Saudi Arabia’s Yemen Strategy: Divide and Destroy

Michael Horton

“Donkey breeders and solar panel dealers are the only one’s making any money at the moment,” says Salim, a resident of Sana’a. Salim is eluding to the fact that most of Yemen, a country of 26 million, is without gasoline and electricity. “We are back to using donkeys to move supplies but I guess the solar panels are a step forward,” he says with a laugh.

While eleven weeks of airstrikes and a punitive naval blockade have laid waste to much of Yemen, most people remain resolute and what is a distinctly Yemeni sense of humor is intact. This is despite the fact that more than 2000 people have been killed, over half of which are civilians, and billions of dollars of infrastructure have been destroyed since the Saudi led “Operation Decisive Storm” began on March 25.

The World Health Organization estimates that 8.6 million Yemenis are now in urgent need of medical help as hospitals struggle to operate without medicines and without electricity. Oxfam estimates that two thirds of Yemen’s population of 26 million do not have access to clean drinking water. The streets of Yemen’s cities are choked with mountainous piles of trash due to the lack of fuel for garbage trucks. The severe conditions in Yemen could lead to a nationwide outbreak of disease.

The Saudis and their coalition partners—and this includes the US military which is providing intelligence and logistical support—have, in the space of eleven weeks, erased fifty years of progress in Yemen. Airstrikes have destroyed roads, bridges, universities, museums, historical sites, factories, and hundreds of homes and even entire villages. Yet, despite the destruction, many Yemenis are determined not to let their country become another Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan, all of which have been on the receiving end of the disastrous interventionist foreign policies of the US and Saudi Arabia.

“Talking is the only way out of this quagmire,” explains a former Yemeni MP. “No one group in Yemen has the power to defeat the other. We have two choices: to go on fighting for the next decade and give the world another Syria, or talk. Our history favors the latter. But I don’t think our Saudi friends have any interest in letting us solve our own problems.”

There is some hope that Yemen and its people will learn from what has transpired in Syria, Libya, and Iraq and draw on their own rich traditions that favor conflict mediation and negotiated settlements. According to former UN Special Adviser on Yemen, Jamal Benomar, Yemen’s major factions—including both the Houthis and representatives from south Yemen—were near signing off on a power sharing agreement before Saudi led airstrikes brought the negotiations to an abrupt end.

The Zaidi Shi’a Houthis, who control much of northwest Yemen, were, before the start of Operation Decisive Storm, on relatively good terms with much of the leadership of Yemen’s various southern secessionist movements. However, partly as a result of the Saudi led aerial campaign, the Houthis went on the offensive in south Yemen, largely in order to prevent Saudi Arabia from installing and backing an alternative government in the southern port city of Aden.

The Houthis, whose membership is largely drawn from northern based tribes, are now locked in a deadly battle with southern militias who are mostly fighting for an independent south Yemen, not for the exiled government of President Hadi. Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen has not only led to the wholesale destruction of much of Yemen’s already fragile physical and social infrastructure, it has also ignited a long simmering civil war between northern and southern based forces that neither side can win.

“The Saudis bait us like dogs, pitting one side against the other,” explains a former colonel who served in the army of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). “This has always been their game in Yemen: get us to fight one another so that we’re never a threat to them. So far it has worked. The last thing that they want is for us to negotiate and unite. ”

Saudi Arabia has a long history of playing all sides in Yemen. For much of the last fifty years the Saudis have maintained a largely covert program whereby leading tribal, military, and government figures in Yemen receive regular payments from the Saudi government in exchange for loyalty. While many of these men are drawn from northern Yemen, the Saudis have also, at times, supported southern based Marxist hardliners who opposed unification. However, up until the commencement of Operation Decisive Storm, Saudi policy in Yemen was largely covert and even careful. Now, with the change in leadership in the Kingdom, Saudi policy in Yemen is anything but covert or careful.

Rather than letting UN led negotiations continue, Saudi Arabia and its partners have opted for a policy whose only clear outcome looks to be the impoverishment and eventual destruction of an entire country. If the war in Yemen continues, the as yet unverified Iranian involvement with Yemen’s Houthi rebels may be the least of Saudi Arabia’s worries.

While Operation Decisive Storm has failed to defeat the Houthis or reinstall the exiled government of Yemeni President Hadi, it has allowed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—and now the Islamic State—to rapidly expand the territory under their control. Saudi efforts in Yemen effectively neutralized the two forces fighting AQAP and IS: the Houthis and the US equipped and trained Yemeni counter-terrorism forces. While a resurgent AQAP and IS may be useful temporary proxies in Saudi Arabia’s war with the Houthis, both groups will—and in the past have—turn on the House of Saud.

In addition to indirectly enabling the expansion of AQAP and IS in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners are arming a host of disparate militias and tribal forces. The only prerequisite for receiving arms and cash is a pledge to fight the Houthis. A popular joke in Sana’a describes the latest get rich quick scheme: get a few of your friends together, claim you are the leader of an anti-Houthi militia, collect the money from Saudi Arabia, and promptly buy a qat farm in the countryside, far away from the falling bombs. Despite the dire situation, humor and hope persist.

“When the bombs stop falling, I think all sides in this conflict will return to the negotiating table,” says a long-serving Yemeni MP. “I think the Saudis know this. That’s why they’re still bombing us. They don’t want a negotiated settlement to this conflict. But we have a history of defying invaders and going our own way. I’m hopeful we’ll turn away from the abyss that we face.”

World Soccer Corruption, Africa’s ‘Illicit Financial Flows’ and Elite Silences

Patrick Bond

The last week has provided extraordinary examples of how corruption erodes the resources and morals of an entire continent – Africa – in part because villains in South Africa made alliances with wicked brothers in Switzerland, Latin America, the Caribbean and especially the United States. We now know more about offshore centers of both reactionary finance and corrupt-corporate soccer. It’s long overdue they are exposed to a spotlight, even if those pointing that light want to leave certain features in the shadows.

