Chris Hedges: Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State

Posted on Jul 5, 2015
By Chris Hedges


Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.

More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.

“The strength of ‘The New Jim Crow’ by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it,” said Naomi Murakawa, author of “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” when we met recently in Princeton, N.J. “But, on the other hand, there is no ‘new’ Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.”

“We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out arrests,” she said. “Reforms are oriented to making violence appear respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate someone’s life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact configuration.” ..................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_capitalism_is_the_foundation_of_police_20150705

[malaise]

1. "...there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.”

^THIS^

[MynameisBlarney]

2. Why not just call it what it is?

Fascism.

[Octafish]

5. There it is.

Writing about the Third Reich, Hannah Arendt pegged the situation today.

Via Chris Hedges:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

[Uncle Joe]

3. If anything should be illegal, that would be for profit prisons;

that institution is a growing cancer on our democratic republic, its a corruptive influence against all branches of government, only serves to feed increased draconian rule and has no redeeming quality, moral, economic or otherwise.

No nation should profit from the imprisonment of its citizenry especially one touting itself to be a "democracy" and or the "land of the free" creating nothing but a bitter, tragic joke.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[blackspade]

4. Another mic drop from Hedges.