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It's Time to Legalize Drugs
By Ethan Nadelmann, Foreign Policy
Posted on December 20, 2007, Printed on December 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/71033/
Prohibition has failed -- again. Instead of treating the demand for
illegal drugs as a market, and addicts as patients, policymakers the
world over have boosted the profits of drug lords and fostered
narcostates that would frighten Al Capone. Finally, a smarter drug
control regime that values reality over rhetoric is rising to replace
the "war" on drugs. "The Global War on Drugs can Be Won" No, it can't. A
"drug-free world," which the United Nations describes as a realistic
goal, is no more attainable than an "alcohol-free world" -- and no one
has talked about that with a straight face since the repeal of
Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile rhetoric about
winning a "war on drugs" persists, despite mountains of evidence
documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy. When the U.N. General
Assembly Special Session on drugs convened in 1998, it committed to
"eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the
coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008" and
to "achieving significant and measurable results in the field of demand
reduction." But today, global production and consumption of those drugs
are roughly the same as they were a decade ago; meanwhile, many
producers have become more efficient, and cocaine and heroin have
become purer and cheaper. It's always dangerous when rhetoric
drives policy -- and especially so when "war on drugs" rhetoric leads
the public to accept collateral casualties that would never be
permissible in civilian law enforcement, much less public health.
Politicians still talk of eliminating drugs from the Earth as though
their use is a plague on humanity. But drug control is not like disease
control, for the simple reason that there's no popular demand for
smallpox or polio. Cannabis and opium have been grown throughout much
of the world for millennia. The same is true for coca in Latin America.
Methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs can be produced anywhere.
Demand for particular illicit drugs waxes and wanes, depending not just
on availability but also fads, fashion, culture, and competition from
alternative means of stimulation and distraction. The relative
harshness of drug laws and the intensity of enforcement matter
surprisingly little, except in totalitarian states. After all, rates of
illegal drug use in the United States are the same as, or higher than,
Europe, despite America's much more punitive policies. "We Can Reduce the Demand for Drugs" Good luck. Reducing
the demand for illegal drugs seems to make sense. But the desire to
alter one's state of consciousness, and to use psychoactive drugs to do
so, is nearly universal -- and mostly not a problem. There's virtually
never been a drug-free society, and more drugs are discovered and
devised every year. Demand-reduction efforts that rely on honest
education and positive alternatives to drug use are helpful, but not
when they devolve into unrealistic, "zero tolerance" policies. As
with sex, abstinence from drugs is the best way to avoid trouble, but
one always needs a fallback strategy for those who can't or won't
refrain. "Zero tolerance" policies deter some people, but they also
dramatically increase the harms and costs for those who don't resist.
Drugs become more potent, drug use becomes more hazardous, and people
who use drugs are marginalized in ways that serve no one. The
better approach is not demand reduction but "harm reduction." Reducing
drug use is fine, but it's not nearly as important as reducing the
death, disease, crime, and suffering associated with both drug misuse
and failed prohibitionist policies. With respect to legal drugs, such
as alcohol and cigarettes, harm reduction means promoting responsible
drinking and designated drivers, or persuading people to switch to
nicotine patches, chewing gums, and smokeless tobacco. With respect to
illegal drugs, it means reducing the transmission of infectious disease
through syringe-exchange programs, reducing overdose fatalities by
making antidotes readily available, and allowing people addicted to
heroin and other illegal opiates to obtain methadone from doctors and
even pharmaceutical heroin from clinics. Britain, Canada,
Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have already embraced this
last option. There's no longer any question that these strategies
decrease drug-related harms without increasing drug use. What blocks
expansion of such programs is not cost; they typically save taxpayers'
money that would otherwise go to criminal justice and healthcare. No,
the roadblocks are abstinence-only ideologues and a cruel indifference
to the lives and well-being of people who use drugs. "Reducing the Supply of Drugs Is the Answer" Not if history is any guide. Reducing
supply makes as much sense as reducing demand; after all, if no one
were planting cannabis, coca, and opium, there wouldn't be any heroin,
cocaine, or marijuana to sell or consume. But the carrot and stick of
crop eradication and substitution have been tried and failed, with rare
exceptions, for half a century. These methods may succeed in targeted
locales, but they usually simply shift production from one region to
another: Opium production moves from Pakistan to Afghanistan; coca from
Peru to Colombia; and cannabis from Mexico to the United States, while
overall global production remains relatively constant or even increases. The
carrot, in the form of economic development and assistance in switching
to legal crops, is typically both late and inadequate. The stick, often
in the form of forced eradication, including aerial spraying, wipes out
illegal and legal crops alike and can be hazardous to both people and
local environments. The best thing to be said for emphasizing supply
reduction is that it provides a rationale for wealthier nations to
spend a little money on economic development in poorer countries. But,
for the most part, crop eradication and substitution wreak havoc among
impoverished farmers without diminishing overall global supply. The
global markets in cannabis, coca, and opium products operate
essentially the same way that other global commodity markets do: If one
source is compromised due to bad weather, rising production costs, or
political difficulties, another emerges. If international drug control
circles wanted to think strategically, the key question would no longer
be how to reduce global supply, but rather: Where does illicit
production cause the fewest problems (and the greatest benefits)? Think
of it as a global vice control challenge. No one expects to eradicate
vice, but it must be effectively zoned and regulated -- even if it's
illegal. "U.S. Drug Policy Is the World's Drug Policy" Sad, but true. Looking
