America Wants Those “Pull Ya Up By Your Own Boot Straps” to Hang You With

You do your your time behind bars and enter a panoply of bars and prison time out here in the normal world

To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Interestingly, working the social worker circuit of assisting the homeless, near homeless, all victims of police brutality, police overreach, judicial overkill, flogged by fines-levies-warrants-garnishments-taxes-fees-debts-interest-PayDay usury, I have to see that Nuremberg Tribunal statement key to what is occurring within the borders of the United States of Assassination.

The gentrification, the displacement, the stop and frisks, the toxins-chemicals-pollutants warfare in our barrios and ghettos, the razing of public space-public education-public services, the school to prison pipeline, the economic totalitarianism, the diseased food, air, water, media – like a type of ecocide placed on poor people, people of color. You think maybe that war of aggression by the Elite, the Money Changers, the FIRE army (finance insurance real estate), that maybe it all is part of a giant metastasized war of aggression set upon 80 percent of us in the USA?

I will move on, to the here and now, one client after another client at a time. Call it the disease of the Broad Brush Stroke. Or, The War on Drugs. Add to it, Measure 11 (Oregon’s mandatory minimum set in 1995). Through the very capitalist Private Prison System. Judges Gone Wild and Without Consciousness. Plea Bargains. Rigged Prosecutions. Asleep at the Gavel Public Defenders. Clerks, Admin, Bailiffs, Cops, Guards, Mountains of Paperwork Creators.

Little Eichmann’s Gone to an Industrial Level.

We can write about the punishment society, as authors sitting in some lofty place or just in some sort of human limbo – a decent income, well-fitted home, good spouse and successful kids.

But, when you are a case worker – I work with people just out of prison or those just going into recovery, homeless, families, veterans, some being treated for mental health issues . . . some with ALL of the foregoing descriptors co-occurring – well the daily slog is fraught with huge life changing successes, admiration and honorable thanks from some survivors.

Work to try and get these fellows and women on their feet. Amazingly fucked up, this country of constant lock-up, threats of being locked up, extradition, warrants that go back a decade, fines and bills and, well, you get the picture. For every disaster in a family, in an individual’s life, there are entire industries set to capitalize on this. Ambulance chasing in a sense. Even without the extreme poverty, crime, addiction, mental health issues, homelessness, a group of around 20 percent of the population (read, controlling 92 of wealth) wreaks havoc upon the land? Well, in this disaster capitalism, a whole lot of people are out of real work, a bigger number in work they despise, and an even larger number precarious, working to supply a medical habit, food habit, rent/mortgage habit, lack-of-savings habit, a debt habit, an aging habit, survival habit.

No invasions, skirmishes, illegal intrusions, wars – hot or cold, all of that shit that this empire doles out to the rest of the world and the result in this sadistic capitalism is A Whole lot of people out of work.

And, the elite, the shimmering few point one percent, not hefting away billions upon billions.

I know my guys who started drinking hard at age 10, in middle class homes, with old man working and mother taking care of the homemaker details. Kids then, adults now, but a towering set of codas explaining how someone comes to me, living on the streets and defecating in pants and singing to the ghosts inside and outside their heads.

Insanity after insanity, that is the doling out of the entire mess that is Trump-land, Media-land, Hollywood-land, Cop-land, Drone-land, Infotainment-land, Hillary/Bush/Obama-land. We are snookered by the insular power we have allowed these war mongers and child killers and people-planet-peace rapers to control.

A society —  from the school board on up to the mayoral board, state committees, federal agencies, that has raped the youth before they even get out of puberty in this school to prison pipeline, or worse, too, cradle-through-ignorance-to-grave-lobotomized sewer line — which treats old and young, the poor, the most vulnerable, like disposable diapers, well, the end result is where we are now: broken, full of absurd opinions, vapid of real depth, and fearing all things foreign. Here, Henry Giroux, and the schools:

The shift to a society now governed through crime, market-driven values and the politics of disposability has radically transformed the public school as a site for a civic and critical education. One major effect can be seen in the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that closely resemble the culture of prisons.

