> >CB: How about the slaves the Founding Fathers like Jefferson and
> >Washington owned? Did they have any power to dissent? How about the
> >Native Americans? Did the Founding Fathers allow them to dissent? How
> >about the all of the white women who couldn't vote?
> >
> >How ridiculous to claim that a genocidal, slave, male supremecist system
> >allowed more dissent than N. Korea 2000.
> >
> >CB
>
>Surely it is obviously I meant contemporary US society. Clearly, the US as
>a slave society and genicidal towards native-Americans was much worse than
>Communist North Korea.
I'm afraid, Jacob, that you severely overestimate "contemporary US society."
***** "Anger Grows as US Jails Its Two Millionth Inmate The Land of the Free Is Now home to 25% of the World's Prison Population"
Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Vigils are being mounted today in more than 30 major cities in the United States to draw attention to the arrival of the two millionth inmate in American jails. The US comprises 5% of the global population yet it is responsible for 25% of the world's prisoners. It has a higher proportion of its citizens in jail than any other country in history, according to the November Coalition, an alliance of civil rights campaigners, justice policy workers and drug law reformers.... *****
I consider the USA today to be the most repressive society, not just abroad but also at home, based upon the rate of incarceration. The USA is decidedly more repressive than North Korea in this regard. Cuba is incomparably freer than the USA.
With regard to poor working-class African Americans, in many ways state repression has intensified during the last couple of decades: "Consider that in 1980, African Americans made up roughly 12 percent of the nation's population and over *23 percent* of all those arrested on drug charges. Ten years later African Americans were still roughly 12 percent of the total population, but their representation among those busted for narcotics had almost doubled to more than *40 percent* while over 60 percent of all narcotics convictions were (and are) African Americans" (Christian Parenti, _Lockdown America: Police and Prison in the Age of Crisis_, NY: Verso, 1999, p. 57).
Ironically, *private properties* of African Americans are not at all protected in this *most capitalist* of the nations:
***** The forfeiture wars also fuel racist policing. Take for example the case of Willie Jones, an African American nurseryman and landscaper, who was off to buy plants and other legitimate landscaping supplies when his $9,600 in cash was seized by cops at Nashville airport because he fitted the "drug courier profile." That is, he was a Black man paying for a round-trip ticket with cash.
In Florida a team of journalists viewed videotapes of approximately one thousand highway stops, and found that police were using traffic violations as a pretext to confiscate "tens of thousands of dollars from motorists." A staggering 85 percent of the targeted travelers were African American, pulled over because they, once again, fitted the nebulous "courier profile." These operations were racist both in application and intent: a 1985 Florida Highway Patrol directive instructed troopers to focus enforcement efforts on "ethnic groups associated with the drug trade."
This tithing of Black, and to a lesser extent Latino, drivers continued throughout the eighties and early nineties. Sheriff Bob Vogel of Volusia County was perhaps the most overtly racist and forfeitue-hungry Florida lawman. Between 1989 and 1992 Vogel's force legally confiscated a total of $8 million in cash from hundreds of motorists: _a staggering 85 percent of whom were African American and 75 percent of whom were never charged with any crime_. "What this data tells me," concluded Vogel, "is that the majority of money being transported for drug activities involves blacks and Hispanics." (Parenti 53-4) *****
Panopticism of Lockdown America is such that even a gifted journalist is at a loss for words; see Parenti helplessly repeat "staggering, staggering."
If America looks better to you than Cuba or even North Korea, you'd have to be white first of all. You also must have a good deal of money, and you have to value your money more than poor people's freedom from the police state. Or else you are simply uninformed about the extent of the American Panopticon.
Yoshie