On May 21, Africa’s ‘illicit financial flows’ (IFF) looting was partially dissected by Nelson Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, in his urgent-sounding report to the African Union, Track it! Stop it! Get it! Mbeki’s bottom line: “Currently, Africa is estimated to be losing more than $50 billion annually in IFFs. But these estimates… often exclude some forms of IFFs that by nature are secret and cannot be properly estimated, such as proceeds of bribery and trafficking of drugs, people and firearms.” Or such as secret deals in minerals and oil; South Africa’s ruling party (under Mbeki’s leadership) made dodgy payments to shady characters in Nigeria, Texas and Saddam-era Iraq. Or tax giveaways by politicians; Mbeki’s 14 years as South Africa’s deputy president (1994-99) and president (1998-2008) witnessed the main corporate tax rate falling from 48% to 28%. Or exchange controls against capital outflows; Pretoria dropped its main exchange control – the financial rand – in 1995 and let the largest Johannesburg firms relocate to London in 1999, causing a massive increase in South Africa’s current account deficit due to ‘licit’ offshoring of profits. These are unmentionables in Mbeki’s report: some of last week’s revealing elite silences.

On May 27, the US Justice Department and FBI alleged that the Zurich-based world soccer mafia known as FIFA exudes “corruption that is rampant, systemic and deep-rooted.” Yet two days later, world soccer dictator Sepp Blatter was re-elected head of the notoriously corrupt Zurich institution FIFA, which runs the World Cup. “Why would I step down? That would mean I recognise that I did wrong.” But on June 2, he did indeed promise to step down within the next nine months, as Justice Department pressure mounted enough to crack even Blatter’s arrogance. According to the New York Times’ explanation, “One high-ranking soccer official said Mr. Blatter had been advised by his legal counsel that continuing in his current position could make defending him against possible future prosecution more difficult.”

More than a decade ago, Blatter’s long-time FIFA ally, Jack Warner from Trinidad, allegedly demanded from Mbeki’s government a bribe of $10 million just before the May 2004 vote deciding the host country for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The main competitor then was Morocco, whose kingdom apparently offered only $1 million to Warner, and hence was the loser by 14 to 10 votes. This is known because of testimony by a fellow bribee, Chuck Blazer, who controlled US soccer for many years, and who wanted $1 million from South Africa. Blazer, formerly a Warner crony but also recently prosecuted for soccer corruption, is being treated for terminal cancer in Manhattan and has turned state’s witness, along with Warner’s sons.

According to the Justice Department, after the 2004 vote, “the South Africans were unable to arrange for the payment to be made directly from government funds. Arrangements were thereafter made with FIFA officials to instead have the $10 million sent from FIFA – using funds that would otherwise have gone from FIFA to South Africa to support the World Cup.” The US agencies’ surveillance technology traced the $10 million to a slush fund benefiting Warner and his mates.

Corruption denialism

Foolishly, South African elites quickly circled the wagons. The then finance minister, Trevor Manuel (now a leader of Rothschilds Bank), rebutted, “I am not aware of any request for a bribe of any size.” Mbeki was also denialist: “I am not aware of anybody who solicited a bribe from the government for the purpose of our country being awarded the right to host the World Cup… no public money was ever used to pay a bribe.”

Can Mbeki be believed? As president, he denied medicines to people living with AIDS fifteen years ago, and so is credited (in a Harvard study) with the unnecessary deaths of at least 330,000 South Africans. Fortunately, protesters from the Treatment Action Campaign raised sufficient pressure to overturn his policies in 2004, at which point AIDS drugs became available and the country’s life expectancy rose from 52 then to 61 today, with three million people getting free generic medicines. So Mbeki was an especially odd choice to lead the IFF Panel, especially given how corruption-riddled his own regime became (e.g., his long-protected police chief Jackie Selebi, who was also head of Interpol, was owned by the local Mob). And especially given Mbeki’s role in the financial liberalisation that is today crippling the South African economy.

Finally, three days after the bribery story broke, FIFA’s local organiser in chief, Danny Jordaan, admitted a $10 million payment was indeed made to Warner’s accounts in early 2008. But he claimed it was for soccer ‘development’ aimed at uplifting the African diaspora: “How could we have paid a bribe for votes four years after we had won the bid?” Disbelieving critics point out that the SA government kept this unprecedented ‘development’ gift to Caribbean soccer a secret in 2010, and had quietly asked FIFA to deposit it directly into Warner’s notorious slush fund account.

In Jordaan’s defence it could be argued that bribing Warner was a sensible investment for the national interest, along with trotting out the octogenarian Mandela to visit him in Trinidad, done clearly against doctor’s orders. Others might then ask whether the illicit funding was really limited to just $10 million – in the context of a World Cup conservatively estimated to have cost South Africa $5 billion (but more like double that if all the unnecessary items plus a dramatic increase in the foreign debt are calculated).

Amongst the bills covered by taxpayers were $3.1 billion in construction costs for ten stadiums (most are white elephants now), an unnecessary new $1 billion airport in Durban, $3.2 billion in profits sucked offshore by FIFA without taxation or exchange controls, and the unquantifiable cost of degraded political rights, housing displacement and elite back-slapping. Brazil suffered far worse, with more graft and many more forced removals from Rio’s favelas – and much bigger pre-Cup social protests in 2013-14 than even South Africa managed in 2010.

But even aside from these bribery revelations, the hangover from hosting the World Cup remains. Celebrating the FIFA bid victory back in 2004, Mbeki intoned “We want to ensure that, one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict.” In reality, hosting the World Cup increased poverty and conflict here, just as happened in Brazil last year.

The US Justice Department completely neglected to mention these most corrupting aspects of FIFA’s rule. A year ago, on a BBC debate, I put it to Jordaan that he was implicated in FIFA’s white elephantism, reminding of how even he had once apologised for luring poor municipalities into building unneeded stadiums, and I complained that in the two most unequal major countries in the world, South Africa and Brazil, FIFA had a responsibility to democratise the World Cup model, not exacerbate inequality. Jordaan giggled in a disturbing way, and then simply cranked up his nationalistic rhetoric (for example, at 8:45 into the tape at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p020r2wy).

This was well understood by business strategists, reflected in the May 2010 remarks of senior insurance industry underwriter Trevor Kerst: “FIFA pays no taxes and institutes exclusion zones around the stadiums where matches take place, and tax income is curtailed. Within these exclusion zones, only FIFA and its partners may sell any goods; nothing from these sales accrues to the government.”

Do US Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the FBI give a damn about the deeper economic and political corruption of our society in 2010, represented by elites like Mbeki and Zuma giddily rolling the country under Blatter’s FIFA steamroller? There is no evidence in her anti-FIFA documentation of any awareness, much less critique of the way over-commercialised sports create mega-project mania in cities.

