Ask not how many times the FBI can lie to us but how many times we can lie to the FBI

Ask not how many times the FBI can lie to us but how many times we can lie to the FBI

by digby

From last February:
Movie director John McTiernan was released from the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, S.D., Tuesday morning after 328 days of incarceration.

The director of hit films including Predator, Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October served a sentence related to allegations he made false statements to an FBI agent about the number of times he hired private investigator Anthony Pellicano -- who remains in prison.
I didn't followed the case so I don't know whether some kinds of punishment was justified but considering the huge lies we are told daily by our government police agencies, this does seem excessive. (If Wikipedia is to be believed, it's abuse of prosecutorial discretion and possible political persecution.)

But that's not why I bring this up. I bring it up because of the speech McTiernan just made at the Deauville Film festival.  He had a different one planned but threw it away and said this instead:
I can only plead with you to examine the current political and cultural works of my country [the U.S.]. We are in the hands of a terrible counterrevolution and a great reaction, a second Civil War sponsored by the same people that lost the first Civil War," the director said.

"And it has created a good president who is a prisoner of the White House who can do little beyond the ceremonial," McTiernan continued. "It has made, despite of what you may see on screens, a prison country, and I've had the pleasure of seeing what most people in our class are never allowed to see. I've seen the engine of the beast, it has given us a country with more prisoners than North Korea per capita, more policemen per capita than Germany in 1938. They have suspended trial by jury in most of America."

He also contended that the U.S. sends 750,000 people per year to prison, and that cumulatively over the last two decades 15 percent of the adult population have been incarcerated. "All are predominantly poor white, poor brown and poor black people. And that is the point," McTiernan said. "That is the engine of the machine; because these people forever are disenfranchised, they can never vote. Taking 15 percent of the electorate out of the electorate is enough to control anything." Applause followed those remarks.

The purpose of the mass incarceration is the transfer of wealth, he said, noting: "They have transferred approximately one-third of the wealth of the country from the middle class and the poor not to the top one percent, but to one-tenth of one percent."
He said this to a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys which should result in Fox News viewers rushing to burn their VHS copies of Die Hard. (They'll be very flammable --- they never opened the box-set their kids gave them for Christmas because they couldn't get the damned VCR to work ...)

It's a very neat formulation for what we are seeing with all the inequality and the prisons and the militarization and proliferation of police agencies at all levels of government. Maybe too neat. But there is more than a grain of truth in what he said.

h/t to HR

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