Earlier this week, President Obama broke his own remarkable clemency record, granting an unprecedented 231 commutations and pardons in a single day. Headlines and tweets broadcast the historic tally; on the White House website, a bar graph tracks Obama’s record to date, which has dramatically outpaced that of his predecessors. With a total of 1,176 recipients, the White House boasted, Obama has granted clemency “more than the last 11 presidents combined.”
The president certainly deserves credit for making clemency a priority before leaving office. His efforts are especially laudable in contrast to the lazy rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump, who has cluelessly condemned clemency recipients as “bad dudes.” In reality, to use language Trump might understand, all successful applicants go through a process of extreme vetting: only a fraction of people in federal prison are eligible in the first place, and selections rely on a careful review of each candidate’s history and behavior behind bars. A record of violence, including as a juvenile, is disqualifying.
Those who make the cut are, as the White House put it this week, “individuals deserving of a second chance.” Many have been serving long mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, crimes for which they have shown remorse. Applications list courses completed, prison jobs maintained, records untarnished by disciplinary write-ups. Last spring, Obama highlighted a handful of men and women who “have made the most of their second chances,” describing their ability to leave prison, get a job, and piece their lives back together as “extraordinary.”
With his legacy and the politics of crime in mind, it makes sense that Obama would be cautious with his commutations, while amplifying the success stories. Yet there’s something disingenuous in the now-familiar rhetoric peddled by the White House with every clemency announcement, which repeatedly tells us we are a “nation of second chances.” Even within the narrow scope of Obama’s clemency initiative — and putting aside his treatment of immigrants and whistleblowers — this is wishful thinking at best. As Obama himself has written in his congratulatory letters to clemency recipients, “thousands of individuals have applied for commutation, and only a fraction of these applications are approved.” Before the latest round of pardons and commutations, Obama had rejected nearly 14,000 clemency applications. On the Department of Justice website, which tracks the rejections, the staggering list of names includes Ferrell Scott, whose application was denied on November 29. Scott is serving life without parole for pot offenses — precisely the kind of draconian sentence clemency exists to address.
Obama’s clemency project was ostensibly born of the recognition that, as then-Attorney General Eric Holder put it in 2013, “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.” At the time, Holder promised the Obama administration was “fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes.” But when it comes to the president’s pardon power — the one place where Obama could directly address the problem — there are few signs of a transformation.
Instead, the White House has promoted a story about exceptionalism: The president has proven exceptionally merciful and the clemency recipients are uniquely deserving — even extraordinary. If the former is true, it is only because we have set the bar so low. As for the latter, it is certainly no small thing to survive — even thrive — while serving some of the harshest prison sentences in the world. But praising such men and women as exceptional diminishes the vast human potential that exists behind bars. As one clemency recipient told me last month, recalling an exchange with the former White House pardon attorney, “I have a list of names of people I would like to see come home. But there are even more people who I’ve never met. To give a list of names would exclude too many people.”
On November 29, a coalition of activists, legal scholars, and attorneys published a letter urging Obama to take much bolder action, to commute the sentences of whole categories of people whose prison terms are plainly unjust. He could, for instance, prioritize the cases of people who should have received retroactive relief under the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which reduced (but did not abolish) the obscene sentencing disparities for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. “There is bipartisan agreement that pre-Fair Sentencing Act crack sentences are unjust and have disproportionately affected people of color,” the authors wrote, “but there is no mechanism for addressing that injustice outside of clemency.” Whether Obama will act on such ideas remains to be seen. But the letter exposed the fallacy of framing clemency as a “second chance” to be bestowed upon a small number of “deserving” individuals. If the underlying sentences were senseless and cruel to begin with — and if clemency is the only way to grant relief — why has the White House made it so hard for these same people to get out of prison?
This is just one of a nagging set of larger questions highlighted by Obama’s clemency initiative. In an era in which so many politicians now recognize the need to correct the excesses of mass incarceration, why should the burden fall on incarcerated people? How is it reasonable to require people in prison — the most disempowered individuals in society, living in state-imposed environments of extreme violence — not only to survive but to excel in order to win relief from a punishment the government itself has admitted was wrong? Should someone serving a draconian sentence under a racist sentencing scheme really have to work so hard to prove their worth when it was the state that robbed them of their humanity?