Blatter’s initial rebuttal was that the charges were laid because a bitter US establishment lost the 2022 World Cup bid to Qatar, because Britain lost the 2018 bid to Russia (which in Ukraine is the main adversary of US foreign policy once again) and because Washington is “the number one sponsor of the Hashemite Kingdom, therefore of my adversary (Jordan’s Prince Ali)… There is something that smells” about the investigation, Blatter pronounced. Donning this ill-fitting victim mantle, he successfully rallied the majority of 203 country votes for his re-election as FIFA chief executive last Friday. South Africa was one of the countries voting for Blatter. No doubt authorities in Pretoria – and Jordaan’s SA Football Association – will continue scrambling with Blatter in coming weeks to creatively explain or disguise the full extent of the bribery.

A banker’s world, from Washington to Zurich to Joburg

But Blatter’s correct: the investigation does indeed smell, as does much else coming from the US Justice Department, because if there is anywhere deserving of corporate corruption probes to the extent of the FIFA investigation, it is Washington itself. Lynch is an especially dubious prosecutor, given her prior role in covering up the US banking system’s corruption by neglecting to pursue criminal charges against HSBC over money laundering associated with Mexican drugs or its Swiss subsidiary’s assistance to wealthy US residents’ illegal tax-dodging.

Manipulation of currencies is another reflection of the way the world’s bankers loot the world, cheating even the City of London and Wall Street on interest rates and currency deals. The Washington model of ‘justice’ is to charge bankers a fine for such crimes, so that no one is jailed, and then banks pass the bill back to their customers. The game continues.

In the same spirit, last week, South Africa’s Competition Commission gathered sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to allege that banks including BNP Paribas, Barclays, JP Morgan, Investec and Standard Chartered colluded to synchronize currency trading to rip off South Africans. But given prevailing power relations, you can safely bet no one will go to jail and at best a tokenistic fine will be levied.

Last Wednesday, the Swiss security forces were fully cooperative in arresting seven FIFA elites (though not Blatter) in a luxury Zurich hotel at Washington’s request. Yet it is no secret, either, that Swiss banks are even more cooperative when it comes to assisting African dictators and multinational corporations like locally-headquartered Glencore, which was founded by the infamous apartheid ally Marc Rich (who fled prosecution in the US and was later pardoned by Bill Clinton in as his last presidential act in 2001). Rich’s protégé is Ivan Glasenberg, a Johannesburg-born self-made man who has become South Africa’s richest citizen, worth at least $5 billion.

But just as with Rich, who busted oil sanctions to aid apartheid, it’s partly ill-begotten wealth. As Mbeki’s report puts it, “the IFF risks inherent in a commodity trade with Switzerland will be substantially higher than in the equivalent transaction with Sweden” because of Swiss corruption, and he even includes mention of how the world’s largest commodity trader, Swiss-based Glencore, did various dubious deals to minimize taxation in South Africa, from where a large share of its profits are sourced. Mbeki was too frightened to mention the name Glencore, though.

The High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows was commissioned three years ago by the African Union and United Nations Economic Commission on Africa (UN ECA). But notwithstanding extensive resources, the panel didn’t turn up anything particularly surprising. Researchers at the UN ECA, Global Financial Integrity and the Universities of Massachusetts, Witwatersrand and London have previously identified even larger IFFs.

One reason is that Mbeki’s team declined to explore the grey area between licit and illicit, in the examples noted above, especially capital control liberalisation and legal tax loopholes. They displayed an annoying habit of providing anecdotes about rip-off schemes using real-life examples, while failing to name and shame the perpetrators. In short, the Mbeki report confirms that he and other African elites are not the least bit serious about building a powerful social force to halt and reverse the damage. His denial of the illicit financial flow to Warner is just icing on the cake.

Instead, such a movement is being built in South Africa by activists confronting these corporations directly. One example is the network demanding that the Marikana massacre report given to President Jacob Zuma in March finally be released so that at least one firm’s obvious blame can be codified and quantified. There is no question that Lonmin – a mining house once termed ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ by Edward Heath – will be criticised by Judge Ian Farlam for colluding with police to arrange the massacre of 34 of its workers on August 16, 2012. Lonmin’s top officials included a board director in charge of ‘transformation’, Cyril Ramaphosa, who 24 hours earlier wrote emails to the police and mining minister describing the wildcat wage strike then raging as “dastardly criminal.”

Ramaphosa is now second in command in South Africa, with a strong likelihood of succeeding Zuma as president in 2019. Ramaphosa had access to a $100 million World Bank loan to build 5500 houses for Lonmin in 2011, but only built three, explaining that Lonmin faced a profitability crisis after 2008. But Dick Forslund of the Alternative Information and Development Centre has proven that the firm had recently exported more than $300 million to Lonmin subsidiaries in the ‘hot money centres’ of Bermuda and London. A classic case of what can generally be termed transfer-pricing profits, it was a supposedly legal tax practice. Given Lonmin’s power and Ramaphosa’s explicit endorsement of the company’s financial accounts, don’t expect a South African government investigation.

In search of accountability

The most critical trade unions – the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa – along with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party, and radical civil society (e.g. Right2Know and the Marikana Support Committee) are bravely attempting to shift public opinion to tackle such sustained corporate corruption. But while the link between crony capitalism and state power is no better personified than by Ramaphosa, he retains the hope of many in big business (and even some liberals) for a cleaner, less clumsily-corrupt ruling party after Zuma goes.

In other words, accountability for this mess will be very hard to achieve. Just as appalling as Bletter’s FIFA re-election on Friday, on the day before, Danny Jordaan was selected as ruling-party mayor of the Nelson Mandela Metro (Port Elizabeth). The most sleazy of South African municipalities, Durban, is fairly certain to win the 2022 Commonwealth Games in three months’ time, and will bid for the 2024 Olympic Games. Mbeki will be given an even larger platform to pretend he wants to halt financial corruption.

The need for non-accountability goes to the very top of South Africa. The most visible personal case of graft was unveiled the same day the FIFA bosses were arrested: Zuma’s upgrade of his rural Nkandla village palace. It cost taxpayers more than $20 million, and catalysed a “Pay Back the Money!” meme that many leftist critics – notably the EFF leader Julius Malema – regularly use against Zuma. But arguing Zumadoes not have to pay back any money, the police minister last Wednesday offered unintendedly hilarious excuses for unjustifiable state security funding on cattle and chicken facilities and a swimming pool (to fight potential fires).

