WaPo | Thiel’s secret financing
of multiple suits against Gawker was legal. But that shouldn’t erase
the squeamishness brought on by a billionaire leveraging his wealth to
obliterate a media outlet, all as part of a personal vendetta. (Thiel
did not respond to request for comment.)
But more about Gawker’s coverage may have rankled Thiel
than, as he put it, the website’s “creepy obsession with outing closeted
men.” Gawker’s tech-focused website Valleywag trained a skeptical and
often searing eye on Silicon Valley culture. It reported on what tech
titans said they were about and what they actually did.
Thiel was
a titan, so he was also a target. Thanks to the lawsuits he funded,
Gawker had to stop bothering him. If he gets his way again, any trace of
that troublesome writing may be erased. This starts to look an awful
lot like book-burning.
The good news is that ALL institutions are currently in play. Been
taking a deep dive with the youngest into questions about dopamine
hegemony and the science and engineering of money. Cryptocurrency and
cryptocurrency-speculation being all the rage at the moment among the
young, dumb, and “want something for nothing” set.
Am absolutely loving the open warfare erupting in the Impyrian
heights among the oligarchs and then licking down like lightning to
destroy errant peasants who attempt to fly too high. Ahhhh.., the petty
satisfactions of pedestrian schadenfreude.
Anyway, what we can all know and see for certain at this moment, is
that the NYC-DC establishment is going into a strong second-half push in
this destroy Trump game. Now that russiagate has failed, it’s down to
adultery and faux racism. All just window-dressing over the real game in
play – that game being control of the money pump. The Koch/Thiel/Mercer
block is not going to easily surrender to the status quo whigs, and the
whigs are fresh out of new tricks against their invigorated asymmetrical
elite political adversaries.
One of the theoretical forerunners and bases of Modern
Monetary Theory (MMT) is chartalism, an economic theory which argues
that money is a creature of the state designed to direct economic
activity. The theory has recently been popularized by David Graeber’s
book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a wide-ranging work that touches upon
issues ranging from gift economies, the linkage between quantification
and violence, and the relationship between debt and conceptions of sin.
In charting out the history of money, Graeber notes that, despite
anthropological evidence to the contrary, economists have long clung to
the myth of barter.
However, money does not emerge from barter-based economic activities,
but rather from the sovereign’s desire to organize economic activity.
The state issues currency and then imposes taxes. Because citizens are
forced to use the state’s currency to pay their taxes, they can trust
that the currency will carry value in day-to-day economic activities.
Governments with their own currency and a floating exchange rate
(sovereign currency issuers like the United States) do not have to
borrow from “bond vigilantes” to spend. They themselves first spend the
money into existence and then collect it through taxation to enforce its
usage. The state can spend unlimited amounts of money. It is only
constrained by biophysical resources, and if the state spends beyond the
availability of resources, the result is inflation, which can be
mitigated by taxation.
These simple facts carry radical policy implications. Taxes are not
being used to fund spending, but rather to control inflation and
redistribute income. Thus, we can make the case for progressive taxation
from a moral standpoint concerned with social justice:
Meanwhile, smart black folk recognizing the game of musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic - FULLY REALIZE the ruthless screwing handed down to us by the DC-NYC establishment over the past 50 years, with the replacement negroe program, mass incarceration, and systematic demonization
Counterpunch | I will never forget an encounter I had back in the ‘90s with
then-Senator Joe Biden from Delaware. I was working as the house
photographer for Widener University, which is just south of the Philly
airport and just north of the Delaware line. Biden was then working hard
in the Senate to fund more cops and prisons. He came to Widener to
speak on the topic, and I was assigned to photograph him. After taking a
few shots, I decided to stay to listen to the man and his pitch for the
Drug War, something that personally interested me, beyond my job as a
flak photographer.
I forget exactly what the beloved working-class senator from the
corporate state of Delaware said. But it didn’t sit right with me. I had
been spending my vacation time as a photographer in places like El
Salvador and Nicaragua, in the middle of the Reagan Wars. I’d also been
photographing addicts on the street through a needle exchange program in
inner city Philadelphia and had been reading on Harm Reduction
research. Later, I become aware, from a book by Ted Gest called Crime & Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order,
that when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, Democrats were
freaked out: they feared they were finished politically.
According to
Gest, it was Joe Biden who saved the day by saying, “‘Give me the crime
issue and you’ll never have trouble with it in an election.’” Crime
bills were the way for Democrats to stay in the political game.
“How did so much crime legislation pass during the partisan 1980s?”
Gest asks. “A key element was important personal relationships in the
Capital, especially between Biden and the new Senate Judiciary Committee
chairman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.” This is the famous racist
Dixiecrat who, following the Nixon Strategy, had changed his party
affiliation to Republican, keeping his Senate seniority. It was the
beginning of a fruitful political friendship — “fruitful” that is, if
you were a politician willing to pander and fuel the Drug War fears of
the time. The result was money for more cops and more prisons. It was
part and parcel with what Michelle Alexander has dubbed “the new Jim
Crow,” where the stigma of being a felon replaced the old stigma of being a nigger. Bill Clinton went on to pursue a similar strategy to stay in the political game.
It was thus that I encountered Senator Biden in a Widener University
auditorium shilling for the Drug War. I was in the second row and raised
my hand. Biden called on me, stepping toward me as I stood up. We were
maybe ten feet apart. My question focused on why he seemed to dismiss
addressing the demand problem in the United Stares. I mentioned Harm
Reduction. The important word I used was decriminalization. My
point was why couldn’t we try something other than using the military
and police and prisons to address our very real drug problem?
I might as well have said something about his children. He knew I was
there as some kind of working PR person, and he lit into me with
vicious glee. He turned to address the audience, avoiding both me and my
question.
“This fellow thinks he’s smart. He cleverly uses the term
‘decriminalization’ — when he really means legalization. He wants to
make drugs legal, folks.” He went on some more. All the time I wanted
to say: “Listen — SIR! — would you answer my question.”