On the same day activists published their letter exhorting Obama to expand his clemency efforts, the American Civil Liberties Union released a report titled “False Hope: How Parole Systems Fail Youth Serving Extreme Sentences.” Documenting how states routinely deny release to those eligible for parole, the ACLU offers numerous profiles of men and women sent to grow up (and in many cases, to die) in prison, whose efforts to prove their value as adults have been repeatedly rebuffed. The stories are all too familiar. They show how poverty, neglect, trauma, and mental illness factor into the lives of young people arrested for violent crimes. They also show how harshly we continue to punish such youth, first with decades in prison, and then with repeated refusals to grant parole, no matter how much they change in the years that follow — or how much evidence shows that older people “age out” of crime. People of color are seen as even less amenable to rehabilitation. Today, despite the wide rejection of the “superpredator” myth, state parole boards show very little mercy to people serving sentences that grew out of such racist hysteria.
As with Obama’s clemency initiative, the problem is largely political: Nobody wants to be the person to free an individual who might go out and commit another crime, even if it has been decades since the original offense — and even if the sentence was disproportionate to begin with. What’s more, the ACLU notes, by focusing on the original crime, “parole board members may never know about the success stories: people convicted of serious crimes who, once released, have become successful community leaders supporting themselves and their families, who grew up and moved beyond the worst thing they ever did.”
One bright spot of Obama’s clemency initiative has been in these very kinds of success stories – publicized in the press and by the White House itself. But in the absence of a deeper rethinking of what we consider a second chance, such anecdotes are no match for generations of fear mongering that has entrenched fear of violent criminals into our very psyche, even at times when crime has hit historic lows.
Just a few days after the ACLU report on parole, the Washington Post unveiled a front-page, four-part investigative series called Second Chance City, which examined a D.C. law called the Youth Rehabilitation Act. Passed in 1985, the law aimed to give judges discretion in handling cases involving young defendants — including by circumventing mandatory minimums — to allow deserving young people to avoid harsh punishment and, ultimately, expunge their record. The Post series raised alarm, finding dozens of cases where beneficiaries of the law had gone on to commit new, often violent offenses, and describing the crimes in dramatic detail. Exhibit A was a black man in his early 20s facing trial for rape, and whose record included eight previous arrests and stints in state custody dating back to his teens. “There’s simply no indication here that Mr. Pitt is amenable to rehabilitation,” a judge told the man’s defense attorney at one point, and the Post would seem to agree.
The series included two large mugshots of the young man in question. Yet absent from the series were figures to contextualize the cases highlighted by the Post, making it impossible to measure the law’s failures against its successes. Indeed, while the YRA may well be flawed in its implementation, the man profiled by the Post could just as easily be considered a poster child for the utter inability of the criminal justice system to address pervasive problems such as mental illness, poverty, and neglect — the very factors so common among youth who cycle in and out of prison. Although the Post noted that the man “began psychiatric treatment at age 13,” the portrait that emerges is of a predator coddled by the courts, free to victimize his community because of an overly lenient justice system.
Most counterproductive was the framing of the series, placed squarely as a counterpoint to efforts at prison reform on Capitol Hill. “At a time when the Obama administration and Congress are working to ease ‘mandatory minimum’ sentencing guidelines for non-violent offenses, in part because of concerns that such laws have unjustly imprisoned large numbers of African-Americans,” the authors write, “D.C. law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about the number of repeat violent offenders on the streets.”
The media should certainly scrutinize attempts at reform, pointing out where they fail. But the Post series was a reminder of how quickly we revert back to old narratives about crime, to convince ourselves that more imprisonment will keep us safe. With the real fights over prison reform happening at the state and local level — over things like the Youth Act — any efforts by the president were always going to be limited. But if the pendulum is to swing back toward a more punitive era, as many fear it will under Trump, Obama must do as much as he can now to preserve the legacy he has carved out.
But beyond Obama — and if we are to make a dent in mass incarceration — Americans must also begin to think much bigger than his administration ever did. We should refuse to let the same government that gave us mandatory minimums define what counts as a “second chance.” We must stop letting our leaders — whether the president or a parole board — divest their responsibility to remedy draconian punishments by placing the burden on people who never should have received them in the first place. Ending mass incarceration will require mercy, but fundamentally it is about justice. And the state has not even begun to account for its own mistakes.