A desperately defensive Pretoria government’s investment in the myth of 2010’s success is too great to allow its citizenry to pull the strings that unravel the corruption jersey. But it’s just as fragile a fabric as the wool chosen by Washington and the IFF Panel to pull over society’s eyes. Those strings would quickly entangle the likes of Blatter, Warner, Blazer, Mbeki, Zuma, Ramaphosa, Manuel, Jordaan, Glasenberg, Lynch and a host of their banker buddies. Their challenge is to gracefully step out of the tangle; ours is to pull the strings tighter, tripping them up (after all, the first three have already fallen harder than anyone expected), and then knitting some entirely new socio-economic and sporting systems as rapidly and as robustly as possible.

Does Egypt have a Government?

Lawrence Davidson

Military officers often take over countries, but only a fool would call the result a government. Governments do not have to be democratic, but they do have to be rule-based. The rules can come in the form of generic laws or customs, but in all cases they have to be promulgated, that is, be publicly set forth. In addition, obedience to the rules has to rest on something more than fear. If whatever system is running the show is subject to the whim of an individual or group of individuals, or operates through rules known only to the police, or relies mostly on terror, it is not a government. It is a despotism of some sort. Most instances of military rule fit the description of despotism. Speaking of such regimes as governments is just so much nonsense.

By the way, dictionary definitions of government are usually inadequate, restricting themselves to vague statements like “a particular system used to control a country.“ If the mafia took over Italy, would you understand their form of control as government?

There has been progress over the years as to what really constitutes government, and the rule of the condottieri no longer fits.

Historically the United States and the politicians who create its foreign policy do not bother with such distinctions. Often they seem to prefer despotisms. Be it for ideological or economic reasons, the U.S. has indulged in regime change for almost two hundred years, and a good number of times the beneficiaries of such change are the local military bosses. This history has had a cumulative effect on U.S. credibility: today, when Washington proclaims its mission is to bring democratic government to an otherwise benighted world, almost no one outside of the USA believes it. This is a fact never mentioned by the mainstream American media.

An example of a current military despotism that has been, and is now again, the recipient of U.S. military largess is the one in Egypt. The military has run things in Egypt since 1952, when a group of officers overthrew King Farouk and emasculated the Egyptian parliament. That situation lasted until 2011, when a popular revolt forced the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, an air force officer who had, for over thirty years, masqueraded as Egypt’s “fourth president.”

Mubarak’s fall was followed by a brief hiatus of democracy. During this time the Egyptian people actually engaged in a relatively free and fair election in which they selected a legitimate president in the person of Mohamed Morsi. The fact that Morsi was a religious Muslim did not make his election any less legitimate, though it did present those who did not vote for him with a choice. Would they accept an elected government led by a devout Muslim, with the implied possibility of altering its orientation though future elections, or would they reject the electoral results and revert back to military despotism, with the explicit awareness that changing that form of rule would require another popular revolution? We now know that a good number of those who did not vote for Morsi chose to return to military control.

That sizable minority certainly has gotten what they wished for. Egypt is now back under the control of a military dictatorship, this time led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a “field marshal” who became the “sixth president” of Egypt by pulling off a coup in 2013, followed by a rigged national election.

What have “President” el-Sisi and his lieutenants been busy doing since putting aside their uniforms for tailored suits? Here is a list of items based on recent news reports as well as anonymously released recordings, which (shades of Richard Nixon) the Egyptian strongmen were at once arrogant and stupid enough to make.

* They have been busy manipulating the Egyptian news media so as to construct a cult of personality in which el-Sisi is promoted as a heroic figure “carrying the responsibility of the country in an existential crisis.” The media have been instructed to describe el-Sisi as a “brave, special, free and patriotic Egyptian.” To criticize him is to “slander this beautiful thing we have found in our lives.” One can’t help wonder who dreamt up this terminology.

* They have been busy funneling money into special accounts controlled by the military. It is of particular interest that one of these accounts is named the “Tamarrod” account. Tamarrod was the name of a supposedly independent secular and “democratic” youth movement that was very active in calling for the removal of Mohamed Morsi. This raises the question of whether significant elements of Egypt’s so-called democratic movement opposing Morsi were no more than fronts funded and manipulated by the military.

* They have been busy manipulating the courts and legal system. This should come as no surprise, because at least since Mubarak’s time the Egyptian courts have been stacked with supporters of military rule. The elected Morsi government ran headlong into a so-called legal barrier when almost everything it attempted was overruled by a court system loyal to the deposed Mubarak dictatorship. Subsequently one of the charges being brought against Morsi by the restored military despotism is “insulting the judiciary.”

* They have been busy destroying any person or group who would oppose them, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared “a terrorist organization.” For the Egyptian military to call the Muslim Brothers terrorists is like Israel calling the Palestinians terrorists. At the very least it is an example of projecting onto your foes tactics that you yourself practice. The el-Sisi cabal has also imprisoned and tried Mr. Morsi on a long list of manufactured charges, some of which may result in his execution. Last but not least, members of the truly independent secular democratic movement have been harassed and imprisoned.

* And, of course, el-Sisi, this “beautiful thing” that has come into the lives of all Egyptians, has allied with Israel to oppose Palestinian resistance to occupation. As a result he and his cabal are now actively complicit in the ruination of every Palestinian trapped in Gaza.

There are many names you can give the present nature of rule in Egypt. You can call it a dictatorship, a despotism, a tyranny, a garrison state, unlimited rule, or even a reign of terror carried on by thugs in suits. All of these would be relatively accurate. What you can’t call it is a government. To do so would slander the centuries-long struggle against all forms of despotism that have taken place both in the West and in the East. And, even more to the point, it would slander all those Egyptians who have, at great personal risk, stayed loyal to the goal of democracy for their country.

Race and the Shrinkage of the Middle Class

Jesse Jackson

They teach our children, drive our buses, clean our streets and deliver our mail. They staff the government and make it run. Their public-sector jobs are at the heart of the middle class, particularly for African-Americans and Latinos. And they are in steep decline.

One of five African-American adults works in government employment. This is a higher percentage than either white Americans or Latinos. It isn’t surprising. Freed of segregation, African-Americans came into our cities just as manufacturing jobs — the traditional pathway to the middle class — were headed abroad. Government employment offered secure jobs, decent pay and benefits, a chance to buy a home and lift your family.

