We were Troy Davis

The state of Georgia executed Troy Davis a few hours ago for the 1989 murder of an off-duty cop. The murder weapon was never found. Seven of nine witnesses have since recanted their testimony and several jurors in Davis's original trial have expressed doubt in their verdict.

   I don't want to go over the surreal nature of executions and death penalty verdicts: the endless and Jobean trials, literal and figurative, for the guilty men and the victims' families, the odd habit of upper courts and prosecutors to show impatience when faced with new evidence of innocence, or the whole race thing.

 Actually, I am going there. I want to talk a little about race. I don't want to go over the percentage of black executed convicts, or the preponderance of white murderers who don't get the needle; that's been done.

   I just thought of this when the press release came out.

   In 2008, a large group of rich white men pleaded poverty and begged congress for almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars. The bailout was orchestrated by the Treasury, which was made up of former Goldman-Sachs executives who had much to do with where the money went, but that's another story. My point is they got their money.

   Fast-forward to a few hours ago. A black man had been begging, not for hundreds of billions of dollars, but for his life. He'd said he was innocent, but even if he hadn't been, there was enough evidence to the contrary to at least get him up off that gurney and back into his cell. They could have done at least that. But he got the needle shortly after he asked God to forgive everyone for executing an innocent man.

   When it come to the death penalty, when it comes to poor defendants from poor families who have to rely on Public Defence lawyers or clever but beleaguered volunteers, politicians and judges get serious.

    Fast forward to now. Barack Obama, a black president, wants to take money from the wealthy to help pay off the debt. A black man is asking a society - that can't grant a black man his life - to give up money that usually goes to white men.

   The right-wing foamers and the Tea-Partiers will scream about socialism, un-Americanism, Communism, and maybe the whole birth certificate issue will come back.

   But deep down, the money, the death penalty, this rage against this black president, is about our races. A race that helped build the country but was never paid for it, another race that feeds its guilt and fear into politics, guns, nooses, prisons, electric chairs, and lethal injections. I'm not going to play the pious Canadian right now because yesterday Parliament passed an Omnibus crime bill that will herald longer sentences and more prisons. We do the same thing but we do it to Aboriginal people.

    We can't argue that one is about money and the other is about crime and the death penalty. Currency, crime, and death are inextricably linked. Money is simply energy and labor channelled into legal tender; death occurs because too much money flows one way but not the other. African-Americans worked for generations without pay, and now the wealth is all in one place. We always say to follow the money, and death and crime oblige. The present system, with its executions, its coddling of the rich, and the war on the poor and middle class, is a product of long-standing debt.

   Nothing will ever change until that imbalance is fixed.