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It is Illegal to Discuss US Law (According to US Law)

This is almost too surreal to be true. According to the Reauthorization Act of 1998, it is illegal for the president-appointed “Drug Czar” to even discuss the possibility of drug legalization or decriminalization. No seriously, read it.

This means, that no sane drug policy can be established in the US because the person most responsible for enforcing our drug policy is bound by law to defend unreasonable and frankly idiotic ideas. Who the hell wrote this nonsense? (Sorry, I know it was Congress.) You can fall anywhere you want on the issue of our actual drug policy, but there’s no way a healthy democracy can function when our appointed officials are barred from even discussing the nature of the laws they’re required to enforce. You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend that the “war on drugs” isn’t a complete failure with an ever-increasing number of drug addicts, a sky-rocketing price tag for failed enforcement efforts and a massive upsurge in drug-related violence at our borders. It is inevitable that the violence south of the border will spread northward into the US (fences be damned) and our drug policy is the primary driver behind that violence.

When will we wake up to the realization that Nancy’s “Just Say No” did not actually work and that criminalization is increasing the cost of the drug problem without actually doing anything to solve it? When will facts and evidence finally take precedence over dogma and fear?

#the republic is broken #what happened while we were sleeping #drug policy

Venture Capitalist, Fred Wilson, on the Occupiers

Less directed than Cuban, but worth reading.

I empathize with the basic complaint of the #OWS movement - that the rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. It is impossible not to see that in our country. And yet I am in the 1%. How can I also be part of the 99%?

And I’ve got issues with some of the subgroups in the #OWS movement. I saw a ton of union placards in the marches uptown and that bothered me. I talked to one person in Zuccotti park on Thursday. He told me how his paycheck gets cut up. After the taxes and union dues, he’s left with very little. And what does he get for those union dues I asked? Not much.

Our institutions are failing us. The failing institutions are not limited to Wall Street. They are everywhere; our government, our political leadership, our unions, our health care system, our education system. The list goes on and on.

The whole post (including the reasons why Wilson is still an optimist) is worth a read.

#fred wilson #occupy

Mark Cuban's Advice to the Occupy Movement

Dead on, and surprisingly with no self-congratulating theatrics by Cuban. He’s getting serious these days. Absolutely worth a read. The thing I’m noticing more and more lately is self-made men (and women) telling the pundits and commentators that the Occupy Wall Street movement is right. People who really did work their way to the top and who know how the system works, both from an outsider and an insider perspective, are all taking the same position. The system is broken. It’s not a free market. What the banks and politicians want is not a free market. Nothing about our current economy reflects a free market. What we want is a free market.

The Tea Party fizzled before they could spark and were almost immediately co-opted into the Republican PR machine. This movement might actually accomplish something.

#Occupy #mark cuban

Krugman: Panic of the Plutocrats

Yeah, I know, Krugman right? Not exactly an objective observer and I concede that, but this piece about the reactions to the Occupy protests is pretty close to dead on. And it highlights where the Republicans and the Democrats are going off the rails. Highlight below (emphasis mine):

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized…

Think about that the next you’re watching FOX News Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine.

7 notes #occupy wallstreet #krugman #overreaction

Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it

Really good commentary by Douglas Rushkoff for CNN this morning. He’s calling Occupy Wallstreet the first Net-Era Movement in America and I think he’s on to something. It reminds me in many ways of the ad hocs from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s kind of weird to be living in times that closely resemble science fiction (scifi that I can remember being new and visionary). But this really is a manifestation of a new economic reality. The jury is still out on just how big a revolution this will be (will this new economy completely replace the old one or just augment and supplement it?), but I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that a revolution is starting.

No one knows where this all going, but it’s clearly going somewhere.

#rushkoff #occupy wallstreet #ad hoc