Women also flocked to public service jobs, which offered greater professional and managerial opportunities.

But in 2008 when the economy collapsed, state budgets were savaged. Tax revenues plummeted; spending needs soared. Deep cutbacks in regular programs followed. No one will be surprised to learn that African Americans lost jobs at a higher rate than whites, often because of seniority.

Now, in the sixth year of the recovery, the economy has inched back, unemployment is down. But employment in the public sector hasn’t bounced back. The new jobs being created pay less and offer less security than the jobs that were lost. And this has devastating effects on the African-American middle class, the very people who have worked hard, played by the rules, and sought to get ahead.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that since 2007, there are 1.8 million missing jobs in the public sector. Moreover, across the country, conservative Republican governors have assaulted unions and sought to curb collective bargaining, erase teacher tenure, and dramatically cut pensions and other benefits.

The loss of jobs and cutback on wages exacerbated the housing collapse. We’ve learned that banks and other predators targeted black neighborhoods like Prince Georges County in Maryland. They marketed shoddy mortgages, leaving those with good credit paying higher rates than they could have and those with no credit betting it all on the assumption that housing prices would never fall.

Many report on the decline of the middle class, which has fallen backward over the last decade in both median income and wealth. More than 8 of 10 Americans, according to a Pew Poll, now report that it is harder to maintain their standard of living than it was 10 years ago.

And African-Americans and Latinos got hit the hardest. The race gap has widened, not narrowed, in this century. The New York Times reports that 50 percent of African-Americans now are low-income households, along with 43 percent of Latinos — a category that has been growing since 2000.

In Illinois, the nonprofit Corporation for Enterprise Development reports that more than one in three households suffers a “persistent state of financial insecurity.” Again, African-Americans, Latinos and single women with children fare worse.

Numbers like this numb. We know the reality. But we seem in denial. When Baltimore blows up, the spotlight is put on the police and their practices, as it should be. But police forces across the country are ordered to keep order in communities racked with unemployment, homelessness, drugs, guns, collapsing schools, impoverished families and crushed hopes. The best-trained, more empathetic police officers in the country would have a hard time fulfilling that mission.

This country cannot stay in denial. We have to have a bold plan to rebuild high poverty neighborhoods from Chicago’s South Side to Appalachia’s valleys. Across the country we have work to do — from rebuilding 100-year-old water systems to creating the rapid transit that will connect people to jobs to moving to clean energy — and we have an entire generation of young people desperate for work. We have corporations stashing trillions abroad to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Billionaire hedge fund operators pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries. We need rebuild America and put people to work. The cost of losing another generation to despair will be far greater than the cost of investing in them on the front side of life.

Anarchist Social Justice

Edward Martin & Mateo Pimentel

In our last publication, we addressed some of the problems of the TPP. It endangers the planet, threatens labor, violates human rights, and it globalizes free trade into another form of neo-imperialism. This is further proof that the 1 percent, both in the United States and around the world, undermine democratic self-determination in the economic and political realms. We argue that free markets, as they manifest themselves today, destabilize the world economy, while fair markets stabilize. Most importantly, the global economy needs to move away from comparative advantage theory towards fair competitive advantage. Although it works for the plutocracy and its corporations, comparative advantage is outdated, and it spells bad news for the rest of us. We argue for an economy, a global economy, based on “common pool resource theory,” in which the economy is understood as a natural resource to be protected just like the environment. We borrow this idea from Elenor Ostrom. Indeed, it is time to start thinking about the economy in the same way that we (ought to) think about preserving the environment and protecting it accordingly.

What follows is the final part of our analysis of oligarchy.

Community of Meaning, Popular Justice

As a justifiable reaction to the problem of oligarchy in organizations and liberal democratic institutions, some theorists and activists have identified alternative political arrangements to liberal democratic organizations and institutions. Such anarchist examples include Chomsky’s recommendations of the Kibbutzim villages of Israel and the worker-owned cooperatives of Spain’s Mondragon experiments. Other anarchist examples are based on the New Social Movements (NSM) school, which for the most part have become an activist alternative means of self-governance through autonomous grass roots organizations (see Alan Scott’s Ideology and New Social Movements). Leading NSM theorists include Alain Touraine, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Claus Offe, Immanueal Wallerstein, Michel Foucalut, and Jurgen Habermas. These proponents base their anarchist tendencies on identity, politics, culture, and ideology, which for all intents and purposes has emerged in the women’s movement, ecological and environmental movements, LGBTQ rights, peace movement, and more.

Currently, anarchist NSM organizations have surfaced in the current culture through what can be described as the “community of meaning” and “popular justice.” The goal of these alternative methods of self-governance is to bypass the rigid oligarchy of the state, and for that matter, even nonprofit organizations that tend toward oligarchic structures. As such, the community of meaning concept is based to a large degree on the anarchist-environmentalist-feminist notion that human relationships in society are primarily based upon a “conscience collective,” that is, the fostering of diverse talents and skills within a local setting (community, neighborhood, school, etc.). The strategy enables persons to respond to various needs and cultivate unique talents while striving to maintain sustainable development strategies and promote “socio-economic justice.” The community of meaning can also be understood within the context of Marxist anarchist tendencies in which the state would eventually give way to self-governing communities with the intention of fostering both individual and collective solidarity “determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the development of all … on the basis of existing productive forces” (see Marx and Engels, The German Ideology). Likewise, individuals within a particular community are united, according to Durkheim, not so much by what they have in common, but rather, by their very differences, interdependence, and “organic solidarity.” The community of meaning, as Hampson and Reddy assert, becomes and indispensable condition for cooperation within society and is subsequently grounded upon ensuring a sustainable planet based on the fundamental human needs of local communities as the policy priority. This approach necessarily commits local and global communities, as Mittleman argues, to sustainable development strategies based upon mutually interrelated human concerns. Thus, if sustainability is to have priority in local policy initiatives at both the local and global community levels, and if public or nonprofit organizations are unable to meet this criteria, then anarchist communities of meaning must bypass these institutions and promote local and global strategies favorable to environmental and socio-economic justice based on sustainable development goals. The guidelines for a community of meaning, act as a strategy in which concerned people seek to address the causes of poverty and simultaneously prevent, and even reverse, environmental degradation. Moreover, the community of meaning, whether informal or formal in nature, seeks to seeks to implement where possible, policies based on what is known as “popular justice.” In fact, Engle Merry and Milner argue that the anarchist combination of the community of meaning and popular justice strategies “is part of a protest against the state and its legal system by subordinate, disadvantaged, or marginalized groups.”

