America Has an Employment Problem, Not an Unemployment Problem
by John Lawrence
Wherever you look from air traffic controllers to fruit pickers to caregivers to teachers to police, there are not enough workers. That is why unemployment is so low - at 3.4%. The Health Services, Professional and Business Services, Trade, and Accommodation and Food Services industries have the highest numbers of job openings. The question is why there is a shortage of workers and what to do about it.The pandemic caused a major disruption in America’s labor force—something many have referred to as The Great Resignation. In 2022, more than 50 million workers quit their jobs, many of whom were in search of an improved work-life balance and flexibility, increased compensation, and a strong company culture. But a closer look at what has happened to the labor force can be better described as ‘The Great Reshuffle’ because hiring rates have outpaced quit rates since November of 2020. So, many workers are quitting their jobs—but many are getting re-hired elsewhere. In a game of musical chairs workers are seeking and getting better jobs, leaving high stress professions like nursing and teaching and getting paid more to do other things.
So America basically has a shortage of "essential workers," workers who do necessary work for traditionally low pay. America has developed so many ways to make money doing inessential work at higher pay so why should anyone who doesn't have to work in an essential job? There are two ways. 1) Pay more for essential work and 2) increase legal immigration because increasingly immigrants are doing the work that Americans who have been Americans longer don't want to do. The worker shortage has empowered workers. They are so to speak in the catbird seat. They are demanding more pay, shorter hours, better working conditions. This is all well and good, but, as the pandemic showed, essential work is necessary for people to live while so many other forms of work, while more lucrative, could disappear tomorrow without affecting much most Americans' quality of life. For instance, Facebook had 86,482 full-time employees as of December 2022, up from just 150 people in 2006. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nothing essential to life would be lost in my opinion. The same is true for other social media like Tik Tok. In fact considering the effects social media has had on the population, the world might be better off if all social media disappeared tomorrow. Then those workers would be available for more essential jobs.
If the advertising industry disappeared tomorrow, the world might be better off. For instance, I can find anything I might be interested in buying on Amazon. I don't need to be pounded on by TV commercials to be told what I should want or what I should need. In particualar, Facebook makes all its considerable revenues from advertising. It does not manufacture a product essential to life or any product at all. People are getting smart that there are cushier, safer jobs with better work-life balance than essential jobs. Caregivers like Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are low paid but essential jobs. Anyone who has had a loved one in the hospital for any length of time realizes how essential they are. They do the dirty work like changing patients diapers and cleaning up when they haven't got to the patients' bedsides in time to prevent a tragedy. Nurses and teachers are overworked considering the nurse/patient ratio and the teacher/student ratio. Much essential work is done by non college graduates and, therefore, does not merit the esteem that college graduates' jobs garner. Nevertheless, they are more important jobs in an essential sense, than many jobs that require a college education. When you need a plumber, you will not usually be hiring a college graduate.
About half of Americans who lost their job during the pandemic and are still not working say they are not willing to take jobs that do not offer the opportunity for remote work. However, many essential jobs can't be done remotely. They are "hands on." It is about time that America values its essential workers and makes a distinction between what's essential and what is inessential. It's a question, to some extent, of values, of what kinds of work are valued. This is where unions come in. America cannot function without essential workers. Yet the only way they can get the pay and benefits they deserve is to unionize and withdraw their workforce if necessary to get what they deserve. For sure, they won't get a better paying job otherwise unless they quit and go to work for Facebook.
American Lifestyle: Fall in Love. Get Married. Fall Out of Love. Get Divorced. Rinse. Repeat.
by John Lawrence
Celebrities set the tone of American lifestyles, and most of them adhere to the serial marriage model. Except for those who have millions of dollars and prefer to go on fighting after the marriage is resolved like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. It wasn't enough that Heard got a $7 million divorce settlement. She could have taken the money and gone home. I mean $7 million is a considerable chunk of change, but she chose to go on fighting even after the divorce. She wrote an article which defamed Johnny Depp. At least according to him it was defamatory. So naturally he sued her for defamation. Meanwhile, the media and the lawyers were getting rich. When there are so many more important issues that money and energy could be devoted to, much money and energy were poured into the issue of whether or not Amber Heard had defamed Johnny Depp or vice versa. So what. Who Cares. Even more entertaining than their movies. We are entertaining ourselves to death.
Then there's Taylor Swift with whom one can hardly keep up with all the songs she's written and records she's made off of her serial relationships. Not to mention all of her Swifty fans who cried crocodile tears over the fact that they couldn't get tickets to one of her concerts. Boo. Hoo. Children are starving in Africa, and people are feeling abused because they can't go to a Taylor Swift concert? What kind of values are these? People are all about emulating celebrities so when a Swifty actually gets into a relationship or a marriage, they must ask themselves, when the simplest problem comes up, "what would Taylor do". Why probably just drop the guy like a hot potato and then write a song about it. This trivializes human relationships. Of course money is not an issue regardless of what happens. Celebrities have more of that commodity than they know what to do with. At least what to do with it constructively like the man who took his fortune, went to Africa and repopulated a game reserve from scratch thereby creating jobs in tourism for the local population. He spent $100 million of his own money, but singlehandedly brought hope and prosperity to a great many people.
Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park was the envy of Africa. Wildlife drew tourists from around the world. But, beginning in the 1960's, a man made catastrophe (war) slaughtered the animals until, it was said, there was nothing left but mosquitos and landmines.Then Greg Carr decided it was his life's work to restore Gorongosa National Park to greatness and restore the local population to some semblance of a decent life. He educated the children, imported all kinds of animals that had previously made a home there, and by the miracle of sexual reproduction, the various herds of predators and prey animals returned themselves to their former glory. At least there are some millionaires and billionaires who want to do good deeds with their money. Then there are the self indulgent celebrities and all their followers who could care less about anything other than their own petty and expensive needs and habits.
Problems With American Constitution/Democracy: It Spells Out Rights But Not Responsibilities
by John Lawrence
Americans like to emphasize their rights, but don't talk much about their responsibilities. As far as the Constitution is concerned, there are none. As far as corporations are concerned, their only responsibility is to maximize profits by any means necessary. So the environment is not even a concern. Global warming is not even a concern. The only concern as far as business is concerned is business. "The business of America is business," so said President Calvin Coolidge in a 1925 speech. Corporations are supposed to maximize profits presumably as their responsibility to their shareholders which excludes about 50% of Americans who don't own any shares. We've already talked about a right and responsibility to work as a balance to Article 25 of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
Rights should be balanced by responsibilities. Unfortunately, in the American Constitution and even in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, they're not. In the very last article of the UN charter we find the only mention of "duties":
"Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
So no responsibilities are spelled out except the obvious one of not infringing on anyone else's rights. There are no explicit duties in return for all the considerable rights and freedoms spelled out in the UN Charter. There is no obligation to work or pay, if possible, to contribute to the " food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services" that one has a right to expect. It just doesn't add up.
So where does this leave the homeless in America. Unlike the UN charter, the American Constitution does not guarantee the right to housing or anything else. Either you pay for it or work to create it or else. The City of San Diego has proposed a "data analytics program" to solve the homeless problem. Now they are going to spend perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars not on anything that would directly help the homeless such as actually giving them the money for rent, but to some firm for some technology. They've been doing the same thing for years. I remember 20 years ago they paid someone $100,000 for a plan to end homelessness. What happened to that? KPBS reported: "In a statement after the vote, Fletcher said the county will continue to tackle the crisis that exists on the streets, "but we must invest in preventative actions like this one that stops people from becoming unhoused. This new technology will do it." New technology indeed.
If the city designated certain areas where the homeless could legally set up their tents, this in and of itself would get them off the public streets. Instead, the city criminalizes the homeless for living on the streets. But where else can they go? Legal campgrounds with basic amenities like toilets and showers would immensely improve the homeless' lot at rock bottom, minimal expense. The City owns lots of land parcels where this would be possible. Buildings are expensive. Vacant land that the City already owns is not. Most homeless people don't want to be "sheltered" except in case of very bad weather. They like the individual freedom of having their own space even if that is a tent. Some have animals which are forbidden in shelters. Some like to consume substances which are forbidden in shelters. Some don't like to be snooped on which is what happens in shelters. Why doesn't the City get this?
What the City is deathly afraid of is that, if they really made the homeless comfortable like in a campground,say, the City of San Diego would become a homeless magnet attracting homeless people and other people, who just wanted to save money and not pay exorbitant rent, from all over the country. Many people, not only the down and out, would prefer minimum amenities at a campground to paying $2000 a month in rent which is about the minimum rent in San Diego. The powers that be don't want to make camping out a permanently acceptable lifestyle. But why not? Not everyone needs a structure to live in to have a reasonably normal and happy life. With a gym or YMCA membership you have access to shower and rest room facilities. Using public transportation supplemented with a bicycle you can get to a job. A cell phone expedites communications and even banking. It's just that the City fathers and mothers find it abhorrent that people could actually prosper in an unhoused environment with minimal amenities at least for a period of time. They don't want San Diego to become the homeless capital of the US.
According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits
by John Lawrence
So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.
"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."
We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.
In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.
"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."
Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.
The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."
"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."
So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.
Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.
We all know what is ‘good for us,’ exercise, organic food, vitamins or supplements, clean air and water, deep sleep, meditation and moderation in all things. They are useful to us. Marcus Aurelius said we will welcome what is useful to us, but the most important thing is to be useful to others. That is what is most natural in our spiritual DNA. Self-respect climbs when we are in service to an idea that makes life better for everyone or for those with a particular need. Beyond the emotional lift, we benefit from participating in the universal act of circulation that promotes health and well-being on every level.
Circulation is essential to physical health. Prosperity grows as seeds are sown through intentional giving. Love becomes commonplace when it is extended as friendship, compassion, commitment, celebration of the accomplishments of others and by means of any authentic appreciation. Ideas are only useful when they are shared, given freely, knowing that their source is inexhaustible.
Movement is necessary to growth of any species. Every culture on earth has its national dance. Some have forgone its expression to no good end. Dancing is a whole-body delight in being alive. Running, jumping, skating, playing sports are useful in many ways. I asked a figure skater once what the appeal was and she said “it’s the closest thing to flying.” I have been walking every day for the past while and I feel the positive effects already. What is useful to me makes me a more fit instrument to express what might be useful to you.
Affirm: “I am naturally led into those activities which promote well being in myself and by extension, my world.”
Carlos Santana: "We Need to Update Bible and Constitution"
by John Lawrence
After the "I Love New York" Homecoming concert was canceled Saturday on account of rain in the middle of Barry Manilow's set, Anderson Cooper interviewed Carlos Santana on CNN. Of Santana's remarkable remarks, among which were "I don't believe in time or space", Santana expressed his opinion that the Bible and the Constitution need to be updated. How refreshing! So many have thought that both were set in stone sort of like the 10 Commandments were actually set in stone. So how would Santana change them? There wasn't enough time in the interview to go into that. The amazing thing was that these opinions were even expressed on cable TV at all. At the concert, Bruce Springsteen, one of the headliners, didn't even get a chance to perform. Mother Nature had the last word as if to say, "You all are acting as if the pandemic is over. It's not" Mother F-ing Nature had the last word. And what about climate change? Millions of dollars must have been spent on this concert with a state of the art audio visual system and a whole bunch of very expensive performers. I don't know if the concert goers got refunds after lightning strikes were observed in the area and the concert was canceled.
We're back up to 1000 deaths a day due to COVID. Having a major concert as if things were back to normal was probably a bad idea in the first place. But when the concert was being planned, it looked like the pandemic was over. It's just that COVID had a different idea and came surging back. Now fully vaccinated people are beginning to die due to the fact that they have been hanging around unvaccinated people, many of them, like those in nursing homes, without a choice in the matter. The fact is that vaccinated people can still get COVID. This hasn't been made clear by the authorities because they seemingly want you to believe that once you're vaccinated, you're safe. You're not. Put you in a room with 10 people with COVID, and you're going to get COVID. Will you probably get a milder case? Yes, but some will still die. I for one don't want to be a statistic: one of the fully vaccinated that dies with COVID, so I will avoid indoor spaces like the plague until 100% of the people are vaccinated. The pandemic is not going to be over any time soon.
Even though the pandemic is basically under control in China, they still have flare ups from time to time mainly due to people coming in from outside and despite the fact that the borders are closed. Americans are acting like the pandemic is over with only about 50% vaccinated. It's fool's gold. COVID is surging whether or not Americans are tired of it and over it in their minds. COVID isn't over them yet. The only probable thing at this time is that a lot of anti-Vaxxers will get COVID. Even Trump is afraid that many of his supporters will be checking out and is telling them to get vaccinated. The crowd booed him. That's so many fewer red state voters if they die. The south is a huge disaster aided and abetted by governors like DeSantis who mandates people not to wear masks! People advocating for increased sickness to augment their political careers are just sick themselves. American rationality is under threat, and they wonder why China is pulling ahead.
Trump Holds Super Spreader Events with Old People as COVID Sets Record in US
by John Lawrence
Yesterday a record was set: 83,000 COVID infections, the highest ever. Meanwhile, Trump was holding a mainly maskless event in the Villages, a retirement community in Florida.The New England Journal of Medicine reported on October 8, 2020:
Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.
The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.
Is this Vietnam's revenge? Vietnam is the country we ravaged burning women and children alive with Agent Orange while affecting our own soldiers as well. The number of Vietnam veterans affected by the chemical Agent Orange is astonishing. Roughly 300-thousand veterans have died from Agent Orange exposure -- that's almost five times as many as the 58-thousand who died in combat. Be that as it may, the fact that the death rate from COVID in the US is 3000 times greater than the death rate in Vietnam is astonishing. Could it have to do with the fact that Vietnam is the least obese country in the world while the US is among the most obese? Out of 191 countries Vietnam has an obesity rate of 2.1% while in the US the obesity rate is 36.2%. As we know obesity is an underlying condition for COVID morbidity. The American diet may be the main underlying condition. Burgers, pizza and fast food may have been a contributing factor to the COVID death rate.
We also know that countries that have got the pandemic under control have been able to reopen their economies successfully. China is on track to expand by roughly 5% in the third quarter roughly at the same rate as in 2019 before the pandemic hit. On the other hand countries that haven't gotten the pandemic under control such as the US have not been able to reopen successfully see sawing back and forth between reopening and reshuting as the COVUD infection rate see saws back and forth. Consumers are wary to come out in public as long as the infection rate is high. Since consumption is 70% of the US economy, much larger than the European consumption rate of 50%, it is more important in the US that consumption remains high in order for the economy to sustain itself. After the election, providing Biden wins, there will probably be another installment of the CARES Act putting money directly in consumers' hands thus preventing the US economy from free fall.
Expert opinion holds that US leadership, namely Trump and his cronies, has abjectly failed in its response to the COVID pandemic. Elections have consequences. Electing clowns like George W Bush, who lied us into a tragic war in Iraq, and Trump who was Missing in Action with respect to the COVID pandemic shows the ignorant mistakes the American electorate has made. Gore and Hillary Clinton would have been infinitely more competent in dealing with the crises that America has had to face. Let's not make the same mistake again! This time we must elect Joe Biden or the US is finished as a world leader. A democracy is only as good as the competence and intelligence of the citizens comprising it. So far the American people - some of them - have displayed their ignorance and incompetence by not wearing masks and complaining that they have a right not to do so. Freedom may just be another name for nothing left to lose as the Kris Kristofferson song says.
The Power Structure Wants the Discussion Circumscribed to Systemic Racism, Not Systemic Inequality
by John Lawrence, June 17, 2020
Let's just talk about systemic racism and not about an economic system in which a few people control all the wealth and the rest get crumbs from the table. The power structure does not want the discussion extended into that area. Let's just integrate black people into the system so that they are not disproportionately poor, only poor proportionally to their percentage of the population. Blacks compose 12% of the American population. 27% of black people are in poverty so the good old American way is to reduce the percentage in poverty to 12%. Then blacks would be proportionately and not disproportionately poor. That's the American way. Don't question systemic poverty and inequality; Confine the discussion to systemic racism.
The American way is to have a few rich people among every ethnic group and then to use this as an example that anyone can get rich in America. So what if the majority are poor. It's more important that you have examples of huge wealth among black people, and that is certainly the case today. American black billionaires on the 2019 Forbes list included American investor Robert Smith with $5 billion, businessman David Steward with $3 billion, media mogul Oprah Winfrey with a net worth of $2.5 billion and American sports executive Michael Jordan with $2.1. There are 615 billionaires in the US; only 6 are black so to be proportionate we'd need about 74 more black billionaires.
