Administration are forced out and the armed Federal policing branches change style.
Bingo, you got your Brown Shirts. Then Congress, the Supreme Court, Governors, state legislatures, the media and anyone with family and vulnerabilities would be brought to heel by these thousands of thug officers and agencies like the IRS and NSA.
CHAIRMAN MAO AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT
And so, I am led reluctantly to the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and to the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The Preamble says we have the right to throw down a tyrant. The logical corollary of the Preamble is the equipment to back it up. Our Bill of Rights says you can own and carry weapons. Constitutional lawyer/professor Barak Obama supports the closely reasoned traditional interpretation, that the “well regulated militia” phrase does not limit that right to narrow militia purposes. This broad Constitutional guarantee of the right to arm ourselves is unique in all the world.
This is, as they say, serious as a heart attack. It is not merely hypothetical. Mao Tse Tung said political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The rationale for rejecting weapons registration is that government control would make rounding up any armed opposition too easy. Likewise limits on caliber and ammo; a .22 varmint rifle and a single box of shells would not be much in opposition to government goons. Therefore, Americans can accumulate military grade weapons and stockpile ammunition. This exposes us to the Jared Loughners.
Does it have to be that way? Could we have a more common-sense approach to gun regulation? What about the revolution in Egypt, by people armed with iPhones? Unfortunately we Americans aren’t like that. Despite our high-minded traditions, in conflict we are characterized by our NFL football, a contest of split-second teamwork and bone-breaking aggression. We are already armed and dangerous.
IT’S PEOPLE, NOT GUNS
And yet there is more to this than potential tyranny, more than weapons regulation. We need to identify the causes of our malaise and work on remedies, because the whole picture ties together. Synergy.
American prisons produce career criminals. It’s like being caged among rival wolf packs. No. Worse...chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins, known to exterminate rival bands.
With 5% of world population in the US, we have about 25% of the reported prisoners. Only countries like Russia and Belarus, at under 600 prisoners per 100,000 population, approach our Number One Imprisonment Rate of 715 per 100K. Canada or Australia or Germany, countries we would like to see as comparable for order, democracy and justice, are way down the list at 95 to 115 per 100K. The figures are even more skewed on race, with about 25% of American black males being jailed at some time. These numbers are so anomalous, so off the scale, clearly something is awry in the Land of the Free.
Drug addiction, single mothers, gangs, poverty, school drop-outs; these are symptoms, not causes. Moralistic scolding is fatuous nonsense. Yes, there are exceptional altruists and genuine success stories. But societies as a whole are driven by innate human response to economic realities of food, shelter, safety and pleasures. People act on expectations of outcome.
And what can we expect? Under the tax and regulatory frameworks of the last 30 years, the creation of wealth has progressively become a casino of abstract money instruments concentrating riches in an ever smaller circle of insiders. It is perhaps unfairly pejorative if taken personally, but as a class they are the insiders.
Political lobbying gives us unequal trade agreements decimating American industry, to the benefit of those same insiders. For the bottom 20% of workers, inflation-adjusted real wages have gone down. Other modern countries provide health care for everyone at half the overall national cost of our shameful profit-for-insurers partial coverage. Self-justifying indifference Balkanizes society into classes of I-got-mine, and can’t-get-there-from-here.
And we as a nation are not investing in our future. In 1960, about 20 percent of the Federal budget was for the health, development and education of young Americans. Today it's 10 percent and falling. Likewise science, infrastructure and energy. As China, South Korea and Germany invest in their futures, again insider Americans will reap globalized benefits.
Job loss was already bad before the insiders’ mortgage game collapsed; now millions of Americans are desperate. Statistics give us a cold image without their anguish. It is not a black and white picture; rather it is a sliding scale adding many more to those who never saw a way to the good life outside of gangs, crime and drug trafficking.