It was personal. But it made the man’s huge investment in the Drug War very clear. He knew very well that decriminalization and
all the very reasonable Harm Reduction research was the Achilles heel
of the Drug War. If the well-respected Ted Gest is correct, the Drug War
virtually made Joe Biden’s political career; working with Strom
Thurmond to put away black people made him who he is today. Is this
unfair to Joe Biden? No doubt, his bi-partisan cooperation with Thurmond
to some degree mitigated the South Carolina senator’s Old South racism.
It did nothing, however, to ease up the trend that led to the mass
incarceration of African Americans; and some would add it did nothing to
mitigate the current dysfunctional national bruise caused by the
ideological struggle between the Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives
Matter movements.
We all know Joe Biden’s well-nourished public persona as the working
man’s politician, the guy all of us want to sit down and have a beer
with. The fact is, I would have loved to sit down and have a beer with
Joe. I’d ask him to answer the question he parried away in that
auditorium. What do we have to do now to undo what you and your
bi-partisan allies created back in the ’80s? We all may have the
opportunity to ask him these questions, since it feels like he’s running
for 2020. But let’s hope the Democrats get their act together and do
better than running good ol’ Joe.
Counterpunch | Eric Holder, the nation’s first black Attorney General made his mark as Washington’s first black chief prosecutor by advancing mass pretext policing (mass frisks, stops, and arrests on minor or made-up and discretionary police grounds) in Black neighborhoods. The nation’s first black president Barack Obama severely constricted his very tepid and belated steps toward criminal justice reform by ruling out any concern for those arrested and sentenced for technically violent offenses. That’s a big problem since more than half the nation’s 1 million Black prisoners are behind bars on technically violent charges.
Locking Up Our Own is a compelling and indispensable volume for those who want to get the whole story on the rise of the “the New Jim Crow” – a story that must include serious attention to class and other fractures within Black America. But it is not without problems. Oddly enough given Forman’s desire to provide a somewhat sympathetic explanation for the Black “leadership” class’s participation in the “new Jim Crow,” he fails to note how persistent harsh racial residential segregation – what sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton have rightly called “American Apartheid” – has fed Black support for aggressive policing and harsh sentencing. The Black middle and professional class lives in much greater immediate proximity than its white counterpart to the deeply impoverished and crime-prone Black “underclass”
Forman might have reflected more ambitiously and radically on the question of what happened to the struggle for Black equality and social justice more broadly in the long capitalist neoliberal era, marked at home and abroad by the triumph of the right over the left hand of the state. Many on the Black Left will find Forman too mild and forgiving in his discussion of the role played by Black bourgeois elites in the rise of racially disparate mass incarceration. They will do so with good reason.
A good counter-text here is Elaine Brown’s 2002 volume The Condemnation of Little B. In this forgotten classic and Black radical text, Brown – a former chairman of the Black Panther Party – tried to understand how the entire city of Atlanta, including its prominent Black citizens, came to unjustly condemn a poor 13-year-old Black boy, Michael Lewis, for the 1997 murder of a white man visiting a well-known drug haven in that city’s Black ghetto. Brown showed how Lewis’s conviction was “effectively predestined, attributable to the comfortable ‘New Age racism’ of white liberals and middle-class blacks who have abandoned the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity.”
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is probably the single greatest disappointment for me with 45's administration. His anti-drug stance is retrograde cover for reinstituting the prosecutorial savagery which resulted in mass incarceration over the past forty years. AG support for harsh or mandatory minimum sentences, coupled with the claim that it provides a vital service in making cases as leverage to flip people to inform on their associates, was the essential recipe for transforming America into the incarceration nation.
Even when it's used as prosecutors claim it is intended to convict ringleaders, the threat of harsh or mandatory minimum sentences to intimidate people into betraying their friends and family members is ethically suspect and legally corrupt. Claiming that it's used to dismantle illegal drug networks is at best historically suspect. In terms of practical results, this policy is has wreaked havoc and proven corrosive in terms of breaking down any pre-existing structures of social trust, community, and friendship that might have been built over time. The explicit message of this policy is that treachery and betrayal is an act worthy of reward. The worst punishment is reserved for those who demonstrate loyalty and integrity. Drug Warriors justify this policy by asserting that Drug Dealers are already lower than murderers or violent rapists, and thus have no integrity to preserve, because they deal Drugs. But that isn’t the worst of it. What’s really ethically indefensible is the difference between the way the policy is described by politicians and prosecutors to the general public, and the way that it’s actually employed.
Prosecutors routinely tout their use of the tactic as the use of informants to “bust up the ladder”- that is - to flip low-level retailers to snitch on the people above them in the hierarchy. That's what's always depicted in the movies and on the teevee crime procedurals. Using snitches this way, the prosecutor claims he is working his way toward the “kingpin” at the top of the hierarchy. The "kingpin" is finally made vulnerable to criminal conviction through informant testimony, or by having a snitch facilitate a transaction with government agents, as if there’s an ultimate "kingpin" whose conviction will lead to final victory in the Drug War.
This simple plot line may hold a deep psychological appeal to children, buybull buddies, or people addicted to purely fictional crime procedurals - but there's no practical or historical reason to believe it's ever really happened, ever. Too many cases show that drug selling organizations were dismantled in exactly the opposite manner. The "kingpin" is the one who gets caught right up front and then receives lenient sentencing for informing on all his subordinates.
Nicky Barnes is a name which comes to mind for buying leniency for himself and/or close relatives by ratting out everyone beneath him in his organization. Rayful Edmond is another prime example of the top-down snitching effect.