Blacks comprised 13.6 percent of the U.S. population according to the 2010 Census, but account for only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income. Whites are the overwhelming majority of the top 1 percent of households by income, comprising 96.2 percent. There are 18.6 million total millionaires in the US, but only an estimated 35,000 are black. That may sound like a lot, but the U.S. population of millionaires is 76 percent White. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians make up about 8 percent each. So problem solved if we add another 4% to the black millionaires list. Then they would be proportionately rich at least at the million dollar level.
Many black athletes and entertainers are millionaires or multi-millionaires. Take the NBA, for example, in which 80% of the players are black. The total annual revenue of the NBA is $8.7 billion of which about 50% goes to the players. Since there are 30 franchises with 15 players per franchise, there are 450 active players. That means that the share of NBA revenues going to black NBA athletes is ($8.7 billion)x(1/2)x(.8) = $3.48 billion or an average of $7.7 million per black player. Bingo! The NBA has created way more black millionaires than it has created white ones. That's for sure.
This is the thinking of the power structure, mainly the Republican power structure which is not threatened by having a few more black millionaires and billionaires. However, they are threatened when you talk about everyone, black or white, having a living wage, everyone, black or white having decent housing, medical care and free public education from pre-school through college. They are threatened by talk of taxing the wealthy, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, as it were. That would be socialism much like the People's Republic of France or the People's Republic of Germany or even the People's Republic of Sweden. The power structure can't tolerate that kind of debate. Let's just make black people equal in the number of millionaires, but not change anything else. Then all the poor blacks and whites, for that matter, can aspire to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as many of their counterparts have done.
Whatever happens we can't change the system to make it inherently more equal, inherently more naturally producing of equal outcomes. Instead, it must produce inherently unequal outcomes so that those who make it in the system will feel like they have really accomplished something and can serve as role models for others to strive harder. Republicans recoiled at all the hippies in the 60s who were having too much fun and not working hard enough. They were even getting free tuition in the California University system and elsewhere. On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America from the hippies and left wingers. It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and an ostensible step towards socialism.
So they changed the system to criminalize all sorts of behaviors mainly involving drugs so they could incarcerate mainly black people and so they could saddle mainly white people with a ton of student loan debt. Then they would have to work hard paying off their debt instead of partying, surfing, having free love and doing drugs. Well, it certainly has worked. In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population. About 1 in 3 black boys will have served some time in the penal system during their lifetimes. Profits are up for the private penitentiary corporations and American millenials are buckling at the knees from the weight of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. So if the percentage of black people in prison gets down to 12%, then this should make the American system non-racist? Wouldn't it be better to eliminate the root causes of incarceration which have to do with poverty and get the incarceration rate down to zero for everyone?
The Fed Will Have Given About a Trillion Dollars a Year to Rich People Since 2008 by the End of 2020
by John Lawrence
The Federal Reserve prints money and gives it to rich people. According to CNBC, it will have printed about $10 trillion by the end of 2020. This policy is called quantitative easing. It represents a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for rich people, but so far, despite Andrew Yang's proposal and the Second Great Depression we find ourselves in due to the coronavirus, there is no UBI in the works for the rest of us. In addition the Fed has lowered interest rates to zero for rich people, but credit card rates for poor people still top 30%. So the rich can borrow unlimited amounts of money to buy up all the foreclosures and failing businesses caused by the Second Great Depression.
The economy is not going to bounce back to where it was which was an economy in which consumerism was 70% of GDP. There just is no way when large scale venues and bars operating at 25% capacity will be the norm for the foreseeable future. There is also the possibility of multiple waves or spikes in the number of cases as states and cities try to open too much too soon. Plus people are just not going to feel comfortable going on cruises and going to professional sports venues until there is a vaccine which is not a foregone conclusion that one can even be developed. The economy as it existed pre pandemic was one in which we were entertaining ourselvesr to death. It was an economy built on entertainment, an economy predicated on selling each other lattes. Even though we can still be entertained at home via TV and via the internet, there is still a substantial enough loss of revenues and jobs that the economy will stumble along at half or three quarters speed unless a fundamental change is made in how the economy functions.
Government investment in the economy similar to FDR's New Deal is not only necessary to get the economy working again, it is essential to change an economy of entertainment and titillation to an economy where real and essential work will once again be the norm. We have a multi trillion dollar deficit in infrastructure in the US. This can be addressed by forgetting the defunct economy consisting of selling each other lattes and putting people to work doing real and essential jobs. This will also contribute to a revitalization of the American spirit. America was built by people doing real work whether that was in agriculture or manufacturing and not by people entertaining us to death.
The book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business," by Neil Postman made the argument very cogently. According to Wikipedia,
The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasises the quality of information in favour of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
Postman was on to something. Entertainment and not religion is the opium of the masses. When people like the Kardashians can make their living by just advocating consumerism and indolence, America has lost its work ethic. A UBI which just allows the consumer economy to reinvent itself would to a certain extent be a missed opportunity for government to create meaningful jobs that the private sector can't create to build a better, more meaningful society, a society built on helping people here and around the world. FDR was on to something. His New Deal can be emulated in a Green New Deal which at one and the same time can address the global warming crisis, build a stronger and more resilient infrastructure and create meaningful jobs for every American.
Is Seduction Consensual Sex, or an Unwanted Sexual Advance
by John Lawrence, October 17, 2019
Youth wants to know! In light of the #MeToo movement the rules have changed for men. So now there are new rules unless you want to get into trouble due to your sex life. Rule #1 - Don't cheat on your wife. For all the men who have been accused of unwanted sexual advances, hardly has it been mentioned that mostly they were married and were attempting to cheat on their wives who were really the injured party in these situations which is hardly ever mentioned. Rule #2 - Establish a dating relationship with a woman first before you have sex with her. Then it would be pretty hard for her to accuse you of nonconsensual sex. Most men who are cheating on their wives are not at liberty to establish a normal dating relationahip with a woman. That's why they want to have sex in their office or on the casting couch, anywhere but at their homes where their wives and children are living.
Advice to women. Rule #1 - If you've been raped, file a police report and establish a rape kit. If you don't want to do that, at least make a do-it-yourself rape kit. It was Monica Lewinsky's self administered rape kit in the form of a stained blue dress that nailed Bill Clinton. Rule #2 - Don't wait 20 years to accuse someone of unwanted sexual advances. There's a statute of limitations for everything else. There should be one for sex too. Many women wait until a man becomes rich and powerful to accuse him. If he hadn't attained that status, she probably wouldn't have brought forth accusations against him. Rule #3 - Don't have consensual sex with a man, and then decide the next day that it wasn't consensual. One night stands or relationships that don't continue as expected lead to sour grapes in some situations, and consensual sex in some womens' minds turns into nonconsensual sex soon thereafter.
A man can protect himself from accusations of unwanted sexual advances by establishing a relationship first that is not just a friendship but a relationship in which both parties are in agreement about what they want out of the relationship. In other words what their intentions are. In this way there should be no misreadings or misgivings if both people go into it with the same understanding. If it doesn't work out, at least consensuality will have been established especially if other friends know about the relationship. Some legitimacy for the relationship will have been established no matter what happens in the long run.
Since men have traditionally been the first ones to make advances, sometimes the advances are unwanted. How does the man know ahead of time whether they are unwanted or not? A man needs to read the tea leaves and feel the woman out about what kind of a relationship she does or doesn't want to have. That will minimize misunderstandings. As far as seduction goes, it is not a good idea in the light of the #MeToo movement. In the past it may have been considered a legitimate form of a sexual relationship, at least one in which a woman couldn't accuse a man of unwanted sexual advances the next day, but at the present time, a man cannot be too careful about getting involved especially if he doesn't want to be accused of sexual impropriety.
The more honorable thing to do if a man wants to have sex with someone other than his wife is to have sex with a prostitute. This was Jimmy Van Heusen's (nee Chester Babcock) solution. He was Frank Sinatra's songwriting buddy, composer of "Swinging on a Star," "All the Way," "Come Fly with Me," "Here's That Rainy Day," "Nancy with the Laughing Face" in honor of Frank's daughter, and many more. He was a single man most of his life, and had relationships mostly with prostitutes. During one period, according to biographies of Jimmy and Frank, he would line up a couple of girls in LA for himself and Frank, fly them to Palm Springs to Frank's estate for the weekend and then take them back to LA after the weekend was over. He paid the prostitutes, but didn't have to pay the aspiring starlets. Sex was understood to be part of the deal. No woman ever accused either Frank or Jimmy of unwanted sexual advances.
Suzy Favor Hamilton was a married track star from Wisconsin who ran in 3 Olympics. In 2000, Suzy was the fastest middle distance runner in the world and was named USA Track & Field's Female Distance Runner of the Year. She later became a prostitute in Las Vegas as detailed in her book Fast Girl. She enjoyed it immensely making $600. or more per hour. After the weekend she flew back home to her husband in Wisconsin. She wasn't "trafficed". It was her personal decision. She only quit being a prostitute when someone recognized her as the former track star and exposed her. Then she decided that she did what she did because of a mental condition. After her prostitution became public, the Big Ten renamed its award for Female Athlete of the Year which had previously carried her name.
Well, it's safe to say that some women enter freely into sexual relationships with rich or famous men. Some regret it later when it becomes evident that the job or marriage opportunities they once thought would come their way have vanished. Some become resentful. Women need to be aware that there are a lot of men out there who want to cheat on their wives and take precautions if they don't want to be part of that. Otherwise, c'est la vie.
Pain is ubiquitous in human life - both mental and physical pain. Being human is to have pain in your life. Coping with pain can take different forms - both positive and negative. The body has natural ways that pain can be alleviated. These involve the secretion of different chemicals like dopamine that cover up the pain or take it away. There are various ways to get these chemicals to activate, the easiest being to ingest some substance like drugs or alcohol. The harder way to do it is by exercise. Runner's high is known to reduce pain. Other forms of physical and perhaps mental activities like meditation can also do it. Running or other strenuous physical activity can induce the body to produce the drugs which overcome pain. The problem is that these activities are painful in and of themselves and require a high form of motivation to get them started and self-discipline to persist.
Continuing major efforts to reduce pain both positive and negative can lead to addiction both positive and negative. The problem with negative addiction is that the ingestion of drugs or alcohol is limited by tolerance. It requires more and more of the substance to get the same beneficial results unless a person is very self disciplined in their consumption. There is only a certain fountain of dopamine available, and this gets depleted as the substances used to release it are taken repeatedly. Less and less dopamine being released means that more and more of the substance used to release it needs to be ingested leading to addiction. Finally, as in heroin addiction, the person is using heroin not to feel better but just not to feel worse.
On the other hand activities which strengthen the mind/body and require self discipline and even pain such as running or weight training result in a release of dopamine which actually makes you feel better when the activity ceases and strengthens the body and that part of the body which creates the dopamine in the first place. The body, which is weakened at first by the activity, builds itself back up to a higher level because of the activity which reduces the source of the pain. As time goes on, pain is reduced not only from the dopamine releasing activity, but also because the body has reduced the source of the pain because it has become stronger.
Negative addiction is so common because it requires no self discipline. Activities which can lead to positive addiction require actual work, and this turns off many people who succumb to negative addiction because it is so much easier to relieve pain that way AT FIRST. As time goes on, however, using substances to overcome pain only makes the pain worse in the long run and reduces the fountain of dopamine which is necessary to overcome it. William Glasser wrote a book entitled "Positive Addiction." According to this article in Psychology Today there are six characteristics of positive addiction:
It is something noncompetitive that you choose to do and you can devote approximately an hour per day;
It is possible for you to do it easily and it doesn’t take a good deal of mental effort to do it well;
You can do it alone or rarely with others but it does not depend upon others to do it;
You believe that it has some value (physical, mental, or spiritual) for you;
You believe that if you persist at it you will improve—but this is completely subjective—you need to be the only one who measures the improvement; and
The activity must have the quality that you can do it without criticizing yourself. If you can’t accept yourself during this time the activity will not be addicting (emphasis original).
Positive activities require self discipline and even the experiencing of some pain as they are undertaken. They result in the diminution of pain only over the long term. They may or may not result in instantaneous gratification whereas drug use is usually instantaneously gratifying until the dopamine fountain is used up or until tolerance sets in. Tolerance occurs when the person no longer responds to the drug in the way that person initially responded. Stated another way, it takes a higher dose of the drug to achieve the same level of response achieved initially. Tolerance increases with negative addiction, but is reduced with positive addiction. In other words positive addicts increase the body's ability to release dopamine over time, but negative addiction does the opposite.
Nevertheless, if managed properly, addictive substances can be used at least by some persons in a temperate manner without their leading to the worst effects of drug addiction. The jazz musician, Art Blakey, was a heroin user most of his life, and he was also a cigarette smoker. He died at 71 from lung cancer probably from the effects of cigarette smoking rather than from heroin usage. Two of his proteges, Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan, weren't so lucky however. Both died young and suffered from the ravages of drug addiction. A lot of the negative effects of substance abuse can probably be ameliorated or offset by positive activities as moderate use of drugs doesn't seem to cause people to be dysfunctional or debilitated.
Only in America can you put a product on the market without any testing to see if there are any health risks. It's about testing by marketing to the American people and you find out later whether the product is toxic or not. In Europe they have the precautionary principle where products are tested first before they are released on the public. So who would have thought that a product that was touted as safer than cigarettes would turn out to be far more deadly and debilitating? Cigarettes contain tobacco which when inhaled is thought to be hazardous to your health, but, like a lot of other products, it won't kill you immediately. That will take 30 years or so. Vaping contains a toxic mixture of chemicals which, as it turns out, can kill you in far less time. Hundreds of people across the country have been sickened by a severe lung illness linked to vaping, and a handful have died, according to public health officials. Many were otherwise healthy young people, in their teens or early 20s.
So who would have thunk it? The Food and Drug Administration is warning that there appears to be a particular danger for people who vape THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana. So people will just have to go back to smoking marijuana the traditional way - in a bong. Or maybe in a hookah. A hookah is a device for vaporizing nicotine using water instead of a bunch of chemicals. That seems far more healthier. It seems that the chemicals in e-cigarettes congeal in the lungs making their function useless and leading to lung disease. The e-cigarette industry, for whom vaping is extremely profitable, have tried to lay the blame on vaping THC and other street products. They would hate to see their investments go down the drain. However, in 53 cases of the illness in Illinois and Wisconsin, 17 percent of the patients said they had vaped only nicotine products, according to an article published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
So a word of caution to vapers: Get a life! You can smoke marijuana legally in most states now. Vote for a Democratic President, and, most importantly, a Democratic Senate in 2020, and marijuana will probably be legalized at the Federal level. Some so-called "hard drugs" have even been used on a regular basis by some people who have led very successful, even celebrated, lives. Take jazz drummer, Art Blakey, for example. Today he is being lauded for having had one of the most successful bands in jazz history. He is considered to be a legendary drummer. Blakey was a heroin addict, a very highly functioning one, and he introduced many of his sidemen to heroin. One of them was Lee Morgan, considered to be one of the great trumpet players of jazz history. However, Morgan's addiction did not have such a happy outcome as did Blakey's. By 1967 Lee was a junkie who had fallen so low that he was seen sleeping on the street outside Birdland without shoes and committing petty crimes so he could buy drugs. Still his record, "The Sidewinder", whose title tune was written on a piece of toilet paper during a break in a recording session, became Blue Note's best-selling record ever, breaking the previous sales record roughly ten times over.
So a word of caution to Americans: be careful of what you put in your mouth. The American mantra is Caveat Emptor - Buyer Beware. According to the journal article, “e-cigarette aerosol is not harmless; it can expose users to substances known to have adverse health effects, including ultrafine particles, heavy metals, volatile organic compounds and other harmful ingredients.” Omigod, you mean that I can't trust American products that I can buy legally on the market more than I can trust street drugs? Well opioids are a case in point. They have been prescribed by legitimate doctors, sold by legitimate pharmacies and the patients have become addicts.
Another note of caution: stay away from Monsanto's Roundup, a pesticide whose main ingredient is glyphosate. The Guardian reports:
Germany has said it will phase out the controversial weedkiller glyphosate because it wipes out insect populations crucial for ecosystems and pollination of food crops.