Top photo: Barack Obama, then a U.S. senator from Illinois, looks out the window of Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, August 20, 2006, on Robben Island, South Africa.
Obama’s “clemency” and his supposed interest in reforming America’s for-profit prison system is a transparent and half hearted PR exercise. It’s a poor attempt to redeem a legacy that looks more like George Bush’s third and fourth terms than anything like the hope and change promised in the 2008/2012 presidential campaigns.
What some commenters here “fail to understand” is that there are more trumped-up, exaggerated and false charges routinely brought against citizens, than real crimes being committed. So when the accused plead out, they are pleading guilty to lesser charges only to avoid lengthy and mandatory sentences which they know they can’t beat, regardless of their guilt or innocence.
The prison/justice system is broken because it’s profitable. At an estimated turnover of $74 billion per annum, it eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. It’s profitable for the police departments, the for-profit prisons, for counties, for states and for thousands of secondary businesses many of whom employ prisoners in shoddy and unsafe working conditions, paying them a disgraceful 25 cents an hour.
Unqualified judges are elected nationwide on the basis of fear inducing tv ads, fooling the public into believing that tough sentencing will prevent crimes, when deeper economic and social problems like poverty, racism, education drop out rates, unemployment, and untreated mental illness have already been proven to correlate directly with increased crime rates.
Coincidentally, these are issues that the corporate media, politicians and bureaucrats aren’t interested in solving, hence the prison industrial complex emerged, concealing but not hindering societal ills created by unchecked capitalism, corruption and greed.
In July 2015, Obama visited the El Reno Federal Correction Institution in Oklahoma, where he met with six inmates serving time for drug offenses. One of those inmates pled out to a crime he didn’t commit. He was jailed at the time of the alleged crime. It’s more than improbable that if you’re already incarcerated, you’re simultaneously committing crimes on the outside. But not to the justice system in America, and apparently not to prosecutors who rely on convictions to advance their careers, too often built on the backs of the disenfranchised, the poor and minorities.
The Innocence Project estimates there could be up to 140,000 innocent people imprisoned at any given time. That number is probably a vast underestimate. From an article published in 2008: “Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.”
The uninformed here, can opine about those serving lesser sentences due to plea bargaining, or make comments such as “They CHOSE to break the law” but that doesn’t change the fact that there are vast swathes of people incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit, including those convicted or charged from false results on field drug kit tests used by police departments.
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/unreliable-unchallenged-police-field-drug-tests-innocent-people-prison
These drug kits almost always produce false positives on innocuous substances like powdered sugar, a Tylenol PM, or even no compound at all.
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/marijuana-advocacy/
There’s only one reason that America jails 25% of the world’s inmates, yet its total population is only 5%: Money.
Wow, Obama is doing something I really respect. Too little too late.
To quote Will Rogers: We have the best politicians money can buy. And, to paraphrase Will Rogers: We have the best judicial system money can buy.
Obama gives clemency to his future body guards.
In a Renewed America, Obamie the Commie needs an entourage of all the criminal friends he can buy.
Extremely well written, Ms Segura. The unwarranted sentences that can be-, are-, and have been legally leveled against Americans makes one question the basic semantics of “clemency”.
Ferrell Scott: I’m not saying this guy hasn’t already served enough time – likely he has (9 years) based on my review of his paperwork. However your article leaves out the fact that he has had cocaine charges, multiple other drug offenses (one for possession over over 1000kg of pot), federal theft offense, and two weapons charges.
Also of note, it is the same government that progressives can’t seem to get enough of that has created a criminal justice system that is utterly broken. When you give power to politicians, be ready to take the good with the bad.
the same government and politicians bought by private interests, you mean. when you stop regulating bribery of government officials, this is what happens.
Nothing is right . Most of American worried about own future and Trump playing with words and USA future do not know what should do! He trying to have experances cabinet to advice him also able to run the country but it is a dark clude which covered whole USA and nations also worried about future of himself too.we didn’t see any positive action of trump and his words is not worthy and what ever he said all changed .i am sure LIERS cheaters gamblers and druggies can not quite and soon he will be scrow himself and country .Time will shows who will be new trump.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
I do not understand this. My comments show very late, and a full thrived in Zaid Jilani’s thread never show at all. I’m not the only one, by far. What is going on?
