A Gentleman’s view.

Active duty cop: ‘The war on drugs is a war on people’ By Stephen C. Webster

Speaking to Raw Story recently, an active duty police officer who asked not to be named threw down the gauntlet over the part of his job he hates most: the drug war.

“I did not get in law enforcement to destroy a person’s future because that person had marijuana or a pill in their pocket,” the officer explained. “Why would you want to destroy that person’s future and cause them great harm because of that? It’s not worth it.”

Like many Americans, the reality of the drug war was was nothing like what he’d been taught to believe in his youth. But statistics like a citizen being arrested for drugs every 19 seconds in 2010, and 1.6 million people incarcerated over drugs in 2009, were nothing compared to what he actually experienced in the front lines of the drug war on America’s users.

But for those officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect the public from dangerous, violent criminals, the drug war isn’t always just another part of the job. For this officer in particular, it’s much more than that: “The war on drugs is a war on people,” he claimed.

“I just didn’t see problems from illegal drug users that I’d been led to believe,” the officer explained. “Most of the calls that we get on drug use, as police, are alcohol related. Alcohol is a serious drug that can be abused, but I just didn’t see the calls on other drugs like I had been led to believe. I didn’t see these drug-crazed people out there doing crazy things… Even growing up before entering law enforcement, I was always led to believe that the drug war was meant to stop all these people from doing crazy things. But on the street, that’s not what you see. That’s a lie.”

In his view, the officer said that the American public would be much better off if the government would “regulate drugs and keep the control out of the hands of the black market criminals.”

“The cartels have been running a serious drug operation in America for decades, and I don’t think most Americans are really aware of it,” he said. “The money comes from the prohibition of drugs. These criminals are making their money because of the prohibition. If you legalize and regulate it, their profits go to zero.”

For more than two decades in law enforcement, he said that he’s carried an immense guilt: his first drug arrest.

“I was in training, on ‘the other side of the tracks,’ for lack of better words, and we pulled a vehicle over,” he explained. “The guy, I think he had a defective taillight or something. He was sober, polite, respectful, no problems, and my training officer said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s gonna have drugs.’ So, I asked if we could search his vehicle and he gave me permission. Within no time, I found a small amount of (hard) drugs, so he was facing a serious charge. The whole time I was thinking, ‘This is not right. This guy’s keeping to himself, not hurting nobody, he’s a peaceful person.’ I instinctively knew this was wrong. I changed my perspective immediately. This was not the war on drugs that I thought it would be.”

Carrying this guilt for his participation in such a system, he got away from making narcotics arrests and received a transfer to another division. There he worked for years, until one day in 2006. Acting on a whim, he ran a Google search for the peculiar terms, “cops against the drug war,” and rather abruptly found a new calling: an activist group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He’s followed their work ever since, and in 2012, the officer finally decided that he too must raise his voice against the drug war.

Today, he’s acquired a unique extra-curricular activity: an anonymous blog served up by LEAP, examining the innards of the drug war from a perspective rarely put on public display. If his superiors knew, he explained, “I would probably be terminated.”

And, he claims, it’s not just him that’s come to some stark, personal conclusions on the drug war: fellow officers are coming around as well — especially those who’ve been doing it for a while.

“I remember a case just here recently when an officer was trying to find marijuana on one guy, and another officer started looking around in this area where there’s actual crime, and he was kind of making fun of him for wasting time,” he said. “There’s plenty of officers that do want to get away from the petty, small drug arrests that distract them from fighting real crime, which is what a lot of them get into law enforcement for individually.”

Right-Wing Lunacy: The Shameless Lies Conservative Media Tell Their Audience

One benefit of the prolonged campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been the revelation that most of the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives live in a fantasy world.  In their imaginations, Barack Obama, a centrist Democrat with roots in Eisenhower Republicanism rather than Rooseveltian liberalism, is a radical figure trying to take America down the path of “European socialism.” The signature healthcare reform of Obama and the Democratic Congress, modeled on Mitt Romney’s insurance-friendly Massachusetts healthcare program and closely resembling a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is described as “statist,” “socialist” or “fascist” (as though Hitler came to power with the goal of providing subsidies to private health insurance companies).