to the United States as a role model for drug control is like looking
to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal with race. The United
States ranks first in the world in per capita incarceration -- with
less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost 25 percent of
the world's prisoners. The number of people locked up for U.S. drug-law
violations has increased from roughly 50,000 in 1980 to almost 500,000
today; that's more than the number of people Western Europe locks up
for everything. Even more deadly is U.S. resistance to syringe-exchange
programs to reduce HIV/AIDS both at home and abroad. Who knows how many
people might not have contracted HIV if the United States had
implemented at home, and supported abroad, the sorts of
syringe-exchange and other harm-reduction programs that have kept
HIV/AIDS rates so low in Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, and
elsewhere. Perhaps millions. And yet, despite this dismal record,
the United States has succeeded in constructing an international drug
prohibition regime modeled after its own highly punitive and moralistic
approach. It has dominated the drug control agencies of the United
Nations and other international organizations, and its federal drug
enforcement agency was the first national police organization to go
global. Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed
policies to the rest of the world. But now, for the first time,
U.S. hegemony in drug control is being challenged. The European Union
is demanding rigorous assessment of drug control strategies. Exhausted
by decades of service to the U.S.-led war on drugs, Latin Americans are
far less inclined to collaborate closely with U.S. drug enforcement
efforts. Finally waking up to the deadly threat of hiv/aids, China,
Indonesia, Vietnam, and even Malaysia and Iran are increasingly
accepting of syringe-exchange and other harm-reduction programs. In
2005, the ayatollah in charge of Iran's Ministry of Justice issued a fatwa declaring methadone maintenance and syringe-exchange programs compatible with sharia (Islamic) law. One only wishes his American counterpart were comparably enlightened. "Afghan Opium Production Must Be Curbed" Be careful what you wish for.
It's easy to believe that eliminating record-high opium production in
Afghanistan -- which today accounts for roughly 90 percent of global
supply, up from 50 percent 10 years ago -- would solve everything from
heroin abuse in Europe and Asia to the resurgence of the Taliban. But
assume for a moment that the United States, NATO, and Hamid Karzai's
government were somehow able to cut opium production in Afghanistan.
Who would benefit? Only the Taliban, warlords, and other black-market
entrepreneurs whose stockpiles of opium would skyrocket in value.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghan peasants would flock to cities,
ill-prepared to find work. And many Afghans would return to their farms
the following year to plant another illegal harvest, utilizing
guerrilla farming methods to escape intensified eradication efforts.
Except now, they'd soon be competing with poor farmers elsewhere in
Central Asia, Latin America, or even Africa. This is, after all, a
global commodities market. And outside Afghanistan? Higher heroin
prices typically translate into higher crime rates by addicts. They
also invite cheaper but more dangerous means of consumption, such as
switching from smoking to injecting heroin, which results in higher HIV
and hepatitis c rates. All things considered, wiping out opium in
Afghanistan would yield far fewer benefits than is commonly assumed. So
what's the solution? Some recommend buying up all the opium in
Afghanistan, which would cost a lot less than is now being spent trying
to eradicate it. But, given that farmers somewhere will produce opium
so long as the demand for heroin persists, maybe the world is better
off, all things considered, with 90 percent of it coming from just one
country. And if that heresy becomes the new gospel, it opens up all
sorts of possibilities for pursuing a new policy in Afghanistan that
reconciles the interests of the United States, NATO, and millions of
Afghan citizens. "Legalization Is the Best Approach" It might be.
Global drug prohibition is clearly a costly disaster. The United
Nations has estimated the value of the global market in illicit drugs
at $400 billion, or 6 percent of global trade. The extraordinary
profits available to those willing to assume the risks enrich
criminals, terrorists, violent political insurgents, and corrupt
politicians and governments. Many cities, states, and even countries in
Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia are reminiscent of Chicago under
Al Capone -- times 50. By bringing the market for drugs out into the
open, legalization would radically change all that for the better. More
importantly, legalization would strip addiction down to what it really
is: a health issue. Most people who use drugs are like the responsible
alcohol consumer, causing no harm to themselves or anyone else. They
would no longer be the state's business. But legalization would also
benefit those who struggle with drugs by reducing the risks of overdose
and disease associated with unregulated products, eliminating the need
to obtain drugs from dangerous criminal markets, and allowing addiction
problems to be treated as medical rather than criminal problems. No
one knows how much governments spend collectively on failing drug war
policies, but it's probably at least $100 billion a year, with federal,
state, and local governments in the United States accounting for almost
half the total. Add to that the tens of billions of dollars to be
gained annually in tax revenues from the sale of legalized drugs. Now
imagine if just a third of that total were committed to reducing
drug-related disease and addiction. Virtually everyone, except those
who profit or gain politically from the current system, would benefit. Some
say legalization is immoral. That's nonsense, unless one believes there
is some principled basis for discriminating against people based solely
on what they put into their bodies, absent harm to others. Others say
legalization would open the floodgates to huge increases in drug abuse.
They forget that we already live in a world in which psychoactive drugs
of all sorts are readily available -- and in which people too poor to
buy drugs resort to sniffing gasoline, glue, and other industrial
products, which can be more harmful than any drug. No, the greatest
downside to legalization may well be the fact that the legal markets
would fall into the hands of the powerful alcohol, tobacco, and
pharmaceutical companies. Still, legalization is a far more pragmatic
option than living with the corruption, violence, and organized crime
of the current system. "Legalization Will Never Happen" Never say never. Wholesale
legalization may be a long way off -- but partial legalization is not.
