Different Day, Same Shit.

Today marks week two of the ongoing government shutdown, brought to you by the House GOP's refusal to sign off on a congressional budget that included funding for the Affordable Care Act, a legislative act that was already passed and signed into law way back in 2010. For some reason, the idea of mandated private health insurance with subsidies for the poor (which itself was downgraded from a far-superior publicly funded single-payer system) sends most conservatives into epileptic seizures. So much so that it's resulted in a crisis that's only gonna get worse, by all indications.

Everyone has a stake in this shutdown. For the political parties, this whole ordeal can end one of two ways: if the Democrats blink, that means the Tea Party element of the GOP can cherry-tap their way towards favorable legislative action through constant hostage-taking. The Democrat party ends up getting its electoral chains snatched and reverts to being the perpetual weak sister of the two parties.* If the Republicans blink, it'll cause an already-burgeoning schism between the moderate and extremist ends of the GOP to fully break open. It won't kill the party, but it will be a deservedly swift kick in the electoral jewels. Oh, and John Boehner faces the possibility of having his position snatched from under him by a vengeful Tea Party.

For President Obama, the stakes are much higher. If he doesn't bend and the GOP refuses to bend, the shutdown keeps on trucking towards yet another fiscal cliff and the president's own image gets tarnished. There'll also be plenty of fuel for an impeachment hearing, if the GOP so desires (a far-gone conclusion). If he bends, the GOP gains victory, adds cherry-tapping to its repertoire of effective legislative strategies and the president's own image gets tarnished. That means the president somehow has to force the extremist and moderate sides of the Republican party to have their own "come to Jesus" moment and pass a clean continuing resolution, preferably before October 17 rolls around.

For the average Joe working for various government agencies, the consequences of maintaining a government shutdown hit home and hit hard. Example? The United States Antarctic Research Program is the latest casualty of the shutdown, which not only affects the livelihoods and aspirations of the 500 or so people stationed at McMurdo, but also the integrity of various other international Antarctic programs that rely on the U.S. for various logistics and support. Meanwhile, NASA's down for the count, along with the Congressional Budget Office and countless other federal agencies. If things keep up beyond October 17, there's no guarantee of whether people will continue receiving their Social Security benefits.

For everyone else, it's a prime example of how a few actors within the government, led on by a large contingent of people who thinks that hamstringing the government's ability to function properly is the best way to make themselves and their agenda known. It's also an example of what happens when a small group of people with the government's worst interests in mind are able to hijack a party and force it to do its bidding or face total destruction.

Or when a party attempts to use a bunch of rabid extremists as its enforcer wing to effect legislative changes without getting their hair mussed.

Or perhaps when a party gerrymanders the living daylights out of its districts to hold on to as many seats and as much power as possible, only to watch that power slip into the hands of ideological fundamentalists with a hankering for a threadbare federal government and a possible subconscious desire to revive the concept of "state's rights," all with the relative consent of their constituents, most of whom regard "Obamacare" and other federal programs as a giveaway for blacks, illegals and the undeserving poor.

Either way it goes, current events are clearly showing folks around the world how not to run a country, because this way just ain't cutting it.

*But at least the perpetual underdogs will still be welcome in every cocktail party in D.C.

The idea of people demonstrating deference and piety towards their social, moral and financial betters is a universal one, but nowhere in America is that idea more prevalent than in the Deep South. This idea shows itself prominently when it comes to the issue of labor unionization, as all of the southern states are "right to work" and unions have a negligible, if not nonexistent presence.

For instance, the United Auto Workers have made several attempts to organize Volkswagen's Chattanooga, TN assembly plant. IG Metall, Germany’s largest labor union, also has its eye on organizing a "works council" within the plant, as is the norm in VW's German facilities. But the prevailing attitude among most workers in this and other auto plants throughout the Deep South is one of not "messing up a good thing" by any attempts at unionization, regardless of if doing so will actually benefit them. It's the fear of seeing their jobs move further southward and the commonly-held view of unions as lazy, parasitic and overpaid louts that's kept unions a rare breed south of the Mason-Dixon. Most workers in the Deep South are also invested in the belief that if they do good by the company, the company will do good by them in return. In the age of Kochist corporate thought, company leaders are often bemused by the thought of acknowledging or returning such shows of corporate piety.

Truthdogg cracks open a window into this sort of thinking, how it relates to the current government shutdown and demonstrates how toxic it's become to the nation at large:

...the idea of the commonwealth, of something for all citizens, is as foreign to this region as the Russian language. Here, we look to our corporate leaders and wealthy families for table crumbs, for protection & entertainment, and for permission to act.

