#Resident Evil has always been anti-government anti-capitalism anti-corporation.

[sexyleon]

Just thinking about how young Leon looks in re4r and it really drives home how his youth has been stolen from him. He was coerced into working for the government after raccoon city, continuously forced to fight through hell after hell— his twenties are gone by the time he makes it to Spain but he is still so so young. It’s sad to think of how much was taken from him.

[adofom1]

Rejecting and Ejecting the Poor: The Victimization and Criminalization of Poor Black People in the Most "Radical" City on the Planet

Project Eject is More Than What Meets the Ear

On a cold, gray and dreary day in Jackson, Mike Hurst, the man appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi by the Trump administration, stood in front of the United States courthouse flanked by various law enforcement agencies, politicians and community "leaders" to announce a new crime prevention initiative called Project Eject.

In his remarks to the media, Hurst claimed to "...want to empower Jackson and its citizens, expel crime from our communities, and work together to make our Capital City safe for everyone."  We should all be aware that the implications of Project Eject are  much deeper and more sinister and can and should be counted as part of a  long line of legalized  victimization of poor Black people in Mississippi.

A Critical Analysis of Project Eject and The Impact It will Have on Poor Black People

Project Eject is a racially bigoted and elitist program that gives expression to Donald Trump's and U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Sessions' national tough on crime agenda.  It is harsh, punitive and extremely short sighted. It is designed to criminalize poor Black people and other social forces in Jackson that the Trump administration has deemed a threat to its hegemony.  Project Eject will begin the process of ethnically cleansing Jackson of poor Black people so that capital and capitalists can operate more comfortably in Mississippi’s  Capital City.

If capital is allowed to further entrench itself in  Jackson, poor and working class Black people will be herded out of Jackson through a number of economic and political maneuvers that have been employed in cities like Detroit, MI, Washington, D.C. and Oakland, CA to name a few.  Hurst promised that those prosecuted under Project Eject will be sent out of state to serve federal sentences without parole.  Should more capital-friendly policies like this one go unchallenged, the likelihood of people incarcerated under Project Eject being able to come home to Jackson will drop precipitously, as the communities they left will have been destroyed; priced out and pushed out to make room for those deemed more desirable by capital and capitalists.  .

The Lumumba administration has already set the stage for the implementation of this brand of policies by declaring Jackson “open for business” and “business friendly”. .  Mayor Lumumba's has stated repeatedly n that he wants people (read: corporations because the law views corporations as people)  to come to Jackson to make a lot of money and become rich. These overtures to capital and capitalist development will make the  ethnic cleansing of poor Black people from Jackson inevitable.  Despite the Mayor’s stipulation that these corporations must invest back into the people of Jackson to do business here, capital cannot and will not respect this request. That is simply not how capitalism works.  Capitalist corporations exploit people. They do not invest in them. It must be understood that whatever "investment" that might be interpreted as going into residents is really an investment into their bottom line.

Project Eject will sever those convicted from the  support systems that are proven to increase the likelihood of successful rehabilitation and reentry. Furthermore, the forced relocation of those incarcerated will place a tremendous  economic, psychological and emotional burden on poor and working class black families, many of whom will undoubtedly want to make attempts to visit and support their loved ones who are being housed in prisons that are hundreds of miles away from Mississippi.

The supporters of Project Eject are sending a message of disdain for poor and working class Black people in the city of Jackson while disguising it with a disingenuous desire to help the city of Jackson with what they view as the problem of crime and violence. They are, in effect, saying that poor Black people  in Jackson are irredeemable and  should be discarded from the city like yesterday's trash. This line of thinking negates  the humanity of people charged and convicted of crimes and looks to brand them as  sub-human and worthy of inhumane treatment.

An Emphasis on Effects While Ignoring Causes

The narrative around Project Eject is that crime and violence in Jackson is out of control and that criminals must be brought to heel by whatever legal or extralegal means possible. Tough on crime proponents love  to point out effects, but if we are serious about ending crime and violence in the city of Jackson and in Mississippi, we must also investigate the causes of the anti-social behaviors that we see and the systems and individuals that are at the root of them.

