In the interview, and in the book, Michelle Alexander makes the argument, clearly, cogently, and with an abundance of supporting evidence, that the War on Drugs in the United States has been carried out as a de facto war against black people.

A war against freedom

I have argued before on this blog that the War on Drugs is economically unsustainable and Constitutionally illogical; but my focus on the pragmatic “big picture” largely omitted the personal specifics of the effects of these policies on the millions of individuals who get sent to jail every year for nonviolent drug offenses, often simple possession.  My coverage of the topic in my book, Principles for a Self-Directed Society,  was succinct and to the point:

The war on drugs is a war waged by the government against the freedom and privacy of its own people.

The government breaks up families to imprison nonviolent offenders, often for nothing more than simple possession.  Drug laws are often applied more harshly to persons of color.

And so on.

A war to enforce a racial caste system

But Michelle Alexander’s argument is far more specific and detailed than my own.  What Alexander makes clear is how the War on Drugs has become the mechanism to enforce a modern-day Jim Crow, with separate and unequal enforcement practices targeted overwhelmingly at the black community, even though the actual rates of drug use are nearly identical in the white community.

She describes systematic and unconstitutional police tactics such as warrantless searches based on no probable cause: just racial profiling, pure and simple.

She describes the effects on the community of millions and millions of these individuals, nonviolent offenders swept up in unconstitutional arrests, as they are incarcerated in for-profit prisons and then branded as felons upon their release.  With a criminal felony conviction on their record, they cannot vote, cannot find employment, cannot get credit, cannot even live in low-rent housing, and even if they can find work they often have their wages seized by the state and turned over to the for-profit prisons.  What would you do, if you were caught in a situation like that?  Well, Jean Valjean, I’ll tell you what you would do:  You’d start stealing things, if your only other option was to starve.  In this manner, past offenders are effectively forced into recidivism by a system that provides them with no other options.

All of these effects are an absolutely intentional consequence of a racist policy designed to guarantee the political and economic supremacy of the white population in parts of the country that have a sizable black population.  The system is designed to keep as many black people as possible locked up in prison for as long as possible, and to force the black community to enrich the coffers of for-profit prisons in the process.

Coded references in politics

It’s no longer permissible for white politicians to openly speak in racist terms when they campaign for public office; so they coach their meaning in coded phrases, and everyone within their target demographic understands precisely what is being said.

“Getting tough on drugs” is code for keeping black people in prison.

“Preventing voter fraud” is code for preventing black people from voting.

The war on Democracy

Of course, all the recent initiatives to require photo ID for voting will not only affect black people: they also affect lower-class whites and Hispanics.  Still, the true purpose of these initiatives could not be more clear: the people in power are trying to retain their power by preventing the poorest people from having access to the political system.  Who has a photo ID?  People who own cars.  Who does not own a car?  The very poor, the very young, and the very old: demographics that largely tend to support public education, public health care, and progressive tax policies.  Prevent these groups from voting, and you can effectively own the system, without the nuisance of having to persuade a majority of the actual population to agree with you.

What, you think I’m being cynical?  Well, then you clearly haven’t been following the Republican presidential campaign; which seems unlikely, as no media channel has talked about practically anything else for months.  If it could be possible for anyone to doubt that I am correct in my interpretation, then just let the candidates speak for themselves.

First, the racist Southern conservative, Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich made it abundantly clear that the purpose of requiring photo ID for voting, is to prevent liberals from voting.  He said so quite clearly in a campaign speech in South Carolina on Friday, January 13, 2012:

If the only people who vote in elections are law-abiding, hardworking citizens who are deeply committed to America, the left wing of the Democratic Party will cease to exist.

“Deeply committed to America” of course is once again code for “agree with everything I say.”  The purpose of Gingrich’s rhetoric is, obviously, to argue that people who disagree with him should be explicitly excluded from the system.  That’s democracy, Southern style!

Racist stereotypes and ultra-nationalists

The Republicans competing for the hardline conservative vote have been doing so by appealing to the anti-black-people sentiments of their base.  They are trying to build themselves up by demonizing a racial minority, a disgusting but often successful tactic employed by ultra-nationalists around the world throughout modern history.

