Prisons

Donald Trump, The President Of Death, Willing To Sacrifice Lives For Economic Greed!

Ronald 2 Comments

President Donald Trump is clearly the President of Death, willing to sacrifice lives for economic greed!

By demonstrating no empathy or compassion for the 78,000 victims so far of the CoronaVirus Pandemic, he will be condemned in history!

By not appreciating and saluting the medical personnel who are sacrificing their safety, and in numerous cases have died doing their job, he will be condemned in history!

By encouraging people not to wear face masks and take other precautions, he has made the life of many state governors more difficult, as they face crazy, anti quarantining demonstrators who have no concern for human life, except for their own lives, and for this he will be condemned in history!

By acting as if the virus would not affect his own supporters, as well as his critics, and even the White House staff, including those who work around him, including Secret Service agents, he will be condemned in history!

The fact that the virus has become a problem in the White House may be a sign of Karma coming for Donald Trump and his family, and for Vice President Mike Pence and his family, as their refusal to take precautions and wear face masks to set an example for their followers’ health and safety, makes them complicit in what might happen, and for this Donald Trump will be condemned in history!

Donald Trump has no concern for people in nursing homes, in prisons, in public housing, in meat packing plants, or agricultural labor, as to him, they are all lowlifes, and he has no concern for human life, just his own aggrandizement!

At a moment of great crisis, one of the worst moments in American history, Donald Trump has proven he is a total failure, and he just might become one of the victims of his own mismanagement!

If that were to transpire, we would have a nation in which a large percentage, certainly a majority, would not mourn his passing!

A Reverse War On Poverty: Senior Citizen Communities, Working Class In Factories, Urban Concentrations, Prisons, And Health Care Workers–“Dispensable” Populations In Trump’s America

Ronald 15 Comments

It is now clear that those who are suffering the most in this CoronaVirus Pandemic are the powerless:

Senior Citizens in Assisted Living Facilities and Nursing Homes

Working class people, many of them immigrants, working in meat plants or others working in assembly line type jobs

Poor people living in urban concentrations of housing

People in prisons, both staff and prisoners

Those directly engaged in health care

These groups are the front line of the assault by the CoronaVirus Pandemic, in Trump’s America!

He and his governing class, and the wealthy and upper middle class are, to a great extent, unaffected by this health crisis.

And Trump has the nerve to wish to cut taxes on the elite, while wanting to deny assistance to state and local governments, particularly in the major concentration of population states, many but not all so called “Blue States”.

This must be fought bitterly, as it is a declaration of war by Donald Trump on the American people, for the benefit of the aristocracy that has grown by leaps and bounds, and has no issue with Donald Trump’s lack of humanity and concern for his fellow Americans!

Promotion Of Equal Justice: Barack Obama And Prison Reform

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President Barack Obama yesterday did something no President has ever done–visit a federal prison In Oklahoma, and talk with officials and inmates who are in prison for long periods of years for nonviolent criminal offenses realted to drugs.

The fact that we have about one percent of the population in prisons, many of them for drug offenses, has become a national issue, with Republicans, such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky joining Democrats such as Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey calling for reform.

Obama is making this a national commitment to reform our entire justice system, which sees so many more African Americans and Hispanics languishing in prison, while whites are able to avoid the large percentage of drug convictions.

The War on Drugs of Richard Nixon was made more strict and harsh under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in particular, putting people with nonviolent offenses, who committed three such crimes, being sentenced to life.

Now Obama has commuted the sentences of 46 drug offenders in prison for a long time, and has done close to 100 such commutations, making him the moat active President since Lyndon B. Johnson in that regard.

Equal justice is his mission, and he is well on the road to that accomplishment, through the hard work of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, following up on the excellent work in this area of former Attorney General Eric Holder!

Bobby Jindal For President: Give Us All A Break!

Ronald 10 Comments

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is working very hard to make a name for himself, as he plans to run for President.

There is a sad lot of candidates for President on the Republican side, but Jindal is among the worst of the worst!

He heads a state, Louisiana, which remains in the bottom ten of states in most statistics, and often almost at the bottom of the bottom!

His state is extremely poor, but Jindal, unlike John Kasich of Ohio and Jan Brewer of Arizona, will not allow Medicaid coverage for one out of four Louisianans, and continues to oppose ObamaCare with no alternative solution.

His state is the worst state per capita for people in prison, and the state prison system is mostly privatized, which makes it an industry designed to incarcerate as many inmates as possible for profit reasons.

His state, historically, is the most corrupt state politically, and now has a US Senator, David Vitter, who was involved in a prostitution scandal, but still was reelected, and now plans to run for Governor in 2015 to succeed Jindal.

Jindal has done nothing to better the lot of poor Louisianans, and every time he opens his mouth, he makes one wonder as to his intelligence, and his lack of empathy for those less fortunate is shocking!

If the GOP were to choose Bobby Jindal as their Presidential nominee in 2016, he would lose in a massive landslide!

