George Santos Finds Prison Distasteful, Plus
Space Command! Plus ICE emulates Stasi, plus music
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George Santos Finds Prison Distasteful
If he’d stolen more money or lied about the right things or attacked a cop on January 6 he might have been eligible for a presidential pardon, but instead arch ex-congressman George Stanton is languishing in a New Jersey prison. New Jersey!
Santos is sending out regular dispatches from the federal prison in Fairton Township, New Jersey, to The South Shore Press in (on?) Long Island. He’s now six weeks in to the seven-year bit to which he was sentenced, although he’ll likely serve considerably less.
There’s nothing really notable here. Fairton is a medium security prison with a minimum security annex, where one presumes Santos is residing—his personal hell, as he says. There are administrators with shitty attitudes about the black mold and faulty air conditioning, neither of which are anything to sneeze at—everywhere is excessively hot this summer, and black mold can cripple you even when it’s painted over—and both of which are suffered by probably hundreds of thousands of renters with predatory landlords nowhere near a prison.
In the linked piece, Santos is careful to praise the correctional officers, who will be the people he has most contact with during his term other than his fellow inmates. He has many reasons to cultivate their good will.
The U.S. is a terrible place to go to prison, or jail. One can find worse places, such as just about anywhere the regime wants to send deportees, but among developed nations we’re the worst. Rehabilitation (not that that’s likely applicable to Santos, whose damage is probably insurmountable) is a joke, to the extent that prisoners who manage to survive and surmount the experience are sometimes headline news, conditions are universally appalling (although sometimes matched, as noted, on the outside), people get sent there too often and for too long and have too few resources when they get out, and it’s really fucking dangerous.
Lots of people care about prison conditions, and about prison for profit, and other prison-related atrocities, and sometimes they’re able to do things that help keep people out of jail, like cashless bail and diversion programs for non-violent offenses, and sometimes they manage to help people survive the worst of the experience in some sort of remediable shape, but for the most part we just keep chugging along, frequently imprisoning and sometimes executing innocent people, at or near the top in terms of total incarcerated population and prisoners per capita, and definitely leading in share prices of for-profit prison and concentration camp operators.
Thanks, George, for reminding me of where we were even before the regime got its hooks in us. You suck, but you’re a human who deserves better than what you’re probably gonna get during the next few years. All of us are and most of us do, for that matter.
Space Command!
Yesterday’s big proof of life display/announcement about moving Space Command from Colorado to Alabama, and my own musings about conditions outside prison, reminded me of a story from 2017 about a visit the then-UN special rapporteur on poverty paid to the U.S., Alabama in particular. Phillip Alston was impressed in a really bad way.
As part of a two-week investigation into poverty and human rights abuses in the United States, Alston visited Alabama’s Black Belt, where a study released earlier this year found that Lowndes County residents are suffering from high rates of hookworm infection, a poverty-related disease typically found only in developing countries and long thought to have been eradicated in the United States.
In addition to examining health care, access to clean and safe drinking water, and sanitation, the special rapporteur is evaluating how economic inequality and racial discrimination are linked to civil rights abuses in Alabama and across the South.
Lowndes County has a long history of racial discrimination and inequality; white residents’ violent opposition to civil rights there earned it the nickname “Bloody Lowndes.” Today, the average annual income is $18,046, and almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Of the county’s 11,000 residents, 74 percent are African American.
“Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States,” Alston said. “But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality.”
Gleaming facilities and some well paid jobs, federal money flowing, about 200 miles from grotesque and desperate poverty in the same state. USA! USA!
“Great poverty and inequality” reminds me of probably my favorite Financial Times story ever, from 2022, on that very subject not just here but in the FT’s UK home.
The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.
To be clear, the US data show that both broad-based growth and the equal distribution of its proceeds matter for wellbeing. Five years of healthy pre-pandemic growth in US living standards across the distribution lifted all boats, a trend that was conspicuously absent in the UK.
But redistributing the gains more evenly would have a far more transformative impact on quality of life for millions. The growth spurt boosted incomes of the bottom decile of US households by roughly an extra 10 per cent. But transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet.
Space Command!
