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.
newstatesman | The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms
of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment,
but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political
development over the past several decades has not merely been divided
into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender
equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked
into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat
inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to
expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security.
From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was
better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy
wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous,
immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of
which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a
regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11
raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland”
safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless
war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that
has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US
wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their
own worst enemies?
The spectre of civil war might be better
understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US
empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a
regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis”
fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising
affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great
Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social
democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution
that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time
in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging,
and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime
roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded
that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.
Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change
In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other
means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to
power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater
laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”.
Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while
declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal
government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with
expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan
put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994,
forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and
the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies
explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While
we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the
ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.
The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at
the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian
institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for
reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public
regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering
congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal
spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise
state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a
woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register
to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral
outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative
behaviour at every opportunity.
In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of
the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark,
50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal
voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and
overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody.
Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a
minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during
periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by
other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.
In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the
Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant
partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify,
in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate
taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit
of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has
sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic
recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak
executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and
more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to
choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement
against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed
imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and
public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against
police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or
else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on
the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have
instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken
coop.
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.
socialistworker | THE GRAND jury decisions not to indict Darren Wilson or Daniel
Pantaleo in the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner has rightly
sparked a nationwide discussion around the state of police violence
against Black and Brown men and women in the U.S., as well as the
systemic racism that runs through U.S. institutions.
A new vein to the mainstream discussion of police violence emerged
recently during a press conference with Garner's widow, which pointed
out how police brutality and mass incarceration are also issues of
reproductive justice.
In a press conference on December 3,
Esaw Garner, referring to the police officer who murdered her husband,
said, "He's still feeding his kids, when my husband is six feet under,
and I'm looking for a way to feed my kids now."
The reproductive justice framework--the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments--is
based on the human right to make personal decisions about one's life,
and the obligation of government and society to ensure that the
conditions are suitable for implementing one's decisions is important
for women of color.
In a nation where the police, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes murder another Black man every 28 hours, Black families live in constant fear that their sons, fathers, husbands, partners and brothers will be the latest victim.
It is essential that we, as reproductive justice activists are
present to make the argument that it is not enough to have the right to
have children or terminate a pregnancy, but that true reproductive
justice means being able to parent without fear your child will be murdered for playing with a toy gun in a public park or for going to the store to buy Skittles.
alternet | Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It
is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the
judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or
professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss
issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political
systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling
apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No
discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and
class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed
reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to
murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More
training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more
minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more
equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or
reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our
capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor
people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in
the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this
predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially
people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the
streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in
prison cages.
Counterpunch | To reverse angles, one need not be a self-affirmed racist to have
complied with ‘red-lining’ or ‘white-flight’, only protecting your home
value as banks and tax codes made fit. In fact, a recent survey on
immigration found Americans (along with Canadians) the mosttolerant
among 27 polled countries, of non-native speakers, the unemployed,
felons, radicals, or ethnic groups, so long as they’re citizens. I’m
not altogether sold, but we might not be the irreparable bigots we
seem. According to the findings, ‘the US has a very legalistic vision of
what it is to be an American’.[i]
(Of course, Nikki Haley stood it on its head when she told the UN it
was ‘ridiculous to look at poverty in the world’s richest nation’.
Apparently just as citizenship welcomes our most-poor, it denies them
outside protection.)
Thus it’s pertinent to ask, in both cases, should we be looking at
conceptions of race and poverty, or of law enforcement and state-power
to understand mass-incarceration or the police’ rising body count?
Consider the FBI memo that invented ‘Black Identity Extremism’ (BIE)
the same time it granted them right to oppress it. ‘Racism’, in which
case, is literally a state-authored fiction, as the group only exists on
FBI records. Moreover, as with the ‘blue lives matter’ bill which makes
resisting arrest a hate crime, their (straw) premise is that racism
‘goes both ways’. I’d prefer that were true, since, as stray
individuals, we’d have limited ability to act on it. But it’s
not. Racism has a definition: prejudice plus power.
