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Class War Reply To The New Statesman

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Class War | The 7 August issue of the New Statesman has a lengthy piece by Stephan Armstrong on “The New Spies”. 

Amongst an analysis of the private security industry targeting protesters at events like the Kent climate camp, Armstrong makes the curious claim that Class War was run by the security services in the 1990s. News to us.

Below is a reply from a member of London Class War to the New Statesman:

As a member of Class War since 1992, I was staggered to read a line in Stephen Armstrong’s article (the New Statesman 7 August 2008) on “The New Spies”. Your reporter writes:

“Like the state security services, which ended up running Class War in the 1990s after a hugely successful penetration……”

Can you back that claim up with facts, or is any old rubbish acceptable when it comes to Anarchist organisations?

We do hope you have not been taken in by 9/11 ‘truth’ activists (and ex-MI5 officers) Annie Machon and David Shayler, who have both come out with conflicting claims about attempted state inflitration of Class War in the early 1990s.

Shayler withdrew his (contradictory) claims about Class War at a public debate with Notes From the Borderland magazine at Conway Hall in 2005. He now makes a living claiming to be the messiah.
As for his former partner Annie Machon (freely quoted in your piece) the New Statesman should treat with caution a woman who has pushed red baiting pieces about Tony Benn, Jack Jones and the KGB in the Mail on Sunday, and who has worked alongside some extremely dubious characters in the nuttier fringes of the 9/11 ‘truth’ movement.

As a revolutionary organisation, Class War is bound to be targeted - on occasion - by the police and security services. Such is life - especially in a society with seemingly never ending funds for public order policing and the secret state.

That situation will not be improved as long as we have ‘experts’ with the limited or biased knowledge of Stephan Armstrong, Annie Machon and David Shayler. It will certainly continue until we have the sort of radical change this society needs.

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Climate protesters arrested after gluing themselves to bank

Friday, August 8th, 2008

guardian.co.uk | Two environmental activists who glued themselves to the front doors of a bank in London today have been arrested for a breach of the peace, police said.

A group of four protesters calling themselves Rising Tide held a banner outside the Royal Bank of Scotland reading: “RBS - cashing in on coal” and handed out leaflets.

The protest was part of the week-long camp for climate action, taking place outside Kingsnorth power station in Kent.

Protesters are campaigning against a new generation of coal-fired electricity plants.

The activists staged the demonstration at the entrance to the RBS oil and gas division to highlight the relationship between the financial sector, the fossil fuel industry and climate change.

In another protest, the Eon-sponsored Lego model of Kingsnorth power station at the Legoland Park in Windsor was “occupied” by tiny Lego eco-activists with a banner reading: “Stop climate change.”

The actions followed a series of protests yesterday when green campaigners blockaded a biofuel depot in Essex, unfurled banners at Gatwick airport and staged a “die-in” at the RBS headquarters by lying in a pool of oil outside the building.

Around 1,500 people have now converged on the climate camp site amid a heavy police presence to prepare for tomorrow’s day of mass action.

Protesters have planned an assault by land, water and air to “shut down” Kingsnorth.

One group of campaigners will lead a procession to the power station’s main gates, while another will reach it through undergrowth.

A third aims to make a secret air approach, while a fourth plans to stage a “great rebel raft regatta” despite moves by police to ban the flotilla on health and safety grounds.

Some politicians have expressed concerns over policing at the climate camp, which has been described as “heavyhanded” by protesters.

The Green party MEP for the south-east, Dr Caroline Lucas, the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes, Norman Baker, and the Morley and Rothwell Labour MP, Colin Challen, have written to Kent police calling for action to resolve the “increasingly threatening confrontation”.

They said the escalating situation had been caused, in part, by “a disproportionate police response”.

The comments came as Kent police extended stop and search powers for officers policing the protests yesterday.

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‘No to Olympics without human rights’

Friday, August 8th, 2008

A protester tried to set himself alight outside the Chinese embassy in Ankara on Friday as Chinese Muslims denounced human rights violations in China ahead of the opening of the Olympic Games.