The chemical, also suspected by some experts to cause cancer in humans, is to be banned by the end of 2023 when the EU’s approval period for it expires, ministers said.
Biologists have sounded the alarm over plummeting insect populations that affect species diversity and damage ecosystems by disrupting natural food chains and plant pollination.
“What harms insects also harms people,” said environment minister Svenja Schulze, of the centre-left Social Democrats, who warned of a future when fruit could become a luxury.
“What we need is more humming and buzzing,” added Schulze, stressing that “a world without insects is not worth living in”.
So modern technology is not all it's cracked up to be whether on the chemical level or on the fossil fuel level or on the plastics level. The fact of the matter is that the technology developed in the last couple hundred years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is ruining the environment on small scales and large scales. Unless there is a change, the earth, let alone the oceans or mundane pollution, will become uninhabitable for humans at least. Probably some insects will survive, but insecticides and pesticides are doing their best to eliminate even those. Probably some day some space travelers will alight on earth only to wonder what happened here that the earth should have become a dead planet.
There is a higher and higher prevalence of mental health issues in today's world. From drug addiction to PTSD to the opioid crisis, it seems that a large percentage of the population doesn't know how to be happy or content or satisfied. Mental health is a function of lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle usually leads to mental as well as physical health. Elementary education should be concerned about teaching young people how to have a healthy lifestyle and good mental and physical health. It should be concerned with what activities and habits lead to good mental health. Instead it is mainly concerned with stuffing intellectual facts into childrens' heads. No wonder they grow up to be absolute ignoramuses when it come to how to live well. They are taught that the good life consists on stuffing more and more facts into their heads so they can "graduate" and get a good job, consume more and make more money. Actually, a person who has mastered how to live i.e.lifestyle doesn't need a lot of money to be happy. You heed a good set of values and a good, healthy lifestyle neither of which the American educational system is concerned with.
Physical education and health used to be part of the curriculum. It isn't any more in many schools. Neither is art and music. Parents have to pay extra for that. The things that lead to a richer and healthier life are considered extracurricular activities that you have to pay for. So young people pick up unhealthy habits like vaping. Vaping was supposed to be a whole lot healthier than cigarette smoking. Remember when New York doctors recommended smoking Chesterfields or Old Golds? Well, those doctors should get back in the business of recommending cigarette smoking again. Compared to vaping it seems to be a whole lot healthier. You don't get lung disease for 30 years or so while with vaping you get it in just a couple of years.
But that's the American way - put a product on the market with no testing whatsoever, and as it turns out, that product can cause serious health problems. If your product promises a high, people will literally gobble it up without any thought for the consequences. Without any thought that there might be something in that product that is a serious health risk - in the case of vaping some kind of oil that congeals in the lungs and renders them useless. So much for the supposed healthier effects of vaping compared to smoking.
Lisa Halverstadt found that ERs are often the only option for patients in crisis and that many patients can remain stuck in ERs for hours — or even days — while they wait for long-term care and services already filled with other patients in need.
Those waits and the chaotic ER environment can translate into increased anxiety, agitation and depression for already-traumatized patients.
And then you have the angry young men who are gun nuts. Their anger can be vitiated because they are only a hare trigger away from a discharge. One diss, one loss of a job or a girlfriend and these people go nuts spewing their hatred over scores of people leading supposedly normal, happy lives. They have never been taught how to manage or release their anger. That's a function of lifestyle - learning those techniques and activities that contribute to a life in which anger can be contained, controlled and released in ways that don't hurt other people . Again they were never taught those techniques or activities in school. Maybe they weren't motivated in school. A lot of young men end up committing crimes which land them in jail for life. In many cases they came from poor homes, homes in which the parents weren't capable of teaching them anything or setting a good example. So in order to have a healthy society, the educational system must pick up the ball that the parents have dropped.
James Ellis, MD, a physician at Waterloo, Iowa-based Covenant Medical Center said emergency rooms across the state are flooded with patients seeking care for mental health issues, according to KWWL.
The volume of mental health patients in Covenant's ER is overwhelming, Dr. Ellis said.
"We are absolutely overwhelmed. We're overwhelmed as a staff. We're overwhelmed as a department. We're overwhelmed as a hospital. And the entire region is just completely overwhelmed," Dr. Ellis told KWWL.
Dr. Ellis attributes the problem to a lack of community resources addressing mental health, forcing patients into the ER. However, he also notes some patients can be violent, which poses a problem for ER facilities that are not equipped to handle these patients.
There are so many issues relating to mental health in American society that it is hard to get a handle on them all. Many are related to poverty and homelessness. Many are related to ignorance and lack of understanding as to what constitutes a good life. Many are related to drugs and the promise of a pain free and angst free existence which doesn't exist for anyone. Many are related to American values of money grubbing and consumerism. Many are related to the lack of emphasis on healthy lifestyles at all levels of the educational system. Basically it's a society in which some people sink and some swim, and devil take the hindermost. A proto Fascist society in which the very rich can afford rehab and other forms of treatment. What they have in common with the poor is that they are just as fucked up, but they just have the money to spend to try to ameliorate their situations.
Weddings these days can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems like a lot of money to pay for something that has a certain statistical percentage of ending in divorce. As an Uber driver I pick up people all the time that are in town for a wedding. They come from all over the world just to attend a wedding. I'm beginning to think that weddings have replaced the coming out parties and debutante balls of the wealthy as THE social event of the middle class. I picked up one woman who was one of 200 guests attending a wedding. I've heard of weddings consisting of 500 guests. All I can think of is a lot of money is being spent that could be better spent - like paying off the student loan debts of the about to be married couple or putting a down payment on a house.
When I think that my mother and father were married at my mother's home with just a few guests in attendance, I'm sure that they didn't spend a lot of money just to get married. People didn't spend through the roof to get married in those days especially if you weren't rich. It is the conspicuous consumption of the present day. The money is mostly spent at the receptions which provide a sit down dinner for hundreds of people. When you add in all the clothes, travel arrangements for the guests coming from all over the world, engagement parties, bridal showers, bridesmaid and groomsmen luncheons, rehearsal dinners, day after brunches, gifts, honeymoon expenses - you have quite a tidy sum of money, probably enough to make a down payment on a house. Instead, this money is squandered on something that has maybe a 50 percent chance of lasting although the statistics are not clear probably because no one wants to gather accurate statistics on this phenomenon.
One thing that is clear is that marriage is becoming a thing that only the upper middle class can afford. The lower middle class and below simply cohabitate these days. They cannot afford to get married. So while there is evidence pointing to a lower divorce rate, there is also evidence to show that there is a declining marriage rate. In California at least there is no such thing as a "common law" marriage. People cohabiting are considered to be single with no rights whatsoever pertaining to the other party if and when they break up even if there are children involved. There is no such thing as "palimony" except if you're rich. Alimony only pertains to legally married couples. Lawyers will only consider taking on a palimony case if there is a lot of money involved so that they can be assured that they will be paid very well. Poor people better forget it; each is supposed to rely solely on their own resources even if the woman has raised 3 kids. In these cases the man need not pay any spousal support.
David's Bridal emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year. It didn't go bankrupt because the wedding business was becoming less profitable. It went bankrupt because it was bought by a private equity firm which loves to suck the equity out of any business, then take it bankrupt, then resuscitate it in such a way that the private equity firm profits the most. David's Bridal is making some changes to accommodate millenials:
Now, David’s Bridal is looking to conquer the new bridal landscape even as the $2.4 billion bridal-wear industry declines along with the marriage rate. Newer online retailers like Reformation offer brides more relaxed alternatives to traditional gowns. Online retailers like Jasmine Bridal are making their own wedding dresses and selling them for less than gowns sold in stores in the past.
Still, instead of an expensive wedding, some thought should be given to paying off student loan debt and making a down payment on a house or condo. Weddings just seem like a lot of wasteful spending that will soon be forgotten while the debts persist.
Back in the 60s one of the things we were against, in addition to being against the "system" or the "establishment", was middle class morality. What was middle class morality because I don't think it is a relevant term any more? Basically, it said that you should study hard, get a good job, get married and be faithful to your spouse. In other words, do your job, keep you nose clean, don't fool around with other women and don't leave your spouse when the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Today you have not only the breakdown of the middle class, but the breakdown of middle class morality and the family.
The idea was put forward that you would have a different partner for different stages of your life. These stages might be a high school girlfriend, a college girlfriend, a wife with possibly a girlfriend on the side and a second wife after the children are grown. This has pretty much led to the breakdown of the traditional family. It has led to a lot of broken families with bad consequences for the children involved. Loyalty to one another and sticking together should be a higher value than sexual freedom especially after a family has been started.
And then there was the guy who said "Turn on, tune in and drop out." "Turn on, tune in, drop out" is a counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966. In 1967 Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and phrased the famous words, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". Today that doesn't make too much sense. The hippie lifestyle turned out to be the precursor of homelessness. The drug culture has led to a culture of opioid and heroin addiction leading to death for many. Prescription and non-prescription drugs are the bane of society and leave many children parentless. That's why so many children are being raised by their grandparents.
Rather than dropping out, choose something that you will be comfortable with and enjoy doing rather than something your parents want you to do. This could be something that either requires or does not require a college degree. Not everyone has to go to college. The dominant culture put the screws to the counterculture by increasing college tuitions with the result that people had to go into a lot of student loan debt. This wasn't so in the easy days of the 60s. The dominant culture said as much as "oh so it's so easy and cheap to go to college that you don't even appreciate a college degree so let's just make it tougher for you. Then maybe you'll appreciate it more and not have time to tune in, turn on and drop out."
So in this synthesis of middle class morality and the counterculture, I present to you the concept of right livlihood, a healthy lifestyle and loyalty to family once a family has begun. Other than that sexual freedom is pretty much OK as long as you don't hurt people in the process. That would be the limiting factor.
Widespread tattoos are a relatively recent cultural phenomenon. When I was growing up, the only people that got tattoos were merchant marines and Popeye. Is this what Gen X and the millennials have contributed to the world? It is just not something that I ever considered necessary in my life. It seems to me like a waste of money and monkey see, monkey do. I don't particularly want to be enculturated. I sort of pride myself in being unenculturated. In my teens I read a book by David Riesman - The Lonely Crowd. What I got out of the book was that I was better off following my own inner gyroscope than conforming to social norms. I wanted to be autonomous. I pretty much have been living my life along those lines.
Enculturated people are conformists. They do what their peers are doing. If their peers are getting tattoos, they get tattoos. Dermatologists are going to have a field day in about 20 years. It can't be a good idea to permanently put poison under your skin. The skin is the body's largest organ. It breathes and there are a lot of diseases associated with the skin like skin cancer.
The word that comes to my mind is superficiality. People that are so concerned about outward appearances are usually superficial. Their concerns have nothing to do with making the world a better place. They don't extend much beyond being selfish and getting money and sex. Extroversion is de rigeur in that world. It's all about being cool and conforming to a norm. Any sort of traditional values are out the window. Traditional values were also out the window for the 1960s era rebels, but at least we wanted to build a better world. It didn't happen. Instead we got a worse world albeit with a lot more cheap consumer goods. Capitalism won.
But I digress. I think we all need to just accept being who we are, and try to be the best version or ourselves rather than going along with the crowd. We should self examine our values, decide which values to hold dear and then stand up for those values. External appearances don't really matter that much. It's better to be who you are and let it go at that.
The definition of insanity supposedly is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Well then, the definition of sanity would be "doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same results." So there, now that we cleared that up, let's go to a deeper level of precision. If you do the same thing over and over and get the same negative results, that would be insanity. What you're looking for is positive results. So if you're getting negative results, the sane thing to do is to change what you're doing. However, if you're doing the same thing over and over and getting positive results, keep doing what you're doing. That would indicate sanity. Don't change what you're doing if you get positive results each time.
So why would you change what you're doing if you're getting positive results? Boredom perhaps? The same 'ol same 'ol. You want a new experience. I think successful people don't get bored if they are getting positive results. They are willing to continue doing the same thing over and over. The positive results keep adding up. Consistency, according to Shakespeare, may be the hobgoblin of a small mind, especially a foolish consistency, but consistency or staying the course, if it is nonfoolish, is also the hallmark of a brilliant mind. Knowing where you're going, knowing what you're about can lead to great results, but you have to be willing to put up with a certain amount of ennui. And anything worth doing is worth doing even if it takes a lot of time to do it. Persistence pays off in the long run. Hopefully.
Some dogs are born to run - Alaskan Huskies for example. Those dogs love nothing more than to be working their asses off pulling a sled. Just give them some raw meat to eat and plenty of work and they're happy. Working dogs in general need to run. Sheep dogs need to be out there herding sheep. Retrievers need to be out there retreiving something. The problem with modern civilization is that a lot of these dogs who have been bred for work and exercise are confined to tiny spaces. This leads to a lot of neurotic dogs, and dogs who are susceptible to all the diseases of modern civilization that humans are susceptible to.
Some people run with their dogs or at least take there dogs to a dog park where they can run with other dogs. Their owners realize that dogs have an inherent need to run and play, but that takes up the owners' time, and many owners want just a docile dog, a dog that will just sit there and obey commands. Lapdogs are a perfect example. You let them out to do their business, and then for the rest of the day they just sit or lie there, no need to run. These are the kinds of dogs that are bred to just lie around.
Humans are the same way. Modern civilization favors the type of human that can just sit behind a desk all day, the type of human who has no need for exercise. The other types become neurotic in this kind of environment, but the docile human is just a good consumer and they obey orders. They are also more susceptible to the degenerative diseases of modern civilization. Neuroscientists can study the genome all they want, but they can't analyze the complex interactions between disparate genes. They would like to just take the technological approach and assume that each gene has one and only one function and can be dealt with in a vacuum, so to speak, without considering that that particular gene, once you change it, might also affect the functioning of other genes.
In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud based his theory on the notion that humans have certain characteristic instincts that are immutable. However, there are all different kinds of human beings. Some are more like Alaskan Huskies. These shouldn't be sitting behind a desk. Some are more like lapdogs and are the perfect types for the consumer society. They have no needs or desires other than to consume. They are docile and compliant. They make perfect subjects for a fascist regime. They don't speak back to authority figures. They carry out orders. These human beings are also subject to all the degenerative diseases of modern society. The goal of their working class parents was to get them through college so they could get a well paying desk job.
The opioid crisis and drugs in general exist to fill the gap between what adult human beings need to keep them healthy and what the consumer society needs and encourages them to do. Colleges and universities encourage their docility and compliance. The military fills that bill as well. Those unevolved human beings that still need to run and play, that haven't become lapdogs, present a dilemma for society when, frustrated by their civilized life, they turn to drugs. Most don't need a lot of encouragement to do so. It's the easy way out.
I thought that with lowered expenses, two rental incomes, social security and a nestegg in savings, I could be fully retired and meet my monthly expenses. Gee, was I wrong. It seems like whatever budget you figure out, your expenses are always double that amount. My nestegg was diminishing rapidly. Emergency type expenditures were always coming up.
So I started as a ride sharing driver. I started with Lyft working out of my house. The rides were intermittent but at least I got my feet wet. Then I stepped it up a bit by doing both Lyft and Uber. I started making some real money, at least enough to supplement my other income. I could even look forward to paying my property taxes without taking money out of savings. The thing I liked about it the most is that I could set my own hours, work when I wanted and not work when I didn't want. It fit in perfectly with my lifestyle. It was a lifestyle that I had become accustomed to since I was self-employed for 40 years.
I would get up in the morning, have my coffee, write for the California Free Press, do stuff around the house and then turn on Uber and/or Lyft around 8:30 AM. I'd do that for 3 hours or so and then head for the YMCA where I would swim or work out. Then I would go home, have lunch and take a nap. I would go back online around 4 PM and work till 7 PM, go home, watch the news, have something to eat, listen to music and read. Sometimes I would hang out with my girlfriend. In fact she called me spur of the moment one Sunday and asked if I wanted to meet her for lunch. When she got close I turned off the app, had lunch with her after which I continued Ubering and Lyfting. We had a nice lunch and I still made $150 that day.
I must say I've met a lot of nice and interesting people driving them around. I only had one serious incident in two years with a woman who refused to get out of the car. Other than that I've got to see a lot of beautiful sunsets, spend time driving around a beautiful city and give tourists advice on what to see and do. The income supplements my "retirement" income and puts me in a position to add to my nestegg. It works for me and fits in with my lifestyle. I was self-employed for 40 years, and I'm still self-employed. That's the beauty of it.
