Keeping the Moral High Ground.

A little reminder on the tactical and strategic value of maintaining the moral high ground.

t r u t h o u t | The Moral Character of Our Country: "What the revisionists fail to understand is that morality is not a tool of advantage for the strong and/or the privileged to be used and appealed to when it is in their interest to do so, and when it is not, to be modified, ignored, or manipulated. Nor is morality a prop, a façade through which we may proclaim our superiority and/or condemn others. If morality is to have any meaning at all, it must recognize as a fundamental principle the dignity and the rights - the lives and well-being - of ALL human beings. If we do not value persons, all persons, not just members of our particular community, religious group, ethnic group, gender etc., and respect their dignity and their rights, then all other things, whether it is property, possessions, national boundaries, the flag etc., lose their meaning and their value as well. Like justice, morality is blind and requires universal and equal application, holding everyone to the same standard. It is the hypocrite, the rogue nation, that attempts to modify the tenets of morality, or argues that it be ignored, or rationalizes loopholes (collateral damage) through which to pursue their individual or national interest.

Further, the refutation of revisionism rests not on moral argument only but on sound war fighting science as well. Contrary to the view of the revisionists, knowledgeable military tacticians who understand the nature of asymmetrical/counterinsurgency warfare, realize that despite what may have been the perception in the past, morality and military science share common concerns. Consider, for example, the status of noncombatants. While much mental effort has been expended explaining ('rationalizing' is probably better) that innocent deaths, though regrettable, are necessary and justifiable as collateral damage, both the moralists and the military theorists such as Gen. Stanley McCrystal, the commanding officer of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, agree that killing noncombatants is not only immoral and illegal but counterproductive to achieving the military goals necessary for success (victory) in asymmetrical/counterinsurgency war, i.e., winning the hearts and minds of the people. It has become clear, therefore, that morality and military science are fundamentally compatible and the move to abandon or 'modify' the former indicates a lack of understanding of the latter. Collateral damage, then, is not only morally disingenuous, it is militarily unsound and those who advocate that we abandon or modify this particular moral (and legal) criterion are both morally and militarily misguided and lack expertise in both areas of study."

Emphasis mine.

This argument apples just as strongly domestically as internationally. It applies to the "war on drugs, the "war on terrorism" and the "culture war," particularly when we see these situations re-framed in such a way as to make our ethical principles "more flexible" to "fit the emergent nature of the situation."

The author was pointing out the moral dimension of health care reform, and reasoned their way to this observation. Ultimately, all actions are governed by ethics, simple, broad principles from which we draw our morals.

Warfare, far from being a "special case" in which the "ordinary rules" do not apply, is a case wherein the the cause and effect dynamics of human nature are painted in blood for all to see. The Karma of war has sharp teeth and moves swiftly indeed; actions that are unethical, unjust and stupid breed resistance from the enemy and demoralize those who are supposedly on "your side."

This is exactly the situation celebrated by chairman Mao's observation that "The revolutionary swims in a sea of peasants." And that very understanding is being illustrated with rocket grenades built, smuggled and even fired by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis of no particularly fixed religious or ideological orientation more complex than "get the HELL off my LAWN!"



You would think that Republicans would understand that most basic motivation. The fact that they do not indicates some moral and practical confusion as to who's lawn it actually is.

And so I draw the circle closed. When one group of people sees another group of people in terms of a problem that stands in the way of achieving their goals - problems that can, may or must be eliminated to achieve that goal - what we have are incompatible moral structures. It's not exactly a stretch to understand why people targeted for elimination will determine that to be an immoral act, one which entirely justifies a response. Obviously, there are no better placed people to understand the depth of delusion here than - in the alleged words of Boss Tweed - that half of the poor hired to kill the other half.

When morality becomes a means to rationalize expedient action, instead of a framework to define RIGHT action, it becomes, at best, an impediment. It's certainly not an argument that is persuasive to those who, in examining it's tenants, can easily see themselves as being "the next group up against the wall." C.F. The Solidarity Movement.

Ideology counts, but it counts with a sword. And in the other pan of the balance, we weigh the Politics of Personal Survival. That which weighs more, well... I suppose in pragmatic terms, it depends on where the sword cuts - and it's a persuasive argument against using it at all.

Ideological movements tend to create their own antithetical movements which in turn tend to be traduced by opportunistic bastards who see them as a horse to ride to immortality and damnation.

It's an environment that encourages the development of absolute moral systems that work from xenophobic first principles. To mention two, but hardly the only examples, the Dominionist theocratic movements within the Conservative Evangelical Protestant movement and of course the equally un-scriptural and immoral theocratic Islamic movement exemplified by Osama Bin Ladin.

Each show distinct similarities in rhetoric and rationalizations to the equally delusional religions of Communism, Fascism and "New World Order Neoconservativism."

For both groups, "right" is defined as actions that advance the group and "wrong" as things that disadvantage the group - as defined by their hierarchical leadership, of course.

Frankly, I attribute much of the growth of these groups to the breakdown of the concept of the rule of law and respect for the individual, much of which was sacrificed on the alter of the Cold War by all participants.

But ultimately, all individuals of any intelligence must come to the conclusion that if a nation or cause would not hesitate to sacrifice them in the name of "national interest" or "national security" or "for the good of the People" or for the "advance of the Cause," they understand that the most fundamental tenant of the social compact with them no longer exists.

That fundamental tenant is that they are as significant to the society as any other person, that their value does not flow from wealth or position or status; that these things are role and reward, a product of a complex interaction between fortune, necessity, opportunity and education, all of which depends upon those that the pathological narcissist would dismiss as being "Useless Mouths."

When you are somewhere within the top third of the pyramid, it makes very little sense, even in an hierarchical, patriarchal, disorderly authoritarian sense - to blow up the bottom third.

