To better put things in perspective, and so I don’t just sound like a disgruntled citizen on a rant, in this post I will try to put the pieces of the puzzle together so the bigger picture can be analyzed. I’ll start with this “war on drugs.” Below I’ve provided a YouTube video that puts some of the pieces together. In the video, retired police captain, Peter Christ, eloquently expounds on why the war on drugs is set up to fail.
Now that we’ve educated ourselves on why the war on drugs is an utter failure and will never work, let’s try to figure out why Uncle Sam continues to implement and defend it. I’ve talked about mass incarceration and how, according to Michelle Alexander, it is a cleverly disguised caste system. I’ve also suggested that the war on drugs continues because there is money to be made off of it. This report names police unions, private prison corporations, alcohol and beer companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and prison guard unions as the top five special interest groups lobbying for the continuation of the war on drugs. Furthermore, I’ve talked about how the war on drugs is heavily racially biased. Here is a link to the ACLU’s website where it talks more about this, and below are charts to help with visualization.
As I hinted at before, the arrest rate for whites for drug possession is pretty stable while the arrest rates for both blacks and Latinos has sky-rocketed. This suggests that it is indeed, just for show. Michelle Alexander calls it “collateral damage.” This collateral damage is necessary to maintain the appearance of non-racial bias. I find it very hard to believe that all of this is mere coincidence. Moving on.
In a previous post I spoke about a recent study that concluded that the U.S. is no longer a democracy, but that instead it has all of the markers of an oligarchy. I argued that this poses a threat to our safety and well-being, mainly because the poor have been targeted and that group is steadily and quickly growing. This report cites a study in the British Medical Journal that blames income inequality in the U.S. for close to one million deaths a year. In this article, former Rolling Stones writer Matt Taibbi expounds on the U.S.’s “profound hatred of the weak and the poor.” The U.S. has done something that many evil regimes and tyrants have done in the past–they’ve scapegoated the innocent and turned citizens against them, as well. Not only does the U.S. blame the poor for its economic woes, Uncle Sam encourages citizens to blame the poor, too, to take the spotlight away from the real causes of this country’s economic troubles. Sound familiar? I’ll give you a clue. Hitler did it to the Jews and Stalin did it to Ukrainian peasants and we all know how that turned out. This is scary, people. And the scariest part is that this has gone on and could continue to go on for years, even decades. With a death rate of almost a million a year and climbing, that sounds like genocide to me. The targeted group–the poor–includes most blacks and Latinos, by the way. See the big picture.