>
>The bourgies can get away with these things because the US public is
>massively demobilized and
>passive. If that public ever resisted in an organized way - a long
>shot, but not impossible, someday, maybe - then the big boys would
>definitely be scared shitless.
>
>Doug
In "Lockdown America" Christian Parenti argues that's how we got on the road to so many people in prison.
His first chapter starts "How bleak the world must have been for those with political and economic power during the late sixties and early seventies. Order seemed to be unravelling: massive anti-war protests on the Mall; a war effort bogged down and hemorrhaging in the mud of Southeast Asia; economic stagnation and declining profit rates; and, in the cities, skyrocketing crime coupled with some of the most violent riots since the Civil War."
In the intro he sums up his argument: "Beginning in the late sixties US capitalism hit a dual social and economic crisis, and it was in response to this crisis that the criminal justice buildup of today began."