North Korea is bad. Right?
Russia is bad, Right?
China is bad, Right?
Nazi Germany bad, Right?
After all, these nations killed and murdered and imprison vast numbers of people and subject or subjected them to the most inhumane treatments imaginable. We were all raised under the delusion and the propaganda that USA Inc was all so much better than that. Certainly better than that stark photograph above.
But the numbers and the macro details offer a far more accurate portrayal of what’s really happening in this country. The man photographed above is undoubtedly no more guilty than any of the 86 prisoners who are still dogs in cages at Gitmo. These men, at the very least, are the ones that our own government indisputably admits have done absolutely nothing wrong. By the explicit admissions of our own government’s most punitive and antagonistic sources, the FBI, the CIA, The Justice Department, the men being held are guilty of nothing more than being goat herders or taxi drivers or hitchhikers.
The outrage over what continues to happen isn’t just from softy tin foil hat and wacky liberal nut jobs…..
THE US GENERAL THAT OPENED GITMO SAYS IT WAS A MISTAKE AND SHOULD BE CLOSED!
MIAMI, Dec 12 (Reuters) – The U.S. general who opened the Guantanamo detention camp said Thursday it was a mistake and should be shut down because “it validates every negative perception of the United States.”
“In retrospect, the entire detention and interrogation strategy was wrong,” Marine Major General Michael Lehnert wrote in a column published in the Detroit Free Press.
Lehnert, now retired from the military and living in Michigan, was the first commander of the task force that opened the detention camp in January 2002 at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.
And yet it stays open.
But Gitmo is hardly the only problem. The corporations that own the US and state governments have succeeded in imprisoning more people per capita in the United States of America than any of those “bad” countries listed above.
All the brilliance and ingenuity and “exceptionalizm” of the United States of America and this is what we have become?
What in the world does this have to do with foreclosure or the rights of any of us, the “lucky ones” at all? We are all victims of a political process and fundamentally a judicial system that has failed us all. Foreclosures just make it personal. Foreclosures and the gross predisposition to forgive bank crimes in service to the banking and corporate interests represent the civil court analog to the criminal and international rights examples above. And while civil court and the loss of possessions and property rights are no where near as significant as the freedom and individual rights of human beings locked in cages, the systemic problem is the same.
OUR GOVERNMENT HAS FAILED US ALL ENTIRELY
At the most fundamental and core level, judges and the entirety of our nation’s court system have failed us all. It is indisputable just how corrupt the executive and legislative branches are. They are owned, bought and sold by corporate and foreign interests that care not for the interests or concerns of individuals and certainly not at all for abstract concepts like liberty or justice. But courts and judges were supposed to balance against this. Judges were supposed to provide that push back, that resistance against all these gross abuses. The black robe, not unlike the cape of a super hero…able to push back against all the evil influences and powers.
Not at all the case today. Especially in the context of the fights of individuals against banks, against corporations, against the very court system that is beating them into corporal submission. When an individual stands against the banks, against the forecloure mills, against their laws and against the court system that is so skewed in favor of the outcome they all, collectively demand, it is merely the continuation of a longer and more transcendent fight.
All Americans are prisoners in one way or another and to one extent or another. Your savings earn nothing, your education debt will be with you forever unless you pay it off or die, one quarter of the population makes less than $10 an hour, you can vote only Democrat or Republican, your national debt can never be repaid, the NSA tracks you and your movements as if you are terrorist.