If any drug stands a chance of being legalized, it's cannabis. Hundreds
of millions of people have used it, the vast majority without suffering
any harm or going on to use "harder" drugs. In Switzerland, for
example, cannabis legalization was twice approved by one chamber of its
parliament, but narrowly rejected by the other. Elsewhere in
Europe, support for the criminalization of cannabis is waning. In the
United States, where roughly 40 percent of the country's 1.8 million
annual drug arrests are for cannabis possession, typically of tiny
amounts, 40 percent of Americans say that the drug should be taxed,
controlled, and regulated like alcohol. Encouraged by Bolivian
President Evo Morales, support is also growing in Latin America and
Europe for removing coca from international antidrug conventions, given
the absence of any credible health reason for keeping it there.
Traditional growers would benefit economically, and there's some
possibility that such products might compete favorably with more
problematic substances, including alcohol. The global war on
drugs persists in part because so many people fail to distinguish
between the harms of drug abuse and the harms of prohibition.
Legalization forces that distinction to the forefront. The opium
problem in Afghanistan is primarily a prohibition problem, not a drug
problem. The same is true of the narcoviolence and corruption that has
afflicted Latin America and the Caribbean for almost three decades --
and that now threatens Africa. Governments can arrest and kill drug
lord after drug lord, but the ultimate solution is a structural one,
not a prosecutorial one. Few people doubt any longer that the war on
drugs is lost, but courage and vision are needed to transcend the
ignorance, fear, and vested interests that sustain it. Want To Know More? Drugpolicy.org,
the Web site of the Drug Policy Alliance, offers statistics, arguments,
and information about drug policies worldwide. Ethan Nadelmann and
Peter Andreas examine the politics of global crime control in Policing
the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Reproduced with permission from Foreign Policy #162 (September/October 2007) www.foreignpolicy.com. © 2007, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Ethan Nadelmann is founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/71033/
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| December 15, 2007 | Liquidation of Empire
| | by Gordon Prather | Winston Churchill – icon for President George W.
Bush and the neo-crazies – is revered for declaring "I did not become Her Majesty's First Minister so that I might oversee the liquidation of the British Empire!" Churchill is – understandably – much less revered for proceeding to do just that. With just a year to go in his Presidency, it increasing appears that Bush-43’s chief legacy may be the liquidation of our empire, accumulated during the so-called American Century. To get a sense of the State of the American Hegemony under the stewardship thus far of Bush-43, take a look at the Antiwar.com homepage. There are separate sections, there, largely devoted to consequences of Bush-43 interventions – actual, intended or threatened – into the internal affairs of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon/Syria, Afghanistan, India, the Koreas, Pakistan, Somalia, the
Congo, Algeria, Peru, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and the American Homeland, itself. Of course, we – and the whole world – were given fair warning that there would be such interventions. In his very first State of the Union Address, Bush-43, the self-proclaimed Commander-in-Chief of the Global War on Terror, declared that; "Our nation will continue to be steadfast and patient and persistent in the pursuit of two great objectives. "First, we will shut down terrorist camps, disrupt terrorist plans, and bring terrorists to justice. "And, second, we must prevent the terrorists and regimes who seek chemical, biological or nuclear weapons from threatening the United States and the world. "Our military has put the terror training camps of Afghanistan out of business, yet camps still exist in at least a dozen countries.
A terrorist underworld -- including groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Jaish-i-Mohammed -- operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the centers of large cities. "Our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy. "Our Navy is patrolling the coast of Africa to block the shipment of weapons and the establishment of terrorist camps in Somalia. "Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. "North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. "Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom. "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. "States
like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. "We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology, and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. "And all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation's security. "We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Bush’s 2002 National Security Statement, formalizing those policies to be implemented during prosecution of the GWOT under the American Hegemony, focused on "rogue states," rather than the
terrorists themselves . The 2006 update to the 2002 NSS further states that; "The best way to block aspiring nuclear states or nuclear terrorists is to deny them access to the essential ingredient of fissile material. "Therefore, our strategy focuses on controlling fissile material with two priority objectives: "First, to keep states from acquiring the capability to produce fissile material suitable for making nuclear weapons; and second, to deter, interdict, or prevent any transfer of that material from states that have this capability to rogue states or to terrorists. "The first objective requires closing a loophole in the Non-Proliferation Treaty that permits regimes to produce fissile material that can be used to make nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian nuclear power program." Of course, the internationally
agreed-upon strategy to prevent nuclear-weapons proliferation has always focused on controlling the fissile materials absolutely essential to their production. But, in return for a signatory’s subjecting all nuclear-energy related activities to International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards – for the exclusive purpose of the IAEA’s being able to verify that certain proscribed materials are never used to produce nuclear weapons – the NPT affirms a signatory’s inalienable right to produce and use such materials for peaceful purposes. Far from constituting a "loop hole," that guarantee is one of the "three pillars" of the NPT. Another NPT pillar is the commitment – reaffirmed by President Clinton at the 2000 NPT Review Conference – to get rid of all our nukes. Then, there’s the NPT prohibition – as well as prohibitions in US law – against Bush’s assisting India [not a NPT-signatory] with its nuclear
