You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2012.
I think Sinfest has promise.
The idea that unfettered, unregulated capitalism is a good thing is sharply dealt with in this interview of Chris Hedges by Bill Moyers. This is what unregulated capitalism does and will always do without the strong hand of the government (aka the people) to limit its excesses and ‘remind’ business that people are not resources to be used and thrown away.
Excerpt from the Alter.net transcript of the Moyers/Hedges conversation.
BILL MOYERS: “They lost control of the park. The arrival in cold weather of individual tents, along with the numerous street people with mental impairment and addictions,” that you’re nothing if not honest in what you write, even about those people you support, “tore apart the community. Drug use as well as assaults and altercations became common.” So how is that square with what you said earlier that the Occupy Movement gave us a blueprint for how to fight back?
CHRIS HEDGES: Because this is the trajectory of all movements. You know, it’s not a linear progression upwards. And the civil rights movement is a perfect example of that. All sorts of failures, whether it’s in Albany, Mississippi or anywhere else. You know, there were all sorts of moments within the civil rights movement where King wasn’t even sure he was going to be able to hold it together. And what happened in Zuccotti is like what happened in 1765 when they rose up against the Stamp Act.
That became the kind of dress rehearsal for the rebellion of 1775, 1776, 1905. The uprising in Russia became again the kind of dress rehearsal. These movements, this process, it takes a very long time. I think the Occupy was movement and I was there.
I mean, I certainly understand why it imploded and its many faults and how at that size, consensus doesn’t work, everything else. And yet it triggered something. It triggered a kind of understanding of systems of power. It, I think, gave people a sense of their own personal power. Once we step out into a group and articulate these injustices and these grievances to a wider public, and of course they resonated with a mainstream. I don’t think it’s over. I don’t know how it’s going to mutate and change, one never knows. But, I think that it’s imperative that we keep that narrative alive by being out there because things are not getting better.
The state is not responding in a rational way to what’s happening. If they really wanted to break the back of the opposition movement, rather than sort of eradicating the 18 encampments, they would’ve gone back and looked at Roosevelt. There would’ve been forgiveness of all student debt, $1 trillion, there would’ve been a massive jobs program targeted at those under the age of 25, and there would’ve been a moratorium on more closures and bank repossessions of homes.
That would’ve been a rational response. Instead, the state has decided to speak exclusively in the language of force and violence to try and crush this movement while people continue this dissent.”
Occupy is far from over. Raising consciousness is but one step in the game plan.
A now classic video by Potholer54 showing with considerable acumen how wrong the Flood myth and by extension, biblical creation, is.
Thanks CBC. Let’s look at the list.
Here are some other notable campaign missteps:
1. Romney’s father, George Romney, then governor of Michigan was considered an early favourite over then vice-president Richard Nixon in the 1967 Republican primaries. But Romney’s comment that he had “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” — a reference to the military and state department officials who had briefed him during a visit to Vietnam — sank his support.
2. During a 1976 debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, and at the height of the Cold War, then-president Gerald Ford said, that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
3. In 1979, days before he officially announced his bid to unseat Carter as the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Ted Kennedy was asked by journalist Roger Mudd why he wanted to be president. Kennedy gave what is considered a long and rambling answer, that didn’t seem to answer the question. Many believe the interview severely hurt his chances.
4. After a disappointing third place finish in the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2004, candidate Howard Dean attempted to lift the spirits of his supporters at a West Des Moines ballroom. At the end of the speech, Dean, shouting over the loud crowd, said that they were going to continue to fight on. Listing off a number of states, a spirited Dean ended his speech by saying: “And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we’re going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Yaaaaah!” The ‘Dean Scream’ as it became known, went on to become the source of great ridicule.
5. During an appearance at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, in March 2004, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry was asked about a particular vote against funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” Kerry said. Republicans seized on the comment, portraying Kerry as the ultimate flip-flopper.
6. In the early stages of the financial crisis and with the Lehman Brothers, one of the most powerful investment banks, filing for bankruptcy, Republican presidential candidate John McCain insisted that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” He later clarified, saying he was talking about American workers, but he was skewered by the Obama campaign for being out of touch.
7. Speaking in Seattle in October 2008, then vice-presidential Democratic candidate Joe Biden seemed to suggest a vote for Barack Obama could spark international turmoil. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like it did John Kennedy,” Biden said.
8. In 2008, at a San Francisco fundraiser during the Democratic primary race, Barack Obama explained the attitudes some small-town residents in Pennsylvania.