Read the goddamned books – even before these Americans come to me as adults, seeking job skills, job training, GEDs, inside help with job leads and job carving – we have set many youth up for victimization by the pigs:

  • Jonathan Simon, “Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  • David Garland, “The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
  • Yolanne Almanzar, “First Grader in $1 Robbery May Face Expulsion,” New York Times (December 4, 2008).
  • Advancement Project in partnership with Padres and Jovenes Unidos, Southwest Youth Collaborative, “Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track” (Chicago: Children & Family Justice Center of Northwestern University School of Law, March 24, 2005).
  • Ellen Goodman, “‘Zero Tolerance’ Means Zero Chance for Troubled Kids,” Centre DailyTimes (Tuesday, January 4, 2000),8.
  • Elora Mukherjee, “Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools” (New York: American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties, March 2008).
  • Randall R. Beger, “Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the Vanishing Rights of Students,” Social Justice 29:1 (2002).
  • Victor M. Rios, “The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration,” in Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives, ed. Marable, Steinberg, and Middlemass.
  • Loic Wacquant, “Urban Outcasts” (London: Polity, 2008).
  • Children’s Defense Fund. “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline,” Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 2007.

There is no honor among thieves, among the politicians, among the lobbies, among the hedge funders, among bankers, among low and high ranking cops-soldiers-mercenaries.

Here, Paul Craig Roberts: With our public schools and police forces working overtime to teach the children who will comprise the future generations that violence is the solution and submission is the only alternative, expect the United States to be unlivable at home and an even worse danger to the rest of the world.

So, this malaise, transferred from parents to children, sometimes bathed in man-made drugs and cortisols and human drugs, inside the womb, all that dysfunction on the Breaking Bad level, but really, the things, subhumans like Chelsea Clinton or Victoria Nuland, certainly bred from the highest of standards, no Orange is the New Black in their histories.

Countless millions matriculating from Stanford, Georgetown, Vassar, University of Chicago, Yale, Harvard, and any number of hundreds of schools, like intellectual meth heads, Jonesing for power, for the elixir of electronic transfers of hundreds of thousands, lusting after the sexual flavor of big homes and fast cars and unlimited consumption.

…. But getting back to the defamed and deformed, my addicts and alcoholics, the ones who tripped themselves up with petty thievery, or through the gnawing worm of drug induced violence, or after the big heists, or hundreds of smash and grabs, or PCS (possession of controlled substance) charges, even with the rage and mayhem, I have them in recovery, in rehabilitation, in various levels of reformation, reclamation, regret, restitution.

Yet the controllers, the media, the idiots writing the scripts, writing the crappy magazine pieces, any number of those in the White Christian-Jewish elite, they have screwed my people for life, albatrosses around their necks and anchors on their souls. Ours.

Yet these formerly abused and abusive people are in their recovery covens, working on some magic left in lives almost exhausted, finding new ways for urban tribes, neo families.

But I run into the defamation of humanity with employers who are not second chance hire-ons, who will not give people second chances, even with those four degrees of separation, even those who have their own family-kin in various stages of recovery or restitution.

I have to work around the broad brush stroke prejudice and racism and ignorance of people who look at all people who have served their time, in one case, 10 years, for what is deemed SO, or sexual offense.

These people are ex-cons, but their lives are Scarlet Lettered and Plagued Perennially with that moniker, crimes that are as individual and different than the very fingerprints left on the judges’ leather-bound rules of dis-law and money changers’ bullion.

One fellow – back to the Measure 11 and Plea Bargain Nightmare – was a fall-down, black-out drunk, working that gig for years. Girlfriend in hand, both fall-down, black-out drunks who played and fought together. One night, out like a light, naked, and, bam, the woman’s 14 year old accuses the black-out, fall-down fellow of “touching her.” We are not talking about rape, penetration, anything of the sort, but, a system full of witch hunting, asleep at the wheel public defenders, prosecutors who want names, reputations, and retribution seeking people.