It makes the creation of a different pyramid an imperative, for it defines the leadership as being unworthy, having violated the social compact. Self-preservation is the strongest motivation of all, and there is no higher cause for creating a social order than mutual self-interest.

Therefore, violating that compact is a misdeed that is both grave and self-defeating.

When you have large numbers of people within a culture who see their interests as being in conflict with a much greater number of individual, lawful citizens, and who see no problem with acting unethically toward those people, who rationalize their unethical and unjust activities with exactly the same words and reasons as do incompetent generals who are quite willing to "destroy the village in order to save it," they have made a fateful choice. They have designated more enemies than they can possibly dispatch, and, short of a dignified redefinition of the terms of engagement, they are in a situation defined long ago by the Great Sage of War, Sun Tsu.

12. Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this wise:--

13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral law? (2) Which of the two generals has most ability? (3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth? (4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced? (5) Which army is stronger? (6) On which side are officers and men more highly trained? (7) In which army is there the greater constancy both in reward and punishment?

14. By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat.

Note that the moral high ground is Sun Tsu's most important consideration. And here's another observation from him that is of immense importance to the current world situation.

2. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

3. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

4. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

5. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

6. There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

Glenn Greenwald on CBC Drug Legalization Debate

A toast to Common Sense in a
Hemp for Victory Mug by webcarve

Via CBC Radio: The Current

Ten years ago, Portugal had a serious drug problem. Throughout the 1990s, just about every indicator from the rate of drug use, to drug-related crime, to sexually transmitted diseases was pointing the wrong way. But instead of responding with more arrests or harsher penalties for drug traffickers, the Portuguese Government decided to decriminalize drugs including so-called hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. At the time, critics predicted an explosion in drug use and all of the social problems that go with it.

But according to Glenn Greenwald, decriminalization has worked in Portugal and it might work elsewhere too. He is a constitutional lawyer and the author of a new report for the American think-tank, The Cato Institute. The report is called "Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies."

I strongly support legalization of Hemp in the US and Canada, for all uses, granting the need for moderate and minimally intrusive regulation and such taxation as may be required to sustain the costs of such efforts. I can see no sustainable, legitimate justification for the continuation of the continental War on Drugs. Arguments against rational hemp policy are based on assumptions that range from the presumptious to the nonsensical and serve no public, humanitarian good.

That should be the single most compelling argument. But the economic and ecological benefits of hemp, as well as the potential of allowing cannibis back into the legitimate pharmacopa are easily as compelling. Against them stands decades upon decades of prejudice and pandering to narrow industiral interests.

Cafferty says the War on Drugs is insane

Lincoln on Prohibition by webcarve

Commentary by Jack Cafferty on CNN: War on drugs is insane:

"How many prison cells are filled with drug offenders? And how many corrections officers does it take to guard them? How much food do these convicts consume?

And when they get out, how many parole and probation officers does it take to supervise their release? And how many ex-offenders turn right around and do it again?

So how's this war on drugs going?

Someone described insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result each time. That's a perfect description of the war on drugs."

Cafferty is right on this. The more you look at the "conventional wisdom" of drug policy, the less sense it makes, the less savory the motives, the more side effects and the less social benefit. And let's remember that this isn't as simple as - say, outlawing chewing gum. It's not even as simple as outlawing the use of Marijuana as a recreational drug. It banned the plant itself - and made all products and uses illegal.

Many of those products and processes have the potential to form the core of next-generation, "green" industries - and if you will note, the United States has a conspicuous and very significant lack of domestic industry and innovation.

Hemp can be rendered into fiber, fuel, plastics, paper and engineered materials - all of which are sustainable. Hemp - before it was banned - was integral to agriculture and industry. The more one looks into the banning of the entire family of hemp plants, the more one begins to believe that the point was not to eliminate drugs - but to eliminate entire industries that, under free-market conditions - would have enormous competitive advantages over tree-based paper, petroleum refineries, cotton grown with petrochemical-based pesticides and so forth.

Perhaps even more significantly, there is little point to large, centralized methanol and biodiesel refineries. The technology to produce fuels from organic materials is far less expensive and unwieldy than petrochemical refining - to the extent that it could well make economic sense for individual farms, and certainly would make sense in any three-elevator prairie town.

The domestic security advantages of a widely distributed fuel supply that is not vulnerable to foreign intervention, terrorism and hurricanes is pretty obvious.

You need an oil press - a simple device. Cold pressed hemp oil can then be processed into biodiesel - or used on your salad. Meanwhile, the fibers are extracted and the leftover biomass is fermented into methanol. It's three crops in the space of one - although obviously, various strains are going to have greater or lesser utility for each of those outcomes.

Oh, it requires no pesticides to grow - and it's an immediate, fast growing crop that can be used, right now, to deal with excess CO².

Hm. I wonder what that would do to large energy monopolies? More to the immediate point, wouldn't it feel good doing it to them?

Hemp for Victory Template Sticker by webcarve

Social Science + Common Sense = Legalize Drugs

willie buck by ZINNPIXX

Yes, folks - you can think of The War On Drugs as lives and money going up in smoke - lives and money that could be doing something useful. That's one hell of a stupidity tax.

There are a great many reasons to object to current drug laws, both from an inherent, civil libertarian point of view and for their unintended consequences. Some of these objections are ideological and conjectural - but there is nothing more concrete than the increased risk of being caught in gangland crossfire, and the reality that legalization will take that kind of player out of the game.

CN ON: Column: How to Get Me to Shut Up About Drugs:

If prohibition is causing violence, countries that are less strict in enforcing the law should see less violence, while those that take a harder law should see more. Changes in law enforcement over time should be correlated with violence as well.

And that's just what Miron and two colleagues found in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Examining data spanning countries and decades, Miron and his colleagues found things like arrest rates, capital punishment and gun laws didn't explain the numbers. But "the hypothesis that drug prohibition generates violence," they concluded, "is generally consistent with the long time-series and cross-country facts."

