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CounterPunchers! We Mean It!
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Today's Stories November 6-8, 2009 Mark Greuter November 5, 2009 Pam Martens Vijay Prashad Brian Gallagher Norman Solomon Nadia Hijab Joseph Shanksy Andy Thayer Tracy Rosenberg Website of the Day November 4, 2009 Stan Cox Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs? Robert Weissman Susan Galleymore Ralph Nader Michael Leonardi Bitta Mistofi Robert Bryce Martha Rosenberg Dave Lindorff Website of the Day November 3, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Franklin C. Spinney Laura Carlsen Serge Halimi John Stanton Sophia Weeks Dave Lindorff November 2, 2009 Steven Higgs Ishmael Reed David Macaray Bouthaina Shaaban David Michael Green David Swanson Ellen Brown Adam Federman James McEnteer Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Carl Ginsburg Mike Whitney Joe Bageant Gareth Porter Saul Landau Anthony DiMaggio Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Niranjan Ramakrishnan Jayne Lyn Stahl Rev. William E. Alberts Alvaro Huerta Martha Rosenberg Binoy Kampmark Norm Kent Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro Ron Jacobs David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 29, 2009 Michael Neumann Mike Whitney Gary Leupp Conn Hallinan Marshall Auerback Laura Flanders Eamonn McCann David Macaray Mark Weisbrot Stephen Soldz Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day October 28, 2009 Moshe Adler Dave Lindorff Frank Joseph Smecker Alexandra Early M. Shahid Alam Vijay Prashad John Ross Franklin Lamb Gregory Travis Susan Galleymore Website of the Day October 27, 2009 Mike Whitney Patrick Cockburn Stewart J. Lawrence Alan Farago Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Bouthaina Shaaban Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around Iain Boal Carl Finamore Jayne Lyn Stahl Website of the Day October 26, 2009 Bill Quigley / Paul Craig Roberts Uri Avnery Mike Whitney Michael Snedeker Shamus Cooke David Michael Green Martha Rosenberg Patrick Bond Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 23-25, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Christopher Ketcham Jeff Gore Gareth Porter Jayne Lyn Stahl Saul Landau Mike Whitney Nikolas Kozloff Ron Jacobs Russell Mokhiber Missy Beattie Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman David Ker Thomson Rannie Amiri Ronnie Cummins Norm Kent Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Ben Sonnenberg Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 22, 2009 Dan Pearson / Jonathan Cook Paul Craig Roberts The US as Failed State Mark Engler Johann Hari Brian M. Downing Eric Toussaint Tom Mountain Israel Shamir Charles Thomson Website of the Day October 21, 2009 Pam Martens Linn Washington, Jr. Liaquat Ali Khan D. K. Wilson Franklin Lamb Norman Solomon Stephen Fleischman Patrice Higonnet Binoy Kampmark Kevin Coval / Website of the Day October 20, 2009 Sharon Smith Tariq Ali Mark Brenner Bouthaina Shaaban Michael D. Yates Dean Baker Dave Lindorff John Ross Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Kevin Zeese Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day October 19, 2009 Mike Whitney Greg Moses John Ross Michael Donnelly Jayne Lyn Stahl Eric Walberg Russell Mokhiber Barbara Rose Johnston John V. Whitbeck Christopher Ketcham Website of the Day October 16-18, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Paul Craig Roberts Carl Ginsburg Ralph Nader Nikolas Kozloff Carlo Galli Dave Lindorff Catherine Rottenberg
/ Neve Gordon Marshall Auerback Nicola Nasser Windy Cooler James L. Secor Ron Jacobs Wes Jackson Jesse Lerner-Kinglake David Ker Thomson Against Leaders Missy Beattie Emily Ratner Stephen Martin Michael Snedeker Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Peter Stone Brown Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 15, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Brian M. Downing Ramzy Baroud Danny Weil M. Idrees Ahmad Margaret Kimberley Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Harvey Wasserman Nirmal Ghosh Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 14, 2009 Michael Neumann M. Reza Pirbhai Gareth Porter Paul Craig Roberts John Strausbaugh Fortress Moon Ralph Nader Dean Baker Charles Modiano Nadia Hijab Walter Brasch Website of the Day October 13, 2009 Peter Linebaugh Shamus Cooke John Ross Brendan Cooney Frida Berrigan Yves Engler David Macaray Dave Lindorff Mark Weisbrot Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day October 12, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg Jessica Arents Eamonn McCann Bill Hatch Sen. Russell Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Gideon Levy Iyad