Un Free In America

For millions of people in America, life consists of day after day of repression, in tiny cells, under the unblinking eye of the State.

It is a cruel irony that while public discourse is thick with words like freedom and liberty, the bodies and lives of millions are trapped within a system that only knows how to humiliate and exploit them.

There really is a prison-industrial-complex and those who deny it most are those who profit from it most; for like the Wizard of Oz, they dare not allow you to peek behind the curtain.

There, by political design and judicial fist, you find unchecked, unbridled power wreaking havoc on the lives of the poor – in the name of ‘corrections’.

What is their kind of corrections? Repression, pure and simple, from people doing lifetimes in prison holes, to naked brutality under cover of state law.

Thanks to the first ‘black’ president, Bill Clinton, it is virtually impossible to file and prove a civil rights lawsuit in court.

For, as Clinton demonstrated, it takes a neoliberal to respond to a wave of lawsuits by changing the rules to make filing even harder; don’t change the conditions – change the rules. That’s neoliberalism.

Those rules are still the rules in force today, for it matters not that there is a Black face in the White House – for, truth be told, he doesn’t make the rules.

The conditions, the life-options, and even the post-prison possibilities, are worse and worse, for more and more people.

That has not changed.