Ron Paul, in literature from 1990 made available by The New Republic, argued that:

we are headed for a race war—public insurrections that will make the 1960s look mild, with many Americans injured or killed…  the problem is much deeper, and it was created by welfare programs, quota systems, and government interference in just about everything we do, plus the victimization mentality created by the civil rights movement, where every black failure is a white crime.

Confronted with this quote, Ron Paul’s reply was something along the lines of, “I don’t know how you could possibly think I would say something like that.”  Then he went and said something else just like that, in a South Carolina campaign speech on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, when he argued that states should have the right to ignore Federal laws that they don’t like: laws such as the Voting Rights Act,   for example; or perhaps the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

“Well, Ron Paul is a nutcase,” you say, and quite right you are: not even the extremists of the far right would ever support his bid for the presidency.

But a majority of the right wing did vote for Rick Santorum in the Iowa caucuses (yes, there was a recount, and Romney lost, for you non-political-junkies who fail to keep up with these things).   In a campaign appearance  in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, January 1, 2012, Santorum told the audience that, in his words,

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.

This type of racial demonizing encourages the listening audience to blame a minority for the entire country’s problems.  Yet rather than chastise Santorum for his racism, the other candidates rushed to take up the theme.

Newt Gingrich proudly announced that,

If the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

Again, this is pure racial demonizing, and the stereotype perpetuated by Gingrich is not based on a shred of fact.  As many have pointed out in response to Gingrich’s offensive remarks, by far the majority of food stamp recipients are in fact white people.  The data is freely available from the United States Census Bureau, and you are welcome to look it up.

Unfortunately, the Census website is set up in such a way that I cannot provide a direct link to the search results for the term “food stamps”; and while the data available on the FactFinder website is exhaustive, the system is quite slow.  So, for your convenience, I have downloaded a set of data from the Census Bureau related to food stamp recipients by racial demographic, and posted them here.  Again, don’t take my word for it: please feel free to look up this data for yourself, and conduct your own custom search.

The Census Bureau data shows quite clearly that 61.0% of food stamp recipients are white, while just 26.4% of food stamp recipients are black.  The myth perpetuated by Santorum, Gingrich, and their ilk is pure racist hate-mongering, designed to win them the support of the lowest common denominator.

The racists will not win

America is better than this.

America, I believe in you.  I believe that the American people are deeply devoted to the ideals of freedom, justice, and political equality.  I believe that America will not tolerate this kind of racist demonizing from the people who wish to win the Presidency.  I believe that America will show them the door.  Come on, America!  You can do it.

Peace.

I was somewhat damaged by the experience.

My in-laws are perfectly nice people, as long as you can keep them off topics of politics and religion.  Unfortunately, they invited a whole lot of their friends and relatives over for the party.

So picture, if you will, a room full of well-off individuals: doctors and their spouses, people who own giant houses in posh neighborhoods and drive fancy expensive cars to their giant beach houses for weekend getaways.  The guests at this party were not members of the top 1% of our economically stratified society; but they are easily in the top 15%.

Now picture these wealthy individuals, dressed in their finery, lambasting the students, working families, middle-class parents and homeless people who participated in the Occupy movement by calling the Occupiers “elitist” of all things!

Listen, I’ve got nothing against nice houses.  Someday my wife and I hope to move up, after we get out from our current underwater mortgage.

But it strikes me as silly, no, hypocritical, for an individual with a personal net worth above a million dollars to describe homeless protesters as “elitist.”

I was at the event as a favor to my wife, so I was not about to get into an argument with her family and their friends.  Instead, we sat in a corner for a while and tried to talk about innocuous topics like sports and the personal habits of former roommates.  Eventually, the political conversation grew too loud to talk over, and I was forced to hide in another room.

Here are a few more of the gems I was subjected to before my retreat:

“Social justice is just another word for socialism.”  Oh, really?  The fact that anyone is willing to make a statement like this simply signifies their overwhelming opposition to the concept of equality: be it equality of opportunity; or equality under the law.  Never mind that guaranteeing the political equality of all citizens regardless of race, creed, color, or financial status used to be considered a fundamental American virtue: clearly the very concept of equality itself has now been reduced to an object of derision in the eyes of the ruling class.  The word “socialism” has lost all meaning in our modern linguistics: the word no longer has anything to do with any particular political philosophy.  When spoken by conservatives, this word is nothing more than another way of calling someone an ass hole.