Burnat Alan Cabal Dan Bacher Website of the Day October 9-11, 2009 Alexander Cockburn James Bovard Kathleen and Bill Christison Andy Worthington Marc Levy Tariq Ali Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Alan Nasser Jack Z. Bratich Steve Breyman David Michael Green Dave Lindorff Paul Buchheit Jim Goodman Missy Beattie Michael Leonardi Nadia Hijab Mel Packer David Macaray James T. Phillips Charles R. Larson Michael Donnelly David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 8, 2009 Saul Landau Paul Fitzgerald / Linn Washington, Jr. Marshall Auerback Dave Lindorff David Rosen Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee John V. Walsh Stewart Lawrence Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 7, 2009 Brendan Cooney Paul Craig Roberts Dean Baker Jonathan Cook John Stanton Joanne Mariner Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada Stephen Lendman Sen. Russell Feingold Mary Lynn Cramer Website of the Day October 6, 2009 Mike Whitney Gareth Porter Jonathan Cook Boris Kagarlitsky Iain Boal Ron Jacobs John Ross Michael Dickinson Stephen Fleischman Ira Glunts Missy Beattie Website of the Day October 5, 2009 Pam Martens Mike Whitney Paul Craig Roberts Harry Browne Sara Mann Omar Barghouti Shamus Cooke Brenda Norrell Fred Gardner Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap Website of the Day October 2-4, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Saul Landau Diana Johnstone Greg Moses William Blum Brian Cloughley Russell Mokhiber John Ross Ellen Brown David Ker Thomson David Macaray Gary Engler Robert Fantina Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer Anthony Papa Joe Allen Harry Browne Ron Jacobs Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition Why Decriminalization of Drugs Won't Get the 10,000 Ton Monkey Off of Mexico's BackLegalize It!By JOHN ROSS Mexico City. Mexico has a 10,000 ton monkey on its back and its name is Washington D.C. While U.S. drug enforcers gloat that 15-foot walls, high tech sensors, drones, blimps, spotter planes and rampant militarization have put a significant dent in the flow of cocaine across its porous southern border. drug use escalates exponentially south of that border. The reason: Colombian-Mexican cartels are now holding their loads longer in Mexico, waiting for the appropriate arrangements to be made to move the blow into El Norte. Inevitably, the cocaine and to a lesser extent crystal meth and heroin (marijuana is readily available in the U.S., the world's largest producer of the weed) leak into the Mexican street where fierce competition for sales and consumption is out of control. As a result, over 13,000 lives have been lost since President Felipe Calderon went to war with the drug cartels in December 2006, many of them in turf battles over trans-shipment routes and retail sales in Mexican cities. Moreover, in the three years of Calderon's drug war, which is being underwritten by $3,000,000,000 in Washington's Merida Initiative funds, the number of "addicts" on this side of the border has risen by 460,000 and now totals almost a million, according to the estimates provided by the National Council on Addictions, and first-time users have jumped from 3.5 million to 4.5 million - some drug experts calculate that 10 million would be closer to the mark, depending on definitions of "user" and "addict." One dangerous corollary: the Mexican prison system is bursting apart at the seams and lethal violence is on the rise. Among long-time observers of Mexican drug wars, there are some, this writer included, who suspect that Washington's militarization of the border and the consequent user boom here was a well-thought out strategy concocted by U.S. drug fighters to force its proxies in this distant neighbor nation to engage and confront the cartels. Viewed from this perspective, the thousands of dead on the ground here are simply cannon fodder in the U.S. War on Drugs initiated by Richard Nixon in 1969, officially declared by Ronald Reagan in 1985, and zealously executed by four U.S. presidents ever since. Barrack Obama, a prohibitionist who likens Felipe Calderon to Al Capone's nemesis Elliot Ness, is only the latest puppet-master in this grotesque dance of death. With jails exploding - prison riots are reported at least once a week - the Calderon administration has moved to tamp down dangerous overcrowding by "decriminalizing" the possession of small quantities of illicit drugs. This past August 21st, the Mexican president signed off on legislation that gives users and "addicts" (as health officers prefer to lump them) the option of treatment or prison if arrested with small amounts of drugs for personal use - two grams of marijuana (about four skinny