Browsing PBH By Articles

Lobbyist Earnings: The Real Reason Why You Can’t Smoke Pot

The Article: Why Can’t You Smoke Pot? Because Lobbyists Are Getting Rich Off of the War on Drugs by Lee Fang in Republic Report.

The Text: John Lovell is a lobbyist who makes a lot of money from making sure you can’t smoke a joint. That’s his job. He’s a lobbyist for the police unions in Sacramento, and he is a driving force behind grabbing Federal dollars to shut down the California marijuana industry. I’ll get to the evidence on this important story in a bit, but first, some context.

At some point in the distant past, the war on drugs might have been popular. But not anymore — the polling is clear, but beyond that, the last three Presidents have used illegal drugs. So why do we still put hundreds of thousands of people in steel cages for pot-related offenses? Well, there are many reasons, but one of them is, of course, money in politics. Corruption. Whatever you want to call it, it’s why you can’t smoke a joint without committing a crime, though of course you can ingest any number of pills or drinks completely within the law.

Some of the groups who want to keep the drug illegal are police unions that want more members to pay more dues. One of the primary sources for cash for more policing activities are Federal grants for penalizing illegal drug use, which help pay for overtime, additional police officers, and equipment for the force. That’s what Lovell does, he gets those grants. He also fights against democratic mechanisms to legalize drugs.

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Cleaning Up The Hood By Policing Drug Sales

The Article: Policing drug sales
Cleaning up the ’hood in The Economist.

The Text: POLICE watched seven people sell drugs in Marshall Courts and Seven Oaks, two districts in south-eastern Newport News, in Virginia. They built strong cases against them. They shared that information with prosecutors. But then the police did something unusual: they sent the seven letters inviting them to police headquarters for a talk, promising that if they came they would not be arrested. Three came, and when they did they met not only police and prosecutors, but also family members, people from their communities, pastors from local churches and representatives from social-service agencies. Their neighbours and relatives told them that dealing drugs was hurting their families and communities. The police showed them the information they had gathered, and they offered the seven a choice: deal again, and we will prosecute you. Stop, and these people will help you turn your lives around.

This approach is known as drug-market intervention (DMI). It was first used in High Point, North Carolina, in 2004 and since then has been tried in more than 30 cities and counties. It is the brainchild of David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College in New York, who thinks that “the most troubled communities can survive the public-health and family issues that come with even the highest levels of addiction. They can’t survive the community impact that comes with overt drug markets”—by which he means markets that draw outsiders to the neighbourhood. Once these are entrenched, a range of problems follow: not just drug use and sales, but open prostitution, muggings, robberies, declining property values, and the loss of businesses and safe public spaces.

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Want To End Corporate Rule? Here’s How

The Article: Nine Strategies to End Corporate Rule by Robert Weissman in Truth Out.

The Text: The last few years have seen a series of corporate catastrophes, for which the perpetrator companies have escaped any meaningful accountability. Big banks and giant Wall Street firms tricked and ripped off homeowners and investors, and crashed the national and global economy. BP’s reckless operations poisoned the Gulf of Mexico in one of the worst oil disasters in history. Massey Energy’s cost-cutting led to the Upper Big Branch coal mine collapse that killed 29 workers.

There have been virtually no criminal prosecutions for Wall Street wrongdoing related to the crash, and precious few civil actions. Criminal charges are likely to be filed against BP, but the company already has been granted new permits to drill for oil in the Gulf. Massey Energy—now owned by Alpha Natural Resources—was forced to pay $200 million in penalties but avoided any criminal prosecution.

This history notwithstanding, We the People, and our government representatives, do have the power to hold companies accountable for the wrongs they commit. The challenge is to mobilize sufficient political pressure to demand that available tools be used and new mechanisms of accountability be created.

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Religion’s Demand For Obedience Keeps Us In The Dark Ages

The Article: How Religion’s Demand for Obedience Keeps Us in the Dark Ages by Adam Lee in AlterNet.

The Text: For the vast majority of human history, the only form of government was the few ruling over the many. As human societies became settled and stratified, tribal chiefs and conquering warlords rose to become kings, pharaohs and emperors, all ruling with absolute power and passing on their thrones to their children. To justify this obvious inequality and explain why they should reign over everyone else, most of these ancient rulers claimed that the gods had chosen them, and priesthoods and holy books obligingly came on the scene to promote and defend the theory of divine right.

It’s true that religion has often served to unite people against tyranny, as well as to justify it. But in many cases, when a religious rebellion overcame a tyrant, it was only to install a different tyrant whose beliefs matched those of the revolutionaries. Christians were at first ruthlessly persecuted by the Roman Empire, but when they ascended to power, they in turn banned all the pagan religions that had previously persecuted them. Protestant reformers like John Calvin broke away from the decrees of the Pope, but Calvinists created their own theocratic city-states where their will would reign supreme.

Similarly, when King Henry VIII split England away from the Catholic church, it wasn’t so he could create a utopia of religious liberty; it was so he could create a theocracy where his preferred beliefs, rather than the Vatican’s, would be the law of the land. And in just the same way, when the Puritans fled England and migrated to the New World, it wasn’t to uphold religious tolerance; it was to impose their beliefs, rather than the Church of England’s.

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When Doing Good Is Actually Bad

The Article: Syria: The evil results of doing good by Robert Grenier in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: Kofi Annan is a good man. We know that. We have all watched him for years. Where there is conflict and misunderstanding, whether among individuals, groups, or nations, he seeks conciliation. When two parties are in armed conflict, he does not take sides; instead, he tries to make peace.

But we also know that his instincts, however noble, have sometimes served him badly. That was true in Rwanda, when Annan’s forbearance provided evil men with an opportunity they should not have had. It was also occasionally true at the UN, where the corrupt and the abusive sometimes found sanctuary in the nurturing environment of the then-Secretary General’s tolerant understanding. And now, once again, we see Kofi Annan on a world stage, following, as usual, his noble instincts.

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