Two days ago, the New York Times reported on the just-released publication of a 2008 report on the CIA's negligence, deceit, disregard for its own rules and stonewalling in connection with investigation of its practice of shooting down airplanes in Peru in 2001. Back then, it was deadly mistakes made in the war on drugs.
A day later, the Wall Street Journal published a report about ramping up the CIA's targeted killing program in the war against terrorism (or against Al Qaida, as the Administration now calls it).
The Peru example underscores why the United States should not be using the CIA to conduct targeted killings. The CIA operates, understandably, in secret. When and if its conduct is investigated, the reports of its violations usually remain secret as well. The power to impose death should not be delegated to an entity, and to individuals, so shielded from standard measures of accountability.
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
Anti-immigrant forces have adeptly shaped the ongoing immigration debate into an issue of crime and punishment. Now, the pending passage of a $600 million border security bill could breathe new life into the narrative of the criminal immigrant - despite the increasing safety of our border communities.
Jamaica has been brought to a state of political crisis as a result of the failed (so far) attempt to extradite a drug kingpin, Chistopher "Dudus" Coke. A discussion of the events on a local Pacifica public affairs program, Soujourner Truth, this Friday (audio file can be accessed through the station's program archive file here), provides a very important link between two topics I've discussed this weekend--neoliberalism and the failed drug war. A good deal else is implicated as well, such as the synergy between conservatism and organized crime in battling the left. Mention is made of this history in Hollywood--a history that involves Ronald Reagan, among others.
Though this was entirely beyond the scope of the discussion, it's worth taking note of here, simply because this history has been so thoroughly erase. Reagan's pre-GE career was almost entirely dependent on MCA, which was heavily involved with the mob. In his last stint as President of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan arranged a sweetheart deal that allowed MCA and MCA alone to both produce TV shows and continue representing talent. The Justice Department eventually ended this illegal scam. Reagan himself escaped prosecution at the time, but there is no doubt that if the Democrats had wanted to pursue a Whitewater-style investigation into Reagan's past, they would not have had to go around inventing shit to accuse Reagan of.
To understand the discussion that follows, a general understanding of what's happened in Jamaica this past week is needed. A good-enough quick overveiw is provided by Jared Mccallister in the NY Daily News:
Jamaica prime minister OKs extradition of alleged drug king pin Christopher (Dudus) Coke
Jared Mccallister Sunday, May 30th 2010, 4:00 AM
After years of opposition and recent pressure from the Obama administration, Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding last week reversed his stance and okayed the extradition of alleged drug king pin Christopher (Dudus) Coke to stand trial in New York.
The failed attempt to take Coke into custody resulted in a state of emergency, gun battles and scores of deaths, as of late last week.
Coke was indicted in Manhattan in 2007 for operating a drug ring and running guns between New York and Jamaica.
Late last week, a top official reported that police regained control of Coke's Tivoli Gardens neighborhood, where his supporters battled with Jamaican Army personnel and police.
But the damage has already been done - to the neighborhood and the reputation of the Golding administration.
The prime minister may have to deal with a political backlash from constituents loyal to Coke. Golding, who heads the ruling Jamaica Labor Party, also admitted he used a U.S. law firm to lobby Washington, to drop the call for Coke's extradition.
And there remains a possibility the opposition People's National Party will step into the discourse against the Golding administration. So far, PNP and JLP leaders have praised the efforts of law enforcement and called for calm in the midst of the violence.
We now turn to somewhat extended comments from the discussion of these events and their significance from the program, the first by prolific author Gerald Horne:
I wanted to write about this two weeks ago,when it broke. But it's not like it's any less true two weeks later. AP has the lowdown on just what a miserable failure the war on drugs has been, and it starts like this:
AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals
MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writer 9:02 PM PDT, May 13, 2010
MEXICO CITY (AP) - After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.
Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.
"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."
The war on drugs started with Nixon, they note:
In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.
"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."
His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.
But most significantly, AP went digging in the weeds to see where drug war money was spent, and found that we spent lots of money of stuff that just didn't work:
For decades, the U.S. government has spent tens of billions of dollars, sent thousands of nonviolent offenders to prison, and propped up a black market that fuels violent organized crime at home and abroad.
