will have been completed. Life in America will have become a nightmare for everyone but an elite of about one to five percent of the population. The streets will be patrolled by armor-plated Blackwater goon squads and other gung ho gun nuts for whom human life means little to nothing.

In the meantime, the words of the late Molly Ivins seem prescient, a plaintive warning about the breakdown of law and order that follows from the complete and institutional breakdown of the rule of law. We will have the right-wing to blame for having made of America the ugliest police state in the history of the world.
The notorious inability of prosecutors to admit that they are ever wrong is a fact of life. What is far more horrifying is the refusal of judges and courts to look at evidence that proves innocence. Can you imagine how that must feel - to be in prison for a crime you didn't commit and to finally be able to prove it, only to have a court refuse to consider the evidence? Most of this is a consequence of a noxious law that Congress rushed through after the Oklahoma City bombing. Called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, the law was aimed at the ability of federal judges to second-guess state courts and at the ability of prisoners to file endless habeas corpus claims challenging the constitutionality of their convictions.

--Molly Ivins


Blackwater is Trained for use in US Cities and Schools

A timely update:

Anti-Crime Unit To Carry Submachine Guns On Central Fla. Streets

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Members of the Orange County anti-crime unit will carry automatic submachine guns to combat heavily armed criminals roaming Central Florida streets.

Sheriff's deputies who patrol areas around South Orange Blossom Trail have the same stories to tell, going up against criminals with powerful guns almost every night, Local 6 reported.

"(It's) a simple concept: Where there's drugs, there's going to be guns," Orange County sheriff's Cmdr. Al Rollins said. ...
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9 comments:

Diane B said...

Len,

Personally, I'm in complete agreement regarding, Blackwater, and the amount of power they are building with in and outside the U.S., and would not be surprised to see in the not to distant future them acquiring much more power,to the point of our Country being a Police State.

You show it well, using Texas, as an example of a major State where it appears that the prison system, is a major business in Texas. Examples being needing to hire guards, and maintenance personal to run the prisons.

I've recently read a few article about the health care, now being privately operated in our prisons now, this should be interesting.

I have been actively involved with Nursing Homes in Ca. and from what I am discovering, with a love one in a Nursing Facility, that these hospitals are taking complete control of these patients, and one of the ways is over medicating them, it is then out of the patients hands and their family. You can't go out of the facility for your primary care Doctor. The Doctor who decides on the medication and ultimate treatment of the Patient must be from the Nursing Home. It then becomes you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back. Meaning, many of these poor suffering patients are being drugged, unable to eat, talk, and have no quality of dignity of life. You are imprisoned in this facility, this is going on all over the Country because of a lack of laws to protect these poor elderly and sick patients.

This, is another form of prison being used in our Country today, and with the aging of our population, this is going to be a major new prison form, in fact it already is.

Unknown said...

Diane, what you describe is horrific. I would love to do an article about it...but it's a topic I could never do justice. I am reminded of Moore's "Sicko" --a great expose of the nation's disregard for it's elders. It's a question of values. Somewhere along the way, America lost its way. People have now become mere fodder for artificial entities called "corporations". Corporations will be the death of mankind.

Diane B said...

Len,

This is happening today, to many innocent American Citizens. My daughter being one of them, it is horrific, Len, it really is! You Len, could really help, bring awareness to this American Tragedy, by writing an article.

This woman, my daughter is only 36 years old, her body is riddled with MS and the little bit of life that is left in her is being completely taken away with this mixture of drugs they are giving her. The medicine, takes away any ability to swallow and chew normal food, all day and night she sleeps, unable to even to swallow her saliva. Now at times their needing to give her oxygen because of the drugs. When these medicines are not in her system she is able to talk, even laugh sometimes, after being completely drugged out for a year,when finally awake my Daughter asked for makeup! But, then they resumed these drugs. I realize she may need a little of them but when you give so much that a person always sleeps and can not eat food.

My daughter, Len, is just one of many people that this is being done to, it has to stop. We must have new laws which are then enforced to protect these patients.

When the Doctor is controlled by the Nursing Home how are you, the patient going to have the best care. How, when even the family is unable to intervene.

My Daughter is going to die, I know that, but I am determined that these final days, months are better then this, over medicated, and sleeping in this half wake daze, struggling to eat, struggling to breeze because of these drugs.

Writing this Len, I hear her words, gasping to speak, in a whisper in this drugged state, "WHY IS THIS HAPPING TO ME"

This is going to stop!

Unknown said...

I believe all these things are a set-up. Of course they already know how to rip off the American people when they put the people into the places they do. Because they never get punished, or at the very least, a slap on the wrist for ruining countless lives. While a marijuana smoker or drunk driver may get put away for life. Especially the smokers, they make good prison workers from what I hear. If I were a foreign country and they were doing this stuff to my people, I'd kill them all. And take no prisoners. Does that shock you? Cause I'm sick and tired of their devil's work.

Unknown said...

P.S. Have a great week!

daveawayfromhome said...

I like to refer to him as "Rent-boy" Rick.

Unknown said...

Diane B said...

When the Doctor is controlled by the Nursing Home how are you, the patient going to have the best care

I am somewhat acquainted with the nursing home situation in America --a scandal that must be exposed. I have only second hand knowledge. What little I know about the situation came to me from someone very dear to me who is now deceased.

Zena said...

If I were a foreign country and they were doing this stuff to my people, I'd kill them all. And take no prisoners. Does that shock you? Cause I'm sick and tired of their devil's work.

America has never been able to rise upon it's origins in the slave trade and piracy. Today's pirates and slave traders wear expensive suits and hang out in air conditioned office blocks.

daveawayfromhome said...

I like to refer to him as "Rent-boy" Rick.

Something else he has in common with Bush.

Anonymous said...

Fuzzflash sez...

Diane b, your story is Dickensian. The geri joints are prisons most vile; abominations. A savage indictment of the disengaged avarice of BushCo & Allied.
I'm sorry to hear about your daughter's illness. She is lucky to have a mom who loves her so. Hope you manage to share many magic moments in your remaining time together.

"America has never been able to rise upon it's origins in the slave trade and piracy. Today's pirates and slave traders wear expensive suits and hang out in air conditioned office blocks."

Yes, Len, we got a good make on some of these swine in the film "The Corporation". On our different trails we have of necessity had to share elevators and brush by these scum in the course of our daily lives. Be mighty surprised if they didn’t make your skin creep too.

Been deep into Oz politics lately. A couple of the quality pseph blog sites are extraordinarily addictive for tragics of my persuasion with the national election due before early December, probably.
As usual, comrade, your last several posts have been outstanding; and quiet though I've been here, there's a battle royal unfolding on the Oz blogs and I'm into it like a rat up a drainpipe. Be back with my more regular bursts of high-powered bullshit blended with beautifully measured prose when we citzens of Oz drive democracy’s stake through John Winston Howard's cold, vain heart.

Unknown said...

Fuzz, you know you have my good wishes on your quest, mate! I can imagine millions of good people in Australia who will be happy to see his sorry backside.