programs. Finally, there’s the implied NPT prohibition – and the explicit prohibition in the UN Charter – against Bush’s imposition of sanctions on Russia and China for facilitating Iran’s enjoyment – without discrimination – of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Hence, implementing Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy – designed to secure the American Hegemony – requires nothing less than the deliberate destruction of the existing international nuclear-weapons proliferation-prevention regime. But, hold on. Even though Bush-43 recently warned Russia and China that World War III could result unless they joined him in imposing crushing economic sanctions on Iran – in violation of the UN Charter – and in denying Iran its inalienable rights under the NPT, Russian President Putin defied Bush by attending a summit meeting in Tehran of the oil-rich Caspian Sea
littoral states, pointedly declaring afterward in a joint Iran-Russia press conference that "Iran is an important regional and global power". Furthermore, China has just defied Bush-43 by concluding a deal with Iran that obliges it "to make all necessary investments to develop the Yadavaran Oil Field in Southwestern Iran." So, maybe Russia and China won’t allow Bush to emasculate the IAEA-NPT-NSG nuke proliferation-prevention regime – which is solidly athwart his American Hegemony ambitions. Then what will be George W. Bush’s chief legacy? World War III, or – like Churchill – liquidiation of an empire? |
| | Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=12058 | | | Copyright 2007 Antiwar.com
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December 12, 2007 | No Liberty Without
Habeas Corpus
| | by Paul Craig Roberts | The
U.S. Supreme Court has taken up the issue whether the executive branch
can detain people indefinitely merely by declaring them to be suspected
terrorists or illegal enemy combatants. The case is a habeas corpus
issue and, therefore, of the utmost importance. Without the protection
of habeas corpus, government can lock away anyone on the basis of
unsubstantiated charges as the Guantanamo detainees have been for
nearly six years. Reporting on the Court's deliberations about Odah v. U.S. and Boumediene v. Bush,
Tom Curry, a national affairs writer for MSNBC, reports that Justice
Stephen Breyer suggested to U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement that
the executive branch could indefinitely hold people such as those in
Guantanamo prison if Congress were to pass "some special statute
involving preventive detention and danger, which has not yet been
enacted." According to Curry, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Arlen
Specter regard a preventive detention statute as a possibility worth
considering. Pray that Curry has misunderstood Breyer. A
different interpretation of Breyer's remarks is that the justice was
telling Bush's solicitor general that in the absence of a preventive
detention statute there is no legal basis for holding the detainees. If there were such a statute, the case before the court would be its constitutionality. Support
for the latter interpretation comes from House Judiciary Committee
member Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). Rep. Nadler thinks Breyer was merely
"thinking out loud," not "floating an idea" and inviting Congress to
pass an unconstitutional statute. Nadler believes that Breyer was
telling Clement that as there is not even a preventive detention
statute, the executive branch has no basis for holding the Gitmo
detainees. That Feinstein, Specter, Jon Kyl, and other U.S.
senators think it is "worth considering" for Congress to overturn
habeas corpus, the greatest bulwark against tyranny, indicates how much
the U.S. constitutional tradition has been lost. The importance of the
case seems to be completely over the heads of the media, who appear to
be looking for a technical solution that permits people accused without
evidence to be held forever. The American press apparently believes
that the U.S. government can make no mistake or behave improperly and
that the detainees are actually, in Sen. Kyl's words, "a danger to our
troops." It is a "danger" that the Bush regime has been unable to
prove even with torture and secret evidence. Half of the detainees have
had to be released. According to news reports, the regime has been able
to create cases against only 14 of those remaining. After all the years
of illegal detention, harsh treatment, and denial of access to
attorneys, the Bush regime has come up with 14 cases, and they are
probably fabricated. Where is the rule of law when hundreds of people can have years stolen from their lives? It
is uncertain how the court will decide the case. Bush's solicitor
general has told the justices that they should trust the executive
branch to correctly balance "the interests of the prisoners" with the
administration's ability to "prosecute the global war on terror." In
other words, it is Waco all over again. The executive branch runs
roughshod over the U.S. Constitution and then demands, "trust us,"
which means don't take away any of the illegitimate power that the
executive branch has claimed and exercised or hold anyone accountable
for abusing executive power. Unfortunately for the future of liberty in
America, a number of the Republican justices see the issue as one of
the separation of powers. The Republican justices or most of them are,
or were, members of the Federalist Society, an organization of
Republican lawyers committed to increased power for the executive.
These Republican justices will be inclined to decide the case in the
interest of executive power. The Federalist Society is a product
of a past time when Republicans were said to have "a lock on the
presidency" but could not get their agenda into law because the
Democrats had a lock on Congress. Republican frustrations manifested
themselves in attempts to heighten the president's powers so that a
Republican agenda could prevail over a Democratic Congress. Like
generals who fight the last war, the Federalist Society is stuck in its
assault on the separation of powers in the interest of "energy in the
executive." Many Federalist Society members join for social
reasons and for networking, as the society provides the pool of
attorneys for Republican appointments to the federal bench and for
Department of Justice appointees. Many members mistakenly think that
the society stands for "original intent," but as their real interest is
career-driven, they don't pay much attention to the society's assault
on the U.S. Constitution. Kings exercised the power to throw into
dungeons people who offended them or whom they regarded as a threat.