This flies in the face of our popular ideas of the smartass rebel, glorified by the Dukes of Hazzard and other tv shows and movies. But it makes sense once it’s understood that the smartass rebel is a marginal character here, much more likely to end his life as Cool Hand Luke than Bo Duke, muttering alone in his shack if not prison itself. As celebrated as the lawbreaking bootleggers still are, they exist outside the mainstream, with their romanticization from the ruling class little different than memories of childhood squirrel hunts and canned sardine lunches.

The mainstream is obedient, deferent and possesses a mixture of awe, gratitude and fear toward the fabulously wealthy that is painfully embarrassing to behold. Watch one of our Congressmen apologize to BP executives for the Katrina disaster if you want to scratch the surface of the worshipfulness that is expected here.

I know, I know. I’m describing something that exists all across the nation in many ways. This is certainly not limited to the South, just like racism is not, and I’m not someone who claims the South is full of more bad people than elsewhere.

But here, this idea of a fixed class permeates in ways that are more difficult to escape, with struggling workers admiring the charity of the Walton family, or arguing that development companies should be given free rein to foul their own water. Today they’re arguing that they don’t need health insurance, that they (I suppose) will just wither and die once it’s clear that the church bake sale can’t pay for their future lung cancer treatments, because they know that they’re lower class and don’t deserve anything more. Perhaps one of their libertarian heroes of finance will step in and personally intervene like God himself, but if they do not, His will is being done.

Passions flare over this in no small part because of race. A rigid class structure maintains the illusion of permanent white dominance, and masks the prevalent white working class fear of slipping to an even lower rung in society. Control is the most important issue for the whites I know who fear changes in racial status (or its loss) and the “tradition” of conservative subservience is the path for keeping it. The adoration of the financially successful reinforces it.

The rigid social structure of the long-lost yet seldom forgotten Confederacy provided plenty of benefits for the "right" folks. The ruling class were rewarded with a never-ending and self-replenishing flow of free labor, while the lower orders looked up to them with a mixture of awe, gratitude and fear. Working-class whites were just grateful for receiving whatever crumbs the ruling class deigned to brush aside in their general direction, all the while comforted with the assurance of always having it better than those coloreds, free and slave. No matter how far down the societal rung one slipped, at least your average Joe of the time knew he would always be a cut above a Negro.

Even after the death of the Confederacy, this mindset still reigned supreme throughout the southern states, intermixed with anger at the federal government for infringing on their way of living (except in cases where they benefited immensely). A large number of people were simply comfortable with the rigid social structure of old, as they knew exactly where they stood and what their assigned roles were. People often reacted to any attempts at bucking or demolishing the social structure with a vicious, inflamed passion. That explains why many people treat the idea of universal healthcare like a communist plot (at least until the hospital bills comes due).

It also goes a long way to explain much of the consternation over Barack Obama's presidential election:

The election of a highly-educated black president shattered it. In fact, as with Bill Clinton, his humble origins are the most distressing part of his biography here. If he were born into a wealthy black family, perhaps with a slaveholding ancestry, or even someone who slipped comfortably into a CEO role (like Herman Cain, subservient to the Koch brothers), President Obama’s election may have been easier to accept.

But he wasn’t like either of those things. Barack Obama leapt over many people in his ambitions, drive and focus, and argues for making his path easier to follow, as liberals tend to do. He’s an inspiring figure for anyone inclined to be inspired. He doesn’t claim that his success comes only from his work and ambition, even while that is clearly a major part of his story. But for those who rely upon inequality and fixed social classes in order to maintain the facade that they aren’t the poorest citizens of this country, his biography destroys everything they thought they knew about the world.

The GOP party goals of lower taxes and freer reign for the corporate class and landed gentry, greatly reduced federal social services, sacrosanct defense expenditures, free or greatly reduced-cost labor via public and private prisons and a landscape of districts gerrymandered just enough to insure a permanent Republican majority all echo a desire for a strong ruling class and a populace too enamored with the tradition of conservative subservience to bother with any sort of genuine progress - at least progress that doesn't directly benefit the ruling class.

There's also the never-ending drive to figuratively and legislatively lynch the first (and as conservatives hope, the last) president of color by cutting off as many of his policies off at the knees as possible. Perpetual gridlock, shutdowns and standstills are all a part of paralyzing government to which it'll have no capacity to make any serious legislative changes until a suitable GOP president is back in the Oval Office. That's something to think about as the House Republicans hold the nation hostage over the Affordable Care Act.