There was more.  They talked at length about which of the Republican presidential contenders is the most strongly anti-choice, since this issue is their overriding concern.

As I finally got up to leave, one of the guests opined, “I am very concerned about the direction this country is heading right now.”

So to you, lady, whoever you are, and to all your like-minded extremists, none of whom are ever likely to read this: if you do ever happen to stumble across this blog, I want you to know that we have something in common.  Just like you, I too am very concerned about the direction this country is heading.

For I look around me, and I see people like you who strongly believe that improving the lot of the poor is the greatest imaginable evil.  I see a government held hostage by such extreme ideologues that they would rather push the entire country into bankruptcy than hold the wealthiest Americans responsible for their fair share of the tax burden.  I see a public that seems to have accepted the concept that the warmongering Military Industrial Complex really is the best structural support for the economy.  I see a mainstream media bought and paid for by the corporations, unwilling to ask any tough questions, gone soft on systematic invasions of privacy.

And behind all these troubling trends, I see extremists like you: people who advocate a Christian totalitarianism, a fundamentalist theocracy, a rule of the clergy, an American Caliphate, built on extremist interpretations of the Bible in place of Sharia, but effectively achieving the same end of subjugating the masses and the state to the will of the Church.

Yeah, Happy New Year.

Their message is clear: “We are the 99% and we’re not going to take it anymore!”  People are protesting out of their deeply held belief that the governments and economies of the world must be run for the benefit of the people of the world.  People are protesting because the banks got bailed out, the hedge fund managers made off with the billions, and we the people have been told to accept poverty, endless unemployment, backbreaking debt, and austerity galore.

The corporate media intentionally misunderstands and obfuscates this message.  The corporate media systematically undercounts the number of protesters in attendance at the rallies.  The corporate media goes out of their way to associate the Occupy movement with a few violence-loving anarchists in Rome.  The corporate media uses terms such as “anti-capitalist” and even “pointless” to describe the Occupy movement.

The corporate media does not get it.

Calling for change is hardly pointless.  The corporate media had no trouble understanding the point of the Tea Party movement: and in the time that the Tea Party has controlled the House of Representatives, we have all had an opportunity to observe the devastating effect of Tea Party ideology on the living standards of the 99%.

Some in the Occupy movement are doubtless opposed to capitalism in its present form: and as long as the government continues to fail in its responsibility to represent the interests of the people, who can blame them?

I think most of the Occupy protesters probably hold more nuanced views: that regulation of the financial system is both necessary and lacking; that political power and high finance are too cozy and must be separated; that the tax system has dramatically increased the gap between the rich and the poor at the expense of the middle class, and therefore the inequalities inherent in the system must be corrected.

My personal hope for an outcome of the Occupy movement is that this popular uprising will result in a Constitutional amendment permanently prohibiting campaign finance of any kind.  Get the money out of politics: all the money.  And while we’re at it:  Fix the tax laws, regulate the banks, tax the sale of stocks, and use the revenues to put the people back to work.

Vive la Occupation!

We believe in freedom.

We believe in hard work.

We believe that good work should be well rewarded.

We believe in the right to own property which is the reward of our work; and we believe in the right of our spouses and children to inherit our property upon the occasion of our passing.

We believe in the rights of the individual to pursue their self-interest wherever it may lie. We also believe in the rule of law as a protection against the excesses of the few for whom the pursuit of self-interest crosses the border into the criminal and thereby threatens the health, safety, privacy, and security of our persons, our families, and our interests.

Therefore, we recognize the necessity for a government to enforce the rule of law.

We believe that all people must be treated equally by the law, and that a person’s genetics, heritage, fortunes, or social status must not be used to dispose the law toward that person in either a favorable or an unfavorable manner.

We believe that the interests of the people outweigh the interests of the state, and we agree that the people should look askance and even raise an outcry whenever the state seeks an expansion of its powers.

We believe in democracy, because we believe that the government’s purpose is to serve the people, and we believe that the right to govern can only be bestowed by the people.