Doctors tell us that, in order to stay healthy, the two most important things are diet and exercise. Yet many people cannot bring themselves to exercise even though their life depends on it. One of the reasons is that the importance of exercise was not impressed on them when they were children. It's a habit that should start at an early age. Schools should be in the business of inculcating healthy lifestyle habits, and not just be concerned about the child's intellectual development. If schools were as concerned about teaching healthy lifestyles, there would be far less alcohol and drug dependency in later years and that goes for opioid addiction, the current national dilemma.
Another reason is that for eons physical work was associated with the lower classes. The rich had slaves or serfs to do the physical work, and the ideal seemed to be a life of leisure, that is a life in which there was no physical work. Exercise is physical work so that contradicts the life of leisure and consumption that, instead of leading to happiness, leads to overweight and a host of medical problems. A life of leisure leads to a life of just plain laziness so that the people who actually did the physical work in the past were probably healthier than the slave drivers and overlords that sat on their asses all day.
Another reason is that some people got enough exercise just in carrying out their daily duties that they didn't need any more. They were tired at the end of the day, and most of their energy was devoted to just making a living. They did not have the leisure time nor the energy or seemingly the need to indulge in an exercise program. A couple of drinks at the end of the day was enough to feel relaxed. So there was no time, nor seeming need until later in life some medical problems developed and the doctor told them they needed to exercise especially to strengthen their cardiovascular system - their heart and their lungs. But by then for most people it was too late. They hadn't started an exercise program as a child, and it was too late to start a new habit. The old unhealthy habits would prevail at that point.
The point is that, if you want a healthy society, one not consisting of a bunch of mentally and physically unhealthy people, where anger is a significant component of criminality, people must be taught from an early age how to live a healthy lifestyle. That is the responsibility of the school system.
There are 10 official American holidays: New Year's Day, Martin Luther King Jr Day, George Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In addition there are the unofficial holidays: Valentines Day, Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, Groundhogs Day, Cinco de Mayo, Saint Patrick's Day, Easter, Flag Day, National Cleanup Day, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, Chanukah, American Indian Heritage Day, Kwanzaa, Halloween and a whole bunch more. There are so many holidays that you wonder when does any work get done.
Of course most holidays are an opportunity to go out and buy stuff. This year consumers are expected to spend over $9 billion on Halloween, a worthless "holy day" if there ever was one. They might better spend the money on Refugees' Day in honor of the 65 million refugees in the world or on Childrens' Health Day or on War Victims' Day or on Global Warming Day.
The word Halloween is a contraction for All Hallows Evening and means "holy evening", a time to honor the saints and martyrs. Of course it's been totally corrupted so that Halloween is a time for kids to stuff themselves with candy contributing to childhood diabetes, honor ghosts and goblins and otherwise raise hell, a total perversion of the original intent of the holiday and a waste of money.
Charlie Brown lamented that Christmas has become too commercialized. What holiday hasn't? Thanksgiving has become a time to stuff your face and then watch football on TV. Most holidays are an opportunity to get shit faced drunk. If a holiday went back to its original meaning of "holy day", then maybe there would be a Peace Day honoring the peacemakers of the world. Thanksgiving might be a time not only to give thanks but to actually help those who are less fortunate instead of a time to gorge yourself with turkey and all the trimmings.
There might be a Mankind Day, a day of service to mankind. The National Cleanup Day is a good idea. The other 364 days of the year we are in the business of trashing the environment. Having one day to clean it up might help some. Instead of Columbus Day honoring a man who dealt in the slave trade, we might have a day honoring those who freed the slaves. Instead of holidays continuing to degenerate into what they've become, days to buy stuff, stuff your face and lounge around, holidays might become anti-commercial and anti-consumerist. Labor Day should take back its meaning of honoring the Union movement and people like Eugene Debs who fought for the 8 hour day.
Halloween should be the first holiday to be gotten rid of. It's not a "holy day" but a perversion of all that's holy.
In a National Geographic survey, Denmark ranked as the world's happiest country. It's a combination of several factors including the feeling that their country cares for them. They can never sink too low because their country will always help them if they are willing to help themselves. They can truly pursue their passion in life because they are set free from worrying about the need to just survive. They have free health care, free education up to and including the university level and parental leave at full pay for a year after every child is born. This can be shared between the two parents including gay and lesbian parents.
There are 5 criteria that the survey used to rate happiness: financial, social, purpose, physical and community. The thought is that you can't be really happy if your physical body is out of whack. And that comes down to not just treating illness as what "health care" in the US consists of. It means how active physically you are. Danes and other Europeans do a lot of walking as well as participate in other physical activities so they have a more robust personal power plant.
The private and the public are in a healthy balance. There's not the intense conflict between the two spheres as you find in the US. There's a feeling that "We're all in this together. An American anthropologist, Jonathan Schwartz, based in Copenhagen said, "Danish happiness is closely tied to their notion of tryghed, the snuggled, tucked-in feeling that begins with a mother's love and extends to the relationship Danes have with their government."
Engaging work and rewarding play are more in balance. Danes get 4 weeks of vacation each year. They feel free to work in a job that is personally rewarding instead of one that represents a daily grind to eke out a living. "The Danes seem more aware of the total needs of a person than most other places," said a psychologist at Claremont Graduate University in California. In other words they are more in tune with life. Maybe it's because they don't devote half their national budget to militarism as we do in the US. The US, assuming for itself the role of world policeman, has been a colossal failure resulting in the fact that there are 65 million refugees in the world.
Perhaps the world's refugees should take up a chant #Refugees' Lives Matter similar to #Black Lives Matter. Their plight at the hands of the US military is similar to the plight of black people at the hands of US police forces.
Middle Class Families Today Worse Off Than They Were 70 Years Ago
by John Lawrence
In the 1950s usually only the husband worked outside the home. Today both spouses work to maintain a middle class lifestyle. So the amount of parent-hours worked to maintain a middle class lifestyle has increased. So who's taking care of the children, maintaining the home, doing the shopping and all those other things that "mothers" used to do?
Answer: today's parents pay for child care. They pay for pre-school, they pay for after school activities, and they pay for two cars instead of one because both parents need a car to get to their respective jobs. Is this an improvement in generational lifestyle or a degradation? Most families today can't make ends meet in terms of the time available and the necessary things that have to get done.
For some lucky parents, a grandparent steps in and fills the gap in terms of child care or after school care. For others they have to pay for strangers to take care of their kids if they can afford it. Others have to relegate their children to the role of latch key kids. In other words there is no one to take care of them. The role of "mother" has largely disappeared from American life.
Income per parent-hour worked doesn't go as far today as it did in the 1950s when one job per household produced enough income for all the necessities of life plus a yearly vacation and enabled parents to send their kids to college. Americans are being duped into spending their money on huge mortgages, two car payments and massive consumerism to make up for the fact that there is no mother in the home. There are effectively two people playing the father role. And the children suffer.
Murphy's Law states, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
This pithy statement references the annoying tendency of life to cause trouble and make things difficult. Problems seem to arise naturally on their own, while solutions always require our attention, energy, and effort. Life never seems to just work itself out for us. If anything, our lives become more complicated and gradually decline into disorder rather than remaining simple and structured.
Why is that?
Murphy's Law is just a common adage that people toss around in conversation, but it is related to one of the great forces of our universe. This force is so fundamental to the way our world works that it permeates nearly every endeavor we pursue. It drives many of the problems we face and leads to disarray. It is the one force that governs everybody's life: Entropy.
What is Entropy and Why Does It Matter?
What is entropy? Here's a simple way to think about it:
Imagine that you take a box of puzzle pieces and dump them out on a table. In theory, it is possible for the pieces to fall perfectly into place and create a completed puzzle when you dump them out of the box. But in reality, that never happens.
Why?
Quite simply, because the odds are overwhelmingly against it. Every piece would have to fall in just the right spot to create a completed puzzle. There is only one possible state where every piece is in order, but there are an infinite number of states where the pieces are in disorder. Mathematically speaking, an orderly outcome is incredibly unlikely to happen at random.
Similarly, if you build a sand castle on the beach and return a few days later, it will no longer be there. There is only one combination of sand particles that looks like your sand castle. Meanwhile, there are an infinite number of combinations that don't look like it.
Again, in theory, it is possible for the wind and waves to move the sand around and create the shape of your sand castle. But in practice, it never happens. The odds are astronomically higher that sand will be scattered into a random clump.
These simple examples capture the essence of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder. And there are always far more disorderly variations than orderly ones.
This is the second in a two part series considering whether or not drugs and prostitution should be legalized in the US as many libertarians including Ron Paul have advocated. Part 1 can be found here.
Prostitution is legal in some form or other in many countries of the world. In many other countries, including Muslim countries, polygyny, which means that one man can have multiple wives, is completely legal. Does prostitution serve some beneficial social purpose or is it something entirely reprehensible that should be criminalized and prosecuted? Or is it a necessary evil that should be regulated and managed but discouraged while not being criminalized. We shall examine some of these ideas in this article. Of course prostitution isn't the societal problem that drugs are. There is no "prostitution war" equivalent to the "drug war" that is ravaging Mexico. Billions of dollars aren't involved in prostitution in the same way that they are in the lucrative drug trade. Prostitution as a societal problem is almost beneath the radar compared to the drug problem where competing cartels have waged war and numerous people have been killed.
There are some 13,000 porn films made every year in the United States, most in the San Fernando Valley in California. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $10 billion or higher. There is no precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors owns DIRECTV, which distributes more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are currently the biggest American companies accommodating porn users with the Hot Network, Adult Pay Per View, and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers.
Evidently, it's not illegal to pay a woman to have sex so long as it's packaged and sold as an illusion, and it adds to the bottom line of corporate profits and as long as the man paying her isn't the man who is actually having sex with her.
The web has made pornography accessible and free. A Newsweek article in the December 5, 2011 issue states: "An estimated 40 million people a day in the US log on to some 4.2 million pornographic websites, according to the Internet Filter Software Review. And though watching porn isn't the same as seeking out real sex, experts say the former can be a kind of gateway drug to the latter."
The problems with the profession of prostitution are mainly visited on the low end prostitutes, the street walkers and hookers, who are regularly brutalized and even serially murdered by their clients. Sex trafficing affects girls and women who are promised a ticket out of some miserable homeland only to find themselves landed up as sex slaves. If prostitution were legalized and regulated, the people who would be helped the most are the low end prostitutes, the poor prostitutes who are exploited by pimps and sex trafficers. Perhaps this is why prostitution remains illegal in the US where disregard of the poor is a tenet and bedrock belief of Republican philosophy. After all legalization and regulation would mean more government bureaucracy even though it might reduce violence and sexually transmitted diseases. In other countries legalization means that prostitution is regulated to make sure that exploitation and disease are minimized under the theory that human behaviour can't be legislated but it can be managed and regulated.
In Holland where prostitution is legal, prostitutes even have their own union! Prostitution is legal in many countries including Canada, Mexico, Israel, England, France, most other European countries, most all of South America including Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. Even Iran has "temporary wives" which can last for only a few hours. Legalizing prostitution not only protects prostitutes and their customers, but it represents a service that can be taxed and can bring in government revenues. Libertarians in the US are all for legalizing drugs and prostitution. The joke is that libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke dope and get laid. The question why do men go to prostitutes is of less interest here than the sociological question of whether legalization or criminalization of such activity produces a more healthful and more crime free society. Societies in which drugs and prostitution are legal tend to have lower incidences of rape and other violent crimes than the US according to the Liberator report. And the US is the world's chief hypocrite in this regard as it tolerates and even encourages prostitution in countries which contain US military bases due to demand from soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen.
Before I go on though, there is a joke along these lines: A middle aged couple went to the county fair. As they were perusing the livestock barns they came across the prize bulls, those who had won blue ribbons. The wife exclaimed to the husband, "Look at that bull. He sired 150 calves last year. That means he had sex 150 times. If that bull can have sex 150 times in a year, surely you can do as good as that bull. They walked a little farther and the wife exclaimed again, "That bull sired 250 calves last year. He had sex 250 times. If that bull can do it, you should be able to do it too. They walked a little farther and the wife said,"Look at that bull. He had sex 350 times last year because he sired 350 calves." Just then the husband piped up, "Yeah but it wasn't always with the same cow!"
The "same cow" syndrome, as I call it, or sexual boredom explains in part why men who seemingly have everything, including the most beautiful wives in the world, cheat. Why do such men as Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse James and now even Ashton Kutcher cheat? Rich and famous men in particular have more opportunities for one thing because women are attracted to them. Rock stars, professional athletes and entertainers have women throwing themselves at them in many cases. They have ample opportunities. These are people who can go out and buy anything they want. If they want another home they simply go out and buy it. Another car? No problem. Another yacht? Same thing. They are used to being able to have anything they want. So it seems that what a lot of these men want in addition to all the other stuff is to have sex with a woman other than their wives even when they are married to the most beautiful women in the world. Men who stay monogamous may have the same desires but don't act on them due to the consequences and loss, both financial and emotional, that would ensue if they were found out. They may be altruistic enough to consider the consequences of breaking the heart of someone they love even if they are attracted to other women. Men seem to be able to divide love and sex into two distinct, sometimes non-overlapping, compartments of their minds. A girlfriend told me once that love and sex are all mixed together in a woman's mind whereas for men they are two distinct phenomena.
Take the case of superstars and multimillionaires Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony who supposedly had a fairy tale marriage and two adorable twin kids. That lasted about seven years. Marc decided that he wanted to spend more time with his ex-wife, a former Miss Universe. Jennifer decided she wasn't "passionately in love" any more. Friends said Marc had an eye for other women. There you have it folks. The fairy tale didn't last. Someone I dated once told me that fairy tale relationships don't last. She and her ex-boyfriend initially had passion that wouldn't quit. They couldn't get enough of each other. Then the passion started to diminish and after seven years they were sleeping in separate bedrooms and couldn't stand each other. Is this where the seven year itch comes in? I think the lesson here is that passionate fairy tale marriages or relationships won't last without concomitant commitment and sometimes even committed relationships won't last particularly if the participants can have anything they want without restrictions of finance or opportunity.
"Till death do us part” is a compelling idea, but with the divorce rate exceeding 50 percent, many people would very likely agree that humans have a biological impulse to be nonmonogamous. One popular theory suggests that the brain is wired to seek out as many partners as possible, a behavior observed in nature. Chimpanzees, for instance, live in promiscuous social groups where males copulate with many females, and vice versa.
But other animals are known to bond for life. Instead of living in a pack like coyotes or wolves, red foxes form a monogamous pair, share their parental and hunting duties equally, and remain a unit until death.
For humans, monogamy is not biologically ordained. According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss of the University of Texas at Austin, humans are in general innately inclined toward nonmonogamy. But, Buss argues, promiscuity is not a universal phenomenon; lifelong relationships can and do work for many people.
So what distinguishes the couples that go the distance? According to several studies, a range of nonbiological factors can help pinpoint which pairings are built to last—those who communicate openly, respect each other, share common interests and maintain a close friendship even when the intense attraction wanes.
Monogamy which isn't prevalent in the non-Western world is having a rough go of it in the US despite the "family values" crowd. Despite their family values politicians such as Newt Gingrich and now Herman Cain turn out to be serial adulturers. Others such as Republican David Vitter and Democrat Eliot Spitzer have been found out for visiting prostitutes. Vitter was able to keep his job in Congress; Spitzer wasn't able to hold on to the governorship of New York.
Muslims can have multiple wives. And according to the Bible Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. King David had eight wives and ten concubines. The Biblical example doesn't bode well for monogamy as the bedrock of western civilization. Monogamy in the western world is undercut by serial marriage which movie stars such as Elizabeth Taylor (8 marriages) indulge in. The marriage vow "till death do us part" has become irrelevant for large numbers of people who fail to even include it as part of their marriage ceremony. And in the western world one can simply remain single and have multiple boy or girl friends. The sanction against sex outside of marriage no longer exists. But still for some people monogamy remains a strongly desirable value and way of life. The fact that there are many ways around monogamy including prostitution is probably a good thing as it relieves sexual tension and pressure for those who are unable or unwilling to maintain strict monogamy. This pressure relief valve probably prevents equivalent energy release in more anti-social and even criminal modalities.
