US empire cannot last on racism, war

The US empire cannot last for another hundred years by relying on “racism, war, brutal predatory capitalism, and Islamophobia,” says Dr. Randy Short with the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization.

Four New York City officials have told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity that a former US Marine was “basically baked to death” in a jail cell one week after he was arrested for trespassing trying to spend a cold night on the roof of a Harlem housing project.

The homeless veteran, who was jailed in a special observation unit for inmates with mental illnesses, was found dead in his jail cell that overheated to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Officials were supposed to check on him every 15 minutes as part of suicide watch but African-American Jerome Murdough was not checked until four hours later when he was found dead.

“There’s been a rash of killings by the police departments across the country of US veterans; many of them suffer from mental illness. I don’t believe anything will be done at all…if they are black, certainly nothing will be done,” said Short in a phone interview with Press TV on Thursday.

“There are other issues that underlie why nothing would happen. The psychotropic drug manufacturers have many billions of dollars in contracts to the US Department of Defense, which means that if people really get to the root of the problem, many of our veterans and soldiers in uniform are made crazy for profit for big companies,” he added

“And so, there’s a lot of suicide, murder, and rape across the board happening within the US military and afterwards, on top of that, the problem is we have close to almost a half million homeless veterans in the United States after people have been used to kill people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places we may not even have reported in news, these people come back spiritually damaged and destroyed.”

Short also said that the case of Murdough’s death and many other US veterans who are being either killed or unfairly incarcerated shows that the US “should not be at war with the rest of the world” and “corporations should not be able to destroy people for profit” as US wars are all “about money and profit.”