About 300 people, mostly Uighur refugees from China’s Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, were seen gathered amid tight security outside the embassy to denounce the Olympic Games being held in Beijing.

While a spokesperson was reading a statement to the press, one of the demonstrators set himself alight, burning his face and hands before the police intervened and extinguished the flames.

The man, in his 30s, was sent to hospital.

“No to Olympics without human rights,” “Killer China” and “Save East Turkestan,” read some of the placards the demonstrators brandished.

The population in Xinjiang, in China’s far north-west, is made of predominantly Muslim Turkic-origin Uighurs, many of whom say they have been subjected to 60 years of communist repression.

Many Uighurs have sought refuge in Turkey, where some Islamist and nationalist groups lend support to demands for an independent Uighur homeland in the region, which they refer to as East Turkestan.

Uighur refugees staged demonstrations in Turkey in April when the Olympic torch passed through Istanbul.

Chinese authorities on Friday announced stepped-up controls on religious figures and potential “trouble-makers” in the Xinjiang city of Kashgar to guard against attacks on the Beijing Olympics.

The order followed an attack Monday that killed 16 police officers and a new threat by Xinjiang separatists to attack the Games.

Source

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Call to crack down on police taser use

Friday, August 8th, 2008

By Mark Davis | CIVIL rights advocates have seized on Federal Government plans for legal bans on torture to argue for tighter controls on the use of tasers by police.

The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, said yesterday the Government was taking steps to ratify the optional protocol to the United Nations convention against torture, which would allow international inspectors to visit Australian prisons.

He said the Government was also considering making torture an offence under federal law, which would bolster state prohibitions and might also apply to Australians overseas.

The president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O’Gorman, called on the Government to push for stricter state rules on the use of tasers by police.

Tasers - electronic stun guns used to paralyse offenders - are used by police in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.

Mr O’Gorman said they were extremely painful, potentially lethal and overused by police.

But Mr McClelland said the UN anti-torture rules and the use of tasers were separate issues.

“Clearly, if a taser is used as an alternative to shooting someone dead, then that is one thing,” he said. “If, on the other hand, a taser was used to repeatedly fire into someone for the purpose of eliciting information, then obviously that is a different situation.”

Australia has already ratified the UN convention against torture, which requires signatories to stop torture inside their borders.

But the Howard government refused to ratify the convention’s optional protocol, which allows for inspections of signatories’ prisons, detention centres and psychiatric institutions.

While neither the convention nor the protocol prohibits tasers, the UN’s committee against torture has said they can cause acute pain amounting to torture.

A spokesman for the NSW Police Minister, David Campbell, said the UN convention would not affect the use of tasers by NSW police because they were tightly monitored and were not used in questioning of offenders or suspects.

“The taser has been issued to specially trained NSW police officers and is used to subdue an offender who presents an immediate threat to the public and/or police,” the spokesman said.

 

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Waterboard torture a theme park attraction

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticise waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the US has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

“Waterboard Thrill Ride” beckons a sign, along with cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants who appears tied down and exclaiming: “It don’t Gitmo better!”

The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Anyone can see this is painful from 50 feet away,” said Mr Powers, who had previously been painting signs and storefronts in the area. “I wanted people to understand the psychological ramifications of this.”

Marion Tracey, 57, from New Jersey, said she found the installation disturbing. It made her think of her father who had nightmares after returning from World War II.

“In all wars, horrible things happen,” she said. “I’d rather not see it.”

Alex Soto, 23, said he thought it was a good thing for people to learn about waterboarding, but he added: “It is pretty twisted.”

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Why DNA databases are doomed

Friday, August 8th, 2008

By Glyn Moody | I’ve been against DNA databases for years, but I’ve always felt that the generic arguments I’ve been using were a little pallid, shall we say. And now, in what amounts to almost a throwaway comment, the wonderful Reg gives me what I’ve been looking for:

Although police are keen to bang the drum for cases where DNA evidence has proved vital, there are obvious privacy objections as well as fears that over-reliance on DNA evidence will lead criminals to use it as an alibi - infecting a crime scene with someone else’s DNA.