Frank has written an excellent essay on prostitution in Holland where it is legal, as it is in most other countries of the developed and undeveloped world, which we present here:
LEGALIZED PROSTITUTION IN THE NETHERLANDS
Introduction
The Netherlands has undergone a long transformation of first viewing prostitution as a dishonorable profession with few rights under the law; to seeing the prostitute as a victim of criminal exploitation by procurers and traffickers; to adopting a public policy of regulated tolerance; to legalizing and accepting adult prostitution in 2000 as a legitimate “right” and form of occupation by consenting adults. The Dutch practical approach to prostitution was evident as far back as 1413 in a decree from the city of Amsterdam:
“Because whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours – indeed it is far better to have these women than not to have them – and also because the holy church tolerates whores on good grounds, for these reasons the court and sheriff of Amsterdam shall not entirely forbid the keeping of brothels.”
One caution to readers. This writer makes no pretenses that the Dutch approach to prostitution today is transferable to the U.S. For every nation has its unique social-cultural history affecting attitudes towards social problems like prostitution, drug abuse, rape, abortion, teenage pregnancy, euthanasia. The legal spectrum for prostitution extends to the death penalty in some Muslim countries to treating sex workers as legally independent, tax-paying business entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. US public policy decisions on prostitution have long been driven by traditional religious-based moral values making prostitution a criminal offense. Costly time consuming court cases are pursued penalizing prostitutes while knowing prostitution is impossible to eliminate. U.S. officials often end up taking a schizophrenic blind eye to its presence and abuses.
Since the 17th century, the Dutch have slowly developed a more permissive culture of pragmatism and tolerance towards the “oldest profession.” Although Calvinistic moral absolutism strongly colored government policy on prostitution in the 17th century, the criminalization of brothels died down as old habits continued. Dutch authorities gradually left brothels alone if they were not a public nuisance. Moral arguments to justify certain laws came to be overshadowed by a jurisprudence based on a cultural value of utilitarianism. Thus, religion, sin, morality are rarely the driving emotions in policy-making for social phenomena in the Netherlands. The Dutch are above all a practical, realistic, open people … characteristics nurtured by centuries of doing business across continents in diverse languages with few pre-conceived prejudices about race, political creed, culture, or religion. No wonder, surveys show that 78% of Dutch citizens favor legalization of prostitution.
In contrast, Sweden sees prostitution as a sex-specific act of violence against women, as an act essentially involuntary and morally repugnant. Sweden’s goal is to suppress and ultimately abolish it. Prostitutes are seen as a victim group and prostitution as a “gross violation of a woman’s integrity.” Prostitutes need to be rehabilitated not punished. In 1999, Swedish law decriminalized the sale of sex and took the historical step of making it a criminal offense to pimp, traffic, and buy sex. Men who buy sex are subject to public exposure and fines or up to six months in prison. Thus, clients as well as pimps and traffickers are seen as oppressors. All face the threat of being punished under criminal law. This plus the Swedish threat of "naming and shaming" the client by publication are generally accepted methods of abolishing prostitution, achieving true gender equality, and protecting women from violence.
Officially reported results are positive. Street prostitution has been eliminated. The number of prostitutes has dropped 40%, and criminal human trafficking gangs tend to avoid Sweden.
Sweden’s abolitionist policy is very un-Dutch. People here regard prostitution as a social phenomenon that cannot be eliminated. Interestingly enough, however, the Dutch are now considering adopting Sweden’s practice of "naming and shaming" the client – to be directed to buyers of sex from women or brothels not legally registered or licensed, to buyers from prostitutes who are minors, and to buyers who commit acts of coercion or violence. Studies show most men who bought sex would likely be deterred by the risk of a pillorying by public exposure in the local newspaper. Heleen Mees, Dutch economist and lawyer, concluded that for many men (including former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer), the promise of anonymity may be the most appealing aspect of buying sex.
How the Dutch System of Legal Regulation Works
The Dutch have long believed banning prostitution makes it ever more difficult to control and counter abuses. Accordingly, prostitution itself has never been illegal in the Netherlands. A 1911 Act banning the owning of a brothel and profiting from prostitution was lifted in 2000. The 1911 Act had only been used against brothels and sex clubs engaging in criminal activities or disturbing public order. It was replaced by Article 250a of the Dutch Criminal Code which made it legal under strict conditions to operate a brothel or solicit clients for a prostitute while prohibiting exploitation of prostitutes.
Like the Netherlands, Germany also legalized prostitution in 2002. The criminal aspect and spiraling violence were overriding factors compelling both countries to legalize and regulate the sex industry.
Dutch law brings tough penalties for the following offenses:
Forcing another person to engage in prostitution, inducing a minor to engage in prostitution, recruiting, abducting or taking a person in prostitution in another country, receiving income from a minor or a person forced to engage in prostitution and forcing another person to surrender income from prostitution.
The Ministry of Justice formulated six key aims of the new Prostitution Act:
Improve monitoring and regulating possibilities for legal prostitution through a municipal licensing system for prostitution businesses and work/residence permits for prostitutes. Curb illegal prostitution and intensify efforts to combat exploitation and forced prostitution. Reduce if not stamp out trafficking of minors, illegal immigrants and individuals without a valid residence permit. Protect minors below 18 against sexual exploitation. Safeguard position, mental integrity, and rights of prostitutes. Separate prostitution from the criminal activities associated with it.
Criminal offences carry a fine and a sentence of up to six years extended to eight or ten years for aggravating circumstances related to exploitation, trafficking, forced prostitution and use/abuse of children.
Guidelines and regulations to control brothels, self-employed sex workers, sex clubs and streetwalkers are set by local municipalities. The Association of Netherlands Municipalities publishes a common set of guidelines. Police, urban district councils, and local municipal health services are responsible for enforcing the laws, formulating and implementing the rules and policies regulating prostitution. This includes safety, hygiene, fire precautions, condoms, panic buttons, hot and cold running water. This also includes warnings, issuing/withdrawing business licenses and sex-worker residence or work permits, temporarily or permanently closing down a business for violation of license conditions, relocation of brothels for reasons of public order.
Workers in the oldest profession are now beginning to feel the pressure of European austerity by paying taxes like everyone else. In the Netherlands, the sex industry generates over $800 million annually in gross revenues. The sex trade went almost entirely untaxed until legalization in 2000. Sex workers are registered as one-woman, self-employed businesses. Authorities are now actively pursuing prostitutes who should be paying an average 33% tax many have managed to avoid. Research indicates about 40% of window prostitutes in Amsterdam pay some income tax. A spokesman for the Tax Service said, “We began at the larger places, the brothels, so now we are moving on to the window landlords and the ladies.”
Of course, an option for the prostitute is to work in the unlicensed, illegal sector. But if the client can find a prostitute there, why can’t a Dutch tax administrator? The prostitute and business establishment thus face real risks of losing their residence/work permits and license to work plus fines and possible jail terms.
As part of the Tax Service’s new tactics, officials are touring the red light districts (Amsterdam, for example) checking that the ladies – along with their required residence/work permits – are aware they must be paying taxes and making sure they have filled in all proper forms. In a notice given in Amsterdam’s city newspaper, landlords and window prostitutes were told they would be audited in typically bureaucratic fashion, “Agents of the Tax Service will walk through various elements of your business administration with you, such as pricing, staffing, agendas and calendars. The facts will be used at a later date in reviewing your returns”
Planned drop-in sessions by tax inspectors will be key in helping the Dutch government receive its share of the lucrative sex industry. For tax enforcement and collection efforts to be really effective, communication is crucial as the first language for most women is not Dutch and few speak English. Around three-quarters of the women working in Amsterdam’s sex industry – involving 8,000 prostitutes of all kinds and 3,000 working behind windows – are from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Another complication is that the industry is an all-cash business making it problematic to apply tax law, despite the fact that sex workers have residence or work permits. As one lady of the profession said, “How can they tell how many people come inside each day or how much money changes hands once the curtain is drawn? Not many customers ask for a receipt.”
What Are the Lingering Problems With the Dutch System of Legalized Prostitution?
The Dutch have been busy reducing the size of the red-light district in Amsterdam out of fear the business is getting out of control in recent years – exacerbated by sharp increases in the flow of women from poorer, less-developed countries. The abuse of prostitutes and illegal trafficking activity have been on the rise. As Job Cohen, former mayor of Amsterdam said in 2008, “We’ve realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneur businesses, but about big crime organizations involved in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities.” Mr. Cohen added, “It is not that we want to get rid of our red-light district. (Fifty percent of the business comes from tourists). We want to reduce it. Things have become unbalanced and if we do not act we will never again regain control.”
In 2008, Amsterdam authorities began reducing half of the city’s 400 prostitution windows and closing a third of its brothels and some of the city’s 70 sex clubs and marijuana cafes. Simultaneously, there has been an intense crackdown on human traffickers who deceive victims by offering work in hotels, restaurants or child care while later forcing them into prostitution. Recent prison terms for small crime gangs have ranged from 4 to 7.5 years. The police conduct frequent controls of brothels to pick up signs of human trafficking.
In 2009, the Dutch Justice Ministry appointed a special public prosecutor responsible for closing down prostitution and coffee shops connected to organized crime. As has been the practice since the legalization of prostitution, withdrawal or refusal to grant a brothel license may occur for moral or ethical reasons or if:
• The brothel owner is unable to produce a police clearance certificate issued by the local authorities.
• The brothel employs a minor or an illegal resident or any person under coercion.
• The intended location conflicts with zoning plans.
• It is in the interest of public order.
• It makes the area less desirable to live in.
Other proposed stiffening up of legal requirements now nearing the last stage of the approval process include:
(1) Minimum age of sex worker will be increased from 18 to 21.
(2) Prostitutes must receive a registration pass with a photograph and a registration number but no name and personal data; clients will be required to check this pass.
(3) License requirements will be extended to escort and internet agencies, home sex outlets, adult movie theaters.
(4) An advertisement of an individual prostitute or of a sex company must show the registration number and license number, respectively; the outside and inside premises of a sex company must display a sign showing it is licensed.
(5) Clients engaging in sex at unlicensed establishments, or with non-registered prostitutes or with minors, or clients guilty of unacceptable treatment of a prostitute will also be subject to a naming and shaming threat of public exposure similar to regulation practice in Sweden.
What Are the Benefits of the Legalization of Prostitution from the Dutch Experience?
From Dutch perspectives, the advantages of legalizing prostitution are several for all parties, i.e., prostitutes, local governmental authorities, communities:
• The rights of prostitutes are asserted as autonomous self-employed businesswomen in a legitimate form of labor offering all the protections/benefits of the labor laws (participating in pension planning and workman’s compensation) as well as the obligations related to tax and social insurance contributions. Prostitutes are self-determining. No longer under control by pimps, they can accept or reject clients, decide when to work and when to retire. Pimping services are disappearing helped by regulations prohibiting pimps from earning a livelihood off the wages of prostitutes.
• Prostitutes are able to report violent and abusive crimes (rape, assault, coercion, extortion) without fear of prosecution or abuse by law enforcement agents – thus being far less vulnerable to predators like clients, pimps, madams, crime gangs, police. Abuses are more easily detected when prostitutes operate publically and legally. Strengthening the rights of women engaged in the oldest profession is seen as the best way to combat sexual violence.
• Prostitution in the “open sunshine” as a registered and licensed profession means the health needs of prostitutes are more likely to be self-addressed by prostitutes and by local health authorities. By local law, brothels must allow health services or interest groups unrestricted access to their premises. •
• While medical checkups are not obligatory, prostitutes self-employed or employed in the legal sector generally comply with the request to have medical checkups four times a year. Employers of prostitutes must pursue safe-sex policies and encourage their employees to have regular checkups for STDs.
• Brothels must meet standards of housing safety, basic hygiene facilities, zoning regulations, quality of life of the community, confinement to designated areas leaving most parts of a community prostitution-free. Streetwalking is less than 5% of all prostitution in the Netherlands. Some municipalities refuse to license window prostitution and streetwalking.
There’s a special phone line for members of the public to anonymously report suspicious activities. This and regular inspections by law enforcement agencies produce valuable information to follow and prosecute offenders in both the regulated and illegal prostitution sectors.
Summary
The Dutch have had a long history of tasting the more prohibitionist, morally-driven approach to prostitution. Then in 1911 came a policy of prohibiting brothels and “living off the avails of prostitution”, (sharing in earnings of a prostitute) together with a discretionary enforcement of the law … a kind of de facto “regulated-tolerance.” Finally, legalization of brothels and formal legitimization and de-stigmatization of prostitutes came in full force in October 2000. Prostitutes can work as regular employees (with a labor contract), although the vast majority now work as independent contractors.
The Dutch approach to legalizing prostitution frees up the justice system from wasting enormous monies and time on nuisance cases. More time is available for getting better control and prosecution of the real vicious culprits … organized crime gangs who continue with the exploitation of minors, human trafficking, coercion, violence, and drugs. The Dutch realize they must do much, much better in breaking down the illegal clandestine underworld of prostitution. And they will get the job done. But they are also realistic in recognizing that banning social phenomena makes them much more difficult to get under control.
And now in true Dutch pragmatic fashion, the red-light districts can expect a business-only visit by the tax inspector. Besides the improving government oversight of all facets of the sex industry, there is the important spin-off of a grass–roots enforced tax policy which is expected to generate much needed tax revenues. Although the 2008 financial crisis was weathered fairly well by the Netherlands, the government ran a deficit of 6% of GDP in 2010. It is now cutting spending +-20% and raising taxes over the next four years in the hope of balancing the budget by 2015. The lucrative sex industry must do its part.
REFERENCES: Legalized Prostitution in the Netherlands ________________________________________________________________
1. “Human Trafficking and Legalized Prostitution in the Netherlands,“ by Dina Siegel Prof. of Criminology at the Willem Pompe Institute, Utrecht University of the Netherlands, March 2009
2. “Prostitution in the Netherlands,” by Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Sept. 18, 2009
3. “Does Legalizing Prostitution Work,” by Helen Mees, Feb.3, 2009
4. “Prostitution in the Netherlands – History,” Wikipedia
5. “Prostitution in the Netherlands Since the Lifting of the Brothel Ban,” by A.L. Daalder of the WODC (Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek en Documentatiecentrum), 2007
6. “The Legalization of Prostitution: Myth and Reality” – A Comparative Study of Four Countries (Including the Netherlands, pages 55-69), Naomi Levenkron of Hotline for Migrant Workers, 2007
7. “The Act Regulating the Legal Situation of Prostitutes” – Implementation, Impact, Current Developments: Findings of a Study on the Impact of the German Prostitution Act (which adopted somewhat the Dutch liberal drugs model), by Prof. Dr. Barbara Kavemann, Ass. Jur. Heike Rabe, Sept. 2007
8. “How the Dutch Protect Their Prostitutes,” by Patrick Jackson of BBC News, Dec. 16, 2006
9. “Legalized Prostitution – Regulating the Oldest Profession,” by Mark Liberator, Dec. 8, 2005
10. “Dutch Policy on Prostitution,” Questions and Answers: Publication by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2004
11. “Prostitution in the Netherlands: Transforming the World’s Oldest Profession into the World’s Newest Industry,” by Gary Feinburg of Crime & Justice International, July/Aug. 2003, Vol. 19, No. 75
12. “Prostitution Laws – Toronto, Ontario and Canada,” (Live off the avails of prostitution) Posted by Toronto Defense Lawyers (TDL), Mar. 8, 2010
End of Frank's Essay
Comments on Frank's essay by John:
Frank says: "US public policy decisions on prostitution have long been driven by traditional religious-based moral values making prostitution a criminal offense." But prostitution is legal, not a criminal offense, in Nevada. Currently eight out of Nevada's 16 counties have active brothels (these are all rural counties). As of June/July 2008, 28 legal brothels existed in Nevada.
Frank brings up the Swedish attitude of legalized prostitution but "naming and shaming" the clients or Johns. (In Holland the "naming and shaming" only applies to clients of illegal forms of prostitution such as intercourse with underaged girls.) In Sweden the women are viewed as victims, and prostitution, though tolerated, is viewed with disapprobation. This begs the question 'is there any individual or social good at all in prostitution or the exchange of money for sex?' I would maintain that there is a relative social and individual good in prostitution. First, under the right conditions, it allows certain women to make a good living who otherwise might be unemployed. Second, prohibition only drives the industry underground and makes exploitation and disease, more, rather than less, likely. Third, it provides an outlet for men who are not in a position, temporary or otherwise, to form a normal emotional, as well as sexual, relationship with a woman.