Examining the stories of prisoners documented by FAMM and the Marshall Project shows cases where the heaviest time landed on the people at the bottom - people who literally had no one available to betray, no “substantial information” to provide to aid prosecutors. So all the time landed on the lowest underlings.. This is fine from the perspective of the harsh prosecutions system, because that System requires someone as a sacrifice to keep the numbers looking good and providing the image of an effective law enforcement campaign. (not to mention the profit motivation for the private for-profit prison-industrial complex itself)
People have been subjected to mandatory minimum sentences simply as a result of having once provided their residence or business as the location for a drug transaction. Mandatory minimums have been handed down for driving buyers and/or sellers to and from a transaction. One instance of driving a buyer to the home of a seller is formally an overt act in furtherance of an illegal drug sale, and therefore all that’s required to convict someone of one count of “felony drug conspiracy.”
Strictly speaking, millions of Americans have committed at least one felony in their lives. Anyone who’s gotten far enough into illegal drug use to purchase their own stash of weed and have acquaintances involved in the same activity has done the above at least once. From the prosecutor's perspective, conspiracy is conspiracy, no matter how minor.
Driving a friend over to a dealer’s apartment to buy a $15 bag of weed is taking part in a drug sales conspiracy, and conspiracy is a felony. Of course rendezvous like these take place daily in the underground marketplace. Most of the time the risk of getting arrested is negligible. In the event that someone is swept up in a raid and busted for that participation, felony conspiracy offers a lever for the prosecutor seeking people to snitch for them. This, notwithstanding the fact that someone who simply drives their friend over to a house and waits outside in the car while they do a deal may have no information of value to bargain with.
Meanwhile, those same ball-busting prosecutors reward those who have risen high enough in the hierarchy of a drug conspiracy to have detailed knowledge of its working and who can offer critical testimony against their companions with reduced sentences, comfortable confinement settings, or witness protection.
The corruption, dishonesty, social and ethical cannibalism within the sphere of forbidden substance users and those who prey on forbidden substance users - has done more than any other single factor to bring on the climate of political malaise in this country. Its still largely third rail status as a subject for national political consideration is a crucial indication of its importance. If Prohibition/War isn't the most important factor, it's certainly the most important unmentioned factor in the increasing antipathy of Americans to both traditional political parties.
For most of my lifetime, it's been out of bounds to broach the notion of drug law reform in a large public forum. That decades-long evasion of honest debate on the relevant issues has enabled the Drug War- with its combination of unchallenged rationale and array of actual consequences - to exert a profoundly destructive effect on both official and unofficial institutions of this society. We're dealing with a corrosive situation that's been allowed to grow and fester for at least 40 years. Not drug use - but the illegal drug markets and the consequences to society of those markets. The society nurtured by that underground economy, which advantages hardened criminals over those who aren't as willing and able to resort to deceit and violence, has routinely exported the psychotic and antisocial values from jails into our communities.
We don't give nearly enough consideration to the negative consequences engendered by mass incarceration and what that has brought back to our communities from the bedlam(s) of the prison industrial complex. It is the criminal marketplace rather than the effect of forbidden substances which has acquired a hegemonic influence over our communities and popular culture. Who among us is factoring in the current state of most of our jails and prisons and what these contagiously export into our communities? Who is factoring in the personal and public health problems and socially corrosive mentalities bubbling up out of prisons - which factors are incontestably worse than the worst impacts even of forbidden substance addiction, per se.
Race obsessives think that the main problem in America is drawn along racial lines. I disagree. The big problem in America is the long-term result of nearly a half-century of a profoundly and deceptively metastasizing Drug War. This dry rot has spread throughout our society corrupting banks, schools, police, courts, jails, politicians, professions, rents, housing, social welfare programs, the public health system, big pharma.
The problems of forbidden substance misuse and abuse are dwarfed by the problems of Greed, Punitive Morality, Stigmatization, and Deception on both sides of the crooked line irrationally drawn by the forbidden substance criminal statutes. The country would see a noticeable improvement within two years of effective drug law reform that worked to minimize the economic demand in the criminal marketplace: cannabis legalization, opioid addiction maintenance, a liberalized prescription and/or registry regime for some of the other substances, all while retaining laws against illegal sales operations.
In less than ten years, we might even get many of our worst schools and neighborhoods back on the path to recovery from that long-standing condition of beleaguered competition with the burdens imposed by the illicit economy.
The Federal government put policies in place that practically mandated a
criminal monopoly over the trade in a wide array of illegal substances,
while criminalizing the entire population with which users/dealers were most closely identified. Leaving aside marijuana for a moment, and fast forwarding to the crack cocaine epidemic - while cocaine/crack can still be found as a street drug in this country; it's
just that not as many people want it. They've seen how it can derail
someone's life. Although both the supply and the numbers of cocaine
users remain many times what they were 45-50 years ago.
The criminalization
and stigmatization of prohibited drugs users works to pre-emptively wall
them off
from most avenues of participation in legitimate society. Their
permanent stigmatization in the mainstream economy, effectively
encourages them to confine their energies to participating in the
criminal economy. As for trends in urban violence, they're probably destined to cycle through for
some time.
45 years of Drug War has made gangsterism dynastic. Furthermore, it has entrenched it through the prison systems. Alcohol
prohibition only lasted 13 years and firmly established organized crime for two or three generations thereafter. What would the mafias have become if the "noble
experiment" of alcohol prohibition hadn't been put to an end after only 13 years? Along with Mass Incarceration, this is a
crucial difference between the current Drug War and the Prohibition
Era.
Then, when that situation eventually gets out of hand, the
government steps in with well-funded militarization of the police,
paramilitary tactics, and mass incarceration policies. It's a
turnkey operation for a totalitarian society, and the justification for
it appears entirely rational as long as the population thinks of it
solely in terms of fear reactions and their relief, and never questions
the flaws in the original premise that led to the breakdown of civic
order in the first place. (Nixon's declaration of war on the left and on blacks for opposition to the Vietnam War)
theatlantic | If a conservative is a liberal who
has been mugged, you might expect black folks, who are
disproportionately victims of crime, to support the politics of law and
order. And they frequently have done just that, according to Forman, a
former public defender in Washington, D.C.; a co-founder of a D.C.
charter school for at-risk youth; and now a professor at Yale Law
School. Using the District of Columbia (a k a “Chocolate City”) as his
laboratory, Forman documents how, as crime rose from the late 1960s to
the ’90s, the city’s African American residents responded by supporting
an array of tough-on-crime measures. A 1975 measure decriminalizing
marijuana died in the majority-black city council, which went on to
implement one of the nation’s most stringent gun-control laws. Black
residents endorsed a ballot initiative that called for imposing harsh
sentences on drug dealers and violent offenders. Replicated on a
national level over the same period, these policies led to mass
incarceration and aggressive policing strategies like stop-and-frisk,
developments that are now looked upon as affronts to racial justice.