We believe in the Constitution. We cherish the separation of powers which prevents our great nation from slipping into the clutches of tyranny.

We believe in the Bill of Rights.

We believe that we have a right to say what we want, how we want, when we want.

We believe that we have an inalienable right to organize, and to gather together without hindrance.

We believe that there is such a thing as a higher calling. We believe that there are forces at play in our universe that transcend the understanding of humans. We believe that the government has no place dictating to us what we should believe about the nature of the sublime and transcendent elements of the universe.

We believe that guns are tools, and like many tools they are dangerous and even deadly if used improperly. We believe that the existence of criminals in the world does not justify the elimination of such tools; on the contrary.

We believe in the right to privacy. We believe that the government does not have the right to search our property or to intercept our communications without a warrant issued based on probably cause.

We believe that our government is unduly swayed by special interests.

We believe that the power of the people has been diluted, and we want to see our democracy restored. We are in agreement that the only way to restore people’s faith in our system of government is to eliminate the influence of the special interests. Whether we choose to focus our ire on 501(c) groups, or on corporations, churches, or unions, we are in agreement that influence is the problem; and the solution is to get the money out of politics.

We believe that the government spends too much. We may not agree on specific line items; but back in 2008 when I wrote the book, I quite strongly voiced my objection to the astronomical federal budget deficit. This is not just a conservative issue.

We believe that the health care overhaul was largely misdirected. Back in 2008, I wrote in the book than an individual private insurance mandate is entirely the wrong approach to health care reform. (I staunchly favor the public option.) In the same way that Medicare reform under Bush was a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies, now health care reform under Obama is a giveaway to the insurance industry.

To top it off, I’ll go one further. I agree with conservatives that most of the Democrats in Congress are corrupt politicians toadying to the interests of their campaign donors. Of course, I believe that the Republicans in Congress are even worse. They are both dirty.

Progressives and conservatives agree on all these points and more.

We aren’t so different, you and I.

That’s right: Members of Congress should be paid minimum wage on an hourly basis.
People get all bent out of shape that the barely-middle-class salary that we pay our teachers is somehow too high, when here we are forking out millions of dollars a year to provide members of Congress with salaries that are four or five times higher than a teacher’s salary. That’s right: in order to get paid as much as a member of Congress gets, you would otherwise have to be a doctor, a lawyer, or the CEO of a profitable company.
Whenever they are polled, the American public overwhelmingly agrees that Congress’s job performance is appalling. Yet members of Congress are public employees; so why do we reward their poor performance with executive-level compensation?
We should not be giving CEO-level salaries to people who spend half their time out campaigning and fundraising. Why pay them for a job they aren’t even doing? Let them work for minimum wage, and see how they like earning the same income as millions upon millions of their constituents. Just make sure to simultaneously crack down on corruption, because you know they would try to cheat.
This year’s budgeting circus, starring Ringmaster Paul Ryan and the acrobatic stuntman “I’ll jump through any hoop the Republicans ask me to jump through” President Obama, is worse drama than daytime television. As was discussed on this blog previously, Ryan and his circus clowns propose to enact yet another tax cut for the wealthiest of the wealthy; and they want to pay for it by cutting even more social services: Medicare, Medicaid, you name it, they want it cut. They branded their package as “deficit reduction” but a report from the nonpartisan Center for Budget Analysis shows that the budget proposal is not even deficit neutral: it actually increases the deficit even more.

Advantages and considerations of paying Congress minimum wage:

• Paying Congress minimum wage would reduce the budget deficit by the amount of their collective salary cuts.
• Paying them minimum wage might make Congresspeople more sympathetic to the conditions of the working class
• On the other hand, reducing their salaries might not actually affect the Congresspeople much, because most of them are millionaires anyway.
• Save the Federal budget even more by eliminating perks and benefits for Congresspeople! Congressional expense accounts, such as flying back and forth for campaigning, should not be paid by taxpayers. Minimum wage workers have to pay for their own transportation, their own lunch, and their own health care. Members of Congress should be subject to the same personal funding mechanisms as the general public. Earning minimum wage, and supporting their families, many Congresspeople would probably qualify for food stamps, if they don’t mind waiting in line at the DSHS. If they don’t like it, they can improve living conditions for the working class.

