This was the dilemma that preoccupied those who would rule the new nation. [James] Madison stated it clearly in the famous Federalist Paper Number Ten. Some kind of representative system was needed to maintain peace among the numerous factions in the new nation. But a representative system also posed dangers, for the factions to which Madison referred were not only those based on the numerous divisions of culture, region, or interest. The most serious and threatening factional division was that between the rich and poor, the division generated by "the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." The true danger, then, was not a "faction"; it was a majority without property, a majority that could use democratic rights against minority. -Francis Fox-Piven & Richard A, Cloward, The New Class War (1982/1985)

We all live in a world rife with political illusions: "America is a democracy"; "Everyone is treated equally"; "The Democrats are friends of Black folks", and the like.
The problem with such sayings is that many folks take them for granted, and once accepted, are taken as social truths.
The exalted Black Human rights activist, Malcolm X once reasoned, "History is best regarded to reward our research." In that light, let us examine the historical role that has been played by the Democratic and the Republican party, especially during the critical period surrounding tie American Civil War.
Many people don't know that the Democratic party was overtly pro-slavery. Historian James M. McPherson, in his remarkable The Negro 's Civil War (1982) notes that none of the political parties of the time were in favor of abolishing the slave trade:
In the second place, none of the four major parties contending for the presidency championed the cause of the Negro. The Constitutional Union party and the two factions of the Democratic Party were pledged to preserve or even to strengthen the institution of slavery. The Republican party, nominally anti-slavery, was officially opposed only to the extension of slavery into the news territories.
No major political party proposed to take action against slavery where it already existed. During the campaign, Democrats charged that if the Republicans won the election, they would abolish slavery and grant civil equality to Negroes. "That is not so," rejoined Horace Greely, an influential Republican spokesman. "Never on earth did the Republican Party propose to abolish Slavery…Its object with respect to Slavery is simply, nakedly, avowedly, its restriction to the existing states."...Lincoln himself had repeatedly voiced his opposition to equal rights for free Negroes. (p.3)
The political parties that were born, regenerated and remodeled after that great and bloody conflict still owe much to their patrimony under the years of bondage. As they were then, so they remain now, when the interests of African-Americans conflict with the interests on what they perceive as their central constituency- white Americans.
In such a context, where politics is driven by the whims and wants of the white majority, the politics of a state becomes one essentially of "white supremacy," or the politics of domination, white class collaboration and the subordination of peoples of color.
From such unpromising beginnings, today's parties do the treacherous business of politics. Whose interests do politicians protect? Whose interests do they serve? (Answer: Who can pay them?)
In the throes of the social upheaval occasioned by the Civil Rights Movement there has been an explosion in the number of Black politicians in various levels and strata of the political system, with the logical result that Black politicians now are in their highest numbers in U.S. history.
Are Black folks now represented in the Houses of Congress? Do they then, in any sense, exercise real power?
Nothing can be farther from the truth.
Representation, in the House or the Senate (or, for that matter, in the various state houses and general assemblies), is a far cry from power. The brilliant Nigerian author, Wole Soyinka, wrote, in the epic collection of poems, Mandela's earth: "When rulers meet, their embraces are of presence. Absent cries make empty phrases."
Presence, even in the halls of political power, is not power. Black political representation in the white supremacist state, is symbolic, but not real, for they are constantly in such numerical inferiority that they can only align themselves with one or the other wing of the Big Bird in power.
Black people are still without power, and are begging at the doors of two political parties that have taken turns spinning Black folks in varying directions, running from pillar-to-post, in search of a false illusion of power.
One year, the Democrats are 'friends'; the next year, the Republicans are 'friends.'
Yet, we remain, powerless in the Citadels of Power.
©1998MAJ

Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? --Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1995)

