TheMillerCircle.org

Among the many rough and tumble features of our country is the shocking incarceration rate that we have progressively developed as our national policy towards crime. Glenn C. Loury, the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University and author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, has written an excellent article in the Boston Review of Books, where he points out (based on a report by the London-based International Centre for Prison Studies) that the United States has 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 population) is higher than that of any other country and is approximately 40% greater than that of our nearest competitors (Russia, Belarus and the Bahamas). Compared to more industrial democracies, the differences in prison populations are very striking, including 6.2 X Canada, 7.8 X France and 12.3 X Japan. As Loury points out “We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.” “The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.” “Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes.” When we decide to do something, we usually get it done! But, did we decide and do we really want the outcome that we now know will result from these policies? We have talked about “Blowback” abroad from secret policies of our Federal Government, largely due to the CIA, the most recent example of which is of course 9/11, but what about “Blowback” from our Federal and State penitentiary system? Are we destroying a sector of our own culture with our incarceration policies? Are we trying to grind into dust the poor black American communities using methods that will accomplish what we did to the native Americans?

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During an all night session debating the Iraq war, Republican and Democratic Senators argued whether to place restrictions on funding coupled to troop withdrawal in the form of the “Levin-Reid” bill, which would force troop withdrawal beginning 120 days after passage of the bill. A recent poll taken has demonstrated that 60% of Americans support this type of approach. The Republicans have altered their position, many of whom now support the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) which, although it recommended a troop withdrawal process, it did not have any binding time table for withdrawal but merely carried ‘recommendations.’ The Republican position is somewhat vacuous, since Bush has already stated that he has included the ISG recommendations into his new plan (which, of course, he has not). But, rather than see the Republicans move their agenda to a vote, where many Democrats might have voted for the ISG option, Harry Reid tabled the debate, angering Republicans who wanted to show that they did not stand squarely with Bush. I did not see all the debate, as it ran throughout the evening and into the morning, but from what I saw very few Republicans are trying to defend the “surge” which was given a rather scathing condemnation by many, including a few Republicans. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who faces what will be a closely contested election next year (in my opinion, this is one seat the Democrats should claim with some ease), voted with the Democrats to end the debate on the Levin-Reid bill, but then got pissed at Reid for tabling the debate, as she was one future candidate who wanted to establish a vote for something different than the way Bush is conducting the war. With any luck, she sang her swan song (the legendary song of a swan, sung only once in it’s lifetime as it is dying) night before last. The people of Maine are too much in need of a good brand of liberal politics to have a Senator like Susan Collins.

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It has now been 35 years since George McGovern ran against Richard Nixon for the presidency in 1972. Rosemary and I worked for McGovern and strongly resonated with his candidacy, even though it seemed like an uphill struggle. The Democratic party was in shambles from the 1968 convention in Chicago and Nixon seemed to have the upper hand all during the campaign. In many ways, it was a lot like the 2004 campaign between Bush and Kerry. At that point in time, pursuing the war, whether Vietnam or Iraq, seemed like a good safe idea. Nixon was able to hype the anti-communist rhetoric and the “domino theory,” just as Bush could hype the anti-terrorist mission in Iraq and the al-Qaeda connection. McGovern was treated by the press, just as Kerry was, as a kind of bumbling fool, where small mistakes got amplified in an attempt to paint the candidate as a rough outsider, the contrarian who didn’t deserve the presidency. It says something about America, that once a war is declared, even if it is declared unconstitutionally, as every conflict since WW II has been, the anti-war candidate is smeared by the press and treated as an aberation to the country. McGovern was painted by the press as an odd ball and his mistakes, such as dumping Thomas Eagleton as his VP running mate were amplified and made to appear as moves of incompetence, revealing an unreliable candidate. What was good about McGovern, was also true of Kerry. Both had been in significant combat roles, McGovern in WW II and Kerry in Vietnam. You would have thought that their opposition to the war would have special significance given their wartime experience, but that was painted as irrelevant and the candidates without war experience or even, in the case of Bush, with a history of dodging military obligation, were given the edge. Again those that declare the war or continue to pursue its original goal, have a huge advantage with the press and the public until the war crumbles, as the Korean war did for Truman, the Vietnam war for the Nixon administration (Gerald Ford) and now as Iraq has done for Bush II. McGovern, as a highly experienced WW II veteran had seen the ugly side of war, and his main ambition was to win the election, stop the insanity of Vietnam and put a halt to our knee jerk reflexes about communism. But, in the end, by November, McGovern had carried only one state, Massachusetts, in one of the most lopsided political victories in the history of our country. As McGovern stepped away from the presidential spotlight, he vowed to continue to bring the issues to the public that he felt very strongly about. Oddly enough, during the very campaign that McGovern lost so decisively, Nixon was sowing the seeds of his own destruction through his paranoia as exemplified by the Watergate break-in, which took place before the election.

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