Will Jerry Brown Close Pelican Bay Prison? (tags)
Democratic Governor Jerry Brown is under a federal mandate to release thousands of prisoners from California's overcrowded concentration camp-prisons. Abolishing the entire prison-punishment system and the death penalty would be best, replacing it with job training for decent-paying jobs in one year for those under 50 and lifetime good pensions for those over 50. He could start by closing Pelican Bay Prison, a vicious hellhole that would make Hitler proud.
The Marla Ruzicka Story -- The *Real* Story (tags)
No one who was a threat -- let alone any real threat -- to the U.S. imperialist war machine would ever be gushingly and pervasively celebrated by it, the Congress, the President and the military, no less, and the political establishment's corporate media. Marla Ruzicka -- even posing for pictures on top of tanks and in group hugs with gun-posing American soldiers, let alone using the war and exploiting the misery of the Iraqi people to parlay that into a hoped-for lucrative cushy position inside the Pentagon or State Department, feathering her nest and her new career with military-industrial complex money (yet still a pittance of that spent on the bombs of war) -- served as a willing PR front for that machine. Furthermore, she was willing to collect and *give* that information directly to the US *military*, providing it with, in effect, valuable intelligence on the Iraqi people (how many males and females of which ages, including possible fighting age, in each family, and what their resources and professional/community positions were, perhaps a community critic of the US war, maybe an intellectual, a journalist, a teacher, or a doctor/nurse who could patch up Iraqi wounded resistace fighters, and who in each family might have gotten shot -- perhaps a resistance member? -- by the US military) under the guise of humanitarian relief. Here is what progressive journalist Christian Parenti had to say about the darling of the U.S. imperialist military machine:
BTL:U.S. Wins Battle of Falluja; Critics Call It a "Hollow Victory" (tags)
Interview with Christian Parenti, journalist and author, conducted by Between the Lines' Scott Harris
Behind the Barbed-Wire with Sherman Austin (tags)
Update about the last visit to Sherman.