Much
of what Forman reports would not surprise anyone who has spent time at a
black church or a black barbershop—or in the company of my mother. In
the ’60s, she marched with Malcolm X, and during the ’80s, after the
public school where she taught was vandalized, she said, “Those niggers
should be put under the jail.” My mom’s ideas about criminal-justice
policy are informed by getting held up at gunpoint in front of our house
on Chicago’s South Side, seeing family members suffer from addiction,
and watching the cops treat my stepfather like a criminal after he got
into a fender bender with a white man.
Needing the
criminal-justice system to help keep you safe, to be fair in its
investigations, and to be merciful with people who’ve run afoul of the
law—this urgent, unwieldy agenda explains much of African American
politics, from the anti-lynching campaigns of the early 20th century to
the Black Lives Matter movement today. As Forman reminds his readers,
black people have long been vigilant, often to no avail, about two kinds
of equality enshrined in our nation’s ideals: equal protection of the
law, and equal justice under the law.
The absence of equal
protection has been, historically, the most vexing problem in the lives
of African Americans. The NAACP was founded in 1909 partly in response
to the federal and state governments’ turning a blind eye to white
violence against blacks. More than half a century later, as open-air
drug markets flourished in inner-city neighborhoods, black activists
perceived a related form of racist neglect by the state. The police,
they believed, would have shut down those markets had they existed in
white communities. In fact, as Forman notes, many activists thought that
those in power actually condoned the availability of drugs in the hood,
as a means to keep the black man down. (In those days, it was black
men—rather than all black people—who were seen as principally injured by
racism, a fallacy that made its way into government policy under the
guise of the controversial Moynihan Report in 1965.) The black radical
Stokely Carmichael, speaking at a historically black college in 1970,
said, “Fighting against drugs is revolutionary because drugs are a trick
of the oppressor.”
Back then, many white progressives
were pro-pot, and disinclined to see drug prohibition as part of a
revolutionary utopia. African American suspicion of white liberals is a
theme throughout Locking Up Our Own. One reason the 1975 effort
to decriminalize marijuana in Washington, D.C., failed is that the
bill’s two primary supporters were white men. Forman quotes the
spoken-word artist Gil Scott-Heron’s portrayal of a typical white member
of Students for a Democratic Society: “He is fighting for legalized
smoke … / All I want is a good home and a wife and children / And some
food to feed them every night.”
Scott-Heron’s
very traditional wish list reveals another important explanation for
black support of law and order. Not for the first time, many
middle-class African Americans subscribed to the “politics of
respectability”: The race advances, the view goes, when black people
demonstrate that they are capable of living up to white standards of
morality and conduct. Among the black elite, advocacy for lenient
criminal-justice policies was deemed an admission that black interests
were allied with the interests of criminals. That sort of solidarity
would hardly help the cause. For many bougie African Americans—certainly
those in cities like Washington and Atlanta, where light-skinned blacks
dominated the middle class—colorism was also at work: The fact that
their dark-skinned hoodlum cousins were getting locked up was not a
problem. Indeed, one of the primary arguments for allowing African
Americans to join Atlanta’s police department in the 1930s and ’40s was
that they would be better able than white officers to distinguish
between elite blacks and the riffraff.
ineteconomics | A new model probes why the US leads the world in jailing and imprisoning people, and what it will take to reverse course.
Mass incarceration in the United States has
mushroomed to the point where we look more like the authoritarian
regimes of Eastern Europe and the Middle East than the democracies of
Western Europe. Yet it vanished from political discussions in campaigns
in the 2016 election. In a new INET Working Paper,
I describe in detail how the US arrived at this point. Drawing on a new
model that synthesizes recent research, I demonstrate how the recent
stability in the number of American prisoners indicates that we have
settled into a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. I explain why it
will hard to dislodge ourselves from this damaging and shameful status
quo.
Mass incarceration started from Nixon’s War on Drugs, in a process
described vividly by John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser,
in 1994:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that,
had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what
I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the
war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily,
we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid
their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night
on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of
course we did.
This was the origin of mass incarceration in the United
States, which has been directed at African Americans from Nixon’s time
to today, when one third of black men go to prison (Bonczar, 2003; Baum,
2016; Alexander, 2010).
Federal laws were expanded in state laws that ranged from
three-strike laws to harsh penalties for possession of small amounts of
marijuana. The laws also shifted the judicial process from judges to
prosecutors, from the courtroom to offices where prosecutors pressure
accused people to plea-bargain. The threat of harsh minimum sentences
gives prosecutors the option of reducing the charge to a lesser one if
the accused is reluctant to languish in jail awaiting trial—if he or she
is unable to make bail—and then face the possibility of long years in
prison.
theatlantic | A lot of factors have contributed to
American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the
power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s
left?
That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,
by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following
decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or
less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that
wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political
influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white)
lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s
whims.
Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the
dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers
with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in
fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling
it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320
million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled
workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.” Temin
then divides workers into groups that can trace their family line in
the U.S. back to before 1970 (when productivity growth began to outpace
wage growth) and groups that immigrated later, and notes that race plays
a pretty big role in how both groups fare in the American economy. “In
the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the
FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located
almost entirely in the low-wage sector,” he writes. “In the group of
recent immigrants, Asians predominantly entered the FTE sector, while
Latino immigrants joined African Americans in the low-wage sector.”