joints), a half gram of cocaine, 40 milligrams of meth amphetamines, and 10 milligrams of heroin. Instead of immediate imprisonment, the drugs will be confiscated and the user/addict booked and fingerprinted and their biometrics recorded in a national registry of "addicts." Those pulled in are then released with the obligation of enrollment in government treatment programs that are still not operational. If the user/addict fails to show up for treatment or is arrested a third time, prison time is prescribed. Those nabbed with larger amounts, calculated at a thousand times the minimum quantities, are automatically assigned to terminally overcrowded state prisons as "traffickers" - "traffickers" arrested with any amount over the higher quantities are sent to maximum security federal penitentiaries as kingpins. There is no middle ground in this schema notes science writer Javier Flores in the national daily La Jornada: one is either a user/addict or a narcotraficante. The Mexican congress passed similar legislation in 2006 during the waning days of Vicente Fox's presidency but when the measure hit his desk, the red telephone rang and George W. Bush was on the line threatening grave repercussions if Fox did not veto the decrim bill - which, of course, he did. What has decrim meant on the streets of Mexico City? A few weeks ago, my friend Xochi (not her real name), a street dealer who makes house calls, and this writer visited a sick friend - Xochi brought along a bag of medicinal marijuana and I some cannabis cookies. The conversation turned to Calderon's recently promulgated decrim and we consulted our offerings to determine if we were users, "addicts", or kingpins. It goes without saying that we were criminally over the limit but fortunately the local gendarmes did not bust down the door. According to Xochi, decrim is turning into a bonanza for Mexico City cops who have taken to carrying scales to weigh confiscated drugs and shaking down those "criminals" who exceed the decreed limits. Shaking down small-time users and dealers is nothing new in this the most corrupt, crime-ridden, and conflictive city in the western hemisphere. Indeed, crooked cops have been planting drugs on unwary citizens as long as cops have patrolled these mean streets. Long before decrim was a gleam in Calderon's eye, those "found" with drugs in their possession did not immediately go straight to jail if they could come up with the "mordida" (literally "bite" or bribe) to get the cops off their backs. As poet Juan Pablo Garcia posited long ago in his 1985 "Pacheco (marijuana user) Manifesto": "drugs don’t make us criminals but laws against drugs do." Overwhelmed by millions of users, addicts, narcotraffickers, and kingpins, Calderon has turned to God for relief. Young people who use drugs do not have God in their (miserable) lives, he explained to Catholic bishops attending a family crisis conference last month, citing the recent death of pop idol Michael Jackson as an example - although there is no evidence that Jacko did not believe in God or was even a user/addict (the official autopsy concluded that Michael was overdosed by a doctor with a lethal anesthetic.) The president's hypothesis was promptly shot down on editorial and op-ed pages all over the country. Aside from increased availability in Mexico thanks to Washington's worldwide crusade against demon drugs, critics pinned the dramatic increase in users-"addicts" on a battered economy in which more than 2,000,000 workers have lost their jobs in the past year as a more pertinent explanation of the boom. With nearly a million young people entering the job market each year, Calderon, who once billed himself as "the president of employment" has floundered badly as a job creator. On the other hand, drug cropping and retail street dealing ("narcominudeo") provide gainful employment for millions of kids without jobs. In fact, there are multiple indicators that drug users, dealers, "addicts", and kingpins do have God in their (miserable) lives. "We, the Marijuanos, are Guadalupanos (devotees of the Virgin of Guadalupe) not goddamn communist whores," Juan Pablo Garcia wrote in his Pacheco Manifesto. Narcotraficantes are celebrated for their devotion to their faith, buying Masses, hiring priests for baptisms and weddings and funerals and even building churches. Drug money - "narco-limosnas" (drug alms) are a significant component of Church finances, concedes Bishop Carlos Aguiar Retes, president of the Mexican Bishops Conference (CEM.) For the Catholic Church, explains Aguascalientes bishop Ramon Godinez, turning illegitimate gains into good works is perfectly pardonable. Although cocaine and meth (Mexico does not produce much heroin) are considered