The Chinese government has intervened in commercial sex work in China in order to alleviate the growing HIV/AIDS problem there. Even though prostitution is illegal, the government thought it necessary to provide condoms, establish clinics to provide check-ups and other measures to prevent the spread of disease.
Consider the two cases of Eliot Spitzer and John Edwards. Spitzer was outed as having visited a prostitute, and, as a result, he was shamed into resigning as New York State Governor. But in short order he has rehabilitated himself and his public image having become a pundit on TV and having had his own talk show on CNN for a period of time. Since there was no emotional attachment, his wife, evidently, has forgiven him, and his marriage remains intact. Edwards, on the other hand, formed an emotional and sexual relationship, a full blown affair, with Rielle Hunter that resulted in the birth of a child while Edwards was married to his wife who was dying of cancer. Edwards has been much reviled and is facing five Federal counts for misusing campaign funds which may land him in jail and cause the loss of his attorney's license and the loss of custody of his children not to mention a stiff fine. If only Edwards had visited a prostitute instead of getting involved in a very personal affair, he might not be in the very serious situation he's presently in which could result in his children becoming parentless for an extended period of time if Edwards goes to jail. Edwards probably rues the day he ever got involved with Hunter not to mention the fact that his affair probably cost a hundred times more in monetary terms than did Spitzer's dalliance with a high priced prostitute. Spitzer has had to come to terms with his sexuality vis a vis his wife and why he felt it necessary to seek sex outside of marriage, but that is between him and his wife and is not a public matter.
End of John's comments.
Wesley's Comments:
As far as prostitution goes, in this country it should be regulated as it is in Holland. I have never been there or sampled the fruits of their labor, but from my readings in Newsweek, Time, and the like it seems to be working. At least by regulating it, organized crime's involvement is reduced and health standards maintained. All good, but in any government entity, there is inherent corruption; just not as violent and final as organized crime's methods that would necessitate laws to control it. More laws!!! That means more government employees to "supervise, enforce, document, inspect, study, propose more regulations", and the list is endless.
Take government out of the picture and street level entrepreneurs (pimps and organized crime) will fill the void. The best solution is the most expensive - as usual.
Our present laws are rooted in the colonial standards where one would be either jailed, stocked, dunked, or humiliated in some way for not attending church on the Sabbath. Witches and anyone else with talents that were not understood were executed. The carry over is our present prohibition on anything deemed sexually explicit.
It can be argued that such regulation serves the common good in that it sets the boundaries of moral conduct and makes for a stronger society. Is it OK for someone with supervisory control over children to abuse them in any way? Is it OK for someone to force a young person into prostitution? If that conduct were not prohibited, would our society be any less corrupt? In my view it would be disastrous and government control is the only viable option. At least the taxes and fees collected may cover a small portion of the cost to taxpayers for regulating it.
As to porn. A multi BILLION dollar world wide business and thanks to the internet, not sanctioned or controlled by our government. But they want to - desperately want to.
Who in the hell does it hurt? Psychologists maintain that it is the first step in the release of sexual repression that may evolve to violent sexual behavior. Is it like the first puff of MJ where some say that you are on the fast track to addiction? Is it a sign of underlying hatred or disrespect of the female gender?
BS! Guys have testosterone and their brain is wired differently - end of story. Maybe some do not get beyond the 3rd grade experience of sneaking a peek up a class mate's dress. Others wish they had and that peek becomes the top playground subject for the week. Could this be the foundation where reputations are built? After all, some guys and some girls will have one by their senior year and many sooner. Is this where porn is started? The unspoken desire to see more!
We are indoctrinated at a very early age "not to look". I heard it from my mother, grandmothers, teachers, clergy, and I can't count the rest that uttered that admonition. But I still did! And they knew it!!! Do I still? I'll never tell. So you head readers out there have fun with that. Am I or am I not a pervert?
Regulate it - Hell No. BUT then what about child porn and MBLA? Well, some regulation is in order. Now the pool of government workers grows a bit more. (Go back to the first paragraph).
There is not freedom without government regulation. With regulation there is not freedom.
As far as prostitution goes, no matter how legal it becomes there will always be a stigma because of those with religious beliefs, and those in public office will still be held to a higher standard if for no other reason than muck raking. In this case, Spitzer and the like might not have committed a crime, but might not have survived an election either. That will be interesting.
Legalizing would be an easy solution, but here again the bureaucracy governing the career field will run out of control. I use the term "career field" because with legalization it will supposedly be a choice freely entered into by the person. Person, because prostitutes come in both sexes and the male side has never been as fully disclosed as the female side.
Breaking the present hold on the "business agents" involved today will be difficult even with licensing, health inspections, and field agents. My original feelings were opposite, but after much consideration I feel that involvement of organized crime and street level pimps, gangs and the like will never be eliminated. In fact, keeping corruption out of even legalized entities will be nigh impossible because the dollar amounts are astronomical.
But if enacted into law, the passage of time will mollify public opinion and both prostitution and drugs will become socially acceptable to some degree.
End of Wesley's Comments
John's Comment on Wesley's Comments
As you point out, legalizing something does not mean that criminal elements will not continue to be involved. I think Frank pointed out that Holland recognizes that fact and provides for monitoring both the legal and illegal aspects of prostitution.
This is the first part of a two part article considering whether or not drugs and prostitution should be legalized in the US. Part 2 on the legalization of prostitution can be found here.
A recent documentary by Ken Burns on Prohibition brought to light the harmful effects of trying to outlaw an activity deeply ingrained in human culture - the drinking of alcohol - which was prohibited by constitutional amendment from 1920 to 1933 when the amendment was repealed. Not only did the prohibition of alcohol not diminish the actual drinking of it, nor did it reduce alcoholism, but prohibition opened up previously unavailable opportunities for organized crime. It also produced an epic level of hypocrisy among politicians who disparaged alcohol publicly while indulging in it privately. Revenues due to excise taxes which funded the Federal government for much of its history up till then dried up. Drug use and prostitution are related since many drug users are prostitutes and many prostitutes are drug users. Many people feel that you can't legislate morality so the government should stay out of trying to control people's personal habits. One such person is libertarian and Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Listen to what he has to say.
Politicians, most notably Eliot Spitzer, former Governor of the great state of New York, have been embarassed, scandalized and driven from office over dalliances with prostitutes while rock stars, athletes and entertainers glorify and seemingly get away with drug use and sexual practices somewhat removed from the mainstream. While virtually no one is subjected to harsh jail sentences as a result of prostitution, minor drug offenses lead to jail time. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world - about 1% of the entire adult population - largely due to minor drug offenses. What amounts to a war is raging on the US Mexican border due to criminal drug syndicates in Mexico which cater to the American appetite for illegal drugs. Of the two - drugs and prostitution - drugs are by far the greater problem due to the illegal importation of them, the killing in Mexico because of rival drug gangs fighting each other for dominance and the large incarceration rate mainly of African-Americans in the US. 9.2% of African-American adults were in prison in 2008. The prisons to house these inmates are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money while the taxes that could be collected on legalized drugs go uncollected in an economy that's in desparate need of revenue.
Jazz singer Anita O'Day in her autobiography "High Times Hard Times" commented about the fact that marijuana, which was legal in the US up till 1933, was made illegal precisely when alcohol was legalized again:
People ask me when I first smoked grass. Well, I smoked it before it became illegal in 1933, although it really wasn't legal for me to smoke anything then. But before going into our dance, George and I would share what we called a reefer. It was no big deal when I was twelve or thirteen. If you lived in the Uptown district, you could buy a joint at the corner store, if not nearer. I never read the newspapers so I didn't know when pot was outlawed and beer became legal. One night I asked George for a hit on a joint and I thought he was going to flip out. 'Do you want to get us arrested?' he hissed. Then he told me what had come down. It didn't make sense. One day weed had been harmless, booze outlawed, the next, alcohol was in and weed led to 'living death.' They didn't fool me. I kept on using it, but I was just a little more cautious.
Other famous jazz musicians such as trumpeter Louis Armstrong were lifelong devotees of marijuana. It didn't seem to hurt his career any. Pianist and composer Thelonious Monk was denied a cabaret card in New York City for many years which meant he could not earn a living playing in clubs, due to a minor drug offense. In some cases musicians were set up and drugs planted on them by police. Habits formed when marijuana was legal were hard to break particularly in the African-American community when marijuana became illegal in 1933. The persistence of cultural patterns of smoking MJ probably has something to do with the large number of African-Americans incarcerated today because of its use. The hypocrisy of a system which makes beer legal one day and marijuana illegal the next does nothing but breed disrespect for the law which is what happened during the Prohibition era.
The history of cocaine has a similar trajectory. Cocaine was perfectly legal in the US up to 1914. In early 20th-century Memphis, Tennesee, cocaine was sold in neighborhood drugstores on Beale Street, costing five or ten cents for a small boxful. In the 1890s the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of Americans homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. Stevedores along the Mississippi River used the drug as a stimulant, and white employers encouraged its use by black laborers. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act outlawed the sale and distribution of cocaine in the United States. However, the use of cocaine was still legal. Cocaine was not considered a controlled substance in the United States until 1970, when it was listed in the Controlled Substances Act. Until that point, the use of cocaine was open and rarely prosecuted in the US. Since 1970 the jails have filled up with people prosecuted for minor drug use.
From 1898 through 1910 diacetylmorphine, the technical name for heroin, was marketed under the trademark name Heroin as a non-addictive morphine substitute and cough suppressant by the German corporation Bayer. The name was derived from the Greek word for Heros because of its perceived "heroic" effects upon a user. Bayer marketed the drug as a cure for morphine addiction before it was discovered that it rapidly metabolizes into morphine. As such, diacetylmorphine is essentially a quicker acting form of morphine. Contrary to Bayer's advertising as a "non-addictive morphine substitute," heroin would soon have one of the highest rates of dependence amongst its users.
In the USA the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914 to control the sale and distribution of diacetylmorphine and other opioids, but allowed the drug to be prescribed and sold for medical purposes. In 1924 the United States Congress banned its sale, importation or manufacture. It is now a Schedule I substance, which makes it illegal for non-medical use in signatory nations of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs treaty, including the United States.
In 1923, the U.S. Treasury Department's Narcotics Division (the first federal drug agency) banned all legal narcotics sales, forcing addicts to buy from illegal street dealers. Soon, a thriving black market opened up in New York's Chinatown.
Today a majority of people in the US favor the legalization of marijuana. At the same time more deaths occurred last year due to prescription drugs than to illegal drugs. These two facts seem to indicate that prescription drugs are a greater problem than marijuana.
On the other hand, Zurich's experience with its "drug park" is a cautionary tale for the liberal tolerance of drug use and its legalization. The following article from the New York Times is so interesting and informative that we reprint it here in its entirety:
After years of steadily rising crime and other drug-related problems, this city once associated more with banking and solid civic virtue than with marauding groups of addicts has ended its innovative experiment with an open drug market in a public park here.
The smashed windows of a Chanel store and a central branch of Credit Suisse, as well as the shooting of an unidentified man on Thursday, betray the sharp tensions that have stemmed from the closing last week of the Platzspitz, a park where the illicit activities of thousands of drug addicts and dealers were tolerated in recent years in a policy of containment of the drug problem.
Andres Oehler, a municipal spokesman, said the City Council had decided to shut the park, now sealed behind 10-foot iron fences hastily erected on the adjoining bridges, because "it was felt that the situation had got out of control in every sense."
But closing the park left several unresolved issues, including the fate of what has become a large international community of addicts in Zurich and the question of what exactly went wrong with an initiative originally aimed at helping drug abusers.
Addicts were drawn from all over Europe in recent years by the Socialist City Council's decision to offer clean syringes, the help of health officials and a large measure of tolerance in the Platzspitz, a once-elegant garden behind the stately National Museum.
The city characterized its approach as an enlightened effort to isolate the drug problem in an area away from residential neighborhoods, curb AIDS and foster rehabilitation. Its policy reflected a strong current of feeling among some European experts that it is the illegal and clandestine nature of the drug business, rather than the drugs themselves, that causes many of the associated problems.
But the situation gradually degenerated. "You give a little finger, and they want the whole hand," said a senior city official who insisted on anonymity. "You turn a blind eye to the small deals, and the big ones come. It was a spiral."
Regular users of the park swelled from a few hundred at the outset in 1987 to about 20,000, with about 25 percent of them coming from other countries. Then, Mr. Oehler said, dealers from Turkey, Yugoslavia and Lebanon moved in last year. Thefts and violence increased, with 81 drug-related deaths in 1991, twice as many as in 1990.
"We were having to resuscitate an average of 12 people a day, with peaks of 40 a day on some days," said Dr. Albert Weittstein, the city's chief medical officer. "Our people were running up around the park blowing oxygen into people's lungs. We started with three doctors, but recently had to put in two more. It has become an impossible strain."
Groups of as many as 50 addicts now gather in the streets adjoining the park, where they are jostled by police officers with orders to disperse them. "This is a crazy decision, we'll be in the whole city now," said one young man, a syringe casually tucked behind his ear, as a policeman pushed him away. He declined to be identified.
On a nearby bench another youth, apparently oblivious to the approaching police officers, calmly tightened a belt around his upper arm before plunging a needle into a bulging vein below his elbow.
Christoph Schmid, a 21-year-old Swiss addict who has been using the park for the last two years, took a measured view of the action. He said the closing and the police crackdown would cause him and others "enormous difficulties" -- heroin has become harder to get and its price has already doubled to about $230 per gram -- but he also said the Platzspitz had recently become too violent. "Too many kids were getting hooked too easily," he added.
The park -- beautifully situated at the confluence of the Sihl and Limmat Rivers, which isolated it from neighbors despite its central location -- is now a monument to vain utopian hope and sordid devastation. "Anarchy is possible," proclaim graffiti scrawled across the National Museum. A bronze statue of a stag has been adorned with the word "Dope" in fluorescent orange paint.
On the ground lie thousands of discarded syringes and syringe packets, now being collected by garbage crews. The rhododendrons that once lined the paths are dead; so, too, are many of the trees. Most of the expanses of grass have been reduced to mud.
Peter Stunzi, the director of the city's parks, said that because the park had become what he called "Zurich's municipal urinal," the soil is such that it will be difficult to plant anything in the near future.
He added that he believed it was right to close the Platzspitz because "Zurich could not be responsible for the drugs of Switzerland and the rest of Europe." But he added, "My worst nightmare is that these people will now have nowhere to go."
The city government wants all those who are not from Zurich to leave. Signs have been posted around the city warning that the authorities will no longer tolerate the public shooting up or handling of drugs or gatherings of groups of addicts. All those not from the city should "go back to the communes, where they will be helped."
Checking for Outsiders
Mr. Oehler, the city's spokesman on drug matters, said that by April hostels in Zurich where addicts are allowed to sleep for about $3 a night will no longer accept anyone who does not have an identity card proving Zurich residency. But he conceded that "the problems will take a long time to resolve."
The city's new measures appear to be coming into force amid tensions in the nine-member City Council. One member, Emilie Lieberherr, who is responsible for social affairs, has protested the action as ill-considered. And there seems to be a general feeling that while mistakes were made, frontal attacks on drug abuse are not the answer either.
"We hoped we could minimize the social costs by creating an open market where people could get help," Dr. Weittstein said. "We thought we'd ferret out the dealers, but we failed, and we did not consider the dynamics of a still illegal business, which meant that dealers and users were attracted from far afield."
He added that the failure of the park did not, in his view, resolve the argument over whether drug prohibition makes matters better or worse. "I believe and most Swiss experts believe, that prohibition does a lot of damage," he said.
Drugs used in the park were still technically illegal. But attempts by plainclothes police officers to clamp down on dealers achieved little.
There are an estimated 30,000 drug addicts in Switzerland, a country whose industrious precision has created enormous wealth and a sparkling order, but also a conspicuous alienation among youths.
About $1.5 million will now be spent on renovating the park, Mr. Stunzi said, and it is hoped that a pristine Platzspitz might reopen by the spring of 1993 at the earliest.
By then, Zurich hopes, its self-created reputation as a drug capital will have faded. But for now, its streets are full of the confused ebb and flow of a disoriented mass of youths. Outside the park's closed gates, when the police move off, hordes of addicts quickly return to try to salvage with spoons some precious white powder that had spilled to the ground.
