F.E.M.A(federal emergency management agency)
The United States Federal Emergency Management Agency has numerous detainment camps throughout the United States. Some camps have been recently constructed and / or renovated and are fully staffed. The existence of the camps coupled with Presidential Executive Orders giving the President and Department of Homeland Security (of which FEMA is now part) control over ‘national essential functions’ in the event of ‘catastrophic emergency’ have resulted in concerns that the camps will be used to forcefully detain American citizens for unconstitutional purposes.
FEMA’s most notable large-scale operation in recent times was in the aftermath of August 2005 hurricane Katrina, which occurred along the north-central Gulf Coast, particularly affecting New Orleans, Louisiana. FEMA’s response to the disaster was widely criticized due to a slow and inadequate response, blocking external private and public assistance from individuals and groups including the Red Cross, [4] banning photographs of the dead [5] and confiscating reporter’s equipment [6] and homeowner’s registered firearms.Readiness Exercise 1984 (REX-84) is an emergency response program involving the implementation of martial law, the movement of civilian populations and the arrest and detainment of segments of the population. A rehearsal of the program was carried out April 5-13, 1984. It was led by FEMA and the Department of Defense and involved the coordination of 34 other Federal departments and agencies. [11] REX-84 was mentioned during the Iran-Contra hearings [12] and publicly exposed by the Miami Herald on Sunday July 5th, 1987. [13]
Similar large-scale emergency preparedness drills have taken place regularly since then. The most recently announced, organized by NORTHCOM, are scheduled for October 15-20. [14] Some assert that the drills continue to include preparations for the suspension of the Constitution and the implementation of martial law.
Parents upset over FEMA
coloring bookUpdated: Monday, 27 Apr 2009, 10:55 PM CDT
Published : Monday, 27 Apr 2009, 9:57 PM CDT
Photojournalist, Robert Brown
MOBILE, Ala. - A page showing fire, severe weather, and flooding, all disasters that can have an impact on a family, especially children. All of these disasters were featured in a coloring book on the Federal Emergency Management Agency's website, designed to help children cope with disasters.
But one page has parents taking the colors away. It's an illustration of the World Trade Center Towers in New York. One of the towers has smoke coming out of it while a plane looks to be heading towards the other.
"They like to color happy pictures not pictures like that I don't think I would like to give my child these kids of pictures to color," said parent Brandy Greer.
Another parent, who was from New York, couldn't believe the scene was in something intended for such young minds. She said she thinks the picture might actually scare a child, since most might now understand the horror of 9/11.
"I think there could be better solutions, for a small child that's coloring. How would they color that to be honest? That's not something I'd put in a coloring book," she said.
She said if you feel your kids need to know about what happened the best way she can think of is how she handled it when 9/11 happened right in her backyard, "To talk to them, that's the best way to talk to them."
Just recently, the National FEMA site took the coloring book down. There are others that don't include anything with 9/11 still on the site.
FEMA officials released this statement:
"We removed the content from our website after reviewing www.FEMA.gov for appropriate material. FEMA for kids assists children in understanding disasters and we will continue to post appropriate material that supports its mission," said John Shea with FEMA.
"FEMA For Kids" not only includes the coloring books but also has stories from other kids who have gone through disasters, ways to put together a kids survival kit, and helpful activities kids can take part in.
The coloring book that included the page on 9/11 was created by the Freeborn County Crisis Response Team in Minnesota.
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Guilty of Being Poor Text size
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Eric Ruder
Dissident Voice
April 25, 2009 The jailers of the 19th century — even in the pre-Civil War South — largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution.
Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century. Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century.
“Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.
“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”
The details of Nowlin’s case are even more alarming than the Times editorial suggests. Not only was Nowlin under orders to pay a fine stemming from someone else’s actions, but she had been laid off from work and lost her home at the time she was ordered to “reimburse” the county for her son’s detention.
Despite her inability to pay, she was held in contempt of court and ordered to serve a 30-day sentence. On March 6, three days after she was incarcerated, she was released for one day to work. She also picked up her paycheck, in the amount of $178.53. This, she thought, could be used to pay the $104, and she would be released from jail.
But when she got back to the jail, the sheriff told her to sign her check over to the county — to pay $120 for her own room and board, and $22 for a drug test and booking fee.
Even more absurd, Nowlin requested but was denied a court-appointed lawyer. So because she was too poor to afford a lawyer and denied her constitutional right to have the court provide one for her, she couldn’t fight the contempt charge that stemmed from her poverty. And her contempt conviction only added to her poverty, as the fines and fees she was obligated to pay now multiplied.
“Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute,” said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”
Michigan isn’t the only place where you can be imprisoned for the crime of involuntary poverty. The same Catch-22 ensnares poor defendants daily in courtrooms across the country.
In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a suit on behalf of Ora Lee Hurley, who couldn’t get out of prison until she had enough money to pay a $705 fine. But she couldn’t pay the fine because she had to pay the Georgia Department of Corrections $600 a month for room and board, and spend $76 a month on public transportation, laundry and food.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
She was released five days a week to work at the K&K Soul Food restaurant, where she earned $6.50 an hour, which netted her about $700 a month after taxes. Hurley was trapped in prison for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence until the Southern Center intervened. Over the course of her incarceration, she earned about $7,000, but she never had enough at one time to pay off her $705 fine.
“This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there,” Sarah Geraghty, a SCHR lawyer, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution while Hurley was still imprisoned. “And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.”
Georgia also lets for-profit probation companies prey on people too poor to pay their traffic violations and court fees. According to a 2008 SCHR report entitled “Profiting from the poor”:
In courts around Georgia, people who are charged with misdemeanors and cannot pay their fines that day in court are placed on probation under the supervision of private, for-profit companies until they pay off their fines. On probation, they must pay these companies substantial monthly “supervision fees” that may double or triple the amount that a person of means would pay for the same offense.
