DC MAYOR TRIES TO RID CITY OF HOMELESS
In a recent STREET SENSE article I pointed out that the homeless often have "no place to go". This article can be seen as an addendum to that.
I came out of the subway system at Judiciary Square just before noon on Wednesday, September 9th, having used the 4th Street exit. As I walked from the escalator toward 4th street, I saw several homeless people speaking to a HAWK ONE security guard who was doing a glorified disclaimer by telling people that he only carries out the orders that are handed down to him. As I listened, I was able to ascertain that the homeless people had been told that they had to leave the large restaurant on the first floor of the One Judiciary Square government office building. As the conversation continued, several PROTECTIVE SERVICES cops walked up -- just one at first and then 3 more several minutes later.
The several homeless people that were involved in the discussion often eat at Thrive DC which is right across the road. From what I was able to gather, they entered the restaurant -- some of them having baggage with them -- and sat down. Some bought food and/or drink and others didn't. They were told that if they weren't buying that they'd have to go. They were made to go out into the bad weather, with it drizzling off and on that day until about 2 PM. One of the homeless was a pregnant woman. There are claims that the cops were overly aggressive as they told people to leave. An officer had supposedly threatened to body slam the pregnant woman as he made them leave the porch earlier that morning as the restaurant prepared to open. During this latter incident, only those who looked homeless were being made to leave. Though the security officer claimed that only those who hadn't purchased anything were being made to leave, the homeless claimed that even those who had made purchases were being put out and that one man had been prevented from purchasing and was made to leave. The homeless who were offended during this incident, claim that there were others -- some homeless -- who didn't look the part and weren't made to leave, though they hadn't purchased anything.
During the conversation, the HAWK ONE officer said that the rule is that, when you buy something, you have 15 to 20 minutes to sit down and eat it and then must leave. In response I asked him,"Do you enforce that 15 to 20 minute rule with everyone or just the homeless? Do you tell everyone that they must leave after they're through eating or just the homeless?" He responded by talking about the many bags that some people bring in. This sounds like a move directed at just the homeless. They were put out of the restaurant irrespective of whether or not they had purchased there.
I also want to point out that, as the officer whom I was told is named OFFICER GREEN arrived, he was not in a talking mood. He just walked up as others of us were having a somewhat productive and respectful conversation with the other cops and said with an assertive attitude,"Have a nice day". As I tried to explain that I had not been part of the situation in the restaurant and that I am a homeless advocate, he repeated himself so as to make it clear that he was in no mood for conversation. He was impossible to reason with.
All of this goes to show that the homeless are being dehumanized by society and relegated to the level of second-rate citizens. However, I would find out on the following day that this incident was the result of an executive order that had been handed down by the mayor.
Mayor Fenty failed to show up at a community meeting which was held by residents of the poor Trinidad neighborhood on Friday, September 4th. However, he was able to attend another community meeting at the First District police station which was attended by well-to-do members of the business community. During this latter meeting, business owners complained to the mayor about the presence of homeless people in and around their businesses. They told the mayor that he was able to decrease the presence of homeless people near the businesses in Franklin Square by closing Franklin School Shelter and asked if he could do something similar for this group of entrepreneurs. Mayor Fenty responded by giving police the order to clean the homeless out from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station eastward to Union Station and southward toward Capitol Hill. The security officer had only been following orders after all.
During that meeting, Mayor Fenty also said that he wants to send any homeless person who is not from Washington, DC back to where they came from. This is reminiscent of moves made by New York mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. This begs the question: If a thousand homeless Washingtonians are made to return to their birthplace in New York and the same number of homeless New Yorkers are made to return to their birthplace in DC, what has the city gained? At some point we must stop doing the homeless shuffle and just solve the problem.
What's noteworthy in all of this is the sheer ignorance of the police and others when it comes to the plight of the homeless. (That's not to speak of the apathy or the I'm-just-doing-my-job mentality.) I'm sure that many officers don't know that the homeless people whom they wake and tell to move on couldn't get into a shelter due to there being a shortage and might not have slept for a day or more because they couldn't find an adequate place to sleep. Ironically, sleep deprivation is seen as a form of torture when U.S. soldiers inflict it on Middle-Eastern enemy combatants but not when cops and security guards inflict it on American homeless people. The difference is that, while the soldiers are deliberately forcing their prisoners to stay awake, the homeless are often being kept awake through a combination of disassociated circumstances which include the police enforcing no-loitering ordinances and there being no place for the homeless to go in lieu of the shelter shortage.
The homeless are being pushed to the limit, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Some of the problems with which they are faced have been created by a mayor who is becoming more openly antagonistic toward them. Others are the result of a faulty system wherein so many different people have held a particular office and left their footprint that one can't logically blame a single official for the problems being experienced by the underprivileged. The latter concern makes accountability nearly impossible. It is also the reason that the rank and file gets the brunt of people's anger when, in fact, that anger should be directed at the public officials who handed down the inhumane orders.
The homeless are victims of objective circumstances as well as policies that target them and add insult to injury. In Washington, DC the average rent for a one-bedroom is $1,400/month. If your rent shouldn't exceed 30% of your gross income, you'd need to make over $4,500/month or about $28/hour. However, the minimum wage in DC is always $1 more than the federal minimum, which puts it at less than $10/hour. Some of the homeless work but still can't afford a place to stay. Add to this the fact that housing programs and shelters are being closed across the city while affordable housing returns to market rate. As if that's not enough, people are losing jobs left and right and becoming homeless, creating the need for more -- not less -- shelter. So, when the homeless are awakened for sleeping in a public place, told to move along or even forced out of town by their mayor it is easy to see why they would get frustrated and feel mistreated. When will we demand the same level of humane treatment for our nation's homeless that we demand for those of other nations?
That said, things seem to building toward a major confrontation between the homeless and city officials, though it wouldn't be completely without precedent. Given the option of not sleeping or sleeping in a jail cell, some would choose the latter. Faced with the dilemma of having no food or jail food, the choice is an obvious one. When made to choose between being made to move along throughout the course of the day or sit in a jail cell, some would rather sit. All in all, going to jail is beginning to look like a move upward and something to be aspired to. This is presumably another result of ignorance on the part of our public officials. It is also a recipe for open conflict -- much like the open conflict between the homeless operating under the leadership of Mitch Snyder and the Reagan administration. The primary difference is that this time around the antagonist has a didderent name -- Adrian Fenty.
Eric Jonathan Sheptock "The Blogger"
www.ericsheptock.com (blog)
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Mobilize for Health!
Will Civil Disobedience For Health Care Make Obama and Dems Listen?
