Banned
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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
Okay, so this isn't just about DUI, so I guess this isn't just about New Jersey, either. So, is it about the Fourth Amendment, then?
This could be interesting. Let's focus on this pre-revolutionary amendment within the context of post-9/11 America. There is a lot to discuss here. So, we have a topic of privacy and government intervention via policing and court orders. In this case, it is DUI and the issue of forced blood samples.
But even before these recent cases, we also have the issue of suspended rights to privacy with illegal wiretaps in the context of counter terrorism. Personally, I'd be more afraid of wiretaps and other forms of tech-based government surveillance than I would be about blood samples if I were to be caught while driving impaired. (Think mobile technology, the Internet, and ways of tracking things such as retail patterns and library usage, etc.)
Mandatory blood tests on suspected drunkards doesn't concern me. If they start doing that to other groups, then we just might have a problem.
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Contained in the following are 50 years old observations that there is no "left" in the US (1st quote box)
and, in the last quote box:
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....Although crime rates have been declining for 25 years, vast amounts of money pour into the criminal justice-industrial complex, diverting scarce resources from other social services such as education, social welfare, and health care. While in recent years downsizing has affected almost every segment of the public sector, the criminal justice bureaucracies have seen an unprecedented expansion.....
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Quote:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=002...3E2.0.CO%3B2-6
Freedom is as Freedom Does; Civil Liberties Today. Corliss Lamont Horizon Press, 1956. 322 pp.
Lamont in this book, is obviously fighting a losing battle. Not only is the Civil Liberties Union in decline; freedom of speech and thougt have also lost ground....Whereained college and university libraries contain the classics of Socialist tradition (I might as
well have said pornography as an example), the material is usually too "hot" for the professors to touch. The result is freedom of speech and thought in form only.
<h3>Read in conjunction with C. Wright Mills</h3>, <i>Yhe Power Elite</i>, Lamont's book provides a concrete picture of the informal alliance existing in this country between the thought police and the military.
Radical opinions of any kind are no longer dismissed as merely infantile or pathological, they are considered a political, military, and industrial liability. The decline in cilil liberties, Lamont argues, is partly due to the increasing fear which individuals have of authority, and their increasing willingness to submit readily to it. In order to exist, freedom has to be exercised, and the average American is unwilling to defend either his own rights or those of others....
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"As the circle of those who decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized and the consequences of decision become enormous, then the course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 21).
"There is nothing in 'the nature of history' in our epoch that rules out the pivotal function of small groups of decision-makers. On the contrary, the structure of the present is such as to make this not only a reasonable, but a rather compelling, view (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).
"There is nothing in 'the psychology of man,' or in the social manner by which men are shaped and selected for and by the command posts of modern society, that makes unreasonable the view that they do confront choices and that the choices they make--or their failure to confront them--are history-making in their consequences" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).
"Accordingly, political men now have every reason to hold the American power elite accountable for a decisive range of the historical events that make up the history of the present" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).
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Authority in the US is sponsored (driven) by corporatism. In that sense, it is not OF AND BY THE PEOPLE.....It must be confronted, questioned and challenged at every turn, if we are to live in an "open society", with open government, the kind least likley to suffer from massive state sponsored corruption. IMO, that WON'T HAPPEN IF CENTRISTS and "LEFT LITE" are the "approved" political opposition to corporatism. THAT IS ALL I SEE EXPRESSED
on this thread, except by dksuddeth.
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A treatise on C. Wright Mills:
Quote:
http://www.logosjournal.com/aronowitz.htm
A Mills Revival?
by Stanley Aronowitz
...Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last three decades of the twentieth century, at a time when social theory had migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies and social “problems” to literature and philosophy where he was rarely discussed and almost never cited., C. Wright Mills was an absent presence.. ... click to show
....In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a “social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. .....
....His study admonishes the labor leadership to attend to the post-war shift that endangers theirs and their members’ power. Arguing that the “main drift” is away from the collaboration between business and labor made necessary and viable by the war he suggests that labor leaders of “great stature” must come to the fore before labor is reduced. “Now there is no war,” but there is a powerful war machine and conservative reaction against labor’s power at the bargaining table.