Yesterday's government shutdown is the end result of what happens when one group of politicians play a game of chicken with a telephone pole. Things tend to get messy real quick and in this case, the engine of government was the first to go.

In the vigorous pursuit to defund what very well could be the stepping stones towards universal healthcare in the U.S., 30 caucus members representing the GOP's "tea party" faction in the House saw fit to double down on the rhetoric and attempt to push through a measure to delay and otherwise attempt to strangle the Affordable Care Act in its crib - something that the Senate predictably rejected.

Which brings us to where we are today, with national parks closed, most veterans services shut down and hundreds of thousands of government workers either furloughed or working without pay as essential employees. The Tea Party contingent are doing a remarkable job of showing the people that government does not work...by making sure it doesn't work.

At this point, you have to feel for House Speaker John Boehner. If he tells the Teabaggers to go forth and engage in a vigorous round of auto-fornication by passing a "clean" continuing resolution, he risks the likelihood of losing the remaining shreds of his authority and his seat to a more Teabagger-friendly Republican, most likely wannabe House Speaker and current Tea Party ringleader Ted Cruz. After all, he's demonstrated time and again that he's the one calling the shots.

If he decides to play to the baser instincts of the Teabaggers and maintain the congressional stalemate, the shutdown continues. Too bad neither the Senate nor the president has any intention of capitulating to GOP demands. That means piecemeal solutions like reopening parts of government here and there are out of the question. Either way it goes, the orange one comes out looking like a complete chump.

An increasing number of moderate Republicans now fear having their legislative asses handed to them by a beyond-pissed electorate, which explains why folks like Michael Grimm and 11 other House Republicans have indicated their support for a "clean" CR - one that's stripped of the poison-pill provision that hamstrings ACA funding. The longer this goes on, the worse the pain gets for the GOP in general.

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Meanwhile, the American people have to put up with some of the inconveniences of a government gone fishing:

• All of America's national parks and monuments are now closed. So don't bother packing your bags for that trip to Yosemite National Park.
• Don't bother sending in your application for a small business loan or loan guarantee, either. The government's not taking those while the shutdown's in effect.
• If you're a veteran with questions about your benefits, good luck. No one's around to answer your questions.
• The National Institutes of Health is also shuttered for the duration of the shutdown, so no further research into life-threatening diseases will be conducted and ongoing clinical trials are closed to new patients.
• Government workers tasked with border patrol, food inspection and air traffic control will work through the shutdown sans pay. Hundreds of thousands of other non-essential govt. workers are now on furlough. Figuring out how to pay the house note is going to be a bitch, but at least they won't have to worry about their car notes.
• No more non-essential inspections of drinking water systems and chemical facilities by the EPA until further notice. 
• Some services for seniors and young children may run out of money in the event of an extended shutdown.
• Even the president isn't immune to the effects of the shutdown. Teabaggers are no doubt pleased that he has to cut his Asia "vacation" short to tend to matters closer to home.

But it's not the shutdown that should have people worried. The debt ceiling deadline is just 15 days away and unless there's a bump in the $17.5 trillion debt limit, the ramifications could very well kick the legs out of the country's current attempts at economic recovery. Without a debt ceiling increase, the U.S. government loses its ability to borrow and defaults on some of its debts, which could set off a chain of events that could eventually lead to sky-high interest rates, frozen credit and investors backing away from U.S. currency and assets as quickly as possible.

Having the government lurch from crisis to manufactured crisis is precisely what the GOP quack doctors prescribed in the first place. A close look at the "Williamsburg Accord" lays out the current stratagem to reorient the national budget towards the general direction of the Ryan Plan, by any means necessary:

In January, demoralized House Republicans retreated to Williamsburg, Virginia, to plot out their legislative strategy for President Obama’s second term. Conservatives were angry that their leaders had been unable to stop the expiration of the Bush tax cuts on high incomes, and sought assurances from their leaders that no further compromises would be forthcoming. The agreement that followed, which Republicans called “The Williamsburg Accord,” received obsessive coverage in the conservative media but scant attention in the mainstream press. (The phrase “Williamsburg Accord” has appeared once in the Washington Post and not at all in the New York Times.) But the decision House Republicans made in January has set the party on the course it has followed since.

