BK: Slavery only happened in a human context that spans millennia. Once human beings, or a portion of them, left the circle of life and began to see Planet Earth as "theirs" to exploit, the permission to exploit (granted by the new, patriarchal God the Father) extended beyond the plants, animals and natural resources to our fellow human beings as well. This "permission to exploit" is the force that made slavery possible and it remains as viable in American society, if not global society, as ever. The civil war shut down the legal concept of slavery, the legalization of the denial of basic rights to a particular class of humans, but the will to exploit simply reorganized and created new legal precepts, such as the Jim Crow laws, which lasted for a century. Fitrakis and Wasserman point out that the "war on drugs" followed quickly in the footsteps of the civil rights laws that smashed Jim Crow. Now we have an American gulag that rivals Stalin's. The prison system is yet another way to create second-class, exploitable citizens, who lack the right to vote and give their input to the creation of the social order.
JB: Civil Rights litigator, Michelle Alexander, wrote about this back in 2010, in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. We have the very dubious distinction of being #1 in the world with the largest percentage of our citizens behind bars. And that prison population is disproportionately people of color. The imbalance continues even after the former prisoners are released. In many states, and particularly in the South, convicted felons never regain the right to vote, even after they have successfully served their time. This has a huge impact on our society, but also on our elections, both local and national. Can you talk about this a bit, Bob?
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press, 2010
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BK: We have the largest prison population in the world -- it's insane. It does not create a safe world, but it does wreck families, shatter lives and consume an enormous chunk of the state and federal budget. And of course, as you say, and as Michelle Alexander says, it's racist. So while it doesn't create a safe world, it does accomplish the goal of disenfranchising people of color. It's part of the leash the U.S. puts around the concept of democracy. The have-nots of the world are characterized as irresponsible; thus, our governing systems need to be protected from their reckless will. My belief is that the opposite is true. If we had a true democracy -- the kind Wasserman and Fitrakis envision in their book -- and the will of "the masses" really had the power to shape our world, my belief, as per a famous bumper sticker of several decades ago, is that the Pentagon would have to hold bake sales to build its weapons but the public schools would have all the textbooks they need. Another thought about the prison system and the concept of punishment vs. healing: This is what restorative justice is all about, as we talked about in an earlier interview. In a punishment-based system, the state asks only "who did it?" when a crime has been committed. In a saner world, the state would ask: What and who were harmed? What must be done to set things right? If only that were our priority! I think "the masses" would prefer such a system, but those in power need to maintain the profitable dysfunctionality of the present system.
JB: And I just read that AG Sessions is well on his way to revving up the prison mills, reversing the trend in the opposite direction. But let's get back to our elections. In what other ways has Jim Crow reared its ugly head and impacted who can vote?
BK: In the book, Fitrakis and Wasserman talk about five Jim Crows -- that is to say, five exploitative and dehumanizing ways the US government has practiced disenfranchisement. We've discussed three of them: slavery, the Jim Crow era after the Civil War and the prison-industrial complex/war on drugs. What they call the fourth Jim Crow is US electoral shenanigans abroad: the extraordinary number of countries we've intervened in to rig elections and remove leaders deemed troublesome to our interests. The authors describe the CIA, for instance, as having "a long history of overturning elections and stripping mostly non-white nations of their right to self-rule." The fifth Jim Crow is the use of the same election-rigging tactics and "contempt for the democratic process" at home: from electronic vote hacking to various forms of vote suppression. Those in power have always feared the anger of groups that have been cheated and repressed, and they know that in order to stay in power they have to limit those groups' ability to vote, in any way they can.
JB: Rumors of Russian meddling have sparked unprecedented interest, concern and dismay about cyberhacking. But there has been lots of evidence of election manipulation since 2000. What will it take to break through the media's superficial and misleading coverage and educate the public about how our elections have been derailed and what it means? Can it be done or are we destined to look on impotently as the last vestiges of democracy circle the drain? Or am I simply overdramatizing the seriousness of the situation?
BK: I have no simple answers about this. The mainstream media has a long history of sucking up to power as opposed to speaking truth to it. In the cyber era, the mainstream, corporate media doesn't have a monopoly on what is called news, but they still control a huge chunk of the American public's information flow. They shape opinion and attitude not so much by reporting outright lies, though that happens, but by minimizing the context in which a breaking story is occurring. There may or may not be some validity to the Russiagate tease, but of course it's never reported in the context of US electoral manipulation and outright leadership removal abroad. Nor is it reported in the context of the DNC's attempts to kill the Bernie Sanders campaign, which is what the alleged Russia hacking was all about. The media, of course, never challenged the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq -- and arguments against this invasion were relegated to the margins. This strikes me as a war crime. I don't know the answer to the question, "what do we do about it?" I'll keep writing about it as long as I can. The truth always finds its way out eventually.
JB: Anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
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