I work this issue every day and am well aware of the racist nature of the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. But even I wasn’t aware of the outrageous statistics comparing the Drug War to Jim Crow era. Michelle Alexander lays it all out in her new book, The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste:
There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population. Read the rest of this entry »
Cable, satellite TV and other video providers have asked the government to intervene in ongoing fee disputes with TV networks — big-money fights that are expected to escalate this year as more contracts expire. Read More
So these people want the government to step in because their tv watching is getting disrupted. This is truly a new level of laziness. When the consumer gets lazy and begins to depend on others instead of themselves, problems arise.
This sort of stuff is actually good because it will make the companies more competitive and open up the market to companies that can do a better job of providing the services that customers want. The consumers only have to vote with their money and feet, when they will though, I’m beginning to wonder.
Cisco unveiled a new Internet technology Tuesday that it says will provide the ultra-fast data speeds necessary to stay ahead of users’ rapidly growing online video demands.
The new technology, known as “CRS-3,” is a network routing system that will be able to offer downloads of up to 322 Terabits per second, according to the company.
Translation: Well in Cisco terms, the router will be able to provide download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second for everyone in San Francisco, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second and stream every movie ever created in less than 4 minutes. Read More
I wanted to get a video of this song done by Clay Walker but was unable to find one. However this one will suffice, as the message here is what really counts.
A German woman fearing that Earth would be sucked into oblivion in a black hole failed on Tuesday in her court attempt to halt the world’s most powerful atom-smasher. The Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.” Read More
It is people like this that have let their close mindedness and false superstitions based on no real evidence deprive the world of so many technological advances. These people and their way of thinking are a detriment to society.
For thousands of years under the Old World concept of a static economy operating under bureaucratic control, human beings lived in hunger, filth, and disease. They worked ceaselessly at backbreaking drudgery to keep life in wretched bodies. They died young. For thousands of years, when not fighting wars, they managed to build pigsty shelters, to sow grain, cook meat, yoke oxen, and chain slaves to mills and oars. Read More
When the American Revolution had its beginning, living conditions had scarcely changed since the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. The colonial woman gathered her own firewood and cooked over an open fire, just as women had cooked since the dawn of history, and just as more than two-thirds of the women on earth are cooking today. She spun thread and wove coarse cloth, with a spindle and loom handed down from the early Egyptians. Every housewife made her own soap and candles and carried water from a spring or well. A crude millstone, dating back to ancient Babylon, ground the grain that the American farmer cut and threshed with knives and flails that were older than history. Read More
What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms “old” and “new” inevitably get confusing, with a new “new” every few years, so let’s call it the “Original” Right, the right wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formed in reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into the leviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal. Read More
It is not surprising that, when culture is in collapse, so too is the level of thinking upon which it is based. This is doubtless the social equivalent of the proposition that water can never rise higher than its source. For a civilization to be creative and to thrive, it must have a substructure capable of producing the values that can sustain it. Our present civilization is dying because it no longer has such a base of support.
Western society has become so thoroughly politicized that it is difficult to imagine any area of human activity that can be said to be beyond the reach of the state. People’s diets, weight levels, child-raising practices, treatment of pets, how he can express anger, whether one can make alterations to his/her home – including replacing a lawn with rocks or plants: these are but a handful of private decisions intruded upon by the state. Other than complaints voiced by those directly affected by the state’s intervention, there are few who consistently defend the liberty of individuals to live as they choose. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week Congress voted to encourage participation in the 2010 census. I voted “No” on this resolution for the simple, obvious reason that the census – like so many government programs – has grown far beyond what the framers of our Constitution intended. The invasive nature of the current census raises serious questions about how and why government will use the collected information. It also demonstrates how the federal bureaucracy consistently encourages citizens to think of themselves in terms of groups, rather than as individual Americans. The not so subtle implication is that each group, whether ethnic, religious, social, or geographic, should speak up and demand its “fair share” of federal largesse. Read the rest of this entry »
My entire adult life I’ve felt the injustices imposed upon honest, hard-working individuals in our society: frivolous traffic tickets, lying politicians, extorted taxes for things we neither want nor need, abusive law enforcement and the like. I’ve always been passionate about these injustices but not actively so.
After spending nearly a decade abroad living and working in Europe I found myself returning to a country I didn’t recognize. I found it difficult to acclimate and integrate into this politically correct, socially abusive, statist society; a society that seemed to be desensitized to police abuse of all magnitudes. The prevailing attitude seems to be: if the cops have someone in custody then they must deserve it.
Almost immediately I was confronted with the abusive nature of the new state order: driving to get a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning in Syracuse, NY, I was pulled over for talking on my cell phone. Having only been in Syracuse for 3 months I had no reason to believe that such a law existed. Regardless the doughnut feeder pulled me from my car, patted me down in the street, and put me in his car while he ran my license and wrote out the citation. It was humiliating and I felt like a common criminal. Read the rest of this entry »
The phone rings at 7 in the morning. The phone rings at midnight. If we don’t answer and let the machine screen the calls, the patients leave interminable messages, explaining that the insurance company already paid, that the second test wasn’t really necessary. It’s amazing how much detail about their medical histories these people will leave on the answering machine of a total stranger. Read More
Everyone seems to have a different take on how to solve Americas health-care problem. But notice that every solution offered involves some elaborate new system of government controls. Different proposals include a public option, mandatory insurance for individuals, government-supported health-care exchanges, government-sponsored efficacy research, government-supported co-ops, and as many other ways of dictating consumer and producer behavior as can fit in a 1,000-page bill.
More government controls, we are told, are necessary to solve problems such as skyrocketing health-insurance prices, lack of competition among insurance companies, the inability of workers to keep their insurance policy when switching jobs, etc. Read More
Does morality depend upon religion? Most people believe it does, which is a major reason behind the appeal of the religious right. People believe that without faith in a supernatural authority, we can have no moral values–no moral absolutes, no black-and-white distinctions, no firm demarcation between good and evil–in life or in politics. This is the assumption underlying Justice Antonin Scalia’s assertion that “government derives its authority from God,” since only religious faith can supposedly provide moral constraints on human action. Read More
If you watch any of the financial channels for any length of time, you’ll eventually hear someone going on about how grateful we should be for government intervention: “thank goodness the government stepped in or the world financial system would have collapsed.” I’m afraid this kind of talk is going to go on longer than the war on terror.
If the bailouts are questioned at all, the TV talking-head will reply, “yes but everyone was worried in the fall of 2008 that they would go to the ATM and wonder whether any money would come out.”
“Look how rocky the markets were after Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy,” they say. “Imagine if other big firms were left to fail!”
“If there had been no bailout and no stimulus, it would have been a depression for sure. Hey, it’s been bad, but if not for the wise men at Treasury and the Fed, we’d all be standing in soup lines or selling apples on street corners. Prices would plummet, we’d all be doomed.”
White House economic director Lawrence Summers said a year ago, “Deflation is a real risk facing the economy,” urging passage of a stimulus bill and taxpayer funds to bail out banks. Summers said that stimulus and bailouts were required for “our economic security.”
Do financial failures and falling prices mean the depression and stagnant economy that Summers and others fear? Read the rest of this entry »
