Severe Conservative Syndrome

The Article: Severe Conservative Syndrome by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

The Text: Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.

That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.

Start with Rick Santorum, who, according to Public Policy Polling, is the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters, running 15 points ahead of Mr. Romney. Anyone with an Internet connection is aware that Mr. Santorum is best known for 2003 remarks about homosexuality, incest and bestiality. But his strangeness runs deeper than that.

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Decriminalize Drugs And Drug Abuse Goes Down

The Article: Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal by E.D. Kain in Forbes.

The Text: Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.

Ten years ago, Portugal decriminalized all drugs. One decade after this unprecedented experiment, drug abuse is down by half:

“Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

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US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions

The Article: US Running on Myths, Lies, Deceptions and Distractions by John Atcheson on Common Dreams.

The Text: The United States is headed for a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want.

Why?

Because the country is running on lies, myths, deceptions and distractions. Not surprisingly, they aren’t working very well for us.

Let’s run through a few of the most destructive lies and myths.

Corporations and the uber rich are the job creators: Uh, no. Corporations are sitting on over $2 trillion dollars in un-invested profits. What jobs they are creating are in China and other countries – which, by the way, engaged in huge government funded stimulus programs when the Great Recession first hit. Which brings us to our next myth…

Government can’t create jobs: This particular whopper is just plain counterfactual. Obama’s much maligned stimulus program created some 3 million jobs and would have created more if he hadn’t caved to Republicans and limited its size and agreed to put 40% of it into unproductive tax cuts. In short, government does create jobs – no one else can or will when there’s not enough consumer demand to justify corporate expansion. And as long as the middle class’s wealth is getting siphoned off by the 1%, there will not be enough demand.

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Slow Down In Syria!

The Article: Why Obama Should Go Slow In Syria by Leslie H. Gelb in the Daily Beast.

The Text: Faced with evil, Americans always want to be on the side of the angels. So American interventionists, hawks, and human-rights types are banding together, as they did in Libya, to stop President Bashar al-Assad from killing his people. But when interventionists become avenging angels, they blind themselves and the nation, and run dangerously amok. They plunge in with no plans, with half-baked plans, with demands to supply arms to rebels they know nothing about, with ideas for no-fly zones and bombing. Their good intentions could pave the road to hell for Syrians—preserving lives today, but sacrificing many more later.

Characteristically, the interventionists aren’t holding themselves to higher account; they’re blaming President Obama. To them, it’s all about his failure to act. But the president is moving sensibly and with due dispatch to restrain Assad’s killings. He’s squeezing the dictator economically and isolating him diplomatically. And while it doesn’t look like much, it is suppressing Assad’s freedom to slaughter. He has the military power to kill far more of his people. Meantime, President Obama is trying to fashion a coalition for more direct action—and it isn’t easy.

The natural choice to blunt Assad’s savagery, the Arab League, is practically useless. The league’s “observer missions” have failed. (What a surprise!) Now, the league seeks a joint observer mission with the United Nations. Mind you, if the league really wanted to act decisively, it could, as it did against Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, under NATO cover.

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“Trickle Down” Is a Plutocratic Religion, Not an Economic Theory

The Article: “Trickle Down” Is a Plutocratic Religion, Not an Economic Theory by Mark Karlin on Buzzflash.

The Text: “Trickle down” is not an economic theory; it’s a self-enriching religion for the wealthiest amongst us.

The economists and pundits are legion who have challenged the notion that the amassing of wealth by a privileged few results in more jobs being created in the US. After all, if this were the case – at a time the richer are becoming even richer – why did we nearly just reach a depression?

This is a very complicated issue to adequately explore, but a book that touches upon a flashpoint area of this debate is “Illegal People” by Truthout contributor and labor specialist, David Bacon. It is the Truthout Progressive Pick of the Week and available with a minimum contribution, shipped directly by Truthout.

One of Bacon’s central arguments is that globalized corporate trade is conducted to increase the profits of large corporate entities. The result is the exact opposite, in many cases, of trickle down. Due to trade agreements that allow corporations to place factories in the lowest cost country, creating near slave-labor conditions – as BuzzFlash at Truthout has shown – for workers who, for example, make almost all American high-tech products overseas.

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