Once arrested, a person could be locked up forever without charges or
evidence brought before a court. Habeas corpus was an English invention
that provides quick release of a person unlawfully held by orders of
the executive. The Bush regime has made the most determined
assault the Anglo-American world has seen on the principle of habeas
corpus. The previous assault was by Stuart kings who destroyed their
rule by proclaiming the "divine right of kings." Now Americans are
faced with Bush/Cheney and the solicitor general of the U.S. Department
of Justice (sic), Paul Clement, proclaiming the divine right of
President Bush and his Justice (sic) Department. We must all pray
that there are not enough Federalist Society members on the Supreme
Court to uphold a Benthamite ruling of preventive detention. Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832) was the Englishman who renewed the assault on
liberty, which centuries of English reforms had created. Bentham
believed that tyranny was no longer a problem, because people were
empowered by democracy to control the government. He argued that any
restraint placed on government's powers would limit the ability of
government to do good. To protect citizens from crime, Bentham favored
the preventive arrest of everyone whose social class, bone structure,
or other chosen indicator suggested a proclivity toward crime. "The
greatest good for the greatest number." The Bush regime is
comprised of modern-day Benthamites. Their agenda is to overthrow the
civil liberties that make law a shield of the people instead of a
weapon in the hands of the state. As anyone can be declared a suspect,
the weapons that Bush would use to fight "the global war on terror"
would soon be turned on the American people. Without habeas corpus,
there is no liberty. |
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How to Vote in the Primaries and Make It Mean Something
By David Swanson, After Downing Street
Posted on December 11, 2007, Printed on December 11, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/70200/
1. Virtually nobody votes in primaries (or caucuses) compared to
general elections. Therefore, each individual primary vote is worth
many times what it is in the general election. And, it's more likely to
be counted, since there's typically less fraud and abuse of the system
in primaries. So, if you vote in general elections, you pretty much
have to vote in primaries in order to not be an idiot. Bring a few
friends to vote too, and you're practically a genius. 2.
If you have to join a party that you don't support in order to vote in
a primary, you can always unjoin again immediately after the primary.
In the meantime, maybe you'll have helped to create a party you can
support. You can even vote in a primary without planning to vote in the
general election. If the 50% of Americans who don't vote at all (or
even a small fraction of them) voted in primaries, they would determine
the candidates in the general elections, in which they might then
choose to vote as well. 3. If there's no candidate you like in a
primary, you can write one in. A relatively very small amount of
organizing can even lead to a victory for that candidate. (Or some
signature gathering could place your candidate's name on the ballot.) 4.
If there is a good candidate on the ballot, then an extremely small
amount of organizing can lead to a victory for that candidate. And
something short of a victory can still mean some number of delegates
for your candidate going to the party's convention from your state, or
momentum for your candidate in future states. Primaries, unlike general
elections, are not winner-take-all. (You can even become a delegate for
your candidate and get a trip to a convention out of this.) 5. In
most presidential elections, the party's nominee is decided before many
states hold their primaries. So, for most people, the point of voting
is not to choose the nominee. (And therefore almost nobody votes,
opening the door to effective action by non-idiots.) The point is also
not to "show support and loyalty" for a nominee already chosen
(democracies have no need for such displays, which are best suited to
another type of regime). Rather, the point is to elect as many
delegates as possible for the candidate whose positions you most favor,
so that those delegates can influence the party's platform and the
nominee's positions at the convention, or even make your candidate the
vice presidential nominee. 6. In early states, surprise underdog
candidates can build momentum, and voting for such a candidate does not
entail spoiling the primary for a mediocre candidate who you believe
has a better chance of defeating the worst candidate. This is because
it takes several states over a period of days or weeks for one
candidate to lock down a victory. A surprising showing for an underdog
candidate with dramatically distinct positions can put that candidate
into the running in the minds of future voters, and can very quickly
move the mediocre candidates to become better than mediocre, and
therefore better able to compete in future states. 7. Swing
voters almost do not exist. Fewer than 4% of voters in 2004 ever
planned to vote for Kerry and switched to Bush or vice versa. So,
appealing to one's own base and turning those people out to vote is key
to winning the general election. Therefore, Democrats who want to win
the general election, for example, should nominate the most Democratic,
not the most Republican, candidate in the primaries. (Republicans
already know this.) 8. Pre-primary corporate polls that purport
to tell us who is most "viable" and "electable" are primarily a product
of corporate media coverage and spin, much of which is "coverage" of
the previous polls. The way to determine which candidate is most viable
begins by canceling your newspaper subscriptions and recycling your
television. 9. In a democracy, the most electable candidate is
the candidate whom the most people actually like. The most reliable
gauge available to any of us of whom people will like is whom we
ourselves personally and honestly most like. Therefore, there can be no
distinction between whom you like and whom you consider "viable." The
candidate you most like, honestly, in your own considered private
opinion, is the most viable candidate. And you can make that even more
so if you lead by example. Don't just vote, but campaign, promote, and
contribute, as much and as early as you can. "To believe your own
thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is
true for all men [and women], -- that is genius." - Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10.
The following are majority positions among Americans, and
overwhelmingly majority positions among Democrats: end the occupation
of Iraq, impeach the vice president, create single-payer not-for-profit
universal health coverage, withdraw from corporate trade agreements
like NAFTA, and slash the Pentagon budget in order to invest in
diplomacy, foreign aid, education, jobs, and green energy. Only one
presidential candidate supports this platform: Dennis Kucinich. Read the full version of this article here.