By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
They're not listening. They're just not listening. It simply does not matter to the president and his advisors, to Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, or to those who decide what is broadcast and published in corporate media that two thirds of the American people still favor an everybody-in-nobody-out health care system, a Medicare For All solution to the nation's health care crisis. For these players Big Pharma favors and insurance company dollars speak louder than their own campaign promises, louder than the will of the American people. Maybe it's time to turn up the volume.
45,000 Americans die every year for lack of affordable, available health care. Not for lack of insurance --- for lack of care. Almost a million Americans went bankrupt last year, two thirds of them for unpayable medical bills. Most of those did have insurance when they first became sick or injured. If we really want health care for everyone --- all of us in and nobody out, maybe it's time to stop deferring to our imagined betters. Maybe it's time to get loud, to get impolite. Maybe it's time to raise their cost of business as usual to unacceptable levels. Our costs, the costs of ordinary American families have been unacceptable for some time now.
Maybe it's time to show we know the truth and to speak that truth to power. That's why they call these things “demonstrations.” Maybe it's time again for nonviolent civil disobedience, time to get arrested, not in the cause of “health insurance reform,” but in the cause of universal and accessible health care for everybody, Medicare For All. That's the thinking behind the good people at MoblizeForHealthCare.Org, a collaborative project initiated by Healthcare-NOW!, Prosperity Agenda, and the Center for the Working Poor.
“It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress...”
The participants threw up a web site at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, and kicked off a national campaign of civil disobedience with a September 28 appearance on Democracy Now, and a demonstration the following day at the New York offices of Aetna Insurance. 17 people inside the insurance company offices were arrested as hundreds more marched, chanted and sang outside. A few hours after this article is published on October 8, a similar civilly disobedient action will take place at the Chicago office of one or another greedy insurance company. On October 15, similar actions will take place in Los Angeles and several other cities, and continue until this administration and congressional leaders abandon their plans to bail out the insurance industry, until they remember and implement their campaign promises of universal, accessible, affordable health care --- not health insurance, but real health care for everybody, Medicare For All.
Black Agenda Report talked late last week to Kevin Zeese, who told us that in the first four days the site was up, nearly a thousand people signed up, with about half expressing a willingness to get arrested in a nonviolent demonstration at an insurance company or some other likely location. We thought this was a great start, and heartily endorsed the effort. In the days to come we will certainly do all we can to help out.
It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress, 86 (the number of current HR 676 co-sponsors, down from 99 in the pre-Obama congress) is not 218. It's time to stop caving to the un-elected billionaire-owned corporate media who tell us every day that “the political will” for Medicare For All just isn't there. These are the same media and politicos who told us tech stocks and real estate prices could only go up, that Saddam had nukes and maybe there's no such thing as man-made climate change. They are the same bipartisan crowd who emerged from the White House only yesterday to assure us that continuing the Afghan war with tens or hundreds of thousands more troops is absolutely necessary and not subject to debate, even if only 39% of Americans believe it.my son died
If you believe a democratic political process consists of elections, the world's free-est press and three branches of government that do what the people who elected them told them to do, you have to admit this process is broken. It's time to step outside that box. If you think politics is broader and deeper than what laws are passed and what our bipartisan establishment and corporate media deem “politically feasible” it's also time to crank up the pressure a notch.
We should not imagine that the path of a widespread national campaign of civil disobedience to obtain univesal health care will be easy. The first demonstration got adequate coverage in New York, even in the corporate press. Today's action in Chicago might do the same, or maybe not. In recent years we have seen half a million marchers on the mall in DC ignored by corporate media while a crowd not one tenth or twentieth that size demonstrating against single payer, a public option or anything of the kind in mid-September was inflated to the dimensions of a near-insurrection by CNN, Fox News and C-SPAN.
We can and should utilize the internet, text messaging and social networking tools like FaceBook, Twiiter, MeetUp and others to grow support, to collaborate and coordinate this effort. But we should know that Verizon and other telecom providers have blocked antiwar, pro-woman and other text messaging before and may do it again. Only last week local police in Pennsylvania and the FBI in New York arrested and charged activists with felonies for using Twitter to let anti-G20 demonstrators in Pittsburg talk to each other over their accounts. Being arrested and having your house trashed is no picnic, and being charged with felonies, especially federal ones --- federal courts convict more than 97% of all defendants, according to the National Lawyers Guild --- is no joke. But neither are the 125 Americans who die daily from lack of accessible, affordable health care. Both are prices someone is defintely bearing, one to bolster insurance company profits, the other for peace abroad and justice at home. It shouldn't be hard to decide which price you'd rather bear.
So we ask our readers to go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org and sign up. The form asks six questions.
· Are you willing to be arrested in a nonviolent demonstration for health care for all?
· Will you demonstrate legally in support of those who are civilly disobedient?
· Have you ever given nonviolent training for other efforts?
· Can you contribute bail money for those arrested?
· Are you a legal professional competent to help defend the arrested?
· Have you or someone in your family been denied medical coverage by an insurer?
“Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done.”
And after you sign up at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, we encourage you to open your phone books and email lists and bend the eyes and ears of all your friends, vial email, FaceBook, Twitter and especially in person. Let them know you gave a few dollars for bail money, that you have offered to demonstrate, legally or otherwise in your city or town to get affordable, accessible, Medicare For All. If you're in a fraternity or sorority, a motorcycle club or a church, carry it to them. There is almost no family in the nation untouched by the health care crisis. Tell them what you know, and what you are doing. And invite them to do the same. If you're anybody I know personally, you can look for my call or email. It's coming.
At some point we are either grownups or children, we either lift up our eyes and put our faith in democracy, or we bow our heads and submit to authority. Submission to authority including unjust authorities, automatic deferral to the wishes of the wealthy and entitled are a big part of American political culture.
We expect that few elected Democrats, and those who aspire to or are already dependent upon their patronage will want to touch this. That's OK. There are Elected Democrats and their baggage train differ from small-d democrats in that their careers are funded by corporations, the most profoundly anti-democratic force in modern human societies. There are way more small-d democrats than the elected ones. Those few are, like Langston Hughes used to say, not the sea, but just the foam on the sea. We are the rocks and the mighty waves themselves. It's about what we want, not what the corporate-sponsored elect consider "politically feasible."
This has to change and nobody can do it but Americans. Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done. We can raise their cost of doing business to unacceptable levels. We can make them listen, if only we will.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and lives near Atlanta GA. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
By Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
They're not listening. They're just not listening. It simply does not matter to the president and his advisors, to Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, or to those who decide what is broadcast and published in corporate media that two thirds of the American people still favor an everybody-in-nobody-out health care system, a Medicare For All solution to the nation's health care crisis. For these players Big Pharma favors and insurance company dollars speak louder than their own campaign promises, louder than the will of the American people. Maybe it's time to turn up the volume.