I know, I know, I’m dreaming. The only way a proposal like this could possibly get enacted into law is by voting every single sitting member of Congress out of office and replacing the lot of them with new politicians who have pledged to enact legislation ending executive pay levels for members of Congress. If we could do that, oh what a better world this would be.

What’s been omitted from our global strategy for reducing the impact of armed conflict is an international framework designed to respond to events in real time and impose cease-fires in conflict zones without taking sides with any particular belligerent.  This would not just apply to conflict zones where there is actually a war going on: this would also apply to situations like what’s going on in Bahrain right now, with unarmed protesters being shot by government forces, and medical staff being punished for treating the wounded, in contravention of the Geneva Conventions.  Why is the world set up to sit back and watch this happen on TV without doing anything about it?

The conflict in Libya would have been over by now if we had reacted immediately when Qadaffi began shooting unarmed protesters with missiles from airplanes; and even then, the last-minute intervention smelled a bit like an attempt to appease the world oil markets.  The winners in the ethnic civil war in Sri Lanka refuse to discuss the report that finds they intentionally and indiscriminately killed tens of thousands of Tamil civilians at the end of the war: a genocidal atrocity.  I remember at the time, in the sickening final days of the decades-long conflict with the Tamil Tiger rebels, hearing news reports of a high civilian death toll as the government forces crushed not just the rebels but the entire population of the Tamil homeland.  After the last of the rebel forces were defeated, entire villages were rounded up and trucked off to squalid camps.  All this happened, and the whole world knew about it, and nobody did a thing.  The attitude of the world government is essentially this:  “The local governments should be left to manage their own affairs, unless the local governments happen to be sitting on resources that are critical to the economic and national security interests of the world’s richest nations; and if somebody has a problem with something that happened, then the lawyers can argue about it in court.”  For each perpetrator who is brought to justice before the International Criminal Court, hundreds go free, and meanwhile nothing can undo the suffering of the people who have been subjected to crimes against humanity.  This attitude is unacceptable; this situation is wholly inadequate for a civilized society to allow such brutal unlawfulness to be perpetuated around the world on a daily basis.

I proposed in the book and I maintain now that we need a fast-response peacekeeping arm of the United Nations: a world police whose task is not to take sides in conflicts but specifically act in real time to prevent atrocities from happening.

Effective prevention happens in real time, not after the fact.

First, in accordance with long personal habit, I must formulate my stance in opposition to another group. There is a well-funded institute (I’m not going to dignify them with a link) that has been promoting what they erroneously describe as bipartisanship. Spokespeople for this group have had multiple appearances on nationally syndicated broadcast networks. The problem is that this group’s spokespeople are all political extremists like David Frum, and the flavor of “nonpartisanship” they promote does not involve finding common ground. When Frum and his extremist cohorts call for an end to partisanship, they are really asking for the other side to stop arguing and let them have their way. Their vision of nonpartisanship basically involves the other guy rolling over. They will not sway anyone with this offensively self-serving line of reasoning.
On the contrary: listing to these egotists on the radio, asking me to stop arguing and let them win in the name of bipartisanship made me so angry that I was actually preparing a draft of a post titled “In Defense of Partisanship,” when some extremist partisan took it too far when he shot Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and a number of innocent bystanders in a politically motivated assassination attempt; for it was political, and we all know it, regardless of counsel’s motion to plead the insanity defense.
After that incident, I decided to hold off on my planned post, and to give the matter some further consideration.
In recent conversation, I found myself launching into yet another tirade against my political opponents; but in the course of the discussion, I remembered the guy who used to be our next door neighbor (half a mile down a rural road) where I grew up on a farm.
This man worked as a logger, and literally everything that came out of his mouth was intentionally offensive. Certainly there can’t be much of anything we would have agreed on politically.
Yet this same man was one of the most generous, supportive, community-minded individuals I have ever met. His family had us over for dinner, and we had them over for family celebrations, and my Mom used to go trail riding on horseback with his wife.
When my Dad died, I had moved away, and couldn’t be there to help around the farm. Our neighbor went out of his way to do far more for my Mom than anyone could possibly have asked of him. Nobody asked: he volunteered. He brought my Mom cords of firewood, and he split and stacked it for her. He fixed our fences. He even helped tend our livestock.
This man, my neighbor, was not an enemy: he was a hero, and the world needs more people like him. What does it matter that we differed on certain matters of policy?
And in consideration of my old neighbor, I am going to attempt to change my tone in this my political blog.
It will not be easy for me. I still identify both of the major political parties (but especially the Republican Party) with the moneyed interests who support political campaigns; and that will not change. I still hear right-wing extremists with radical agendas getting lots of media coverage, and I rarely or never seem to hear the media giving equal coverage to their progressive counterparts; and my resulting frustration with media bias is not going to simply dissipate.
But I will not continue to blame conservative voters as a whole. Instead I hope to appeal to the rational sensibilities of the people on the other side. We can find common good, and we can work together to make America a better place in a Self-Directed Society.

