Could it be that the possible 44th president of the United States is a reincarnation of the 16th? Creepy...

Also, some (selective, since its a poll) good news from Polling Report.com

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Jan. 22-23, 2004. N=1,006 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3.

"Suppose the next general election for president were being held TODAY and you had to choose between George W. Bush, the Republican, and [see below], the Democrat -- who would you vote for?" If "Other" or "Undecided": "As of TODAY, do you LEAN more toward Bush, the Republican, or [see below], the Democrat?"

Bush John Kerry Other
% % %
1/22-23/04 46 49 5
1/8-9/04 52 41 7

In case you were in doubt this is to serve as my official endorsement of John Kerry for President 2004!

Also, a good Kerry page is actually his senate home page:
Brother won three purple hearts in Vietnam then came home to Capital Hill and testified in the Senate against the war. What more could you want in a president?

Happy Birthday Paul! May fresh fish rain on you all year!

Believe it or not I found this page today for work purposes (don't ask) and it may be one of the weirdest sites I've ever seen. What is particularly strange is that it is part of the National Archive, the same organization that maintains documents like the Federalist Papers and the Emancipation Proclamation.
When Nixon Met Elvis:


There's a really interesting and ernest letter that Elvis wrote to Nixon while on a plane with some Senator, and either the turbulance was bad or else Elvis was very drunk. In the letter, Elvis offers his service to the President, since he has intimate knowledge of "the drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc." who "do NOT consider me as their enemy or as they call it The Establishment." He asks to be appointed a federal agent even. Later he adds that "I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good."

You know, sometimes I feel like I'm losing my, how shall we say, "sense of humor" about American history, but then every now and then something comes along that is just so surreal you have to stop being so cynical. Or maybe you can still be cynical, and it's just really really funny...

I could teach someone how to watercolor, how to write a Google Poem, about Postmodern Body Criticism, and Photoshop text manipulation, so that they too could make something horrorshow like this:



Anyone interested?

What do the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Iroquois, and Black Hawk all have in common? Well, they are either the names of indigenous tribes or individuals defeated by the American Army, or else they are American Army helicopters currently used to defeat other brown-skinned people who stand in the way.

Personally, the use of these names makes me sick. You can't even find a page about the real Black Hawk's war unless you search for minus Down (-down), otherwise you get pages for that big-budget Hollywood state-backed propaganda bullshit movie about Mogadishu (which, admittedly, I've never seen, but I know propaganda bullshit when I don't see it.) Or you get pages for the video game of the same name. While it is tragic to me that anyone dies in a war, we lost about 30 soldiers in that entire conflict while "most soldiers interviewed said that through most of the fight they fired on crowds and eventually at anyone and anything they saw" (a quote from the book the movie is supposed to be based on .)

The real issue here is how little has changed. Do we name our helicopters after defeated Indians because they were worthy opponents and fearsome warriors, or because we so successfully and thoroughly eradicated them to promote our own agenda? What myth are we trying to invoke with these names? Is the story we tell today the same as it was 200 years ago?

To counteract the myth, here's (what I think is) the real story of Black Hawk:

Black Hawk was a Sauk leader who fought on the side of the British in the War of 1812, hoping to prevent further American incursion into his native lands. The Sauk had ceded most of their territory in Illinois in a disastorous and disputed treaty with the US gov't signed in about 1804. Black Hawk and others considered the treaty null and void because they felt that the individuals who signed it did not have the authority to speak for the whole tribe. Nevertheless, the Sauks had been pushed as far west as Iowa by the 1830's, where they encountered the hostile tribes of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. Caught between these warriors in the west and the encroaching settlers continually streaming from the east, the Sauk were in an increasingly comprimised position. Then, the final straw came when in 1828, President John Adams (a distant relative of mine, I should confess) sold the Sauk's Iowa lands, leaving the tribe essentially homeless. Left with little choice, Black Hawk decided to lead both the Sauk and the Fox tribes (with whom they had had an alliance since the early part of the century) back to Illinois in 1832, igniting paranoia amongst the whites who now made the new state their home.

Once in Illinois, Black Hawk faced attacks from the state militia (whose ranks included both a young Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, future prez. of the Confederacy.) Black Hawk's men were able to elude the troops for over five months, and they held out as long as they could. At one point Sauk/Fox warriors attempting to surrender were fired on by US soldiers. Finally they were defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe. Black Hawk was taken captive, and spent the rest of his life being toured around the east coast, at one point by none other than President Andrew Jackson, as if he were a curio, an exotic animal, an inanimate object.

This is what Black Hawk himself had to say (I find it so similar to what so many "beneficiaries" of our military aid would say today):

"I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me...The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk...He is now a prisoner of the wh
it
e
men.
..He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies. Indians do not steal.

