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The controversial execution of Troy Davis last week in Georgia ignited outrage around the world while injecting renewed attention across America into the propriety of the death penalty, particularly in Davis-like cases where there is evidence of innocence or serious reason for doubt about guilt.

Despite the outrage over the execution of Davis though, an overarching reality is that most people don’t give a rusty-darn about debates over the death penalty.

Most folks don’t give a flick about conceptions of justice because they are just trying to make it, often barely, day-to-day.

But there is a reality about the death penalty that too few people properly appreciate: it ain’t an out-of-sight/out-of-mind circumstance impacting only families of murder victims, the death-sentenced inmate and narrow interests on either side of the pro-con execution divide.

The death penalty, besides that constantly raised “morality” thing, is a money thing that picks the pockets of all Americans, regardless of their support for or opposition to execution.
Execution of witches in 17th Century England: A long history of official killing

1) I had brunch on Sunday in Chinatown with a friend who works in local television news. He complained that the Occupy Wall Street people had sent over video that they said showed demonstrators getting maced. It didn’t show any such thing, my friend insisted. After brunch I walked over to occupied Zuccotti Park (two blocks north of Wall Street) and told somebody at the Media table that they had to be careful about claiming more for their video than it actually showed. Then I went home and looked at the video, and it clearly showed several young women, who presented no physical threat, getting wrapped up by police in a plastic net and pepper sprayed in the face.
Officer Anthony Bologna is being sued for gratuitously pepper-spraying women at the Wall St. occupation

2) My friend’s other complaint about Occupy Wall Street was that they didn’t have a list of demands. Nobody knows what they want, said my friend. It is true that they don’t have a policy statement yet, nothing to spoonfeed the corporate press. But they are trying. On Saturday night, I sat through their General Assembly meeting in the park and heard the report of the One Demand Working Group. Basically, they wanted to demand that other autonomous groups in other cities join them. Most of the General Assembly pointed their hands down and wiggled their fingers, meaning disapproval (in a supportive way). Several people said that you can’t demand solidarity from an autonomous group, you can only encourage it. And everyone seemed to think the language wasn’t “provocative” or “funny,” which meant it had way too much Process jargon and not enough Anglo Saxon monosyllables. It was suggested (not decided) that the One Demand Working Group try another draft and perhaps combine their efforts with the Principles of Solidarity Working Group.

3) The Process is how stuff gets worked out when you don’t have leaders, only Facilitators who facilitate group decisions. There are lots of Facilitators, so the police can’t nail anyone as a leader, not that anyone would want a leader anyway.

4) The Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals wanted help writing a letter to Stephen Colbert, who had done a report that focused on a Non-Male Identified Individual who was in a state of disrobe while protesting Wall Street on the sidewalk. The report featured only interviews with Male Identified Individuals commenting on the naked Non-Male Identified Individual. The Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals wanted Colbert to rectify this imbalance. Male Bodied Individuals, who were not wholly Male Identified, were welcome at the meeting of the Ad Hoc Caucus of Non-Male Identified Individuals.

5) I think that the corporate press has a difficult time understanding Occupy Wall Street because, like 99% of Americans, they have no experience with democracy. They spend most of their time enslaved by large totalitarian collectives known as “corporations” and have never once decided anything for themselves as a group of equal workers. Instead they follow orders and write about elections, which are big puppet shows financed and scripted by Wall Street.

6) Most journalists wouldn’t know democracy if it bit them on the ass.

Thanks to Globalrevolution, it looks like the revolution may be televised afterall!

While you’re down there at the bottom of our page, slide over to the right side, and check out our new T-shirt, which you can order. Watch the reactions you get as people read the logo “This Can’t Be Happening!” and our newest motto: “a major distabilizing influence.”

Just $18, shipping included, or free for a donation of $50 or more to support ThisCantBeHappening!

Click on this image for the video

This appalling video shows what the Bureau of Land Management is really doing in its euphemistically-named “round-ups” of America’s wild horses.

As was reported in ThisCantBeHappening! earlier, the contractors hired by BLM to run horses off of public lands, so that those so-called “dual use” lands can be taken over by mining, timber or agribusiness-owned cattle interests, are not only destroying a part of the heritage of the American West, but are doing it with a cruelty that is both astonishing to behold, and also that is being hidden as much as possible from the public.