Eat a U.S. billionaire a day and in less than three years we’d be rid of them all, if we can keep them corralled.
ICE emulates Stasi
The most stunning thing to me about the East German Stasi, their secret police/domestic security thug outfit, was the ubiquity of it. By the time that regime fell, after only 40 years in power, an insanely high percentage of the population, as many as 15% by some estimates (experts disagree), were either directly employed by the service or acting as regular or occasional informers for it.
We would be fools to think that despite Kristi Noem’s (and the regime’s generally) love of outlandish theater, the internal security forces are not going about more subterranean business, recruiting informants, whether through coercion, cash or cupidity, and bolstering their domestic spying capabilities along with the overt armed goon hiring blitz coming down the pike.
This is in addition to our already swollen internal security agencies, some with unrivalled surveillance capabilities from which their thick-headedness and the occasionally sprightly court is often our only protection.
Thanks to an assist from Joe Biden, ICE and presumably other domestic security agnecies under the homeland security umbrella will have access to one the most highly touted surveillance software packages available anywhere.
US immigration agents will have access to one of the world’s most sophisticated hacking tools after a decision by the Trump administration to move ahead with a contract with Paragon Solutions, a company founded in Israel which makes spyware that can be used to hack into any mobile phone – including encrypted applications.
The Department of Homeland Security first entered into a contract with Paragon, now owned by a US firm, in late 2024, under the Biden administration. But the $2m contract was put on hold pending a compliance review to make sure it adhered to an executive order that restricts the US government’s use of spyware, Wired reported at the time.
That pause has now been lifted, according to public procurement documents, which list US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as the contracting agency.
Yeah, they’ll be restricting the use of spyware, nudge nudge wink wink.
The Bush fils administration inaugurated and then shuttered, in the wake of strident protests, a program aimed at recruiting a massive number of snitches. Remember Operation TIPS?
The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.
The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report "suspicious activity".
…
Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.
Even if you don’t remember the aborted effort, I can assure you that top officials in the current regime do, and that the lesson they’ll have taken from the failure of the program is to keep their mouths shut about any similar programs. They intend to brook no opposition; we can only hope they’re as incompetent as they sometimes seem.
All the ingredients necessary to cook up a tasty Stasi omelet. Yum!
Music
I have resumed morning walks after a really long and unwise but understandable hiatus, mostly fatigue-related—walking helps combate the fatigue but the fatigue makes it hard to drag my aging ass out of bed before the sun comes up and makes everything sweaty—and I listen to my streaming music service’s algorithmic recommendations during the at-this-point 30 minutes I’m out and about every other day, and sometimes for an hour or two or three (or four, maybe five—I am a slave to the people) while I’m writing, which I’m trying to do on a regular daily schedule again.
For some reason today it was throwing a lot of old stuff at me despite my general policy of weighting my selections in favor of recent and new-to-me stuff. We’re talking The Clash, Billy Idol, Sex Pistols, 80s Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, The Smiths (a band I tend to actively dislike) Pixies, late 60s Stones, early Springsteen, The Cure, early Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, post-Woodstock Alvin Lee and Ten Years After, and, in a truly odd moment, the Dixie Cups 1965 version of “Iko Iko,” which I probably haven’t listened to in four or five years.
Weirdly, I read an interview with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones only yesterday, which I’m desperately trying to believe is a coincidence.
Anyway. Here now for your listening pleasure …
The Clash, London Calling, “Should I Stay or Should I Go”
The Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come The Sex Pistols, “Pretty Vacant”
The Dixie Cups, “Iko Iko”
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, "I Love Rock 'n' Roll"
Ten Years After, A Space in Time, “I’d Love to Change the World”
The Dirty Mac, “Yer Blues”
And playing us out:
The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed, “You Can’t Always Get What You What”
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I’m starting to get my chops back, I think. Worth a read most days, I hope. Free subscriptions get you everything but the bone-deep satisfaction of helping a brother out, while paid subscriptions—$5/month, $50/year or $/more than that if you want, contribute to my immediate well-being and future prospects. Share it if you like it, please, subscribed or not, and let me know what you think in the comments.
Take care; be well.