The perpetual war on drugs not only is not being won, it is not designed to be won. The police, private prisons and the whole prison-industrial-drug complex benefit too much from it continuing. The drug war is "Our Children's Children's War" because unless we chose differently it will still be raging far in the future.

• War Is Peace
• Freedom Is Slavery
• Ignorance Is Strength

(Newspeak slogans from George Orwell's 1984)

Appearing  on The Daily Show, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki explained how the “failed” war on drugs was fueled by corporate-interests. “It has to do with business,” he told Jon Stewart. “This country is finding, everywhere we look, we are seeing places where the extraordinary power of corporations in this country, and the unholy alliance they have with those in Congress, is destroying everything… There are private prisons all over this country that rely for their own survival on the incarceration of our fellow human beings.”

But Jarecki said even public detention facilities were part of the commercialization of prisons. “I went to prison-industrial trade shows where I saw people who literally make their entire life’s work out of selling you the better stun gun,” he explained. Jarecki’s latest documentary, The House I Live In, explores America’s war on drugs and the resulting mass incarceration. The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any country in the world, he noted.

 

“This has been such a disaster,” he said. “Forty-years, a trillion dollars spent, 45 million arrests, and yet drugs are cheaper, purer, more available today than ever before.”

Watch video, courtesy of Comedy Central, below:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-16-2012/exclusive---eugene-jarecki-extended-interview-pt--1 (6 min.)

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-october-16-2012/exclusive---eugene-jarecki-extended-interview-pt--2  (7 min.)  - towards the end gives example of Portugal that very successfully decriminalized drugs 10 yrs. ago and put money into treatment which is far cheaper than the criminal system approach

This entry was posted on October 24, 2012 at 1:24 PM and has received 1027 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

A moving article by Michael Meade on the effects of war on those involved long after they return.
M/M

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-meade-dhl/war-veterans-ptsd_b_1101691.html

I want to give a report on a recent retreat with a group of veterans of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and Vietnam. I want you to know how courageous they were in telling them. I’d like their voices to be heard over the din of the political battles and the mostly abstract arguments about whether it is too soon to bring troops home. The problem is that too many of those who go off to war fail to find a way back from it. The problem is that the war continues to live inside the wounded bodies, the rattled nerves and the battered souls.

The depth of sorrow in a woman’s voice pours out as she struggles through tears to read her poem about losing her husband after he returned from the war. It may be her first poem ever, born of palpable tragedy and honest grief. She doesn’t think she could read it in public, yet she knows that she speaks for many others stranded on the road between life and death. She knows because she was in the military herself, because her husband committed suicide after years of battling with PTSD. She calls them the “walking dead” — the ones who make it back from the war but can’t make it back into life.

“The war was over, that’s what they said;
but not for the warriors and the walking dead.
Dropped back into life, like they were never gone,
the war still raging, hidden deep inside.
The horrors, the killing, just learning to cope;
the anger and fighting, alcohol and dope.

The hole in our family, the loss that we feel;
they say it gets better, with time we all heal.
The war was over, that’s what they said;
but not for the families of the walking dead.”

Read more

This entry was posted on December 5, 2011 at 12:33 AM and has received 997 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Interesting theory on how the Bush administration could get their war on Iran
even though most of congress is a "No" on a direct war. By use of an "accidental" war.
   http://conflictsforum.org/2007/ticking-clocks-and-accidental-war/

Make me wonder about how many past "accidental" wars were in fact planned.
I have read books on WWI suggesting that several fugures in the German high command
wanted a war in 1914 rather than later when Russia would be to strong to beat and
that they encouraged Austro-Hungry to push Serbia to war that led to WWI

This entry was posted on November 15, 2007 at 11:26 PM and has received 1283 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.