At the moment, there’s not much point doing that because DNA isn’t regarded as as an indispensable, infallible tool. Put everyone’s DNA in a database, and the police are bound to get lazy - that’s human nature - using it as a quick and foolproof method for finding perpetrators.

At that point, it will be worth seeding crime scenes with some judiciously-chosen DNA - secure in the knowledge that the rozzers will be able to work out whose it is. At this point, DNA begins to lose its value, as everyone starts sprinkling the stuff everywhere, utterly confusing the DNA bloodhounds.

And so, inevitably, we will be left with a huge DNA database, useless for its original purpose, built at enormous cost, posing an even huger security risk. Great. Not.

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DMCA Does Not Apply to U.S. Government

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Via Bruce Schneier |  According to a recent court ruling, we are all subject to the provisions of the DMCA, but the government is not:

he Court of Federal Claims that first heard the case threw it out, and the new Appellate ruling upholds that decision. The reasoning behind the decisions focuses on the US government’s sovereign immunity, which the court describes thusly: “The United States, as [a] sovereign, ‘is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued . . . and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court’s jurisdiction to entertain the suit.’”In the case of copyright law, the US has given up much of its immunity, but the government retains a few noteworthy exceptions. The one most relevant to this case says that when a government employee is in a position to induce the use of the copyrighted material, “[the provision] does not provide a Government employee a right of action ‘where he was in a position to order, influence, or induce use of the copyrighted work by the Government.’” Given that Davenport used his position as part of the relevant Air Force office to get his peers to use his software, the case fails this test.

But the court also addressed the DMCA claims made by Blueport, and its decision here is quite striking. “The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity,” the judge wrote, “Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government.” Thus, because sovereign immunity is not explicitly eliminated, and the phrasing of the statute does not mention organizations, the DMCA cannot be applied to the US government, even in cases where the more general immunity to copyright claims does not apply.

It appears that Congress took a “do as we say, not as we need to do” approach to strengthening digital copyrights.

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Peaceful Protesters Become Terrorists in a Federal Database

Friday, August 8th, 2008

By Patty Donovan | According to documents released on Thursday, July 17, 2008, undercover state troopers in Maryland infiltrated at least three groups peacefully protesting the death penalty and advocating peace. These troopers illegally sent reports of the activities of these groups to U.S. intelligence and military agencies. The Maryland chapter of the ACLU was able to obtain these documents through a Freedom of Information lawsuit claiming the state police refused to release the documents proving they illegally spied on peace activists.

This illegal, clandestine reporting occurred from March 2005 to May 2006. The officers involved used false names or “covert identities” to open special email accounts in order to receive messages from the groups. They participated fully in these groups, attending meetings and protests.

Within these 46 pages of documents is an account of an activist’s name being entered into a federal database of terrorist and drug trafficking suspects. This particular database is termed HIDTA for the (Washington-Baltimore) High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and was formed to enable local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies to share information on such suspects.

Activist Max Obuszewski, whose only “crime” was opposition of the death penalty was listed in the database as a terrorist. His “primary” crime was “terrorism-anti-government” with a secondary crime of “terrorism-anti-war protesters”.

According to ACLU attorney David Rocah, federal laws prohibit departments that receive federal funds from maintaining databases of political activities and affiliations and state police violated these laws. Mr. Rocah stated: “This is not supposed to happen in America. In a free society, which relies on the engagement of citizens in debate and protest and political activity to maintain that freedom… you should be able to attend a meeting about an issue you care about without having to worry that government spies are entering your name into a database used to track alleged terrorists and drug traffickers.” He called the surveillance “Kafka-esque insanity.”

The unlawful surveillance of Mr. Obuszewski and his group, Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, was exposed during his trial for trespass and disorderly conduct in a 2004 protest outside the National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. These documents indicate that the undercover state troopers from Maryland’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division infiltrated 3 groups. These include Mr. Obuszewski’s group: the Coalition to End the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a murderer slated for execution.