Miron's conclusion is sobering: If governments respond to gang violence with tougher laws and crackdowns, they will ultimately produce more violence.

Among western nations, none has fought the drug trade harder than the United States. And none has a murder rate close to that of the U.S. Miron thinks that's not a coincidence. "I have one set of estimates that maybe 50 per cent of homicides in the U.S. are due to the prohibition of drugs."

The best way to make a significant and lasting reduction in gang violence, Miron contends, is to remove drugs from the black market. They can be strictly regulated using any of a hundred different policy models. But they must be legalized.

Of course, the police scoff at this. Legalization wouldn't hurt organized crime, they say. Gangsters would just move on to some other lucrative enterprise.

But this assumes there are lucrative enterprises available to organized crime that gangsters are not now exploiting -- in defiance of economic theory and common sense.

It's also contrary to historical experience. "We definitely see crime fall when we make things legal," Miron says. "

Now, add into the mix all the economic benefits that we abandon due to the most direct consequences of drug policy - the loss of an entire, green, sustainable and very important agricultural sector, in favor of petroleum based alternatives. There are very few crops out there that have as many uses per plant. Canada's relatively sane approach to exploring hemp production for fiber, oils and other uses promises to grow into a huge new economic sector in a relatively short period. It's fairly obvious that there is significant potential for an entire range of pharmaceutical applications.

Combine the dramatic cost savings with the potential and proven economic benefits and it's easy to see how we can afford to deal rationally with the people who's drug abuse IS a problem for them and those around them. And perhaps we can then also talk rationally about what drug abuse is, why it happens, and what makes the most sense, generally and individually.

One of the most critical undiscussed topics in that range is why people think using is better than not using. Usually this relates to either an inherent mental health issue - and making crazy illegal is obviously silly - or to social stresses that we might well be able to do something about if we were to speak openly about it.

One more reason to loudly ignore people who predict the immenent collapse of Society As They Wish It Was if we "permit" people to use the drugs they will use in any case. Because, well, that is the problem. Not pot. Not even heroin. It's busybodies and bad social policy. We can afford neither in our rapidly changing world.

Like tax cuts? Let's eliminate the Morality Tax.

I once boggled my somewhat socially conservative doctor that a "tax" could be defined as any cost that you were forced to bear that was an unavoidable cost of doing business.

It didn't matter if you paid it to the government or not, or if it was the result of law, regulation, or simply "common practice." Anything that was the unavoidable predicate of doing business - such as overhead costs of recovering from ten or fifteen different insurance programs, which for one family doctor, require a staff of five clerks - was a tax upon your resources, your time and your liberty.

Of course, all human societies are based on exchanges of this nature. We can, however, calculate the cost/benefit ratios with the application of computers and common sense and come up with an assessment as to whether a tax is fair.

Fair and reasonable taxation brings you as much or more benefit than you could otherwise get - or brings you benefits you could not reasonably get at any price as an individual. For instance, while rich people may complain that they are taxed at a higher rate than poor people, they benefit disproportionately from social stability and low crime rates. When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he famously replied, "That's where the money is." So high levels of crime can be seen as a regressive tax upon wealth, and they are extorted in terms of direct insurance costs, security systems, the requirement for personal security and gated communities and other fairly direct costs. This is aside from the direct human impacts of having one's liberty very severely restricted. Regressive taxes are unfair, and need to be rationally addressed.

A fair tax is one that is as low as possible in order to achieve the desired effect with as few consequential costs as possible. So one of the first principles is to not simply throw money away on things that bring no concrete, provable, positive benefit. To the extent that tax dollars go to such efforts, those taxes ARE manifestly unfair.

Unfair taxes impose costs that negatively impact your life or restrict otherwise legal choices without proof of overriding benefit. The latter sort of tax is the sort that breeds resentment and evasion, generates contempt for the law, creates black markets where none existed and spreads cynicism and corruption throughout structures that absolutely rely on high levels of personal integrity in order to function; the offices of the court and law enforcement.

The problem becomes more complex when a tax is not even seen to be a tax, compounded when the benefit - or supposed benefit - advantages one group while imposing costs diffusely, or worse yet, disproportionately imposes costs on an entirely different group of people.

I was talking about single-payer health care to my doctor, who reflexively resisted the idea until I pointed out just how much it would simplify his life and reduce his overhead. I pointed out that doctors in Canada maintaining roughly the same level of patient traffic might have one person on staff, or perhaps at most two, and someone starting out could establish a practice with one person on a part-time basis. In many ways, an inflexible adherence to an ideological viewpoint blinds us to costs that a more pragmatic vision might well sharply reduce, or even eliminate.

The idea applies to drug policy as well, and the more you hate the idea of paying money to support people who "don't deserve it," the more outraged you should be.

One of the more rational arguments against marijuana is that people that use it "will never amount to anything." Now, this is an opinion based on not much at all - I mean, I think we all would like to have the slacker record sported by that notorious pothead, Willie Nelson. But even if the presumption were actually true, the outcome of throwing casual users - and even growers - into prison for long stretches interrupts their lives and gives them a criminal record - pretty much ensuring the exact outcome promised by anti-drug crusaders, at a cost several orders of magnitude greater than doing absolutely nothing about the problems associated with recreational drug use, or even wide-spread addiction.

Indeed, the costs being what they are, and the punitive attitudes toward addicts being what they are, the current culture of prohibition prevents us from doing anything significantly positive about the real problems associated with drug use - and what small initiatives as do exist, such as needle exchanges, which do have very real and measurable impacts on disease and death are met with horror and often federal interference.

