The rebellion in Baltimore is an uprising against austerity, claims top US academic

[bravenak]

Ed Vulliamy
Saturday 2 May 2015 15.54 EDT Last modified on Saturday 2 May 2015 19.01 EDT


For Baltimore to be the setting for the latest in a recent spate of high-profile police murders and riots in America – after Ferguson, New York and North Charleston – is especially compelling in the public imagination because the city was also the location for David Simon’s brilliant TV series The Wire.

Baltimore is the city from which Simon wrote for this newspaper in 2013 about “two Americas” in the “horror show” his country has become, one crucial element of which is that the US is “the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons”.

The Wire, he said, “was about people who were worthless and who were no longer necessary”, most of them black, and who become the assembly-line raw material for “the prison-industrial complex”. At an event hosted by the Observer that year, Simon said: “Once America marginalised the black 10% of the population it no longer needed, it set out to make money out of them by putting them in jail.”


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/02/baltimore-rebellion-is-uprising-against-austerity-freddie-gray

[Sunlei]

1. 100+ years of Corps taking advantage of cheap prison labor & a society willing to feed that beast

through local 'law' where everything is a crime.

perhaps it should be against the law to pay anyone in America less then minimum wage and remove the 'prisoners can be slaves' from the 13th amendment. THIS LINE----> except as punishment for a crime.

[daredtowork]

5. In CA the cause of human rights was stymied because we "needed"

cheap prison labor to put out forest fires and save property. Some prisoners died.

Prison life is cheap.

[bravenak]

7. Yep. Prison is the new slavery.

[Cheese Sandwich]

2. To me it looks like an uprising against conditions of extreme exploitation and oppression

Exploitation in the economy and oppression by the public authorities. The cops are the face of it.

The economic crisis and the pressure that followed it, what many of us are all living through, it's felt harder in the poorest neighborhoods, and hardest of all in poor black neighborhoods.

Abusive, violent policing, treating the poor like animals, it's all part of system of exploitation and control for profit. It's a direct line straight from the slave ships to the modern prisons.

Violent, abusive police are needed to control the poor in a system based on extreme inequality.

If we saw the Baltimore uprising in another country we would immediately recognize it as a people's political struggle for freedom and control over their own lives. It's harder for people to see when it's in our own country though.

[bravenak]

6. Exactly. If this were say, Egypt, we'd see it for what it is.

[Cheese Sandwich]

9. I guess more people are starting to see it...

Maybe because of all the camera phones things are harder to deny.

[smokey nj]

3. Thanks for this, bravenak

"...because they can lock us up they can kill us with impunity." That line was a punch in the gut.

[bravenak]

4. That hit me too. Soon it will be all of us. It might already be.

[Downwinder]

8. Kick and Rec

[freshwest]

10. He nailed it! Thanks for posting this analysis. n/t

[Zorra]

11. Recommend. nt

[marym625]

12. K&R!

Great post!



Why would anyone think otherwise

[bravenak]

13. Seriously.

[JDPriestly]

14. Excellent video. Thanks.

[cali]

15. Yes. And it is nothing short of horrifying.

[F4lconF16]

16. K&R

The Black Lives Matter movement has done a really good job linking the economic problems with the socio-cultural ones. It's what makes this protest so incredibly powerful, and far more radical than most people realize. These protests and the riots are a strike back at a lot more than just the police. It's a strike back at the collection of systemic oppressions that have left people with nothing. #BlackLivesMatter can mean quite a lot.

[bravenak]

17. I agree.

I'm glad to see occupy being supportive. I think that's a good thing. This might end up being anither activist summer.

[hifiguy]

18. Great post.

The "war on drugs" and the prison-industrial complex have got to GO.

[bravenak]

19. Yes they DO!

Two stupid evil ideas.

[octoberlib]

20. K&R! Informative article. I just downloaded Ruth Wilson Gilmore's book, The Golden Gulag,

which was quoted in the article. Thanks for posting and thanks for educating me.




"But these events are variations on old themes that have not gone away since segregation, across time and across America. Read the Kerner commission’s report into the race riots of 1967 and it seems to describe much of what has recently happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, where angry protests followed the death in police custody of a young black man, Freddie Gray. “What white Americans have never fully understood, but what the Negro can never forget,” the report said, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/02/baltimore-rebellion-is-uprising-against-austerity-freddie-gray

[bravenak]

21. That was a great quote for me too.

It puts it all into perspective. Things were designed this way and that's why they are like this. None of this was accidental.