The New Debtors’ Prisons

Here is a tale that sounds like it comes right from the pages of “Little Dorrit,” Charles Dickens’s scathing indictment of Victorian England’s debtors’ prisons. Unfortunately, it is happening in 21st-century America.

Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son. When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.

In 1970, the Supreme Court ruled that it violates equal protection to keep inmates in prison extra time because they are too poor to pay a fine or court costs. More recently, the court ruled that a state generally cannot revoke a defendant’s probation and imprison him for failing to pay a fine if he is unable to do so.

That has not stopped the practice. In Georgia, poor people who cannot pay off fines — plus a monthly fee to the private company that collects the payments — are often sent to jail for nonpayment, according to Stephen Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights. In 2006, the center sued on behalf of a woman who was locked up in Atlanta for eight months past her original sentence because she could not pay a $705 fine.

Until a few years ago, the police in Gulfport, Miss., regularly did sweeps of the city’s predominantly African-American neighborhoods, identified people with unpaid fines, and put them in jail. Defendants who could not pay were forced to remain there until they “sat off” their fines. The city ended the practice after it was sued.

Prisoners’ rights advocates worry that in these hard times, when government budgets are under pressure, courts and prisons will get even tougher about forcing indigent defendants to pay costs and fees, and will imprison more of them if they cannot come up with the money. The government should be helping people on society’s margins build productive lives. Throwing them in jail for being poor makes that much more difficult.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Chilling Right Wing Hate-mongers

A Dangerous gang of cowards

Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Chilling Rise of Right-Wing Hate in Ameirca

4/05/2009 11:43:00 AM Posted by Metavirus

Crooks and Liars posted new details about the right-wing psychopath who gunned down three police officers in Pittsburgh:

Thanks to some sleuth work on the Internet, we're starting to learn more about Richard Poplawski, the 23-year-old who killed three police officers yesterday in Pittsburgh, evidently out of fear that his guns were going to be taken away.

It appears that what police may be looking at is a budding white supremacist who frequented one of the most popular neo-Nazi websites and harbored an apocalyptic dread of the federal government...

[T]he Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has some corroboration from other sources that indicates he fits this profile:

Richard Andrew "Pop" Poplawski's ex-girlfriend said he dragged her by the hair and threatened to shoot her.

He slept with a gun under his pillow in a basement room filled with firearms and ammunition, convinced that Jews controlled the media and President Obama was scheming to take away his arsenal, friends and relatives said Saturday.

"He was a violent, abusive man. He dragged me by the hair, pulling me across the floor. I saw him choke his own mother. He was controlling," said Melissa Gladish, 23, of Verona, his former girlfriend who received a protection from abuse order against him in 2005. She said she had no doubt he would kill someone.

I can't begin to tell you how frightened this makes me. The radical right wingers that were so prevalent during the Clinton administration went dormant during the Bush years. Now that Obama is in office, and irresponsible sociopaths like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann are recklessly stoking the fires of paranoid rightwing victimization, I fear we will face countless tragedies like what just went on in Pittsburgh.

When liberal radicals get upset, they engage in protests and damage property, like the nonsense you saw outside the G-20 summit.

When right wing radicals get upset, they either shoot lots of people and or blow up a building with lots of people in it (see, e.g., the FBI building in Oklahoma City).

As Tim F. at Balloon Juice opines:

How is that “orderly revolution” going, Michelle? How about that laundry soap rebellion, Erick? This is what Glenn Beck’s citizen army looks like. People like Michelle Malkin fantasize about citizens rising up against the (Democratic) state. They stoke their followers’ paranoia with bullshit that, mostly, they know is bullshit, for ratings and a shot at political traction. Did they expect the American revolution?

In response to John’s famous Peak Wingnut post I pointed out that political irrelevance will hardly stifle rightwing victimology but feed it like CO2, manure and sunlight. I tend to call the relevant phenomenon ‘toxic victim syndrome’, or TVS. The feeling that one is a powerless victim has a corrosive psychological effect. It exempts self-appointed victims from normal moral standards. It justifies (in one’s own mind) an endless list of behaviors that an ordinary person would never consider.

How many people have to die before the right-wing media acknowledges their complicity in these kinds of attacks and voluntarily dials back their inflammatory rhetoric and incitements to violence?

Sadly, I think it's going to take a long time for that to happen -- and a lot more innocent people are going to die in the interim. I guess this is what "America First" means for the radical right under an Obama presidency.

For the final word, here's John Cole:

And, of course, when you point out that certain individuals with all their talk about “revolution” and “armed insurrection” are inciting this kind of behavior in unstable people, you will get howls of protest about the 1st Amendment and what not. Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn’t make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons.

Update: One more final word from Andrew Sullivan:

Many of us have worried that the heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces might spill over at some point into violence in the hands of individuals prone to lashing out. We now have what seems to be a clear instance of that and three dead police officers. One wonders whether Fox News or the Second Amendment fanatics will chill it out a little. And then one realizes who we're talking about.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Bomb; Let's Play Ball

Opening Day

Tuesday 07 April 2009

by: William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Thousands of people gather in Hradcany Square ahead of US President Barack Obama's speech in Prague. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

- Albert Einstein

Monday in Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Maryland, Missouri, Minnesota, Illinois, California and a small corner of Canada was Opening Day for the 2009 Major League Baseball season. Last year's World Series winners, the Philadelphia Phillies, began their season the night before with a 4-1 loss to the Atlanta Braves, but will have 161 more chances to make up for it before the last first pitch of the regular season is thrown in Dodger Stadium six months from now.