The notion of popular justice for Engle Merry, “is a process for making decisions and compelling compliance to a set of rules that is relatively informal in ritual and decorum, nonprofessional in language and personnel, local in scope, and limited in jurisdiction.” Theoretically, popular justice governs the community of meaning and simultaneously attempts to apply local standards and rules, that is commonsense forms of reasoning to human relationships rather than state laws. Forums of popular justice, in its original conception, are specifically intended to resolve disputes that involve small sums of money, aspects of family life, and interpersonal injury short of murder. Nevertheless, popular justice forums can act, in similar capacity, as a model by which environmental and socioeconomic justice concerns can be addressed as a form of binding arbitration. According to Engel Merry and Milner, these forums thus create a venue for the less powerful members of society, such as, “the urban poor, rural peasants, the working class, minorities, women,” to voice their concerns. In contrast, elites utilize formal legal institutions through the state, since those same elites have co-opted those very institutions and can thus control those institutions for their own ends.

In the past, popular justice has manifested itself in numerous venues. One form of popular justice can be identified as “reformist.” In the reformist tradition popular justice intends to develop adequate procedures for the varied complexities the legal system facilitates; its goal is to make the system work more efficiently, not to change its fundamental principles. This is intended to increase popular participation in the functions of a centralized judicial system. Reformist approaches to popular justice usually appear in countries based on the principles of liberal democracy and capitalist economies. Failures in the judicial system are generally attributed to the burdens on the legal system rather than to the underlying structures of capitalism and its relationship to law and the state. On the other hand, the socialist tradition of popular justice is derived from Marxist-Leninist theories about the role of popular justice “tribunals” to empower the masses to address violations of laws and rules. The role of the tribunals is to also educate the masses in the creation of the Marxist “new man” of the revolutionary socialist order. According to Engle Merry, the masses are included when “socialist popular justice promises to transform relations of power from the domination of the bourgeoisie to that of the proletariat.” Yet popular justice in this tradition tends to reinforce existing structures of power in the same manner as that of the reformist. Both socialist and reformist approaches promote a form of institutional justice closely connected to, and controlled, by the state.

Another model of popular justice, based on violent uprisings in the anarchic tradition, is one that is associated with mass revolt against the state and the existing social order. While anarchic uprisings certainly can be nonviolent, they nevertheless tend to be violent and are derived from popular unrest due to perceived social injustices. As a result of anarchic uprisings, the masses generally intend to terminate their oppression and punish or reeducate their enemies. In this case the masses do not rely on an abstract idea of justice, but on their own experience and extent of the injuries they have suffered. However, this type of popular justice in its violent form is usually “quelled by the state or brought under control of local communities.”

The anarchic-environmentalist-feminist notion of popular justice associated with the community of meaning, tends to be more closely connected to, and controlled by indigenous people and grassroots movements. While this version of popular justice does not necessarily rule out its use by elites, it nevertheless attempts to function outside the state and institutional mechanisms. A withdrawal from society, which is arguably too rigid, hierarchical and bureaucratic to serve the needs of a popular majority, is one of the goals of popular justice. The central understanding of this form of justice, according to Rifkin, is “decentralization … replacing centralized bureaucracy with small, local forums on a more humane scale.” In this sense community norms govern people in a more humanistic and democratic manner while simultaneously maintaining local autonomy.

Conclusion

As Weber observes, “How are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism?” Some would argue that the vast disparity of economic power and wealth that is increasing in the United States, translates into greater inequality for the poor and marginalized. The question remains pertinent today. As this crisis deepens (the contradiction between the egalitarian expectations of democracy and the rational utility of capital), the state and its citizenry have the historical choice to address this conflict. Here, Marcuse urges the human community to initiate “the radical reconstruction of society … to find there the images and tones which may break through the established universe of discourse and preserve the future.” If organizations and their policy outcomes are to have greater meaning and democratic accountability for the twenty-first century, and if in fact it is worthwhile to understand how organizations tend to serve elites within these very organizations, and not the rank and file members that comprise it, then the primary goal of a democratic society would be to strengthen their democratic institutions and restructure the allocation of power away from elite control. As such, anarchist principles of social justice point the way for this restructuring and renewal of democratic institutions. The strengthening of democratic institutions must therefore come from outside these very institutions as a form of ongoing anarchist critique, agitation, and even civil disobedience if needed. The continued challenge for committed democrats is to be mindful that democratic institutions act on behalf of an elite interest and, ipso facto, subvert democratic egalitarian self-determining groups. Hence, providing resistance to the oligarchic nature of democratic institutions in the United States and other democracies through anarchic justice is vital to democracy and greater democratic participation. Anarchic resistance to democratic institutions is, in essence, the lifeblood of democracy.

Here is what we prescribe. We argue for anarchy as a form of democratic governance. One way to engender this in the United States is to move to a parliamentary system. Secondly, we argue for a Marxist form of economics that prevents exploitation. Additionally, Ostrom’s “common pool resource theory” is part of the solution. Finally, we argue, along with C. Wright Mills’ thesis in his great work The Power Elite, that the state has been coopted by the rich, or the 1 percent, and that the capitalist class uses the state at the expense of everyone else. In our next series, we want to take a look at liberalism and address some of the hidden aspects of social justice hidden therein, specifically through John Locke and Adam Smith.

40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People

Bill Quigley

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) reports 2.2 million people are in our nation’s jails and prisons and another 4.5 million people are on probation or parole in the US, totaling 6.8 million people, one of every 35 adults. We are far and away the world leader in putting our own people in jail. Most of the people inside are poor and Black. Here are 40 reasons why.

One. It is not just about crime. Our jails and prisons have grown from holding about 500,000 people in 1980 to 2.2 million today. The fact is that crime rates have risen and fallen independently of our growing incarceration rates.

Two. Police discriminate. The first step in putting people in jail starts with interactions between police and people. From the very beginning Black and poor people are targeted by the police. Police departments have engaged in campaigns of stopping and frisking people who are walking, mostly poor people and people of color, without cause for decades. Recently New York City lost a federal civil rights challenge to their police stop and frisk practices by the Center for Constitutional Rights during which police stopped over 500,000 people annually without any indication that the people stopped had been involved in any crime at all. About 80 percent of those stops were of Black and Latinos who compromise 25 and 28 percent of NYC’s total population. Chicago police do the same thing stopping even more people also in a racially discriminatory way with 72 percent of the stops of Black people even though the city is 32 percent Black.