Hint: Government debt is not a factor.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid quite literally prop up the middle class.  Eliminate these programs, and the middle class will all but disappear.  THAT is the whole point.  The Republican attacks on social services are nothing short of a full-scale, systematic, intentional effort to eliminate the middle class.

Thanks to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, seniors can retire without completely relying on their adult children to take care of them.  That allows those families to increase their household wealth through savings and investment, instead of living paycheck to paycheck while struggling with their bills.  Thanks to Medicare and Medicaid, seniors, the disabled, and the destitute can received life-saving health care services that otherwise would have bankrupted them or their families.  Without those services, these people would have died, and that is what the Republicans are proposing, in a sick new twist on Marie Antoinette’s famous slogan: “Let them go bankrupt and die.”

Eliminating the Competition

Republicans want to eliminate Social Security because they do not want members of the middle class to have the opportunity to increase their household wealth.

An important principle of doing business in a capitalist economy is that monopolies are profitable.  Increasing market share increases profits.  Therefore, any reasonable business person will do everything possible to eliminate the competition.  The increased saving and spending power of the middle class is perceived by the ultra-rich as a threat.  (Remember that most members of Congress have personal wealth greater than $1 million, and thus our nation’s highest governing body is stacked to over-represent the interests of the ultra-rich.)

In brief:  It’s all about eliminating the competition.

Why eliminate the middle class?  There is just one motive: profit.  The aristocracy profits from the elimination of the middle class in many ways.  For one, as previously mentioned, if you eliminate the middle class’s ability to make investments, then you automatically increase the proportion of investment income that flows to the aristocracy.

For another thing, desperate people are easier to control.  Desperate people don’t complain about rigged elections because they’re too worried about feeding their families.  Desperate people will work for next to nothing, even though it’s not enough to cover their basic expenses, because they have no other options.  True, desperate people commit more property crimes: but the victims of those crimes are other desperate people.  The aristocracy in their gated communities are generally not affected by crime, with one exception: privately owned prisons, and the forced labor that takes place within them, are very, very profitable.

Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Throws Seniors Under the Bus

Budgetary concerns are a parlor trick to distract voters from the real issues.  Republican fiscal mismanagement caused our budget crisis in the first place.  Republican fiscal policy will never solve the problem it created: it can only make matters worse.

The media campaign has been ongoing for some time now, and it can only be expected to intensify.  President Bush Jr. was unable to privatize Social Security in his administration, but the Republican Party’s animosity towards social services of any kind has found new life in the 112^th Congress, which is presently holding the entire government hostage over the budget, and which may well force a government shutdown just to prove something or other.

The latest Congressional budget proposal for the next fiscal year got a big op-ed write-up in the Wall Street Journal by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee.  Ryan’s proposed budget includes dramatic tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthiest Americans; expensive tax cuts which he intends to pay for by slashing or eliminating social services including Medicare and Medicaid, which he categorizes as “welfare”.

If Medicaid is “welfare,” one wonders how the nation’s seniors will feel about being the targets of “welfare reform.”  As Ezra Klein pointed out in his piece in the Washington Post, two-thirds of Medicaid expenditures go to provide care to the elderly and the disabled (Klein’s statistics are from the Kaiser Commission and the Urban Institute).  Another 20% of Medicaid’s budget provides health care to children.  A small minority of the program’s funds go to adults; and as I have argued before, if we want to get those adults off the public rolls, then we should start by raising the minimum wage, not by eliminating social services.  Indeed, if the primary concern were budgetary, then we should start by increasing the top marginal tax rate and the corporate tax rate, not by eliminating social services.