An Indian who is bad as the white men could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eaten up by the wolves. The white men are bad schoolmasters; they carry false books, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to leave us alone, and keep away from us; they followed on, and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us, like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers...

The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse-they poison the heart...Farewell, my nation!...Farewell to the Black Hawk."
(quoted in The People's History (Thanks to Terry for typing)).

(I should mention that this is Black Hawk's surrender speech...)

To find out more about the real Black Hawk, read Howard Zinn, The People's History, or check out this page, which is perhaps a bit too neutral for my taste but has a lot of primary documents, including Black Hawk's autobiography. . It's really a site that's part of a larger Lincoln project, so they can't make the whole thing sound too bad without impugning one of our most popular presidents.

Also, here is info from a .mil site on the various helicopters named after tribes:

Okay, so there is a lot to talk about today for me. My first instinct is to say HELP! I discovered this morning I'm in serious academic peril from having two "pesky" incompletes and filing the wrong stupid forms for my thesis. This means I am not only in limbo academically, but eek, financially. But whatev, I'm becomg so nihilistic and cynical about school I almost don't have the energy to deal with it. Anyways, narcissist that I am this is what I want to get off my chest, but will my bureaucratic nightmares make yours any better? No, misery may love company, tis true, but collective whining is like a chorus of dodos, doomed to extinction because they didn't learn to run away or hide or fight back when those pesky colonialists stole their eggy-wegs . So in this analogy, my thesis is an egg, the IDP graduate offices are Portugese colonists, and I'm a dodo, poised on the edge...

Fuck! I knew this morning when I heard they were going to start slaughtering civets to prevents SARS that the civet was probably really fucking cute and it isn't their fault anyways that they're a delicacy! I mean this thing is really fucking cute! Somehow it breaks my heart more to think of these animals getting slaughtered than of a few hundred people dying. Is that so wrong? I mean, at least a person understands what's happening... I guess I've never faced death though, so who knows. For now I will just ponder how really fucking cute the civet is and feel the general pain that is the threat of widespread epidemic...

Today is the first day I've felt happy, yes truly happy (despite my concern for the civets) since I don't know when... like ferevah. And do you want to know why? Because it's a campaign year, lovey, that's why. There's no greater show on the planet if you ask me. If you didn't see the Dems face off in their first debate of the year last night, there were some pretty funny moments, like when Dean promised to balance the budget in the "6th or 7th year" of his administration. Or when Kucinich, when told he wasn't very "electable" said "well, I'm electable if you vote for me!"

I eat this stuff up. But even though I would call the American presidential campaign "the greatest show on earth", I'm not so cynical as to believe that the election doesn't change anything. When some Greensters back in 2thou said things to that extent it kinda pissed me off; I mean you gotta agree that we'd be in a different place today if Ole Al was prez (although I'm with you all the way in the whole Clinton-was-the-new-Reagan theory.) Anywho! I digress. But, this is just to say that I'm very excited. Everyday brings something new from now to November. My golden boy from 2000, Bill Bradley, just endorsed Dean today, which is cool I guess. But what is up with Dean, man? Is he crazy or what? I think "pugnacious" is my favorite word for him. He reminds me too much of myself I'm afraid: embittered and impassioned-- he could come off as a leftist wingnut in a national campaign. But as he said last night, "A gaffe in Washington is when you tell the truth and the Washington establishment doesn't think you should have," which is why we get kicked out of all the best parties with all the choice hors d'oeuvres.

Hey, if you want some fun facts, go to the Des Moines Register's page on the Campaign . They have the first caucus so they know what's what. According to them, George Bush has raised close to a 100 MILLION dollars already! YeeHaw! Let the games begin!

Oh also, PollingReport is great. I'm gonna add it to my links. Check it DAILY!

(and btw i stole the above picture from MSNBC. YUK!)

Here is an article I wrote for the IMC in August 2001 when there was a prison convention in Philadelphia. Still has some good facts:

Prisons of Profit: Turning a Buck on America's Incarceration Frenzy

The American Correctional Association has no qualms about defining itself as a businessman's dream: an organization whose main goal is to turn a profit for its members. But unlike most capitalist corporations, the vendors who will arrive this week to hawk their wares are making money off of people who are kept behind bars. "Don't let your company miss out on this prime, revenue-generating opportunity!" the ACA says on their webpage, just after reminding us that nearly two million Americans are incarcerated, with "dramatic increases' forecasted for the years ahead.

Not only does the ACA organize two conventions like this one every year, but it also sells "records of corrections practitioners, buyers, and users" to corporations for direct mailings, "one of the most targeted, measurable and cost-effective ways to sell your products and services to the growing corrections and criminal justice markets." (http://www.corrections.com/aca/)

But the ACA, like any business convention organizer, is only as powerful and profitable as its members. And the vast enterprise of privatization and profiteering in American prisons is growing as fast as the inmate population. A dangerous cycle of incarceration and privatization has been building over the past two decades. With the national annual cost of corrections facilities coming in around the $50 billion mark, prisons and prisoners have become a growth market. And 81% of sales of prison goods take place at conventions like the ACA's.