State Violence and Criminality Begets Community Violence and Criminality

Poor Black people who engage in antisocial and criminal behavior are the victims of unjust and evil social, political and economic orders. Every time we see a homeless person, families living in abject poverty, human beings being caged like animals, or a mentally ill person walking down Capitol Street eating out of trash cans, we should be reminded of the type of violence that is being heaped upon poor people and Black people everyday in this city. We should be mindful of how this descending violence coming down on the people from the highest echelons of this society fuels the lateral violence we see in our communities.

The government on the federal, state or local level do not want to deal with this reality. Because to talk about the reality of how the violence that is perpetuated against poor and Black people begets the violence that we see in our communities would call into question the way the economic, political and social systems are failing people. More people would be forced to interrogate and ultimately see the high levels of exploitation seen in this capitalist economic system as incompatible with a just and humane society.

Deny, Cover Up, and Eject

It is easy to condemn individuals and throw them away by labeling them  as deviant, violent aberrations. It is easy for the State to deny the central role it plays and has always played in fomenting and maintaining a certain homeostasis of crime, violence and dysfunction. Upholding this false narrative ensures that poor and working class Black people can not sustain long term resistance to our oppression. If we allow those in power to do this, we lend legitimacy to this story  and we allow the State to cover up the vast amount crimes it has and continues to perpetuate against poor and working class Black people. To allow law enforcement to eject poor Black people from Jackson is allowing them to bury the evidence of this state's civil and human rights abuses against Black people.

The Current System Produces Violence and Criminality

The truth of the matter is that  this society produces, then profits from violence and criminality. As evidence, the United States has over 2 million people, more than any other country in the world, who are currently  locked in cages. Most of these people are locked away for crimes of violence. We have to come to grips with the reality that violence and criminality is what this society produces because this is what this country was founded upon.

The perpetuation of violence and crime does not develop in a social vacuum and contrary to what many may want to believe, there is no such thing as a criminal or violence gene that predisposes certain people to being more violent and criminal than others. Criminality and violence develops within a larger context.

The larger social and cultural context of America is violent. American culture celebrates dominance, violence, and the total annihilation of adversaries in popular culture, sports and the propaganda of the U.S. Military industrial complex.

Black people have been subjected to untold amounts of physical violence, surveillance and economic reprisals because we have always been viewed as a threat to the established hegemonic order of the United States. Violence  is how this country maintains its stature and power in the world. Violence is how it exacts control over its subjects. This country is criminogenic and cannot and would not exist without violence. Therefore, it is hypocritical for the State to act surprised that the people who they have violently oppressed in perpetuity would commit acts of violence among themselves and others.

Instead of talking about how the various forms of violence perpetrated against poor and Black people in this country and specifically in Mississippi begets the violence we see on an interpersonal level in our communities, we have federal, county and city officials who want to lay the blame at the feet of people who have suffered under the extreme oppression and violence of the social, economic and political order they have been forced to exist under.

Black people have been rendered disposable by a perpetually inadequately funded and failed education system, an economy that has no use for us outside of slave labor in public and private prisons, and systematic and unrelenting racial oppression. It is not surprising that many poor Black people engage in violence and other antisocial behaviors. In fact, it is surprising that in light of the trauma that Black people have been subjected to, that more Black people don't engage in these types of behavior.

Project Eject Continues Ethnic Cleansing in Mississippi

From the nineteen teens until the early 1970s millions of Black people left the south for northern urban cities. The dominant historical narrative is that Black people left their homes, familiarity and families to find greater economic opportunities in the factories and steel and textiles mills of the north. To some degree this is true, but not all Black people left the only homes they had ever known of their own volition. In many instances, Black people were forcibly removed from southern cities and towns in Mississippi. Project Eject plans to continue this type of forcible removal.

Historically, Black people have also been run out of Mississippi through outright violence, terroristic threats, land theft and economic exploitation. This was not voluntary migration. This was forced migration and ethnic cleansing carried out in the southern United States.