45,000 Americans die every year for lack of affordable, available health care. Not for lack of insurance --- for lack of care. Almost a million Americans went bankrupt last year, two thirds of them for unpayable medical bills. Most of those did have insurance when they first became sick or injured. If we really want health care for everyone --- all of us in and nobody out, maybe it's time to stop deferring to our imagined betters. Maybe it's time to get loud, to get impolite. Maybe it's time to raise their cost of business as usual to unacceptable levels. Our costs, the costs of ordinary American families have been unacceptable for some time now.
Maybe it's time to show we know the truth and to speak that truth to power. That's why they call these things “demonstrations.” Maybe it's time again for nonviolent civil disobedience, time to get arrested, not in the cause of “health insurance reform,” but in the cause of universal and accessible health care for everybody, Medicare For All. That's the thinking behind the good people at MoblizeForHealthCare.Org, a collaborative project initiated by Healthcare-NOW!, Prosperity Agenda, and the Center for the Working Poor.
“It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress...”
The participants threw up a web site at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, and kicked off a national campaign of civil disobedience with a September 28 appearance on Democracy Now, and a demonstration the following day at the New York offices of Aetna Insurance. 17 people inside the insurance company offices were arrested as hundreds more marched, chanted and sang outside. A few hours after this article is published on October 8, a similar civilly disobedient action will take place at the Chicago office of one or another greedy insurance company. On October 15, similar actions will take place in Los Angeles and several other cities, and continue until this administration and congressional leaders abandon their plans to bail out the insurance industry, until they remember and implement their campaign promises of universal, accessible, affordable health care --- not health insurance, but real health care for everybody, Medicare For All.
Black Agenda Report talked late last week to Kevin Zeese, who told us that in the first four days the site was up, nearly a thousand people signed up, with about half expressing a willingness to get arrested in a nonviolent demonstration at an insurance company or some other likely location. We thought this was a great start, and heartily endorsed the effort. In the days to come we will certainly do all we can to help out.
It's high time to let go of the political pessimism that says well, we don't have the votes in Congress, 86 (the number of current HR 676 co-sponsors, down from 99 in the pre-Obama congress) is not 218. It's time to stop caving to the un-elected billionaire-owned corporate media who tell us every day that “the political will” for Medicare For All just isn't there. These are the same media and politicos who told us tech stocks and real estate prices could only go up, that Saddam had nukes and maybe there's no such thing as man-made climate change. They are the same bipartisan crowd who emerged from the White House only yesterday to assure us that continuing the Afghan war with tens or hundreds of thousands more troops is absolutely necessary and not subject to debate, even if only 39% of Americans believe it.my son died
If you believe a democratic political process consists of elections, the world's free-est press and three branches of government that do what the people who elected them told them to do, you have to admit this process is broken. It's time to step outside that box. If you think politics is broader and deeper than what laws are passed and what our bipartisan establishment and corporate media deem “politically feasible” it's also time to crank up the pressure a notch.
We should not imagine that the path of a widespread national campaign of civil disobedience to obtain univesal health care will be easy. The first demonstration got adequate coverage in New York, even in the corporate press. Today's action in Chicago might do the same, or maybe not. In recent years we have seen half a million marchers on the mall in DC ignored by corporate media while a crowd not one tenth or twentieth that size demonstrating against single payer, a public option or anything of the kind in mid-September was inflated to the dimensions of a near-insurrection by CNN, Fox News and C-SPAN.
We can and should utilize the internet, text messaging and social networking tools like FaceBook, Twiiter, MeetUp and others to grow support, to collaborate and coordinate this effort. But we should know that Verizon and other telecom providers have blocked antiwar, pro-woman and other text messaging before and may do it again. Only last week local police in Pennsylvania and the FBI in New York arrested and charged activists with felonies for using Twitter to let anti-G20 demonstrators in Pittsburg talk to each other over their accounts. Being arrested and having your house trashed is no picnic, and being charged with felonies, especially federal ones --- federal courts convict more than 97% of all defendants, according to the National Lawyers Guild --- is no joke. But neither are the 125 Americans who die daily from lack of accessible, affordable health care. Both are prices someone is defintely bearing, one to bolster insurance company profits, the other for peace abroad and justice at home. It shouldn't be hard to decide which price you'd rather bear.
So we ask our readers to go to www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org and sign up. The form asks six questions.
· Are you willing to be arrested in a nonviolent demonstration for health care for all?
· Will you demonstrate legally in support of those who are civilly disobedient?
· Have you ever given nonviolent training for other efforts?
· Can you contribute bail money for those arrested?
· Are you a legal professional competent to help defend the arrested?
· Have you or someone in your family been denied medical coverage by an insurer?
“Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done.”
And after you sign up at www.mobilizeforhealthcare.org, we encourage you to open your phone books and email lists and bend the eyes and ears of all your friends, vial email, FaceBook, Twitter and especially in person. Let them know you gave a few dollars for bail money, that you have offered to demonstrate, legally or otherwise in your city or town to get affordable, accessible, Medicare For All. If you're in a fraternity or sorority, a motorcycle club or a church, carry it to them. There is almost no family in the nation untouched by the health care crisis. Tell them what you know, and what you are doing. And invite them to do the same. If you're anybody I know personally, you can look for my call or email. It's coming.
At some point we are either grownups or children, we either lift up our eyes and put our faith in democracy, or we bow our heads and submit to authority. Submission to authority including unjust authorities, automatic deferral to the wishes of the wealthy and entitled are a big part of American political culture.
We expect that few elected Democrats, and those who aspire to or are already dependent upon their patronage will want to touch this. That's OK. There are Elected Democrats and their baggage train differ from small-d democrats in that their careers are funded by corporations, the most profoundly anti-democratic force in modern human societies. There are way more small-d democrats than the elected ones. Those few are, like Langston Hughes used to say, not the sea, but just the foam on the sea. We are the rocks and the mighty waves themselves. It's about what we want, not what the corporate-sponsored elect consider "politically feasible."
This has to change and nobody can do it but Americans. Back in the 60's it used to be said that the young people were impatient with injustice. We need to lose that patience again to get something done. We can raise their cost of doing business to unacceptable levels. We can make them listen, if only we will.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and lives near Atlanta GA. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Save Lives, Legalize Drugs!
A Radical Solution to the War on Drugs: Legalize EVERYTHING
By John H. Richardson
We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.
Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.
Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:
6,487.
To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.
I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.
Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."
That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."
Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.
So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."
I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.
"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."
Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem
Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."
"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"
"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."
So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.
That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.
But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?
"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."
I told Franklin I was surprised to hear a cop express so much sympathy for drug addicts. Even pro-drug types don't do that much. "I do have sympathy," he says. "What they're dealing with is a health issue, not a criminal issue. And as long as you treat it as a criminal issue, we're treating the symptom and not the cause."
Why Cleaning Up the Justice System Solves the Wasted-Money Problem
Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he's made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he's been surprised by another discovery: "I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they're not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize."
And why, exactly, don't we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?
"Selfish reasons," he says. "There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country."
Really? One third?
"And give back all the federal funds too. That's why very seldom will you see a police chief step forward and say, 'Yeah, we need to do this.'"
I made a stab at crunching those numbers, too. In 2003, America's local police budgets (PDF) were $43 billion dollars. A third of that: $12.9 billion. Add another $9 billion in domestic and international law enforcement (PDF) and the number rises to $21.9 billion.
Then consider America's prisons, the problems with which we've discussed here time and again. "The prison population is off the hook in this country," Franklin says. "In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we'd rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment."
So... our federal prison budget in 2007 was $6.3 billion, and 55 percent of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. The total state-prison budget for the U.S. in 2007 was $49 billion, according to this study from the Pew Foundation, which found that "at least" 44 states had gone into the red to incarcerate their citizens. Using the same 55 percent number — which is probably low — we arrive at a rough total of the prison expenses associated with the drug war: $30.4 billion.
"I know jails are a big business and keep lot of people employed," Franklin says, "but it doesn't make it right."
To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering:
15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.
"We've got serious constitutional issues involved, too," Franklin adds. "Improper search and seizure is occurring every day..."
But I'll save that for another column.
Correction appended: An earlier version of this column estimated an incorrect fraction of America's local police budgets.
Sound off on the drug war! Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/drug-war-facts-090109#ixzz0Ty8H5uV7
By John H. Richardson
We've heard a lot about the terrible death toll Mexico has suffered during the drug war — over 11,000 souls so far. This helps to account for the startling lack of controversy that greeted last week's news that Mexico had suddenly decriminalized drugs — not just marijuana but also cocaine, LSD, and heroin. In place of the outrage and threats that U.S. officials expressed when Mexico tried to decriminalize in 2006 was a mild statement, from our new drug czar, that we are going to take a "wait and see" approach.
Still, we've heard nothing about the American death toll. Isn't that strange? So far as I can tell, nobody has even tried to come up with a number.
Until now. I've done some rough math, and this is what I found:
6,487.
To repeat, that's 6,487 dead Americans. Throw in overdoses and the cost of this country's paralyzing drug laws is closer to 15,000 lives.
I'm basing these numbers on an interview with a high-ranking former narcotics officer named Neill Franklin. A member of the Maryland State Police for 32 years, Franklin eventually rose to the position of commander in Maryland's Bureau of Drug Enforcement. As he puts it, he was a classic "good soldier" in the drug war.
Franklin's turning point came in October of 2000. "I lost a very, very close friend of mine, a narcotics agent for Maryland State Police," he says. "His name was Ed Toatley. He was assassinated outside of Washington, D.C., trying to make a drug deal in a park. He had a wife, he had three kids. I had just spoken to him a couple of weeks prior to him getting assigned to this particular deal — he was finally going to bring this guy down, and lo and behold the guy kills him."
That got Franklin thinking. "I started doing the research and asking the questions: What progress are we making on this thing? And it turns out that not only are we losing kids who are in the game, but we are losing communities and fellow cops. We had lost a number of police officers in Baltimore alone."
Another turning point was 2002, when Angela Dawson and her five kids were murdered in East Baltimore by drug dealers she had been tying to keep from doing business in front of her house. "They fire-bombed the house late one night and the whole family perished," Franklin remembers.
So he started brooding on the drug war's body count. "Baltimore is a city of just a hair over 600,000 people. Our annual homicide rate was fluctuating between 240 and 300 every year for decades. Think about that: 240 to 300 homicides annually, and 75 percent to 80 percent are drug related. It's either gangs that are using drugs to support operations, or territorial disputes among drug dealers, or people just getting caught in the line of fire. And Baltimore is a small city compared to others," Franklin notes. "So we're not talking a handful of homicides; we're talking about the majority of the homicides in any city in the U.S. So if you add those cities up — just lowball it, take just 50 percent — I guarantee you, you'll find the numbers are quite similar to what they have in Mexico."
I took his advice. In 2007, the last year for which hard numbers are available, 16,425 people were murdered. Since our most recent Census said that 79 percent of the country is urban, I cut out the rural Americans — although there's plenty of drug use there, too — and came up with 12,975 urban homicides. Low-balling that number at 50 percent, I arrived at a rough estimate of 6,487 drug deaths. Using 75 percent, the toll rises to 9,731.
"And now we've got the cartel gangs coming up from Mexico," Franklin reminds me. "They're in over 130 cities in the U.S. already, and it's not going to get better."
Why Regulating Legal Drugs Fixes the Dead-Body Problem
Neill Franklin's solution is radical: "You have to take the money out of it. Many people talk about legalization and decriminalize — it's still illegal, but you're just not sending as many people to jail, especially for the nonviolent offenses. However, the money is still being made in the illegal sales, so you still have the drug wars. It's prohibition that's killing our people. That's why people are dying."
"So," I ask, "you want to legalize everything?"
"Yes. But I like to put it like this: I want regulation of everything. Because right now, I think they're confusing prohibition with regulation. What I'm talking about is applying standards — quality control, just like alcohol. We should have learned our lesson during alcohol prohibitions — we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and applied standards of sale and manufacture, so it has to be a certain quality and you can't sell it to just anybody, and you still go to jail if you sell it to the wrong people. So, among other things, you'll also reduce overdoses — the majority of the overdoses we have is people who don't know what they're getting or buying because the purity level fluctuates. In addition, people are afraid to get help because they don't want to go jail, so they let their friends die."
So let's add overdoses to our death toll. In 2005, recent Senate testimony shows, 22,400 Americans died of drug overdoses. Leaving aside prescription drugs and counting only the 39 percent of overdoses attributed to cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines, I count another 8,736 deaths.
That brings us to 15,223 Americans dead from the drug war.
But what about the argument that drugs will spread like wildfire if we don't keep bringing down the hammer?