If you want to grasp why Republicans are careening toward a potential federal government shutdown, and possibly toward provoking a sovereign debt crisis after that, you need to understand that this is the inevitable product of a conscious party strategy. Just as Republicans responded to their 2008 defeat by moving farther right, they responded to the 2012 defeat by moving right yet again. Since they had begun from a position of total opposition to the entire Obama agenda, the newer rightward lurch took the form of trying to wrest concessions from Obama by provoking a series of crises.

Heritage Action for America's Michael Needham drove home the push for a "balanced budget" through an open letter to conservative congressmen:

Dear Congressman,

In the coming months, you will face tremendous pressure to accept a deal to raise our nation’s debt ceiling. Conservatives around the country will insist the debt ceiling not be raised unless our nation gets on a path to a balanced budget within 10 years and stays balanced. This is not an arbitrary marker; rather, it is the marker laid out by the entire House Republican Conference in what has become known as the Williamsburg Accord.

Conservatives cannot enter into the debt ceiling debate without understanding the promise of the Williamsburg Accord.

On January 18, four current and former chairmen of the Republican Study Committee announced an agreement to re-sequence the 2013 fiscal fights. In exchange for holding the line on the sequester and producing a budget that balanced in ten years, conservatives agreed to postpone the debt ceiling debate for several months. In turn, the debate on the debt ceiling would revolve around enacting the policies that put the federal budget on the path to 10-year balance.

A few days later, Speaker Boehner declared, “It’s time for us to come to a plan that will in fact balance the budget over the next 10 years.” He said it was the GOP’s “commitment to the American people.”

As the proverbial ink dried on the Williamsburg Accord, the House Republican Conference marched in unison. Lawmakers focused on laying the groundwork to enact the policies necessary to achieve a 10-year balance, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, and attach them to any future increases in the debt ceiling.

At the same time, the National Republican Congressional Committee quietly poll-tested the message in key districts. Balancing the budget was a winning political argument in swing districts. The NRCC poll found that 45 percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents and 76 percent of Republicans thought balancing the federal budget would “significantly increase economic growth and create millions of American jobs.”

Good policy is good politics, and we know from recent history a coherent, principled message on the debt ceiling can shift public opinion. Before landing on the Budget Control Act in August 2011, Republicans consistently said America had a spending problem and spending reductions must accompany any increase in the debt ceiling.

Not surprisingly, the accepted narrative of that showdown is wrong. Many forget Republicans were winning the generic congressional vote the entire month of July. President Obama’s disapproval rating stood at 52% by the end of August. In September, Mitt Romney was leading in head-to-head polling.

The path to balance is the path to victory.

Conservatives should not raise our nation’s statutory debt limit unless Congress passes and the President signs into law real reforms and immediate spending reductions that place America on a path to balance within 10 years without raising taxes and keeping the budget in balance.

Regardless of how many concessions the Democrats offer to conservatives, the GOP in its current state is bound to go with the Assad option and obliterate everything within reach, just because. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation's getting pretty sick of playing hostages to a bunch of legislative psychotics.

In lieu of a fleshed-out post on the impending shutdown, here's Bill Clinton recounting his own experience with government shutdowns and a few bits of advice for President Obama:

Clinton would not negotiate, he said. “The current price of stopping it is higher than the price of letting the Republicans do it and taking their medicine,” he said. “If they’re going to change the way the Constitution works and fundamentally alter the character of our country and damage the future of a lot of kids, you just have to say no.”

It's not everyday you see a person of color willing to pal around with a confederacy of Confederates, let alone pose for a photo shoot that proved to be a bit too much for the NAACP to take. Apparently, the city of Lake City, Florida has a rich and storied history of capturing and reverberating the echos of the long-since-lost Confederate States of America under the guise of "heritage." If the National Socialist German Workers' Party had been better students of history, you'd probably see the swastika aloft in Germany as much quantity as one sees the Confederate battle flag in portions of the United States:

The controversy surrounding the Stars and Bars, or the Confederate Flag, is a controversy that has hounded Lake City for decades. The Stars and Bars, emblazoned as part of Lake City's logo, rides on every City vehicle and is part of Lake City stationery. The recent controversies surrounding the City Police Chief and the City Manager have culminated in the Local Branch of the NAACP asking for the Chief and City Manager's resignations. The straw that broke the camel's back, a photo of Lake City's African American Police Chief posing with the Confederate Mechanized Cavalry during the Olustee Festival. The Lake City Branch of the NAACP is being supported in its efforts by the State chapter of the NAACP.

