I don’t know how old you are, but if you were a sentient human being living in the United States during the 1980’s, then you know that the crack cocaine epidemic in our cities was a much bigger problem than the Sandanistas. I challenge anyone to dispute that.
And the bottom line is that Gary Webb was right and our government was completely complicit in allowing crack cocaine to be imported into the this country so that some of the proceeds from the sales could be used to fund the Contras who were fighting the Sandanista government in Nicaragua.
The idea was not to decimate the black community, but that was the effect. And the fallout was immeasurably worse because of the draconian sentencing laws that were passed in the 1970’s and 1980’s which filled our prisons with low-level drug offenders and turned hundreds of thousands of petty criminals into convicted felons, with all the loss of job opportunity and voting rights that that entails.
So, let me ask you a question. How angry are we entitled to be about this?
We’re entitled to be as pissed off as we want to be, I suppose. Folks like me were climbing the walls over the use of drug money to fund the Contras for decades at this point. There were a lot of innocent victims thanks to the Cold War.
The quotes from Katharine Graham and Keith Schneider in the linked story are very, very discouraging. As was the movie review of “Kill The Messenger” I heard this morning:
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/10/355051018/movie-review-kill-the-messenger?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campa
ign=movies
When Nationally Prominent Film Critic Kenneth Turan concludes by encouraging us to just shrug our shoulders at the incredible futility and immorality of our media-government-industrial complex, I think about viewpoints like that sitting shoulder by shoulder with current events in Ferguson and Syria and elsewhere, types of events which are repeated all over our country and all over the world every day, all paid for by our tax dollars.
Kat Graham made presentations to CIA recruits filled with semi-secret conclusions and advice. That’s tremendously fucked up. Her tit was out of the wringer by then, I guess?
I want to join others in doing something to repair the decadence, despair and malaise that American society has fallen into.
Reason Magazine certainly has apologies to issue. Oh, lol…
Yeah, funny how glibertarians rush to defend government abuse when it’s on behalf of their preferred narratives.
Once you remember that a LibertarianTM is just a Republican who smokes a little weed and wants the freedom to procure services from prostitutes, it all makes sense that at the end of the day they’re still good little fascists.
Putting a government agency beyond the law has proven to be a huge mistake.
Americans need to be asking themselves “Where is all that opium being raised in Afghanistan going to go?” I suspect that the Chinese ought to be asking that question too. We’ve had a cocaine war. It seems that we are headed towards seeing an opium war.
While it looks like a policy of omission of consideration of collateral consequences, some transparency into US foreign policy about the use of addictive drugs, food, fuel, and water as weapons of a hidden war would be immensely relieving, given the history of Iran-Contra.
Are we certain the intent wasn’t to decimate the black communities? I’m not. They couldn’t find a better way to make money to fight a war?
One of the singular events that changed the United States forever. “We The People” has mutated to Washington Inc. as a military/industrial complex, a corporation lacking democracy and run by lobbyists. Representatives in House and Senate should run for two terms or 8 years max. It’s time to radically clean house and perhaps revise the balance between State and Federal government. Government and its people should be bound closer together, it’s seen in the global move towards nationalism: Scotland, Flemings in Belgium and Catalonia as examples.
Another CIA cocaine runner was pilot Hank Asher who won Florida for George Bush in 2000 and this accelerated the destruction of the empire. Perhaps not a bad deal after all.
○ Presidential Elections In 21st Century and Gary Webb
Term limits solve nothing. They are a cynical ploy that fosters 1) voter laziness 2) the notion that legislating and governance is best left to novices 3) increases the power of lobbyists because those in office no little to nothing. As implemented in CA, it also denigrates those in lower chambers — either “move up” or get out just as an elected official has become a journeyman.
Plus we already have term limits, they’re called elections.
Dang! Beat me to it!
Yes, exactly. It’s partly a combination of overly restrictive term limits and too many ballot initiatives that has made California’s government such a mess. Nobody has a chance to develop any kind of coherent vision.
Meanwhile, suppose Jerry Brown wasn’t eligible to run for another term. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Even if it’s not Jerry Brown, we should all be able to think of other people that we’d rather not have subjected to term limits. Ted Kennedy maybe? Franklin Roosevelt?
