Jim Crow had a Bastard Child and it's name is the War on Drugs

Did you know that more African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850?

In the above speech, Michelle Alexander argues persuasively we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial segregation has been replaced by mass incarceration as a system of social control.

Michelle Alexander is a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator. She won a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship and now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and subsequently directed the Civil Rights Clinics at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. Alexander is a former law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, and has appeared as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is her first book.

The above video was recorded at New York's Riverside Church on May 21, 2011. More info, reading, and video links about this issue are below the fold.

Webster Tarpley talks U.S. v Pakistan with Kevin Barrett

Great stuff from Webster Tarpley, American's foremost truth-teller regarding U.S. Foreign Policy. You won't hear this kind of information on the alphabet networks.

Click to hear interview

Commentary: Dick Fitzwell talks Weinergate

CLICK FOR MP3 OF COMMENTARY

In this commentary, Not Ready for Prime Time News chief anchorman, Dick Fitzwell, gives his perspective on the media sensation known as 'Weinergate.' Also included with the following commentary is some behind the scenes banter between Mr. Fitzwell and LansingandBeyond.com Operations Manager, Doug Warren.

A Message for the Youth (or the Young at Heart)

Are you bored with school, your job, life in general?

Are you . . .

Turned Off?

Tuned Out?

Then maybe it is time to Drop Out

Now, dropping out doesn't mean you stop learning. In fact, it means that your learning has just begun.

Go find a library and read . . . a lot.

Maybe find an older mentor, or two, or three.

Ask lots of questions. 'Pick their brains.'

Listen. Absorb their lessons and advice.

Get on with some REAL learning.

Learn how to build a house, fix your car, grow a garden.

Learn how to skin a buck . . . and run a trotline.

Learn how to provide for yourself and those you care about. It's the kind of learning that you cannot - will not - get from an establishment school.

It's the kind of learning you can turn to when life gets tough.

It's the kind of learning that can keep you out of jail and/or the morgue.

Turn off the T.V. . . . Tune in Your Brain.

Start today to begin gathering real knowledge . . . real knowledge that you can use to build a real future.

A future that is on your terms . . . rather than the terms that society steers you toward.

It's your destiny . . . and there is no reason why you shouldn't be in control of it.

Memory Hole History: Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 31, 1921

The deadliest 'race riot' in American history didn't occur in Detroit or Los Angeles and wasn't even started by 'Negroes.' This is the history that you weren't taught in your favorite government school.

Brought to you by TheRoot.com

J.B. Stradford, the son of a freed Kentucky slave, rose to prominence in Oklahoma during the early 1900s as one of the key developers of the all-black Tulsa enclave Greenwood. A lawyer and businessman, Stradford owned the 65-room hotel that sat right in the heart of the thriving community that would later become known as "the Black Wall Street."

But in a single day, all of that would change. On May 31, 1921, the arrest of a young black man on a questionable charge of assaulting a young white woman touched off the deadliest race riot in U.S. history. Whites charged through the community in retaliation, leaving an estimated 300 people dead, another 10,000 black residents homeless and 35 city blocks in ruin.

My fellow Michiganders: Which side of history will you be on?

As much as I hoped it wouldn’t be the case last November. It appears that Governor Rick Snyder is nothing more than a velvet-gloved austerity whore hell bent on engineering an IMF-style dismantling of Michigan’s government and economy. It’s time for true liberals and conservatives to wake up and unite against the systematic destruction of Michigan’s economy, resources, Constitution and rule of law.

I am pleased to see, in the funny and serious serious links that follow, I am not alone in this belief.

The Tenfold Path to Guts, Solidarity and the Defeat of the Corporate Elite

A very good primer on how to fight America's corporate takeover at Truthout.org by Bruce E. Levine. - D.W.

Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.

Read the rest at Truth-out.org