From products like the B.O.S.S., the body orifice safety scanner, to the Tasertron, a "less-lethal handheld electronic immobilization weapon" there is an increasing number of specialized products designed to restrain and subdue inmates. Besides these control devices, there is also a huge market for general care and services prisoners need, like food, clothes, telephones, and health care. Here as well prisoners' needs are sacrificed to the bottom line of profit. MCI, for example, supplies pay phones to prisons, where the pay-per-call phones make three times as much as payphones on the street, since this is the only way prisoners have of contacting people on outside. MCI installed its phones in Californian prisons through a program called Maximum Security, free of charge to the state, along with 32% of the profits thrown in for good measure. They then went on to charge a $3 surcharge on every call prisoners made. In one state MCI Maximum security was caught tacking an extra minute onto each call. (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/pris2.htm)

Unfortunately, these are only small pieces of a much larger picture. States are overwhelmed by the cost of incarcerating so many people every year. The current climate of our justice system, namely the enthusiasm for harsh mandatory sentences for non-violent offenders, continues to exacerbate the problem. The story of how these mandatory sentences get tied up with a booming corrections market reveals the systematic classism and racism that dominate American capitalism.

The History of Private Prisons

In 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of New York State, established the first mandatory sentences for drug offenders in the nation, and saw his prison population explode. At about the same time, governor of California, Ronald Reagan, opened the first privately owned and operated prisons to hold illegal immigrants. Most for-profit prisons are minimum security, so they soon became an ideal solution for housing prisoners who weren't particularly violent. Today roughly two-thirds of our prison population is non-violent offenders.

After Regan became President, the Drug War took over American consciousness. Not only mandatory sentences, but the "Three Strikes" rule came into pl
ay
.

Penalties and sentences for possession of certain substances soon came to reflect deep racial differences in the justice system. For example, sentences for possession of crack cocaine, used mainly by African Americans, are five times longer than the charges for a similar amount of powdered cocaine, which is mostly used by whites. This trend has become so extreme that today the ratio of blacks to whites in prison in 6 to 1. (http://www.lindesmith.org/library/)

As the prison population grew, so did the private prison industry. Private prisons today hold about 100,000 prisoners, about 5% of the total population, yet the largest of the corporations who own these prisons turn a pretty profit and are heavily invested in on Wall Street. The Corrections Corporation of American, a multinational business that operates prisons in Puerto Rico, Australia and the United Kingdom, has been called a 'theme stock" for the nineties. (http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=852)

As with the military industrial complex, many of the leaders of the private prison industry are former government big-wigs, blurring the line between national and private interests. Wakenhut Corrections, the second largest private prison operator, was founded and headed by George Wakenhut, a former FBI agent. Wakenhut has worked closely with the Federal government for years, selling its private security services at home and abroad. Its annual profits exceed $1 billion dollars, and its board of directors includes a former head of the FBI, a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a former CIA director, a former CIA deputy director, a former head of the Secret Service, a former head of the Marine Corps, and a former Attorney General. (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/pris3.htm)

It should come as no surprise then, that these corporations established a great deal of influence on national security, on investors, and on public opinion. They pour thousands of dollars into lobbying for influence in state and national policy. They also court the press relentlessly, keeping consciousness of private prisons high in the public's mind.

These private prisons operate on the principle of good old fashioned American capitalism. Prisoners are commodities, and the buying and selling of them is the business. The national average cost per day for holding one prisoner is about $43 dollars. Private prisons will bid for prisoners by undercutting each other, asking for $39, or $35 per day to house the state's inmate. This profit mongering results in lower standards of living for the prisoners, as the costs of housing and supporting them gets whittled down to the bottom line.

Supporters of private prisons endorse them as being a good source of labor for communities, especially in rural areas, where jobs are scant. Yet the conditions that rank and file employees are forced to work in are also reflective of purely corporate interests. Whereas in state-run facilities guards are unionized and provided with a retirement fund, private guards are underpaid, prevented from organizing, offered fewer benefits, and are frequently understaffed and overwhelmed. Private prison guards receive little training and preparation for a high-stress job. The combination of these factors often leads to higher levels of violence in private prisons; prisoners against prisoners, prisoners against guards, and guards against prisoners. There are also continuing problems with escapes and riots. In one year at a Bobby Ross Group private prison in Montana three people escaped and one was murdered. "We really hate to lose a customer," a lawyer from the group said.