How can otherwise sane people believe such lunacy?  The answer is that members of the right-wing counterculture are brainwashed — that is the only appropriate term — by  the apocalyptic propaganda ground out constantly by the conservative media establishment. A perfect example is a recent essay by Philip Klein, a senior editorial writer of the Washington Examiner, the right-wing newspaper owned by the billionaire Philip Anshutz:  “The Welfare State Is Destroying America.”

Klein begins, typically, with the fall from grace of America under the sinister Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the establishment of Social Security: “But Roosevelt was dead wrong that the program would help the nation avoid deep debt.  Social Security and the entitlement programs that followed its legacy of seeking to protect citizens from the ‘hazards and vicissitudes of life,’ turned out to be fiscal disasters.”

In the real world, of course, today’s national debt has nothing to do with Social Security, whose trust fund has a surplus that will last for decades, with the precise date of the trust fund’s exhaustion depending on the rate of general economic growth. True, the federal government has to raise the tax revenue to repay the money it borrowed from the trust fund — but then, the federal government has to repay all of its creditors, domestic and foreign.  What’s wrong with that?

As if to concede that there is no Social Security crisis in the near future, Klein engages in three intellectually dishonest maneuvers typical of right-wing propagandists. First, he talks about medium-term and long-term problems as though they were present-day emergencies. Second, he blurs the distinction between Social Security’s long-term fiscal challenges, which are minor, and those caused by rising healthcare costs, in order to make Social Security seem worse off than it is in reality. Third, he implies that “the growing debt burden” of the United States is primarily caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ignoring tax cuts, wars and the effects of a near-depression:

With health care costs rising and the population aging, America’s welfare-state obligations are bringing the country to its financial knees. If left unchecked, the growing debt burden will not only trigger runaway inflation and stifling taxes, but it will also threaten national security.

By now readers of the Washington Examiner must assume that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson deliberately designed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be paid for by federal borrowing.  Why shouldn’t Klein’s audience leap to that false conclusion?  After all, Klein has not mentioned the funding streams that pay for these programs:  payroll taxes (Social Security), payroll taxes and general revenues (Medicare) and general revenues (Medicaid).

If Klein were honest with his readers, he would point out that the main causes of federal deficits in the last generation have been the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, plus the fiscal aftereffects of the Great Recession, in the form of falling tax revenues and increased spending on unemployment insurance and stimulus programs.  But that would distract from the false impression that Klein is seeking to convey.

So far in this classic of polemical literature, “The Welfare State Is Destroying America,” Philip Klein has relied solely on rhetoric.  In the next few paragraphs he uses a few numbers, all of which have been cherry-picked to paint a picture of imminent national economic collapse, and all of which are misleading.

Here is misleading argument No. 1:

Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare alone currently account for 46 percent — or nearly half of — federal spending, excluding interest payments. Over the next 25 years, that percentage will explode to 66 percent, or close to two-thirds, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Ooh, scary!  These numbers may frighten readers, but they are meaningless. The only number that conceivably would matter would be the overall federal-state-local spending as a share of GDP, which in the U.S. is well below the average for industrial democracies that are just as competitive and prosperous. Saying that the share of federal spending that is devoted to Social Security and healthcare spending will grow over 25 years from 46 to 66 percent does not support Klein’s case that the welfare state will “destroy” America. These are just irrelevant numbers, thrown out to impress the ignorant reader of the Washington Examiner.

Misleading argument No. 2 follows:

Numbers associated with the nation’s debt crisis are almost too staggering to comprehend. Last month, total U.S. debt surpassed $15 trillion. But a recent analysis by Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff found that when long-term entitlement obligations are considered, the true fiscal gap is $211 trillion.

