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9/11 And
America’s Criminal Justice Crackdown
by
Seth Sandronsky
Dissident
Voice
October 27, 2003
How many
times have you heard people say the events of 9/11 “changed everything?”
Well, yes and no.
Yes to the
obvious, the U.S. as the target of Mideast terrorists who slew thousands of
innocent people.
No,
however, to America’s criminal justice crackdown underway prior to that fateful
day.
Before
9/11, the crackdown was aimed largely at the non-white population.
Now this
official campaign of incarceration, intimidation and observation has expanded.
Currently,
some anti-war whites are in the cross-hairs of law enforcement.
And with
much more publicity, I might add, than many darker-skinned folks got when
confronting the criminal justice system before 9/11.
The
current crackdown to make America safe and secure after 9/11 was foreshadowed
by the U.S. government’s war against drugs and nonwhite immigrants. One
result of these dual, domestic wars is that the U.S. currently has 2.1 million
people living behind bars.
The U.S.
also has a total of 6.6 million humans now in prison, on parole or probation.
These marginalized folks are disproportionately poor blacks and to a lesser
extent poor Latinos (http://www.monthlyreview.org/0903vogel.htm)
After
9/11, the Bush White House, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, has tried to
muzzle political dissent against its foreign policy of preventive attacks on
sovereign nations. As a result, some white dissidents are getting
increased attention from law enforcement.
The “Man”
snooping into their library reading and traveling habits, for example. In
contrast, black and brown folks have lived with racial profiling from the
authorities as a matter of daily course prior to 9/11, with scant notoriety.
Before
9/11, such U.S. government repression was just not on the radar screen of many
whites, anti- or pro-war. Yet during that time, black and brown people in
the U.S. were at-risk from SWAT teams and INS raids, detailed in Lockdown
America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti (Verso
Books, 1999).
Why such
government repression against the nonwhite population before 9/11?
Here are
two reasons.
First is
that this policing kept the unemployed out of sight and mind in the prison
industrial complex, and politically neutered. In this way, they were less
likely to organize and rebel against the status quo in the ways that groups
such as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets did during the 1960s.
U.S.
rulers learned this much from that era of social unrest. What’s the
excuse for the rest of us?
Second,
real and threatened immigration raids in America have kept foreign workers
desperate. Thus they are less likely to join unions.
This
tendency depressed their wages, and the wages of other workers. The latter
group were perhaps unaware of how the job market functions, swayed by official
myths about level playing fields created by modern competition freed from labor
unions.
In the
meantime, some immigrant workers hit the road for a job due to U.S. foreign
policy that forced their countries to open up to corporate America.
Its food
exports, for example, have driven peasants off the land, into cites, and across
U.S. borders to find work for wages.
America’s
wars against some drugs, and Third World immigrants foreshadowed the post-9/11
campaign to defeat global terrorism. Both U.S. government wars have used
the imagery of a menacing, nonwhite “other.”
Right-wing
talk radio has also contributed to this distortion of reality.
Such
“shock jocks” on the airwaves have helped to forge a false community of
interests between white elites and workers against the nonwhite hordes, a stunt
of stunning proportions.
In this
distorted view, one threat is foreign, while the other is domestic.
The target
audience for such skin color propaganda has been and is some of America’s white
population.
Many are
alienated and dehumanized. This dysfunction I blame in big part on the
capitalist system that makes nature and people into commodities for exchange on
the market.
Most white
working folks, like millions of others with slightly more skin melanin, are now
dealing with cascading social crises. One is the jobless recovery.
Some
officials have said that relief is on the way. On Oct. 20, for instance,
Treasury Chief John Snow predicted that the U.S. economy will create two
million new jobs by the next presidential election.
What kind
of hourly jobs? Well if the past is any indication of the future, nine
out of every 10 will be non-union jobs.
The
lesson? Workers divided by the economics of racism are more likely to get
non-union wages.
Lower pay
means that workers have to labor longer to make ends meet. Snow did not
mention that fact from government statistics in his rosy prediction for a jobs
boom during the coming year.
All the
more reason for the political strategy of engineering fear of the nonwhite
“other.” It can (and does) misdirect attention away from the common
struggle to find hourly work that covers the cost of food, health care and
transport.
The
racialized approach to keeping the majority down and divided seems “natural” in
America. It is, after all, the most imperial of all nations, with its
growing number of police, prisons and wars.
One thing
is apparent. The events of 9/11 have changed the official face of
“globalzation.”
That is
some of what the anti-war movement is voicing in its opposition to the
administration’s war plans at home and abroad. Let this political
awakening flower.
Let us not
forget, however, during this flowering to unpack the domestic roots of the
current attempt to roll back civil liberties. The past is alive in the
present.
* No
Skateboards For The American Empire
* Arnold’s
California Dreaming
* Under
Bush, U.S. Economy Recovers, Unlike Workers
* Risky
Business: U.S. Borrowing And Foreign Lending
* In
California, The Ballot Box And The Market
* Globalize
That: Capital Flight to China
* In
US, A Job-loss Economy Emerges
* For
Black Teens, Jobs Crisis Worsens
* A
New Day for Affirmative Action?
* In
California, A Racial Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
* In
U.S., Slow Growth, Excess Inventory and Mounting Debt