Furthermore, that federal interference seems at times to be driven by assumptions that have no foundation in science, nor respect for trained and certified medical opinion. The record of the DEA in regard to physicians who specialize in pain management is particularly troubling; it speaks to some dogmatic or religious presumption that anyone seeking relief for pain is probably lying, and that any doctor who believes such a story is no doubt a willing co-conspirator. That's an insulting and dysfunctional presumption that, aside from anything else, directly interferes with the responsible provision of health care up to the standards defined by the Hippocratic oath. Why? Well, in order to escape being shut down entirely, doctors are forced to manage pain with drugs that are both less effective and more toxic than opioid drugs.

Underlying this fairly obvious abuse of process is an assumption that, at it's roots, is of purely religious origin, that anyone trying to avoid pain - much less seeking pleasure - is acting against the direct will of God, who metes out suffering to the deserving in order to "teach them a lesson," and that - in it's most pure and insistent form, ANY attempt to relieve suffering is against the will of God.

There is a large plurality of people - including deeply religious, conservative Christians - who would name that attitude as being obviously malicious if not evil, for if anything is, the sanctification of suffering as anything other than an individual decision must obviously lead to the insult of conscience.

It requires the suppression of empathy for others - and leads, more or less directly, for people who see no problem with putting persons using drugs for the relief of pain in prison, claiming "A Greater Good" that somehow would justify individuals perishing in utter agony as an acceptable price.

This then leads us to question what possible benefit might justify that cost, assuming for the moment that it was at all defensible to impose such an obviously unfair tax. Hell, let's say that you reflexively resent the idea of being "forced to pay for welfare" on just the bare assumption that most people on welfare will not be capable or willing to "work hard" and "deserve" your charity. Well, if that is your presumption - and note that I'm not agreeing with it, but if it is what you assume, how can you possibly justify the presumption that you impose what may well amount to a literal "death tax" on a small proportion of the population who happen to need certain drugs in order to alleviate pain? They tend to have much shorter lives, may become suicidal, often become reliant on street drugs - because they cannot alleviate their pain legally - and that in turn leads in statistically certain ways down the social toilet. And you pay for that. Every penny. One way or another. Do you really think that's fair?

Untreated, or under-treated pain interferes with life up to the point of shortening it in a solidly statistical sense. The positive effects of reliable pain management are equally measurable, and they have equally measurable positive economic effects. Now, all of these measurable negative effects, personal, social and economic are supposed to be balanced by - what?

It is a superstitious presumption that people who use certain drugs are evil by definition, that their use is somehow "sinful" and that they deserve to be punished. Social theories are like any other - they should have some proof to be taken seriously; and certainly they should never be implemented as policy before there IS such proof. This particular theory has had the better part of a century to prove itself - but the data is overwhelmingly in favor of the Government getting out of the morality business.

Because that's exactly what it is. Moralism. A presumption that a personal choice to use certain drugs is inherently immoral to such a degree that it's reasonable to simply ignore both evidence, personal experience, science, social costs and consequences in the name of a false and failed moralistic assertion. And by "false and failed," I mean that it is a morality that is obvioiously and provably wrong, that believing and living according to it's stictures does NOT bring any inherent benefit.

But wait, it's even worse. Moralism is a religious presumption, quite alien to the rule of law, it must be rooted out. While there is no one particular church that benefits, it does indeed serve only to increase the social comfort zone and underline with state-imposed sanctions the moral teachings of a wide variety of churches and organizations with moralistic viewpoints. It has much the same effect, in practice, of having established a church.

The proof of the morality pudding should be self-evident. The moral course will tend to have a better outcome than the immoral course IF that morality is founded in an ethical substructure that has contact with reality and human nature, if it's correctly, intelligently and humanely explained.

But social conservatives are utterly terrified at the "chaos" that would ensue if that actually occurred, that if they had the reins of government wrested from their hands, if they were unable to send their fanatical agents of propriety out against the "freaks" and "outliers" that prove that their generational lifestyle choices are not superior by definition, that society would collapse.

Perhaps their social structures would - but as they are the most arrogant of all "Welfare Queens," and as the consequences, even to them is simply the cost of having to cope with being proven wrong, I think a chorus of "tough noogies" is in order.

I very much resent being forced to pay taxes to support the establishment of an effective state religion that claims the right to punish me for disproving their assumptions by example.

Of course, a change of this magnitude will have costs of its own; social and monetary. But everything I know, both from an ethical and pragmatically economic view suggests that those costs will be lower in an absolute sense, while bringing significant economic benefits, so we will actually have the funds to deal with the problems that do arise in a much more effective way.

Balance this against the impact of having to abandon a moralistic world-view that makes predictions about consequences that can only be made to come true by the perversion of law and society. I, personally, think it a small price to pay.

I am unapologetic when I assert that nearly any human action with merely individual consequences that is opposed by a social conservative on principle is worth doing, and the more clearly that opposition comes out of either direct religious belief or negative assumptions about human nature, the more absolutely I feel those assumptions should be gleefully contested. Quite frankly, no human progress, no advance in civilization has ever been accomplished save over the objections - and occasionally, over ramparts of dead bodies - of people wishing to impose a more narrow, more authoritarian and usually religiously justified vision that happens to be immensely satisfying and profitable to them.

That's what's actually so hopeful about our current economic crisis. We literally cannot afford to continue to pay the overhead costs incurred by indulging social conservatives. We cannot afford the prisons, we cannot afford to be the world's training ground for torture techniques that will be used to oppress, deprive and interfere with people who would, on balance, be likely to mind their own business and generate wealth were their views and life-choices viewed with indifference by their governments.

So by all means - let us cut taxes. Radically. Let us restrict government to doing things that are of proven worth and benefit to it's citizens. Let us reject all costly and impertinent efforts toward social engineering, let us eliminate all taxes designed to coerce people to behave in ways that please other people without regard to the harm done to those those direct or indirect impositions impose.

