http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/rise_of_the_new_black_radicals_20150426
the beast is not simply white supremacy, chronic poverty and the many faces of racism but the destructive energy of
corporate capitalism.
The world’s hundreds of millions of disenfranchised youths—in America this group is dominated by the black and brown underclass—come out of the surplus labor created by our system of
corporate neofeudalism. These young men and women have been discarded as human refuse and are preyed upon by a legal system that criminalizes poverty. In the United States they constitute the bulk of the 2.3 million human beings locked in jails and prisons.
Corporate power, which knows what is coming, has put in place sophisticated systems of control that include militarized police, elaborate propaganda campaigns that seek to make us
fearful and therefore passive, wholesale surveillance of every citizen and a court system that has stripped legal protection from the poor and any who dissent.
it’s legal extortion. When a government is making 30 to 40 percent of their yearly budget off of
tickets, fines and imprisonment, it’s extortion. It’s the same thing the mob did in the ’20s.
a debtor’s prison being run by a collusion between city officials, police and court judges, who treated our community like an ATM machine...ferguson gets about three warrants per household. One and a half cases for each household. You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and three warrants per household from an average crime rate. You get numbers like this from racist bull
, arrests from jaywalking, and constant low-level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”
[in Ferguson], their age ranges anywhere from 12 to 28 or 29, that went against the most powerful military force in this world. That’s pretty much what happened. … That’s not what’s explained, but that’s what it was. It was tanks on every corner, our phones tapped, they follow us. Every day we was out there we thought we were gonna die. At one point in time they said they were gonna kill us. ‘We’re not shooting rubber bullets tonight, we’re shooting live ammunition.’ And these are the things that you don’t see on the news.
“In St. Louis if you’ve been arrested and you’re facing a misdemeanor or felony charges,
you’re not allowed a Pell Grant to go to college,” he said. “So if you can’t afford to pay to go to college you’re
just stuck. If you’re on probation and you’re trying to get a job, it’s a
right-to-work state,
they have the right to deny you employment because of your past. They don’t have to give you an opportunity to work. Where do they leave you, back in the same system
“I think D.C. is a perfect example of what America is,” he said. “You have this big white house representing the government, that was built by slaves, that’s beautiful, excellent manicured lawns, and right outside the gate you have 50 homeless people sleeping in a park. Right outside of the gate of the White House. That perfectly describes America.”