We are a Nation of Gangsters. Some gangsters wind up in prison. Most of the really dangerous, really powerful gangsters never seem to wind up in prison. Lots of criminals do, though crime and the law seem pretty amorphous these days. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country.
A few weeks ago the Netflix prison show Orange is the New Black won the SAG Award for Best Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series. I've been a SAG Member since 1982, around the Dawn of Trickle-Down and The Slow-Motion Neoliberal Coup. One of the perks is that SAG Members get free DVD screeners of nominated films in the mail in December. They figure for the Television awards voting you can just watch the nominees on TV. I voted for Orange is the New Black even though I have never seen it. The problem is I don't have the time to watch too much of anything these days. I have too many books to read. Well, I'm not the only one who votes for stuff they haven't seen. I think I actually saw half the nominees I voted for. I'm not above voting for someone just because I've liked them in other things, or just because I think they're hot.
I was hired in 1997 to be a "featured extra" in the HBO Original Series OZ, the ground-breaking prison drama, and eventually I would go on to work 26 episodes. I even wound up getting a character name and speaking! Working on the show qualified me to get medical insurance for a while. (Health Insurance: Talk about a racket). My vote for Orange was a nod to the imaginary prison pathos I first started to experience on the set of OZ.
Luke Perry and me on the set of OZ
Our first day on set the group of us that were hired to play the regular identifiable "gang members" settled in and got used to each other and the lay of the land. There were the Italian Mafia, the Black Muslims, the Gang Bangers, the Aryan Skinheads, the Latinos, the Gays, the Bikers and the Christians. I started off being a dangerously fascist Aryan, then they made me a Christian. These days I cannot tell the difference between the two. The early seasons of OZ were filmed in Manhattan over at the Chelsea Market, which is a converted Nabisco warehouse. It was always either too hot or too cold, but at least we got to lie down in the bunks of the prison cells during the interminable waiting periods between scene shoots. The set designers succeeded in depicting a realistic prison, and the props and set pieces were authentic. At first many of us were perplexed about the brand-name on the bars of soap and toothpaste and blankets and other authentic prison accessories. They all had the same name: Bob Barker. Everyone was confused by this and half-expected the game show host to show up. But as it turns out, Bob Barker Industries is one of the key beneficiaries of taxpayer money spent on the Prison-Industrial Complex.
James Kilgore writes in Truthout about the millions made from mass incarceration:
While a host of suppliers have found prisons and jails to be a unique niche, perhaps none has adapted to the new marketplace as masterfully as Bob Barker Industries. Founded in the 1970s and now based in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, Bob Barker (no connection to the former TV game show host) produces a wide range of goods for prisoners and prison staff.
The firm bills itself as a "worldwide leader in delivering innovative products and services to correctional and rehabilitation customers." The company vision: "Transforming criminal justice while honoring God in all we do," captures the divine inspiration behind their profit-making.
Barker's transformation program includes a variety of cheaply made goods for the incarcerated: jumpsuits, sandals, T-shirts, board games, and black-and-white-striped canvas shoes. They also sell steel stools and benches for day rooms and yards...
While production has sapped most of the firm's energy over the past four decades, about two years ago, Bob Barker Industries underwent a process of reflection and added a vice president of social responsibility, tasked with monitoring and improving the company's impact.
Since that time, some changes have taken place, including the installation of solar panels at company headquarters as an energy-saving measure. However, perhaps their most daring venture has been the initiative sparked by Bob Barker, Jr. (son of the company founder) to address recidivism. Based on the newfound company revelation that "incarcerated individuals have value in the eyes of God," the newly minted Bob Barker Foundation has attempted to support a number of rehabilitation initiatives.
In fact, Bob Barker, Jr., in an interview with a North Carolina TV show, said that he "would die a very happy man" if the company could be so successful in combatting recidivism that they would go out of business. Though the company's finances are not public, they earn an estimated $100 million a year in revenue. And despite Bob Barker's vows of self-sacrifice and devotion to ending recidivism, they are not likely to close up shop any time soon.