A Major Day For Civil Liberties And Civil Rights In NYC And Nationally!

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Today was a day of major victories on civil liberties and civil rights, both in New York City and in the nation!

A federal court judge declared New York City’s “Stop And Frisk Law”, which targeted young black and Hispanic males in 90 percent of the cases of utilizing this law. People were being stopped based on racial profiling, simply because police chose to consider young black and Hispanic males as suspect, forcing them to be checked on whether they had guns or drugs, without any obvious reason to believe so, and with 88 percent of those stopped sent on their way without charges or arrests.

The federal court judge ruled that the “Stop And Frisk” law violated the 4th Amendment, and the 14th Amendment, and ordered that federal monitors watch over changes in the law.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly denounced the decision, and plan an appeal, but it is clear that minority youth are being victimized, with only a small percentage actually engaged in crimes and wrongdoing.

Attorney General Eric Holder also gave a speech today in San Francisco before the American Bar Association, and called for a new policy on those arrested and incarcerated for drug possession, which puts many people in prison, ruins their lives for the future when they leave prison, and if anything, teaches them about crime because of the environment they live in while in prison. It also undermines the ability of their families, including children, to advance out of poverty in the long run.

It is amazing that population has gone up about 40 percent since 1980, but 800 percent increase in people in prison and jails, and it is costing the nation $80 billion a year to house and supervise 2.2 million people in prison, dooming the drug offenders with a disadvantage they cannot overcome when they leave incarceration.

This is all due to Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, which began in 1971, and has totally failed, another part of the Nixon tragedy for our nation.

One can be sure that the Republican Party will oppose both developments today, but it is essential to promote justice and equality in a country that claims to believe in freedom and liberty.

And the idea that 5 percent of the world (the US), houses 25 percent of all prisoners worldwide is atrocious, unacceptable, and great cannon fodder for our enemies overseas, besides being morally wrong! And much of this imprisonment is in the South, with private corporations making incarceration a profit making business, which is, in itself, despicable!

The Bill of Rights and other civil liberties is in constant combat with those who have no concern for these rights,but today has been a good day for civil liberties and civil rights!

Six Months Of Rick Scott As Governor Of Florida: What Hath The Voters Wrought?

Ronald 1 Comment

It has now been six months for Rick Scott as Governor of Florida, and he stands at a low point in public opinion polls, recently 29 percent, but now down to 27 percent, the lowest of all Governors of the 50 states!

Scott, who came from a corrupt background of Medicare fraud into politics, and spent over $70 million of his own fortune to win the Governorship by about 50,000 votes statewide and less than a majority of all votes cast, has set a horrific record as Governor, but is arrogant enough to claim he does not care about his public opinion ratings!

As a recent Miami Times article outlined, Rick Scott has been responsible for the following tragic developments in the Sunshine state:

1. Mandated drug testing for state workers and welfare recipients, although there are law suits in process against these tests, and he seems to have backed off on state workers taking such tests.

2. Enacted Jim Crow style voting laws, creating new restrictions on voting, and undermining the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while bringing back memories of the voting restrictions that existed before that federal law went into effect under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Presidency.

3. Fought a Prescription Drug Database, even though Florida is the state with the most drug abuse, but finally backed away after a lot of pressure was brought, even by his own Attorney General.

4. Privatized Medicaid, causing confusion and loss of services and funding for severely disabled Florida citizens, with cases now in court against this, and appeals by individual families in process.

5. Outsourced prisons to his political supporters, who want to privatize them, despite fact that Florida already has more prisoners than any other state except Texas, and has made no prison reforms which are badly needed, so instead prisons are being made a profit industry.

6. Cut jobless benefits to 23 weeks in a state with one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

7. Gave tax breaks to large corporations while not being concerned about the survival of unemployed people.

8. Slashed public education funding dramatically in a state which ranks among the worst in educational standards, but at same time took away tenure from teachers, and required ALL public workers to pay three percent of their income for their pension plans, a pay cut in difficult times, and undermining morale.

9. Worked aggressively against environmental protection programs statewide, ignoring the significance of the Everglades and other environmentally sensitive lands, instead promoting development. by private corporations.

10. Rejected high speed rail development funds from the federal government for expansion in the high traffic area of Central Florida.

11.Refused to be interviewed by the news media, comments only in Twitter style, and set up signing of bills to include only friends and supporters of what he is doing.

Governor Scott has shown the height of arrogance and insensitivity to groups that are being victimized by his policies, and Florida must, somehow, bear three and a half more years of this, unless Scott can be found to have done something illegal, leading to impeachment, or IF a recall movement can be brought about, but unlikely since it is not provided for in the state constitution.

This is the result of citizens NOT paying attention, and either not voting, or not understanding the issues when they do vote!

It is a good lesson in the importance of citizens paying attention to politics and public issues in the future, so as to avoid the nightmare Florida is going through right now!