After
divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of
strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between
them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial
prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes
precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE
workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically
pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and
business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some
groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in
the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass
incarceration, housing segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin
writes.
newyorker | So what makes for the madness of American incarceration? If it isn’t
crazy drug laws or outrageous sentences or profit-seeking prison
keepers, what is it? Pfaff has a simple explanation: it’s prosecutors.
They are political creatures, who get political rewards for locking
people up and almost unlimited power to do it.
Pfaff, in making his case, points to a
surprising pattern. While violent crime was increasing by a hundred per
cent between 1970 and 1990, the number of “line” prosecutors rose by
only seventeen per cent. But between 1990 and 2007, while the crime rate
began to fall, the number of line prosecutors went up by fifty per
cent, and the number of prisoners rose with it. That fact may explain
the central paradox of mass incarceration: fewer crimes, more criminals;
less wrongdoing to imprison people for, more people imprisoned. A
political current was at work, too. Pfaff thinks prosecutors were
elevated in status by the surge in crime from the sixties to the
nineties. “It could be that as the officials spearheading the war on
crime,” he writes, “district attorneys have seen their political options
expand, and this has encouraged them to remain tough on crime even as
crime has fallen.”
Meanwhile,
prosecutors grew more powerful. “There is basically no limit to how
prosecutors can use the charges available to them to threaten
defendants,” Pfaff observes. That’s why mandatory-sentencing rules can
affect the justice system even if the mandatory minimums are relatively
rarely enforced. A defendant, forced to choose between a thirty-year
sentence if convicted of using a gun in a crime and pleading to a lesser
drug offense, is bound to cop to the latter. Some ninety-five per cent
of criminal cases in the U.S. are decided by plea bargains—the risk of
being convicted of a more serious offense and getting a much longer
sentence is a formidable incentive—and so prosecutors can determine
another man’s crime and punishment while scarcely setting foot in a
courtroom. “Nearly everyone in prison ended up there by signing a piece
of paper in a dingy conference room in a county office building,” Pfaff
writes.
In a justice system designed
to be adversarial, the prosecutor has few adversaries. Though the
legendary Gideon v. Wainwright decision insisted that people facing jail
time have the right to a lawyer, the system of public defenders—and the
vast majority of the accused can depend only on a public defender—is
simply too overwhelmed to offer them much help. (Pfaff cites the
journalist Amy Bach, who once watched an overburdened public defender
“plead out” forty-eight clients in a row in a single courtroom.)
Meanwhile,
all the rewards for the prosecutor, at any level, are for making more
prisoners. Since most prosecutors are elected, they might seem
responsive to democratic discipline. In truth, they are so easily
reëlected that a common path for a successful prosecutor is toward
higher office. And the one thing that can cripple a prosecutor’s
political ascent is a reputation, even if based on only a single case,
for being too lenient. In short, our system has huge incentives for
brutality, and no incentives at all for mercy.
Independent | World leaders have called for an end to the criminalisation of drugs.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy's annual report advocates the removal of both civil and criminal penalties for drug use and possession.
Prohibition of drugs has had "little or no impact" on the rate of
drug use, the report says, with the number of drug users increasing by
almost 20 per cent between 2006 and 2013 to 246 million people.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy panel includes former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, British businessman Richard Branson and the former presidents of Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil.
The report warns prohibition of drugs fuels mass incarceration and
executions in contravention of international law and drives human rights
abuses by those who supply drugs.
It cites examples of successful decriminalisation policies, offering
Portugal as the best example, which replaced criminal sanctions for drug
use with civil penalties and health interventions 15 years ago.
The Committee also denounces the "barbaric actions" of Philippino
President Rodrigo Duterte, who calls on the public to execute those
involved in the drugs trade. More than 3,600 people were killed during Mr Duterte's first 100 days in office as part of his brutal crackdown on drugs. Fist tap Big Don.
democracynow | AMY GOODMAN: Ava DuVernay’s new documentary, called 13th, is being released by Netflix on Friday. It premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center here in New York. Part of the documentary looks at how ALEC, the America Legislative Exchange Council, has played a central role in the expansion of the U.S. prison system—ALEC’s work with states to write legislation promoting the privatization of prisons, in addition to pushing for harsher, longer sentences.
Joining us now is Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, who is also featured in 13th.
Talk about the thesis of the film 13th. It’s not just about the 13th Amendment, but the clause within the 13th Amendment that goes from slavery in the amendment of 1865 to mass incarceration today, and then how private corporations play a role in this.
LISA GRAVES: Well, this film is a magnificent, incredible meditation about race and crime in America, and it really tells new stories. One of the stories it tells is about how that amendment, where it says that you can’t be enslaved or you can’t be put in involuntary servitude unless you’re convicted of a crime, except as punishment, has really manifested in the 21st century and the 20th century through a lot of criminal justice policies.
And one of the things that Ava DuVernay brilliantly shows is the role of corporations in joining in this effort, this very racialized criminal justice system, how corporations, through ALEC, have helped advance their own bottom line. And one of the things that she helps document is the role of the Corrections Corporation of America within ALEC. It was a member of ALEC for a number of years, as we’ve written about. It was the chair of ALEC’s crime task force for a number of years, and ultimately it left ALEC after it was disclosed that CCA was in the room when corporations were voting on the SB 1070 legislation in Arizona that would have put—that was designed to put more immigrants in detention facilities and jails for immigrants. And CCA is just one of the many corporations that has been part of ALEC as it has pushed forward both for privatization of prisons, as well as measures to make people go to jail for longer—longer sentences.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain how ALEC works. You’ve got the private corporations, like CCA, and then you’ve got the legislators, who introduce the legislation written by the—or co-written by the corporations.
antimedia | Though the U.S. population accounts for only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, its prisons held 22 percent of the world’s prisoners at the end of October 2013, making America’s incarceration rate the highest in the world.
And while the cost of today’s federal prisons has surpassed the Federal Bureau Of Prisons’ $6.85 billion budget, state prisons are not far behind. With “[s]tate corrections budgets … nearly [quadrupling] in the past two decades,”
Vera Institute of Justice notes, each average inmate now costs
taxpayers over $31,000 per year. In 2010 alone, states spent over $5.4
billion on maintaining their prisons.