It is quite possible that Monday was also an opening day of a different kind, one that involves every living thing on planet Earth. There has been a far deadlier game than baseball being played without reprieve every day for more than 60 years. Done the right way and with the right people in the right positions, Monday could become known as the day humanity finally began to stop playing the nuclear game.

"Hours after North Korea's missile test," reported The New York Times on Monday morning, "President Obama on Sunday called for new United Nations sanctions and laid out a new approach to American nuclear disarmament policy - one intended to strengthen the United States and its allies in halting proliferation. 'In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up,' Mr. Obama told a huge crowd in Prague's central square. 'Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread.' And yet, he said, too few resources have been committed to developing a strategy to stop terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that are 'determined to buy, build or steal' a bomb."

"Mr. Obama," continued the Times report, "said that his administration would 'reduce the role of nuclear weapons' in its national security strategy, and would urge other countries to do the same. He pointed to the agreement he reached last week with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia to begin negotiations on reducing warheads and stockpiles, and said the two countries would try to reach an agreement by the end of the year. He also promised to aggressively pursue American ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which in the past has faced strong opposition in Congress. It is a strategy based on the idea that if the United States shows it is willing to greatly shrink the size of its atomic arsenal, ban nuclear testing and cut off the worldwide production of bomb material, reluctant allies and partners around the world will be more likely to rewrite nuclear treaties and enforce sanctions against North Korea and Iran."

The "No Nukes!" cry seems almost quaint with nearly 20 years now standing between today and the end of the cold war, a hold-over from the heyday of the ban-the-bomb movement that flourished during Reagan's time. The facts, however, are precisely as President Obama stated them; the world today is more threatened by the use of nuclear weaponry than at any time in history short of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The two best examples of this grave threat are not Iran and North Korea, contrary to popular belief. North Korea has tested such weapons, and Iran appears bound and determined to possess nuclear arms someday (or at least appears bound and determined to appear bound and determined), but neither country at this time presents the same level of threat to the world as Pakistan and Russia. Both own formidable stockpiles of nuclear arms, if the definition of the word "own" is taken to mean "having nukes within their borders." Their control over these weapons, unfortunately, is the lethal rub.

Estimates vary, but it is believed Pakistan currently possesses somewhere between 60 and 100 nuclear weapons. This is a nerve-wracking reality given the nature of that nation's relations with neighboring India - the two countries have gone to war a number of times already over the disputed Kashmir region and other issues - and given the shaky nature of the Pakistani government.

Specifically, Pakistan's stability is threatened by the wide swath of its population that shares ethnic, cultural and religious connections to the fundamentalist Islamic populace of Afghanistan. It is widely suspected that Pakistan's intelligence services and religiously-devoted civilians have provided aid and support to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, and the constant foment within Pakistan's hard-line Islamic community presents a serious threat to that nation's government.

If the hard-liners in Pakistan are ever successful in toppling the government, several very scary things will happen at once. Nuclear-armed India would be galvanized by the sheer terror of sharing a border with a madhouse, and could quickly be compelled to take military action of some kind, as could nuclear-armed China. If the Pakistani government falls, and all those Pakistani nukes are not immediately accounted for and secured, the specter of loose Pakistani nukes falling into the hands of terrorist organizations would have the entire Western Hemisphere hiding under the bed.

The threat posed by Russia's nuclear arsenal is no less severe, and is in many ways far more insidious and chilling. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons were produced and placed inside Russia. Since the collapse of the USSR and the creation of the Russian Republic, military protection and safekeeping of the radioactive leftovers from the construction of these weapons have fallen into an unimaginable state of disrepair. In many places within Russia, fissionable materials vital to the creation of a bomb are left unguarded, secured by little more than a deadbolt lock.

Anyone with an Internet connection and a modicum of mechanical ability can find plans for building a nuclear device and build one from scratch. The hard part about making a functional homemade bomb is getting hold of the nuclear materials for the bomb's core. To date, and as far as we know, nobody has managed to get this done. But with nuclear materials literally laying unprotected all over the Russian landscape, the danger of someone successfully constructing a nuclear weapon is all too real.

The time has come to remove finally and forever this nuclear scourge from our world. President Obama has put the challenge before the American people, the American Congress and the global community at large. "This goal will not be reached quickly - perhaps not in my lifetime," he told a crowd in Prague this weekend. "We must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, 'Yes, we can.'"

It's opening day. Let's play ball.

»

---

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Democrats Duck Bush Torture Probe

As we have said on numerous occasions and numerous blogs, if the Goopers are truly unraveling, just hide and watch the Dembulbs save them.

I know. I've seen this film before and I didn't like it the first or second time around.

Nevertheless, this time it seems a little different. Is someone being blackmailed? BuCheney, Inc have been wiretapping for 8 years. Don't you just know that anyone of the opposition, of whom is perceived as is any threat at all has been wiretapped and something either criminal or embarrassing as hell isn't being held over their heads? (Not that that is an excuse for a truly patriotic, courageous public servant.) LOL, LOL, LOL!