A letter obtained by the Observer and dated July 2, 2012, purports to be from the NAACP and is addressed to the City Council. It asks for the resignations or termination of both Police Chief Gilmore and City Manager Wendell Johnson. The letter claims that the community has lost "all confidence in Chief Gilmore and the Police Department." The letter also claims that black and white Lake City police officers are treated differently.

The letter concludes: "We supported Chief Gilmore when she became the new police chief but after several incidents of poor decision making and judgments, we believe that continuing to turn our heads, is not going to solve the problem, and City Manager Johnson has done nothing to address any of these problems. We wish Chief Gilmore and City Manager Johnson much success in their endeavors but we believe that Chief Gilmore has not managed the Lake City Police Department well during her tenure here, and neither has City Manager Johnson."

It's interesting to me how the Confederate mystique is so embedded in this community that the police chief has to take a glamour shot with people who like to "ride with Forrest."

For those who don't know who Nathan Bedford Forrest is, he was, to put it lightly, an interesting figure in the annals of history. Born in poverty, he eventually grew up to become a wealthy businessman and slave trader. When the Civil War started, he joined the Confederate Army, where he was swiftly kicked upstairs* to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and with time, Lieutenant General. After the war, he became the first "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that would have defined the words "domestic terrorists" if their targets weren't so...colored. People with a starry-eyed affection towards the defeated Confederacy won't waste any time hailing him as a great man. Everyone else will most likely wonder why the Union neglected to hang him and other Confederate commanders for treason.

By not putting Forrest, Jefferson Davis and other important figures who created and contributed to the Confederacy to the gallows and by not "deconfederatizing" the southeast when it had the chance, the U.S. not only allowed a sick and otherwise deficient mindset to develop for generations, it also cultivated a spirit of rebellion that caused the "solid south" to remain at political and ideological odds with the rest of the nation till this very day. It's one that caused the state of Georgia to incorporate the Confederate battle flag within its own state flag in protest of Brown v. Board of Education.

That spirit recently manifested itself as the Tea Party/GOP goal of open rebellion against the "liberal" federal government, with the president featured as the centerpiece at which Teabaggers and other conservatives hurl hateful invective and death threats. It's a spirit that encourages discriminatory laws and behavior against minorities for the good of the nation and one that suggests national safety nets like Medicare and Social Security to be "socialist" devices hardworking people would do without. People kept saying "The South Shall Rise Again," but no one figured it would be the spirit of the South that would be risen.

It's sad that the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference have to fight battles that should have been long won. Then again, I suppose the price of freedom and progress is constant vigilance.

*His superior officers didn't think wealthy planters should have to suffer the indignity of being low-ranked cannon fodder.

Millions of Americans expect to go about their day without worrying about a simple traffic stop effectively ruining the rest of their lives. They don't expect to be incarcerated and face thousands of dollars in fines for trivial offenses, but it happens:

Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.

When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.

For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.

“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”

In a 2010 study, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law examined the fee structure in the 15 states — including California, Florida and Texas — with the largest prison populations. It asserted: “Many states are imposing new and often onerous ‘user fees’ on individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose severe — and often hidden — costs on communities, taxpayers and indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find employment and housing as well as to meet child support obligations.”

The New York Times article goes on to describe how the courts are turning to private companies to handle probation services and fee collection, and how these companies are making their earnings off the back of the poor who are fined, charged and sentenced. In short, the law enforcement and judicial arms are again being used as a profit center for private companies and the officials who take their slice of the proceeds.

Historically speaking, this public/private profiteering at the expense of ordinary Americans lacking in the resources needed to do anything about it has had its greatest effect on the black American community. Today, Americans of all stripes who often don't have the means to take care of expensive fines or discrepancies in paperwork are now being placed into a form of debt peonage, which entails a cycle of stacked fees and incarceration for not paying those fees, many of which were accrued while they were incarcerated.

There's nothing new under this sun. In December 1865, Congress adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, one of three "Reconstruction-era Amendments." This amendment was principally responsible for officially outlawing slavery as experienced by millions of people prior to and during the Civil War:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Please note the highlighted phrase, as it plays a big role in the emergence of the Convict Lease system.

In the post-Reconstruction era of the Deep South, the relative new-found freedom of millions of ex-slaves and other black Americans were sharply curtailed by newly-established Jim Crow laws and Black Codes all across the south. Meanwhile, industry was replacing the cotton industry as an economic driver, which meant moneyed interests were constantly in search of cheap or damn-near-free labor. Government officials began using vagrancy laws and other minor violations to issue steep fines and issue lengthy sentences to poor black American men and a few of their white counterparts. These people would then be pressed into labor and leased to various corporations and entrepreneurs until they "completed their sentences" or manage to pay their debts.