It's time for grownups to behave like grownups and demand the sort of government grownups deserve. Those that cannot handle that degree of personal freedom - well, we have prisons and staff, armed forces and some obvious needs for regimented groups of people with shovels and backhoes. Regulated environments can be arranged for those persons that need them and it can be done in ways that truly does advantage everyone concerned - but only if it's done with the intent to benefit of those who really need it, and not because we think they "deserve" a restriction of their liberties due to dysfunctional behavior, faith, color or socio-economic status.

Sane people reject punitive authoritarianism. There's a good reason for this. It creates a large number of crazy people that sane people are forced to deal with, compensate for, care for, avoid or arm themselves against. And you need no better reason than the purely selfish to support this. The arguments are far more compelling for those who genuinely think human suffering, intolerance, institutional racism and the militarization of a society in service of a war against itself is an insupportable evil. It is. But it's not merely evil. It's also conspicuously stupid; and we cannot afford to pay for stupid.

Presumed Profitable - Private Justice a Public Scandal.

Viewing with alarm - ten years behind the curve.

America Behind Bars: Why Attempts at Prison Reform Keep Failing

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted March 5, 2008.

In its 2005 annual report, the Corrections Corporation of America laid out what's at stake for a prison industry facing reform:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities ... The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.

... Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences for some nonviolent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release ... Also, sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitors who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.

The reforms described by the rather alarmed-sounding CCA mirror those that Pew and other advocates herald as a way to curb the growing prison crisis -- and it appears that lawmakers are finally willing to hear them. "What we're seeing is state leaders around the country starting to call time out," said Pew researcher Susan K. Urahn during the Post's online chat. "We are seeing activity in several states where legislators from both parties are saying, 'We aren't getting our money's worth out of prisons.'" So, for example, "for the same amount of money, you could keep one inmate behind bars for an additional year, or you could provide treatment and intensive supervision for several others -- and cut the recidivism rate considerably." But who will provide treatment -- and how about those electric monitors? Like prison construction itself, prison "reform" will largely amount to trading in one set of services for another.

There's more...

Others continue to defend the sweeping policies that got us here in the first place. "The fact that we have a large prison population by itself is not a central problem because it has contributed to the extraordinary increase in public safety we have had in this country," conservative sociologist James Q. Wilson told the Washington Post. Hardly unbiased criticism, given that Wilson was one of the intellectual engines behind the "broken windows" theory that helped get us into this mess. (And tell that to black or Latino families who experience the criminal justice system's harshest excesses -- from children growing up without their parents to parents paying crippling phone fees to reach their children. Or tell that to now-elderly prisoners living out their final days behind bars, whose threat to society is negligible and whose failing health makes them highly vulnerable -- and hugely expensive to care for.)

I often refer to the Republican theory of public policy as "The Bigger Hammer Approach." That is to say, if a problem exists, apply force until the problem is many thousands of finely distributed problems that must be dealt with by local authority or, of course provide an opportunity for "private enterprise."

Occasionally that may work, though I'll be damned if I can think of an example, but not when the problem is inherently toxic.

This approach, conflated with Regan Republican's mindless adoration of privatizing anything that isn't nailed down, and certainly anything that can be unbolted and shifted with a crane leads us to absurd situations, wherein reducing recidivism is the last thing on a prison administrator's mind.

We have to remember that while crime is harmful to individuals, it is also harmful to society as a whole. The peace and well-being of society is a Commons, one that it is, inarguably, the most fundamental duty of government to preserve - even at the expense of ideological purity.

We currently find ourselves with far too many people in jail, to the extent that it is symptomatic of a society at war with it's own people, rather than of any particular culture of meaningful lawlessness. The statistics speak for themselves; the overwhelming majority of persons in prison are there for non-violent drug offenses, often for life without parole.

On the other hand, kill someone and you might find yourself out on parole in as little as six years.
Especially if you happen to be white. Did I mention that the majority of persons in prison for all offenses are black or otherwise Non-White?

Well, such blatant contempt for the Equal Justice clause causes widespread disrespect for the law itself; it creates a situation where a large portion of the American people feel that the government is, in fact, at war with them. And with the rhetoric of The War on Drugs and the War on Crime, it's difficult to say "don't take it personally, it's just politics."

It is intensely personal and it's a particularly cynical and corrupt sort of political exploitation of people and their tolerance.

We have left the courts far to little discretion in sentencing and diversion, we treat drug addiction like a crime (and assume that everyone who uses opiates is a criminal unless they are writhing in agony at the moment of accusation ) and we are, bizarrely enough, willing to incarcerate someone for life at thirty grand per year, per bed, rather than five grand per bed per year for drug treatment. Even if they NEVER get clean and sober, even if they never leave, it's still a better deal for the taxpayers.

And you see, here's the thing people don't seem to understand: if I pay taxes to fund an institution, it's not entirely a private institution, is it? Indeed, it's doing what a public institution would. Perhaps it's cheaper, but unless Joe Taxpayer can look at the books, we don't know how they manage that, and we do know that the results are contrary to promise.

There's another point as well. Whether or not a fee for service goes to a government or private agency, if it's effectively mandatory, in order to do personal or public business, it is a tax. And as taxpayers, we have the right to expect a reasonable return on investment. When 1 in a hundred citizens are in jail - well, that's a huge blow, in lost earnings, in lost revenue and in human life. It's appalling. And appallingly stupid.

I think it no coincidice that it's a plan much loved by socially conservatives, who are willing to pay any price ( while, of course, not touching personal capital ) to ensure that their lifestyle and their comforts and their secure enclaves remain unbesmirched by productive citizens of middle to lower classes and, of course, of dusky hues and questionable politics.

But such arrogance and misrule on behalf of very few at the expense of the great majority and at the expense of the ruin of ten percent of the entire population causes anyone who cannot casually afford a cigarette boat out of pocket change to contemplate a brutal political calculus.