Unlike BIE, ‘SIR’ (state-invented racism) and ‘CRP’
(capitalist-powered racism) have been the constant since answering the
mixed ranks of poor in Bacon’s Rebellion with the 1705, Virginia Slave
Codes, our first official color-line. Since then, occasionally its been
lifted due to public reckoning. But it’s never been imposed without
the help of some authority, be it state, judicial, or investment
capital. ‘Law and order’ is sympathetic to profit. The Slave-trade
launched our banking system, and the plantation supplied the
organizational model for the corporate firm.ii Post-slavery, fomenting racism was and remains an indispensable strike-breaker.
This doesn’t apply only to blacks. Today, corporations open our borders to cheap, bracerolabor
that it can throw away when its worn, or dares lift its head, while
coaxing us to blame the workers. Or stuff them in jail, along with 1 in
10 African-Americans. After all, wrenching kids from their parents
precedes our deranged president.
It’s ironic though, that the free-market is putting labor in cages, like the slave-market did.
theintercept |Dr. Touré
Reed, professor of 20th Century U.S. and African American History at
Illinois State University, observed that the presumption that black
Americans aren’t equally or more invested in economic interventions as
white Americans is “pregnant, of course, with class presumptions” which
work well for the black and Latinx professional middle class — many of
whom play a significant role in defining public narratives via their
work in politics or media. Since “the principal beneficiaries of
universal policies would be poor and working class people who would
disproportionately be black and brown,” he told me, “dismissing such
policies on the grounds that they aren’t addressing systemic racism is
a sleight of hand of sorts.”
Intersectionality, the “buzzword” taken up so faithfully by mainstream Democrats
in 2016, requires an acknowledgment that like race and sexual identity,
class is a dimension that mediates one’s perspective. That means the hashtag #trustblackwomen shouldn’t collapse the interests of Oprah, a billionaire, with, well, anyone else’s.
Similarly, not all blacks or latinos should be presumed to speak
equally to the interests of poor and working class people of color. This
is a truth easily internalized when Democrats consider figures like Ben Carson or Ted Cruz. It’s a more difficult reality to swallow when considering one of our own.
None of this is to say that in every scenario, race, gender, sexuality, and class are equal inputs. Affluent black athletes are still tackled by cops despite their wealth, and black Harvard professors are arrested
trying to unlock their own front doors. But the fact that racism hurts
even those with economic privilege is not “proof” that class doesn’t
matter, as some race reductionists have claimed. It’s simply affirmation
that racism matters too.
Consider, for instance, my colleague Zaid Jilani’s review of comprehensive police shooting data in 2015, in which he found
that 95 percent of police shootings had occurred in neighborhoods where
the household income averaged below $100,000 a year. Remember that
Philando Castile was pulled over, in part, because he was flagged for
dozens of driving offenses described as “crimes of poverty”
by local public defender Erik Sandvick. Failure to show proof of
insurance, driving with a broken taillight — these are hardly patrician
slip ups. If anything is privileged, it’s the fiction that there’s no
difference between the abuses suffered by wealthy black athletes and
working class blacks like Philando Castile. Race can increase your odds
of being targeted and abused. Money can help you survive abuse and secure justice — something which sadly eluded Castile.
“There is a tendency to reduce issues
that have quite a bit to do with the economic opportunities available to
all Americans, African Americans among them, and in some instances
overrepresented among them, to matters of race,” explained Dr. Reed, who
is currently writing a book on the conservative implications of race
reductionism. He pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, as well
as the mass incarceration crisis, as examples. “In both those
instances, Flint and the criminal justice system, whites are 40 percent,
or near 40 percent, of the victims,” he said. And that’s an awfully
high number for collateral damage.” He went on: “There’s something
systemic at play. But it can’t be reduced, be reducible, to race.”
The alliance of the American left with right-wing nationalist
national security and surveillance state officials since 2016 in
fighting ‘fascists’ seems inexplicable in ideological terms. The reason?