But while we know everything about government’s prison budgets, few
reports shed light on the hidden costs of high incarceration rates.
In order to help the U.S. population understand what mass
incarceration means to smaller communities, Washington University in St.
Louis conducted a study entitled “The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S.,” led by doctoral student and certified public accountant Michael McLaughlin.
Researchers concluded the “annual economic burden” resulting
from the high rate of incarceration in America is an estimated $1.2
trillion, or nearly 6 percent of the GDP. This burden is also eleven
times higher than what governments take from taxpayers to support state
and federal prisons.
NYTimes |This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet31 percentof those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.
Policy makers are joining advocates in demanding an end to biased policing and mass incarceration, and in November, Californians specifically have the opportunity to vote Yes on Prop 64, the most racial-justice-oriented marijuana legalization measure ever. Prop 64 would reduce (and in many cases eliminate) criminal penalties for marijuana offenses, and it’s retroactive — people sitting in prison for low-level marijuana offenses would be released and have their records expunged. In addition, Prop 64 would drive millions of dollars in direct funding and investments to those communities most harmed by the criminal justice system.
WaPo | Russia believes that its heroin problem was caused, even perhaps
intentionally, by the United States with the destabilization of
Afghanistan. But Russia can also surely see that the war on drugs is
weakening the United States. Every year Americans of all races
collectively spend $100 billion to buy illegal drugs.
As a country, we then bear costs of roughly $100 billion a year from
fighting the crime related to illegal drugs and from the loss to
productivity caused by incarceration. Our national defense budget, by
way of contrast, is $600 billion
a year. If you want a competitor to be thrown off focus by a
distraction, a project that drains its resources at this scale annually
would seem welcome.
Then there is the social division spawned by
the war on drugs. The burdens of mass incarceration and the increased
capacity of the police for violence have fallen most heavily on African
Americans and Latinos, despite the equal-opportunity use of drugs by
whites, blacks and Latinos. The combined impact of racial disparities in
mass incarceration and in the application of police force has now, in
2016, brought about the most severe racial split that our country has
seen in a long time.
This racial division isn’t merely
depressing and dispiriting. It isn’t merely material for politicians
from either party to exploit. It also weakens us as a country. Any
country where citizens are engaged in intense conflict and controversy
among themselves has a reduced capacity to play an impactful role in the
world. What the war on drugs has done to us is good news for Russia.
And
here it is worth remembering that “law-and-order” Donald Trump would
double down. When Trump invokes his mighty wall on the Mexican border,
he often extols as a virtue that it will keep the drugs out. Every time I
hear crowds chant, “Build the wall,”
I can’t help but think about the all the tunnels that international
drug traffickers have already constructed underneath our border. A Trump
wall would go up; the web of drug tunnels would go under.
At
this point, our situation is already crystal clear. The drug war is not
solving the problems of either addiction or crime. It is, however,
tearing our social fabric, and that weakens us as a country, including
within the geopolitical order. Trump and Putin are on the same page
here. With regard to the war on drugs, they are aligned in pursuing a
policy that makes America weaker.
In some policy areas, including health care, military affairs and the economy, the most consequential political decisions are made in the nation’s capital. But in the criminal justice system, states, cities and counties are the central players. For every federal law enforcement agent, about a half-dozen state highway patrol officers, county sheriffs and city police patrol the streets. Similarly, less than one-seventh of the country’s prison inmates are in federal facilities.
Because the federal prison system is so small, even dramatic congressional reforms in federal criminal penalties would have only a modest impact on the level of incarceration in the United States. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was thus making an empty promise when he pledged to reduce the number of prisoners in the United States below that of China: Not even granting presidential pardons to every single federal prisoner would achieve this goal.
narconews | The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and
Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal
support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that
was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American
financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500
billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering. Globalizing corporations
and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast
amounts of capital.
Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the
reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.
Without growing organized crime and military activities through
government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal
prison population.[1]
Whether through subsidy, credit and asset forfeiture kickbacks to
state and local government or increased laws, regulations and federal
sentencing and imprisonment, the supremacy of the federal enforcement
infrastructure and the industry it feeds was to be a Clinton legacy.
One of the first major initiatives by President Bill Clinton was the
Omnibus Crime Bill, signed into law in September 1994. This legislation
implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund
prison construction that mandatory sentencing would help require,
loosened the rules on allowing federal asset forfeiture teams to keep
and spend the money their operations made from seizing assets, and
provided federal monies for local police. The legislation also provided a
variety of pork for a Clinton Administration vogue constituency
Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Community Development
Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The CDCs and CDFIs
became instrumental during this period in putting a socially acceptable
face on increasing central control of local finance and shutting off
equity capital to small business.
The potential impact on the private prison industry was significant.
With the bill only through the house, former Attorney General Benjamin
Civiletti joined the board of Wackenhut Corrections, which went public
in July 1994 with an initial public offering of 2.2 million shares. By
the end of 1998, Wackenhut’s stock market value had increased almost ten
times. When I visited their website at that time it offered a feature
that flashed the number of beds they owned and managed. The number
increased as I was watching it the prison business was growing that
fast.
However, the Clinton Administration did not wait for the Omnibus
Crime Bill to build the federal enforcement infrastructure.
Government-wide, agencies were encouraged to cash in on support in both
Executive Branch and Congress for authorizations and programs many
justified under the umbrella of the War on Drugs that allowed agency
personnel to carry weapons, make arrests and generate revenues from
money makers such as civil money penalties and asset forfeitures and
seizures. Indeed, federal enforcement was moving towards a model that
some would call “for profit” faster than one could say “Sheriff of
Nottingham.”
On February 4, 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced Operation Safe Home, a new enforcement program at HUD.
