Links/Commentary: June 09, 2014

Assorted commentary for today, 21/Prairial/222:

• The mainstream British media seem to have a sort of blackout on coverage for the Green Party, despite surging support that saw the Greens land fourth place behind the Tories in the recent EU elections, with an impressive 8% of the overall vote (and only 3 seats, given the vagaries of the Westminster model). More media space seems to be reserved for the Lib-Dems (fifth behind the Greens), or for the gaffe-prone racists from the UKIP and the BNP. For Europe as a whole, the Green-EFA bloc has garnered an impressive 58 seats this time. Even better days are hopefully ahead…
• I’m starting to look a little bit like Julius Martov. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad one.
• Corey Robin on the Jacobin Magazine: The model of a “virtuous” defendant, in the Stalinist and American criminal justice systems. The US prison population now equals that of the Gulag system just before Stalin’s death, according to one of the more reliable estimates, and a good chunk of these are in for petty non-violent crimes like marijuana possession. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: 750,000 prisoners incarcerated on charges of marijuana possession, at about $21k a year to keep them in prison, cost about $15.75 billion a year – $46 billion if you consider that the average sentence is a little over 3 years long. Quite a pretty penny for the prison-industrial complex, no?
• While a uniform civil code is most welcome in India, care must be taken to ensure that it is truly uniform, and not just pandering to the majority. Scroll.in covers the Goa civil code, which the BJP holds up as India’s only “truly uniform” code.
• The level of support enjoyed by the Greek neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is surprising, given how badly the Nazis treated Greece in their 1941-44 occupation. The once-fringe party took in 10% of the Greek vote in the recent EU elections
• Today’s feel-good story: The women of a small Uttarakhand village solve their water woes, and bring about an economic upswing.