The lesson here, I believe, is to not create a central location for drug addicts, offer free needles and attract them from all over the world. Zurich effectively created a drug addict's nirvana while their efforts at rehabilitation were insufficient. They more or less said that drug users will inevitably always be with us so let's just herd them into one central location. Intervention as opposed to incarceration might be a better approach. This would mean taking the addict off of the street, denying them access to drugs and then offering them treatment and rehabilitation before letting them go free again. This requires societal resources, but might maximize the probability that a particular addict might stay clean once he or she goes back into society.
The question of drug legalization has to do with which drugs are to be legalized - just soft drugs like marijuana or hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine too. Ron Paul is for legalizing all drugs on the grounds that government should not dictate people's personal habits, and most people would not try heroin anyway even if it were legal. Certainly, legalizing marijuana would cut the cross border illegal trade considerably while doing nothing more than legalizing a substance which had been previously legal in the US up till 1933. The Prohibition era for marijuana would be over as it was for alcohol in 1933. The growing and selling of marijuana could provide jobs for many people in a jobless economy. Taxing marijuana could provide much needed government revenues. The diminution of the prison population would be a social good. I honestly don't see any downside. Probably taxes should be kept low for the first five years so that the crime syndicates in Mexico would not be able to undercut the price, and would be largely put out of business. For hard drugs I would advocate legalization also but very tough regulation and high taxation to make them very expensive. In addition to lowering the prison population, legalization of drugs would reduce the killing in Mexico and the cross border illegal shipments of guns and cash from the US. The border situation with illegal guns, money and immigrants could be normalized. It would be a step in the right direction towards increasing border security.
Along with legalization of drugs, education about the effects of using drugs and addiction in general whether it be drugs, food or sex as well as programs for getting people who want to quit the drug habit off of drugs should be stepped up. Public schools should teach students not only about drugs but other life skills such as how to deal with finances. Sex education is a necessity if for no other reason than US media culture is permeated and saturated with gratuitous sexual messaging. The cultural winds blowing on impressionable minds glorify sex, drugs, violence and consumerism. Public education needs to combat these forces. Perhaps this is why Republicans are dead set on destroying the public education system.
Wesley's Comments
As far as I am concerned if someone wants to indulge themselves with a present day illegal substance, let them. No stigma, but absolute enforcement of laws governing conduct, driving and work place sobriety standards. Give no quarter and make the penalties extremely severe.
I don't give a damn if someone dies of an overdose whether it be drugs or alcohol. If a person has so little self control, or self respect, perhaps society would be better off without them. You use it and end up hooked, you have no one to blame but yourself - suffer the consequences. If the government is involved (which it will be), there has to be a way of recouping expenses besides excise taxes. Those desiring rehabilitation can volunteer for it, and those convicted of non-injurious drug use should be sentenced to a project similar to the CCC or WPA of the Depression era. Anyone convicted of drug use resulting in injury or death of another should be executed.
You and some readers might think me insensitive and unreasonable at the least, and, more than likely, far worse. So be it. It is time our society wakes up to the fact that we, individually, are responsible not only to ourselves, but to society as a whole. It is not mine, nor anyone else's financial responsibility, to support the indulgent behavior of others, and that will be the 800 pound gorilla in the room. More public assistance to the weak willed, over and above the tax revenues collected, is not called for.
In my estimation the only things not eliminated by legalization of drugs are things for which one can be prosecuted due to other infractions of the law not having anything to do with drugs per se. Every other aspect whether legal or illegal should remain the same, but will probably get worse if drugs are legalized because of the additional laws and standards required. Catch 22 comes to mind.
I did not isolate my stand on drugs to MJ. Legalize them all just as it was up to the early parts of the 20th century. Opiates were an over the counter remedy for everything. Hells bells, there were even door to door salesmen peddling the stuff. Addiction, yes there was, but the primary difference today is that people are driving cars at 70 miles an hour. Now, thanks to OSHA, nearly all factory and work place tools and machinery are idiot proof so perhaps a mild buzz could be acceptable. Maybe even a little meth prescribed to senior citizens would speed up their reactions and the little old blue hair ladies that can barely see over the steering wheel can maintain freeway speeds.
I can foresee a definite improvement in traffic flow; and that time distance reaction thing, that is an acquired skill. I should know. I practiced steadily for a number of years with some of Kentucky's finest. Never had or caused an accident while under the influence of the stuff; it was the sober hours that were a problem. Probably a hangover thing and from what I have been told that is not a problem with MJ.
And as I wrote, if you cause injury or death while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you should face a MANDATORY death sentence. No incarceration, no rehab, no counseling, no appeals. The sentence to be carried out right after being found guilty. NO delay.
End of Wesley's Comments
John's Comment on Wesley's Comments
Wayne, what about a minor injury? Surely you wouldn't recommend putting someone to death for that even if under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I can see it for a head on collision in which innocent people in the other car are killed. There was a case like that here recently. I think the drunk guy who lived got 20-30 years in jail. I am for capital punishment in open and shut egregious cases, but not for those convicted based on eyewitness testimony which is notoriously inaccurate resulting in the incarceration and death of a lot of innocent people. A drunk driver causing an accident, on the other hand, is pretty much an open and shut case.
Frank's Essay:
DUTCH POLICY TOWARDS HARD ANDSOFT DRUGS
Introduction
A country’s drug policy evolves slowly and reflects national conditions and culture. As punitive or other model drug laws have evolved in countries over the past century, so have the unique drug policy enforcement solutions pioneered by the Dutch. Their open minded attitudes toward illicit drugs, like toward prostitution, are driven by their peculiar societal values – a realistic, humane approach to social problems like drugs as a health-centered and social well-being matter, not primarily as a problem of the police and judiciary – values that embody:
First, a long history of tolerance and pragmatism.
Second, a strong belief in individual freedom, like deciding about private matters such as one’s own health, while also having a strong sense of responsibility for the community’s well-being.
Third, a view of drug issues as manageable health and harm reduction matters – as “normal social problems” with real-life, scientific distinctions in relative risks – not an alien threat, a “forbiddenfruit” perennially punishable by the criminal prosecution and imprisonment apparatus.
Fourth, a non-absolutist ideological approach to social problems where criminal law is not perceived as enforcing social or religious morality, and government is expected to act with reserve on issues involving religion and moral questions.
Fifth, a belief that hiding or taking a blind eye to negative social problems does not make them go away but only makes them more difficult and costly to control.
What is the Historical Trend in Drug Policy?
Repressive and indiscriminate drug policies adopted under the 1919 Opium Act slowly gave way to very grave doubts as to the effectiveness of that approach. In the 50s and 60s, harsh sentencing practices for drug offenses including cannabis did not deter a notable increase in consumption. So in 1976, the Dutch parliament amended the Act to focus on battling the risks of drug abuse for society and individuals rather than just fighting consumption itself. The pre-1976 policy of prohibition and penal measures paid scant attention to the human, social, psychological, economic fallout of hard and soft drug use and the need to prevent further human suffering and disease.
While the Opium Act criminalized drug possession, cultivation, trafficking, importing and exporting, the 1976 amendments and subsequent amendments have established two classes of drugs: (1) hard drugs deemed to be an unacceptable risk to public health including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, ecstasy, hallucinogenic (magic) mushrooms; (2) tolerable traditional hemp-product soft drugs, marijuana and hashish. Dutch drug policy has pragmatically reverted to a new guideline of distinguishing drugs and related punishable acts based on their harm to the individual and to public health – a policy of minimizing the hazards and abuse of drug use rather than just suppressing all drugs … a policy addressing demand and supply that supports a certain degree of tolerance and non-prosecution rather than indiscriminate law enforcement.
The now amended 1976 Opium Act incorporates some unique strategies for reducing the harm of drug use and abuse:
The prevention or alleviation of social and individual risks caused by drug use.
A rational relation between those risks and policy measures, e.g., possessing, dealing in, selling, and producing drugs are criminal offenses with severe penalties for hard drugs. Drug possession for dealing is also more severely punished than possession for personal use which police generally take a soft approach to.
A differentiation of policy measures that considers risks of legal and medical drugs.
A police and judiciary that gives high priority to tackling the large-scale drug trade and production of drugs.
Recognition of the inadequacy of criminal law concerning other aspects (i.e., apart from trafficking) of the drug problem.
Not taking action against possession of small quantities of soft or hard drugs for personal consumption; tolerating (de facto legalizing) under strict conditions the consumption and traffic in soft drugs in youth centers and coffee houses where threshold quantities and the intent to deal determine personal possession, use, and trafficking offenses.
A high law-enforcement priority of cracking down, levying stiff penalties on hard drugs trafficking and production – including exportation and importation, large-scale commercial cultivation of cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD.
A “normalization” policy that treats drug problems as normal social problems, not as punishable deviant behavior only making societal control problems worse; a policy of integration and social rehabilitation of addicts; a policy of low threshold treatment acceptance, minimum paperwork, routine medical treatment services … all to avoid delaying care, marginalizing, stigmatizing, or isolating drug users.
Early focus on health promotion to young people in particular of the benefits of universal drug prevention … through curricular school-based programs such as, “The HealthySchool of Drugs” program – comprising lectures in secondary school on alcohol, tobacco and cannabis – and prevention outside school under the, “Going Out, Alcohol and Drugs” program – aimed at reducing health and safety problems among young people using drugs in recreational and party settings. Also, a wide range of support programs are offered to addicts with the goals to prevent and relieve risks of drug use for addicts, their immediate environment, and society as a whole.
What Are the Enforcement Principles and Rules?
The amended 1976 Opium Act still holds the possession of marijuana/hashish to be a petty misdemeanor today. But, even that offense is seldom enforced under the “expediency principle” in Dutch criminal law. This principle gives authorities discretionary powers to refrain from prosecuting certain offenses “on grounds derived from the public interest.” It applies to cases involving small quantities for personal use where there’s no dealing or other drug-related crime. Thus, cannabis and hashish are technically illegal but “tolerated.”
The “expediency principle” helps separate to the extent possible the recreational soft drug market – posing a minimal risk to society – from the true hard drug, criminal markets. The goal has been to separate distribution channels thereby greatly reducing the gateway from soft drugs to heroin and cocaine. It is felt this policy and the early educational school programs prevent experimenting youth from getting drawn into the dangerous criminal elements of the hard drug culture.
For the Dutch, drug use is a health matter not unlike the use of tobacco and alcohol. A paradigm of arresting and incarcerating thousands of citizens for minor drug possession or use offenses is not accepted. In stark contrast, Sweden views all forms of drug possession and use, regardless of quantities or drug type, as an abuse – while Portugal has decriminalized ALL drugs with favorable results. Each country must find its own way. For the Dutch, freedom to decide about matters relating to one’s own health is fundamental. So a visible, manageable retail market for cannabis was allowed to develop. But, as stated, wholesale dealers, traffickers, and large-scale cultivators of cannabis or hard drugs will be rewarded by the full force of the penal laws.
The Dutch do not see the separation of soft drugs from hard drugs and flexible law enforcement measures as some magical cure-all. The prime aim is prevention of health risks and the negative consequences for society arising from drug abuse. This involves educational measures where a restricted tolerance approach enables authorities to monitor and control better the social phenomena of drug abuse. Abuses are also fought by healthmeasures such as treatment monitoring centers, extensive demand reduction and detoxification facilities, a free methadone supply program for heroin users, a free syringe exchange program, and free testing of ecstasy pills.
The lure of stepping-up to hard drugs is checked by allowing purchase of cannabis in alcohol-free coffee-shops. For evidence shows this separation of the market for illicit drugs means youthful cannabis users are less likely to slip into contact with hard drugs. Also, surveys show the vast majority of Dutch people never try marijuana. Most who do try it don’t continue to use it very often, much less hard drugs. Moreover, users know that cannabis is far safer than hard drugs and less addictive than even caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, and many prescription drugs.
Coffee-shop regulations are very strict. Operators are legally and strictly bound to adhere to following rules:
No alcohol or hard drugs may be sold or consumed in a coffee house. Driving under the influence of soft drugs is considered as driving under the influence of alcohol. Police check for this.
No advertising, active promotion, web sites are allowed.
Cannabis can only be sold to people aged 18 or over. No minors are allowed around or in coffee-shop premises.
No sale of large quantities is allowed – the limit is 5 grams to one person in one day. This maximum amount is tolerated, not prosecuted, even though technically illegal.
The coffee-shop must not be causing a public nuisance, e.g., must not be located within 250 meters of a school.
The coffee-shop operator is allowed a maximum level of cannabis stock for selling of 500 grams, but local authorities can impose lower limits. Of course, no selling of hard drugs is allowed.
The decision whether or not to tolerate coffee-shops lies entirely with the local municipalities. Smoking cannabis is banned in public places. (As of 2005, 72% of the 467 municipalities pursued a zero policy with regard to the number of tolerated coffee-shops).
The local mayor is entitled to close a coffee-shop for violating any of the above rules (including being a public nuisance, e.g., disturbing a neighborhood’s public order and safety).
Why Drug Decriminalization and Tolerance?
The Dutch have normalized and decriminalized the soft and hard drug problem as a practical compromise between the extremes of an intensified war on drugs and legalization. Drug use is a fact of life. It must be discouraged, and the harm and risks minimized in a flexible, realistic manner. Under the Opium Act during 1919 to 1976, the Dutch learned this lesson the hard way when severe and disproportionate penalization failed to stop a steep rise in drug users and abusers. Continuing an all-out fight risked driving more and more drug users into the fringes of the underworld, making them hidden and beyond reach of any “helping” institution, other than the justice system. In short, a repressive, prohibitive approach led to negative side effects both for the individual and Dutch society.
The amended Opium Act of 1976 relegates criminal law to a relatively minor role in preventing individual drug abuse. However, as noted, cannabis and all other drugs are still statutorily illegal. But the law is not enforced for possession of small amounts for personal use or sale of small amounts in coffee-shops. So over the last 35 years, the goal has been to avoid situations where cannabis consumers suffer more damage from criminal proceedings than from use of the drug itself. A policy of tolerance for selling soft drugs in coffee-shops evolved on grounds it stops many users from contacting drug dealers and experimenting with hard drugs. Facts support this conclusion as the number of convictions, addicts, drug casualties in the Netherlands is one of the lowest in Europe and far below that of the US.
From Dutch perspectives, trying to eradicate drugs or drug addiction by criminal law makes the cure worse than the disease. On the other hand, unilateral formal legalization of soft drugs is not a goal and is unnecessary – not only because cannabis retail prices would drop further thus creating ever more “drugs tourism” – but mainly because Dutch courts have ruled that institutionalized non-enforcementin past years constitutes de facto decriminalization, i.e., a roughly legal regime for soft drugs. One thing is certain, however. Hard drugs are illegal and are unlikely to be legalized, at least in the near future. Some feel that the best argument for legalization is that it undermines outside-the-country drug cartels, often protected by terrorist groups. The Netherlands has never had the massive smuggling industry or a "next door" land route to the heart of drug country like the US has with Mexico. But imported drugs, for example, from Afghanistan to Dutch harbors and then channeled to the rest of Europe do remain a serious problem.
The outright banning of all coffee-shops is also not an option as it will not solve the problems of crime, street-drug trade, nuisance, and health. For the Dutch, it comes down to striking a careful balance between the rights of cannabis consumers and coffee-shop retailers and the Dutch government’s responsibility to public health and safety. This means setting fair and very strict limits of what can and cannot tolerated by all concerned.
Over-dramatization, criminalization, or moralization of the drug problem has thus given way to prevention,harm reduction and treatment policies… i.e., the promotion of healthylifestyles. While comparisons to other countries show the Netherlands’ tolerant policy has worked well for decades, the country has its share of drug problems. But these are no more and often far less than many modern democracies which have much harsher drug laws and penalties.
Serious attention is being directed to the nuisance related by cannabis use by “drugs tourism” and by foreign drug addicts residing illegally. Amsterdam and Dutch cities near Germany and France have been under strain from the flow of EU “drugs tourists” who are taking advantage of the Netherlands’ more liberal soft drug laws. In Maastricht alone, 70% of the 2 million visitors to Maastricht’s 14 coffee-shops come from abroad. This has increased nuisance complaints regarding the hazards of drug runners luring tourists to coffee-shops, petty crime, and the smell of weed smoke. In their constant efforts to correct such policy shortcomings, the Dutch are about to implement nation-wide a “weed-pass” system to contain “drugs tourism.”