The wealthy argue that no progress would be possible without concentrations of capital - and indeed, that's an arguemnt with great and obvious merit. But the same concentrations of capital may be used as brutal weapons against progress. And for every Burt Rutan, for every Richard Branson, for every Dyson and Dean Kamen, there is at least one Peter Coors or Paris Hilton.

Capital concentrations are only one aspect of progress, and the web has proven it possible via the Dean and Paul Campaigns and in many other ways, to get individuals to pool small sums and make large, targeted impacts. It's also possible for the web to serve the same infrastructural and organizing purpose as large companies, governments and foundations, with greater efficiency, transparently and security.

The thing to remember here is that - and I pause at this leftist-sounding rhetoric, but it's obviously true in this case - the rich are indeed exploiting the working classes in order to create wealth. Which, historically, is ok, as long as it's done with some sense of reciprocity.

But it's clear they feel their grip slipping. Over the last two or three decades, even as the worship of wealth and greed and the lifestyles of the rich and famous has become an industry in itself, simple tools have expanded the ability for individuals of no particular means to build their own enterprises - everything from dotcoms to fast food chains to publishing empires. The actual cost of doing business has plummeted - and by the by, that's true both for "legitimate" and "criminal" enterprises alike.

It would behoove us, then, to concentrate on realigning our idea of "legitimate" and "criminal" with basic moral, constitutional and libertarian ideas of "right and wrong," the ones that relate to actual harm done to actual persons.

Or in other words, it's utterly bizarre that trafficking in pot is illegal when trafficking in oxycontin is not, if you have a patent or a license. Furthermore, even if pot WERE legal, it would be absurd to expect congress to create a protected market with price supports, so that medical marijuana users had to pay a premium for something they could grow in their back yard.

There are clear and obvious ethical problems with our drug and crime policies, and the thing about ethical problems is that "whatcha gonna do about it" is not a viable approach to dealing with it. Certainly, government has the power to enact laws, and people to enforce them - but in order to achieve any meaningful end that seems just to the majority of the citizenry, laws must have ethical intents and outcomes and they must be respected by the citizenry as being useful as well as well-intentioned.

Otherwise, the law will be recognized only in the breech, and if respected to any extent, via lip service at parole hearings.

And that, I would submit to you, is the present case - and a case that exactly to the taste of the prison industry.

Bush must be ON drugs to appoint this Drug Warrier...

AlterNet: Drug Warrior's Shadow Looms Over California's Pot Clubs:

The appointment has many in California's medical-marijuana community wondering if Russoniello would intensify the crackdown on the state's cannabis clinics. As federal prosecutor for the Northern District from 1982 to 1990, he was a cofounder of the CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) program, an annual series of paramilitary federal-state raids on pot farmers and their neighbors. He also accompanied Nancy Reagan to the Oakland elementary school where she first intoned her anti-drug mantra, "Just say no," in 1984.

Russoniello fitted in well with the Reagan administration's crime policies, which switched enforcement priorities from white-collar crime to drug offenses. (In fact, Rudolph Giuliani, then the third-ranking Justice Department official, interviewed him for the job.) The Reagan "war on drugs" whacked marijuana farmers and small-time black crack dealers with five-year mandatory minimums and intensified forfeiture laws so that someone caught copping $50 worth of dope could have their car confiscated. In a 1994 interview with Smoke and Mirrors author Dan Baum, Russoniello recalled that he was happy that the department was going to get tough on drug users as well as on dealers; that he believed drug treatment was a government-sponsored crutch, that methadone maintenance merely prolonged addicts' dependence; and that the widespread pot farming in Northern California was like "an open wound on our prayer hand."

Oh, well that sure as hell flushes California's electoral votes down the toilet for any Republican OTHER than Ron Paul. And probably Oregon, Washington and maybe more than half of Nevada.

All these years and I am still being amazed by Bush's amazing political tone-deafness.

Or doesn't he realize just how much small grower "pot money" is going to go to Democrats, statewide, at all levels?

How do we save the earth, our freedom and our culture? With the stroke of a pen...

Note: I've revised and bumped this post rather than write a new post covering much of the same ground less well. I'd also like to put it into the context of "Framing the Unspoken Debate: Metaphor, Morality and Politics," which I wrote subsequently to this essay. Specifically, all the ills I address below can be accurately seen as Moral Pathologies of both Right and Left.

First - read this account of a very bad black man's life. Consider that his story is one of opportunities and context.

Second - The promise of a plant that is condemned, not because it is a drug, but because it's related to a drug. And why is it condemned? Because methanol would have competed with oil and chemical processes derived from oil and therefore it had to be demonized.

I can also point you to reasons why marijuana as a drug was outlawed, at least in part. It had little to do with it's actual effects, for good or ill and far more to do with attacks on cultures and subcultures that depended on it - in preference to ethanol brewed from wheat, oats, barley and corn, ironically enough.

Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out is a good starting point, illustrating the original agendas and the lies that hid them. But reason alone is a fair starting point. Consider this one statistic; that half of all prison beds are filled with non-violent drug offenders?

Consider that imprisonment itself has many of the same disruptive effects upon family and community as does drug-use itself, even when the drug use is undetected and untreated. We have little or no idea what the impact would be if we simply replaced punishment with treatment for those who needed it - but we do know that even if we replaced half of all jail beds with community-based treatment, we would be saving money, and employing a better class of people doing it.

Of course, there is a shadow-good in the current system; it keeps people inclined to be prison guards away from those who are not. However, I think treatment is a better option there - or perhaps, just perhaps, a mind-altering experience.

But there is more to the war on drugs than power, even more to it than social control, even more to it than the "opiate of the masses" attempting to eliminate shortcuts to and supposed replacements for approved forms of spiritual expression and experience. Indeed, the only traditionally sacred herb that remains legal for ordinary folks is tobacco - but only in it's most addictive and least psychoactive forms. The more sacredly effective forms of the herb are kept very expensive, or legally unobtainable within the United States. Dominican and Cuban tobaccos are some of the best remaining strains of the herb that originally swept Europe with it's manifold effects, both sacred and profane.

