South America’s Path To Drug Legalization

The Article: South America Sees Drug Path to Legalization by Damien Cave in the New York Times.

The Text: The agricultural output of this country includes rice, soybeans and wheat. Soon, though, the government may get its hands dirty with a far more complicated crop — marijuana — as part of a rising movement in this region to create alternatives to the United States-led war on drugs.

Uruguay’s famously rebellious president first called for “regulated and controlled legalization of marijuana” in a security plan unveiled last month. And now all anyone here can talk about are the potential impacts of a formal market for what Ronald Reagan once described as “probably the most dangerous drug in America.”

“It’s a profound change in approach,” said Sebastián Sabini, one of the lawmakers working on the contentious proposal unveiled by President José Mujica on June 20. “We want to separate the market: users from traffickers, marijuana from other drugs like heroin.”

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How Botswana Has Taken On AIDS

The Article: Botswana’s ‘Stunning Achievement’ Against AIDS by Justin Beaubien at NPR.

The Text: The southern African nation of Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world. Nearly 25 percent of all adults in the country are infected with the virus. Only the nearby kingdom of Swaziland has a higher rate.

But Botswana is also remarkable for its response to the epidemic. It has one of the most comprehensive and effective HIV treatment programs in Africa. Transmission of HIV from infected mothers to their fetuses and newborn babies has been brought down to just 4 percent.

A decade ago, Botswana was facing a national crisis as AIDS appeared on the verge of decimating the country’s adult population. Now, Botswana provides free, life-saving AIDS drugs to almost all of its citizens who need them.

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The Bankers Who Broke The World

The Article: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Matthew Yglesias in Slate.

The Text: I’ve come to believe that the best book about the global recession of 2008-present is Liaqart Ahamed’s Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, a history of central banking in the interwar period. The mistakes being made today are not “the same” as the mistakes of the central bankers of the 1930s but the basic plot is the same. This morning the Bank of England team up with the European Central Bank to issue a steady-as-she-goes policy statement, just as the Federal Reserve did yesterday.

To see how disappointing this is, imagine a very different world. This is a world where the US economy is growing at a modest pace but with an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent. That number is slowly falling and the employment-to-population ratio is slowly rising. The United Kingdom is in similar shape. Across the European continent, joblessness is a bit higher than that in a few countries but only absolute cranks are talking about the idea of the eurozone busting up. It’s a world, in other words, where everything is basically fine.

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A History Of American Assassination

The Article: Assassination Nation by Doug Noble in CounterPunch.

The Text:

“A broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced counterinsurgency as the prevailing expression of the American way of war.”

–Andrew Bacevich

This spring the US drone killing program has come out of the closet. Attorney General Eric Holder publicly defended the drone killing of an American citizen, while Obama’s counter terrorism czar John Brennan publicly explained and justified the target killing program. And a New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane chronicled Obama’s personal role in vetting a secret “Kill List.”

This striking new transparency, the official acknowledgment for the first time of a broad-based US assassination and targeted killing program, has resulted from the unprecedented and controversial visibility of drone warfare. Drones now make news every day, and those of us who have been protesting their use for years have heightened their visibility in the public eye, forcing official acknowledgment and fostering worldwide scrutiny. This new scrutiny focuses not only on drone use but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the targeted killing itself – and the “kill lists” that make them possible.

This new exposure has set off a firestorm of reaction around the globe. Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism told Democracy Now! “The kill list got really heavy coverage … newspapers have all expressed significant concern about the existence of the kill list, the idea of this level of executive power.” A Washington Post editorial noted that “No president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Becker and Shane of the Times pronounced Obama’s role “without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war …” [7] And former president Jimmy Carter insisted, in a recent editorial in The New York Times, “We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these [drone] attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.” [8]

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How Wealth Floods Offshore

The Article: Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals by Heather Stewart in the Guardian.

The Text: The world’s super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad – a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

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