These pages highlight at least 288 hours of surveillance. Officers attended at least 20 meetings and a dozen rallies against the death penalty. Some of these rallies took place at the SuperMax jail in Baltimore. The documents reference a proposed sit-in at the offices of Baltimore County State’s Attorney Sandra A. O’Connor. They contain No reports of violence or even any threat of violence. In fact, they show how the organizers repeatedly stressed the importance of peaceful and orderly demonstrations.

A report about a demonstration at the jail contains the following: “There were about 75-80 protesters at the rally and none participated in any type of civil disobedience or illegal acts. Protesters were even careful to move out of the way for Division of Correction employees who were going into the parking lot for work.”

Even though these meetings and protests were carried out peacefully and in full compliance with all laws, the information about the protesters and their activities was sent to seven agencies, including the National Security Agency and an unnamed military intelligence official.

“Americans have the right to peaceably assemble with others of a like mind and speak out about what they believe in,” Mr. Rocah said. “For state agencies to spend hundreds of hours entering information about lawful and peaceful political activities into a criminal database is beyond unconscionable. It is a waste of taxpayer dollars, which does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers.”

((http://washtimes.com/news/2008/jul/18/m…)

When I first read this article, I was completely appalled. The inferences for all of us are huge. Are we already living in a police state? Are all of us reading this, because we are non-conformists, targeted and in terrorist databases?

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Bin Laden Firm to Build Saudi Arabian Prisons to Replace Guantanamo Bay

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Saudi Arabia prisons to replace Guantanamo bay
Pakistan Daily 

Saudi Arabia is to build five modern prisons in the kingdom to replace US Guantanamo detention facility, a new report has revealed.

Jordanian daily quoted unnamed sources as saying that US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Saudi officials are cooperating to construct the prisons which are to replace Guantanamo and US secret prisons in Europe.

Riyadh is to spent about two billion Saudi Rials for the project which can accommodate up to 18000 inmates, they added.

Bin laden firm and with the help of German engineers will build the prisons in the Saudi cities of Mecca, Haer, Demmam, and Qasim.

The US has been under pressure due to violating individual rights in its detention camps in Europe and Guantanamo Bay.

UN human rights investigators have urged the White House to shut down the Guantanamo camp.

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Guantanamo detainee petitions rights panel over torture

Friday, August 8th, 2008

A Guantanamo detainee on Wednesday urged a human rights panel that investigates abuse cases in the Americas to review his accusations that he was tortured in the US “war on terror” prison.

Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian who has been held at the US naval base in Cuba for six years as an “enemy combatant” without charge, became the first Guantanamo detainee to file a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The panel is an autonomous organ of the 35-nation Organization of American States (OAS), a multilateral forum of which the United States is a member.

Two groups that represent Guantanamo detainees — the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) — filed the petition on Ameziane’s behalf.

“Guantanamo Bay has become a global symbol of impunity and inhumanity,” CEJIL attorney Michael Camilleri said in a statement.

“Now an international body will have the opportunity to demand that the United States hold accountable those responsible for Mr. Ameziane’s torture and abuse,” he said.

Ameziane alleges that he was subjected to a form of waterboarding, with guards holding his head back and placing a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him.

In another instance, his entire body was sprayed with cayenne pepper and then hosed down with pepper to simulate the skin-burning effect of pepper spray, CCR and CEJIL said.

“Guards then cuffed and chained him and took him to an interrogation room, where he was left for several hours, writhing in pain, his clothes soaked while air conditioning blasted in the room, and his body burning from the pepper spray,” they said.

The detainee also charges that he has been held in solitary confinement without a window for the past year.

Ameziane fled Algeria about 16 years ago to “escape persecution and seek a better life,” CCR and CEJIL said. He lived in Austria and Canada, where he was denied political asylum.

He then traveled to Afghanistan, where he was captured by corrupt local police while trying to cross the border into Pakistan and sold to US military forces for a bounty, according to the two groups.

AFP American Edition

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Anthrax case against bio-weapons expert ’staggering for lack of evidence’

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The case against the lone suspect in the 2001 anthrax case, who killed himself last week, has been blasted by his lawyer as based on nothing but “innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence”. 

