Crime

I've long believed in ending the War on Drugs, and even legalizing many (if not most) drugs, for the simple reason that it would cut off a major blood supply of organized crime. I think that illegalizing drugs creates far greater evil than the behavior it attempts (mostly unsuccessfully) to curb. Let me say first off that I don't take drugs, and I don't advocate their use. But I think that the existence of black markets, which the War on Drugs actually sustains, is one of the greatest cancers in our society. If this were a truly moral society, there would instead be a concerted War on Organized Crime. I've always felt this way, but it was really made much more immediate for me when a friend told me about her brutal rape in the '90's by a restaurant owner, who is a member of a local Mafia. Because of his frightening connections, she was unable to seek justice.

By David Swanson

David Cole of Georgetown University and formerly of the Center for Constitutional Rights has been doing some good writing, not only on our failure to enforce laws against powerful people, but also on our out-of-control epidemic of incarceration which has struck those too unimportant to gain immunity.

Cole argues persuasively that we lock up a dramatically higher percentage of our people than any other nation because it is mostly poor African-American communities that get hit. He points out that when segregation was legal in the 1950s, African-Americans were 30 percent of the prison population, whereas now, with a monstrously increased prison population, African-Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of it. Sixty percent of African-American high school dropouts have spent time behind bars.

A beloved friend of mine was brutally raped several years ago by an organized crime figure in her city. A serial predator, he used his business front, a restaurant, to lure young women with prospects of working there. Eventually he would get them alone, then viciously assault them, and rape them, like he did to my friend. What's more, in addition to the horrific crime itself, he went even further in committing the foulest gestures of misogyny. But it didn't stop there -- afterwards he would slander his victims as prostitutes to his staff -- to cover his tracks. Still, the most terrifying part is -- he knew he could get away with it.

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of
your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose,
just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your
Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article
today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the
world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the
CIA payroll.

By David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Justice says that alcohol plays a pivotal role in two-thirds of all cases of violence against an intimate (a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend), and blames alcohol for contributing to 100,000 sexual assaults against young people every year. That's right, alcohol hurts more people than al Qaeda.

Of course, alcohol does not always lead every consumer of it to violence. Most people who drink alcohol don't hurt anyone. But a large percentage of those who do get violent have been drinking alcohol. Should we ban it? We tried that once with miserable results, and we've banned other substances with equally bad outcomes.

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

By Dave Lindorff

A new study of 1004 union organizing drives conducted by the
director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of
Industrial and Labor Relations has found that two-third of the
companies involved were violating US labor law by holding one-on-one
interrogations of workers, by threatening workers about their union
support, by firing union organizers or using half a dozen other illegal
tactics to defeat unionization campaigns.

Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner, author of No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition ot Organizing,
says that these illegal tactics by employers have been used to drive
union representation at American companies down to only 12.4 percent
from a level of 22 percent just 30 years ago.

By Dave Lindorff

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left, but
also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the US
government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on
the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion “black box” that is completely
protected from public and even congressional scrutiny, and on large
swaths of the Pentagon budget, which are kept hidden allegedly for
“national security” reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine
attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the “government knows
best.”

Arkansas State Democratic Chairman, Bill Gwatney, died this afternoon at the hospital where he was taken after a gunman entered the Democratic Party Headquarters in Little Rock this morning and opened fire, then fled. According to police Lt. Terry Hastings, the gunman fired several shots, "He came in and went into this office and started shooting." The gunman, a white male in his 40s, lead police on a high speed chase which ended in a hail of bullets between the police and the suspect, who was injured. The suspected gunman died.

Gwatney was a state legislator for 10 years, and owned 3 GM car dealerships. He was a superdelegate to the Democratic Convention. ABCNews.com reported that workers at the Republican State Party office were sent home as a precautionary measure.

Bill Clinton, Arkansas' former governor and former first lady, Hillary, called Gwatney a strong state party chairman and "a cherished friend and confidante. We are deeply saddened by the news that Bill Gwatney has passed away," the former governor and first lady of Arkansas said in a joint statement. "His leadership and commitment to Arkansas and this country have always inspired us and those who had the opportunity to know him."