Today, almost everything on Capitol Hill is taken hostage in the partisan war.
Robert Reich: Bain Capital and JPMorgan are parts of the same problem.
Secel Montgomery, left, who is serving a life sentence, takes care of an elder prisoner at the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, California, September 16, 2011. (Photo: Todd Heisler / The New York Times)
Last Friday, the day the NATO 3 were arrested, approximately 35,948 people were arrested across the United States. On Sunday, when at least 45 protesters were arrested at Chicago's NATO summit protests, approximately 35,948 Americans - the number arrested on a daily basis in the US, according to FBI statistics - were handcuffed, read their Miranda rights (maybe), carted off to jail and booked. The plurality of those people were arrested for nonviolent drug crimes. Some of these people will be charged, convicted, prosecuted and jailed. Unlike the NATO 3 (or the Chicago Seven, or the Haymarket Eight), these people will go on to become part of a vast, near-voiceless crowd of 2.3 million incarcerated Americans, most of whom are visible only in the somber mugshots posted to their state's Department of Corrections web site.
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Tanya Guzman-Martinez was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and placed in a detention center for suspected undocumented immigrants. Guzman-Martinez identifies and lives as a woman, but ICE ignored her transgendered status and put her in a male housing unit where she endured "extreme" harassment and abuse at the hands of guards and male detainees.
Singer and activist Tom Morello says it’s his job as a musician “to steel the backbone of people on the front lines of social justice struggles, and to put wind in sails of those struggles.”
Here’s a list of 21 songs that have done just that - from Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land to Public Enemy’s Fight the Power.