By Jason Leopold
March 30, 2009

Despite now overwhelming evidence that ex-President George W. Bush and many top aides engaged in a systematic policy of illegal torture, national Democrats appear to be shying away from their recommendation last year for a special prosecutor to investigate these apparent war crimes.

Last June, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 55 other congressional Democrats signed a letter to then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey demanding a special prosecutor to investigate the growing body of evidence that Bush administration officials had sanctioned torture, which had been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Not unexpectedly, Mukasey – a staunch defender of Bush’s theories about expansive presidential powers – ignored the letter. Now, however, despite even more evidence of torture and a Democratic administration in place, the calls for a special prosecutor have grown muted.

Aides to several Democratic lawmakers who signed the June 2008 letter told me that the focus has shifted to the economy and that pressure for a special prosecutor to bring criminal charges over the Bush administration’s past actions could become a distraction to that focus.

They added that the most that now can be expected is either a “blue ribbon” investigative panel such as Conyers proposed earlier this year or a similar “truth and reconciliation commission” as advocated by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. Not a single signer of last year’s letter has stepped forward to renew the demand for a special prosecutor to the Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder.

The loss of Democratic interest in a special prosecutor suggests that the signers made the recommendation last year knowing that Mukasey would ignore it but thinking that the letter would appease the Democratic “base,” which was calling for accountability on Bush’s war crimes.

This readiness of Democrats to put the pursuit of bipartisanship over the pursuit of justice – after a victorious election – parallels their actions 16 years ago when President Bill Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress swept under the rug investigations of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, such as the Iran-Contra scandal and Iraqgate support for Saddam Hussein. [See Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

However, this time, Bush-43’s apparent violations of international laws prohibiting torture are forcing global demands for action, if the United States fails to live up to its obligations to enforce its own commitment to anti-torture laws and treaties.

Torture is a war crime that carries universal enforcement, which means that prosecutors of other nations can bring charges if the nation directly implicated doesn’t act. In that regard, Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon took the initial steps last week to investigate whether six high-level Bush officials, including key lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, violated laws against torture.

Torture Results

Also, over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the waterboarding – or simulated drowning – of “war on terror” suspect Abu Zabaida induced him to provide a host of new leads about al-Qaeda plots, but that his torture-induced claims turned out to be time-consuming dead-ends.

“Not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations,” the Post reported.

“Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida – chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates – was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.” [Washington Post, March 29, 2009]

Two weeks ago, other evidence about Bush’s torture policy surfaced when journalist Mark Danner published chilling details from a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that concluded that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees at CIA secret prisons “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings have legal consequence.

The June 2008 letter from Conyers apparently was prompted by the same or similar ICRC findings, citing “several instances of acts of torture against detainees, including soaking a prisoner’s hand in alcohol and lighting it on fire, subjecting a prisoner to sexual abuse and forcing a prisoner to eat a baseball.”

Conyers and the other Democrats told Mukasey then that the ICRC findings alone warranted action but were buttressed by other information that senior Bush administration officials met in the White House to approve the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” and that “President Bush was aware of, and approved of the meetings taking place.”

The letter added: "This information indicates that the Bush administration may have systematically implemented, from the top down, detainee interrogation policies that constitute torture or otherwise violate the law.

“We believe that these serious and significant revelations warrant an immediate investigation to determine whether actions taken by the President, his Cabinet, and other Administration officials are in violation of the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and other U.S. and international laws.

"Despite the seriousness of the evidence, the Justice Department has brought prosecution against only one civilian for an interrogation-related crime. Given that record, we believe it is necessary to appoint a special counsel in order to ensure that a thorough and impartial investigation occurs."

Still Waiting

Nearly nine months have passed since Conyers and the other Democratic lawmakers sent the letter to Mukasey. Since then, more evidence has piled up implicating at least a dozen senior Bush administration officials in sanctioning a policy of torture.

For instance, in January, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who heads military commissions at Guantanamo, became the highest ranking U.S. official who said the interrogation of at least one detainee at Guantanamo met the legal definition of torture and as a result she would not allow a war crimes tribunal against him to proceed.

Last week, Vijay Padmanabhan, the State Department’s chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation, told the Associated Press that the Bush administration overreacted after 9/11 and set up a policy of torture at the facility.

“I think Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration," Padmanabhan told the AP. He criticized other “overreactions” such as extraordinary renditions, waterboarding at secret CIA prisons and "other enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture.”


Meanwhile, other Bush administration veterans, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have spoken openly about their support for and approval of waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods, although they continued to insist that the tactics did not constitute torture.

During a speech at the University of Texas at Austin recently, former Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "there are things that you can call waterboarding that I am thoroughly convinced are not torture. There are things that you can call waterboarding that might be torture. …

“The point that ought to be understood is that throwing a term around recklessly for its emotional content doesn't really get you anywhere."

In waterboarding, a person is strapped to a board with his head tilted downward and a cloth covering his face. Water is then poured over the cloth forcing the panicked gag reflex associated with drowning. It has been condemned as torture since the days of the Spanish Inquisition and its use has resulted in past criminal prosecutions under U.S. law.

Before leaving office, Vice President Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three “high value” detainees and the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.

Admissions of Crimes

Civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney’s comments amounted to an admission of war crimes. The ACLU called on Attorney General Holder two weeks ago to appoint a special prosecutor to launch a probe into the Bush administration's torture practices.