Read more of David Swanson at After Downing Street.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/70200/
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Go to Original
"Neocon Job"
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown
Thursday 06 December 2007
Full text of Keith's Special Comment
Finally, as promised, a Special Comment about the president's cataclysmic deception about Iran.
There are few choices more terrifying than the one Mr. Bush has left us with tonight.
We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole - or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked - at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so - whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed, were still even remotely plausible.
A pathological presidential liar, or an idiot-in-chief. It is the nightmare scenario of political science fiction: A critical juncture in our history and, contained in either answer, a president manifestly unfit to serve, and behind him in the vice presidency: an unapologetic war-monger who has long been seeing a world visible only to himself.
After Ms. Perino's announcement from the White House late last night, the timeline is inescapable and clear.
In August the president was told by his hand-picked Major Domo of intelligence Mike McConnell, a flinty, high-strung-looking, worrying-warrior who will always see more clouds than silver linings, that what "everybody thought" about Iran might be, in essence, crap.
Yet on October 17th the President said of Iran and its president Ahmadinejad:
"I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War Three, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge to make a nuclear weapon."
And as he said that, Mr. Bush knew that at bare minimum there was a strong chance that his rhetoric was nothing more than words with which to scare the Iranians.
Or was it, Sir, to scare the Americans?
Does Iran not really fit into the equation here? Have you just scribbled it into the fill-in-the-blank on the same template you used, to scare us about Iraq?
In August, any commander-in-chief still able-minded or uncorrupted or both, Sir, would have invoked the quality the job most requires: mental flexibility.
A bright man, or an honest man, would have realized no later than the McConnell briefing that the only true danger about Iran was the damage that could be done by an unhinged, irrational Chicken Little of a president, shooting his mouth off, backed up by only his own hysteria and his own delusions of omniscience.
Not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Bush.
The Chicken Little of presidents is the one, Sir, that you see in the mirror.
And the mind reels at the thought of a vice president fully briefed on the revised Intel as long as two weeks ago - briefed on the fact that Iran abandoned its pursuit of this imminent threat four years ago - who never bothered to mention it to his boss.
It is nearly forgotten today, but throughout much of Ronald Reagan's presidency it was widely believed that he was little more than a front-man for some never-viewed, behind-the-scenes, string-puller.
Today, as evidenced by this latest remarkable, historic malfeasance, it is inescapable, that Dick Cheney is either this president's evil ventriloquist, or he thinks he is.
What servant of any of the 42 previous presidents could possibly withhold information of this urgency and gravity, and wind up back at his desk the next morning, instead of winding up before a Congressional investigation - or a criminal one?
Mr. Bush - if you can still hear us - if you did not previously agree to this scenario in which Dick Cheney is the actual detective and you're Remington Steele - you must disenthrall yourself: Mr. Cheney has usurped your constitutional powers, cut you out of the information loop, and led you down the path to an unprecedented presidency in which the facts are optional, the Intel is valued less than the hunch, and the assistant runs the store.
The problem is, Sir, your assistant is robbing you - and your country - blind.
Not merely in monetary terms, Mr. Bush, but more importantly of the traditions and righteousness for which we have stood, at great risk, for centuries: Honesty, Law, Moral Force.
Mr. Cheney has helped, Sir, to make your Administration into the kind our ancestors saw in the 1860's and 1870's and 1880's - the ones that abandoned Reconstruction, and sent this country marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ...
Presidents who will be remembered only in a blur of failure, Mr. Bush.
Presidents who will be remembered only as functions of those who opposed them - the opponents whom history proved right.
Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland ... Bush.
Would that we could let this president off the hook by seeing him only as marionette or moron.
But a study of the mutation of his language about Iran proves that though he may not be very good at it, he is, himself, still a manipulative, Machiavellian, snake-oil salesman.
The Bushian etymology was tracked by Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post's website.
It is staggering.
March 31st: "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon ..."
June 5th: "Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons ..."
June 19th: "Consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon ..."
July 12th: "The same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons ..."
August 6th: "This is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon ..."
Notice a pattern?
Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
Then, sometime between August 6th and August 9th, those terms are suddenly swapped out, so subtly that only in retrospect can we see that somebody has warned the president, not only that he has gone out too far on the limb of terror - but there may not even be a tree there ...
McConnell, or someone, must have briefed him then.
August 9th: "They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program ..."
August 28th: "Iran's active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons ..."
October 4th: "You should not have the know-how on how to make a (nuclear) weapon ..."
October 17th: "Until they suspend and/or make it clear that they, that their statements aren't real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon."
Before August 9th, it's: Trying to develop, build or pursue a nuclear weapon.
After August 9th, it's: Desire, pursuit, want ... knowledge, technology, know-how to enrich uranium.
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that the National Intelligence Estimate this week talks of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program in 2003 ...
And you talked of the Iranians suspending their nuclear weapons program on October 17th ...
And that's just a coincidence?
And we are to believe, Mr. Bush, that nobody told you any of this until last week?
Your insistence that you were not briefed on the NIE until last week might be legally true - something like "what the definition of is is" - but with the subject matter being not interns but the threat of nuclear war.
Legally, it might save you from some war crimes trial ... but ethically, it is a lie.