The national security and surveillance states are corporate-state
amalgams that exist to enforce an imperial world order. The attempted
U.S. coup in Bolivia was to control lithium for liberal, green EVs
(Electric Vehicles). The U.S. coup in Venezuela that is still under way
is to control oil. The build-out of the surveillance state domestically
is to secure control of domestic politics by and for capital. This is
fascism.
One of the many good arguments against George W. Bush’s 2003 war
against Iraq was that combat forces turn into reactionary armies when
they return home. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a
veteran of the first Gulf War. The militia movement of the early 1990s
was made up of veterans of U.S. dirty wars in Central America and the
first Gulf War. Veterans returning from W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco were
unable to find meaningful employment during the Great Recession. What
this meant practically is a choice between becoming a cop or stocking
shelves at Target for minimum wage.
Those most capable of inflicting harm amongst the Capitol invaders
appear to be those who had military training combined with an alleged
willingness to use it. That a lot of cops appeared sympathetic to the
invaders more likely than not ties to real or imagined shared experience
in the military. The militarization of the police includes the
psychology of seeing others as enemy combatants, as well as a duty to
commit violence for imagined right. This is manifested in varying
solidarities including class and the residual detritus of American
history, including race. What is missing from assertions of what people
‘are,’ fascist, racist, etc., is any notion of relative power.
Consider: do liberals really believe that the U.S. is trying to
restore democracy in Bolivia or Venezuela by ousting democratically
elected leaders and replacing them with hard-right pawns of the U.S.?
Why then would the CIA care about democracy in the U.S.? The CIA brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq. The CIA helped install Pinochet in Chile. The CIA ousted Mosaddeq in Iran and Arbenz
in Guatemala. While it is a large and complex organization, some fair
proportion of everything dark and evil that has taken place since 1948
can be laid at its feet.
The point: between the alliance of corporate and state interests
reflected in the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailouts, and the CIA’s
long history of destroying functioning democracies for the benefit of
American business interests, lies the approximate locus of American
power. Few of the players involved in these machinations are motivated
by ideology. One of Howard Zinn’s contributions in A People’s History is
his explication of the economic motives that powerful people and
organizations hide with ideological explanations of their actions. In
other words, what people are, e.g. racist, fascist, does little to
explain history.
Now that Donald Trump is out of power, what do the liberal opponents
of fascism intend to do to disentangle the corporate from political
power that defines it? One of the early answers is to redefine it
as exclusively the province of authoritarian leaders. In fact, the
Nazis based much of their political economy on the American model. The
Americans provided eugenics, slavery, genocide, the legal framework for
Nazi race laws, and an industrial model that motivated some fair portion
of German militarism. In the present, the Americans have mass
incarceration, a militarized police force, a large and intrusive
surveillance apparatus, political police (FBI) and a public-private
domestic spying operation.
NPR | Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an
epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of
George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for
justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American
communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the
origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control
of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
mic | The connections between black people protesting state
violence in the United States and Palestinians fighting occupation in
Gaza and the West Bank have been well-documented.
When armored trucks and riot officers stormed the streets of
Ferguson, Missouri, in August — days after white Ferguson police
officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown —
some Palestinians used social media to communicate advice to protesters on how to cope with tear gas.
In the subsequent months, this transnational solidarity has
only grown stronger. Activist and scholar Angela Davis has spoken at
length about its links, highlighting, for instance, how the multinational security company G4S has provided both material support for the Israeli occupation — a support they have vowed to scale down over the next three years — and for private prisons in the U.S., which profit from mass incarceration, a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts black and brown people.
"Both communities share many of the same grievances, suffer
from the same systematic forms of violations, and therefore also
campaign against some similar actors that profit from these abuses,"
Fadi Quran, an activist and educator in Palestine, told Mic.
"[G4S] is just one example of many, and that's why solidarity and
connecting our struggles is not only important, but necessary if we want
to put an end to injustice."
It doesn't end there. Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, a
co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in February expressed solidarity with
the people of Palestine in a letter addressed
to the students of Stanford University, some of whom were voting for
their school to divest from "corporations that profit from the
Occupation" in February (the university declined to divest shortly thereafter).
