In The Secure and the Dispossessed, Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes have collected an unflinching survey of a species gone mad. The book’s subtitle is “How the Military and Corporations Are Shaping a Climate-Changed World.” In short, the Authoritarian Exceptionalist Military Corporate Complex is flamboyantly recognizing the hole it is in, and exponentially increasing the rate of digging, while hiring PR firms to redefine “digging” as “robust engagement in advanced resilient green initiatives that save us all by further enriching the rich, militarizing the world, and rendering the earth uninhabitable.”

Over a hundred concentration camps now colonize Ohio’s landscape including a federal prison, 87 county jails, 25 state-funded adult prisons, three privately-operated adult prisons, seven juvenile prisons and five Immigration Custom and Enforcement cages. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “...every state in this country is more likely to incarcerate its residents than almost every nation on this planet.” Ohio’s incarceration rate is greater than the incarceration rates of Cuba, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Iraq, China, Haiti, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, or Pakistan. The State of Ohio has approximately 262,000 people on probation/parole, 50,257 adult prison inmates (ODRC, Sept 2017) an estimated 18,190 jail inmates and 505 juvenile inmates. Its adult prison population is superseded only by Pennsylvania (50,580), New York (50,864), Georgia (54,353), Florida (99,119), California (131,436), Texas (147,053) and the Federal government (196,500).

OCTOBER 12, 2017 – COLUMBUS, OHIO: The Estate of Jaron Ben-Rasu Thomas has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Columbus Division of Police. The lawsuit brings civil rights, wrongful death, survivor and loss of consortium claims. The family seeks declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief for the violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of Thomas to be free from excessive use of force and his common-law right to be free from reckless conduct directly and proximately causing his pain, emotional distress and death. The lawsuit was filed on October 12, 2017 in the Southern District of the United States Federal District Court. 

In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was a white American and had a Christian name, he was not immediately labeled a terrorist, even though his death toll considerably exceeded that achieved in many ‘terrorist attacks’, including those that occur in war zones (such as US drone murders of innocent people attending weddings).

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there is now an average of one mass shooting (arbitrarily defined by the FBI as a shooting in which at least four victims are shot) each day in the USA. By any measure, this is a national crisis.