“full thrived” should read “full third”
Jack Green is a hasbara troll
Every point he’s raised below comes straight from a hasbara manual, and has been recited here, often verbatim, by him many times — and rebutted almost as many times. He does not post in any but Israel-related threads. It’s his sole purpose for being here.
Max Blumenthal has addressed the common occurrence of the hasbara troll, found all over the Internet.
Jack Green’s nonsense about Israel and the apartheid issue is a topic I copiously address — with documentation — in the thread I link above. Do a ctrl F on my name in that thread.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the world.
*also, fwiw, I’ve noticed subsequent comment(s) (ie. more than one (1) in a 24hr period) at TI can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours (or longer!) to post. I assume it is an automated system designed to limit anyone from hogging/flaming the conversation… such as it is. **”refresh” seems to help speed things along, but I wouldn’t swear by it.
Don Siegelman should be one of the first pardoned, or is Obama afraid of Carl Rove?
Hello, me again—
Seems to be a bit slow article wise. This is a new report from commondreams …
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/26/under-cover-christmas-obama-establishes-controversial-anti-propaganda-agency
As if there isn’t already enough to worry about…
Test.
What I was able to scan through of the article was quite good.
I REALLY applaud the points of Fellow Citizen and Patricia Williams.
ff–o snap!
ff– o snap!
first… free leonard peltier.
then prosecute the guy who released marc rich.
And, still, no clemency for Leonard Peltier….incredible.
“Nazis were executed for precisely what Washington is doing today.”
– Paul Craig Roberts
Exactly what is “Washington” doing today for which Nazis were executed?
Cities don’t “do.”
People act; cities just sit there.
And which Nazis were executed for doing precisely what?
A few Nazis were executed after a trial and after a bloody war. Many other Nazis, most others, were not executed. I don’t know about the Nazis captured by the Russians. The Russians arbitrarily executed people Stalin didn’t like so I suppose many Nazis were executed by the Russians for the “crime” of being a Nazi. But if that’s the standard — executing people for their political affiliation — then welcome to a horrible new reality.
I hope Vladmir Putin’s version of “justice” — executing political opponents — doesn’t arrive in Washington in January in guise of Putin admirer Donald Trump.
That would really suck.
Believe me.
well, noeliberals and neoconservatives give orders to commit war crimes, like some nazis did.
> Cities don’t “do.” People act; cities just sit there.
that is really stupid
I applaud the POTUS action and hope that it restores a little of his self tattered legacy, and hope that he uses the next 4 weeks to do THOUSANDS more pardons and acts of clemency. In particular, he should pardon Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and especially political prisoner Leonard Peltier. As well as the huge majority of non-violent drug offenders, that he himself was, but didn’t get caught (Bill Clinton too, very likely W. Bush too).
Obama only cares for his legacy now, not for justice – so don’t hold your breath waiting for him to do the right thing.
I’d like to hear the reason that Leonard Peltier is not one of those released. Perhaps he has not shown enough ‘contrition’ for being scape goated.
It’s the American state that should be showing contrition!! It could begin with the 700 FBI agents that paraded around the White House in response to then outgoing President Clinton’s planned pardon of Peltier, and include Clinton himself for his spinelessness when confronted with the protest.
> How is it reasonable to require people in prison — the most disempowered individuals in society, living in state-imposed environments of extreme violence — not only to survive but to excel in order to win relief from a punishment the government itself has admitted was wrong?
great question. if the sentence is unjust, nothing else should matter; the convict’s behavior in prison should be irrelevant. but people are always looking for ways to justify the mistakes they’ve made and the evil they’ve knowingly committed
Test.
British surveillance operations targeted the French businessman. Beyond France, the disclosures highlight the U.K.’s extensive spying operations across Africa. It is not a good news for England. I understand that any country does not think positive about another country.
What you fail to take into consideration is that the many of people in prison on drug charges are there after a plea bargain wherein they pled guilty to a crime and accepted their punishment. This process of plea bargaining allows those who were guilty of violent offenses to have those charges dismissed in exchange for their guilty plea to a lesser charge of possession. So when We are told that these prisoners being let out are non-violent we really don’t know if we are getting the whole story.