"No studying could prepare me for the level of violence and
trauma that exists inside Palestine," Cullors-Brignac wrote of a recent
visit she took to Palestine. "The Black Lives Matter movement can
benefit greatly by learning about struggles outside of the U.S., but
particularly the Palestinian struggle."
To further illustrate the degree to which these movements are mutually intertwined, Mic
has asked people from across the Palestinian diaspora — students,
artists, educators, Americans, Europeans and people currently living in
Palestine — to create a set of visual responses to the question:
"If you could say one thing to black American citizens about police brutality in the U.S., what would it be?"
The answers come from Palestinians from all over the world,
of varying backgrounds and spanning a 45-year age range. But they all
have one thing in common: They depict, unambiguously, how the civil
rights struggle in Palestine and that of black Americans aren't as
disconnected as one might presume.
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.
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.
Evolver | Join us in a peaceful protest to help end the war on drugs! We will be carrying picket signs and handing out literature to garner support for our cause by those who are most affected by failed drug policy.
June 17th marks the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. This devastating, trillion dollar policy resulted in the ruin of countless individuals and families across the nation. It disproportionately criminalized minorities leaving wounds felt by three generations. For decades, we have stood by and watched as mainstream America gawks at the number of minority prisoners in the US. We joke and conjecture at potential causes for the disappearance of Black men over lattes. Blaming everything from evolution to upbringing, our policy makers have all but ignored the elephant in the room, our grossly discriminatory and aggressive criminal justice policy. We believe it is time for a change. No longer will we allow our fathers, uncles, brothers, husbands, wives, children, and grand children to be "acceptable casualties" of the war on drugs.
A few facts for your consideration:
• Given current rates of incarceration, three in ten of the next generation of black men can expect to be disenfranchised at some point in their lifetime. In states that disenfranchise ex-offenders, as many as 40% of black men may permanently lose their right to vote.
Source: Sentencing Project, "Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States," (Washington, DC: March 2010), p. 1.
Between 2006 and 2008 people of color were between 4 and 12 times as likely to be arrested for a marijuana related offense than whites. This disparity in the arrest rate was found in all cities and all counties in California, and was averaged over three years to remove any one year statistical anomalies.
Source: Drug Policy Alliance
African Americans have been admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate up to 57 times higher than whites. In some states, 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African American. The rate of Latino imprisonment has been staggering as well. Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black and Latino.
2,424,279 or 1 in every 99.1 adults were behind bars in 2009 in federal, state and local prisons and jails, the highest incarceration rate in the world.
2/3 of people incarcerated for a drug offense in state prison are black or Hispanic, although these groups use and sell drugs at similar rates as whites.
AlterNet | According to a new study, prosperity is highest in countries that practice religion the least. From Dostoyevsky to right-wing commentator Ann Coulter we are warned of the perils of godlessness. "If there is no God," Dostoyevsky wrote, "everything is permitted." Coulter routinely attributes our nation's most intractable troubles to the moral vacuum of atheism.
But a growing body of research in what one sociologist describes as the "emerging field of secularity" is challenging long-held assumptions about the relationship of religion and effective governance.
In a paper posted recently on the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, independent researcher Gregory S. Paul reports a strong correlation within First World democracies between socioeconomic well-being and secularity. In short, prosperity is highest in societies where religion is practiced least.
Using existing data, Paul combined 25 indicators of societal and economic stability — things like crime, suicide, drug use, incarceration, unemployment, income, abortion and public corruption — to score each country using what he calls the "successful societies scale." He also scored countries on their degree of religiosity, as determined by such measures as church attendance, belief in a creator deity and acceptance of Bible literalism.
Comparing the two scores, he found, with little exception, that the least religious countries enjoyed the most prosperity. Of particular note, the U.S. holds the distinction of most religious and least prosperous among the 17 countries included in the study, ranking last in 14 of the 25 socioeconomic measures.
Paul is quick to point out that his study reveals correlation, not causation. Which came first — prosperity or secularity — is unclear, but Paul ventures a guess. While it's possible that good governance and socioeconomic health are byproducts of a secular society, more likely, he speculates, people are inclined to drop their attachment to religion once they feel distanced from the insecurities and burdens of life.