I like the point about voter laziness, too. I like to think that we already have all the term limits we need–for the House it’s two years, for senators it’s six years, and so on. (Actually, the correct term for what we call term limits now would be rotation in office.) If you really don’t want to keep electing the same people, then get off your butt and vote for someone else.
I’m not sure the two year term for House and Assembly seats is long enough anymore. It was fine when legislatures only met for a few months a year, but the complexity of the work today gets shortchanged by the demands of getting re-elected. Public funding of elections would partially correct that. Set and limited periods of time in which campaigning is permitted would likely be more of a plus than a minus.
Devastation of the black community is much more complex than making crack cocaine available. The availability of drugs doesn’t make people take them unless they are imprisoned and the drugs forced into their bodies.
Why wasn’t there a crack explosion on Rodeo Drive? People have to have pretty terrible lives to become addicts. Why do people have terrible lives because of their ethnicity? THAT’s the question we should be asking.
I know you mean well, but 1) drug usage/abuse in minority communities is equal to or less than that in white communities 2) the “Rodeo Drive” community was snorting the good stuff, and lots of it 3) white people in general, and wealthier white people more specifically, aren’t targets for police drug busts and when against all odds they do get busted, they mostly go to posh “treatment centers” and not prison.
Your point (1) is opposite of the OP’s statement. Which is correct, I don’t know.
Regarding point (2), you are right and I knew it was a poor choice when I typed it. Maybe Park Avenue would have been better.
Your point (3) is undeniable.
Crack is for poor people; powdered cocaine and prescription narcotics are for wealthier people. The so-called “crack epidemic” was later moderated in part because the volume of cocaine imported significantly increased and the price accordingly dropped. A lesson in semi-pure capitalism. Only “semi” because the cost of getting busted by government interference was partially built into the price.
Well Booman said “black” not “poor”, indicating that the black community was hit harder and eliciting comments that the objective was racist.
He said decimate not devastate. I missed that.
Turtle is in trouble…
Something I’ve been recently arguing is that “messaging”–one-way marketing communications–helps conservatives more than progressives because there is no push back or follow-up nor is there any recognition of the complexity and nuance in what voters want to see done. Politicians accustomed to completely controlling the message come unglued when they lose that power.
What this interview tried to do was establish a chatty conversation with McConnell, push some issues, joke around about sports–the typical softball sports media stuff. McConnell sputtered just like Sarah Palin in front of Katie Couric’s softball question about what newspapers she read.
The more the GOP is put in situations of two-way conversation instead of staged messaging, the more frequently they will lose. The GOP cannot honestly tell the people what it is actually about.
BS, evidenced by “the draconian sentencing laws that were passed in the 1970’s and 1980’s which filled our prisons with low-level drug offenders and turned hundreds of thousands of petty criminals into convicted felons, with all the loss of job opportunity and voting rights that that entails.”
For whom? For some (prison industrial complex, White Supremacists [the CCC version, not the KKK version], et al.) it was an opportunity, justice even.
Unless I want an up-close and personal conversation with a 3-letter agency the answer is probably “only mildly” since the actual answer could earn someone a one-way trip to GitMo…
You can sure say the sentencing laws were aimed at doing something terrible to the black community. I don’t think CIA dabbling in drug dealing was–too small-time–nor did Gary Webb. His persecutors falsely claimed he did of course, it’s part of how they brought him down.
When there’s enough bad faith around, as there was in the Reagan administration, things kind of come together to look like a conspiracy even where there isn’t one.
It wasn’t so small-time though.
How angry?
HOW ABOUT FUCKING LIVID!
Livid enough, that if we had a Democratic Congress, we should impeach Reagan posthumously, and George H.W. Bush, even though it’s not going to be too long before he joins “The Gipper” in an inner circle of Hell!
Btw – I’ve been livid about this since I first heard of Webb’s story back in the very early 00’s.
And even before that!
If you followed the Iran-Contra Mega-Scandal (far, FAR, worse than Watergate) like I did, Webb only confirmed your darkest thoughts about this country!
