Im aware many poor working class White Americans, African Americans, and Latino Americans along with a considerable percentage of the professional Asian community on the West Coast, specifically, are very proud of President Obama and his policy programs. In deed, Barack Obama campaigned in 2007 and 2008 saying he would pass legislation raising the minimum wage and making it easier to organize unions so people could stand up for their own rights in the workplace. It pains me to say to you the President apparently lied! Once in office with a clear political majority in both Houses of Congress the President promptly froze the wages of Federal workers, and made no move to protect union organizing or to raise the minimum wage. Four and five years later, with the House of Representatives safely under Republican control, the President has begun to make noises about how “ America deserves a raise ” and has finally declared that Federal contract workers will soon have to be paid a minimum of $10.10 to $10.45 per hour. I want you to really think about what Im about to say. No cluster of issues impact poor working class Americans, Black and Latino America in particular, more savagely and disproportionately than police practices, the drug war, and the prison state. African Americans are only one eighth of the U.S. population, but make up more than 40% of its population in prisons and smaller jails. Together with Latinos, who are another eighth and make up nearly 30% of U.S. prisoners, people of color are a quarter of the U.S. population and more than 70% of the locked down. These sensitive issues would benefit more from a few Presidential initiatives and well placed strokes of the pen than police practices, the drug war, and the prison state. Here are just a handful of things President Obama and his party could and should do, things that Republicans are powerless to prevent, which could clearly make a large and lasting impact upon the communities the Democrats purportedly represent... With the stroke of a Presidential pen, Barack Obama could halt the construction and opening of the new Federal supermax prison at ADX Thomson in Illinois, also called “Gitmo North.” Citizen activists in the Presidents home state last year managed to close down the States brutal supermax prison at Tamms because they know that supermax prisons do not rehabilitate, they are instruments of torture, pure and simple. Ordinary citizens know that torture should not be a career, or a business governments engage in. Even Obamas own Bureau of Prisons is on record as expressing a strong desire to examine whether the regimes in supermax prisons across the country constitute torture. the President knows this and its time to look for that Presidential pen. The President could take public notice of the alarming militarization of police forces across the country, and the wave of police shootings of civilians. Far more persons die in the U.S. of police gunfire than of terrorist incidents and school shootings. The Fed plays an enormous role in the funding, training, and arming of thousands of local police departments across the country, through its grants to the State-level training and certification agencies, and its authorization of the sale of military equipment to police departments. The result is that every county and town in the U.S. now has a SWAT team, employing shoot-first-question-later tactics, and although African Americans are far from the only victims of unchecked police violence, a Black person is killed by police, security officers or vigilantes once every 28 hours. Again, this is a clear case for a Presidential statement, a few orders to underlings and that mighty executive pen. The President could order his Justice Department to reconsider its objections to the retroactive reduction of unfair and disproportionate sentences to crack cocaine defendants. When the President signed the so-called Fair Sentencing Act reducing the crack to powder cocaine penalty ratio from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1, thousands of defendants should have been eligible for immediate release. But President Obamas and Attorney General Eric Holders Justice Department have gone to court repeatedly to keep them behind bars. Our civil rights establishment from the Mark Morials and Al Sharptons down, seem more invested in the prestige of the President than doing justice to prisoners, and so have politely refused to call Obama and Holder on this glaring disconnect between their public pronouncements and their actual policies. The mighty Presidential pen in the hands of Barack Obama could have made a big difference here any time in the last several years, and still can, if only he would truly lend himself to African American concerns. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that rolling back the Carceral state is something no government on earth has ever done successfully. Right now in Venezuela, that nation is confronting a crisis of crime, the practical limits of prison expansion, and of what kind of society they want to build. Theyre taking a different path than so-called “progressives” here, who seem upset only about prisoners who are factually “innocent” and only about prisons if theyre privatized. Venezuela, is frankly, committed to shrinking its prison population and exploring models of restorative rather than punitive justice. There really are other ways to go, if we have the will and the vision both our Democrats and Republicans lack. President Obamas Attorney General has learned how to let the words “mass incarceration” roll off his lips fluently, after his recent discovery that such a thing actually exists. The President opined that Trayvon Martin could have been his own son, minus the status, the privilege, the neighborhood, and a few other things the President enjoys. But, we must remember that mighty Presidential pen that can call commissions, impose directives, re-set priorities and make all manner of changes by executive order, changes that no evil and immoral Republicans can block or reverse, at least until they re-take the oval office, is still in Mr. Obamas desk drawer, or wherever President Barack Obama keeps it. He hasnt found it the last five years in office. Maybe he will discover it in these last three.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 13:06:10 +0000
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