"First, there's no concrete study to support such a belief — it's all completely speculation," Franklin insists. "So in my left hand I have all this speculation about what may happen to addiction rates, and then I look at my other hand and I see all these dead bodies that are actually fact, not speculation. And you're going to ask me to weigh the two? Second, if the addiction rate does go up, I'm going to have a lot of live addicts that I can cure. The direction we're going in now, I've got a lot of dead bodies."
I told Franklin I was surprised to hear a cop express so much sympathy for drug addicts. Even pro-drug types don't do that much. "I do have sympathy," he says. "What they're dealing with is a health issue, not a criminal issue. And as long as you treat it as a criminal issue, we're treating the symptom and not the cause."
Why Cleaning Up the Justice System Solves the Wasted-Money Problem
Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he's made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he's been surprised by another discovery: "I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they're not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize."
And why, exactly, don't we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?
"Selfish reasons," he says. "There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country."
Really? One third?
"And give back all the federal funds too. That's why very seldom will you see a police chief step forward and say, 'Yeah, we need to do this.'"
I made a stab at crunching those numbers, too. In 2003, America's local police budgets (PDF) were $43 billion dollars. A third of that: $12.9 billion. Add another $9 billion in domestic and international law enforcement (PDF) and the number rises to $21.9 billion.
Then consider America's prisons, the problems with which we've discussed here time and again. "The prison population is off the hook in this country," Franklin says. "In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we'd rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment."
So... our federal prison budget in 2007 was $6.3 billion, and 55 percent of the prisoners were there for drug offenses. The total state-prison budget for the U.S. in 2007 was $49 billion, according to this study from the Pew Foundation, which found that "at least" 44 states had gone into the red to incarcerate their citizens. Using the same 55 percent number — which is probably low — we arrive at a rough total of the prison expenses associated with the drug war: $30.4 billion.
"I know jails are a big business and keep lot of people employed," Franklin says, "but it doesn't make it right."
To review, using what seem to be very conservative numbers, our first unofficial tally of the drug war in the United States is staggering:
15,223 dead and $52.3 billion spent each year — which is, incidentally, almost enough to pay for universal health care.
"We've got serious constitutional issues involved, too," Franklin adds. "Improper search and seizure is occurring every day..."
But I'll save that for another column.
Correction appended: An earlier version of this column estimated an incorrect fraction of America's local police budgets.
Sound off on the drug war! Click here to e-mail John H. Richardson about his weekly political column at Esquire.com.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/drug-war-facts-090109#ixzz0Ty8H5uV7
Give Back the Prize, Obama
Top Ten Reasons President Obama Should Give Back the Nobel Peace Prize
by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
In the real world Barack Obama is a politician. The Nobel Peace Prize is highly political too, handed out with equanimity to bloodthirsty warmongers and genuine peacemakers alike, according to the politics of the moment. Henry Kissinger got one less than a year after breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam war to bomb Hanoi over the 1972 Christmas holidays. Dr. King's receipt of the prize on the other hand, contributed mightily to his eventual public opposition to the imperial war in Vietnam.
Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Like his Republican opponent John McCain, Barack Obama ran not as the peace candidate on Afghanistan, but the war candidate, promising to up the ante with drone attacks and cross-border forays into Afghanistan. The main difference between Obama and McCain on that issue was that McCain said we should escalate the war in that part of the world because we were winning, while Obama contended we must escalate it because we were winning. This is one promise Obama has kept. His first military strike inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater was ordered within 36 hours of his inauguration. The president is reportedly now considering the deployment of 40,000 or more additional US forces to Afghanistan.
Reason Number Nine: Obama's puppet Afghan president is the brother of the country's and possibly the planet's biggest opium dealer.
That's no small thing, since Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's opium, most of which is refined into heroin for addicts at home and around the world. To be fair, Obama did inherit the puppet regime from his predecessor, who also begat the tradition of the United States funding its puppet regimes and mercenary armies abroad with drug profits. We did it in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where many of our local generals were the opium lords who ran the refineries and exported the crop. The Reagan regime also paid for its bloody contra war in Nicaragua with a mixture of illicit arms sales and profits from the cocaine trade too. So despite being hailed as a '”transformative leader” President Obama continues a proud and corrupt tradition of dubious and drug-soaked allies to carry on the wars at the fringes of America's global empire.
Reason Number Eight: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.
When Iran announced that it planned to exercise its treaty right to diversify its energy sources and build a plant for enriching uranium within the guidelines of applicable international agreements, President Obama sank nearly to the level of his predecessors in trying to sell to the world the spectre of an imaginary nuclear threat. The fact that the president's own intelligence agencies and the relevant international bodies affirm that there is no Iranian nuclear threat didn't stop the president warlike rhetoric of sanctions and drastic measures directed against Iran. The last president who sold us imaginary tales of Middle Eastern nukes used those tales to justify a genocidal war that has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis along with a few thousand Americans, at a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Reason Number Seven: Barack Obama's first budget called for expanding, not shrinking the army and marine corps.
The military has two jobs, breaking things and killing people. It's no secret that with no real military rivals anywhere on earth for the last twenty years, the United States, with five percent of the world's population has outspent the rest of the planet combined on military hardware, personnel, bases, research and operations. President Obama ran for office pledging to expand the US army and marines by 90 to 120 thousand pairs of boots, the better to fight multiple wars in far-flung corners of a world where the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries.
Reason Number Six: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.
In a 1948 rebranding, the US renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Nothing else changed but the name. Barack Obama is the first president in more than two centuries of US history to keep the Secretary of War installed by a predecessor of the opposite party. The current Secretary of War, Robert Gates has a history of bloodstained treachery stretching back to his betrayal of Jimmy Carter when he served on Carter's National Security Administration team. Gates allegedly assured Iran they'd get a better deal from Reagan if they kept the hostages till the new president took office. Gates was rewarded with the post of deputy director at the Reagan era CIA, where he doctored intelligence and ran murderous secret operations around the world till the end of the first Bush administration. When 1993 Democrats decided to “look forward” and not prosecute the crimes of Reagan-Bush misrule, Gates slunk off to private life until his recall a decade later by the second Bush. The Pentagon under Robert Gates has 2.1 million uniformed employees and millions more contractors, civilian employees, armies of spooks, lobbyists and propagandists and dozens of secret budgets.