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
You know what I’m not seeing as a “gaffe”? Not responding and not being responsible to the American people. Why is it that the US has no universal healthcare? Ask the citizenry, they want it. Does it come up at all? No of course not, we get the partisan bickering over how quickly to pay the private medical insurance industry. How about the jobless situation? Barely a whisper, but oh ho, talk about the national debt that most of the public could care less about. Now we can have a discussion about that.
The gaffe every US president has made and continues to make is governing for the benefit of the 1% as opposed to the rest of the nation. That should be on the list at #1.
This is a little out of the norm for the DWR Friday musical interlude, but what can I say I like the clip it makes me chair dance, so up it goes. :)
When I was quite young and much more naive than I am today, I was talking to my dad about drugs. We were talking about all the negative health effects of smoking in school, so I told my dad that I thought that it would be a wonderful idea if smoking was made illegal. Within a generation lung, throat, and mouth cancer would be decimated, people all over the planet would be happy, healthy, and less prone to violence. This could save the world!
My dad was quick to point out how I was in error. Drug lords, he said, would love nothing more than to have smoking become illegal. Making things illegal, without affecting the costs of production, would dramatically increase the retail price. The mark-up would be astronomical, making selling cigarettes very profitable indeed. He then pointed out that my grandfather, a dear and marvellous man, is addicted to smoking. Making it illegal would not magically make his addiction go away. The only thing it would do is make him a “criminal” and put him and his habit in jail.
Later on in my schooling, we learned about the prohibition era and how the criminalization of alcohol provided the financial backbone for a rampant expansion in organized crime. Another solid examples showing that making a substance illegal in no way reduces it’s use in a society, but rather just strengthens the criminal element and lowers public safety. Experiment failed, prohibition doesn’t work.
Now we have “The War on Drugs”. It seems obvious to me, from these earlier lessons, that having any drug be illegal is a dumb idea. Really dumb. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are, nor does it matter how bad a particular drug is for human consumption. All that matters is that prohibition doesn’t work. I point this out to people and in response I get a torrent of reasons why drugs are bad and how they destroy lives. To me this just begs the question ‘If this is so important, why are you employing such a demonstrably poor way of dealing with it?’
Then I get the speculations. ‘If drugs were legal, they would run rampant. Six year olds would be doing heroine, and society would be saying its ok’. This reminds me of theists who claim that, without god, people would go around raping people and burning school buses filled with children for fun. There is no reason to believe that these horror stories would actualize if drugs were legal, just as there is no reason to believe people without religion are all psycho killer arsonists.
But while there has always been evidence that prohibition was ineffective, there hasn’t been much to show that de-criminalization wouldn’t lead to the other ‘greater’ evils proposed by Drug War Mongers. The most I’ve gotten from an advocate of current drug laws was that, while the laws aren’t a perfect solution, they are the best solution we have. Enter Portugal. AIDS was rampant due to drug needle sharing, drug use was high, things were quite bad. Then in 2001, Portugal went rogue. The decriminalized drugs. All of them.
Nations on board with the War on Drugs were quick to predict catastrophic results for this radical move. Portugal was on the path of self-destruction. Soon the entire country would be populated by stoned-out-of-their-mind-gang-bangers, slitting each other’s throats to get their next fix for their un-controlled drug overdose orgy!
But then…somehow… armageddon did NOT decimate Portugal. Nothing close to what was predicted came to be. What did happen? Drug use fell. A lot. Portugal now has about a third the drug use of the average European nation. What about that AIDS problem? Down by almost a fifth!
Of course, it’s not as simple as ‘Make things legal then-POOF- everything’s better”. Treatment and rehab programs were made available. With the extra resources due to abandoning the War on Drugs, these programs were actually good. Plus, addicts, no longer fearful of persecution, actually used them. They actually committed themselves to helping people in a meaningful way. And it worked. Imagine that!
I’ve always been a huge fan of empirical evidence. There have been countless ideas about how the world could/ought to be. Admittedly some of them were absolute genius in there intricacy, detail, and internal coherency. I’ve come up with a few myself. But ultimately, that doesn’t actually matter. What really makes an idea worthy of pursuit is if the damn thing works.
The results are in. Societies always lose the War on Drugs. What happens if we abandon the war and decriminalize? Portugal has shown us the immense progress that is attainable in just one short decade. So far, most of the western world has not learned from the failure of prohibition, but perhaps it can learn from the success of Portugal.
Brief articles:1 and 2
Extensive article with data here
And for those who favour video:
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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