“The fact that such crimes have been committed can no longer be doubted or debated, nor can the need for an independent prosecutor be ignored by a new Justice Department committed to restoring the rule of law,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said.

“Given the increasing evidence of deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse, and that such conduct was the predictable result of policy changes made at the highest levels of government, an independent prosecutor is clearly in the public interest,” Romero said.

Holder has not responded to the ACLU’s request. Over the next several weeks, however, the evidence of torture should continue to mount.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to release a voluminous report on the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees held in U.S. custody and the brutal interrogation techniques they were subjected to, according to Defense Department and intelligence sources.

The declassified version of the report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes, and will reveal a wealth of new information about the genesis of the Bush administration's interrogation policies, according to these sources. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents, and took 18 months to complete.

The Justice Department also is expected to release a declassified version of a critical report prepared by its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigated legal work by former attorneys at the Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on the limits of presidential authority.

The report concluded that three key attorneys – John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury – blurred the lines between an attorney charged with providing independent legal advice to the White House and a policy advocate who was working to advance the administration’s goals, which included a legal justification for torture, said the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the contents of the report are still classified.

On April 2, the Justice Department also is expected to release three still-classified legal opinions that Bradbury wrote in May 2005, reaffirming Bush’s claimed authority to subject “war on terror” prisoners to harsh interrogations.

Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

To Bush's GWOT, RIP

Only problem is, Bob. 

Can we be sure that GWOT is really dead or is it still being run by Cheney and his loyalist who still hold offices in the most important agencies of the executive when it comes to foreign policy?

By Robert Parry
March 31, 2009

President Barack Obama has come under some criticism for slowing his promised withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and for beefing up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but his 70-day-old administration at least has dumped one part of George W. Bush’s bellicose foreign policy: the phrase “global war on terror.”

Burying the “GWOT,” as it was known in Washington jargon, also is not just a semantic shift or a meaningless word game. Bush’s post-9/11 concept of eliminating “every terrorist group of global reach” created the framework for an endless war covering the entire planet, including U.S. territory. The GWOT was to be everywhere and never ending.

(Terror has been with us since....well,.....forever. It always will be, as long a mankind's head rules, uninformed by mankind's heart.)

It became the justification in 2002 for Bush administration lawyers to craft legal opinions that asserted that the President, as Commander in Chief, possessed “plenary” or total power, thus transforming the American Republic into a new-age national security state with all constitutional and legal rights left to the discretion of George W. Bush.

Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo tossed away U.S. constitutional rights almost casually. The “global war on terror” meant scrapping habeas corpus, the ancient right to challenge arbitrary arrests. Out, too, went the First, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth and the Eighth Amendments. [See, for instance, Consortiumnews.com’s “How Close the Bush Bullet.”]

(John Yoo should be "taken out-back and horse-whipped," as my Grandpa used to say about people whose behavior there was just no rational excuse for, under any circumstances)

The GWOT overrode U.S. treaty and other commitments, opening the door to the torture of detainees in U.S. custody. It permitted the President to dispatch military units and CIA operatives to kidnap or kill suspected terrorists around the world.

Most Americans might have associated the GWOT with the fight against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. But the “war” actually was much broader, covering any irregular fighting force “with global reach,” which apparently was defined as any group that could pool its resources to buy an airplane ticket, whether they were holed up on an island in the Philippines, in the mountains of Central Asia, in a desert in the Middle East or in the jungles of Colombia.

Beyond intervening in guerrilla conflicts around the world, Bush's GWOT could seek “regime change” against established national governments – in Iraq, Iran and North Korea – the nations he famously labeled the "axis of evil." They were part of the GWOT, though they were not implicated in the 9/11 attacks.

Initially, Iran even joined the coalition against the Taliban as Bush moved to oust the Afghan government which had provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, Iran was still lumped into the GWOT. Some Bush administration officials, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, also raised 9/11 suspicions about Iraq, though the allegations turned out to be false.

(Dick Cheney reminds me of the spooky, old woman peaking out from behind her lace curtains.)

Muslim Resentments

Bush’s GWOT became especially unpopular in the Muslim world, which saw the U.S.-led campaign as directed primarily against Islamic militants

.(Who can possibly blame them?)

A Gallup poll in early 2002 found strong anti-American sentiment in U.S. allies and adversaries alike. The countries surveyed included Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

The lowest scores came from Pakistan, a principal U.S. ally in the Afghan war. In nuclear-armed Pakistan, only five percent of the respondents had a favorable opinion of the United States, making any counterinsurgency cooperation with Washington problematic for Islamabad politicians.

Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said Muslims described the United States as "ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked, biased." Newport added that "the people of Islamic countries have significant grievances with the West in general and with the United States in particular."

(The Muslims aren't by themselves! People from many other nations say the same thing, including my pals in Kiwiland, Oz and Europe.)

How Bush framed the terrorism issue also bred resentment and confusion inside the United States. In answering “why do they hate us?” Bush offered the sophomoric notion that Islamic extremists “hated our freedoms” and wanted to destroy the American Way of Life.

