well here is a quote to go with my last post
the heck with it here is the whole article on this matter
Nixon's Drug War, An Excuse To Lock Up Blacks And Protesters, Continues
There is a certain degree of cynicism one can develop in looking at social and power structures in the world. But sometimes you come across something so unexpected that it is like a sharp slap in the face. Dan Baum's mention of his interview with John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon, in the latest issue of Harper's is one of those moments.
“
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Disbelief and shock can be the inability to comprehend what some people are willing to do in pursuit of their goals. Baum wrote that he must have looked shocked. Dumbfounded seems more understandable.
What people are capable of doing
Growing up in that era you might have reasonably assumed that people pushing to criminalize drugs might have thought they were doing the right thing. But with all that we now know — the perfidy throughout the Vietnam war, the My Lai massacre, cold-blooded murder of civil rights advocates, the COINTELPRO program of the FBI, internment of American citizens during the Second World War simply because of their race or ethnic background, and the long list that a casual look at history could fill many times over — that someone might commit such an evil for their own ends can hardly be shocking.
Perhaps, just perhaps, an embittered Ehrlichman had decided to attack Nixon and what he stood for, since the disgraced President had managed to negotiate an immunity deal, even as his political henchmen landed behind bars.
But given Nixon's paranoia, his grudges and enemies list, his administration's assault on the democratic process, his well-documented racism, his willingness to lie and cheat and break laws and destroy people, and the administration's speed to implement subsequent cover-up, taking the statement on face value seems much more sensible. After all, the Nixon campaign embraced the so-called southern strategy of playing on the prejudices of southern whites to gain votes because black Americans tended to back for Democrats. When Ehrlichman called blacks and those opposing the war enemies, he meant it literally. They were political enemies that could potentially help keep Nixon out of office.
And so, the United States government developed a major policy, with massive implications on spending and societal impact, to declare that two classes of people should be destroyed, locked up if possible, for the convenience and pleasure of people in power. The justice system was warped into a private enforcer.
In the U.S., money becomes power, and that is a fact of history. So long as any economy needs concentrations of resources to attain anything, there will be disparities. But that type of practical recognition of some having more, some having less is different than systemic income inequality that — first, last, and always — is an attempt to enthrone the chosen few, cloaking them in power, on the backs of everyone else.
That this country pursued a reckless policy, given how badly Prohibition proved itself not that many decades before, to reinforce the personal vendetta of a head of state should be shocking. People's mouths should drop open.
Drug criminalization keeps serving those in power
Except, the criminalization and creation of the "other" to fear, much as is happening in politics today with a different set of targets, has been too useful to too many. When the communist boogeyman collapsed under its instability in Russia, and China eventually began to recognize the need for a degree of independent industry, something had to take its place.
The drug wars continued into the Reagan years. Bill Clinton then tried to prove himself tougher than any Republican with the 1994 omnibus crime legislation. He now admits that he made the problem of incarceration worse than it had been. That is a euphemism. What the policy did was stab millions in the back, all to get votes and stay in power. Policies like the three-strikes rule that could leave someone in life imprisonment for non-violent offenses were even colder than Nixon's.
Lock people up and throw away the key. Except, of course, minorities get hit harder than whites, and those who are poor won't be able to afford the defense that might leave them in the sunlight, rather than facing the sun through the stencil of bars.
Money gets transferred to the prison industry and law enforcement, politicians distract concerns by pointing out the "criminal" element. People find their lives and potentials swept away after generations of racial segregation and being locked out of opportunities available to others.
The economic toll
Imprisonment, used as a state-enforced policy of racial punishment, has taken a heavy toll on personal economics. Taking into account the number of African-Americans locked away in prison, the black unemployment rate is effectively undercounted by an additional 7 percent.
Even now, as the concept of marijuana legalization expands, African-Americans continue to face arrest at much higher rates than other races, even in states where laws have changed, according to an analysis by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
Arrest means a harder time getting a job, impossibility of school loans, fines, and, often, jail time, which is an enormous lost opportunity.
And yet, the country is slow to recognize how much it has targeted and continues to target those with the fewest resources to protect themselves. Once the machine starts, it keeps moving out of inertia and, over time, injustice seems normal.