THE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR TERRORISM SUBSIDIES
America's failed War on Drugs is a central contributor to these multiplexed problems. It is the most pernicious stupidity in American policy. It is a failure like alcohol prohibition was, and for the same reasons. Eighty years ago prohibition profits made simple mafias into international businesses.
Today illegal drugs and the legitimate businesses captured through cash laundering are at least 1% of the world economy. Some estimates are much higher. This is huge. What could a smart crocodile do with a billion dollars tax free? Does it surprise us that this enormous market should make gang-life a growth industry for people sinking in poverty and no honest jobs?
High school civics class and the American Dream, where’s that at? From Toronto to Sao Paulo, Seattle to Miami, the savage Salvatruchas, the Jamaican posse gangs, Zeta, and others introduce kids to a ferocious lifestyle. The kids feel they have two options; join or die. If they are jailed, it is like a scholarship to Crime University. We create sociopath swarms in a subculture that values and rewards them.
Drug money destabilizes struggling democracies and their economies, causing yet more problems like illegal immigration. And billions of untraceable cash dollars go to our very worst enemies; the FARC, Al Qaeda, Taliban, and similar monsters.
GOING DOWN ENTWINED
Prohibition does not work, not to mention wasting our nation's police and military in this foolish campaign. Whether drugs are bad or badder or neither is immaterial. The point is that we are squandering scarce resources on a concept that already was proved a failure eighty years ago. According to the analysts, after a trillion dollars and forty years of War on Drugs, price is down, purity is up, availability up.
There is no evidence that decriminalization would cause a net increase in addiction. Dope is readily available to whomever wants it. The issue therefore is not availability, but causes of addiction.
Tobacco and alcohol are psychoactive drugs; all drugs like them must be under the umbrella of regulations and taxation, out of the underworld. They are in fact cheap products which support huge mark-ups, whether taxes in the case of the legal drugs or untaxed profit for the traffickers and terrorists.
Not counting judicial and prison costs, the US federal, state, and local governments spend at least 40 billion dollars annually on drug persecution. The foregone tax revenue is estimated at near 80 billion. These are probably conservative estimates. I have been unable to find out if they include US military interdiction costs. So we are talking about more than 120 billion dollars per year. And the real effective sum would be far more, upon exchanging wasteful expenses for a positive revenue stream. It could go a long way toward education, jobs, health, and community programs.
This would actually make a difference to the causes of addiction. The whole picture includes growing poverty, social milieu, hopeless disdain, HIV, children in criminal gangs, gun crimes, international terrorism, sex slavery, illegal immigration, prison crowding, racketeering, corruption, shaky democracies, weapons trafficking, the heinous massacre in Tamaulipas, and more cascading calamities.
These are not separate issues. Rather, they combine effects as dope and guns and enormous cash flow move organically, feeding off social damage done by the legal but dysfunctional tax and finance rule-set. Synergy.
We have two intertwined economies and societies; the drugs/gang system and the tax code/finance/insiders’ system, both running toward societal breakdown. We must redirect the money.
Drugs must be
decriminalized, regulated, licensed, and taxed. Take them away from the world’s criminal/terrorist economy. Finance and the tax code must aim toward real wealth and jobs, new industries, sustainable agriculture, the American tax-base, and not toward heedless avarice. Wealth is good, ambition is good; we just need to change the game so wealth accrues to production and creativity rather than sterile manipulations.
WHILE ROME BURNS
It’s difficult to make these truths understandable to people who don’t already get it. Our Congressional leaders are more ideological than rational, discussing illegal drugs as if some kind of moral line in the sand while sipping highballs and puffing cigarettes. Anyhow, pandering to ignorant voters is easier than convincing them to support policies based on science and statistics. We are already an international laughingstock for the science teaching policies in benighted Kansas and Texas.
As a nation we are playing with fire. Should present trends continue, we will have nostalgic policy driven by hacks and hyenas using misguided patriots to front for them. Their short-sighted agenda will not cope with energy/environment costs, global warming, epidemics, water shortages and other issues more fundamental than political.
Cutting investments for science,