We know how prohibition works from history class: alcohol prohibition in the 1930s didn’t reduce alcohol abuse, but it did turn a regulated industry into an illegal black market that enriched violent gangsters like Al Capone.
The harm done by prohibition goes beyond gang violence. Thousands of Americans have been imprisoned for no other offense than carrying a small amount of marijuana.
Invasive search procedures and racial profiling have become commonplace, creating mistrust between law enforcement agents and the communities they serve.
Billions of tax dollars are wasted on an ineffective policy that solves nothing.
Legalizing marijuana will cut down on violent crime, reduce unjust imprisonment, repair civil liberties, restore trust between civilians and police, and replace wasteful government spending with new tax revenues.
It will also help American farmers, who will be able to cultivate marijuana as well as the versatile and environmentally friendly hemp crop.
Many of the arguments about the Obama administration that have played out among pundits and activists alike are based on whether or not the Obama administration is living up to the abstract vagaries of Obama campaign rhetoric. Is President Obama changing the government enough? Is he being bipartisan enough? Is he really avoiding ideology? It was an intentional part of then-Senator Obama's campaign strategy for these terms to be vague, thus allowing voters to read their own hopes and desires into Barack Obama. That we are still arguing over these terms is a testament to the success of the execution of that strategy.
Personally, I am tired of these arguments, because they don't seem to ever lead to new knowledge. Instead, I now find it much more interesting to actually try and quantify how much the federal budget has changed from the Republican trifecta (FY 2002, 2004-2007) to the Democratic trifecta (FY 2010-2013). This way, we can develop a quantitative metric for understanding what our electoral fights in this country are really all about. What sort of change really takes place from strong Republican control of the federal government to strong Democratic control of the federal government? Rather than arguing over vague abstractions-which essentially means we don't even know what we are arguing over--let's put a price tag on change.
I have already done some work on this front. Two weeks ago, the total spending difference from the 2009 to 2010 budget, broken down by federal department, were listed here on Open Left. Also, earlier this week, I was able to quantify the difference in total social spending between the Republican trifecta, the Democratic trifecta, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The overall results were surprisingly minimalist: shifting from Republican to Democratic control of the federal government resulted in a shift of about 2% of the national economy away from what might loosely be termed "private enterprise" and toward "social investment" in things like education, energy, health care, infrastructure, and pensions. Lest people think this is only an issue of the wrong type of Democrats being in charge, my research also showed that if the Congressional Progressive Caucus was running the show, the difference would have been 3% of the national economy instead of 2%.
Apart from these big-picture analyses, it is important to catalogue all of the differences on a more specific level, as well. For example, yesterday, the Huffington Post took a look at the differences between spending on the "drug war" from 2009 to 2010. Again, the results were minimal (more in the extended entry):
In 2008, a disturbing trend developed in mainstream media regarding Mexico. While Mexico's President Felipe Calderón began his aggression against the Cartels roughly two years ago, the resulting uptick in violence was of no real interest to mainstream media. But when the U.S. Joint Forces Command reportJoint Operating Environment (JOE 2008) was issued in November, 2008, and declared Mexico and Pakistan nations in danger of a "rapid and sudden collapse," mainstream news outlets and certain politicians began broadcasting fears of violence spilling over into the US.
Washington, D.C. (FNN)-In a move some are describing as a "news dump" timed to coincide with the attention being paid to President Obama's foreign trip, the Justice Department announced the Administration's plans to introduce legislation to legalize and regulate the manufacture, sales, possession, and use of what are today legally known as Schedule I drugs.
Additionally, Schedule II through Schedule V drugs will be made available to adult members of the public at their request, with a doctor's prescription no longer being required before such drugs can be dispensed.
The drugs being "legalized" through this legislation would include marijuana, LSD, heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy; also included will be all pharmaceutical drugs currently under restricted distribution: among those are Xanax, OxyContin, and Viagra.
The AIG Bonus Scandal having been disposed of for the moment, Congress is all a-flitter, all of a sudden, about the new "Greatest Threat To The American Way Of Life In All Of World History Of The Week"...and this week the threat is The Mexican Drug War.
The Mexican Drug Cartels, Senator Joe Lieberman told us in a March 25th hearing, are the number one organized crime threat we face in America today.