“Today, knit together as they are by trade associations, the corporations steadily translate economic strength into effective and united political power. The power of the federal state has increased enormously. The state is now so big in the economy, and the power of business is so great in the state, that unions can no longer seriously expect even the traditional short-run economic gains without considering the conditions under which their demands are politically realizable.” Top down rule, which implies keeping the membership at bay is, according to Mills, inadequate to the new situation where a military-industrial alliance was emerging, among whose aims was to weaken and otherwise destroy the labor movement.
How to combat this drift? Mills forthrightly suggests that the labor leader become the basis for the formation of a “new power bloc.” Rather than make deals on the top with powerful interests, “he will have to accumulate power from the bottom. . . . If the democratic power of members is to be used against the concentrated power of money, it must in some way create its own political force . . . the left would create an independent labor party” based on labor’s formidable economic strength. At the same time, Mills argues, it must enlarge its own base to include the “underdogs”—few of whom are in the unions. By underdogs Mills does not mean those at the very bottom. They are, in his view, too habituated to “submission.” He means the working poor, the unskilled who were largely left out of the great organizing wave of the 1930s and the war years. And he calls for the organization of elements of the new middle class and the rapidly growing white collar strata whose potential power, he argues, will remain unrealized unless they are organized.
One may read the New Men of Power with a number of pairs of eyes. At minimum it can be read as a stimulating account of the problems and prospects facing post-World War II American labor. It is descriptively comprehensive of the state of organized labor and the obstacles which it faced in this period. If Mills was mistaken to believe that unions would have to become an independent political force to meet the elementary economic demands of their memberships, it may be argued that this limitation applies only to the first three decades after the war. Unions did deliver, and in some cases handsomely, to a substantial minority of the American working class. They organized neither the “underdogs” nor the new middle class and white collar clerical, technical and professional workers who were all but ignored by the postwar labor movement, but forged a new social compact with large employers for their own members. For a third of the labor force in unions, and a much larger percentage of industrial workers, they succeeded in negotiating what may be called a “private” welfare state, huge advances in their members’ standard of living and a high degree of job security and individual protection against arbitrary discharge and other forms of discipline.
Ironically, this book is far more accurate in its central prognostication of labor’s decline for the years since 1973. Labor has paid a steep price for its refusal to heed Mills’s admonition to forge its own power bloc. Buffeted by economic globalization, corporate mergers and the deindustrialization of vast areas of the northeast and midwest and by the growth of the largely non-union south as the industrial investment of choice, many unions have despaired of making new gains and are hanging on to their declining memberships for dear life. Labor is, perhaps irreversibly, on the defensive. In this period, union density—the proportion of union members to the work force—has been cut in half. Collective bargaining stills occurs regularly in unionized industries and occupations and employers still sign contracts. But the last two decades are marked by labor’s steady retreat from hard-won gains. In many instances, collective bargaining as yielded to collective begging.
Corporations and their political allies have succeeded in rolling back one of the most important features of the New Deal-era reforms, the provision of a minimum income for the long-term unemployed (pejoratively coded as “welfare” by post-New Deal politicians). Many who still collect checks are forced to work in public and private agencies for minimum wages, in some states replacing union labor. Social Security is on the block and privatization of public goods, especially schools and health care facilities, seems to be the long-term program of conservatives and many in the liberal center.
Mills recognizes, as few labor leaders do, the importance of reaching out to the various publics that frame the political landscape. During the era of the social compact, union leaders saw little value in taking labor’s case to the public either during strikes or important legislative campaigns. As junior partners of the power élite they were often advised to keep conflicts in the “family” and rely on lobbying, influence with leading politicians through electoral support, and other traditionally élite tactics to achieve their goals. Labor leaders would rarely divulge the issues in union negotiations and during the final stages of bargaining because they agreed to a press blackout. Only as an act of desperation, when an organizing drive or a strike was in its losing stage, did some unions make public statements. Following Mills’s advice, one might argue, especially for public employees unions and unions in major national corporations, the public is always the third party at the bargaining table and the struggle to win it over has generally be won by management.