Three. Police traffic stops also racially target people in cars. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Hispanic drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. Connecticut, in an April 2015 report, reported on 620,000 traffic stops which revealed widespread racial profiling, particularly during daylight hours when the race of driver was more visible.

Four. Once stopped, Black and Hispanic motorists are more likely to be given tickets than white drivers stopped for the same offenses.

Five. Once stopped, Blacks and Latinos are also more likely to be searched. DOJ reports Black drivers at traffic stops were searched by police three times more often and Hispanic drivers two times more often than white drivers. A large research study in Kansas City found when police decided to pull over cars for investigatory stops, where officers look into the car’s interior, ask probing questions and even search the car, the race of the driver was a clear indicator of who was going to be stopped: 28 percent of young Black males twenty five or younger were stopped in a year’s time, versus white men who had 12 percent chance and white women only a 7 percent chance. In fact, not until Black men reach 50 years old do their rate of police stops for this kind of treatment dip below those of white men twenty five and under.

Six. Traffic tickets are big business. And even if most people do not go directly to jail for traffic tickets, poor people are hit the worst by these ticket systems. As we saw with Ferguson where some of the towns in St. Louis receive 40 percent or more of their city revenues from traffic tickets, tickets are money makers for towns.

Seven. The consequences of traffic tickets are much more severe among poor people. People with means will just pay the fines. But for poor and working people fines are a real hardship. For example, over 4 million people in California do not have valid driver’s licenses because they have unpaid fines and fees for traffic tickets. And we know unpaid tickets can lead to jail.

Eight. In schools, African American kids are much more likely to be referred to the police than other kids. African American students are 16 percent of those enrolled in schools but 27 percent of those referred to the police. Kids with disabilities are discriminated against at about the same rate because they are 14 percent of those enrolled in school and 26 of those referred to the police.

Nine. Though Black people make up about 12 percent of the US population, Black children are 28 percent of juvenile arrests. DOJ reports that there are over 57,000 people under the age of 21 in juvenile detention. The US even has 10,000 children in adult jails and prisons any given day.

Ten. The War on Drugs targets Black people. Drug arrests are a big source of bodies and business for the criminal legal system.   Half the arrests these days are for drugs and half of those are for marijuana. Despite the fact that Black and white people use marijuana at the same rates, a Black person is 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than a white person. The ACLU found that in some states Black people were six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites.   For all drug arrests between 1980 and 2000 the U.S. Black drug arrest rate rose dramatically from 6.5 to 29.1 per 1,000 persons; during the same period, the white drug arrest rate barely increased from 3.5 to 4.6 per 1,000 persons.

Eleven. Many people in jail and prison because the US has much tougher drug laws and much longer sentences for drug offenses than most other countries. Drug offenders receive an average sentence of 7 months in France, twelve months in England and 23 months in the US.

Twelve. The bail system penalizes poor people. Every day there are about 500,000 people are in jails, who are still presumed innocent and awaiting trial, just because they are too poor to pay money to get out on bail.  Not too long ago, judges used to allow most people, even poor people to be free while they were awaiting trial but no more.   In a 2013 study of New York City courts, over 50% of the people held in jail awaiting trial for misdemeanor or felony charges were unable to pay bail amounts of $2500 or less.

Thirteen. This system creates a lot of jobs. Jails and prisons provide a lot of jobs to local, state and federal officials. To understand how this system works it is good to know the difference between jails and prisons. Jails are local, usually for people recently arrested or awaiting trial. Prisons are state and federal and are for people who have already been convicted. There are more than 3000 local jails across the US, according to the Vera Institute, and together usually hold about 500,000 people awaiting trial and an additional 200,000 or so convicted on minor charges. Over the course of a year, these local jails process over 11.7 million people. Prisons are state and federal lockups which usually hold about twice the number of people as local jails or just over 1.5 million prisoners.

Fourteen. The people in local jails are not there because they are a threat to the rest of us. Nearly 75 percent of the hundreds of thousands of people in local jails are there for nonviolent offenses such as traffic, property, drug or public order offenses.

Fifteen. Criminal bonds are big business. Nationwide, over 60 percent of people arrested are forced to post a financial bond to be released pending trial usually by posting cash or a house or paying a bond company. There are about 15,000 bail bond agents working in the bail bond industry which takes in about $14 billion every year.

Sixteen. A very high percentage of people in local jails are people with diagnosed mental illnesses. The rate of mental illness inside jails is four to six times higher than on the outside. Over 14 percent of the men and over 30 percent of the women entering jails and prisons were found to have serious mental illness in a study of over 1000 prisoners. A recent study in New York City’s Rikers Island jail found 4,000 prisoners, 40 percent of their inmates, were suffering from mental illness. In many of our cities, the local jail is the primary place where people with severe mental problems end up. Yet treatment for mental illness in jails is nearly non-existent.

Seventeen. Lots of people in jail need treatment. Nearly 70 percent of people prison meet the medical criteria for drug abuse or dependence yet only 7 to 17 percent ever receive drug abuse treatment inside prison.

Eighteen. Those who are too poor, too mentally ill or too chemically dependent, though still presumed innocent, are kept in cages until their trial dates. No wonder it is fair to say, as the New York Times reported, our jails “have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves.”

Nineteen. Poor people have to rely on public defenders.   Though anyone threatened with even a day in jail is entitled to a lawyer, the reality is much different. Many poor people facing misdemeanor charges never see a lawyer at all. For example, in Delaware more than 75 percent of the people in its Court of Common Pleas never speak to a lawyer. A study of Jackson County Michigan found 95 percent of people facing misdemeanors waived their right to an attorney and have plead guilty rather than pay a $240 charge for a public defender. Thirteen states have no state structure at all to make sure people have access to public defenders in misdemeanor courts.

Twenty. When poor people face felony charges they often find the public defenders overworked and underfunded and thus not fully available to provide adequate help in their case. In recent years public defenders in Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania were so overwhelmed with cases they refused to represent any new clients.   Most other states also have public defender offices that have been crushed by overwork, inadequate finances and do not measure up to the basic principles for public defenders outlined by the American Bar Association. It is not uncommon for public defenders to have more than 100 cases going at the same time, sometimes several hundred. Famous trial lawyer Gerry Spence, who never lost a criminal case because of his extensive preparation for each one, said that if he was a public defender and represented a hundred clients he would never have won a case.