What Klein fails to point out is that Kotlikoff’s calculation for unfunded entitlement obligations is for the period between now and infinity. Even if Kotlikoff and Klein used the briefer time span of, say, 2012-2100, there would be no cause for alarm, because nobody is going to present the federal government with a check for advance payment of all projected entitlement payments in the remainder of the 21st century, due tomorrow.  In other words, saying the U.S. has a “fiscal gap” is like saying that you are in danger of bankruptcy from a “personal fiscal gap,” because you could not pay off the entire house or car mortgage today. As long as you can make the installment payments at a reasonable interest rate, you, like the nation, are fine.

The abstract “fiscal gap” arises almost entirely from the minor projected shortfall of payroll tax funding for Social Security and, more important, from the estimated out-of-control growth of healthcare costs in decades to come.  Change the variables, by means of new taxes for Social Security, benefit cuts or control of excessive costs in the U.S. medical industry, and the Big Scary Fiscal Gap disappears or shrinks dramatically, depriving right-wing hacks and left-wing deficit hawks of a club used to beat Social Security and Medicare.

Does Klein tell his readers this? Of course not.  He’s just throwing out scary-sounding statistics to stampede the yahoos.

On to misleading argument No. 3:

Greece, with an economy 1/50th the size of the U.S., is threatening the economic standing of the rest of Europe because of its growing debt burden, which hit 143 percent of its gross domestic product in 2010.

The U.S. is on pace to match that dubious distinction in under 20 years, according to the CBO, and to soar to 716 percent by 2080. Sustaining such debt would require raising marginal tax rates to as high as 88 percent, the CBO has told The Washington Examiner.

Shame on the CBO for misleading the public in this way. The experts of the CBO know perfectly well that the United States is never going to have a national debt of 716 percent of GDP or marginal tax rates of 88 percent.  Long before anything like these absurd numbers were reached, policies would be changed to cut costs in medical spending. Long-term projections like these are just scary stories told to frighten the public into fiscal sobriety, in the same spirit that a parent would tell an overweight child that if she or he kept eating, then according to a straight-line computer projection, by the age of 40 she or he would weigh 23 tons.

As it happens, the CBO’s own rigorous work undercuts the apocalyptic narrative set forth by conservatives like Philip Klein.  Here, from a CBO report of a few years back (the long-term projections have not significantly changed),  is Box 2, “The Effect of the Aging of the Population on Spending on Medicare and Medicaid.”

This one graph disproves practically everything American conservatives say about the alleged unaffordability of entitlements. Note that the aging of the American population alone would only raise the share of GDP spent on Medicare and Medicaid slightly between now and 2082.  The projected increase is almost entirely the result of excess cost growth in America’s dysfunctional medical-industrial sector and has next to nothing to do with aging. Now look at Figure 4, “Projected Spending on Health Care as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product.”

Observe that the cancerous growth of healthcare costs occurs chiefly in private sector healthcare spending — not in Medicare and Medicaid.  In other words, the cost problem is one of the entire U.S. medical industry, private and public alike.  It is not a problem caused by “entitlements.”

Debating the solutions would take us too far from the subject, although it should be noted that most other countries control healthcare costs by means of “all-payer regulation” — that is, government-imposed price controls — not by means of market competition, the right’s unrealistic panacea, which no other nation uses, for the reason that simple market economics does not work in the healthcare sector.  For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to reproduce a final chart from the CBO report, Figure 5, “Federal Spending for Medicare and Medicaid as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product Under Different Assumptions About Excess Cost Growth.”

Note that if the excess cost growth problem is solved, then the nightmare scenario never materializes, either in the near future or the distant future.  Indeed, in the last few years, partly because of the loss of employer-based healthcare by the unemployed, and partly because of reforms in medical provision, healthcare cost growth in the U.S. has slowed.  If that trend continues, then conservatives will no longer be able to claim that healthcare in general (not just Medicare and Medicaid) will eat up half the economy in 2082.  The right will have to use other arguments to discredit Social Security and Medicare, like the hoary old claim that these programs are fascist or communist — an argument that has never persuaded the growing number of American voters who depend on Social Security and Medicare for their retirements and for protecting their physical health.