The ambiguity comes in when the subsequent writings are considered. Discouraged by the labor movement’s inability to reverse or halt the reactionary legislative and political offensive, by the early 1950s Mills had abandoned hope that the labor movement was capable of stemming the tide of almost complete corporate capitalist domination of economic, political and cultural life. Discussion of the labor movement’s social weight is largely absent from White Collar, published in 1951, only three years after The New Men of Power. The Power Elite, which appeared in 1956, more or less permanently consigns organized labor to a subordinate status within the pantheon of national power. In Mills’s view the moment had come and gone when unions could even conceive of making a qualitative difference in power arrangements. Whereas in 1948, Mills’s address was chiefly to the labor leaders themselves—it was both a careful sociological portrait of these new men of power and an attempted dialogue with them—the subsequent works do not have a specific labor public in mind.
It was the theory of mass society, a concept that spans radical and conservative critiques of late capitalism, that informed Mills’s later pessimism. Mills was a leading figure in the sociology of “mass” culture and mass society wich developed along several highly visible lines in the 1940s and 1950s. He observed the increasing homogenization of American culture and brilliantly linked some of its more egregious features to the decline of the democratic public. While his rhetoric was distinctly in the American vein, his views paralleled, and were crucially influenced by, those of Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, the leading theorists of the Frankfurt school. While there is little evidence that he was similarly impressed by psychoanalysis, like them he linked cultural massification to mounting political conformity associated with the emergence of fascism and other authoritarian movements in nearly all advanced industrial societies....
.....In the immediate post-World War II period, Mills detects the autonomous power of the military as, increasingly, the driving force in the alliance, just as the political élite occupied that position during the 1930s slump, when the provision of social welfare attained an urgency, lest by neglecting the needs of the underlying population, the system might be endangered. The military, as a relatively autonomous power center, gained sustenance from the rearmament program leading to World War II but since there was no peace after 1945, it retained its central position in the power structure. Almost immediately the United States and the Soviet Union, the two remaining superpowers, were engaged in a new “cold” war in which nuclear and conventional weapons played an enormous economic as well as political role in world and domestic politics. And the cold aspects of the war were punctuated by discontinuous, but frequent, “hot” wars such as those in Korea, Southeast Asia, China, and Israel. Under these circumstances, the military, allying itself with those large corporations engaged in defense production, accumulated substantial independent power. Needless to say, the corporations, the holders of what he calls “big money,” are by no means ignored. After all, they remain the backbone of the entire system.
But in his analysis of the commanding heights, Mills is not content to describe the three institutional orders that comprise the power élite. He shows that the scope of its power embraces wide sections upon which the legitimacy of American society depends. Chief among them are the celebrities who, as the premier ornaments of mass society, are routinely recruited to lend prestige to the high officials of the three principal institutions of power. Political parties and their candidates eagerly showcase celebrities who support them; corporate executives regularly mingle with celebrities in Hollywood and New York at exclusive clubs and parties; and “warlords”—high military officers, corporate officials, their scientists and technologists engaged in perfecting more lethal weapons of mass destruction, the politicians responsible for executive and congressional approval of military budgets—congregate in many of the same social and cultural spaces as well as in the business suites of warfare.
In short, following the muckraking tradition, but also international sociological discourse on power, The Power Elite uses the evidentiary method first perfected by the independent scholars such as Ferdinand Lundberg of tracing interlocking networks of social and cultural association as much as business relationship to establish the boundaries and contour of power. Moreover, in this work we can see the movement of individuals among the leading institutional orders that constitute the nexus of power, so that their difference tends to blur.
Naming the power élite as the only “independent variable” in American society, Mills was obliged to revise his earlier estimation of the labor movement. Barely eight years after designating the labor leaders “new men of power” who had to choose whether to lead the entire society in the name of working people and other subordinate groups he designated them a “dependent variable” in the political economy. Accordingly, he lost hope that, in any possible practical eventuality, working people and their unions would enter the historical stage as autonomous actors, at least until a powerful new left of intellectuals and other oppressed groups emerged to push them.....
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http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesam...view_2006.html
"Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later."