Douglass Blackmon's definitive book on this issue, "Slavery by Another Name," sums up the issue thus:

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

In short, the clause "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" was used as a gaping loophole as a way to revive a form of forced labor, not just for the benefit of moneyed interests who indeed benefited financially, but as a sop to a people born and bred to believe their black counterparts were naturally lazy and that only work via forced labor was the way to keep them "productive." This form of debt peonage was thought to have been done away with after World War II, but it managed to get a new lease on life during the 1980s. It currently survives thanks in part to the proliferation of private judicial services that manage everything from prisons to probation and drug testing.

In an era where an outright refusal to properly fund the courts system collides with a ragged economy and a continuing thirst for punitive justice measures, private judicial services are flourishing, enticing states with a seemingly low initial overhead and the promise of savings to both governments and taxpayers. However, recent studies have shown the supposed savings to be negligible, if not non-existent. As noted in the article, many jurisdictions are using fees and surcharges as a new form of funding, usually in lieu of slashed state and local funding.

There's also the risk of corruption among state and federal judicial members and these private corporations. This comment from Eric D. sheds light on the corruption that occurs when private profits collude with harsh public punishment:

As I mentioned in my earlier text, this is just the tip of the iceberg in Alabama. In the county adjacent to where Childersburg is located, Shelby County, the only Judge in that county to hear felony cases has set up a "work release." This "work release" which is in fact a jail is run by the judge's sister-in-law. You can be incarcerated there for anything from child support or speeding tickets up to drug distribution.

The deal is you are jailed and allowed to leave only for work or some project that the judge's sister in law decides to use her free labor for. If you can find a job under their many constraints then your entire paycheck must be made payable to jailers and at a later date the judge's sister in law will deduct 40% of your GROSS check, subtract whatever they choose for fines and fees including charges for drug tests that they administer at will and you get the difference if there is anything left.

Because it is private it does not fall under Dept of Corrections guidelines. These inmates are required to purchase their own food although in theory bread and ham is given once a day. I personally know a man who spent 24 months incarcerated eating ham sandwiches every day, only to find out that he was held an extra 7 months after his restitution was paid but was not remitted by the judge's sister in law. And guess who hears any complaints? That's right, the same judge who made sure his sister in law runs the place. The Good Ole Boy system is still just fine in AL.

The corruption is endemic, even at the juvenile level. In 2011, a Pennsylvania judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison for shipping over 4,000 kids, some as young as ten, off to two privately run youth detention centers, in exchange for over $1 million in kickbacks from the private prison company charged with running the facilities.

Many private prisons also receive federal funding for housing and feeding inmates, which these prisons often do in a substandard manner. Others facilitate overcrowding and poor staffing to cut costs and pocket profits. One private firm actually required one state to have a 90-percent occupancy rate before it could take advantage of a sweetheart deal:

The proposal seeks to build upon a deal reached last fall in which the company purchased the 1,798-bed Lake Erie Correctional Institution from the state of Ohio for $72.7 million. Ohio officials lauded the September transaction, saying that private management of the facility would save a projected $3 million annually.

Linda Janes, chief of staff for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the purchase came at time when the state was facing a $8 billion shortfall. The $72.7 million prison purchase was aimed at helping to fill a $188 million deficit within the corrections agency.

Ohio's deal requires the state to maintain a 90% occupancy rate, but Janes said that provision remains in effect for 18 months — not 20 years — before it can be renegotiated. As part of the deal, Ohio pays the company a monthly fee, totaling $3.8 million per year.

It's little wonder the arrest rate for young black males in the United States remains at least eight times higher than their white counterparts. It's hard trying to maintain an ideal level of occupancy. It's also a part of why the War on Drugs (also known as the War on Weed) is slated to continue for the foreseeable future. After all, there has to be some way to keep the prisons full.

The whole idea of having your finances, job prospects, reputation and personal freedom boned thanks to fines, surcharges and fees that stack up and prove financially insurmountable should scare just about anyone. However, some people don't see any of this as that big of a deal. After all, you should have obeyed the law. Problem is, there are so many laws on the books today that even the most innocent and law-abiding citizen can get fined or go to jail over a law he or she wasn't even aware existed.