Note that in effect, the enjoyment of this "vice" is restricted by price and access to the elites that can "handle it" - ordinary tobacco addicts are kept pacified with denatured and adulterated nicotine delivery devices.

All of these concentrations of power, of wealth, of doctrinal property are expressions of a deep-seated terror that obsesses those who are called to power and control; a fear of what would happen if "The wrong people" were to be allowed to act as they pleased. It's not that they fear what they would do or not do, so much, as they fear the inability to be sure what any given individual should do. And sadly, if you look at the lives of those most obsessed with the behavior of other people, you will find little forgiveness for their own human failings, foibles or even harmless whims. They fear their own Liberty as much or more as that of any other - for they know all to well what they are capable of, if only they did not discipline themselves against it.

So really, they forbid all things that tempt them, and make mandatory all that comforts them in the rather childish assumption that these things are universal dangers and comforts, while allowing that other restrictions that really don't seem to apply to their own nature are nonetheless best conformed to in public, for the benefit of those who might otherwise be led into temptation and folly.

So by this, and many other small but telling examples that you may glean from examining the social standards for the "ruling classes" across time to themselves and the stricter standards applied to "ordinary people," we must conclude that there is some degree of apprehension as to what might happen if the common people were permitted to simply do as they pleased, to whatever reward or lack thereof that they might find.

The parallel argument is to examine the ethics of choosing on behalf of others what sort of expressions and behaviors they will be permitted or forbidden, and what they must or must not do in order to deserve such permissions in comparison it to the supposed evils and harms that may arise if these behaviors are not restricted.

There is no case where a rational, defensible examination of any restriction of truly personal liberty can be clearly demonstrated to have a greater benefit than the harm caused. Indeed, it's fairly easy to substantiate that exercises such as the Drug War create widespread, systemic, crippling harm on a level all out of proportion to any positive social gains. The same arguments apply to attacks on birth control - and the reasons why they are problematic were well-put in Grizwold(Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965))



Ignore the nonsense about "penumbras," thought they are true enough - go directly to the Great Unmentioned Amendment. It's existence renders absurd any argument that there is no "constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy." Of course not. The Constitution recognizes rights, and recognizes some that the founders thought required explicit protections.

Nonetheless, the Due Process Clause itself is foundation enough, as Justice Marshall famously noted in a widely cited dissent:

In Poe, Justice John Marshall Harlan II filed one of the most cited dissenting opinions in Supreme Court history. He argued, foremost, that the Supreme Court should have heard the case rather than dismissing it. Thereafter he indicated his support for a broad interpretation of the due process clause. He famously wrote, "the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints." On the basis of this interpretation of the due process clause, Harlan concluded that the Connecticut statute violated the Constitution.

Shortly after the Poe decision was handed down, Estelle Griswold (Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut) and Dr. C. Lee Buxton (a physician and professor at the Yale School of Medicine) opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, Connecticut, in order to test the contraception law once again. Shortly after the clinic was opened, Griswold and Buxton were arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined $100 each. The conviction was upheld by the Appellate Division of the Circuit Court, and by the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors. Griswold then appealed her conviction to the Supreme Court of the United States.

There are situations where the overall social benefits of a minor restriction on personal liberty are persuasive to a person of conscience. But by making the conscientious choice, the arguably moral and considerate choice - indeed, the sane choice compulsory, we replace conscience with compliance and pretend they are the same thing.

I would use a properly-designed safety belt whether or not it were mandatory. I do it mindfully, every single time, even though the car I drive has a full set of airbags. It's part of the ritual that puts me in a responsible mindset for driving. And frankly, I do not care to include the "freedom" to exit my vehicle via the windshield as part of my personal portfolio of liberties!

Should we try and legislate responsible behavior? That is the liberal excuse for fiddling with people's freedom to make personal choices. In very rare cases, your more enlightened liberals see the idea of providing access to "better" choices to be acceptable; more often they try to enact laws they know will not be respected in private and certainly cannot be detected or prosecuted without some intrusion into constitutionally-protected rights.

In a trial balloon that could remove all metaphor from the phrase "nanny state," the assemblywoman announced plans last week to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for parents to spank their own children under the age of 4. Convicted fanny-slappers would face up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

Conservatives prefer to artificially increase the consequences of choices they disapprove of, then point to the artificial consequences as justification for advising against "irresponsible behavior." I do not care to concede any duty to be "responsible" to even the most benificant tyranny; at most, I will comply when it's not convenient or personally profitable to evade the tyrant's rule.

But neither approach to coercion of "good behavior" is any more reasonable; both take responsibility OUT of the hands of the individual and place it into the hands of some form of self-perpetrating elite, who, by virtue of recognizing one another as being worthy by virtue of some intangible and largely irrelevant commonality, such as Yale or the Episcopal faith, are of course better qualified to assume the burden of being responsible for the "little people."

Neither better motives nor more competence than those I cynically allege change my objection to any degree. Indeed, I disqualify myself explicitly as being of sound enough judgment to be either right OR left "enough" to decide what other people "should" be doing when they are minding their own business and enforcing my will in that regard. (I am, of course, always willing to consult with responsible individuals on matters within my competent purview.)

Distorting the consequences of irresponsibility, either by overly padding the corners of life or by breeding werewolves to prowl outside the "designated safe areas," Liberty Herself is raped. There can be no effective liberty with out the ability to make a broad range of choices, be responsible for the consequences of those choices and have those choices and consequences bear some understandable relationship.

The rewards and the costs of living as you choose, based on your own understanding of your personal needs and individual desires should be in balance with the choices you make. That is true Liberty and actual Justice.

