As we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr, it appears we are a far less prejudiced country than we once were. Individual expressions of racism are less tolerated than ever, we have an African-American President, and African-Americans are increasingly being accepted into executive suites. Yet when we look closer, we find that Greedy Bastards have rebranded racism and made it acceptable again, by calling it "the war on drugs."
These statistics compiled by New York Times columnist Charles Blow and author Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) are mind-blowing.
Why is this happening, when personal prejudice is so much less common, medicinal marijuana initiatives routinely pass around the country, and illicit drug use is accepted enough that Steve Jobs could praise psychedelic drugs as key to his creative success at Apple Computer?
The modern drug war in politics can be traced back to political operative named Clifford White, an advisor to Barry Goldwater, who recognized that there were votes to be had in the backlash against the civil rights movement. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the war on drugs became convenient code for politicians who wanted to appeal to certain working class white voters with coded racist appeals. President Reagan used this political support to escalate the war on drugs.
A Federal law passed in 1986 allowed law enforcement agencies to seize drug money, and use it to supplement their budgets. Grabbing cash connected to drugs meant that police departments could buy more tools and training. Like the fee-for-service model in medicine, that pays doctors for performing procedures, not for making people healthier, the "forfeiture laws" effectively pay the police departments for making busts - not for reducing the drug trade.
In fact, if the war on drugs was ever won, it would be a financial disaster for law enforcement. There's so much dirty money funding law enforcement agencies that now, according to NPR, some police departments have become "addicted to drug money".
The second significant institutional incentive is of more recent origin, though it too has its beginnings in the Reagan era - the development of for-profit prison companies and their vast lobbying and political apparatus.
The Justice Policy Institute noted that these companies make more money through longer prison sentences, but you don't need a report from a nonprofit group to know that. Just look at their own investor reports. The Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison company in the country, lists as a business risk in its 10K to the SEC "any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them." CCA also told investors it would make less money if there were lower minimum sentences and more eligibility for inmates for early release for good behavior.
Putting people in jail and keeping them there is good for business. So that's what these companies lobby for. According to the Justice Policy Institute, these companies "have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts." They are large donors to state-based think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), who market harsh immigration, drug laws, and prison privatization laws to state level politicians around the country. While the rationale is no longer outright bigotry, the net effect, in terms of stripping millions of blacks of political and economic rights, is the same.
This is the face of racism today. It isn't the racist sheriff in Alabama turning hoses and dogs onto protesters, or the all-white development or country club, but the smooth lobbyist and campaign contributor discussing the efficiency of private prison initiatives or the politician too cowardly to act on decriminalizing marijuana for fear of antagonizing a powerful lobby. It's racism, Greedy-Bastards-style.
What's the alternative? David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has highlighted a very simple common sense approach known as hotspotting. He advocates for sitting down the gang members that perpetrate most of the violence, police, prosecutors, and community leaders to talk about their shared problems and the consequences of crime. Such an approach has dramatically reduced homicide rates in Boston and Chicago, and across the country. Yet these programs and programs like them with proven success in reducing crime are the first to go on the chopping block, because they don't provide the budgetary incentive that forfeiture laws do.
Today, the march for civil rights isn't about convincing Americans that racism is wrong. It is about getting money out of politics, so that the profit from institutional racism is eliminated. The Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs. Ferguson saying "separate but equal" has been trumped by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, eliminating all restrictions on corporate cash in politics. If we are to honor Dr. King, let us make this our generation's cause. It won't be an easy fight, but as he said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
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I'm willing to bet that anyone who claims that the impacts of systemic and institutional oppression are imagined, are not decision makers or hold power in deciding what systems are in place, what policies support those systems and how those policies are applied.
Those folks (the decision-makers...who come in all colors, shapes and sizes, FYI) know exactly what it is and they count on the fact that most day-to-day people perpetuate narratives that makes it easier for them to profit and harder to hold decision-makers accountable.