This story is not atypical. In jail awaiting arraignment, and, another fellow is facing two years in a plea offer, and wants to fight it (oh, shit, a jury trial), and alas, gets one, and the fellow gets 20 years in prison.

So, my client is facing 30 years, cops a plea for ten. TEN years, civilians. Try that out for size, behind bars, soaked with the sweat of the SO label. This is a system created by the Chosen Few, the elites, the jurisprudence which is broke by the codes of Judea-Christian vengeance, all that legitimized crap of the upper class, and, the prosecutor goes for both jugulars, and, my guys gets 10 years.

Her serves those secreted away years with some sort of calm, exemplary time inside, works with end of life patients, hospice, the library, and, well, hits the streets once he’s out, sober now for 13 years, and he wants a better life. Wants to mentor adult men coming out of prison, and he’s been working toward a two-year college degree.

Yet, this punishment, retribution-seeking, vengeance-loving society, with that broad-broad brush stroke insanity, puts him into the same category of a predator, a serial kidnapper, child porn child abuser, rapist.

I just want this fucking state to listen, to take one case at a time, to go through the public records, to listen to my client, to consider the perversion of this whacked out society that puts every Registered Sex Offender in the same camp that Trump should have been prosecuted inside, and his Chosen Few friend, Jeffery Epstein:

From RT:

A lawsuit filed in federal court in New York has accused presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump of repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl more than two decades ago. A suit with similar allegations filed by the same plaintiff was dismissed in California.

The suit filed Monday, first reported by The Real Deal, alleges that the rapes occurred in 1994 at Upper East Side parties hosted by ex-hedge fund manager and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump had known Epstein for seven years by that time. The plaintiff, known only as Jane Doe, claims that Trump and Epstein lured her and other girls to the parties at Epstein’s mansion with promises of a modeling career. The plaintiff said that instead she was sexually assaulted by the two men in a way the suit characterizes as “savage.”

Look, I am more than a social worker, teacher, small-time dude with two graduate degrees and an undergraduate one. Someone who is small-time poet and writer, someone with aspirations larger and more lofty than this shit-storm marginalizing that this society has ungraciously codified for folk like me.

I should be in the face of this state’s governor, in the faces of the cops, the judicial boards, those DCJ pukes, the entire mess that is the controllers with nothing more for brains than compliance and corruption and corrosion.

My guy wants to mentor adult men, to help them transition from prison to this life, to some semblance of normalcy, to reintegrate or integrate for the first time, so they may find me, their social worker helping them overcome those final barriers – hard skills, soft skills, education, a million things to get them job and life ready.

Yet, the Department of Health and Human Services, the nanny state mavens, the entire mess that is an upside down Peter Principle world, turns this guy’s one bad pass-out shit storm mistake into a life sentence. Maybe a suicide sentence by The Drip-Drip-Drip torture capitalism invented, or by his own hand.

He wants to help people, and he has jumped through all the hoops, but this punishment society, victimizing culture, wants more than a pound of flesh from him, from all SO’s, all felons, all people living outside the capitalism and capitulation box.

It is insanity, madness, meanness, the way of the elite and their little sheeple, those Little Eichmann’s that make the gears turn, and keep the bearings run squeaky clean.

As they say in the business of social work, or as we are told by those “valiant” employers, all run by the likes of Mitt, Buffet, Bezos, et al  – “We will take some felons, and not many, really, and no convictions the past seven years, and, well, those SO’s, may they rot in hell.” What a world, what a matriarchal and patriarchal world we have bulldozed into an endless berm against sanity.

Note: For A really captivating and non-traditional anti-memoir, anti-autobiography, Check Out, “Terminal Velocity — A Man Lost of Tribe” at LA Progressive. By yours truly!

Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.