"They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government," Bush said in his Sept. 20, 2001, address to Congress. "They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

(This bit of b.s. was what sent me on trips to Egypt. Bush's explanation didn't make any sense. I wanted to talk with Muslims about why they hated us. As it turns out, they didn't until shock and awe. Imagine sitting in the home of an Egyptian, Muslim family while the bombs fell on Baghdad. As the scenes of death and horrendous violence appeared on their T.V., I simply lost it. Egyptian Muslims were comforting me as I wept for the people of Iraq and the people of the U.S. Ironic, eh?)

Though playing well domestically, this self-serving explanation fell flat with many Middle East experts who recognized that bin Laden's goals were focused much more on Middle East politics and had little to do with American freedoms.

Bin Laden's principal grievance was with the government of his native land, Saudi Arabia, which he viewed as corrupt. Toward this end, he sought to drive U.S. military forces from the Persian Gulf and especially from Saudi Arabia, home of the holiest sites in Islam.

Many Middle Easterners also considered Bush’s “hate our freedom” comments ignorant and insulting because it failed to recognize their legitimate concerns about U.S. policies.

In the seven years since Bush launched the GWOT, Muslims have found many more reasons to resent the United States – the bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, Washington’s neglect of the Palestinian problem, and Bush’s hypocritical rhetoric about democracy and freedom while favoring many Middle Eastern despots and locking prisoners up indefinitely at Guantanamo.

So, in inheriting Bush’s many messes, President Obama doesn’t only face the problem of two ongoing wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan – but he also must cope with political instability in Pakistan, a strategic challenge from Iran, simmering anger among Arabs over Israel’s recent war in Gaza, and a rise in regional militancy.

In that sense, a small but not insignificant step was taken by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday when she announced that “the administration has stopped using the [‘war on terror’] phrase, and I think that speaks for itself.”

But an RIP for the GWOT is not just a nod to the sensibilities of the Muslim world. Scrapping the phrase further indicates that Obama is abandoning Bush’s rationale for an imperial presidency, even if the new President hasn’t dropped all his predecessor’s policies.

 
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

No More Refuge for Scoundrels

By Joe Conason

While the leaders of the world’s largest economies debate stimulus and regulation in London, let us hope they do not forget the compelling questions of crime and punishment. Rooted in the most massive swindles in financial history, the global crisis offers an unprecedented opportunity to prosecute the criminals whose machinations steered us toward disaster—and to deter them in the future.

Unfolding on the very doorstep of the G-20 meeting in London and in Washington is the instructive story of Joseph Cassano, former head of American International Group’s Financial Products Group, whose role in his company’s crash—which triggered the ruin of world money markets—may soon lead to criminal charges against him. What the Cassano story points up once more is how the existence of tax and regulatory havens across the world encourage nefarious conduct, lack of transparency, evasion of taxes and corporate criminality.

According to a new investigative report from ABC News, Mr. Cassano is the subject of a criminal fraud investigation by the F.B.I. that is examining how he and his colleagues in AIG’s financial products division set up the scheme to insure more than a trillion dollars of junk mortgage paper held by major banks. He walked away from those bad deals with over $300 million in personal profit. Aside from the fascinating matter of how he managed to commit these catastrophic bets without interference from his superiors, the most pertinent question is how he gamed the gaping loopholes in the international regulatory and legal systems.

Evidently Mr. Cassano established dozens of separate companies, including many that were located offshore, to handle the allegedly fraudulent transactions—a maneuver that was designed to keep the deals effectively off the books of AIG and to mislead regulators in the United States and Britain. The crooks at Enron Corporation used the same techniques, essentially, to conceal what should have been reported on their corporate balance sheets—and they too used offshore locations as instruments of fraud.

Jack Blum, a former Senate staffer who helped to lead the investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International more than a decade ago, told ABC reporters that the abuse of tax havens “is the other very important issue underneath the AIG scandal. All of these contracts were moved offshore for the express purpose of getting out from under regulation and tax evasion.”

Massive fraud has been at the center of this  crisis from bottom to top, as everyone paying attention must know. The criminal mind-set extended from the bankers and mortgage agents who made loans to unqualified borrowers and sometimes tricked them into signing agreements they could not fulfill. (Among the most industrious marketers were many with actual criminal records, whose entry into the mortgage industry was not blocked by the state regulators.) They marketed those same bad loans with false assurances of their soundness to convince investors to buy them—and somehow induced rating agencies to offer hollow testaments to their creditworthiness. Investors then resold the toxic packages to other investors both here and abroad. At every step, the inflation of the bubble was hastened by fraud, forgery and deception.

At the highest levels, those fraudulent transactions were aided by the existence of “secrecy spaces” in nice quaint places from Switzerland to Anguilla, where the malefactors could rely upon local authorities to collude in their conspiracies. Not only do the governments in the tax and regulatory havens pretend not to see what their corporate visitors are doing, but they actively shut out the scrutiny of anyone who might take action.

The costs imposed on the world by those selfish little entities are too great to ignore any longer. Vast amounts of taxable wealth, last estimated to exceed $12 trillion, are hidden in the protected banks of tax-haven principalities, with annual losses to the U.S. Treasury that may well be greater than $100 billion. But those same places appear to have provided a regulatory twilight zone where financiers like Joseph Cassano could run wild and ruin the rest of the world for profit. The urge to cheat on taxes and the desire to evade regulation represent the same destructive impulse, which governments around the world should now take steps to suppress.

jconason@observer.com

Joe Conason can be reached via email at joe.conason@observer.com.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Cheney's Moles In Obama Administration

We were suspicious that something like this was going on on Inauguration day, when it was reported that Cheney was moving into his new digs in Virginia, close to D.C.  Why not his home in Maryland that, at his insistence, was blacked out on Google earth. Why didn't he go home to Texas/Wyoming, like most V'P.'s do? 

