GOP Protection Racket

[razors edge]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/07/25/gop_protection_racket.php

It’s time to burst the bubble. Republicans say they are the party of security and that they are the only ones who can keep us safe. "The United States faces a ruthless enemy—and we need a commander in chief and a Congress who understand the nature of the threat and the gravity that America finds itself in," Karl Rove advised the RNC earlier this year. "President Bush and the Republican Party do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many Democrats."

Nothing could be further from the truth. Republicans are not the party of security. They are the party of fear. From their colorized terrorism alerts to their exaggerated threats of Iraqi WMDs, the Republican party wants us to feel afraid. Their policies are designed to sound tough and transfer funds among friends—not necessarily to keep us safe. If they don’t keep us safe, it’s even better. People will be more scared, pay more money, and vote even redder in the next election. It’s a protection racket.

We saw it first on crime. Conservatives got tough on crime and inaugurated the biggest prison building scheme in world history. Driven by slogans like “three-strikes-you’re-out” and “truth-in-sentencing,” U.S. prison populations have quadrupled since 1980. More than two million Americans wake up behind bars every morning, and one in 15 Americans will spend at least a year in prison during their lifetime. The land of the free and the home of the brave has been opening, on average, three new prisons or jails every month for the past quarter century.

The politics of security are divorced from reality. We build prisons when crime is rising; we build prisons when crime is going down. Crime has been on the decline for the past decade, as the baby boom aged from the crime-prone teens and twenties towards the more sedate forties and fifties—but still we build. Between 1993 and 2002, the collection of states typically labeled Republican increased their rates of incarceration twice as fast as the collection labeled Democratic. But Democratic states showed twice the decline in FBI Index crimes. Something has gone wrong.

[ThomWV]

1. Look To Canada For A Working System nt

[razors edge]

2. Absolutely,

I have worked in Canada, and now live in northern Ohio.