Over a million and a half human beings arise daily in American cages.
These people constitute "invisible populations" living in "invisible worlds" whose lives have become cheap fodder for what scholar/activist Angela Y. Davis has termed, the "punishment industry" (forward; Jacobson-Hardy, Micheal, Behind the Razor Wire: Portrait of a Contemporary American Prison System (New York: NYU Press, 1998 [forthcoming]).
Although the formal penitentiary can be traced to the ill-fated "Philadelphia System" and the infamous Walnut Street Jail of the late 18th century that spawned it, the earliest uses of imprisonment on American shores had a nakedly political objective. After the slaughter and betrayal that was King Philips War (1675-1676) thousands of 'Indians' (actually Wampanoags), including those 'loyal' 'Christian' Wampanoags who helped the whites, were imprisoned on barren island of the New England coast where they died of cold and hunger.
Those who survived were shipped to a savage and short life as slaves (merely another form of imprisonment) in the West Indies. One of the early sites of imprisonment became Deer Island Jail (recently vacated because of its dilapidated condition) in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
These nameless men and women were truly prisoners of war, encaged in early American concentration camps, not for what they did, but because of what they were-so-called Indians. Those who survived that harrowing hell became prisoners of the political order (political prisoners) for life-slaves.
This early nefarious usage of imprisonment by the English settlers of Massachusetts, would influence and mark the subtextual usages of imprisonment down through American history, and each newly entering ethnic group found itself thrown into American gulags for what are economic, social and political reasons, as noted by Richard Quinney, thusly:
Prisons in this country are used mainly for those who commit a select group of crimes, primarily burglary, robbery, larceny, and assault. Excluded are the criminals of the capitalist class, who cause more of an economic and social loss to the country and the society, but who are not often given prison sentences. This means that prisons are institutions of control for the working class, especially the surplus population of the working class. (Quinney, R. "The Political Economy of Criminal Justice" Class, State and Crime, Longman, 1977).
While Quinney is undoubtedly correct, he doesn't go far enough, for at the time he was writing those words, the Black Liberation Movement was on the wane, after years of state and societal attacks. The American prison system, back in the 1920s, showed a Black population that did not outrageously outpace it's population percentage. The numbers of Black imprisonment show a marked, dramatic, and increasingly precipitous rise in the 1970s, far outstripping the African-American population percentage.
As a Black Judge in Memphis notes, Black youth are caught up in a "containment system" that serves white economic interests. Judge Joseph B. Bowen, Jr., of Shelby County, Tennessee notes:

The criminal justice system makes a lot of money for everybody, from the judge to the bailiff, from the bail bondsmen to the police, the sheriffs deputies, everybody. The neoslave, the young Black male, becomes the fodder, the raw material, for this industry-like profit-making system.

The fodder is Black, and the beneficiaries--those who profit from the system--are white. [Washington, Linn, Black Judges on Justice (New York:New Press, 1994), 60]
As Black youth were becoming increasingly radical in their struggle against the white power structure, the "containment system" was moved into place, to bottle up, and encage the rage of an oppressed, damned people beginning to corn to grips with living in the midst of a white supremacist domain.
Studies have consistently borne out the view that one's race, sad secondarily, one's class, is a powerful aggravating circumstance when it comes to judgments and sentencings. Even on the unconscious level, these powerful predictors are present, and active:
Where unconscious racism works in the law, it perpetrates racist harms. More than this, however, it serves to reinforce unexamined racial beliefs, working as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that maintains races by confirming the validity of racial biases. Consider the sentencing of convicted criminals. A number of studies document large disparities in sentencing that correlate only to the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. Having committed the same crime in the same jurisdiction, with the same record of prior convictions, one is likely to receive a higher sentence if one is non-White or if one's victim is White. These disparities are particularly evident in capital cases. One study shows that in otherwise similar situations prosecutors seek the death penalty against Latinos four times more often than against Whites, and are fourteen times more likely to seek the death penalty against those who murder Whites than against those who murder Latinos. [Haney- Lopez, Ian F., White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY:NYU Press, 1996), 138-9.]
Professor Haney argues that this is so, not only at trial, but at plea bargains, at probation and parole, and at every stop in between.
To these arguments there will no doubt be many who suggest it be dismissed, for those in prison surely deserve to be there. But prisons are political constructions, built to meet political ends and objectives, such as the containment of the oppressed. They are thus agents of a legalized form of violence, and warped beneficiaries of violence. This is seen clearest in the context of what is laughable called the 'War on Drugs', which as former Massachusetts Prison Psychiatrist, Dr. James Gilligan, M.D. explained, is anything but;
In short--and this is by far the most important finding of all that is knows on the subject: "For illegal psychoactive drugs, the illegal market itself accounts for far more violence than pharmacological effects." Thus, the "war on drugs" appears to be a self-generating war. Outlawing drugs, with the consequent decrease in their supply, followed by the increase in their cost, generates the illegal market--and all the violence that follows from that.
Since the war on drugs victimizes mostly those who are young, poor and/or black, and benefits mostly organized crime, it might be said to be a war on the young, the poor, and on blacks, a method of stimulating violence, and a very expensive means of subsidizing organized crime, boosting the employment of police and correction officers and border guards, and subsidizing the construction industry by promoting the building of more prisons. One could also wonder whether it is not, wittingly or unwittingly, a means of distracting the white middle class voting public from recognizing and ameliorating the real poverty and misery that are epidemic in the central-city ghettos. [Gilligan, J., Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York:Vintage, 1996), 220-21.]
Across a nation that claims to be the 'Land of the Free', over a million souls sleep tonight in cages, consigned there by an improper process, kept there by political expediency, and destined to do so tomorrow because of the willing blindness of a sated and jaded citizenry.
And the gulags continue to swell.
©1998MAJ