One hundred million dollars is chump change to the Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE: CXW) with $1.76 billion in revenue. These people have bribed state legislators and governors and in return get contracts that guarantee high levels of prison population. You have a problem with that characterization? Really? Post-Citizens United campaign finance is outright bribery. Let's face it.
CCA are actually running the prison. This is Privatization. They like to call it a "Public-Private Partnership". Whenever anyone says to you, the taxpayer, the words "public-private partnership", hold on to your wallets.
Remember this guy? This Pennsylvania judge sentenced to 28 years for selling children to the private prison? http://www.dailykos.com/...
Have we, together as a nation, slipped into some perverse time warp to some Dickensian
realm?
Well, I guess you've gotta feed the belly of the beast.
Wasn't OZ an accurate representation of the beastly world of American mass incarceration? Didn't we have ex-cons in the cast? Didn't it vividly depict the prisoners' inner horror and outward corruption and violence? Who gets killed? Who gets raped? Who scams anyone they can? Who runs the kitchen? Who runs the laundry? Who is monitoring the shower room? Who tries to negotiate every single moment of breath just to get through the day? Who feeds this beast?
The private prison corporations get a guaranteed minimum amount of prisoners, contractually, so let us make the cops go out and arrest a bunch of underclass lowlifes no one cares about.
Today the horror is so routine and pervasive that now you need a show like Orange is the New Black to render it into comedy, though I might be wrong because I haven't watched it yet. I have a problem making the commitment.
Even in prison, the hierarchy of gangs mirrors the corrupt, immoral, Neoliberal, Market-Driven Horror. The massive maw needs to be fed in a grossly immoral racket perpetrated by a set of Gangsters who corrupt politicians and destabilize society for the sake of profit. You can also add the Merchants of Death in the Military-Industrial Complex to this group of destabilizers.
In the prison of our imagination, Jeremiah Cloutier, Prisoner 00C966, the failed and criminal Christian pastor, played by my buddy Luke Perry, (spoiler alert!) gets buried alive inside a cement wall.
The rest of us are daily imprisoned inside the kleptocratic structures of the obscene legislation purchased from state legislators and created by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. We have all sorts of rackets given legitimacy by serious-sounding "councils" and "think tanks". The Koch Brothers are writing our laws now.
What prison are you in?
Private prisons. Private armies. Private stadiums. Private libraries. Private Parking Meters. Private Education.
The lie they tell you is that they will make things cheaper and more efficient. The opposite is true. Privatization of properly Public economic sectors is a series of rackets perpetrated by the Health Insurance Gang, the Military Weapons Gang, The Oil Gang, the Money Gang. Don't you people get it? They need to get their vig.
How many scams target you as the victim?
How about the scam where the corporation bribes the lawmakers to make a law where the state taxes of their employees are simply credited back to the corporation? As of April 2012, at least 16 states practice this legalized form of theft, according to a report by the organization Good Jobs First. http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/...
Nearly $700 million is getting diverted each year. And it is very unlikely that the affected workers are aware, given that no state requires that the diversion be disclosed on pay stubs.
Where is the money going? To the employers of those workers. A growing number of states are diverting revenue traditionally devoted to funding essential government services to pay for lavish subsidy awards to corporations for job creation or sometimes simply job retention. The practice of redirecting large portions of the state personal income tax (PIT) withholding deducted from paychecks means many workers are, in effect, paying taxes to their boss.
How about the bankster racket where the banks pay their bankers to work in government service, a practice they don't want the public to even know about?
http://www.newrepublic.com/...
How about the racket where the big utility corporations rig their billing so that tiny charges that appear to be taxes are actually just an extra way to suck tons of money out of the sheep-like consumers? Just read David Cay Johnston's books. DCJ has said: "Let me give you a real killer number here. If you can get a law passed to collect a penny a day from everybody in America -- and I show how one industry did this -- if you can get a penny a day from everybody in America, at the end of the year you’ll have over a billion dollars."