...(Last paragraph) Finally, where do things stand in terms of Mills's major theoretical claims? At the most general level, the historical and cross-national evidence leaves me in agreement with Mills that the economic, political, and military sectors are potentially independent power bases, although I would add that power also can be generated from a religious organizational base, as seen in the civil rights movement, the rise of the Christian Right, and the Iranian Revolution. In terms of the United States, however, historical and sociological research leads me to place far more emphasis than Mills did on corporate capitalism and class conflict as the dominant factors in the power equation. Events and research in the United States since the 1960s also leave me with a belief that there are potential power bases for popular action that Mills overlooked, but with the proviso that these social movements are often in conflict with each other. Until organized labor, liberals, and leftists can forge a coalition of non-violent social movements and focus on Democratic Party primaries if and when they enter the electoral arena, </h3>the power elite will continue on its merry way whatever the consequences for everyone else....</h3>
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The Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award in 1964.
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http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/20
....Who should belong to the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP)?
SSSP members are an interdisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, advocates, and students interested in the application of critical, scientific, and humanistic perspectives to the study of vital social problems. If you are involved in scholarship or action in pursuit of a just society nationally or internationally, you belong in the SSSP. You will meet others engaged in research to find the causes and consequences of social problems, as well as others seeking to apply existing scholarship to the formulation of social policies. Many members are social scientists by training. Many teach in colleges and universities. Increasing numbers work in applied research and policy settings. Membership is open to anyone who supports SSSP's goals.
What does the SSSP have to offer?
Founded in 1951, the Society for the Study of Social Problems promotes research on and serious examination of problems of social life. The SSSP works to solve these problems and to develop informed social policy. As a member, you will find peers and colleagues working together to develop and apply research which makes a difference.
http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/209
....William Chambliss of The George Washington University is organizing a workshop on "State Organized Crime" for the May session of the Onati Center for Socio-Legal Studies. Participants presenting papers at the Workshop includes Ray Michalowski, Ronald Kramer, Nancy Wonders and Jeff Chambliss.
(Posted 10-11-07).....
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Quote:
http://www.apfn.net/Messageboard/02-...on.cgi.12.html
William J. Chambliss
State-Organized Crime Part 9
Sun Feb 20, 2005 00:19
....CONCLUSION
My concern here is to point out the importance of studying state-organized crime. Although I have suggested some theoretical notions that appear to me to be promising, the more important goal is to raise the issue for further study. The theoretical and empirical problems raised by advocating the study of state-organized crime are, however, formidable.
<h3>Data on contemporary examples of state-organized crime are difficult to obtain.</h3> The data I have been able to gather depend on sources that must be used cautiously. Government hearings, court trials, interviews, newspaper accounts, and historical documents are replete with problems of validity and reliability. In my view they are no more so than conventional research methods in the social sciences, but that does not alter the fact that there is room for error in interpreting the findings. It will require considerable imagination and diligence for others to pursue research on this topic and add to the empirical base from which theoretical propositions can be tested and elaborated.
We need to explore different political, economic, and social systems in varying historical periods to discover why some forms of social organization are more likely to produce state-organized crimes than others. We need to explore the possibility that some types of state agencies are more prone to engaging in criminality than others. It seems likely, for example, that state agencies whose activities can be hidden from scrutiny are more likely to engage in criminal acts than those whose record is public. This principle may also apply to whole nation-states: <h3>the more open the society, the less likely it is that state-organized crime will become institutionalized.</h3>
There are also important parallels between state-organized criminality and the criminality of police and law-enforcement agencies generally. <h3>Local police departments that find it more useful to cooperate with criminal syndicates than to combat them are responding to their own particular contradictions, conflicts, and dilemmas (Chambliss, 1988).</h3> An exploration of the theoretical implications of these similarities could yield some important findings.