Wouldn’t say that Iran/Contra was worse than Watergate if the latter includes the hiding of the Nixon/Kissinger 1968 “October Surprise” and that the election “dirty tricks” that they initiated were allowed to live on and have been infecting our democracy ever since. Both were horrible and subverted democracy in different ways to the detriment of people in this and other countries.
True, that!
And if you count Reagan’s shady dealings with Iran before the ’80 election, that makes the rest of Iran-Contra even worse still!
Without team Reagan’s Iranian “October Surprise,” getting a door open for the arms for cash deal to illegally fund the Contra thugs would have been tres difficult considering that team Reagan was supplying weapons to Iraq in its war with Iran at the same time. The Iranian PTB seemed to have gotten more sophisticated since then.
I would not give our intelligence services a pass on this. It’s a recurring storyline. Alfred McCoy’s “The Politics of Heroin In Southeast Asia” suggests that this criminal activity has been going on for a long time, and the results of importing drugs for the underclass have been well-noted since the Chinese opium wars. The Japanese certainly knew that opium and morphine worked well in controlling Chinese unrest during their occupation.
Henrik Kruger’s “The Great Heroin Coup” goes into various iterations of the drug trade along with the matching US foreign intervention. The French Connection, for example, was a deal with the Guerini Gang of Marseilles in exchange for them helping to take out the post-WWII Communists who were controlling the docks in France and were a political force after the fall of the Vichy Government.
I read recently that the post-WWII drug lines followed the ratlines used to move war criminals out of Europe after the Nazis’ defeat.
Also, in “Agency of Fear” the author describes the creation of the DEA under Nixon. Nixon apparently gave his buddy E. Howard Hunt the job of staffing the DEA, and a lot of ex-CIA were put in important places. That would allow friendly packages to move and target the competition.
We are entitled to be furious. But the cocaine business with Iran-Contra was only an extension (by many of the same people) of a practice that had been going on for decades, the financing of covert operations by narcotics.
Read Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia.
Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs
Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina
Larry Collins, “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency”, NY Times, December 3, 1993.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/03/opinion/03iht-edlarry.html
You will see how drugs factor deeply into the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam …
Anger is a reaction, not an entitlement. The entitlement is to expect reparations, change, new policies and laws, and most of all justice. And that requires transmuting anger into the passion in passionate engagement in struggling for justice.
Handling anger so that it does not become paralyzing, counterproductive, or lead to co-option is among the hardest disciplines of being a progressive.
Bullshit. Pure, Pollyanna-like, weak, leftiness bullshit.
The “black community” was the only group of Americans at that time that was taking real, well-organized, hands-on anti-PermaGov action. In the government’s face and in the streets. It was three-pronged…the non-violent, church-led movement of which MLK Jr. was the nominal head until he was shot down, the whole Black Panther/Black Muslim etc. “Fuck with us and we will fuck with you right back” thing, and the old-line NAACP-type socio-politcal movements.
It cannot be considered some kind of coincidence or a form of unwanted collateral damage that the crack epidemic was focused almost entirely upon urban black neighborhoods. Within 10 years the areas where all three of those movements were strongest had been absolutely devastated by the crack epidemic. Most of them never really recovered nor did the movements that were spawned in them.
Further?
Sure.
You also write:
And who promoted and passed those laws that essentially finished off the remnants of most black urban neighborhoods and movements?
Please.
The same powers that promoted Iran-Contra.
I do not much believe in coincidences, and certainly not on this scale.
You shouldn’t either.
WTFU.
AG
P.S.I don’t know if those plotters were sufficiently prescient to be able to predict how Iran-Contra would not only break the U.S. urban black culture that has thrived for almost 100 years but also open a real estate boom (the one that we laughingly refer to as “gentrification”) that would transform major cities into real estate developers’ gold mines, but I will bet you that when the gentrification movement began to grow the same people were in it up to their elbows. It is often said “Follow the money.” These people create money with their wars and human control plots. Bet on it. “I saw my opportunities and I took ’em” said the old NYC Tammany Hall-era ward heeler George Washington Plunkitt. He was small potatoes compared to these vicious hustlers. Do not allow it to be possible to forgive them by dint of willful blindness, Booman. They are worse than anything you can imagine. Much worse. Bet on that as well.