This is neo-peonage, in a nutshell. Lower and middle-class Americans who are often one or two paychecks away from poverty are financially devastated by fines and fees. If they can't pay up in time, they're put in jail and often put to work in a revitalized Convict Lease System for extraordinarily cheap. If B.B. Comer was to somehow time-travel to today's Childersburg to see the spectacle as told by Eric D., he'd be right at home with what he'd find.

From 2006 to 2010, the BATF ran a program that essentially walked millions of firearms into the tender loving hands of Mexican cartel members, with the purpose of nabbing straw purchasers and gun runners on the U.S. side. It was a good idea at the time (to them), at least until a Border Patrol agent was killed. After that, the wheels pretty much fell off that wagon.

Today, Darrell Issa intends to use a program crafted during the Bush administration to collect the scalps of one U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and a certain U.S. president. If you want a great indication of how eager Issa is to bend the Obama administration over his knee, note that he's asking for a partial investigation that covers the program from 2009 and onward. Remember, the program started back in 2006.

President Obama is also under fire for exercising executive privilege on behalf of Holder, obstinately to prevent sensitive documents and transcripts from being released under subpoena. Now some are accusing the Obama administration of "covering up the truth."

Somewhere on the House floor is the corpse of Brian Terry, propped up and placed behind glass to elicit heartstring tugs and politically motivated sympathy.

Allow yours truly to direct you to more detailed commentary on Fast and Furious and the ongoing attempts to legally lynch the president and U.S. attorney general with high-tech rope:

- Redeye's Front Page: "The "Fast and Furious" legal lynching of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder"
- "The Rant" by Tom Degan: "The Importance of Being Eric"
- Digby's Hullabaloo: "Issa goes down the rabbit hole"
- Field Negro: "The Sequel"

“This is not a billy club... This is not a fire hose…. This is not Jim Crow…. My parents and my grandparents can tell you what a colored-only water fountain tasted like. They could tell you what a colored-only bathroom smelled like..." "...this tiny little thing that doesn’t wound, that has no sharp edges. To call photo ID a degradation of human rights is not only something that is so fundamentally wrong, but is something my parents would not even recognize…. That [claim that ID requirements violate human rights] is the old tactic of telling us the very opposite of what it true.”

The above quote belongs to former U.S. Representative Artur Davis. Just recently, the ex-legislator from Alabama turned in his Democrat card, pledged his allegiance to the GOP and loaded up the U-Haul for a one-way trip to Virginia. Not to be too hard on the man, but I suppose seeing his governorship chances go up in smoke after seeing every black Democrat worth their salt stand by Ron Sparks was a bit too much for the man to bear. In fact, he practically swore off politics after being hung out to dry by "his own people." Since he wasn't too keen on listening to their wishes in the first place, it wasn't much a loss for the Dem team.

Black Americans across Alabama smelled a rat. It cheesed Davis off to no end that he couldn't lead his fellow black constituents around like the pied piper, no matter how hard he tried. He's politically shrewd, but as David Schraub points out, he also seems infatuated with how the bottoms of his own feet taste. His shrewdness is often balanced out by decisions that leave you going, "what the hell was this guy thinking?"

One of those decisions is his support of voter ID. On the face of it, voter ID seems like a relatively harmless and well-intentioned idea that anyone would be crazy enough to oppose. Who doesn't want to make sure there aren't any corpses or absentee ballots lying around to tilt an election? After all, pretty much everyone has some form of photo ID on them, don't they?

As it turns out, not everyone has a voter ID. Many states don't require one and if you've been to your local DMV, you may have first-hand knowledge of how painfully byzantine the entire process of getting any sort of ID is. And it gets worse if you happen to be down and out on the street. If you're a homeless guy who has an urge to do his patriotic duty and vote*, you might be hard-pressed to have a copy of your birth certificate on your person and having a new copy made usually entails finding a reliable mailing address and paying a fee, two things that don't come easy to anyone living on the street. Of course, those on the right would probably dismiss those concerns as "whining."

Personally, I believe ol' Artur to be wrong about voter ID being harmless. It all comes down to who the many voter ID laws currently benefit and how they're affecting current voters today.

This town is starting to look like a garbage heap. And we got too damn many niggers urban thugs, yo, ruining the quality of life for everybody. And I'll tell you what it's gonna take. You people, you are - you need to have a gun. You need to have training. You need to know how to use that gun. You need to get a permit to carry that gun. And you do in fact need to carry that gun and we need to see some dead niggers thugs littering the landscape in Atlanta.