You obviously think the president has nothing better to do than sit around reviewing pardon requests. I would agree that far too many non-violent offenders are spending far too much time in prison, but let’s not forget that they are there for a reason. They CHOSE to break the law. Now they are suffering the consequences. Whether or not those consequences are fair or not is another matter and maybe you should work to change those. As far as the president is concerned, if he was to personally review every request for a pardon he wouldn’t have time to do anything else, like you know, run the country.
I think President Obama is doing a very good thing by granting all the pardons, but he should realize that he should not leave us to their mercy while he himself enjoys secret service protection from all the convicted criminals. In line with all his pardons he must renounce his privileges and let himself be under the same level of protection as the rest of us.
I guess you missed the part that said that they cannot have any record of violence for consideration of clemency, even as juveniles (Hillary’s “super-predators”) or are you being threatened by pot smokers in your neighborhood.
Good point, would have been truly excellent had it not been a fake assurance. Maybe Hillary Clinton can qualify for pardon on these grounds, but it’ll be safer to lock her up.
We can be dismayed that clemency has not been as wide nor as sweeping under Obama as we’d hoped but get ready for the clemency door to be slammed shut and locked with the incoming Oligarchs.
Maybe not. It’s a law they can’t change, and that many of them will need to avail themselves of near the end of Trump’s term.
One day I was involved in social work presenting no cost services in a prison, which the inmates could take advantage of upon release. In case they lost the paper I left for them I suggested to them an easy way to memorize how to google the services.
One of the inmates said to me “You do not understand if somebody gives us something like this while we are in here we hold on to it”. I was both touched by his words, and like never before was made aware of the meaning of hope.
We all know how horribly the U.S. ranks in placing their people in prisons, and it is one of the greatest failures of our society. The phrase “Make America great again” is an oxymoron as long as the inside of a prison cell is what we so widely present to so many of our less fortunate people.
Luckily you are obviously a compassionate AND observant person. So many church going folks go to Kairos or other religiously based prison visitor programs and swallow whole the propaganda that is fed us…You noticed that NOT all prisoners are violent, dangerous, ungrateful, mentally ill or illiterate. I was a Federal Drug prisoner for 10 years and I met a LARGE number of kind, normal women …who had made a dangerous error in judgement..often by helping a husband or relative without quite grasping the implications
Women without records are at a disadvantage over men as it is when it comes to things like equal pay, then after serving time it is very hard to find meaningful employment. It is insane that on top of these challenge inmates often come out of prisons facing fines and fees. Some of the probation systems have been privatized and the paroles pay stiff monthly fees for things like ankle monitors of which they have to pay for out of meager minimum wage salaries.
Some people really do overpay for their mistakes while others like the most amoral banksters whom raided our financial system in terms of $17 trillion to hold up their last Ponzi scheme, which ruined the lives of so many everyday citizens, go on to live lives of luxury and are honored with appointments to the highest offices in the land.
Liliana beautifully wrote:
“Should someone serving a draconian sentence under a racist sentencing scheme really have to work so hard to prove their worth when it was the state that robbed them of their humanity?”
”Ending mass incarceration will require mercy, but fundamentally it is about justice. And the state has not even begun to account for its own mistakes.”
Yes, mistakes in the likes of a society that sanctifies greed, consumerism, complete political corruption, represented government of the elite, corporate welfare scoundrels, adulation of the thieving haves, and a complete lack of passion for those whom need to have some sense of hope and justice directed to their spirits and hearts.
It all needs to be placed right side up, and that will require major changes in the way our society educates, messages, cares for the sickly, selects work that enhances our being rather than oppresses it, provides proper housing, establishes rational transportation, and allows the constant stimulation of creative thinking through the arts and free expression, which will challenge the narrative of those oppressors existing in a realm of amoral fantasy.
You forgot the Golden Rule of this society (he who has the gold makes the rules). The ruling class is not going to allow laws to be enacted that criminalize the regular activities of its members.
Using pardons to undo wholesale laws on the books retroactively – no matter how bad those laws – is simply too far a road for an executive office already far too powerful.