Why? he's still running the shadow government, that's why.

AUDIO-- Seymour Hersh: Cheney ‘Left A Stay Behind’ In Obama’s Government, Can ‘Still Control Policy Up To A Point’

By GottaLaff


I've been following Seymour Hersh forever, especially lately. No sense in stopping now.

So. You want to know what the Nation of Dick has been up to now? Yes? You may regret it:

[...] Hersh replied that though “a lot of people that had told me in the last year of Bush, ‘call me next, next February,’ not many people had talked to him. He implied that they were still scared of Cheney. “Are you saying that you think Vice President Cheney is still having a chilling effect on people who might otherwise be coming forward,” asked [Terry] Gross. “I’ll make it worse,” answered Hersh, adding that he believes Cheney “put people back” in government to “stay behind” in order to “tell him what’s going on” and perhaps even “do sabotage”:

HERSH: I’ll make it worse. I think he’s put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence.

[...] In 2006, Robert Dreyfuss reported for The American Prospect that when Cheney helped staff the Bush administration in 2001, he put together a “corps of hard-line acolytes” that served “as his eyes and ears” in the federal bureaucracy. Former officials called them “Dick Cheney’s spies.”

Additionally, before leaving office, the Bush administration aggressively placed political appointees into permanent civil service positions as part of a process known as “burrowing.” [Laffy Note: My post on that here] Some of the burrowed former political appointees have close ties to Cheney, such as Jeffrey T. Salmon, who was a speechwriter for Cheney when he served as defense secretary. In July, he was named deputy director for resource management in the Energy Department’s Office of Science

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Big Turn Off

Join us for one hour tonight!

Earth Hour is almost upon us -- 8:30 p.m. local time on Saturday, March 28.

Don't know what Earth Hour is? Organized by the World Wildlife Fund, it is a worldwide effort to raise awareness about climate change with the hopes of spurring political action. Individuals, businesses and governments are encouraged to turn off their lights for an hour. It is estimated that 36 million people in the U.S. participated in Earth Hour in 2008.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Reagan: The Great American Socialist

Ravi Batra comments that if Democratic President Barack Obama is a "small" socialist, then Reagan was the "Great American Socialist." (Photo: University of Texas)

   
Socialism has been much in the news for some months. Recently, some GOP stalwarts charged President Obama with preaching the heresy. John Boehner, the House minority leader, characterized Obama's stimulus package as, "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment."
    
"Socialism" is a pejorative term in American politics and needs to be carefully examined. It usually refers to increased government control over the economy, or policies that promote the redistribution of wealth. There is no doubt that President Obama's economic measures, passed and proposed, will raise tax rates on the richest Americans to pay for increased government funding of health care, green energy and education. So the new president is indeed a redistributionist, but so was Ronald Reagan, except that Obama's plans will transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, whereas Reagan's bills transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the opulent. In fact, Obama's measures are puny, whereas Reagan's were massive. If the Democrat is a "small" socialist, Reagan was the Great American Socialist.

Let's go back to the early 1980's. In 1981, Reagan signed a law that sharply reduced the income tax for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The president asserted his program would create jobs, purge inflation and, get this, trim the budget deficit. However, following the tax cut, the deficit soared from 2.5 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, alarming financial markets, sending interest rates sky high, and culminating in the worst recession since the 1930's.

Soon the president realized he needed new revenues to trim the deficit, bring down interest rates and improve his chances for reelection. He would not rescind the income tax cut, but other taxes were acceptable. In 1982, taxes were raised on gasoline and cigarettes, but the deficit hardly budged. In 1983, the president signed the biggest tax rise on payrolls, promising to create a surplus in the Social Security system, while knowing all along that the new revenue would be used to finance the deficit.
   
The retirement system was looted from the first day the Social Security surplus came into being, because the legislation itself gave the president a free hand to spend the surplus in any way he liked. Thus began a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class, especially the self-employed small businessman, to the wealthy. The self-employment tax jumped as much as 66 percent.
   
In 1986, Reagan slashed the top tax rate further. His redistributionist obsession led to a perversity in the law. The wealthiest faced a 28 percent tax rate, while those with lower incomes faced a 33 percent rate; in addition, the bottom rate climbed from 11 percent to 15 percent. For the first time in history, the top rate fell and the bottom rate rose simultaneously. Even unemployment compensation was not spared. The jobless had to pay income tax on their benefits. A year later, the man who would not spare unemployment compensation from taxation called for a cut in the capital gains tax. Thus, Reagan was a staunch socialist, totally committed to his cause of wealth redistribution towards the affluent.
   
How much wealth transfer has occurred through Reagan's policies? At least $3 trillion.
   
The Social Security hike generated over $2 trillion in surplus between 1984 and 2007, and if it had been properly invested, say, in AAA corporate bonds it could have earned another trillion by now. At present, the fund is empty, because it has been used up to finance the federal deficits resulting from frequent cuts in income tax rates. If this is not redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, what else is?
   