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Quote:
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/wes...sbn=081333487X
Power, Politics And Crime
by William J Chambliss
Jan 11, 2001
Paperback
Description
In the United States today, we are on the verge of fulfilling a nightmare scenario. Parents are fearful of letting their children play in their own yards and elderly people are afraid to leave their homes. The bogeyman in this rampant panic about crime is the young black male, who, in the media and public image, is a “superpredator” lurking on every street corner ready to attack any prey that is vulnerable. But is crime in America really as bad as the public has been made to believe? Power, Politics, and Crime argues that the current panic over crime has been manufactured by the media, law enforcement bureaucracies, and the private prison industry. It shows how the definition of criminal behavior systematically singles out the inner-city African American. But urban minorities aren’t the only victims. Although crime rates have been declining for 25 years, vast amounts of money pour into the criminal justice-industrial complex, diverting scarce resources from other social services such as education, social welfare, and health care. While in recent years downsizing has affected almost every segment of the public sector, the criminal justice bureaucracies have seen an unprecedented expansion. Through ethnographic observations, analysis of census data, and historical research, William Chambliss describes what is happening, why it has come about, and what can be done about it. He explores the genesis of crime as a political issue, and the effect that crime policies have had on different segments of the population. The book is more than a statement about the politics of crime and punishment—it’s a powerful indictment of contemporary law enforcement practices in the United States. In addition to updating the data the author has added a discussion of the "declining crime rate." Contrary to presentations in the media and by law enforcement agencies, the rate has been declining for over 25 years and therefore cannot be attributed to any "get tough on crime" policies so dear to the hearts of prosecutors and politicians. Chapter Seven, "Crime Myths and Smokescreens" has been completely revised and updated. Updates include a discussion of the recent scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department which has resulted in criminal charges against police officers and the release of numerous convicted felons because of falsified evidence and testimony on the part of police officers. The attack on Louima in the police station in New York as well as the shooting of Diallo are discussed in some detail as well as other recent exposures of police brutality and corruption. The sections on white collar, corporate, and state crimes have been updated and recent examples added to the text.
Reviews
”…Chambliss offers a powerful critique of the consequences of contemporary penal practices.”
— Contemporary Sociology
”This concise, well-documented book systematically illustrates the development of the crime-control industrial process – that has led to the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world.”
— SAGE Race Relations
“An excellent guide that provides various tools and methods for thinking about how crime is perceived, defined and punished in American society.”
— Southland Prison News
”[D]elineates how shaky the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports can be, especially for year-to-year comparisons.”
— Orange County Register
”In a sweeping indictment of over forty years of crime policy, Chambliss marshals evidence to show that America’s war on crime has been a costly failure with terrible side effects. The work documents how, starting with Barry Goldwater’s campaign, conservative politicians consciously sought to link crime problems to the civil rights movement. By the 1990s, this cynical and racist campaign has been so successful that even Democrats have enthusiastically embraced justice policies that have replaced a third of young African American males under correctional supervision. The war on drugs is a special target of Chambliss’ analysis: not only has this war been a spectacular failure, it has spawned corruption while creating a correctional industrial complex. Casualties of the war on drugs are easy to find, Chambliss documents, with higher education leading the list. The most dramatic result, however, is that America now shares with the newly created state of Russia, the world’s highest incarceration rate.”
— Meda Chesney-Lind, University of Hawaii at Manoa
”Chambliss's lucid, incisive, and highly informative study leaves the reader with little doubt that crime is a very serious problem in the United States, though not in the manner that the population has been induced to believe by intensive and politically-motivated indoctrination that has had a dire effect on the society, helping to forge a virtual war against the poor. One basic problem is the manipulated perception of crime, uncorrelated with its actual course. A second is the vast category of harmful and dangerous crime that goes largely unpunished because of the power and privilege of the perpetrators. This is a wake-up call that is badly needed, offering insight and guidelines for people who care about their society, its serious flaws, and what it could become if citizens were to take the real issues into their own hands.”
— Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
”William Chambliss is upset, and based on the data he amasses, the rest of us ought to be. The crime industry is every bit as wasteful and destructive of American values as the military industrial complex of a generation ago. Together with increasingly pliant and self-interested politicians and media, they take us into the new millennium strapped for cash and burdened by fear and prejudice.”
— David Kairys, Temple University School of Law; editor, The Politics of Law, Third Edition
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I think that coments in the "Conclusion" in the second to last quote box above, contradict this:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ustwo
If anything the government is under more scrutiny than in the past. With easy video and being able to post about anything on the internet things which wouldn't have made ink 30 years ago are now mainstream stories....
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Last edited by host; 12-22-2007 at 08:20 AM..
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