FTR…..Some black leaders were in favor of “the obscene sentencing disparities for crimes involving crack versus powder cocaine. ” IIRC the argument was, crack was destroying their communities, and they wanted to put a stop to it.
Happy holidays, everyone.
I’m thinking they were in favor of harsh punishment for crack but I can’t imagine them being in favor of the disparity in sentencing since it would hardly help clean up their communities.
No pardon or clemency for Snowden or Manning, certainly no justice there.
I don’t disagree with anything in this column, but another large concern that the column failed to mention is political prisoners like Leonard Peltier and Mumi Abu Jamal. Drugs should be legal and nonviolent blue collar crime should not bring long sentences, but people should also not be prosecuted for political actions.
I agree. Our political prisoners say so much about Obama’s legacy – from Peltier to Snowden to Aaron Schwarz.
Mumia was convicted of murdering a police officer. He is not a political prisoner.
agree with everything except your contention that Jamel act should be pardoned. He killed a cop who was giving his brother a traffic ticket. The evidence is overwhelming. Anyone can call anything a political act, it doesn’t make it so.
The evidence against Mumia Abu Jamal is not only not “overwhelming,” it relies on the words of cops, who are liars.
Nonsense , the evidence relies on the bullets that killed the cop matching Jamal’s gun.
Not to mention the crack addict who, as an informant worked with the D.A. to get a conviction. In the mean time Mumia is denied medical treatment for his problems. Fcuk the so called justice handed to him.
Beside, whether someone was guilty is not relevant to getting a pardon. The idea that because he allegedly shot a damn cop he shouldn’t be pardoned is disgusting.
That psycho Roof who murdered those people in the church in SC, thought he was commiting a political act. How would you feel about a pardon for him?
Person for person blacks are the overwhelming winner as the most criminal race on the planet. Obanana is their great black hope to set them free from paying the price for their criminality. He is a disgrace, but then again he is black.
I know you’re doing your best with your very limited intellect. Keep on keepin’ on.
NOT TRUE.
They are the most criminalised, penalised, deprived race.
But the record of abused persons are palestinians who are regularly murdered and robbed by the israelis.
meanwhile your comment puts a stain of ugly on whatever race you pretend to represent.
Your mother is the biggest criminal the human species has ever endured . She had you !
Ugly. Very ugly.
Great story, Liliana Segura.
When you get a blood transfusion, blac or any color works and accepted.
You are a mean person.
The two atom bombs, depleted uranium, Agent Orange, nuclear submarines, B-21s, ICBMs, drone warfare, the Holocaust?
Wow those persons of color sure do get around.
The bitter joke is that if they were the criminals you claim they are, you would likely respect them.
fake
Your comment indicts you, not those imprisoned. You imprisoned yourself in your warped and closed mind holding its doors firmly shut from within. Given your pen name and comment here, there is only the conclusion that it reflects a very sad, lonely, and miserable life.
The State doesn’t rob anyone of anything.
The State is an illusion, a fiction, a fabrication, a creation of cultural biases perpetuated by lip-flapping grifters (i.e., “politicians”), various commercial factions, academics and polemicists. The State bears absolutely no resemblance to that originally envisioned by Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton et al.
Those who work for the State actually work for the political flim-flammers (only nominally tied to voters) who create State jobs to solve one political problem or another. As long as commercial interests predominate, people are nothing more than commodities — branded and marketed by these same politicians who generalize, stereotype, demonize, scapegoat and ultimately betray the ideals manifest in the Constitution.
The entire system is rotten to the core. Voters don’t matter, rights count for nothing, representatives represent those who pay them, media scoops the scum from the surface of the swamp (calling it “news”) and the legal system — once a shining example of evidence and morality — sorts people like a factory conveyor belt designed to sort eggs or recyclables.
Prisoners aren’t delivered to their cells because of a design flaw. The system only works as long as it has raw materials — people — from which profits can be extracted. Lack of a living wage, drug laws, law enforcement extortion schemes (see Ferguson MO for example), tax policies, for-profit detainment businesses, and lack of social spending all combine for the same purpose: Revenue. It isn’t a coincidence that the immoral and enormous incarceration rates in America parallel the immoral and enormous concentration of wealth in America. The latter demands the former like hunger demands bread.