The rich have became so unsocial that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich. Isocrates (ca. 366 B.C.)

For several years, during every recent election cycle, we hear various politician. asking the rhetorical question "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
For millions of poor people in America, poverty is their daily reality.
Homelessness isn't a thing of the past, it is an enduring, ever-present burden upon the spirit. In a nation predicated upon the preciousness of property, those who are without property are treated as virtual non-people, invisible in the streets, damned to a hell where they are seen, if at all, as worthlessness itself.
In the ongoing War against the Poor that is politically popular in America today, the poor are truly getting poorer, while the rich are getting it all. There are jobs out there, but at levels that barely approach subsistence.
When income maintenance programs (like welfare) got cut, they had serious societal effects, Scholars Frances Fox Piven & Richard A, Cloward noted recently;
Three general effects will follow the reduction of subsistence resources: economic insecurity will be intensified among the unemployed; large numbers of persons now exempted from work will be thrown into the labor market, thus creating additional unemployment; and economic insecurity among tine working poor will be greatly worsened. [fr. The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare State and Its Consequences (Pantheon Bks: N.Y., 1982/1985), pp. 32-33]
In a macabre twist of words (for which politicians are famous) they called the program one of Welfare Reform, but what was reformed was the life options of the poor. What was reformed was the ability of labor to resist the encroachment of capital on their living standards, by resisting lower wages. What was reformed was the power relation between labor and capital, to labor's detriment.
What was reformed was the relationship between the working class and the poor. What was reformed was the relationship between poor and survival.
In these new series of relationships, capital is strengthened, labor is weakened, and the poor are simply crushed expendable.
This, then is Clinton's gift to the poor. Cutting off their knees, for their own 'good'!
The very same Clinton that is receiving the wealth of forgiveness blinks at the losses of the poor. The Clinton who "feels your pain" doesn't find the pain of tin poor worth feeling.
Clinton has always been the darling of the wizards of Wall Street; those who own wealth call the shots, and it is in their interest to keep labor in constant terror of starvation.
Income maintenance programs therefore serves the interest of the workers, for it protects them from the threat of starvation, as well as it protects the very' poor.
Whose pain does Clinton really feel?
For millions of people in urban and rural America, are things better than they are four years ago?
For millions of people in America, the rising of the Dow Jones Average, the stocks and bond volumes increasing, the raging markets, mean next to nothing at all. They live a bare and frugal existence, hoping tomorrow will be better than the. hellish yesterday.
And they will have good ole Bill to thank for "Feeling" their "pain."
©MAJ