But you did manage to get in your jabs implying a racist motive anyway.
This article is just a brick in the pyramid of liberal propaganda Buchanan describes in his chapter "Catechism of A Revolution" in DEATH OF THE WEST, that I referred to above.
You scapegoat and deflect from the true causes of black incarceration: drug use and crime!
If they were to avoid drug use and crime and teen pregnancy, and pursue education, they wouldn't be caught in your alleged white-racist-prison conspiracy. There are many other immigrants of many races --including blacks from Africa and the Caribbean islands-- who move up in our society and don't fall into these traps of their own making.
No one forces them to use drugs or commit the crimes that land them in prison.
And I'm referring to that percentage of black Americans who commit these crimes. Not the tens of millions of honest hardworking black Americans who don't.
It's obvious that police are choosing to target certain groups for drug arrests. The scapegoat here are people of color whose arrests are used to pad arrest numbers and fill for profit prisons. On top of that there are huge sentencing disparities, even the extreme libertarian conservative Ron Paul who did not vote for the MLK holiday nor is supportive the civil rights act agrees blacks are discriminated against in the drug war.
Private prison companies may be in it, primarily, for the money. But the "end game" on the part of the political right has always been to accomplish what the abolition of slavery "undermined"; the incarceration of Black Americans. And, these laws have been very effective.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -- Thoreau
Get money out of politics by becoming a rootstriker: rootstrikers.org.
Okay...so our President could denounce this...and so could every rep in Washington, but they choose power and they choose to be bought and influenced.
Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices - 545 human beings out of the 235 million - are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.
Also, if you read the article, you'll see that drug use is about the same in the African American and White community. With 80% of the drug convictions for possession, why are African American's incarcerated at a rate 10 times that of the White community? I don't care how you parse it, the you can't get those numbers to add up.
A partnership is a person under the law, because it is a group of people. The law has evolved this way.
Unions can give unlimited funds to a campaign or candidate. An individual can spend his or her own money without limit on a campaign (think JFK, Bloomberg).
Before Citizens united, corporations set up pheny front groups to promote issues. This is cleaner.
This is what's happening;
"Put two rats in a large cage with adequate food and water. The rats will co-exist peacefully. Then, send an electric shock through the metal floor of the cage. The rats will attack each other. They know nothing about the forces that are causing their pain; all they know is that they are suffering and there is another rat in the cage."
The 'cage' being the Black community and the electric current being the oppressive forces of racism.
Or, do you think that Black people were genetically predisposed to act this way? That they are totally separate from the influences of American society as a whole and that all of their problems are self-inflicted?
Oh, wait...that would be RACIST, wouldn't it...?
"The REAL problem is racism. Anybody not in denial will acknowledgÂe this much."
Me:
But African-Americans are some of the most racist people of all, though they often deny it. Even a few black comedians have pointed it out.
The strongest cages of all are the gages of the mind. It's become a tradition in African-American society to criticize other black people getting ahead. And once they become successful, other blacks are always trying to pull them down. Don't try to deny it, because you know it's true. It's not a genetic thing, it's a *cultural* thing. It's BLACK ON BLACK RACISM! How can anything that's *anti-black* be considered *black*? The blacks who condemn other blacks for getting ahead are the worst of all racists, because they are racist against their *own community*. As if African-Americans didn't have enough stacked against them, people in their *own community* want them to fail! And that's a home-grown problem that whites have no part of, and that only blacks can fix.
The War on Drugs is a crime against humanity as a whole. It doesn't matter the substance or the legislation, the fact of the matter is that incarcerating people based on chemicals they ingest is ridiculous and arbitrary. While his points are correct and valid they are lacking in insight to the fundamental issue of right and wrong, freedom and choice.
At one point, an English King imposed the death penalty for smoking tobacco, but people still persisted. I find it plausible that the "War on Drugs" was formulated with racist intent but it's not wrong due to racial implications; it's wrong due to basic human decency.