The realization that Nixon turned the U.S. justice system into a private army to punish those who didn't love him for too many good reasons is shocking. That this is news today, and that the mechanisms once started as a personal vendetta continue to crush people born to the "wrong" parents, should be nauseating.
source
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016...4782e142c8
Quote:The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
the heck with it here is the whole article on this matter
Nixon's Drug War, An Excuse To Lock Up Blacks And Protesters, Continues
There is a certain degree of cynicism one can develop in looking at social and power structures in the world. But sometimes you come across something so unexpected that it is like a sharp slap in the face. Dan Baum's mention of his interview with John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon, in the latest issue of Harper's is one of those moments.
“
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Disbelief and shock can be the inability to comprehend what some people are willing to do in pursuit of their goals. Baum wrote that he must have looked shocked. Dumbfounded seems more understandable.
What people are capable of doing
Growing up in that era you might have reasonably assumed that people pushing to criminalize drugs might have thought they were doing the right thing. But with all that we now know — the perfidy throughout the Vietnam war, the My Lai massacre, cold-blooded murder of civil rights advocates, the COINTELPRO program of the FBI, internment of American citizens during the Second World War simply because of their race or ethnic background, and the long list that a casual look at history could fill many times over — that someone might commit such an evil for their own ends can hardly be shocking.
Perhaps, just perhaps, an embittered Ehrlichman had decided to attack Nixon and what he stood for, since the disgraced President had managed to negotiate an immunity deal, even as his political henchmen landed behind bars.
But given Nixon's paranoia, his grudges and enemies list, his administration's assault on the democratic process, his well-documented racism, his willingness to lie and cheat and break laws and destroy people, and the administration's speed to implement subsequent cover-up, taking the statement on face value seems much more sensible. After all, the Nixon campaign embraced the so-called southern strategy of playing on the prejudices of southern whites to gain votes because black Americans tended to back for Democrats. When Ehrlichman called blacks and those opposing the war enemies, he meant it literally. They were political enemies that could potentially help keep Nixon out of office.
And so, the United States government developed a major policy, with massive implications on spending and societal impact, to declare that two classes of people should be destroyed, locked up if possible, for the convenience and pleasure of people in power. The justice system was warped into a private enforcer.
In the U.S., money becomes power, and that is a fact of history. So long as any economy needs concentrations of resources to attain anything, there will be disparities. But that type of practical recognition of some having more, some having less is different than systemic income inequality that — first, last, and always — is an attempt to enthrone the chosen few, cloaking them in power, on the backs of everyone else.
That this country pursued a reckless policy, given how badly Prohibition proved itself not that many decades before, to reinforce the personal vendetta of a head of state should be shocking. People's mouths should drop open.
Drug criminalization keeps serving those in power
Except, the criminalization and creation of the "other" to fear, much as is happening in politics today with a different set of targets, has been too useful to too many. When the communist boogeyman collapsed under its instability in Russia, and China eventually began to recognize the need for a degree of independent industry, something had to take its place.
The drug wars continued into the Reagan years. Bill Clinton then tried to prove himself tougher than any Republican with the 1994 omnibus crime legislation. He now admits that he made the problem of incarceration worse than it had been. That is a euphemism. What the policy did was stab millions in the back, all to get votes and stay in power. Policies like the three-strikes rule that could leave someone in life imprisonment for non-violent offenses were even colder than Nixon's.
Lock people up and throw away the key. Except, of course, minorities get hit harder than whites, and those who are poor won't be able to afford the defense that might leave them in the sunlight, rather than facing the sun through the stencil of bars.
Money gets transferred to the prison industry and law enforcement, politicians distract concerns by pointing out the "criminal" element. People find their lives and potentials swept away after generations of racial segregation and being locked out of opportunities available to others.
The economic toll
Imprisonment, used as a state-enforced policy of racial punishment, has taken a heavy toll on personal economics. Taking into account the number of African-Americans locked away in prison, the black unemployment rate is effectively undercounted by an additional 7 percent.
Even now, as the concept of marijuana legalization expands, African-Americans continue to face arrest at much higher rates than other races, even in states where laws have changed, according to an analysis by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
Arrest means a harder time getting a job, impossibility of school loans, fines, and, often, jail time, which is an enormous lost opportunity.
And yet, the country is slow to recognize how much it has targeted and continues to target those with the fewest resources to protect themselves. Once the machine starts, it keeps moving out of inertia and, over time, injustice seems normal.
The realization that Nixon turned the U.S. justice system into a private army to punish those who didn't love him for too many good reasons is shocking. That this is news today, and that the mechanisms once started as a personal vendetta continue to crush people born to the "wrong" parents, should be nauseating.
source
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2016...4782e142c8
