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Showing posts with label Burma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Burma. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Where The Crank Labs Are... AKA "Californians in Prison, By County"
A panel of federal judges Tuesday ordered state officials to lower California's prison population by about 40,500. No mass prisoner releases are imminent, but the order eventually could affect some counties more than others, since many counties send a higher proportion of residents to prison.Da Buffalo commented @ Google Maps:
"Where the Methamphetamine labs are in California" would be a useful comparison. But as someone who's watched the drug culture over the last 40 years morph to nihilistic escapism, and has lived in California for the last 33 of them, I'd say the prison-industrial complex is making 'bank' on Meth.
View Californians in Prison, By County in a larger map
Also See: Methland... @ Global Guerillas
(A PDF of the prologue to Nick Reding's book "Methland" is available here)
Why Midwestern Small Towns Have Been Ravaged by Meth Addiction @ Alternet
(with a recent review of the now-released Nick Reding book and discussion)
...and this Travus T. Hipp Commentary: Incidental Illuminations And A Closer Examination Of The Situation In Burma - We Have Some 'Conflicts Of Interest' Besides Chevron/Texaco Oil... Drugs & Gems
(The drug now driving Burma's underground economy is NOT Heroin anymore)
In summation... my socio-cultural insight @ the Global Guerrillas article (and a partial answer to this statement pulled from the Alternet article):
"Aside from its ease of manufacture -- you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis -- the drug's most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren't that kind of people. "We're in Iowa, for God's sake," a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. "We don't do that." In mainstream America's Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training."
I live in a town where there are literally hundreds of teenage speed freaks and AFAICT (and I've been watching the drug culture since the sixties) it fill a hole in one's psychology that, in consumer cultures such as the U.S. and most of the Western industrial world, is caused by the media's endless pitch that one is never good enough, the car is never classy enough, WHAT? You don't have a diamond studded Rollie on your wrist?
...and of course, the girl is NEVER skinny enough or self-assured enough to get the boy she likes (or so she thinks).
In other words all that advertising batters their self-esteem to the point, when it's all said and done, our children take a drug that essentially makes it easy for them to say: "I don't give a f*ck what you think!"
Last fathers day, I was listening to a local radio station.
There was this loud audio-compressed pitch for a local superstore.
BUY A CELL PHONE... BUY A PLASMA TV... BUY THIS... BUY THAT!... BUY SOMETHING!!! (the ad really said that last...), and after that ad, a PSA for methresources, the US government's meth self-help site.
Go figure.
Oh, and by the way, Perdue Pharma, the folks who brought us "Hillbilly Heroin", OxyContin (Rush Limbaugh's favorite), another curse on the rural youth of America, were fined a few million dollars and slapped on the wrist for lying to doctors across America about the non-addictive quality of their product.
The FDA told them it was OK to say that it MIGHT be less addictive... but that's NOT what their sales reps told the doctors.
Why hammer on the poor rural folks of America in need of a few extra buck to make the mortgage for the shack, and not put companies like Perdue Pharma out of business entirely for creating a generation of teenage junkies?
I'll answer that... Because the imprisoning and 'programming' of American youth is BIG dollars, and attacking the pharmacological source of another plague isn't.
The local smoothie store, 'Jamba Juice', employing kids in, and just out of high school, makes it quite clear on their job app that if you've been in a 'program' it no problem at all.
They expect you've been institutionalized by the time you leave High School.
Sick.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Patriots, Refugees, and Terrorists: "Was George Washington a terrorist?" - Findlaw Writ
By JOANNE MARINER
Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008
"Was George Washington a terrorist?" asked Bill Frelick, Human Rights Watch's refugee policy director, only semi-facetiously.
What sparked his question was the exceedingly broad definition of terrorist activity employed in U.S. immigration law. That definition, as expanded in the USA PATRIOT Act and REAL ID Act, applies to "any activity which is unlawful under the laws of the place where it is committed," when that activity involves the use of a weapon or "dangerous device" with the intent "to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property." The actions of a present-day George Washington would most certainly be covered.
A concrete reason why this broad definition is worrying is that under current U.S. law, people who have engaged in terrorist activities, or who have provided support for terrorist activities--in many cases, even involuntary support--are presumptively barred from resettlement in the United States as refugees. Among the thousands of people negatively affected by this rule in recent years have been Colombians who paid small bribes under duress to paramilitary groups, Burmese who were forcibly conscripted into rebel armies, and Cubans who supported "counter-revolutionary" groups funded by the US government.
The patent unfairness of this broad ban has garnered congressional attention and, as of last year, the problem was supposed to have been remedied. In December, Congress passed legislation that broadened executive authority to grant waivers to deserving refugees who would otherwise be barred under the law's overly broad "terrorism"-related bans.
Yet the reform does not seem to have worked. In recent months it has become clear that, despite the changes in the terms of the law, the Department of Homeland Security is continuing to bar refugees who should benefit from the expanded waiver authority. These people have fled their countries to escape persecution, and they're being told that they're terrorists. What is going on?
Democrats and Mujahideen
Since the December amendments to the immigration laws, a number of refugees have received letters from the Department of Homeland Security informing them that they are being denied permanent residence in the United States because of facts that they stated on their applications for refugee status.
Among those who have received such letters are:
. Iraqi refugees who took part in failed efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the 1990s;
. Afghans who supported the mujahideen groups that fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, including groups that the United States funded;
. Sudanese who belonged to the Democratic Unionist Party, a democratic party opposed to the current Sudanese government and a partner in U.S. negotiations in the region.
In rejecting these people's applications for permanent residence, DHS is relying on facts that, in many cases, were fully disclosed in their initial refugee applications. Circumstances that, in other words, were deemed acceptable under what were supposed to be tougher rules are now being relied upon to bar people from staying in the United States. In some instances, moreover, the department appears to be characterizing First-Amendment-protected speech as support of terrorism.
Politicians and Bureaucrats
Although the omnibus appropriations bill that was passed by Congress last December was lauded as an important immigration law reform, the officials at the Department of Homeland Security charged with implementing the new rules don't seem to have gotten the message. Before too many deserving refugees are barred from the United States as terrorists, there needs to be clear and authoritative guidance from on high.
Senior DHS officials need to review the rules being applied in these cases to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security is actually implementing the statutory waiver authority that it has been granted. Congress has spoken and the law has changed: "Terrorism"-related immigration bans should not be applied to refugees who do not pose any threat to the United States.
In the longer term, of course, the law's definition of terrorism should be narrowed to reflect a more meaningful, common-sense understanding of the term. While expanding DHS's waiver authority was a step forward, it is still absurd that a present-day George Washington would require a waiver to settle in the United States.
Joanne Mariner is a human rights attorney. Her previous columns on the detainee cases and the "war on terrorism" are available in FindLaw's archive.
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