Obama should be called the President of Grand Gestures — he is quite adept at doing nothing while seeming to do something praiseworthy. He is like a doctor treating the Black Plague. Sure, he saves a few (or claims he has), but the disease remains as virulent as ever.
The worse news?
His replacement is a flea infested rat bringing with him a horde of his plague carrying brethren.
openly unpretentious “flea infested rat bringing” which was people’s choice based on all other rotten to the core, flea infested theatrical options they had …
it seems to be systemic
RCL
Hahahaha …
Trump Tower.
Trump University.
Trump Steaks.
Trump Vodka.
Trump Casino.
Donald J. Trump Collection (Trump Fashions)
Trump Jet.
Trump Magazine.
Do you even know what “unpretentious means?
The last word I’d use to describe Trump is “unpretentious.” Okay maybe the second to the last word, (the last word being “smart.”) But still this guy is as humble and unpretentious as bling on a rapper.
It’s hilarious that anyone could describe the grandiose guy with a comb-over from hell as unpretentious.
As we will discover, the only thing Trump is good at is failure. He buys politicians with his dead daddy’s money, pays no tax (thanks hirelings), pays lawyers to stiff people and then bullshits his way into calling his cheating “success.”
It was said of George Bush, “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.”
Donald Trump bought third base from Steinbrenner, hung it on his wall and claims it as proof of his success.
I hope you enjoy sad disillusionment.
You’ve got a lot of it heading your way.
Well, I think I do and BTW what I said was: –openly unpretentious- mostly speaking about his manners and political projections (which is what the political establishment, the status quo and the U.S. viscerally hate about him). Compare him to Obama or the Clintons even though they don’t claim a building in the center of Manhattan as their home.
Yes, he has a line of underwear under his name, but he is not pretending not to be a “narcissist @ssh0l3″. He, very evidently, is one! He is true or much, much more true than the rest of the pack.
RCL
He is true or much, much more true to his sh!t than the rest of the pack
If by openly unpretentious you mean rude, crude, impulsive, dismissive of consequences, and politically incorrect, then yes, Donald Trump is “openly unpretentious.”
If considering other’s rights, feelings, validity as human beings, and being cognizant of consequences counts as the opposite, then I’m all for the opposite of “openly unpretentious.” I don’t scream at my opponents. I don’t swindle my employees. I don’t make grandiose promises. I don’t threaten war for random acts of defiance, I don’t mistake the actions of a few zealots as an indictment of an entire religion and I don’t blame an entire national heritage for the criminal acts of a few members of that heritage.
Do you see my point?
Blunt may be a positive trait in a movie critic or a crime boss; it is not a trait I want to see in a president.
Truthful and blunt are not synonyms — otherwise we’d hear oaths in court as, “I swear that the evidence that I shall give shall be blunt, entirely blunt, and nothing but blunt, so help me ,,, um … believe me.”
There is absolutely nothing “openly unpretentious” about Trump’s blustering grandiosity and babbling cluelessness.
You can put lipstick and a wig on him, but he’s still a squealing Trump.
++
His replacement is a flea infested rat bringing with him a horde of his plague carrying brethren.?
or he is asking those wealthers to do something right and good for a change
More silliness from the dumbstruck gulls.
Here’s NPR:
Yet you claim the group of people least likely to help others, most likely to pillage the economy, most likely to hire accountants and retain off-shore bankers, and those — like Trump — who’ve avoided paying taxes for decades are suddenly going to change???
That is more absurd than calling Trump “unpretentious.”
You’ve given us a bloated monster.
At least don’t pretend you don’t know exactly what Trump is all about.
Enjoy the coming catastrophes.
At least it promises to be spectacular.
[voice of arrogant, deluded Trump supporter]
“Well, now that HRC and the democratics™ are out, we can rebuild the political system to be pure and free™ !”
…yeah, that’ll be great!
just like the war after the next? …. built with sticks and stones.
oh… and do us a solid and “Drain the Swamp”
unless it’s no longer a good slogan. Don’t want to offend the predacious.
Happy Holidaze
Looking forward to the Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz, or will it be a modern version of Nabucco?! It’s likely the only thing that will set whistleblowers free any time soon… Little & big brother both approve. Happy Holidays to the team at TI, Jacob Price.