By Guillaume Simard-Morissette 

Justice Department officials claim that Bruce Ivins, 62, a US government bio-weapons scientist, posted envelopes containing anthrax spores to members of Congress and the media in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, spreading fear across America.

Mr Ivins took an overdose of sleeping pills after what his family and friends describe as persecution by the FBI, which told him he was about to be charged with murder. He worked at the Fort Detrick military base facility in Frederick, Maryland.

On Wednesday, Justice Department officials made their evidence against Mr Ivins public. Their case rested primarily on his possession of strands of anthrax genetically virtually identical to those used in the attacks, work in the laboratory at late hours during the months of the attacks and a history of paranoia.

Paul Kemp, Mr Ivins’s lawyer, described the case as “an orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence - all contorted to create the illusion of guilt by Dr Ivins”.

Prosecutors could not place Mr Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, where the letters were posted and there was no match between Ivins’s handwriting and that found in the anthrax laden letters.

Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey questioned the government’s insistence that the complex attack could have been orchestrated by one individual.

Those close to Mr Ivins have suggested he was driven to suicide by investigators in much the same way as David Kelly, the British biological warfare expert, killed himself in 2003 amid a furore over justifications for the Iraq war.

The $15 million investigation lasted five years and led to a fruitless investigation of Steven Hatfill, another Fort Detrick researcher.

Mr Hatfill’s lawsuit against the US government was resolved in June with a $5.8 million settlement.

During a memorial service for Ivins on Wednesday at the Fort Detrick base, attended by hundreds of family, friends and colleagues, the dead researcher, who was married with two children, was praised as a dedicated servant to his country and a mentor to young scientists.

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US accused of backing terrorism in Pakistan

Friday, August 8th, 2008

Indo-Asian News Service | Pakistan has accused the US of backing militancy within the country, saying this goes against the grain of the Washington-led global war against terror.

 

Quoting “impeccable official sources”, The News reported on Tuesday that “strong evidence and circumstantial evidence of American acquiescence to terrorism inside Pakistan” was outlined by President Pervez Musharraf, army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj in separate meetings with two senior US officials in Islamabad on July 12.

The visit of the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen and CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes, “carrying what were seen as India-influenced intelligence inputs had hardened the resolve of Pakistan’s security establishment to keep supreme Pakistan’s national security interest even if it meant straining ties with the US and NATO”, the newspaper said.

It quoted a senior official with direct knowledge of the meetings as saying that Pakistan’s military leadership and the president asked the American visitors “not to distinguish between a terrorist for the United States and Afghanistan and a terrorist for Pakistan”.

“For reasons best known to Langley, the CIA headquarters, as well as the Pentagon, Pakistani officials say the Americans were not interested in disrupting the Kabul-based fountainhead of terrorism in Balochistan nor do they want to allocate the marvellous Predator (unmanned armed aerial combat vehicle) resource to neutralise the kingpin of suicide bombings against the Pakistani military establishment now hiding near the Pakistan-Afghan border,” The News said.

During the meetings, the US officials were also asked why the CIA-run Predators and the US military did not swing into action when they were provided the exact location of tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud, “Pakistan’s enemy number one and the mastermind of almost every suicide operation against the Pakistan Army and the ISI since June 2006″, the newspaper added.

One such precise piece of information was made available to the CIA May 24 when Mehsud drove to a remote South Waziristan mountain post in his Toyota Land Cruiser to address the media and returned to his safe abode.

“The United States military has the capacity to direct a missile to a precise location at very short notice as it has done close to 20 times in the last few years to hit Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan,” The News noted.

Pakistani officials, according to the newspaper, “have long been intrigued by the presence of highly encrypted communications gear with Mehsud. This communication gear enables him to collect real-time information on Pakistani troop movements from an unidentified foreign source without being intercepted by Pakistani intelligence”.

Mullen and the CIA official were in Pakistan on an unannounced visit July 12 to present what the US media claimed was evidence of the ISI’s ties with Taliban commander Maulana Sirajuddin Haqqani and the alleged involvement of Pakistani agents in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

“Pakistani military leaders rubbished the American information and evidence on the Kabul bombing but provided some rationale for keeping a window open with Haqqani, just as the British government had decided to open talks with some Taliban leaders in southern Afghanistan last year,” The News said.