It is indefensible.
You have been yelling threats into a phone for nearly four months, after the guy on the other end had already hung up.
You, Mr. Bush, are a bald-faced liar.
And more over, you have just revealed that John Bolton, and Norman Podhoretz, and the Wall Street Journal Editorial board, are also bald-faced liars.
We are to believe that the Intel community, or maybe the State Department, cooked the raw intelligence about Iran, falsely diminished the Iranian nuclear threat, to make you look bad?
And you proceeded to let them make you look bad?
You not only knew all of this about Iran, in early August ...
But you also knew ... it was ... accurate.
And instead of sharing this good news with the people you have obviously forgotten you represent ...
You merely fine-tuned your terrorizing of those people, to legally cover your own backside ...
While you filled the factual gap with sadistic visions of - as you phrased it on August 28th: a quote "nuclear holocaust" - and, as you phrased it on October 17th, quote: "World War Three."
My comments, Mr. Bush, are often dismissed as simple repetitions of the phrase "George Bush has no business being president."
Well, guess what?
Tonight: hanged by your own words ... convicted by your own deliberate lies ...
You, sir, have no business ... being president.
Good night, and good luck.
| By Michael Nenonen, Republic of East Vancouver
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/americagoingfascist06dec07.shtml
December 6, 2007
America Is Going Fascist (Dec. 6, 2007)
http://rinf.com/alt-news/politics/america-is-going-fascist/1905/
The signs are all there for anyone to see, and time is getting short for action.
Reading Naomi Wolf's The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young
Patriot (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007), I realized the hour is later
than I thought.
Many of us have watched the Bush regime's actions with a growing
feeling of horror intertwined with a sense that somehow we've seen all
of this before, but we aren't sure where. We're confused because what
we're seeing conflicts with unexamined and deeply held assumptions we
have about American freedom. Wolf's short but meticulously documented
book shows that what is happening in America has indeed happened many
times before, not in the United States, but rather in places like
Chile, Italy, Russia, and Germany. In each case, people couldn't
understand why they didn't recognize where they were heading before
they passed the point of no return.
It's shifting fast
Wolf argues that the United States is undergoing a "fascist shift" from
an authoritarian but still relatively open society to a totalitarian
society. The techniques for forcing this shift have evolved over the
last century and are now studied by aspiring tyrants the world over.
These methods are even part of the formal curriculum in places like the
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, previously known as the School of the Americas,
in Fort Benning, Georgia, where thousands of Latin Americans have been
trained by the United States government in the most savage techniques
of insurgency and counterinsurgency.
Fascists use ten basic strategies to shut down open societies.
They invoke an external and internal threat in order to convince the
population to grant their rulers extraordinary powers. They establish
secret prisons that practice torture, prisons that are initially few in
number and only incarcerate social pariahs, but that quickly multiply
and soon imprison "opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders,
well-known performers, publishers, and journalists." They develop a
paramilitary force that operates without legal restraint. They set up a
system of intense domestic surveillance that gathers information for
the purposes of intimidating and blackmailing citizens. They
infiltrate, monitor, and disorganize citizens' groups. They arbitrarily
detain and release citizens, especially at borders. They target key
individuals like civil servants, academics, and artists in order to
ensure their complicity or silence. They take control of the press.
They publicly equate dissent with treason. Finally, they suspend the
rule of law. All of these strategies are being employed in America today.
Consider the evidence
The Bush administration and its supporters have consistently portrayed
the security threat posed by international terrorists as a threat to
the very survival of Western civilization in order to justify permanent
war and to keep the American public in a state of panic and paranoia.
The prisons at Guantanamo and God-knows how many CIA "Black Sites"
torture their inmates, even though human rights organizations have
demonstrated that the majority of at least Guantanamo's inmates are
innocent victims of mass arrests. The inmates are designated as "enemy
combatants" who have no rights under international or American law. And
there is nothing stopping American presidents from filling these
prisons with American citizens. In an April 24 2007 article for the
Huffington Post, Wolf writes that thanks to the Military Commissions
Act of 2006, "the president has the power to call any US citizen an
'enemy combatant'. He has the power to define what 'enemy combatant'
means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the
executive branch the right to define 'enemy combatant' any way he or
she wants and then seize Americans accordingly. Even if you or I are
American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of
what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as
we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a
knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in
isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial." She points out
that while currently Americans in such situations will be spared any
torture except psychosis-inducing isolation and can look forward to
eventual trials, these rights typically evaporate in the final stages
of a fascist shift.
They're called "mercenaries"
Military contractors are the regime's paramilitary force. Blackwater's
mercenaries, many of whom were trained by Latin America's most horrific
police states, have operated in Iraq outside of Iraqi, American, and
military law, and have murdered uncounted innocent Iraqis with
impunity. Domestically, Blackwater was contracted to provide hundreds
of armed security guards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans, and there's evidence that they fired on civilians.
Blackwater's business plan calls for their use in future disasters and
emergencies throughout the United States, and it's supported by some of
the biggest powerbrokers in America.
American intelligence agencies are now bypassing court orders to
wiretap citizens' telephones, spy on their e-mails, and monitor their
financial transactions, and the USA Patriot Act forces corporations,
booksellers, librarians, and doctors to turn over previously
confidential information about Americans to the state.