But the prisoners are not so much customers as they are commodities. Because private prisons are businesses and not state-run organizations, there is no controlling authority to oversee what happens to them. And since private prisons bid for prisoners, a nation-wide trade in inmates has developed, called bed-brokering. States with too many prisoners literally sell them to states
with
room i
n th
eir prisons. This has strange but devastating side-effects, for example one Bobby Ross Group prison in Texas, the Newton County Correctional Center, was Hawaii's third largest prison. This means that prisoners are even further detached from their families and homes. Guards feel no sense of responsibility or accountability in dealing with another state's inmate. And amongst prisoners, already divisive cultural differences often result in violent conflicts.

To transport inmates between states, prisons will subcontract another security firm to drive them across country. Again, the employees of these organizations are often not sufficiently trained or prepared for the job. Inmates who get on the van in one state may be forced to go along for the ride as the bus traverses the country, picking up more people. Sometimes they may spend as much as a month on the road. Again, assaults and escapes are common. (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/pris2.htm).

Prison Labor

Private prisons will turn a profit on a prisoner even if he spends every day in solitary confinement, but another aspect of the privatization of prison is prison labor. White bread American corporations like Microsoft, Victoria's Secret, TWA and Starbucks have all used prisoners as laborers. A state-subsidized organization called UNICOR employs about 20,000 prisoners nationwide making everything from military uniforms to office furniture. Inmates are paid about $40 per month for their labor.

There is some disagreement about how much of affect prison labor has on other labor markets both in this country and internationally. Christian Parenti agrees that 'politically and ideologically' it’s very important but not necessarily an incentive for locking people up. He quotes a Navy source who says Unicor's "product is inferior, costs more and takes longer to procure." Parenti also states that without the subsidies UNICOR receives from the government, they would go under. In 1999, UNICOR made about $281 million.

On the other side of the debate, Eva Goldberg and Linda Evans write in an article called "The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy" (http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-goldberg.html) that "the growth of the prison industrial complex is inextricably tied to the fortunes of labor. Ever since the onset of the Reagan-Bush years in 1980, workers in the United States have been under siege. Aggressive union busting, corporate deregulation, and especially the flight of capital in search of cheaper labor markets, have been crucial factors in the downward plight of American workers."

Whether or not prison labor is an actual competitor with other labor markets seems to matter less than the perception that it is. Certainly American wages have been driven down by forced competition with cheaper markets. And UNICOR states that its program "makes a significant contribution to our nation’s economy by lowering the cost of producing domestic goods in the face of increasing foreign competition."(http://www.unicor.gov/about/partners.htm)

These facts become most disturbing in light of the fact that recidivism, the rate at which people commit more crimes and return to jail, is closely tied to whether or not the person can find employment. For example, one study showed that the rates of youth violence were roughly the same for both white and black men between the ages of 16 and 18. After the teen years, two things become clear; one, most of these men stop committing crimes. Of those who do commit more crimes, twice as many are African American. The significant exception is black men who are employed; their rates of recidivism are comparable to whites. (http://www.lindesmith.org/library/)

Clearly there is a connection between employment and incarceration. Denying people jobs and living wages contributes to the frustration that leads to drug abuse. And keeping people out of legitimate labor could be said to encourage finding alternate means of support in a black market trade
like narco
tics. What
is perh
aps most frustrating is the connection between the loss of jobs to foreign markets, which creates the conditions for crime, which in turn lead to incarceration and forced labor. American prison workers would then be competing on the same level with Third World economies, to which they'd lost potential jobs in the first place.

Parenti writes, that "the answer in the 1990's is clear: racialize poverty via criminal codes, such as drug laws and mandatory minimum sentences that disproportionately affect poor people of color. Then lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible. In this way criminal justice regulates, absorbs, terrorizes and disorganizes the poor."

These are just a few of the facts and factors surrounding the prison-industrial complex. Please follow these links and read the articles mentioned here. As far as solutions to these problems, our first steps would be in abolishing mandatory sentences and private prisons. But these are only the symptoms of the deeper diseases of poverty, racism, classism, and multinational capitalism. Until we break out of those prisons, none of us will be free.

Desert Storm chess set, by E. Howard Kellogg, Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, ca. 1991
Gift of Mr. Kellogg
Wood, plastic, tile, 2 x 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches

In August 1990 Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait to gain possession of its rich oil fields and access to the sea. In retaliation, the United States mounted Operation Desert Shield, condemning Iraq and gathering international support for economic embargoes. When Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, refused to budge, President Bush ordered the U.S. military into battle, launching Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Victory came swiftly, and by the end of February, Iraqi troops were surrendering by the thousands. Polls showed that a stunning 89 percent of Americans approved of President Bush's actions.

With a nephew held hostage in Iraq during Desert Storm, Mr. Kellogg found comfort in making this battle in miniature. After Iraq's defeat–and his nephew's release–he sent it as a gift to the President.

From the National Archives Exhibit Tokens and Treasures: Gifts to Twelve Presidents