The above quoted, slightly modified for translation purposes, comes from Rush Limbaugh-clone Neil Boortz. Like many Americans, Boortz suffers from a severe case of Extreme Color Arousal, a condition nurtured by generations of subtle societal and tribal indoctrination and propaganda against black Americans* and triggered by the mere sights and sounds of black Americans, black American culture or practically any action or event caused by or stemming from black Americans. Combined with the negative preconceived notions that many white Americans have of their fellow black citizens plus the need for politicians and businesses to nurture and illicit both emotion and compliance from voters and customers with "dog whistles" and coded language, Extreme Color Arousal can manifest itself in a number of ways.

Take the sad case of Trayvon Martin, for example. The sight of a young black man in a grey hoodie aroused negative emotions within George Zimmerman. His own possible bias of blacks in general, his association of blacks with criminal behavior ("they always get away") and his desire to rid the neighborhood of the scourge of black criminality led him to stalk, corner and kill an innocent young man. That's Extreme Color Arousal in action, folks.

There are countless cases where cops have allowed Extreme Color Arousal to override their training and judgment, prompting them to treat black Americans in their custody with a far heavier hand than those of other ethnic backgrounds, if they're not killed outright. The NYPD's "Stop and Frisk" campaign targets far more black American citizens than other ethnic groups, thanks to officers operating on their own preconceived notions and color arousal, or on an institutional bias that promotes color aroused behavior. Other police departments around the country carry a biased attitude towards black Americans that often results in their rough treatment or even death.

Then there's the reaction of many Americans to President Barack Obama. Sadly, there are some who simply cannot cope with the sight and knowledge of a black man** in the Oval Office or any other loft position of power, for that matter. Paula Smith could not cope with having President Obama in office, hence her small but telling way of lashing out in a fit of Extreme Color Arousal.


This "2012 Don't Re-nig!" sticker is just one of many ways that Extreme Color Arousal manifests itself. Given that overt racism is no longer acceptable in polite social circles, those expressing their dissatisfaction with niggers thugs and criminals employ coded language. This way, bigoted individuals have a way of shielding themselves from the criticisms of those who can "crack the code." Plausible deniability and feigned innocence/ignorance are those shields.

Extreme Color Arousal stems from a pathological fear and dislike of black Americans, reinforced by negative portrayals and associations of blacks as criminals, thugs, "beasts," and other entities who should be, of course, feared and loathed. For some, the only way for them to feel safe is to grab a gun and be prepared to shoot any nigger criminal who makes them "fear for their life," so they can "take back" the city.† This sort of paranoia never ends well.

The entire nation seems to be gripped in this paranoia. People like Boortz are only the visible symptoms of a serious, deeply embedded problem that's crippling this nation.

* Many white Americans have been trained and indoctrinated to see black Americans as somehow inferior to themselves, as justification for slavery and later the economic and social segregation of black Americans. It also served to divide poor whites against their poor black brethren, to prevent both from joining forces in protest against major societal and economic interests.

** Obama comes from mixed heritage, but as far as many Americans are concerned, he's a black man. Thank the "One Drop Rule" for that one.

† Some white Americans see the rise of black Americans to prominent positions of power as a sort of zero-sum game -- blacks gain power while whites lose power. Combine the rise of black-led and largely black-managed cities with serious tax funding issues from suburban flight, exacerbated social issues, constant association of black-led and managed governments with corruption, crime and failure and a "us vs. them" mentality that effectively separates suburban commuters from their city-dwelling counterparts, and you have scores of whites believing that 1)their cities were somehow "conquered" by blacks and 2)therefore need to be "taken back" (which usually means having a "proper" government put in its place, one that just happens to be all-white and possibly all-conservative).

FEMA is asking more than 83,000 recipients of aid to reimburse the government an average of $4,622 each, BlackAmericaWeb reports. The agency says that clerical or employee errors may have resulted in some victims receiving more compensation than what may now be allocated.

This comes six years after disbursement of the funds intended to help victims of Hurricane Katrina seek new shelter and put their lives back together. And the funds are due within a 30-day period, just in time for income tax season. Other than getting a refund back from Uncle Sam, very few people have the resources to come up with a quick $4,600, let alone those effected by Hurricane Katrina. Such an oversight should have been written off as a loss and left alone.

There's been plenty of talk about the spending habits of those effected by Katrina, namely of the "booze and rims" variety. People make mistakes, and many people don't do well when confronted with the management of large sums of money given in one lump. Not much you can do about this aside from a copious amount of fiscal management education, one of the many things that no one wants done in this country.