As a New Yorker, your perception may be skewed by the 1973 Rockefeller Drug Law. In the rest the country, the federal 1970 anti-drug law was in response to all the white DFH of the sixties. Revenge of the parents. (The US incarceration rate dipped in the early 1970s.) (More on this in a moment.)
MLK, Jr.’s approval rating took some big hits in the two years before his death. (1966-67 riots) Mostly among whites, but within the black community as well. His shoes were never more than partially filled. By the early 1970s, COINTELPRO and local police thugs had effectively undermined SNCC and the Black Panther. However, SDS and other peace and not rabidly anti-communist organizations weren’t spared either.
What was most devastating to the black community was the beginning of deindustrialization. As the last in, that community was the first hit. By the mid-1960s in Los Angeles. That was also what precipitated the 1966-67 riots. The reverberating impact of this economic shift hit African-American families particularly hard. Fewer marriages, more divorce, and more children born and raised by single mothers.
It was the 1980s (so-called) anti-drug laws (federal and state) that were blatantly discriminatory. That’s when the US incarceration rate began to soar. From half a million inmates in 1980 to a million in 1990 to over two million in 2000.
My perception is “skewed”…if anything…by my direct, in-the-street experience as a working musician playing primarily minority-based musics in primarily-minority populated areas, Marie2. NYC, Indianapolis, Atlantic City, Boston, Detroit, Chicago and LA among others. Living in some of those areas as well. I didn’t give a flying fuck at the time about Reagan, the CIA or any other PermaGov bullshit…too busy staying alive and learning from the masters. I just saw, heard and understood. I experienced first-hand the change from major to minor as the relatively laid-back heroin and marijuana street user culture turned crazy ugly under the spell of crack cocaine. I saw it; I felt it and unlike most of the people who were living in those areas the time I had already been radicalized by what went down during the late ’60s/early ’70s in Boston and New York. I knew who was playing the game but it wasn”t just Rockefeller and the Attica Boys. Way back in ’67 I had been in Vietnam and Bangkok and seen first-hand the people who were running the drug game. Up close and personal. Close enough to understand what was going down, at any rate. It wasn’t “news” to me. It was just what was happening.
It’s still happening, only on other levels.
Bet on it.
Oil’s a drug, too.
Y’get yer pushers and yer users. And yer suppliers as well…the real criminals.
The pushers go to jail; the users get fucked up and die hard and the suppliers rise up the supply line.
Right into the highest reaches of the PermaGov.
Bet on it.
Follow the money.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. “How strange the change from major to minor” is one of the classic Cole Porter lyrics in his song “Everytime We Say Goodbye.” It happens at the end of the second statement statement of the melody, and John Coltrane’s version of it lives as deep in my soul as does my mother’s last goodbye.
Bet on that as well.
Check it out.
Oh right, the preciousness of “my direct, in-the-street experience as a working musician playing primarily minority-based musics in primarily-minority populated areas,” gives you license to dismiss/discount the experiences, education, and reading of others that also just happened to live through those years as well.
“I didn’t give a flying fuck at the time about Reagan, the CIA or any other PermaGov bullshit” So telling since a lot of others, including many white people that you disdain, were actively resisting all the crap that was being implemented during the Reagan years and the horrors being visited on El Salvador and Nicaragua. (The pain and fear was evident in the faces of undocumented refugees from those countries that were in my classroom.) Volunteering what little spare time we had to offer at Pacifica in efforts to get the word out to those that didn’t or couldn’t read. Before Iran-Contra broke into the news there was Christic Institute and Avirgan v. Hull.
relatively laid-back heroin and marijuana street user culture turned crazy ugly under the spell of crack cocaine. Uh, no. More than a decade before crack cocaine hit the street “laid-back” heroin users Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison were dead. And pot today isn’t the mild stuff that was around in the sixties. But there were speed freaks messing things up by 1970.
Superficially collapsing fifty years of events, developments, etc. into one big stewpot is neither illuminating nor good and accurate story telling.
Robert Parry on ‘Kill the Messenger’
Ronald Reagan worst American ever!
I saw it; I felt it and unlike most of the people who were living in those areas the time I had already been radicalized by what went down during the late ’60s/early ’70s in Boston and New York. I knew who was playing the game but it wasn”t just Rockefeller and the Attica Boys.
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