One of the reasons that some Black people were run out of places like Mississippi is because white people created a narrative that they were lazy, criminal vagrants who did not want to work. The reality was that poor Black people who had seen their parents and great grandparents economically exploited and subjected to slavery by another name did not want to continue to allow their labor to be exploited by the racist white families that had previously owned their fore parents. That is why it was quite disturbing to hear U.S. Attorney Hurst refer to some people as nothing more than criminals that he does not want to be in the city. Criminal is a code word for poor Black people who do not fit into the plans that the ruling class has for the Capital city.Since Black people can no longer  be outright killed or run out of town without some outcry, Project Eject is a legal way of ethnically cleansing this undesirable class of people from the population of Jackson to make way for people who they deem more valuable to the future of Jackson.

Both individuals like Hurst and many from the Black political class  in Jackson are unwilling to attempt to solve the problems that produce poverty, crime and violence so shipping them off is an easy fix. By the time they spend a decade or more in prison, they will not be able to come back to Jackson because the likelihood that there families will be priced out of their homes and moved to the outside of Jackson are great.

Black Collaborators

The saddest, but not surprising part of the Project Eject press conference was the sea of Black faces surrounding Hurst as he made the announcement that he planned to eject Black people from the city. As a human defense lawyer, I see the people who Hurst's message was directed toward on a daily basis. Most of them are young Black men who have been either miseducated or not educated at all. These young men could be the children or grandchildren of the Black elected officials  and community "leaders" who stood with Hurst as he laid out his plan to Eject them from the city.

The sad reality is that in addition to being failed by the dominant society, the Black political class and the Black community at large has failed them too. As it stands, there are no viable options or opportunities for poor Black youth in the city of Jackson. On the one hand, this vacuum exists because we have not invested enough in our own children in terms of building the necessary independent economic, political or social institutions necessary to speak to the unique needs of Black children and young adults and prepare them for a racist and hostile society. On the other hand, this vacuum exists because Black elected officials year after year have merely talked about what Black youth need instead of using to the city's resources to meet those needs.

Real Solutions 

For the misguided, Project Eject represents the opportunity for a respite from crime and violence. However, the problem of crime and violence cannot be solved through over policing and tough on crime policies.

Crime in Jackson must be treated as a public health crisis. People must be provided mental health services, substance abuse treatment and economic democracy through control of the means of production. Ultimately, if we are serious about bringing crime and violence to a minimum in Jackson, we must prepare ourselves to dismantle the current political, economic and social order. It is this order that keeps poor people generally and poor Black people specifically going through a cycle of crime and violence as both perpetrators and victims. This cyclical process benefits the ruling elite's agenda to have poor Black people trapped inside of the prison industrial complex and locked outside of the city.

[bluewatsons]

Sarah Jones, J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America, The New Republic (November 17, 2016)

The bestselling author of "Hillbilly Elegy" has emerged as the liberal media's favorite white trash–splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons.

J.D. Vance is the man of the hour, maybe the year. His memoir Hillbilly Elegy is a New York Times bestseller, acclaimed for its colorful and at times moving account of life in a dysfunctional clan of eastern Kentucky natives. It has received positive reviews across the board, with the Times calling it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass.” In the rise of Donald Trump, it has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for blue America to interpret that most mysterious of species: the economically precarious white voter.

Vance’s influence has been everywhere this campaign season, shaping our conception of what motivates these voters. And it is already playing a role in how liberals are responding to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, which was accomplished in part by a defection of downscale whites from the Democratic Party. Appalachia overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and Vance has since emerged as one of the media’s favorite Trump explainers. The problem is that he is a flawed guide to this world, and there is a danger that Democrats are learning all the wrong lessons from the election.

Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. “Our religion has changed,” he laments, to a version “heavy on emotional rhetoric” and “light on the kind of social support” that he needed as a child. He also faults “a peculiar crisis of masculinity.” This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently to blame for everything from his mother’s drug addiction to the region’s economic crisis.