Reason Number Five: In the Americas, the US Still Blockades Cuba, Threatens Venezuela, & Funds The Longest and Bloodiest War in South America since the Genocide of Native Americans in Colombia
All of these are legacy policies President Obama inherited. He has renounced none of them and continued each and every one. Obama still punishes Cuba for the crime of self-rule by keeping intact travel bans and a fifty year blockade of the island only 90 miles from Florida, separating families, choking trade and disrupting cultural ties. Colombia continues to be one of the world's top recipients, after Israel and Egypt, of US military aid, which it utilizes to prosecute a decades-long civil war in which Afro-Colombians and been particularly victimized. More than a million Colombians are displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands have died. And under President Obama, the US is now building two military bases in Colombia near the Venezuelan border.
Reason Number Four: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.
From stateside military brigs Carolinas to dungeons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Egypt and black holes in ships at sea or remote Diego Garcia, where the US military has allowed no journalists for twenty years, US civil servants are committing lawless and unspeakable acts of torture and degradation. They've been doing it for some time now in our name and on our dime. It didn't start with George Bush and apparently it will not end with Barack Obama. In the spirit of 1993 Democrats who declined to investigate or prosecute the decade of rampant criminality on the part of three Reagan-Bush administrations, Nobel laureate Barack Obama has adopted a don't ask don't tell don't prosecute policy on war crimes, international kidnapping and torture committed by US agents in or out of uniform. Let's look to the future, the president has told us, crimes are in the past. But aren't all crimes in the past?
Reason Number Three: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.
Comedian Bill Maher says people should try to remember that Barack Obama is their president, not their boyfriend. When your boyfriend lies it's a private matter whether you forgive, forget or believe him the next time. Presidents act with your money and in your name. When they lie it's a very public affair. Although close and lawyerly scrutiny of his statements reveals he probably never intended to withdraw from Iraq, Candidate Obama deliberately gave the impression he would bring home some or most of the troops because he knew that was what the electorate wanted in a Democratic candidate for president. By now President Obama should have withdrawn more than half a dozen combat brigades from Iraq, but there are few signs of that happening. An Iraqi referendum on whether the US must leave by a date certain is supposed to occur in 2010 under the current Status of Forces Agreement, but it is doubtful that this will ever occur.
Reason Number Three: The US Continues to Ignore Israeli nukes, while it acts as banker, diplomatic cover, and armorer its brutal Israel's sixty year occupation of Palestine.
Despite being in violation of more UN resolutions than any nation on earth, Israel is the top recipient of US economic and military aid. The optimism in the Arab world that greeted Obama's swearing in has given way to resignation and despair as the bloody occupation endures, the choking of Gaza and the taking of Palestinian land and resources on the West Bank continues. The Obama administration has even blocked the investigation of Israeli war crimes in its military assault against the nearly helpless civilian population of Gaza last year. Israel still conducts military exercises to underline the nuclear threat it poses to every other state in the region, a nuclear threat President Obama is not even inclined to acknowledge, let alone address in the meaningful fashion of a peacemaker. This is the same Barack Obama who used to attend Palestinian community events as a state senator in Chicago. Barack Obama has been captured by the office of president rather than the other way around.
Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.
In recent years the US has given military aid to more than fifty of the fifty four nations on the African continent, invariably backing at least one, and often two or more sides in every case of invasion or civil war. As Glen Ford pointed out only last week, the US has just concluded a joint training exercise with personnel from dozens of African armies, all of which are being made to look to Uncle Sam as their paymaster, armorer and training resource. The US intends to grab the lion's share of African oil, water, agricultural and mineral resources in the coming century. The rape of the Congo, in which more than five million have perished in the last decade, has been perpetrated to make central Africa safe for business. Congolese resources are flowing to the US and its allies, so five million dead there is not considered a genocide. But neighboring Darfur, where the Chinese are pumping the oil, a hundredth of that death toll several years back still fuels fresh charges of genocide and calls for US intervention on the part of our bipartisan foreign policy elite. By backing the military sectors of African societies instead of civil sectors, by sending arms instead of forgiving the debt and allowing African countries to build their own hospitals and educate their people, the First Black President perpetuates a dreadful legacy of neo-colonial oppression that has cost millions of lives and will injure millions more to come.
Reason Number One: It just ain't right.
The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.
The European elite didn't do Barack a favor with this Nobel prize. But then you don't flatter the king to help the monarch out. You flatter the king to help yourself. The Nobel Peace Prize is their soiled and fulsome love note to the new emperor. It will hang around Obama's neck like a millstone, a token of the vast gulf between the fiction of a progressive black president and the reality of just another imperial CEO minding the same old store.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendarport.com.
by Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
In the real world Barack Obama is a politician. The Nobel Peace Prize is highly political too, handed out with equanimity to bloodthirsty warmongers and genuine peacemakers alike, according to the politics of the moment. Henry Kissinger got one less than a year after breaking off peace talks to end the Vietnam war to bomb Hanoi over the 1972 Christmas holidays. Dr. King's receipt of the prize on the other hand, contributed mightily to his eventual public opposition to the imperial war in Vietnam.
Black Agenda Report salutes the European journalist who posed the key question at the Nobel press conference. Corporate American media being the great force for openness and accountability that it is, the query would have been a career-killer for any American reporter who dared utter it. In that same spirit of reality-based reporting and commentary we offer these top ten reasons the president ought to reconsider accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reason Number Ten: The president is escalating, not ending the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Like his Republican opponent John McCain, Barack Obama ran not as the peace candidate on Afghanistan, but the war candidate, promising to up the ante with drone attacks and cross-border forays into Afghanistan. The main difference between Obama and McCain on that issue was that McCain said we should escalate the war in that part of the world because we were winning, while Obama contended we must escalate it because we were winning. This is one promise Obama has kept. His first military strike inside the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater was ordered within 36 hours of his inauguration. The president is reportedly now considering the deployment of 40,000 or more additional US forces to Afghanistan.
Reason Number Nine: Obama's puppet Afghan president is the brother of the country's and possibly the planet's biggest opium dealer.
That's no small thing, since Afghanistan supplies 90% of the world's opium, most of which is refined into heroin for addicts at home and around the world. To be fair, Obama did inherit the puppet regime from his predecessor, who also begat the tradition of the United States funding its puppet regimes and mercenary armies abroad with drug profits. We did it in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where many of our local generals were the opium lords who ran the refineries and exported the crop. The Reagan regime also paid for its bloody contra war in Nicaragua with a mixture of illicit arms sales and profits from the cocaine trade too. So despite being hailed as a '”transformative leader” President Obama continues a proud and corrupt tradition of dubious and drug-soaked allies to carry on the wars at the fringes of America's global empire.
Reason Number Eight: President Obama is still peddling lies about Iran building nuclear weapons.