Twenty One. Lots of poor people plead guilty. Lack of adequate public defense leads many people in prison to plead guilty. The American Bar Association reviewed the US public defender system and concluded it lacked fundamental fairness and put poor people at constant risk of wrongful conviction. “All too often, defendants plead guilty, even if they are innocent, without really understanding their legal rights or what is occurring…The fundamental right to a lawyer that America assumes applies to everyone accused of criminal conduct effectively does not exist in practice for countless people across the US.”

Twenty Two. Many are forced to plead guilty. Consider all the exonerations of people who were forced by police to confess even when they did not do the crime who were later proven innocent: some criminologists estimate 2 to 8 percent of the people in prison are innocent but pled guilty.   One longtime federal judge estimates that there is so much pressure on people to plead guilty that there may easily be 20,000 people in prison for crimes they did not commit.

Twenty Three. Almost nobody in prison ever had a trial. Trials are rare in the criminal injustice system. Over 95 percent of criminal cases are finished by plea bargains.   In 1980, nearly 20 percent of criminal cases were tried but that number is reduced to less than 3 percent because sentences are now so much higher for those who lose trials, there are more punishing drug laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and more power has been given to prosecutors.

Twenty Four. Poor people get jail and jail makes people worse off. The poorest people, those who had to remain in jail since their arrest, were 4 times more likely to receive a prison sentence than those who got out on bail. There are tens of thousands of rapes inside jails and prisons each year. DOJ reports over 4,000 inmates are murdered each year inside each year. As US Supreme Court Justice Kennedy told Congress recently “This idea of total incarceration just isn’t working. And it’s not humane. We [society and Congress and the legal profession] have no interest in corrections, nobody looks at it.”

Twenty Five. Average prison sentences are much longer than they used to be, especially for people of color. Since 1990, the average time for property crimes has gone up 24 percent and time for drug crimes has gone up 36 percent. In the US federal system, nearly 75 percent of the people sent to prison for drug offenses are Black or Latino.

Twenty Six. There is about a 70 percent chance that an African American man without a high school diploma will be imprisoned by the time he reaches his mid-thirties; the rate for white males without a high school diploma is 53 percent lower. In the 1980, there was only an 8 percent difference. In New York City, for example, Blacks are jailed at nearly 12 times the rate of whites and Latinos more than five times the rate of whites.

Twenty Seven. Almost 1 of 12 Black men ages 25 to 54 are in jail or prison, compared to 1 in 60 nonblack men. That is 600,000 African American men, an imprisonment rate of five times that of white men.

Twenty Eight. Prison has become a very big private business.Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) owns and runs 67 for-profit jails in 20 states with over 90,000 beds. Along with GEO (formerly Wackenhut), these two private prison companies have donated more than $10 million to candidates and spent another $25 million lobbying according to the Washington Post. They lobby for more incarceration and have doubled the number of prisoners they hold over the past ten years.

Twenty Nine. The Sentencing Project reports that over 159,000 people are serving life sentences in the US. Nearly half are African American and 1 in 6 are Latino. The number of people serving life in prison has gone up by more than 400% since 1984. Nearly 250,000 prisoners in the US are over age 50.

Thirty. Inside prisons, the poorest people are taken advantage of again as most items such as telephone calls to families are priced exorbitantly high, some as high as $12.95 for a 15 minute call, further separating families.

Thirty One. The DOJ reports another 3.9 million people are on probation. Probation is when a court puts a person under supervision instead of sending them to prison. Probation is also becoming a big business for private companies which get governments to contract with them to collect outstanding debts and supervise people on probation.Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that over a thousand courts assign hundreds of thousands of people to be under the supervision of private companies who then require those on probation to pay the company for the supervision and collect fines, fees and costs or else go to jail. For example, one man in Georgia who was fined $200 for stealing a can of beer from a convenience store was ultimately jailed after the private probation company ran up over a thousand dollars in in fees.

Thirty Two. The DOJ reports an additional 850,000 people are on parole. Parole is when a person who has been in prison is released to serve the rest of their sentence under supervision.

Thirty Three. The DOJ reported in 2012 that as many as 100 million people have a criminal record, and over 94 million of those records are online.

Thirty Four. Everyone can find out people have a record. Because it is so easy to access to arrest and court records, people who have been arrested and convicted face very serious problems getting a job, renting an apartment, public assistance, and education. Eighty-seven percent of employers conduct background checks. Employment losses for people with criminal records have been estimated at as much as $65 billion every year.

Thirty Five. Race is a multiplier of disadvantage in unemployment for people who get out of prison. A study by Professor Devah Pager demonstrated that employers who were unlikely to even check on the criminal history of white male applicants, seriously discriminated against all Black applicants and even more so against Black applicants with criminal records.

Thirty Six. Families are hurt by this. The Sentencing Project reports 180,000 women are subject to lifetime bans from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families because of felony drug convictions.

Thirty Seven. Convicted people cannot get jobs after they get out. More than 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed one year after being released. Is it a surprise that within three years of release from prison, about two-thirds of the state prisoners were rearrested?

Thirty Eight. The US spends $80 billion on this big business of corrections every year. As a retired criminal court judge I know says, “the high costs of this system would be worth it if the system was actually working and making us safer, but we are not safer, the system is not working, so the actual dollars we are spending are another indication of our failure.” The cost of being number one in incarceration is four times higher than it was in 1982. Anyone feeling four times safer than they used to?

Thirty Nine. Putting more people in jail creates more poverty. The overall poverty rate in our country is undoubtedly higher because of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past 35 years with one research project estimating poverty would have decreased by 20 percent if we had not put all these extra people in prison. This makes sense given the fact that most all the people brought into the system are poor to begin with, it is now much harder for them to find a job because of the barriers to employment and good jobs erected by a criminal record to those who get out of prison, the increased number of one parent families because of a parent being in jail, and the bans on receiving food stamps and housing assistance.

Forty. Putting all these problems together and you can see why the Center for American Progress rightly concludes “Today, a criminal record serves as both a direct cause and consequence of poverty.”

What does it say about our society that it uses its jails and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it’s the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.