Gore was a former Senator from Tennessee. His hometown of Nashville was
home of the largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation
of America (CCA). He was joined at the press conference by Secretary of
the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen, Attorney General Janet Reno, Director of
Drug Policy Lee Brown and Secretary of HUD Henry Cisneros who said that the Operation Safe Home initiative would claim $800 million of HUD’s
resources. Operation Safe Home was to receive significant support from
the Senate and House appropriations committees. It turned the HUD Inspector
General’s office from an auditor of program areas to a developer of
programs competing for funding with the offices they were supposed to be
auditing a serious conflict of interest and built-in failure of
government internal controls.
According to the announcement, Operation Safe Home was expected to
“combat violent crime in public and assisted housing.” As part of this
program, the HUD Office of Inspector General
(OIG) coordinated with various federal, state and local enforcement task
forces. Federal agencies that partnered with HUD included the FBI,
the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Secret Service,
the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S.
Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and
the Department of Justice (DOJ). The primary performance measures
reported in the HUD OIG Semi-Annual
Performance Report to Congress for this program are the total number of
asset forfeitures/seizures, equity skimming collections and arrests.
Subsequent intra-agency efforts such as the “ACE” program sponsored by DOJ and initiated by U.S. Attorney’s Offices, working with the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund, HUD OIG and HUD Office of General Counsel promoted revenue generating activities as well.
serendipity | The essential bond between capitalism and nationalism was broken in
1945, but it took some time for elite planners to recognize this new
condition and to begin bringing the world system into alignment with it.
The strong Western nation state had been the bulwark of capitalism for
centuries, and initial postwar policies were based on the assumption
that this would continue indefinitely. The Bretton Woods financial
system (the IMF, World Bank, and a system of fixed exchange rates among
major currencies) was set up to stabilize national economies, and
popular prosperity was encouraged to provide political stability.
Neoliberalism in the US and Britain represented the first serious break
with this policy framework — and brought the first visible signs of the
fission of the nation-capital bond.
The neoliberal project was economically profitable in the US and
Britain, and the public accepted the matrix economic mythology.
Meanwhile, the integrated global economy gave rise to a new generation
of transnational corporations, and corporate leaders began to realize
that corporate growth was not dependent on strong core nation-states.
Indeed, Western nations — with their environmental laws,
consumer-protection measures, and other forms of regulatory
"interference" — were a burden on corporate growth. Having been
successfully field tested in the two oldest "democracies," the
neoliberal project moved onto the global stage. The Bretton Woods system
of fixed rates of currency exchange was weakened, and the international
financial system became destabilizing, instead of stabilizing, for
national economies. The radical free-trade project was launched, leading
eventually to the World Trade Organization. The fission that had begun
in 1945 was finally manifesting as an explosive change in the world
system.
The objective of neoliberal free-trade treaties is to remove all
political controls over domestic and international trade and commerce.
Corporations have free rein to maximize profits, heedless of
environmental consequences and safety risks. Instead of governments
regulating corporations, the WTO now sets rules for governments, telling
them what kind of beef they must import, whether or not they can ban
asbestos, and what additives they must permit in petroleum products. So
far, in every case where the WTO has been asked to review a health,
safety, or environmental regulation, the regulation has been overturned.
Most of the world has been turned into a periphery; the imperial core
has been boiled down to the capitalist elite themselves, represented by
their bureaucratic, unrepresentative, WTO world government. The burden
of accelerated imperialism falls hardest outside the West, where loans
are used as a lever by the IMF to compel debtor nations such as Rwanda
and South Korea to accept suicidal "reform" packages. In the 1800s,
genocide was employed to clear North America and Australia of their
native populations, creating room for growth. Today, a similar program
of genocide has apparently been unleashed against sub-Saharan Africa.
The IMF destroys the economies, the CIA trains militias and stirs up
tribal conflicts, and the West sells weapons to all sides. Famine and
genocidal civil wars are the predictable and inevitable result.
Meanwhile, AIDS runs rampant while the WTO and the US government use
trade laws to prevent medicines from reaching the victims.
As in the past, Western military force will be required to control the
non-Western periphery and make adjustments to local political
arrangements when considered necessary by elite planners. The Pentagon
continues to provide the primary policing power, with NATO playing an
ever-increasing role. Resentment against the West and against
neoliberalism is growing in the Third World, and the frequency of
military interventions is bound to increase. All of this needs to be
made acceptable to Western minds, adding a new dimension to the matrix.
In the latest matrix reality, the West is called the "international
community," whose goal is to serve "humanitarian" causes. Bill Clinton
made it explicit with his "Clinton Doctrine," in which (as quoted in the
Washington Post) he solemnly promised, "If somebody comes after
innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their
race, their ethnic background or their religion and it is within our
power stop it, we will stop it." This matrix fabrication is very
effective indeed; who opposes prevention of genocide? Only outside the
matrix does one see that genocide is caused by the West in the first
place, that the worst cases of genocide are continuing, that
"assistance" usually makes things worse (as in the Balkans), and that
the Clinton doctrine handily enables the US president to intervene when
and where he chooses. Since dictators and the stirring of ethnic
rivalries are standard tools used in managing the periphery, a US
president can always find "innocent civilians" wherever elite plans call
for an intervention.
In matrix reality, globalization is not a project but rather the
inevitable result of beneficial market forces. Genocide in Africa is no
fault of the West, but is due to ancient tribal rivalries. Every measure
demanded by globalization is referred to as "reform," (the word is
never used with irony). "Democracy" and "reform" are frequently used
together, always leaving the subtle impression that one has something to
do with the other. The illusion is presented that all economic boats
are rising, and if yours isn't, it must be your own fault: you aren't
"competitive" enough. Economic failures are explained away as "temporary
adjustments," or else the victim (as in South Korea or Russia in the
1990s) is blamed for not being sufficiently neoliberal. "Investor
confidence" is referred to with the same awe and reverence that earlier
societies might have expressed toward the "will of the gods."