“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” he writes. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”

And he isn’t interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did. “Public policy can help,” he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us … it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

Set aside the anti-government bromides that could have been ripped from a random page of National Review, where Vance is a regular contributor. There is a more sinister thesis at work here, one that dovetails with many liberal views of Appalachia and its problems. Vance assures readers that an emphasis on Appalachia’s economic insecurity is “incomplete” without a critical examination of its culture. His great takeaway from life in America’s underclass is: Pull up those bootstraps. Don’t question elites. Don’t ask if they erred by granting people mortgages and lines of credit they couldn’t afford to repay. Don’t call it what it is—corporate deception—or admit that it plunged this country into one of the worst economic crises it’s ever experienced.

No wonder Peter Thiel, the almost comically evil Silicon Valley libertarian, endorsed the book. (Vance also works for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management.) The question is why so many liberals are doing the same.

In many ways, I should appreciate Elegy. I grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. My parents are the sort of god-fearing hard workers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I attended an out-of-state Christian college thanks to scholarships, and had to raise money to even buy a plane ticket to attend grad school. My rare genetic disease didn’t get diagnosed until I was 21 because I lacked consistent access to health care. I’m one of the few members of my high school class who earned a bachelor’s degree, one of the fewer still who earned a master’s degree, and one of maybe three or four who left the area for good.

But unlike Vance, I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it. My public high school didn’t have enough textbooks and half our science lab equipment didn’t work. Some of my classmates did not have enough to eat; others wore the same clothes every day. Sometimes this happened because their addict parents spent money on drugs. But the state was no help here either. Its solution to our opioid epidemic has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable. There aren’t enough beds in psychiatric hospitals to serve the region—the same reason Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) nearly died at the hands of his mentally ill son in 2013.

And then there is welfare. In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty.

Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer reported earlier this year that the number of families surviving on $2 a day grew by 130 percent between 1996 and 2011. Blacks and Latinos are still disproportionately more likely to live under the poverty line, but predominately white Appalachia hasn’t been spared the scourge either. And while Obamacare has significantly reduced the number of uninsured Americans, its premiums are still often expensive and are set to rise. Organizations like Remote Access Medical (RAM) have been forced to make up the difference: Back home, people start lining up at 4 a.m. for a chance to access RAM’s free healthcare clinics. From 2007 to 2011, the lifespans of eastern Kentucky women declined by 13 months even as they rose for women in the rest of the country.

According to the Economic Innovation Group, my home congressional district—Virginia’s Ninth—is one of the poorestin the country. Fifty-one percent of adults are unemployed; 19 percent lack a high school diploma. EIG estimates that fully half of its 722,810 residents are in economic distress.

As I noted in Scalawag earlier this year, the Ninth is not an outlier for the region. On EIG’s interactive map, central Appalachia is a sea of distress. If you are born where I grew up, you have to travel hundreds of miles to find a prosperous America. How do you get off the dole when there’s not enough work to go around? Frequently, you don’t. Until you lose your benefits entirely: The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF), passed by Bill Clinton and supported by Hillary Clinton, boots parents off welfare if they’re out of work.

At various points in this election cycle, liberal journalists havesounded quite a bit like Vance. “‘Economic anxiety’ as a campaign issue has always been a red herring,” Kevin Drum declared in Mother Jones. “If you want to get to the root of this white anxiety, you have to go to its roots. It’s cultural, not economic.”

At Vox, Dylan Matthews argued that while Trump voters deserved to be taken seriously, most were actually fairly well-off, with a median household income of $72,000. The influence of economic anxiety, he concluded, had been exaggerated.

Neither Drum or Matthews accounted for regional disparities in white poverty rates, and they failed to anticipate how those disparities would impact the election. Trump supporters were wealthier than Clinton supporters overall, but Trump’s victories in battleground states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio correlated to high foreclosure rates. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney with the white working class and flipped certain strategic counties red.

But Matthews was right in at least one sense: Trump Country has always been bigger than Appalachia and the white working class itself. You just wouldn’t know this from reading the news.