We are a nation of gangsters.
There are those who would say that so long as it is legal, then it is okay to do. So long as it is legal... Who makes the laws? Where are the moral standards? Gone. I cannot think of a more immoral act than corrupting the law in order to enslave humans to feed the god of greed.
Now, the god of greed has gone global. The tyranny of the "free market", which is actually rigged, has spawned organisms of deceit across the globe. What is the TPP but a baldly tyrannical attempt to control the world?
A remarkable thing happened a few days ago. I received two interesting envelopes in the mail. One was a residual check for $8.70 for a Pay TV sale of my talking episode in HBO's OZ. The second envelope was from a very dedicated fan, Dale, from New Zealand.
Dear Mr. Love:
Kia Ora, which means hello in Maori. How are you? My name is Dale, I'm a Mum from New Zealand and I'm excited to write to you. I really enjoy watching OZ and you did an awesome job as Harden. Thank you for being a part of the show and entertaining us. You are very talented. I wish you and your family great health and the best of luck in all your future projects.
I understand how busy you must be but it would mean alot if you could personally autograph the enclosed photo-cards and small card to me if possible please? Also find enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope.
Thank you for your hard work, time and for reading this Kiwi gal's letter, it means alot to me.
Sincerely,
Dale
Postal Pathos
What delicious food for my ever-hungry ego! Dale! Such an OZ aficionado! New Zealand must be gobsmacked by the power of this special show of which I was a part!
Crowds of Kiwis surround me shouting "good on ya, mate!" They clap my back and chug beer.
Then I remember the strange unease I felt at my mailbox when I first saw the unusual envelope, par avion, from Palmerston North, around the globe. I jump on the internet and type "autograph scam". You can Google it yourself. You'll see. This particular racket targets actors, writers and musicians. I picture rows of Maori Mums sitting at long tables in front of screens, working down the list of minor and failed actors on the IMDb, neatly writing pleading praise, creating the lure designed to reel in their particular kettle of fish. One actor wound up seeing his autograph on Ebay for one Euro.
I see rows of Nigerian widows of the former Speaker of Parliament writing emails to me begging to hold $24 million for them if I only give them my bank account number.
I see rows of prisoners in America sewing garments for Victoria's Secret. License plates aren't the only things these slaves can make!
http://www.motherjones.com/...
Our entire insane system makes racketeering the central tenet of capitalism. The result is the imprisonment of us all.
But what about the people rotting in real prisons as they fill the quotas that Privatization and the War on Drugs demand? It's best not to think of them. It's better to think about the idea of them, as part of a show of some kind.
It's more entertaining, or distracting, to think of Harden, Prisoner 91H481, played by your buddy Yours Truly. (spoiler alert!) Harden steals Supreme Allah's medical records from the infirmary because Hill, played by my buddy Harold Perrineau, gave him a hundred bucks to do so because he knows Harden does bedpan duty for the ward of HIV cases and knife-wound victims and he has access. People will pay for access to information, you know. The stolen medical records reveal that Supreme Allah is allergic to eggs, thus confirming a fact Hill thought he had overheard at one time.
The stories we tell may be convoluted, but this is a simple business transaction, after all. We need to boost the ratings.
Harden's Curse
So the next day, in our imaginary prison kitchen possibly supplied by Aramark (NYSE: ARMK), with their swill and maggoty fabricated food, Supreme Allah's assassins mix rancid eggs into his porridge, and then he eats it, and blows up with severe asthmatic shock and suffocates to death.
I'm sure Harden didn't think things through. What did he care why Hill wanted the information? Money is money, after all. What does he care for these stinking, vile subhumans, anyway? Let them kill each other. He has, after all, the certainty of his Bible. One day, he will take his country back.
Our world was built upon the sins of genocide and slavery. The real atmosphere of our collective prison is polluted with the cheap cologne of a false, fascistic Christianity masking, ineffectively, the foul gas of greed.