"Popular religion," Paul proposes, "is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment." Paul, who was criticized, mostly on statistical grounds, for a similar study published in 2005, says his new findings lend support to the belief that mass acceptance of popular religion is determined more by environmental influences and less by selective, evolutionary forces, as scholars and philosophers have long debated.
blackagendareport | Despite the breathtaking size, intensity and multi-racial character
of this month’s protests, and the record-breaking popularity of the
insurgent movement, the corporate electoral duopoly – not the loathsome
persona of Donald Trump, but the Democrat-Republican tag-team-- remains
the greatest impediment to social transformation. They are the institutional enemy.
That most emphatically includes the Black political class, virtually
all Democrats, who have overseen the steady deterioration of the Black
economic condition, managed much of the local workings of the Mass Black
Incarceration State, and supported a U.S.war machine that has
slaughtered millions of non-whites in the two generations since Dr. King
called this country “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,
today.”
The bigger the Congressional Black Caucus gets (it now stands at 50
full-voting members in the House), the more servile to party corporate
leadership it becomes. By wide margins, the Black Caucus has opposed ending militarization of the police (80 percent “nay,” in 2014); supported elevating the police to a “protected class”
and making assault on police a federal “hate” crime (75 percent, in
2018); and voted to further empower the FBI to spy on citizens (two-thirds of the Black Caucus, in 2020). Nearly half the Black members of Congress supported the bombing of Libya and
NATO’s invasion of Africa in 2011, and the vast bulk of them have
signed off on every escalating war budget put forward by Presidents
Obama and Trump. In short, the Black Caucus is a bulwark of systemic
racism and U.S. imperial warfare. Not one serving Black congressperson
has raised a peep about the ongoing slaughter in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, where more than six million have died under four U.S.
presidents.
“The Black Caucus is a bulwark of systemic racism and U.S. imperial warfare.”
The biggest luminaries of the Black Caucus, including “Auntie” Maxine
Waters, of California, South Carolina’s James Clyburn, and New York’s Hakeem Jeffries and Greg Meeks, are today rallying around New York Democratic incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel to beat back progressive Black challenger Jamaal Bowman,
a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. The Black Caucus has
slavishly followed every directive of House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi since she ordered them to refrain from holding hearings on Katrina, in 2005. They are collaborators in the duopoly’s greatest crimes against Black America, and the world.
The “street power” that has been so dramatically manifested over the
past month will be dissipated and ultimately wasted if organizers put
forward demands that leave the levers of power in the hands of local
Democrats, of whatever color. The demand to defund the police is
unassailable, in principle. However, if in practice it devolves to
endless and debilitating dickering with local legislatures over funding
that will inevitably be cut across the board due to collapsing tax
rolls, no lasting transformation will be achieved, and the movement will
splinter and fade. That’s why we at BAR support community control of
the police – the institutionalization of grassroots people’s power to
shape and oversee the mechanisms of their own security and end forever
the armed occupation of our communities by hostile forces.
Sycophants revel in their programming. The brainwashing the psychopathic entities have administered to American sycophants since a very young age, has them proudly waving the flag of their nation as "the greatest country on Earth," while vociferously avoiding real world facts: Theirs is a nation built on corruption at all levels.
• Mass-murder is our international policy.
• Enforcement of psychopathic edicts by gun and incarceration are standard procedures at home.
• Endless taxation and regulation are the benevolent side of the U.S. psychopathocracy.
The sycophants kiss up to the images the psychopaths have planted in their minds. With servile devotion, sycophants reach for the handouts from their masters, oblivious to the source of the presumed benefits.
As an example, the sycophants have dutifully filed tax returns to receive their economic stimulus tax rebate. Unbeknownst to them, this is just one of the techniques FED Chairman Bernanke will use to dump created-from-nothing cash from his "helicopter." The end result is that the new cash waters down the value of the already existing "dollars" in circulation and causes a devaluing inflation. The FED will then recover this cash drop with the hidden inflation tax: A closed circuit loop designed by psychopaths for psychopaths to extract servile deference from sycophants who are ignorant of the real nature of a fiat economy.