But as I’ve already stated, the budget has nothing to do with this push to eliminate social services.  The budget is just a transparent excuse.  The budget could easily be fixed by taxing the rich and cutting military spending.  Instead, Republicans want to increase military spending and cut taxes for the rich; and they will pay for these expenses by raising taxes on the rest of us and by eliminating the social services that were established generations ago to benefit the People of the United States of America.

Republican Fiscal Irresponsibility

Republican economic policies gave us high unemployment, skyrocketing bankruptcy filings, the collapse of the housing market, and a trillion dollar federal budget deficit.  Obama inherited all these problems from Bush, even though the Mainstream Media seems to have some memory problems regarding this incontrovertible fact, since the media consistently fails to challenge Republicans when they LIE and try to pin all the problems on Obama as if he had somehow caused them … years before he got elected.

So, a Republican President Bush and his Republican Congress comrades inherited a budget surplus from Democrat President Clinton.  They promptly turned this pile of money into a stack of “IOU’s” by handing out the contents of the Treasury to the richest people in the country.  Remember that?  It was called the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich.  I got a lousy $300 “tax refund” check out of the deal.  If I had been a multi-billionaire, my check from the government would have been for millions of dollars.  The appeasement scheme was intentionally regressive: it mostly benefitted those at the very top of our modern neo-feudalist aristocracy.  Someday, my son will have to pick up the tab plus interest.

Stealing from the Poor to Give to the Rich

Well, that’s where all the money went: we gave it away to the rich people.  (Then we spent billions we didn’t have on wars we didn’t need…)  Now that there’s no money left, the only solution Congress can think to propose is to give even more money to the rich people in an act which will strip away the last straw of hope from the needy, the destitute, the suffering, the aged, and the crippled.

Of course, that’s how Republicans think: you rob from the poor so you can give money to the rich.  This is their agenda, their philosophy, and their intended course of action.

The Republican philosophy: “Let them go bankrupt and die.”



As I stated in the book, cannabis is hardly a boon to society. It is an addictive intoxicant with negative health consequences.
On the other hand, we as a society should compare its social costs to the cost of prohibition. It is arguably less addictive than tobacco, and demonstrably less dangerous to the user than alcohol. Despite the fact that nicotine is an addictive carcinogenic poison, tobacco is legal because we believe that the individual has a right to make his or her own choices about whether of not to use it. Tobacco kills thousands of people a year, but we will probably never outlaw tobacco because we believe in freedom. (Or, some might say, we believe in the profits that tobacco generates.)
We tried to outlaw alcohol in this country. We soon repealed the Amendment because we recognized that Prohibition was a disaster. It did not change people’s behavior as the amendment’s sponsors had hoped. Instead in created a historic wave of violence due to organized crime. The takeaway is that people don’t stop using intoxicants just because the intoxicants are illegal: instead, the money for the intoxicants is funneled to criminal networks, who employ the profits to widen their influence, which generally exerts a destructive influence on society.
We pride ourselves on learning from our mistakes.
In this country we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the War on Drugs, and what does all that money buy us?
The War on Drugs sends millions of nonviolent offenders to jail every year, often for no greater crime than simple possession. The additional cost of the War on Drugs to local communities is tremendous financially, because they have to pay for the incarceration and related costs. Simultaneously, the War on Drugs costs communities even more from a social perspective, because it breaks up families, deprives children of their fathers, deprives wives of their husbands, and deprives households of the financial support of the primary breadwinner.
The War on Drugs buys invasive government policies that violate individuals’ privacy and reduce freedom for everyone.
The extraordinary cost of prosecuting and incarcerating all these nonviolent offenders is rarely considered in discussions concerning the War on Drugs and the debate over legalization.
We could reduce the government deficit by eliminating this pointless War on Drugs and all its attendant invasions of privacy.
Furthermore, just as significantly from a fiscal perspective, we could tax the sale of decriminalized cannabis and use the tax revenue to pay off the national debt and to shore up the storied 20-years-from-now shortfall in Social Security.