The violence, we are told, is beginning to affect America's National Security...and unless I'm mistaken, Congress is looking to spin up for some sort of action that might range from sending thousands of troops to the US Southwest-and beyond-to going after users in the US "by any means necessary" to perhaps even getting all "Jack Bauer" on some Mexicans who would, presumably, have some useful information.
Although no one's discussed it yet, we will probably hear someone even propose sending cartel leaders to Guantanamo (Michelle Bachman...I'm thinking of you...).
However, there is another way to disarm these dangerous cartels...and history tells us it works.
So Congress, before you go passing some "warrantless wiretapping for drugs" 4th Amendment exception, allow me to suggest that instead of a drug war, what we really need...is a drug peace.
Amidst all of the discussion about how the Republican Party is searching for a way out of the wilderness, the sheer scope of the Republican deficit is often missed. Currently, Republicans face a far more severe electoral problem than Democrats faced four years ago. Consider the following:
Republicans equally popular as Republican boogeymen: With a favorable rating hovering just on the south side of 40%, Republicans are currently about as favorable as most of their favorite boogeymen used to scare voters. Republicans are currently viewed about as favorably as legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, Communist China, and increasing the current level of immigration. All of these right-wing scare tactics--increasing immigration, legal drugs, gay marriage, Communist superpowers--hover around the same 40% favorable rating as Republicans themselves. Among voters under 45, Republicans lose pretty solidly to most, if not all, of these boogeyman. If you are only as popular as the ideas you try to scare voters with, and if long-term trends suggest that it won't be long before the boogeymen you use will actually be more popular than you are, then it is really, really hard to see a way back for your party.
Demographic trends point in the wrong direction for Republicans. This has been a favorite subject of mine for a while, as I wrote in Maybe It Is A Battle Of Civilizations, Towards a Pluralist Strategy, and The End of Bubba Dominance. The simple fact is that Democratic voting groups, mainly non-whites and non-Christians, but also union voters and the LGBT community--are actually growing in size. For example, when projected ethnic population growth (PDF), and is applied to current ethnic voting patterns, if the 2008 election had been held in 2020, Obama would have defeated McCain by 9.8%, a 2.5% increase from the 2008 margin of 7.3%. That doesn't even factor in what will inevitably be a large non-Christian and LGBT vote, two groups that vote for Democrats at nearly the same rate as non-whites. The point is that if Republican popularity stagnates among current demographic groups, overall Republican popularity will actually decline. They have to improve just to maintain their current level of unpopularity.
(more great anti-Republican numbers in the extended entry)
The first round of questions for the transition team's change.gov website came to a close at midnight. The question
""Will you consider legalizing marijuana so that the government can regulate it, tax it, put age limits on it, and create millions of new jobs and create a billion dollar industry right here in the U.S.?"
is in the lead with 7,947 people liking this question, and 634 people not liking this question.
Overall the first round of questions generated a turnout of 978,947 votes on 10,303 questions from 20,462 people.
Now, I don't mean to mock the question, or the public in general, when I say "this is the sort of thing that can happen." Quite to the contrary, as I explain in the extended entry, half the country has used marijuana, more people are arrested each year for marijuana than for violent crime, the nation overwhelmingly favors reduction in marijuana penalties, it is very relevant to our economic downturn, and it is a question that simply has not been asked of the incoming administration in other forums. It should be asked, and I am glad it is on track to winning.
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
- Invisible Man (prologue), Ralph Ellison
More than 50 years after Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man appeared, a black man may well be poised to become President, and yet, Black America as a whole still remains virtually invisible, describable in exactly the same terms that Ellison used:
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination indeed, everything except me.
You make think this is an exaggeration. If so, this diary is a challenge to think again.
Let's cut right to the chase: This year, we can expect anti-affirmative action initiatives to placed on the ballot in certain key swing states with the intention of generating white backlash to defeat the Democratic candidate-particularly if that candidate is Barack Obama. Yet, at the same time, it's been shown that employers, on average, will hire white ex-felons more readily than they will hire similarly-qualified blacks with no prison record. The notion of hordes of Black workers taking jobs from more qualified Whites is sheer fantasy-the exact opposite of what happens every day of the week, all across America.