Thousands of human rights, environmental, anti-war, and other citizens'
groups have been infiltrated by government agents, many of whom have
clearly acted as agent provocateurs in order to undermine the groups'
solidarity and to legitimize police actions against them.
Political opponents listed
America's Transportation Security Administration maintains a terrorist
watch list of tens of thousands of Americans who are now subjected to
security searches and arbitrary detention at airports. The list
includes people like Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and respected
constitutional scholar Walter F Murphy.
US Attorneys, CIA agents, military lawyers, and other civil servants
who've disagreed with the Bush administration have been threatened and
fired. David Horowitz and his colleagues have mounted a well-funded
nation-wide intimidation campaign that has university students spying
on their professors and that has successfully coerced regents at State
Universities to discipline or fire left-leaning professors like Ward
Churchill. The regime's supporters have organized campaigns to damage
the careers of artists like the Dixie Chicks for criticism of the
president and his policies.
The administration has Fox News in its pocket, it has paid journalists
for positive coverage, it has disseminated misinformation through the
media, and it's ferociously attacking critical journalists. Arrests of
US journalists are at an all-time high. The Bush administration's
outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame was done in retaliation against
her husband, Joseph Wilson, whose New York Times op-ed piece exposed
lies that the Bush administration used to lead the nation to war. Worse
than this, independent journalists appear to be marked for death by
American forces in Iraq. In her Huffington Post article, Wolf writes,
"The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts
of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon
unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from
organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. . . . In some cases
reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in
2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members
seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news
organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers."
The goal of these tactics, as she writes in The End of America, is to
create "a new reality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained
and no longer counts."
Dissent = treason
In recent years, prominent Republicans like Ann Coulter, Melanie
Morgan, and William Kristol have accused liberal journalists of treason
and espionage for publishing leaked material damaging to the
administration, and in February 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young
said "Congressmen who wilfully take actions during wartime that damage
morale and undermine the military are sabateurs, and should be hanged."
This would be amusing, were it not for the Bush administration's
revival of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act after half a century's
slumber.
And finally, the Bush administration shows contempt for the law. In The
End of America, Wolf writes that Bush has used more signing statements
than any previous president, and by doing so has relegated "Congress to
an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he
wishes to enforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So
Americans are living under laws their representatives never passed.
Signing statements put the president above the law." He has also gutted
the Posse Comitatus Act, which was created to prevent the president
from maintaining a standing army for use against American citizens.
Wolf writes that the 2007 Defence Authorization Bill lets the president
"expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the
National Guard troops without the permission of the governor when
'public order' has been lost; he can send these troops out into our
streets at his direction-overriding local law enforcement
authorities-during a national disaster, epidemic, serious public health
emergency, terrorist attack, or 'other condition.'" On its own, this is
an incredible expansion of presidential power, but when combined with
the use of military contractors like Blackwater it gives the president
almost dictatorial authority.
Wolf shows that fascist shifts don't happen overnight, but rather over
a course of years during which the fascists' plans unfold at an
accelerating pace. Germany in 1933 was further along this path than it
was in 1931, and Germany in 1935 was farther along than it was in 1933.
Similarly, America in 2007 is farther along the path than it was in
2005, or will be in 2009, provided that a massive pro-democracy
movement, complete with impeachment proceedings, doesn't reverse the
shift while there's still time. A simple Democratic victory in the 2008
presidential election won't do the job unless the institutional and
legal environment created by the Bush administration is thoroughly
dismantled. Regardless of whether the next president is a Republican or
a Democrat, he or she will inherit a legacy of centralized power that a
democracy simply can't tolerate.
Left behind
Unfortunately, during the shift opposition politicians and activists
still tend to perceive the world through a democratic frame of
reference, and this prevents them from seeing that their opponents are
no longer operating within this frame. As the opposition is tying its
boxing gloves, the fascists are breaking out the machetes.
Wolf's work has its problems. She doesn't acknowledge that Black and
Indigenous Americans have long lived under quasi-fascist rule, she
doesn't examine the role that previous administrations have played in
setting the stage for the Bush regime, and she doesn't acknowledge the
roles played by corporatism, widespread social dislocation and the
radical Christian right in the rise of a fascist American zeitgeist.
Despite this, The End of America needs to be read by as many people as
possible.
Wolf writes about America, but Canadians don't have any cause for
comfort. Canadian and American military forces are already deeply
enmeshed. Thanks to NAFTA, we're tied at the hip to the American
economy, while the Security and Prosperity Partnership is integrating
our countries' security forces and harmonizing our no-fly lists. The
Harper government is eager to kowtow to the Americans, even to the
point of refusing to advocate for Canadian citizens on American death
rows. The powerful think tanks and lobbying groups that influence our
provincial and federal governments, such as the Fraser Institute and
the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, either can't see the shift
for what it is or they don't care. More than all of this, however, is
the simple reality that once the shift is complete, the American
government will act even more irrationally and belligerently than
before. Canada has resources like oil and water the United States is
going to need, and the Canadian border is less defensible than the
French border was in 1940.
Americans and Canadians have to fight back more fiercely than ever
before, to organize and lobby and fill the streets with mass protests,
to raise awareness and forge alliances with anyone opposed to
totalitarianism regardless of whether they're liberals, socialists, or
conservatives. We have to take all the steps that have rescued dying
democracies in the past, and to take them immediately, in the desperate
hope that it isn't already too late.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/tag/u.s.a.
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