While the settler of the policemen has the right the live-long day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother… Frantz Fanon,
The Wretched of the Earth (1966)

When a young man named Donta Dawson was face-to-face with a Philadelphia cop, who demanded that he lift his hands immediately, the result was the farthest from his consciousness. He probably thought that this was merely another in a long train of harassments, something that would be a bother, but not a serious life-threatening imposition.
Sitting in his own car, in front of his family's house, in his home neighborhood on Glenwood Ave. in North Philadelphia, Dawson, just 19 years of age, was shot to death by a man who bore the title, 'peace officer.' his crime? He did not move fast enough. He was 'suspicious'; a 'suspect.' He was presumed guilty, simply because he was a black youth who had to justify his existence to a hostile white cop. Because of the capital crime, of Black Birth, he was executed.
Predictably, the killer cop, a man named DiPasquale, was neither investigated, nor charged for killing the teen. The DA's office is "investigating."
Except for a select few, most politicians are silent as the proverbial grave. In positions of power, they are powerless in the face of this civilized, legalized barbarity. They are Black politicians who possess only the office: none of the Power. They have nothing to say. They nave even less to do. Faced with the enormity of death, politics is notoriously silent when it really comes to protecting the people, or restraining the forces of the state: They don't run the police; the police run them into silent acquiescence.
In an age of right-wing resurgence, and lock - 'em up, throw-away-the-key criminal justice policies, where are the voices of let the "punishment fit the crime?"
How man voices arc clamoring for the death penalty? Where are the editorials calling for his prosecution "to the fullest extent of the law"?
At best, there are feeble pleas that he be "suspended", or , at best, "fired".
Didn't Donta Dawson lose whatever job he had? Doesn't everyone who goes to jail? From those who have made a career of being "tough on crime", this is one offense that they have all but ignored.
For, it is not a crime when the cops kill-it is their JOB.
Their job is legalized terrorism of the poor, the impoverished, the anti- established, the powerless. They are protectors of the raging class divide in America. If they behaved in the suburbs the way they did in the ghettoes, millions of Americans would be looking to revolution as the solution. In truth, they perform differently in different sections of society, for they perform different functions for different segments of society. What the brilliant revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon once wrote of colonial Algeria, applies to oppressed societies all around the world, a world cut in twain;
The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the officinal, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression... In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilders" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence aid their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. (31)
In the streets of the ghetto, the people are not safe from the police. They treat the people as if they are prisoners of war, for, in truth, they are: Prisoners of a War that began when Africans came to these shores, in chains. Young Black life snuffed for nothing. And nothing at all is done about it.
©MAJ

Once again, Pennsylvania's highest court has shown us the best justice that FOP money can buy. Ignoring right reason, their own precedent, and fundamental justice, they have returned to the stranglehold of death. In their echoes of the tortured logic of Judge Albert Sabo, they have reflected a. striking fidelity to the DA's office. If it is fair to have a tribunal who are in part admittedly paid by the FOP-and at least one justice who can double as DA one day and a judge the next in the same case--then fairness is just as empty a word as "justice." To paraphrase Judge Sabo, it is "just an emotional feeling."
In recent months the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has upheld death sentences in cases where an impartial reading of transcripts or pleadings would make an honest affirmation all but impossible. They have ignored all evidence of innocence, overlooked clear instances of jury taint, and cast a dead eye on defense attorneys' ineffectiveness. What they have done in my case is par for the course. This is a political decision, paid for by the FOP on the eve of the election. I t is a Mischief Night gift from a court that has a talent for the macabre.
I am sorry that this court did not rule on the right side of history. But I am not surprised. Every time our nation has come to a fork in the road with regard to race, it has chosen to take the path of compromise and betrayal. On October 29th, 1998, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court committed a collective crime: it damned due process, strangled the fair trial, and raped justice.
Even after this legal legerdemain [sleight of' hand] I remain innocent. A court cannot make an innocent man guilty. Any ruling founded on injustice is not justice. The righteous fight for life, liberty, and for justice can only continue.