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White House press corps plane detained in China

Friday, August 8th, 2008

BEIJING - A charter airplane carrying the White House press corps was detained for nearly three hours Friday at Beijing’s international airport not long after President Bush arrived to attend the Olympic Games.

The flight crew of the Northwest Airlines 747 had been expecting to park at a VIP terminal, but after landing was instead directed by the control tower to a normal international gate.

White House officials would say only there were “logistical problems” getting clearance to unload the aircraft. The flight crew was told the Chinese were insisting that all luggage be inspected.

Typically, the White House press charter receives the “custom of the port,” meaning reporters, photographers and camera crews are able to get off the plane right after landing, board buses and head to their hotels and work areas while U.S. State Department officials process immigration and customs details.

Delays on landing have happened before, but no one on the plane was able to recall one this long.

The plane landed at 2:10 a.m. local time. Passengers finally were able to get off the plane shortly after 5 a.m. However, they were made to pass through Chinese immigration control individually, and baggage was still being screened.

Many of those on the plane — roughly 40 journalists — were due to cover the president’s first appearance of the day: the opening of the new Beijing U.S. Embassy complex.

AP

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Candidates for Sale

Friday, August 8th, 2008

What do Obama and McCain have in common? The same big donors, who will expect to have their way no matter who wins 

Remember the total, hideous, inexcusable absence of oversight that has been the great hallmark of George Bush’s America for almost eight years now? Well, now we’re getting to see that same regulatory malfeasance applied to yet another cornerstone of our political system. The Federal Election Commission — the body that supposedly enforces campaign-finance laws in this country — has been out of business for more than six months. That’s because Congress was dragging its feet over confirmation hearings for new FEC commissioners, leaving the agency without a quorum. The commission just started work again for the first time on July 10th under its new chairman, Donald McGahn, a classic Republican Party yahoo whose chief qualifications include representing Tom DeLay, the corrupt ex-speaker of the House, in matters of campaign finance.

Apart from the obvious absurdity of not having a functioning election-policing mechanism in an election year in the world’s richest democracy, the late start by the FEC makes it almost impossible for the agency to do its job. The commission has a long-standing reluctance to take action in the last months before a vote, a policy designed to help prevent federal regulators from influencing election outcomes. Normally, the FEC tries to root out infractions and loopholes — fining campaigns for incomplete reporting, or for taking shortcuts around spending limits — in the early months of a campaign season. But that ship sailed way too long ago to take the stink off the 2008 race.

“The time for setting the ground rules was earlier,” says Craig Holman, a lobbyist with the watchdog group Public Citizen. “There isn’t time to do much now.”

That’s especially true given the magnitude of what we’re dealing with here: the biggest pile of political contributions in the history of free elections, nearly a billion dollars given to presidential candidates in this season alone. Because the FEC has been dead in the water for so long, it’s likely that we’ll still be in the dark about a large chunk of this record manure pile of campaign contributions when we go to vote in November.

But that doesn’t mean that a little sifting through campaign records doesn’t tell us quite a lot about who’s backing whom in these races. The truth is that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain are being inundated with cash from more or less exactly the same gorgons of the corporate scene. From Wall Street to the Big Oil powerhouses to the military-industrial complex, America’s fat-cat business leaders know that the Animal House-style party of the last eight years that made almost all of them rich with bonuses, government contracts and bubble profits is about to come to an end, and someone is going to have to pay to clean up the mess. They want that someone to be you, not them, and they’ve spared no expense to make sure both presidential candidates will be there to bail them out next year.

They’re succeeding. Both would-be presidents have already sold us out. They’ve taken the money and run — completing the cyclical transformation of the American political narrative from one of monopolistic Republican iniquity to an even more depressing tale about the overweening power of corporate money and the essentially fictitious nature of our two-party system.

In layman’s terms, we’ve gone from being screwed to being fucked. Who knows — maybe Barack Obama will surprise us if he wins the election. But if you look at the money, it doesn’t look good.