When Iran announced that it planned to exercise its treaty right to diversify its energy sources and build a plant for enriching uranium within the guidelines of applicable international agreements, President Obama sank nearly to the level of his predecessors in trying to sell to the world the spectre of an imaginary nuclear threat. The fact that the president's own intelligence agencies and the relevant international bodies affirm that there is no Iranian nuclear threat didn't stop the president warlike rhetoric of sanctions and drastic measures directed against Iran. The last president who sold us imaginary tales of Middle Eastern nukes used those tales to justify a genocidal war that has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis along with a few thousand Americans, at a cost estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Reason Number Seven: Barack Obama's first budget called for expanding, not shrinking the army and marine corps.
The military has two jobs, breaking things and killing people. It's no secret that with no real military rivals anywhere on earth for the last twenty years, the United States, with five percent of the world's population has outspent the rest of the planet combined on military hardware, personnel, bases, research and operations. President Obama ran for office pledging to expand the US army and marines by 90 to 120 thousand pairs of boots, the better to fight multiple wars in far-flung corners of a world where the US maintains more than 800 military bases in over 100 countries.
Reason Number Six: President Obama retained Robert Gates, a bloodthirsty Reaganite war criminal as Secretary of Defense.
In a 1948 rebranding, the US renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Nothing else changed but the name. Barack Obama is the first president in more than two centuries of US history to keep the Secretary of War installed by a predecessor of the opposite party. The current Secretary of War, Robert Gates has a history of bloodstained treachery stretching back to his betrayal of Jimmy Carter when he served on Carter's National Security Administration team. Gates allegedly assured Iran they'd get a better deal from Reagan if they kept the hostages till the new president took office. Gates was rewarded with the post of deputy director at the Reagan era CIA, where he doctored intelligence and ran murderous secret operations around the world till the end of the first Bush administration. When 1993 Democrats decided to “look forward” and not prosecute the crimes of Reagan-Bush misrule, Gates slunk off to private life until his recall a decade later by the second Bush. The Pentagon under Robert Gates has 2.1 million uniformed employees and millions more contractors, civilian employees, armies of spooks, lobbyists and propagandists and dozens of secret budgets.
Reason Number Five: In the Americas, the US Still Blockades Cuba, Threatens Venezuela, & Funds The Longest and Bloodiest War in South America since the Genocide of Native Americans in Colombia
All of these are legacy policies President Obama inherited. He has renounced none of them and continued each and every one. Obama still punishes Cuba for the crime of self-rule by keeping intact travel bans and a fifty year blockade of the island only 90 miles from Florida, separating families, choking trade and disrupting cultural ties. Colombia continues to be one of the world's top recipients, after Israel and Egypt, of US military aid, which it utilizes to prosecute a decades-long civil war in which Afro-Colombians and been particularly victimized. More than a million Colombians are displaced by the war and hundreds of thousands have died. And under President Obama, the US is now building two military bases in Colombia near the Venezuelan border.
Reason Number Four: The US government, in and out of uniform still practices torture and maintains a global gulag of law-free secret prisons.
From stateside military brigs Carolinas to dungeons in Eastern Europe, torture chambers in Egypt and black holes in ships at sea or remote Diego Garcia, where the US military has allowed no journalists for twenty years, US civil servants are committing lawless and unspeakable acts of torture and degradation. They've been doing it for some time now in our name and on our dime. It didn't start with George Bush and apparently it will not end with Barack Obama. In the spirit of 1993 Democrats who declined to investigate or prosecute the decade of rampant criminality on the part of three Reagan-Bush administrations, Nobel laureate Barack Obama has adopted a don't ask don't tell don't prosecute policy on war crimes, international kidnapping and torture committed by US agents in or out of uniform. Let's look to the future, the president has told us, crimes are in the past. But aren't all crimes in the past?
Reason Number Three: The president has utterly disregarded his campaign pledge to withdraw one combat brigade per month from Iraq.
Comedian Bill Maher says people should try to remember that Barack Obama is their president, not their boyfriend. When your boyfriend lies it's a private matter whether you forgive, forget or believe him the next time. Presidents act with your money and in your name. When they lie it's a very public affair. Although close and lawyerly scrutiny of his statements reveals he probably never intended to withdraw from Iraq, Candidate Obama deliberately gave the impression he would bring home some or most of the troops because he knew that was what the electorate wanted in a Democratic candidate for president. By now President Obama should have withdrawn more than half a dozen combat brigades from Iraq, but there are few signs of that happening. An Iraqi referendum on whether the US must leave by a date certain is supposed to occur in 2010 under the current Status of Forces Agreement, but it is doubtful that this will ever occur.
Reason Number Three: The US Continues to Ignore Israeli nukes, while it acts as banker, diplomatic cover, and armorer its brutal Israel's sixty year occupation of Palestine.
Despite being in violation of more UN resolutions than any nation on earth, Israel is the top recipient of US economic and military aid. The optimism in the Arab world that greeted Obama's swearing in has given way to resignation and despair as the bloody occupation endures, the choking of Gaza and the taking of Palestinian land and resources on the West Bank continues. The Obama administration has even blocked the investigation of Israeli war crimes in its military assault against the nearly helpless civilian population of Gaza last year. Israel still conducts military exercises to underline the nuclear threat it poses to every other state in the region, a nuclear threat President Obama is not even inclined to acknowledge, let alone address in the meaningful fashion of a peacemaker. This is the same Barack Obama who used to attend Palestinian community events as a state senator in Chicago. Barack Obama has been captured by the office of president rather than the other way around.
Reason Number Two: The US is Funnelling Billions Into Expanding Its Military Presence Across the African Continent.
In recent years the US has given military aid to more than fifty of the fifty four nations on the African continent, invariably backing at least one, and often two or more sides in every case of invasion or civil war. As Glen Ford pointed out only last week, the US has just concluded a joint training exercise with personnel from dozens of African armies, all of which are being made to look to Uncle Sam as their paymaster, armorer and training resource. The US intends to grab the lion's share of African oil, water, agricultural and mineral resources in the coming century. The rape of the Congo, in which more than five million have perished in the last decade, has been perpetrated to make central Africa safe for business. Congolese resources are flowing to the US and its allies, so five million dead there is not considered a genocide. But neighboring Darfur, where the Chinese are pumping the oil, a hundredth of that death toll several years back still fuels fresh charges of genocide and calls for US intervention on the part of our bipartisan foreign policy elite. By backing the military sectors of African societies instead of civil sectors, by sending arms instead of forgiving the debt and allowing African countries to build their own hospitals and educate their people, the First Black President perpetuates a dreadful legacy of neo-colonial oppression that has cost millions of lives and will injure millions more to come.