Thus, Reagan was the first Republican socialist - and a great one, because his wealth transfer occurred on a massive scale. His accomplishment dwarfs even FDR's, and if today the small businessman suffers a crippling tax burden, he must thank Reagan the redistributionist. However, FDR took pains to help the poor, while Reagan took pains to help the wealthiest like himself.
   
Reagan's measures were similar to those that the Republicans adopted during the 1920's, which were followed by the catastrophic Depression. More recently, such policies were mimicked by President George W. Bush and they are about to plunge the world into a depression as well. Ironically, the Reagan-style socialism or wealth redistribution is about to destroy monopoly capitalism, the very system that he wanted to preserve and enrich.
   
Wake up America and elect leaders with a heart - not those who would tax your unemployment benefits and cut the capital gains tax.
    -------
    Dr. Ravi Batra, a professor of economics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, is the author of five international best sellers. He was the chairperson of his department from 1977 to 1980. This article is based on Batra's two books, "The New Golden Age" and "Greenspan's Fraud." His web site is Ravibatra.com.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Hey GOP! Just go the hell away....for a long time.

Just when you think it can't get any worse.....

A romp through the Republican ... budget?
 


P.M. Carpenter  Friday, March 27. 

I'll also offer Republicans a little sincere advice: Go away. Just go away for a long, long while. Grab whatever cash you have in the RNC account and hasten thee to a faraway exotic spa, or go on a year-long drunk, or simply hide yourselves at home, shutter the blinds, and shut the f*ck up. It's not your critics doing you harm. It's you and your non-budgeting budgets which advocate spending freezes during a deep freeze. It's Dick Cheney running around defending torture and denouncing social progress. It's Sarah Palin babbling about deficiently prayerful McCainites. It's your Cantors and Pences and Boehners looking and sounding so insufferably goofy. It's Michael Steele strategizing with God but genuflecting before Rush. For those fond of reifying brevity, it can even be just two words: Michele Bachmann.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

It's Time To End The War On Drugs

In case no one has noticed, the war on drugs was lost almost before it began, but it has been an extremely expensive war even so. Apparently we learned nothing from prohibition.

As with prohibition, the war on drugs has created a whole new way to make gazillions for organized crime, not to mention criminal lawyers and prison corporations who love nothing better than recidivism.

As with prohibition, ordinary, work-a-day citizens have been turned into criminals where no tendency toward a criminal life-style was evident. Lives have been ruined; the lives of people at a young age, unfortunately. If parents want to assure themselves that their kids will, at least, experiment with drugs, they should be thankful to the drug warriors, because making drugs illegal assured that very thing. Once a society makes a substance illegal, it has lost all control over it and the profit motive is there for others to sell said substance.

Courts across America are jammed up. A big part of the problem is drug related crime.

The last time I checked the statistics, it costs tax payers an average of $47,000 per year to incarcerate one individual. The vast majority of Americans are lucky if they make that much in a year. Of course, the amount varies from state to state just as the cost of living does, but is anyone really interested in spending anywhere near that much money to incarcerate a person who prefers cannabis in the evenings to a glass of wine or a few beers?

Legalize it and tax it, but please don't give the market to the tobacco industry. They have already proved to everyone that they have no integrity. If anyone can find a way to make cannabis truly addictive, it would be the same people who took an already dangerous, addictive drug, nicotine, and manipulated the content in cigarettes in order to hopelessly addict even more people, while lying for decades about their knowledge of the addictiveness of nicotine, which is, by the way, worse than addiction to the many illegal drugs.

Time To Restore The Fourth Amendment

Whenever there is any kind of war, civil rights watchers had better be on their toes. Even a cursory knowledge of history tells us that. The 4th Amendment began being shredded in earnest when the war on drugs was declared. Today I'm not sure that it actually exists anymore except on paper (no matter what they say on Law and Order.). It is time that we restore it completely. I wonder if there are any statistics on how many doors have been kicked in and people at the address killed because the police had the wrong address while trying to make a drug bust? We have all heard on the news (usually local) that it has happened, probably more times than the police want to count, that's for sure. How many cops have been killed by new organized crime created by these new prohibition law?. How much time is wasted by police doing paperwork on a cannabis case while people are being raped, murdered and robbed on the streets of America? I've spoken to countless cops in many cites over the years who wish the government would legalize cannabis.

Too many people have died, too many lives have been ruined by this senseless war, probably far more than would have been lost to or ruined by the drugs themselves. Perhaps we should stop declaring war on inanimate objects or highly charged emotional states. It doesn't make any sense and it never did. Declaring war on a plant that grows just about anywhere anything else will grow has got to be one of the most incredibly stupid things I have ever heard.

So who was behind some of the most incredibly stupid laws ever written? The cotton industry for one, who didn't want to have to compete with the much stronger, durable fiber, hemp. It is still illegal to this day to grow hemp in America. Of course that was ages ago. The lobbyists who really wanted cannabis outlawed belonged to the alcohol industry. ( Since Holland de-criminalized cannabis years ago, the biggest drug problem in the Netherlands is still alcohol.)

