New Delhi. The political life in the U.S. is not democratic and the reality is that the Republicans and the Democrats serve the interests of the corporate America, said well-known US activist Suzanne Adely. Adely was speaking in a discussion organized by Polemic in association with the history society of Ramjas College on Tuesday.
According to a release, in the talk she said that the backbone of US imperialism is the domestic repression of Arab, south Asian communities, immigrant workers and the afro American communities. She traced the building of the US democracy and the imperialism in the enslavement of the black population and genocide of indigenous population by the white settlers. The modern forms of repression can be traced to the period of 1920s and 1930s which saw tremendous industrialization and urbanization. With these twin phenomena rose social and political movement which led the police to come up with the tactics of attacking and targeting immigrant workers. The 1960s saw a re-emergence of struggles for social and political rights around the agenda of restructuring the existing power structure. The police emerged with counter intelligence measures to tackle the radical movements. They used spies to infiltrate the organization break them and in some cases assassinate the leaders of the movement. In the late 1960s with the foreign policy of the US becoming about dominating the middle east the power that be realized it cannot be achieved without dominating and repressing the Arab communities domestically.
In the 1980s with the onset of the Reagan administration and the pursuit of neoliberal policies the prison system in the US was privatized which saw a jump in prison population to the tune of 798% and currently has the largest population in the world.
This “for profit” prison system also fallows what can be called the “school-house-prison pipeline”. At adolescent mostly non white kids are sucked inside the criminal justice system. This system also created situation where immigrants without legal documents are imprisoned for a period of 2-10 years for profit of the prison contractors. Adely ended her talk by making the point about racial profiling by the police in the US as a legal measure and that every 28 hours a black person is killed in extrajudicial killing by the police. The talk was followed by a discussion with students from various colleges of the Delhi University.