Western quality of life continues to decline, while the WTO establishes
legal precedents ensuring that its authority will not be challenged when
its decisions become more draconian. Things will get much worse in the
West; this was anticipated in elite circles when the neoliberal project
was still on the drawing board, as is illustrated in Samuel Huntington's
"The Crisis of Democracy" report discussed earlier.
The management of discontented societies
The postwar years, especially in the United States, were characterized
by consensus politics. Most people shared a common understanding of how
society worked, and generally approved of how things were going.
Prosperity was real and the matrix version of reality was reassuring.
Most people believed in it. Those beliefs became a shared consensus, and
the government could then carry out its plans as it intended,
"responding" to the programmed public will.
The "excess democracy" of the 1960s and 1970s attacked this shared
consensus from below, and neoliberal planners decided from above that
ongoing consensus wasn't worth paying for. They accepted that segments
of society would persist in disbelieving various parts of the matrix.
Activism and protest were to be expected. New means of social control
would be needed to deal with activist movements and with growing
discontent, as neoliberalism gradually tightened the economic screws.
Such means of control were identified and have since been largely
implemented, particularly in the United States. In many ways America
sets the pace of globalization; innovations can often be observed there
before they occur elsewhere. This is particularly true in the case of
social-control techniques.
The most obvious means of social control, in a discontented society, is a
strong, semi-militarized police force. Most of the periphery has been
managed by such means for centuries. This was obvious to elite planners
in the West, was adopted as policy, and has now been largely
implemented. Urban and suburban ghettos — where the adverse consequences
of neoliberalism are currently most concentrated — have literally
become occupied territories, where police beatings and unjustified
shootings are commonplace.
So that the beefed-up police force could maintain control in conditions
of mass unrest, elite planners also realized that much of the Bill of
Rights would need to be neutralized. (This is not surprising, given that
the Bill's authors had just lived through a revolution and were seeking
to ensure that future generations would have the means to organize and
overthrow any oppressive future government.) The rights-neutralization
project has been largely implemented, as exemplified by armed midnight
raids, outrageous search-and-seizure practices, overly broad conspiracy
laws, wholesale invasion of privacy, massive incarceration, and the rise
of prison slave labor (see "KGB-ing America.", Tony Serra, Whole Earth,
Winter, 1998). The Rubicon has been crossed — the techniques of
oppression long common in the empire's periphery are being imported to
the core.
In the matrix, the genre of the TV or movie police drama has served to
create a reality in which "rights" are a joke, the accused are
despicable sociopaths, and no criminal is ever brought to justice until
some noble cop or prosecutor bends the rules a bit. Government officials
bolster the construct by declaring "wars" on crime and drugs; the noble
cops are fighting a war out there in the streets — and you
can't win a war without using your enemy's dirty tricks. The CIA plays
its role by managing the international drug trade and making sure that
ghetto drug dealers are well supplied. In this way, the American public
has been led to accept the means of its own suppression.
The mechanisms of the police state are in place. They will be used when
necessary — as we see in ghettos and skyrocketing prison populations, as
we saw on the streets of Seattle and Washington D.C. during the
anti-WTO demonstrations there, and as is suggested by executive orders
that enable the president to suspend the Constitution and declare
martial law whenever he deems it necessary. But raw force is only the
last line of defense for the elite regime. Neoliberal planners
introduced more subtle defenses into the matrix; looking at these will
bring us back to our discussion of the left and right.
Divide and rule is one of the oldest means of mass control — standard
practice since at least the Roman Empire. This is applied at the level
of modern imperialism, where each small nation competes with others for
capital investments. Within societies it works this way: If each social
group can be convinced that some other group is the source of its
discontent, then the population's energy will be spent in inter-group
struggles. The regime can sit on the sidelines, intervening covertly to
stir things up or to guide them in desired directions. In this way most
discontent can be neutralized, and force can be reserved for exceptional
cases. In the prosperous postwar years, consensus politics served to
manage the population. Under neoliberalism, programmed factionalism has
become the front-line defense — the matrix version of divide and rule.
salon | According to a Feb. 16 CNN/ORC poll, a whopping 65 percent of South Carolinian black voters are planning to support Hillary Clinton in Saturday’sprimary, while only 28 percent are planning to support Bernie Sanders.
The furor that broke out last night, however, may just shift the political winds.
In the middle of a $500-per-person Clintonfundraising event in Charleston on Wednesday evening, a young Black Lives Matter activist stepped out in front of the former secretary of state, turned toward the small audience, and held aloft a banner emblazoned with the phrase, “We need to bring them to heel.”
The protester,as she later explained, “wanted to make sure that black people are paying attention to [Clinton’s] record” by drawing attention to the racist rhetoricClinton used in 1996, when she, as first lady, strongly supported the “tough on crime” method of governance, andsuccessfullylobbiedfor a billbased on that methodto be passed into law.
“They are not just gangs of kids anymore,” Clinton warned the public at the time. “They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘super-predators.’ No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we need to bring them to heel.”
The crime bill that Clinton advocated for is now widely regarded as a “terrible mistake,” and the demonizing language that she used to describe young people who belong to gangs (a group that, because ofinstitutionalized racismandoppression, is majorityblack and Latino/a) would now be political suicide.
Since the ’90s, the Democratic Party — and Hillary Clinton along with it — has morphed from voicing demagogic, dangerous ideas about black children and supporting catastrophic crime policies to, today, speaking of how “we have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance,” and promising an end to the decades-long era of mass incarceration, which, of course, they hold much responsibility for creating.
But, despite Clinton’s sudden populist transformation, the memory of the American people isn’t quite so short and fleeting.
WaPo | Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure
activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal
drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion.
In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty
important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense.
Yet
despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug
use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this
hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally
urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the
problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight
recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal
prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the
world’s leading imprisoner.
The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize
other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which
in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social
outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product
without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point
to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel
alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic
trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are
gang- and drug-related homicides.
But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
. As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low
rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If
you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you
with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at
the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more
murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are
emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption.
Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such
places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong
offense.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...