The modern formula for sycophant management is simple: Build roads, manufacture employment, extend credit, provide shopping opportunities, blast them with entertainment, maintain a welfare net, create the semblance of a justice system, pretend to have an election from time to time, provide grants for science, industry, arts "and other purposes" and the sycophants will grovel before the all-powerful psychopathocracy. If all this abundant benevolence fails to entrance and entrain the sycophants to the will of the psychopaths then fear, terror, wars and rumors of wars are the fallback policies of the ages.
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.
go-ogle | Deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban public infrastructure, the expanding criminal justice system, and the privatization of correctional facilities create the nexus in which the school-to-prison pipeline is the logical outgrowth. The relationship between urban public schools and the criminal justice system was fostered by a variety of forces that systematically excluded black populations from participation in economic and social development. The economization of incarceration has further influenced a political environment where crime control is the reigning logic of governance of the urban poor. Residential and school segregation spatially and socially marked the urban poor and the black population was targeted and object of social ill.
De-industrialization of inner cities in the 1940's marked a new era in racial and social disparity. Facilitated and accelerated by government subsidies, the movement of resources out of urban centers was a precondition of poor urban isolation. As manufacturing jobs shifted out into the suburbs, and later abroad, employment opportunity for inner city folks dwindled. Federal subsidies such as FHA and VA facilitated suburbanization beginning in the late 1940's, creating a mass exodus of middle-income and white households. There is an established pattern of discretionary action on behalf of banks and public institutions that excluded black folks from partaking in these opportunities to move out into the suburbs. Access to superior living conditions, better funded schools, and higher-paying work was significantly limited. White flight signaled the beginning of a systemic disinvestment in public urban institutions. With homeowners now mobilized in America's suburbs, local politicians were advocating for resources that privileged their propertied constituents. Meanwhile, in cities, high unemployment rates compounded with low performing urban schools further ossified the color line. City schools as public institutions are thus situated within a larger political economy of post-industrial urban change. In Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon writes:
In the years between 1945 and 1960, a number of developments coincided to lay the foundation for the isolation and alienation of the urban poor that characterize our cities-and our city schools-today. the migration to cities of southern blacks fleeing poverty, segregation, inadequate education, federally subsidized suburbanization of white families and manufacturing firms leaving these same cities, federal and state policies that did not adequately address the problems festering in urban neighborhoods, corporate disinterest, and local political patronage and corruption.
Within two decades, major American cities had drastically transformed from predominantly manufacturing to white collar industry. In the early 1940's, New York's manufacturing industry employed a little over 40 percent of the total working population. By the 1960's, the vast majority of those jobs had been displaced by employment opportunities in the corporate, real estate, banking, financial, legal, and insurance industries, as well as civil service jobs in the growing bureaucracy of New York. Under the auspices of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, New York was transformed from an industrial working-class city to a corporate center with a booming middle-class. Investments shifted from the funding and supporting of urban infrastructure, including city schools, to financing middle-class housing and a growing service industry. Meanwhile, in 1950's New Jersey, the dispersal of manufacturing jobs from urban centers to the suburbs (and later abroad) accelerated the pace. The relocation of the manufacturing sector outside the reach of poor urban communities of color was aided by federal subsidies worth a little over 120 billion dollars. Resources for sustaining a viable community in poor areas, many of which were predominantly black or latino, were increasingly scarce. White flight and deindustrialization shifted good jobs away from them, creating a socially isolated superfluous population without the means to access white-collar jobs.
The effects of white flight and urban disinvestment would have generational reverberations, many youth of color were effectively shut out from jobs in the high-tech industry through the lack of educational preparedness available to them. Public schools in poor urban communities did little more than warehouse children in poor conditions. The institution funneled these youth into positions of subordination in the new economuy. Urban schools prepared youth for low-wage service sector jobs through a curriculum that emphasized discipline and conformity. They also pushed insubordinate youth into the juvenile justice system. City schools just did not have the adequate resources to provide a contemporary and quality education for its poor children.
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 ...
