Anti-Job Pro-Freedom Quotes Of The Week 156-161

The future is already here. It is just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson


Total income listed on tax returns grew every year after World War II, with a single one-year exception, until 2001, making the five-year period of lower average incomes and four years of lower total incomes a new experience for the majority of Americans born since 1945.
The White House said the fact that average incomes were smaller five years after the Internet bubble burst “should not surprise anyone.”
The growth in total incomes was concentrated among those making more than $1 million. The number of such taxpayers grew by more than 26 percent, to 303,817 in 2005, from 239,685 in 2000.
These individuals, who constitute less than a quarter of 1 percent of all taxpayers, reaped almost 47 percent of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.
…
Nearly half of Americans reported incomes of less than $30,000…
from
2005 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 Peak
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
New York Times
Published: August 21, 2007


…America's homegrown gulag archipelago, a vast network of jails, prisons and "supermax" tombs for the living dead that, without anyone quite noticing, has metastasized into the largest detention system in the advanced industrial world. The proportion of the US population languishing in such facilities now stands at 737 per 100,000, the highest rate on earth…

In 2002 just 19 percent of the felony sentences handed down at the state level were for violent offenses, and of those only about 5 percent were for murder. Nonviolent drug offenses involving trafficking or possession (the modern equivalent of rum-running or getting caught with a bottle of bathtub gin) accounted for 31 percent of the total, while purely economic crimes such as burglary and fraud made up an additional 32 percent.
from
Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?
By Daniel Lazare, The Nation.
Posted August 20, 2007.


Where the Danes provide their unemployed with up to 80 percent of their previous salary and the Germans provide them with 60 percent, America has deregulated the rich while throwing a growing portion of its working class in jail.
from
Jailing Nation: How Did Our Prison System Become Such a Nightmare?
By Daniel Lazare, The Nation. Posted August 20, 2007.










Freedom itself was attacked this morning, by a faceless coward.
G.W. Bush



In some towns, the prison is the primary employer, and no one wants to give it up.
… Incidentally, our criminal justice system releases prisoners with so few resources that it's a miracle they manage to survive at all. A cynic might say it's another way to ensure that our prisons stay full.
from
Drugs and Prison
Posted by: Urstrly
Aug 20, 2007 5:00 AM