For example, a person of means may pay $200 for a traffic ticket on the day of court and be done with it, while a person too poor to pay that day is placed on probation and ends up paying $500 or more for the same offense.
The privatization of misdemeanor probation has placed unprecedented law enforcement authority in the hands of for-profit companies that act essentially as collection agencies. These companies, focused on profit rather than public safety or rehabilitation, are not designed to supervise people or connect them to services and jobs. Rather, they charge exorbitant monthly fees and use the threat of imprisonment and a variety of bullying tactics to squeeze money out of the men and women under their supervision.
For too many poor people convicted of misdemeanors, our state is not living up to the constitutional promise of equal justice under law.
In Gulfport, Miss., the municipal court started a “fine collection task force” to crack down on people who owed fees for misdemeanors. According to the SCHR Web site:
The task force trolled through predominantly African American neighborhoods, rounding up people who had outstanding court fines. After arresting and jailing them, the City of Gulfport processed these people through a court proceeding at which no defense attorney was present or even offered.
Many people were jailed for months after hearings lasting just seconds. While the city collected money, it also packed the jail with hundreds of people who couldn’t pay, including people who were sick, physically disabled and/or limited by mental disabilities.
The disregard of the justice system for the rights of poor people to equal protection and due process is cause for outrage. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise in an era when the government spends billions bailing out banks while letting foreclosures and unemployment ruin the lives of working people.
We need to build a movement, like the working-class struggles of the 1930s, that can demand an end to the inhuman practice of incarcerating people for no other crime than finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.
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Comment Rules
209 Responses to “Guilty of Being Poor” F*ck the system Says:
April 25th, 2009 at 11:06 am thats shocking!
whats next, public floggings or a good bit of state endorsed lynching for repeat “offenders”
Reply
Mike Philbin Reply:
April 25th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Prison doesn’t work FOR ANYONE.
All it allows Gov to do is run EXPERIMENTS on people who’ve given up their rights by trying to work the system.
You’re right, the system is totally fu<ked.
Reply
Amazing Reply:
April 25th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
ofcourse the system is a failure.
how the fuck can you jail a person who is revolting against the system fellas
almost everyone who is in jail just figured it out they figured the system out and said fuck this.
that’s why most are there.
the system owns you,opresses you and you feel chained and controled as if in a box and they are gonna take that already fucked up status of life and ACTUALLY put you inside a box so you can def not do shit at all in another fucking box holy shit a casing inside of a casing means they really needed to shut you up.
welcome to the system that was never built for us but for the benefit of the psychological architects and wizards we all call bankers.
21st century internment camps?( F.E.M.A camps) look it up
On the surface, NECEA proposes to direct the Secretary of Homeland Security in the establishment of six “national emergency centers on military installations," one in each of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regions.
The purpose of these centres is to use existing military infrastructure for several emergency situations or natural disasters that might render individuals and families “dislocated.” NECEA further proposes that over the course of the next two years, $360,000,000 is to be appropriated for this initiative. (To whom do you think such construction contracts will be awarded?)
As already mentioned, primary concern must be given to the following catch-all phrase: that the purpose of these military-based emergency centres may “meet other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.” In other words, that the purpose is to be determined by the same U.S. government body who, since launching the trailer for the War on Terrorism in 2001, has systematically worked to institutionalize prejudice against civil rights groups and activists, anti-war movements, unions, ‘brown’ people (you are homogeneous, don’t challenge this) and Muslims, while stripping the American citizen of their right to privacy and dissent.
Second, nowhere does NECEA provide clear indication as to which system of justice those inside of the emergency centres would be held. Since they are to be established within the parameters of military bases, the de facto assumption is that those within would be subject to military law. More dangerous perhaps is an all-together different system, removed even from the military one, learned courtesy of Guantanamo and all other secret and illegal US ‘security’ facilities across the globe.
NECEA does, however, mention that within six months, the “Secretary of Defense shall transfer to the Secretary of Homeland Security administrative [sic] jurisdiction.” It would then follow that the definition of ‘administrative’ jurisdiction here may have nothing to do with legal jurisdiction, and so NECEA makes it possible that those within the emergency centre would, for the duration of their (interred) stay, not be subject to the regular legal system. Once more, Americans may welcome the suspension of habeas corpus.
At a more general level, these centres are “capable of being scaled up or down” and would each be subject to a “24/7 operations watch center [which] shall be in full ready mode.” For what, exactly, the watch centre will be ready, is left to our imagination and to be utilised at the discretion of those in power. Nowhere is it mentioned for whom these centres are to be established, or more specifically, who would be kept within these locations.
NECEA begs the following questions: Are these ‘emergency centres’ only for U.S. Citizens? How does one become eligible? Is it on a first-come, first-served basis? Does one have to be arrested? If the centre is filled to capacity and there is indeed a natural disaster, how will individuals be kept out? If one is inside of the emergency centre, can they simply walk out and leave, or will their freedom of movement be at the discretion of the military? Etc., ad infinitum.
Finally, and if not more insidious, is the reality that nowhere in NECEA is mentioned either the duration of these emergency centres or the efforts that must be undertaken to restore to order and to normal the lives and environment post ‘emergency.’
‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’
Within the reality presented above and in order to understand the full weight of this silent war on Americans, it is necessary to view it within a greater context. First, there is the unfortunate reality that Obama has time and again stated that his administration will neither investigate, hold to account, nor prosecute the officials responsible for the United States.
Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence. It’s an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration “invoked a legal tool known as the ’state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” He was right then, and we’re dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.
Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.
This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.