Reason Number One: It just ain't right.
The Nobel Peace Prize is bad politics, even for Obama supporters. For the rest of his career it will invite unflattering comparisons of Barack Obama with the work of genuine peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King who declared that his own country, the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” The US presidency would be a great place to put a genuine peacemaker, a visionary woman or man who would bend the law to enforce respect for human rights, who would take the lead in nuclear disarmament by trashing the largest stockpile of nukes in the world which would be under his control. A peacemaker would open the doors to travel and trade with Cuba, and follow the Cuban example of aiding Africa with teachers, doctors and appropriate technology rather than flooding the continent with arms. A peacemaker would close the torture chambers and prosecute war criminals so that justice would roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. None of that is going on.
The European elite didn't do Barack a favor with this Nobel prize. But then you don't flatter the king to help the monarch out. You flatter the king to help yourself. The Nobel Peace Prize is their soiled and fulsome love note to the new emperor. It will hang around Obama's neck like a millstone, a token of the vast gulf between the fiction of a progressive black president and the reality of just another imperial CEO minding the same old store.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor of Black Agenda Report, and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendarport.com.
Too Positive?
Check out: Barbara Ehrenreich: The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
I think there is a difference between positivity vs. complacency on one hand and delusion on the other, even though I've never liked the corporate motivational speakers-types or advocates of unlimited prosperity and "The Secret" enthusiasts. Having a positive attitude works for humanity when it's coupled with a genuine understanding of reality and the challenges of the human experience. Positivity isn't about delusion (i.e. the Wall Street/'no housing bubble' mentality, etc.). It's about understanding your own personal power and the possibility of improvement and advancement. It's definitely possible to be realistic and positive at the same time. One way to see this realized is to look at expectations. If a person has unrealistic expectations (hence an unrealistic person), she is unlikely to be positive once those expectations aren't met, but if she were to base her expectations on what is actually possible under the current circumstances, positivity is easier to maintain.
A concrete example of this concerns the last presidential election. I knew someone who had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, convinced herself that a leftist third-party candidate had the chance of winning. When this didn't happened, she was extremely upset to the point of insanity, even though most of the left, even the Green Party-types, were celebrating because not only did the country elect its first other-than-white president, Obama happened to be more progressive than McCain, albeit not nearly as progressive as Cynthia McKinney and others. Most who had supported third-party candidates did so with the understanding that they would not win the election and probably not even win the critical 5% needed to gain further attention and access, so they were not upset when Barack Obama won. They held up their heads, and some were even excited about it.
This is not to say that we shouldn't think big, but we should do so while aiming small. This will keep us from suffering from the kind of delusional positivity that Ehrenreich is criticizing.
On the other hand, I believe she is also criticizing complacency with the status quo. This is also delusional thinking. If you're positive because you think things are fine the way they are in this country and the world, you need to read. It's as simple as that.
I think there is a difference between positivity vs. complacency on one hand and delusion on the other, even though I've never liked the corporate motivational speakers-types or advocates of unlimited prosperity and "The Secret" enthusiasts. Having a positive attitude works for humanity when it's coupled with a genuine understanding of reality and the challenges of the human experience. Positivity isn't about delusion (i.e. the Wall Street/'no housing bubble' mentality, etc.). It's about understanding your own personal power and the possibility of improvement and advancement. It's definitely possible to be realistic and positive at the same time. One way to see this realized is to look at expectations. If a person has unrealistic expectations (hence an unrealistic person), she is unlikely to be positive once those expectations aren't met, but if she were to base her expectations on what is actually possible under the current circumstances, positivity is easier to maintain.
A concrete example of this concerns the last presidential election. I knew someone who had somehow, perhaps unconsciously, convinced herself that a leftist third-party candidate had the chance of winning. When this didn't happened, she was extremely upset to the point of insanity, even though most of the left, even the Green Party-types, were celebrating because not only did the country elect its first other-than-white president, Obama happened to be more progressive than McCain, albeit not nearly as progressive as Cynthia McKinney and others. Most who had supported third-party candidates did so with the understanding that they would not win the election and probably not even win the critical 5% needed to gain further attention and access, so they were not upset when Barack Obama won. They held up their heads, and some were even excited about it.
This is not to say that we shouldn't think big, but we should do so while aiming small. This will keep us from suffering from the kind of delusional positivity that Ehrenreich is criticizing.
On the other hand, I believe she is also criticizing complacency with the status quo. This is also delusional thinking. If you're positive because you think things are fine the way they are in this country and the world, you need to read. It's as simple as that.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Perfect Tribute to Columbus's Victims
Today's Democracy Now! featuring Buffy Sainte-Marie, indigenous singer and activist.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Verses in Faith Mind
There is a very famous poem written by the third patriarch of Zen, Seng-ts’an, called the Hsin-Hsin Ming, which translates as Verses in Faith Mind. In this poem Seng-ts’an writes these lines: “Do not seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.” This is a reversal of the way most people go about trying to realize absolute truth. Most people seek truth, but Seng-ts’an is saying not to seek truth. This sounds very strange indeed. How will you find truth if you don’t seek it? How will you find happiness if you do not seek it? How will you find God if you do not seek God? Everyone seems to be seeking something. In spirituality seeking is highly honored and respected, and here comes Seng-ts’an saying not to seek.
[…]
In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.
[…]
This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.
[…]
In order to seek, you must first have an idea, ideal, or an image, what it is you are seeking. That idea may not even be very conscious or clear but it must be there in order for you to seek. Being an idea it cannot be real. That’s why Seng-ts’an says “only cease to cherish opinions.” By opinions he means ideas, ideals, beliefs, and images, as well as personal opinions. This sounds easy but it is rarely as easy as it seems. Seng-ts’an is not saying you should never have a thought in your head, he is saying not to cherish the thoughts in your head. To cherish implies an emotional attachment and holding on to. When you cherish something, you place value on it because you think that it is real or because it defines who you think you are. This cherishing of thoughts and opinions is what the false self thrives on. It is what the false self is made of. When you realize that none of your ideas about truth are real, it is quite a shock to your system. It is an unexpected blow to the seeker and the seeking.
[…]
This is why I sometimes ask people, “Are you ready to lose your world?” Because true awakening will not fit into the world as you imagine it or the self you imagine yourself to be. Reality is not something that you integrate into your personal view of things. Reality is life without your distorting stories, ideas, and beliefs. It is perfect unity free of all reference points, with nowhere to stand and nothing to grab hold of. It has never been spoken, never been written, never been imagined. It is not hidden, but in plain view. Cease to cherish opinions and it stands before your very eyes.
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