The fourth part also revolves around the privatization of our prisons. When you turn over what had been a public function to private industry, the interest of the state becomes maximizing the value received for cost incurred. It is contrary to the economic interests of government for there to be empty beds in the privately-run prisons. In other words, keeping the prisons at capacity is more important for the government than seeing that justice is done. Even overcrowded prisons--so long as the government can avoid large judgments against it for the resulting problems--are in the best interests of the state.
Naomi Wolf, in her November 25th article in The Guardian, "The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy," mentions three very specific goals that seem to be nearly universal among the people at the Occupy Wall Street site in Zuccotti Park, NYC. These are: 1) Get the money out of politics; 2) reform the laws governing America's banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being mentioned to accomplish this being a restoration of the New Deal era Glass-Steagall Act--which has been effectively repealed by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000; 3) "draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors."
This war against our rights under our Constitution is drawing to its conclusion. The oligarchs are acquiring ever greater power at the expense of the 99 Percent of Americans from whom they wish to steal all hope, all power, as well as the 99 Percent's future.
We have become a nation of fearful citizens who agree to ever greater levels of surveillance in the name of safety. The privatization of police functions in gated communities and large industrial concerns has all but erased the line between law enforcement and the desires of the rich. Many of these private security firms act as much like a private army as they do any sort of law enforcement organization, and are staffed by former law enforcement officers and military men.
Do not doubt for an instant that the actions against the Occupy Movement are being coordinated at some higher level. The only real question is whether they are being coordinated by the Federal Government, or by the oligarchs? The assassination of President Kennedy--as well as that of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Fred Hampton--demonstrates the ability of rogue elements within our Government to coordinate with money men outside the Government in order to eliminate those who the oligarchs consider a danger to their power and position. Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh, Vietnam's Diem Brothers, Chile's Salvador Allende, and Panama's Omar Torrijos, simply represent those times the United States Government and the oligarchs fully cooperated to achieve their murderous ends. (See John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man; copyright 2004, for more on the latter incidents.)
The rise of mercenaries and the corporations that rent them out in this country should scare the hell out of anyone who remembers the hated Hessians of our Revolutionary War. They owe no loyalty to the United States or its Constitution, and are a clear and present danger to our representative democracy.
Mercenaries also provide the government that uses them with plausible deniability. This was the reason that the condottieri and their mercenary bands were so popular in Renaissance Italy. The prince who hired them could disavow any overly brutal action by the mercenaries, even those the prince had personally ordered; Then he would pay off the condottieri to take service in some distant--i.e., non-threatening to the prince--land; and cry great crocodile tears at the horrible act against his "beloved people." If you have not read Machiavelli's The Prince, do so. I guarantee you the Koch Brothers and the Walton family have.
In Renaissance Italy, there wasn't even a pretense of law; only the whim of the princes and those nobles who owed them fealty. Even in the so-called republics such as Venice, Florence, or Genoa, only the leading families enjoyed even the pretense of justice, the average shopkeeper or farmer depended upon their guild or patron tor any protection from the tyranny of those self-same families.
The United States is headed for a similar system of justice at a break-neck pace. The Golden Rule of the Cynic: "He who has the gold makes the rules," holds sway now more than it has at any other point in my lifetime. I would like to see Chief Justice Marshall's vision of "The Government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men," to be at long last realized, and the term "equal justice under the law," at long last be have a firm grounding throughout our representative democracy. Until then--
CHORUS:
"Set out runnin' but I take my time,
a friend of the Devil is a friend of mine;
If I get home before daylight,
I just might get some sleep tonight."
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