Continue http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/22210615/candidates_for_sale/2

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America’s never-ending prohibition

Friday, August 8th, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - America’s alcohol prohibition lasted 13 years, filled the country’s prisons, inspired contempt for the law among millions, bred corruption and produced Al Capone. What it did not do was keep Americans from drinking.

 

America’s marijuana prohibition drew into its 72nd year this month. It has created a huge underground industry catering to users, helped the U.S. prison population balloon into the world’s largest, and diverted the resources of American law enforcement. What it has not done is keep Americans from using marijuana.

 

On the contrary. Since 1937, the year marijuana was outlawed, its use in the United States has gone up by 4,000 percent, according to the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington-based lobby group which advocates regulating the drug similar to alcohol. A recent World Health Organization study of marijuana use in 17 countries placed Americans at the top of the list.

 

The 1920-1933 prohibition on the sale, production and transportation of alcohol is now seen as a dismal failure of social engineering. Will the prohibition on marijuana ever be seen in a similar light?

 

For the first time in a generation, there is a bill before Congress that would eliminate federal penalties “for the personal use of marijuana by responsible adults.” But not even the congressman who introduced the bill, Democrat Barney Frank, sees bright prospects for swift passage.

 

The last time the U.S. Congress dealt with legislation that would have decriminalized marijuana was in 1978, when a bill introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy was passed by the Senate but never got to a vote in the House.

 

The case for legalizing marijuana, the most widely used drug after alcohol and tobacco, rests on several planks - the most obvious being that prohibition simply hasn’t worked despite extraordinarily labor-intensive and costly government efforts. In 2006, the last year for which figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are available, 830,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges, most of them for possession rather than trafficking. 

That works out at a marijuana arrest every 38 seconds. A study last year estimated the cost of these arrests at $10.7 billion.

 

“This is an enormous waste of law enforcement resources that should be focused on violent and serious crime,” says Allen St. Pierre, who heads the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the marijuana smokers’ lobby in Washington.

 

NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN USE AND ABUSE

 

“With alcohol we acknowledge the distinction between use and abuse, and we focus our law enforcement on efforts to stop irresponsible use. We do not arrest or jail responsible drinkers. That should be our policy for marijuana as well.”

 

The Bush administration’s drug czar, John Walters, will have none of this. He talks about marijuana in terms reminiscent of the apocalyptic warnings issued by Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Bureau of Narcotics in the 1930s and a driving force behind the 1937 marijuana prohibition.

 

Anslinger deemed marijuana “an addictive drug which induces in its users insanity, criminality and death.” Walters often takes issue with “the perception that marijuana is about fun and freedom. It isn’t. It’s about dependency, disease and dysfunction.”

 

(For a vivid portrayal of the dysfunction Walters warns about, see a mock documentary produced for the White House Office of National Drug Policy. It is entitled Stoners in the Mist, a play on the 1988 film on mountain gorillas in the Congo. here)

 

Americans who have admitted smoking marijuana at one point or another but escaped dependency, disease and dysfunction include President George W. Bush, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator John Kerry, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, former Vice President Al Gore and Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee for next November’s presidential election.

 

Former President Bill Clinton falls into a special category. When he studied in England, away from the long reach of U.S. law, he experimented with marijuana “a time or two,” he once told a television interviewer. “I didn’t inhale and I didn’t try again.”

Hollywood, conscious of a mass audience that does inhale, has produced a slew of new “stoner” movies this year. The pot-smoking protagonists include an investment banker and a medical student (Harold & Kumar), a psychiatrist (The Wackness), and a process server (Pineapple Express).

 

But sympathetic portrayals of marijuana use in popular culture do not necessarily translate into faster progress towards legalization. Government anti-drug fighters are serious in their opposition.

 

When Barney Frank, at a news conference to explain the rationale for his bill, was asked what timeline he had in mind, he quipped: “Not soon … but eventually, you’ll see the development of a marijuana futures market.” David Murray, the chief scientist in the drug czar’s office who had listened to the briefing, was not amused. “It’s not funny,” he said, “not funny at all.”

 

But not impossible either, in the long run

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