to be killer drugs, reefer madness is alive and kicking south of the border. Mexicans consume 357 tons of drugs annually, advances Secretary of Public Security Genero Garcia Luna, of which marijuana accounts for 343. Marijuana is considered a dangerous drug by crusaders like Garcia Luna and his boss Calderon and those who use it are considered "addicts" in need of "treatment" - actually Mexican marijuana is typically punchless and low in THC content when compared to hot house-grown, high-potency strains in the U.S. where cannabis is considered to be medicinal in some states. What makes treatment propositions even more absurd is that there are no treatment centers to accommodate newly decriminalized pot smokers. For hard-core addicts desperate to get off the crack pipe or the needle, public detox clinics have been stripped back to the bone. While wealthy user/"addicts" sign themselves into deluxe spas to detox, the poor have few options. Like every other public service the Calderon government is charged with providing, drug treatment has been privatized under the prevailing neo-liberal economic model. Evangelical churches run treatment programs in many working class colonies that force addicts to go cold turkey. Corporal punishment and the Word of God are means of coercion to get young people off drugs. The drug gangs themselves run their own treatment programs for street dealers that get hooked on the goods they push according to one Ciudad Juarez pistolero Julio Cesar Aleman, a member of a hit squad known as "The Artists of Assassination", enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel, who are charged by federal authorities with a total of 45 killings - 28 of them at two treatment homes in that Gran Guignol border city. "La Linea (a rival drug gang) gets them off drugs, fattens them up, and sends them back out on the street to deal," he explained to police agents to justify the homicidal assaults. Decriminalizing drugs in a country through which 80% of the U.S. cocaine supply passes (Drug Enforcement Administration estimates) changes little in Mexico so long as it borders the biggest drug market on the planet. Even as decrim takes root north of the border, more than 800,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana in 2008 according to Ethan Nadelman of the Drug Policy Institute. Legalization and not decrim is the only answer. Drug reform is catching on in Latin America. In addition to Mexico's feeble and misplaced efforts at providing alternatives to incarceration, Argentina courts recently ruled that personal possession of marijuana is not criminal. In Colombia, decriminalization of small amounts of cocaine has been the law since the 1990s. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales champions the medicinal properties of the coca leaf, the source of powdered cocaine, and endorses the industrialization of the plant. At a 2008 drug policy conference in Brazil, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, and Ernesto Zedillo, the squarest Mexican president to ever administrate the affairs of this country, declared that the prohibitionist approach had failed. So has decrim. The 10,000 ton monkey is not going to get off Mexico's back until drugs are legalized everywhere in the Americas, including the United States. As the godfather of Jamaican ganja reggae Peter Tosh croons "Doctors smoke it, nurses smoke it, even judges smoke it, and lawyers too: Legalize It! Don't Criticize It! Legalize It! Don't Criminalize It!" Or decriminalize it either. John Ross will present his just-published (Nation Books) cult classic, the monstrous "El Monstruo - Dread & Redemption in Mexico City", Friday the 13th at Northtown Books in Arcata Ca (7 PM); Weds. Nov 18th at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco's Mission District (7 PM); and Nov 19th at UC-Berkeley's Center for Latino Policy Studies (3:30 PM.) Admission to all three events is gratis. He can be reached at: johnross@igc.org Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Obama and Black America Ten months into Obama-time, the plight of black Americans is terrible. Yet overwhelmingly they rally behind the president. In a powerful report from the Deep South Kevin Alexander Gray asks the question: what should the black political agenda be? Mark Rudd counterposes “organizing” with “activism” and describes what it will take to build a movement. H. Bruce Franklin gives a chronology of the march into Afghanistan. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! 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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
"Powerful and shocking ..
Waiting for
Lightning
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