Laura Leigh, founder of the organization Wild Horse Education, who has been fighting to protect the wild horses, notes that contrary to the claims of the BLM, which has the responsibility for managing some 260 million acres of federal lands, federal law does not “force” the agency to “cull” these horses. Rather they are required to “manage” them. But through a duplicitous process reminiscent of how the “Indian problem” was “solved” during the 19th century, the agency has been shrinking the horses’ range areas, and then declaring them to be over-crowded, and then coming in and driving them out of their remaining land, often running the terrified animals until their hoves literally fall off. Many of the “round-ups,” as Leigh has written, are deliberately done during the foaling season, leading to many deaths among the young horses.

(Third in a series of Rediscovering America)
 
“How are you?” a perky, young female clerk asked me as I walked through the front door of the odds and ends shop in Upper Dublin, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia.

I was taken aback by her forthright question. I hadn’t been back to the US for a dozen years and had just arrived the night before from Denmark, where one is not ordinarily asked such an intimate question by strangers. I had come to visit my friend Dave and partake in a reunion of the 1970s alternative weekly, the Los Angeles Vanguard, and the new online newspaper, This Cant Be Happening!.

“Not so well; kinda sad,” I ventured timidly.

The questioner’s jaw dropped. The three women customers stopped talking and looked at me inquisitively.

“Why’s that?” asked the clerk.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked incredulously.

The clerk nodded her head. “Yes, I do.”

“Well, I’m sad about this country killing so many people in the world through their wars of aggression.”

The three customers immediately rushed out the door, one waving her gloved hand to the clerk while averting her eyes from my perplexed face.
Old Glory is everywhere in today's America

There is a whole rogues’ gallery of charlatans, cowards, racists and liars involved in the 22-year lynching of Troy Davis, the black man who whose life was summarily terminated by the state of Georgia and by the United States of America last night, but one of them, the horribly ironically named Chatham County Superior Court Judge Penny Freesman, will have a special place of honor in the growing pantheon of criminal jurists who have overseen the execution of innocent men in the course of America’s bloody legal history.

Judge Freesman was the superior court judge who assumed responsibility for Davis’ case at the state level in 2011, signing the new and final execution order despite knowing that seven out of the nine prosecution witnesses used to convict him for the 1989 shooting death of an off-duty white police officer in Savannah had recanted, and then, last night, refusing to lift the execution order, despite pleas to spare his life and grant him a new trial from former FBI Director William Sessions, the Pope, former conservative Republican Georgia Congressman Bob Barr (a former Georgia prosecutor), and over 600,000 people worldwide who sent in petitions.

Freesman now joins the likes of Judge Webster Thayer, who oversaw the politically motivated conviction and execution of anarchists Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on a trumped-up murder charge, Judge Morris Ritchie, who oversaw the equally politically motivated conviction and execution of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor leader Joe Hill on another trumped-up murder charge, and Judge Irving Kaufman, who oversaw the conviction and execution of Ethel Rosenberg, clearly the victim of a politically motivated and truly sick federal government effort to get her husband Julius to admit to spying for the Russians (whatever the truth may be about whether Julius was a spy, his wife was not guilty of the the crime of treason and did not deserve execution).
Troy Davis and Judge Penny Freesman, a victim and his murderer, linked in history forever

London -– Hearing hard-core Republicans applaud the use of the death penalty during a recent televised forum for GOP presidential candidates incensed Sara Callaway, an African-American living in London for the past 25-years.

“It was like a declaration of war against all of us committed to justice,” said Callaway, one of over two hundred people who gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in London’s upscale Mayfair section for a silent, candle-lit vigil protesting the execution of U.S. death row inmate Troy Davis.

That London vigil beginning hours before Davis’ execution in Georgia was among many held in cities across Europe. Georgia officials executed Davis by lethal injection ignoring not just the hundreds of thousands of appeals from Americans (and the overwhelming evidence that his trial had been a fraud and a lynching), but worldwide protests against that action.

European, American and supporters across the globe opposed the death of Davis, whose conviction stood on evidence now severely compromised by eyewitness recantations, improprieties by authorities and identification of a suspect–one of the witnesses for the prosecution — who one juror in the case alleges she heard admit to killing the off-duty policeman whose murder sent Davis to death row.

The killing of Troy Davis may have hurt the US reputation as a just society worldwide more than the Iraq invasion

Free Wall Street, NY – For God’s sake, all you liberal, progressive, anarchist, socialist, communist, hippie, hip hop, yippie, punk whatevers of all aligned and unaligned varieties no matter what your age! There’s a little spark of something down in Zuccotti Park in the heart of darkest darkness near Wall Street! Many hundreds of people have gathered there without permit, declared it their own and are refusing to leave until Wall Street reforms its evil ways!