Philip Klein concludes his Op-Ed about how the welfare state is destroying America with further nonsense (you can’t claim he isn’t consistent).  Reciting yet another right-wing myth, Klein asserts that because of Social Security and Medicare, the bond markets in general and the Chinese government in particular will stop lending America money and interest rates will skyrocket, destroying the American economy, yadda yadda yadda:

Just this past August, Standard and Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt for the first time in American history. Once bond holders abandon America, the nation will either have to dramatically cut spending, raise taxes steeply, or print money to buy up the debt — which would trigger massive inflation.

Where has he been since last August?  Even a senior editorial writer at the Washington Examiner should be aware that the downgrading of America’s credit rating was followed by a rush of money into American bonds, not out of them, in defiance of the predictions of the deficit hawks. Evidently the bond markets think America is the world’s safe haven and are not terribly worried about long-term American entitlement costs.

The growing debt burden is also a national security risk, because it reduces America’s leverage against nations such as China, which owns a substantial amount of U.S. debt. And the fiscal crunch will force devastating cuts to our military — far beyond anything contemplated today.

Somebody should tell Klein that China’s export-oriented growth model depends on keeping its currency undervalued and accumulating dollars, which it then uses to buy dollar-denominated debt like U.S. Treasury bonds.  If China revalued its currency, it would stop buying bonds to the detriment of its industries and to the benefit of many American exporters.  If this were to happen, the U.S. deficit would shrink and we would need less external financing.  Hurrah! In the long run there doubtless will be increases in U.S. interest rates, but they are unlikely to come about for the reasons that Klein and other apocalyptics on the right predict.

As for the Pentagon, the chief threat to the future of the U.S. military is neither the American welfare state nor the Chinese financial authorities, but the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which prefers round after round of tax cuts for the rich to the taxes that would permit the U.S. to fund both an adequate military and an affordable welfare state.

Klein concludes inescapably:

Thus, the conclusion is inescapable that, if America doesn’t end the welfare state as we have known it since 1935, it will end America as we know it today.

It may seem cruel to pick on Philip Klein, who is, after all, simply one of many minor hacks in the right-wing media machine controlled by billionaires like Anshutz and the Koch brothers.  But it is worth reading the right’s propaganda now and then, just to find out how it is that so many of our conservative fellow citizens can have been so deceived.

Michael Lind’s 

The Republicans: They Are Who We Thought They Were By Bryian Revoner

After watching this latest Republican Debate on Fox News, one thing becomes clear, and that is the very real split between the insane and the reasonable. For whatever reason, there just does not seem to be any middle-ground in this GOP nomination grouping or the conservative trademark overall. This is why the conservative voters have had such a difficult time trying to find their perfect candidate, which in itself speaks volumes about the rationale of the GOP mindset.

One of the worst things about being crazy is being too crazy to realize that you’re crazy, and that is the conservative ideology in a political nutshell. For the GOP voters to ask a candidate to be just crazy enough to satisfy their conservative dreams of going rogue through manifest destiny with 2nd Amendment remedies attached to conservatively friendly, Americanized Christianity, while at the same time being reasonable enough, moderate enough, and politically appealing enough to draw the interests of Independents, Reagan-Democrats, and dissatisfied President Obama supporters,  is definitely beyond the limits of absurdity.

When you peel back all of the rhetoric and all of the political ballyhooing, you are left with one of two choices as a Republican/conservative. One choice is based on what candidates like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich like to refer to as a consistent conservative, and the other choice is based on the only conservative alternative, which is what pundits like Glenn Beck like to call the progressive Republicans.