Nevertheless, if we insist on continuing these ridiculous policies, everyone from the president, his staff and cabinet, members of congress, to the bail out babies on Wall Street should have to submit to the piss police. After all, if people who flip burgers need to be clean and sober to do their jobs, surely the highest ranking officials of the nation and the irreplaceable thieves on Wall Street certainly do. Oh, by the way, lets test for alcohol too. After all alcohol is more of a problem when it comes to exercising good judgment. Even hangovers from alcohol impair a person's judgment. Can't test for alcohol, you say? Maybe not, but since the liver cannot completely metabolize alcohol, it leaves another quite toxic substance in the system for quite some time. As a matter of fact it is the substance that causes hangovers; acetaldahyde.

Time for the insanity to end.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

States consider drug tests for welfare recipients

By TOM BREEN, Associated Press Writer Tom Breen, Associated Press Writer Thu Mar 26, 9:28 am ET

CHARLESTON, W.Va. –




Want government assistance? Just say no to drugs.

Lawmakers in at least eight states want recipients of food stamps, unemployment benefits or welfare to submit to random drug testing.

The effort comes as more Americans turn to these safety nets to ride out the recession. Poverty and civil liberties advocates fear the strategy could backfire, discouraging some people from seeking financial aid and making already desperate situations worse. (It could backfire in an even worse way for the drug warriors and everyone else using our tax dollars to fight an endless, extremely expensive "war on drugs" which we lost years ago. Wars are expensive, even if they are already lost. In this case, especially if the war has already been lost.)
 .
Those in favor of the drug tests say they are motivated out of a concern for their constituents' health and ability to put themselves on more solid financial footing once the economy rebounds. But proponents concede they also want to send a message: you don't get something for nothing. (Yeah right, we all know how concerned these people are for their so-called constituents. That's why many of them voted for policies which led us over an economic cliff for campaign support from their real constituents, some of whom may not even be in the state they represent, not to mention their districts, but all of whom stood to get wealthier of said policies.)


"Nobody's being forced into these assistance programs," said Craig Blair, a Republican in the West Virginia Legislature who has created a Web site — notwithmytaxdollars.com — that bears a bobble-headed likeness of himself advocating this position. "If so many jobs require random drug tests these days, why not these benefits?" (Of course they aren't being forced into assistance programs. Neither are the crooks on Wall Street, but are they being asked to submit to the piss police?)

Blair is proposing the most comprehensive measure in the country, as it would apply to anyone applying for food stamps, unemployment compensation or the federal programs usually known as "welfare": Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Women, Infants and Children.

Lawmakers in other states are offering similar, but more modest proposals.

On Wednesday, the Kansas House of Representatives approved a measure mandating drug testing for the 14,000 or so people getting cash assistance from the state, which now goes before the state senate. In February, the Oklahoma Senate unanimously passed a measure that would require drug testing as a condition of receiving TANF benefits, and similar bills have been introduced in Missouri and Hawaii. A Florida senator has proposed a bill linking unemployment compensation to drug testing, and a member of Minnesota's House of Representatives has a bill requiring drug tests of people who get public assistance under a state program there.

A January attempt in the Arizona Senate to establish such a law failed

In the past, such efforts have been stymied by legal and cost concerns, said Christine Nelson, a program manager with the National Conference of State Legislatures. But states' bigger fiscal crises, and the surging demand for public assistance, could change that.

"It's an example of where you could cut costs at the expense of a segment of society that's least able to defend themselves," said Frank Crabtree, executive director of the West Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Drug testing is not the only restriction envisioned for people receiving public assistance: a bill in the Tennessee Legislature would cap lottery winnings for recipients at $600. (Perhaps they should be sterilized as well...snark. After all, kids are expensive.)

 
There seems to be no coordinated move around the country to push these bills, and similar proposals have arisen periodically since federal welfare reform in the 1990s. But the appearance of a cluster of such proposals in the midst of the recession shows lawmakers are newly engaged about who is getting public assistance.

Particularly troubling to some policy analysts is the drive to drug test people collecting unemployment insurance, whose numbers nationwide now exceed 5.4 million, the highest total on records dating back to 1967.

"It doesn't seem like the kind of thing to bring up during a recession," said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "People who are unemployed, who have lost their job, that's a sympathetic group. Americans are tuned into that, because they're worried they'll be next."

Indeed, these proposals are coming at a time when more Americans find themselves in need of public assistance.

Although the number of TANF recipients has stayed relatively stable at 3.8 million in the last year, claims for unemployment benefits and food stamps have soared.

In December, more than 31.7 million Americans were receiving food stamp benefits, compared with 27.5 million the year before.

The link between public assistance and drug testing stems from the Congressional overhaul of welfare in the 1990s, which allowed states to implement drug testing as a condition of receiving help.

But a federal court struck down a Michigan law that would have allowed for "random, suspicionless" testing, saying it violated the 4th Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure, said Liz Schott, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

At least six states — Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Virginia — tie eligibility for some public assistance to drug testing for convicted felons or parolees, according to the NCSL.
Nelson said programs that screen welfare applicants by assigning them to case workers for interviews have shown some success without the need for drug tests. These alternative measures offer treatment, but can also threaten future benefits if drug problems persist, she said.

They also cost less than the $400 or so needed for tests that can catch a sufficient range of illegal drugs, and rule out false positive results with a follow-up test, she said.
___
Associated Press Writer Lawrence Messina in Charleston contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.