In March, Trump won nearly 70 percent of the Republican primary vote in Virginia’s Buchanan County. At the time, it was his widest margin of victory, and no one seemed surprised that this deeply conservative and impoverished pocket in southwest Virginia’s coal country handed him such decisive success. And no one seemed to realize Buchanan County had once been a Democratic stronghold.

A glossy Wall Street Journal packagelabeled it “The Place That Wants Donald Trump The Most” and promised readers that understanding Buchanan County was key to understanding the “source” of Trump’s popularity. The Financial Times profiled a local young man who fled this dystopia for the University of Virginia; it titled the piece “The Boy Who Escaped Trump Country.” And then there was Bloomberg View: “Coal County is Desperate for Donald Trump.” (The same piece said the county seat, Grundy, “looks as if it fell into a crevice and got stuck.”)

And then Staten Island went to the polls. A full 82 percent of Staten Island Republicans voted to give Trump the party’s nomination, wresting the title of Trumpiest County away from Buchanan. The two locations have little in common aside from Trump. Staten Island, population 472,621, is New York City’s wealthiest borough. Its median household income is $70,295, a figure not far off from the figure Matthews cites as the median income of the average Trump supporter. Buchanan County, population 23,597, has a median household income of $27,328 and the highest unemployment rate in Virginia. Staten Island, then, tracks closer to the Trumpist norm, but it received a fraction of the coverage.

No one wrote escape narratives about Staten Island. Few plumbed the psyches of suburban Trumpists. And no one examined why Democratic Buchanan County had become Republican. Instead, the media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-in-exile.

“A preoccupation with penalizing poor whites reveals an uneasytension between what Americans are taught to think the country promises—the dream of upward mobility—and the less appealing truth that class barriers almost invariably make that dream unobtainable,” Nancy Isenberg wrote in the preface to her book White Trash. If the system worked for you, you’re not likely to blame it for the plight of poor whites. Far easier instead to believe that poor whites are poor because they deserve to be.

But now we see the consequences of this class blindness. The media and the establishment figures who run the Democratic Party both had a responsibility to properly identify and indict the system’s failures. They abdicated that responsibility. Donald Trump took it up—if not always in the form of policy, then in his burn-it-all-down posture.

No analysis of Trumpism is complete without a reckoning of its white supremacy and misogyny. Appalachia is, like so many other places, a deeply racist and sexist place. It is not a coincidence that Trumpist bastions, from Buchanan County to Staten Island, are predominately white, or that Trump rode a tide of xenophobia to power. Economic hardship isn’t unique to white members of the working class, either. Blacks, Latinos, and Natives occupy a far more precarious economic position overall. White supremacy is indeed the overarching theme of Trumpism.

But that doesn’t mean we should repeat the establishment failures of this election cycle and minimize the influence of economic precarity. Trump is a racist and a sexist, but his victory is not due only to racism or sexism any more than it is due only to classism: He still won white women and a number of counties that had voted for Obama twice. This is not a simple story, and it never really has been.

We don’t need to normalize Trumpism or empathize with white supremacy to reach these voters. They weren’t destined to vote for Trump; many were Democratic voters. They aren’t destined to stay loyal to him in the future. To win them back, we must address their material concerns, and we can do that without coddling their prejudices. After all, America’s most famous progressive populist—Bernie Sanders—won many of the counties Clinton lost to Trump.

There’s danger ahead if Democrats don’t act quickly. The Traditionalist Worker’s Party has already announced plans for an outreach push in greater Appalachia. The American Nazi Party promoted “free health care for the white working class” in literature it distributed in Missoula, Montana, last Friday. If Democrats have any hope of establishing themselves as the populist alternative to Trump, they can’t allow American Nazis to fall to their left on health care for any population.

By electing Trump, my community has condemned itself to further suffering. The lines for RAM will get longer. Our schools will get poorer and our children hungrier. It will be one catastrophic tragedy out of the many a Trump presidency will generate. So yes, be angry with the white working class’s political choices. I certainly am; home will never feel like home again.

But don’t emulate Vance in your rage. Give the white working class the progressive populism it needs to survive, and invest in the areas the Democratic Party has neglected. Remember that bootstraps are for people with boots. And elegies are no use to the living.