But when it’s time to cut some program not called defense, they all turn into small government Jekyll, but whenever they decide to invade, destroy, occupy, and then rebuild another country like Iraq, most of them will then turn into big-government Hyde; leaving behind political dysfunction for the dreamy, conservative voters seeking the perfect candidate in the middle. And unlike Glenn Beck’s analogy, to real progressives it seems like the only difference between consistent conservatives and progressive conservatives is the issue and which side of the political aisle that issue benefits.

For example, candidates like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum will all harp heavily on the ‘less-government-in-our-lives’ train to help big businesses and sleazy fat cats inch as close as they possibly can to a zero percent tax rate by stripping away regulations, only to revert back to the good, old standby of ‘big-government’ when it’s time to go to war with Iran to destroy what they think could be there or to try to retrieve what they know is there in our lame-duck, downed drone. Now ask yourself if any of this sounds like the party that’s honestly determined to cut spending.

As former Arizona Cardinals football coach Dennis Green said to the media about the Chicago Bears after they defeated him on Monday Night Football, “They are who we thought they were,” and no sentiment rings more truly when applied to the feelings that all voters should have about the Republican Party, because they are who most of us thought they were, and the debates have done nothing to alter that perception. If anything, the debates have only reinforced it.

If you still don’t have a clearer picture of the dangerously insane vs. the reasonable, consider this. Gingrich and Bachmann actually had the nerve to look a nationally televised audience in the eye and assertively suggest that wiping out certain judiciaries and judicial decisions, especially those that are prone to be more left-leaning judiciaries and judicial decisions, like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should be the job of big-government Hyde.

In simple terms, less-government Gingrich, with support from less-government Bachmann, stated his unwavering desire to wield the right to strike down any piece of judicial legislation that he didn’t agree with while in the Oval Office. He even talked about dragging non-conservative, activist judges in front of Congress to be lectured on the grounds of ineptitude. Now isn’t that a Timothy McVeigh calling a Osama bin Laden a terrorist!

So based on this overall point of view, if the court system–including the Supreme Court–didn’t declare something like Obamacare unconstitutional, a Republican led Congress would reserve the right to overrule that decision, even though within the next 2 to 4 years a Democratic led Congress could come into power and restore those courts and their decisions right back into political prominence. Now ask yourself if any of this sounds like the party that is looking to get big government out your life.

To the sane, responsible conservative, if they still exist, the only viable candidates based on a reasonable grasp of reality, whether that’s based on governing or trying to win the general election, are Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul. Now that isn’t saying very much, but you have to recognize who the rest of the field consists of. Compared to Santorum, Gingrich, and Bachmann, even the recently departed Herman Cain seems more reasonable.

For example, Jon Huntsman contributed one of the smartest lines of the night when he again promised not to sign any goofball, “He-Man Woman-haters Club,” wedge pledges. Romney talked about his ability to seek out and conjoin with Democrats in a bipartisanship effort to get things done, and Paul accused the conservative, war-machine of propping up the Iranian, nuclear weapons of mass destruction act, which is a recycled, left-over re-run from the Bush 43 era, to try to drum up Middle Eastern, Islamic fears to help persuade the U.S. to go into Iran to pursue ‘Operation Iraqi Occupation’ the Iranian sequel!

Despite the limited understandings of the gung-ho, conservative voters, there is a huge difference between being a consistent conservative and being a formidable, general election candidate. And until they are willing to remove their party blinders, they won’t ever be able to embrace the candidate who has the best chance to give President Obama a run for his electoral money.

And as bad as conservatives claim that they want Obama gone in 2012, what will it say about them if they purposely decide not to choose the candidate that gives them the best chance to do so? Does that say more about their alleged concerns over Obama’s policies, or does it say more about their crazed, disingenuous, agenda-driven lust for power? To the reasonable deductions of basic, GOP, politics; the agenda-driven lust for power is much more feasible than any fairytale concern over socialized medicine! When it comes to the GOP, they are who we thought they were.