Until that very simple concept of fairness is re-established, honored and insisted upon by every free person in this society, we will not live in the free and open society we have been told exists in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave."

That may be effected by the stroke of a pen. All we need do is choose - as a block of freedom loving people - to recognize that the Unenumerated Rights ARE the right to choose for one's own individual sake, according to one's own perception of individual benefit, and most importantly, the most important of all enumerated rights - the right to be wrong. Yes, we do have the right to bear responsibility for being wrong, to accept and pay the due and just consequences that always flow from a bad choice, whether or not there's any recognition of it in law - and learn from it.

A free people - a people who are raised to tend to their own and govern themselves - have no need for coercive government, or indeed, any shred of external government they do not actively subscribe to.

If government - as a social institution - were restricted to doing only those things that enough people wanted done and were willing to make an individual choice to support, it would still have more to do in theory than it could achieve in practice.

This comes to be from a simple precept. People who are willing and able to govern themselves in all respects that they are interested in acting need no external government. To the extent they wish to act outside of their competence or experience, they may wish to abate their risks, for the price of screwing up at the expense of other people is a considerable consequence. And ultimately, unavoidably and necessarily those who demonstrate the unwillingness or inability to govern themselves will have to accept some form of restricted covenant upon their liberty that will assure those affected by their poor choices that both justice and prudence are satisfied.

Nonetheless, the fact that some cannot or will not be responsible for the consequences of their actions is no argument against the majority of those who are responsible and do choose to cope with the consequences of their choices.

Many on the Right like to use the term "personal responsibility" in ways that have no relationship whatsoever to the concept above. They mean it in the sense that you are personally responsible for visibly conforming to some external standard of behavior and must accept what arbitrary consequences that may be imposed upon you for being caught acting in private against those precepts.

The general lack of predictable and just outcomes in our system of justice is due to a simple fact; our system of justice is not about you, either as victim nor perpetrator; it's about a form of social justice and social regulation. Any individual justice is at best an accidental side-effect to a process that is brutally indifferent to the harm it causes in the process of "sending the right message."

The alternative, we are told, would be Chaos. And most fear chaos, flux and uncertainty to the point where we are willing to tolerate nearly any restriction upon our rights to avoid that fear.

But fear of unalloyed chaos is universal that we can be assured that no great amount will ever exist; all we need do is re-examine our constitution, which is our primary social compact in the United States, a document that sprang in it's from the best and most influential minds of America and Europe. It's very much more than our own private compact; it illustrates principles that are rooted in the bones of history and every act of regulatory futility and governmental abuse that predates it. It is a document of vast hope and even greater cynicism.

It sets up a mechanism whereby people in manageable chunks may regulate themselves as they see fit in concordance, while permitting dissent within and, should that prove futile, explicitly permitting people to "vote with their feet," to find a State that offers a social compact more suited to them and their needs.

The Federal Government was created as a check on those states putting too many restrictions on individuals, and as a means of organizing matters that were in the common interest of all states - such as a common defense, or the critical issues of interstate commerce, which are not things you might think of - what can and cannot be transported due to it's effect upon the morals of the innocent, but practical matters such as the maximum draft of a barge, a common standard of time, of wagon-gauges (so that wagons and carriages will create standard ruts and therefore avoid perfectly predictable problems.)

In other words, when there must be a standard chosen in order for a market to exist at all, you need an authority on the standards to make an acceptable choice from a wide array of possible alternates in cases where competition between standards would be foolish - like railroads and electrical plugs.

These are all cases where my "liberty" to chose between a dozen competing standards may interfere with my effective ability to buy and use an appliance I need in the place where I live. Increasingly, the choice of a reasonable standard is outside the competence of specialists.

This is the sort of thing that the best sort of government does best has been proven to work rather well even in the effective absence of anything we'd think of as government.

alt.config is pretty much all the government that Usenet Alt.* hierarchy has, is comprised of anyone and everyone worldwide that has an interest in the Usenet Alt.* hierarchy and it operates largely by consensus and common sense. That is also true of Usenet in a larger sense; the only penalty that can be assessed against those who violate a Big 8 newsgroup charter is to lose one's ability to connect to the Internet, and that penalty is assessed on a case-by-case, peer-by-peer basis.

Those persons and ISP/Hosts/servers who are locked off part or all of the "backbone" have every right - and a fair amount of practical ability - to route around the backbone. Furthermore, if too many people are restricted from "the" backbone, they can and will build "the other" backbone.

This is a model for rational self-government that depends on actual, predicable human behavior based in individual self-interest balanced against other, competing self-interests. It works, and it works rather well. Not only that, it is not possible to sabotage and subvert it by speaking one way and acting in another; the system depends on the actual behavior of participants to regulate itself, and to determine where and when boundaries must be drawn.

On the Internet, there are no crimes of thought or of motive. The Internet cares only about traffic, and whether you are placing more of a load on the system than you are contributing. Nor does the fact that the calculation is sloppy, dynamic and designedly imprecise of any great bother to most. So long as the signal-to-noise ratio is acceptable, it works as well as it needs to.

It is a new world view and an intuitively obvious demonstration of what is possible. There is one great truth that history paints with relentless precision; when a general perception of a better and more useful way of seeing the world and interacting with each other becomes widespread, it will come to pass.

[Jan 24, 2007: Substantially revised and updated to correct errors and include reference to the California Anti-Spanking initiative.]

tag: Internet, alt.config, chaotic systems, free speech, ethics, social control, discipline, punishment, politics, sustainability, liberalism, radicalism, constitution, constitutional, choice, bill of rights, ethical realism, authoritarianism, anti authoritarianism, moralism, individualism, morality, pragmatism, spanking, responsiblity, consequences, justice Grizwold v Connecticut, Justice, 9th Amendment, Unenumerated Rights, anti-authoritarian, drug war, energy policy