Now is not the time to stay home and read blogs about how horrible everything is!

Now is not the time to overeat, drink, shoot up, watch television, look at internet porn or whatever else you use as an antidote to despair!

Now is the time to go to Zucotti Park and overthrow capitalism!
Where's the support? A group of activists has occupied a piece of Wall Street since Saturday

The first thing that needs to be said to the heartless boneheads who, at the last Republican presidential debate, cheered at the idea of letting a hypothetical 30-year-old cancer victim who hadn’t bought health insurance die, is that this is no mere hypothetical situation. The second thing that needs to be said is that most such people in real life don’t “refuse to get” health insurance. They either cannot afford it (and their employer doesn’t provide it), or they are rejected by insurers because of pre-existing conditions.

If you are a young person, earning a take-home salary of perhaps $20,000, are trying to raise two kids on your own, and you live in Texas, for example (Medicaid eligibility is set state by state), you would not be eligible for Medicaid coverage. Your two kids would supposedly be eligible, but not you. Meanwhile, if your employer, like most employers who are paying minimum wage, doesn’t offer some kind of group policy, if you were lucky enough not to be rejected for some pre-existing medical condition like diabetes or a heart murmer or something, you’d have to come up with perhaps $3,000 to cover yourself with a plan that would not pay for doctor visits, just major hospital bills. But say you were paying $800 a month for rent, and another $3000 a year to keep some 12-year-old rust-bucket of a vehicle insured and on the road to get you to work and home. That would only leave you $7,000 to feed and clothe your kids and yourself. Would you take $3000 of that to pay for health insurance for yourself and reduce your money for living expenses to $4000 for the year?

Of course not! It would be coming right out of your childrens’ mouths!

All over America, especially these days with one in five of us either out of work or working at some job like the one described above or worse, while looking for a decently paying job, millions of individuals and families are struggling with this desperate problem.
The only exam the uninsured in America can count on is a wallet biopsy

Hvalsoe, Denmark–It was with joy that I watched television coverage of election day, September 15. According to all the nine political parties running, and the mass media, there were no wars in the world and Denmark no longer was involved in three wars—Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya–alongside the USA.

In fact, all through the three-week long election campaign, none of the parties spoke of war, or of that most fundamental of moral questions a society must ask: do we kill other people who do not attack us?

There were eight political parties in the 179-member parliament before election day. The right-wing coalition of liberals (Venstre, middle-to-large farmers’ traditional party) and conservatives (Konservativ, businessmen’s traditional party) held power for a decade but to achieve a parliamentary majority had been compelled to rely on the far right, racist People’s Party (DF).

These eight parties form two blocs: red (center left) and blue (center right).Two in the red bloc declare themselves to be socialist: The People’s Socialists (SF) and the Red Green Alliance (Enhedslisten/Unity List or EL). Another is the traditional majority party, Social Democrats (SD). The fourth “red” party, which shifts between blocs, is the Radical Liberals (Radical Venstre/RV, small business employers and self-employed).

In this election, significant shifts in the numbers of parliamentary factions occurred. EL went from 2.2% of the vote to 6.7% for a gain of eight MPs, 12 in all. The Conservatives lost ten of their 18 (from 10.4% to 4.9%), with most of those votes going to the RV (from 5.1% to 9.5%), which went from nine to 17 MPs, and the laissez faire, libertarian capitalist party, Liberal Alliance, which went from five to nine MPs (and from 2.8% to 5% of the vote).

The red bloc now has 89 MPs and the blue 86. Semi-autonomous Greenland and the Faroe Islands each have two MPs in the Danish parliament. These four are usually divided between the two blocs. So the red bloc, despite lacking one vote for a majority, can form a government and rule only if the Red Green Alliance does not oppose its three new partners over principled anti-war morality or pro-socialist economic policies, which is not likely to happen. In the past ten years, several billion dollars has been used for war and new billions are slated to buy more killing machines. Other billions have been used to bail out the banks here, just as in the US. EL’s new partners have supported these policies and continue to do so.

Since its founding, in 1989, EL has opposed aggressive wars. But in this election, it decided to join the red bloc and negotiate with it, if victorious, for a state budget based on a capitalist economy.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, 44-year-old leader of the Social Democrats, will become Denmark's first female prime minister