Coffee-shops will be turned into private clubs requiring proof of membership by a pass issued to adult Dutch citizens for use in one club only. Maastricht has already banned foreigners’ access to coffee-shops except neighboring Germans and Belgians … at some economic cost. For example, foreign visitors to Maastricht’s or Amsterdam’s coffee-shops spend up to €75/day ($100/day) for cannabis compared to €125-250/day ($90-180/day) on shopping, eating out and lodging.
Cannabis Penalization Policies and Penalties
Dutch penalization policy makes a sharp distinction between drug users and drug traffickers. Drug use is seen primarily as a public health, harm-reduction issue poorly addressed by a paradigm of punishment-based prohibition. Adult people can buy, possess or use small quantities without criminal sanctions. Research clearly shows that cannabis is a very safe drug. But possession of this soft drug for commercial purposes is a serious criminal offense, subject to some tough penalties. In 2010, one of the largest Dutch cannabis-selling coffee shops was fined €10 million ($13.5 million) and a 4 month prison term for keeping more than the allowed 500 grams of stock cannabis in the shop.
Today, Dutch cannabis is grown locally and only up to 40% is sold locally – the majority is exported. Producing and exporting cannabis, ecstasy or amphetamines illegally is thus becoming a major Dutch enforcement and penal priority given organized crime’s rising interest in the lucrative European cannabis market. Dutch police are under pressure to aggressively pursue, prosecute, and punish large-scale possession, dealing and cultivation of cannabis.
In this regard, decriminalization of soft drugs has brought key manpower and income benefits that can be redirected to healthy and productive public ends: (1) it frees up police enforcement manpower from petty abuses to fight commercial drug trafficking and production; (2) it yields substantial police, judiciary, and detention cost savings, and it generates €400-500 million ($540-675 million) in coffee-shop tax revenues yearly. These funds finance a wide range of drug actions: aggressive prosecution of illegal trafficking and production; a high standard of preventive care, counseling and educational information, medical treatment services for addicts, and special housing for long-term addicts. Little wonder that the numberof addicts and deaths by overdose in the Netherlands is near the lowest in Europe and far lower than the US.
Furthermore, the Dutch government has announced it will classify cannabis with a THC level above 15% as a high potency, hard drug. Those coffee-shops selling cannabis with 17-18% THC levels today will have to use milder cannabis variants. This action plus strict regulation of a fast growing number of synthetic drugs; closure of coffee-shops within 250 meters of a school; shutdown of over 400 coffee-shops from 1179 in 1997 to ± 680 today (a 40% decrease) for reasons of nuisance, disturbance and other violations; a “weed pass;” and a stepped-up attack on trafficking and Dutch production of cannabis reflect a determination to adjust the country’s drug policy to new market realities – even if that means reversing tolerance policies.
Here’s a brief summary of the penalties for drug offenses:
Possessing up to 30 grams of cannabis for personal use is a minor offense with a maximum detention of 1 month (and/or a fine of €2,250/$3,000). But this penalty is not usually enforced.
Possessing more than 30 grams of cannabis, regardless of the quantity, is a criminal offense with a maximum detention of 2 years (and/or a fine of €25,000/$34,000).
Importing/exporting soft drugs is a criminal offense with a maximum detention of 4 years (and/or a fine of €45,000/$60,000). Penalties are increased for repeated offenses.
Buying, selling, producing, transporting soft drugs for commercial purposes is a criminal offense with a minimum detention of 1 month (and/or a fine) up to 8 years (and/or a fine of €45,000/$60,000) depending on the quantity.
Selling more than 5 grams to a client in any one day by a coffee-shop is a criminal offense. Coffee-shop owners or operators risk prosecution and being closed down (and/or big fines) for violating this or other coffee-shop rules as noted above.
What Are the Successes of Dutch Drug Policy?
Ambitious politicians, media, and other “experts” can’t resist spreading wildly exaggerated myths, misunderstandings, and misinformation in their disagreement with Dutch drug policy. This is not only dishonest but strange considering more and more global leaders have declared the “war on drugs” to be destructive and a failure. Many countries (and a small number of US states) have moved to various forms of decriminalizing low-level drug possession and adopting health-centered approaches to cut consumption, improve public health, and weaken the power of organized crime.
The pragmatic, pioneering Dutch approach of setting tolerance guidelines that make drug policy more visible are methods adopted by most EU countries. Decriminalizing the possession of soft drugs has not led to a rise in their use. There’s ample empirical evidence that removal of criminal provisions for cannabis possession does not markedly increase the prevalence of cannabis or any other illicit drug. Studies by the Trimbus Institute on drug addiction and mental health show that 5% of Dutch citizens smoked marijuana or hashish in the past year compared to an average of 7% in the rest of Europe. Supporting statistics are noted in TABLE 1:
The US percentage of total marijuana arrests was 52% of total drug arrests with arrests for possession increasing significantly from 34% in 1995 to 46% in 2010. No wonder US prisons are bursting with drug offenders, most of whom would probably not be in prison now if possession of 1 ounce or less had not been criminalized in a majority of states. As one expert said, “The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners.”
The above demonstrates that de facto legalization to purchase marijuana in the Netherlands has not given rise to marijuana levels of use – nor cocaine or heroin use – significantly higher than those in countries like France, Sweden and the US which pursue repressive drug policies. The Dutch intense policy of prevention and care has made drug addicts healthier and HIV prevalence even lower than in many countries where HIV infections are already very low. The Dutch government reports there are about 25,000 hard drug addicts or 1.6 per 1000 people. This is well below the EU average.
TABLE 3 illustrates the relative drug health treatment intensity for selected countries:
US, France, and Sweden have prohibitionist drug regimes for all drugs while Germany and the Netherlands have de facto decriminalization regimes for soft drugs. The US has at least 6 times more drug-user treatments/rehabs per 100,000 people than the Netherlands where HIV infections are also very low. This situation and the US doorway to a gigantic flow of drugs from its close-by neighbor, Mexico, make US legalizing or decriminalizing of drugs more complex and problematic. In contrast, the Dutch produce all of their cannabis consumption needs locally. And the level of hard drug consumption is very low. Another factor is that the Netherlands, third most densely populated country in the world, has 16.5 million people living on a land territory one-fourth the size of New York state (or one-half the size of my state of Maine). This also makes hands-on policy implementation, oversight and control of drugs relatively easier.
Tolerating cannabis use and taxing it works for the Dutch … with the exception of ongoing new market challenges that are causing a rethink of tolerance policies, e.g., drugs tourism, coffee-shops’ selling to minors and creating a public nuisance, potentially dangerous ecstasy and synthetic drugs, and illegal export of cannabis abroad.
Dutch success emphasizing prevention and health care shows up in the number of drug related deaths which are very low averaging 120/year or less than .75 per 100,000 people. Deaths related to overdose of cannabis are unheard of. Hard drugs, or synthetic drugs combined with alcohol or prescription drugs can have certain bad medical, even deathly effects. While hard drug users are seldom prosecuted and heroin junkies have vanished from the streets into heroin-assisted treatment centers, potential intensification of health hazards and toxic addiction are key Dutch arguments for sticking by their decriminalized “harm-reduction” policy rather than legalizing all drugs at this time. But, debate and studies of this option live on.
“The trend in cocaine and heroin addiction in theNetherlands is stabilizing, even decreasing. One percent of Dutch people aged between 15 and 34 is a recent cocaine user, well below the European average of 2.2%. The number of heroin clients in addiction care and rehabilitation facilities has decreased as well as has property-related crime ascribed to heroin users. But there are signs of an increase of (injected) heroin usage due to an influx of (mainly homeless) Eastern European immigrants.”
Summary
Rather than wage war on drugs or legalize all drugs, the Dutch have taken a public health approach emphasizing “de facto decriminalization” and “normalization”… aimed at harm reduction, the integration of drug users in society, and the avoidance of stigmatizing, marginalizing, and isolating drug users.
Decriminalization has not resulted in any unusual increase in cannabis and hard drug use or abuse that poses a public threat … as confirmed by a 30-year Dutch experience and a truly excellent 2004 study by Craig Reinarman, PhD and his associates, “The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy:Cannabis inAmsterdam and in San Francisco.” However, trafficking, production, importing and exporting of drugs necessitates a relentless police pursuit and judicial prosecution effort.
The Dutch demand and supply approach to reducing the risks and harm of drugs has proven to be sane and successful. Cannabis and hard drugs are better controlled openly in a safe environment rather than in the wilds of the dangerous street-drug trade or in a prison complex.
Since hard drug use is seen as a social and medical issue not punished for the behavior alone, the emphasis is on health risk reduction and treatment. The Dutch government is able to aid about 90% of help-seeking addicts for detoxification programs. Regional and local authorities are responsible for the organization, implementation, and coordination of addiction care. Treatment is mainly delivered by non-governmental organizations on a regional level, followed by private organizations including physicians, hospitals, and private clinics. And treatment costs are at least 6 times less than trying to reduce consumption by mandatory prison sentences .. more enforcement .. higher penalties .. all leading to a dead end.
Finally, there’s that very important cash flow from coffee-shop value added taxes and income tax revenues that can be applied to drugs enforcement, prevention and treatment.
REFERENCES : Dutch Policy Towards Hard Drugs and Soft Drugs ______________________________________________________
1. European Monitoring Centre For Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), Annual Report 2010 – “The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe”
2. Report to the EMCDDA by the Reitox National Focal Point: “The Netherlands Drug Situation in 2010,” Dec. 22, 2010
3. “Trends in Drug Usage in Europe,” A Response to the EMCDDA 2010 Annual Report, 2011
4. Reaction of Trimbus Institut to the EMCDDA Annual Report 2011, by Margriet van Laar, Head of Drug Monitoring, November 15, 2011
5. “Dutch Reclassify High-Potency Marijuana As Hard Drug,” Associated Press, Toby Sterling, Oct. 7, 2011 and World News Netherlands, Oct. 7, 2011
6. Get the Facts- Drug War Facts.Org.: “The Netherlands Compared to the U.S.,” 2009
7.“The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and in San Francisco,” 2004, by Craig Reinaraman, PhD; Peter Cohen, PhD; Hendrien Kaal, PhD., 2004
8. “National Drug Policy: The Netherlands,” by Benjamin Dolin of Law and Government Division, Parliament of Canada, Aug. 15, 2001
9. “Dutch Drug Policy: A Model for America?” In press for: JOURNAL OF HEALTH & SOCIAL POLICY, by David F. Duncan, Dr. P.H. CAS, Thomas Nicholson, PhD, 1997
10. “The Dutch Harm Reduction Model of Addiction Treatment,” Addiction Services, Amsterdam Wiki, April 3, 2009
11. “Normalization of the Drugs Problem: An Outline of the Dutch Drugs Policy,” by Otto Janssen, June 1992
12. “Marijuana: The Myths Are Killing Us,” by Karen P. Tandy of DEA, June 17, 2005
13. “The Myths of Drug Legalization,” AMERICA, The National Catholic Weekly, March 16, 1996, by Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
14. “Drugs Policy in the Netherlands,” by UK Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, The Netherlands, April 1997
15. “Dutch Drug Policy In A European Context,” by Tim Boekhout van Solinge, Journal of Drug Issues – Vol.29, No.3, 1999
16. “Soft Drugs in the Netherlands,” By Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Sept. 2009
17. “Honor Thy Promise: Why the Dutch Drug Policies Should Not Be a Barrier to the Full Implementation of the Schengen Agreement,”BostonCollege International & Comparative Law Review (Vol.23, Issue 1, Article 8)) by Susan H. Easton, Dec. 12, 1999
Frank Thomas The Netherlands November 15, 2011
John's Comment on Frank's Essay:
Clearly, the Dutch methods are working and superior to those in the US. First, effective and thorough studies of the problem reveal what does and what doesn't work. Then Dutch pragmatism and a willingness to implement those policies that are working and reject those policies that are not working lead to a rational solution to the problem. Instead of viewing drug policy as strictly a law enforcement problem, the Dutch have an integrated approach which includes treatment while allowing for the recreational use of soft drugs which under well defined circumstances can even be considered a social good much as the recreational use of alcohol can be considered a social good when used in moderation. At a time when a majority of the American population favors legalization of marijuana, US policy makers should study the Dutch policy on drugs as an example of what works. Last year in the US there were more deaths from the misuse of prescription drugs than from illegal drugs. Drug use in general is a problem that needs to be solved by education, treatment and rehabilitation instead of relying on the criminal justice system while allowing for the moderate use of recreational drugs just as alcohol, caffeine and nicotine when used in moderation have been tolerated for many years. All in all the Dutch approach is intelligent and humane without a lot of moralizing or implementation of preconceived prejudices.
In his book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," Chris Hedges has a whole chapter on pornography, "The Illusion of Love". The title of this blog is taken from a quote from Andrea Dworkin which Hedges uses as a lead-in to the chapter. Recently, Michelle Bachmann has garnered some media notice for signing a pledge put out by the FAMiLY LEADER, an Iowa conservative group, to rid the country of pornography among other things. The pledge has gained notoriety for a phrase suggesting that African-American families were better off during slavery than they are today. But there is little discussion of the substance of the pledge including its stance on pornography (as usual the media is only interested in the most sensationalized aspects of reality). Bachmann, whom many have characterized as a right wing nut case, has championed Christian conservative family values including the definition of marriage as being "between a man and a woman." Irregardless, the Left has been mute regarding pornography which suggests that it adopts the "live and let live" attitude it has about homosexuality and marriage and the family in general which is really a libertarian attitude. After reading Chris Hedges' chapter on pornography, the Left might reconsider this stance at least with regard to pornography. What Hedges has to say is truly shocking and the faint of heart might consider discontinuing reading this blog right here.
Suffice it to say that pornography has gone mainstream. According to Hedges:
There are some 13,000 porn films made every year in the United States, most in the San Fernando Valley in California. According to the Internet Filter Review, worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Annual sales in the United States are estimated at $10 billion or higher. There is no precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is very lucrative to some of the nation's largest corporations. General Motors owns DIRECTV, which distributes more than 40 million streams of porn into American homes every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are currently the biggest American companies accommodating porn users with the Hot Network, Adult Pay Per View, and similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by consumers.
And Obama thought he was saving the American auto industry! Instead he saved one of America's largest porn purveyors! The mainstreaming of porn has openly flouted obscenity laws which like other regulatory laws have been largely missing in action. According to the website HULIQ, "According to Miller v. California (1973), the "Miller Test" became a Supreme Court-sanctioned ruling that set up a three-part array in which "community standards" could be used to determine whether or not an item was pornographic, obscene, and of no redeeming value. This allowed communities and regions to set their own obscenity standards, which is in keeping with Tea Party standards (as a federal law banning pornography would not)." So where are the community standards especially in the red Tea Party states that would ban pornography? Or is it OK because there's a lot of money in it? So what's the problem with the mainstreaming of pornography? It's innocuous adult entertainment, isn't it? Hardly. According to Hedges, "The largest users of Internet porn are between the ages of twelve and seventeen. And porn producers increasingly target adolescents." I've even heard this demographic referred to as "children"! "The age demographic has moved downwards, especially in the UK and Europe," explained Steve Honest, the European director of production for Bluebird Films. "Porn is the new rock and roll. Young people and women are embracing porn and making purchases. Porn targets the mid-teens to the mid-twenties and up."
Hedges interviewed porn star Patrice Roldan who has starred in nearly two hundred films including Lord of Asses, Anal Girls Next Door, Monster Cock Fuckfest 9, Deep Throat Anal, Trophy Whores, and Young Dumb & Covered in Cum. Roldan made good money in the porn industry so to say that these girls who entered the industry voluntarily were exploited is not wholly accurate. In addition to the money they made filming, they could go on "dates" with their fans who they met at the annual Las Vegas porn convention at $3000 -$5000 a pop and up. Some made great money as hotel-bound prostitutes. Just imagine if you could have met Marilyn Monroe or Lana Turner or Sophia Loren at an annual convention and "dated" them! But in those days movie stars couldn't even sleep together onscreen in the same bed much less "date" their adoring fans. But that's de rigeur in the porn film world. Tres ordinaire et normale. After Roldan's first film, she was handed $600. and contracted gonnorhea. Hedges again: "She began, once she had treated her gonnorhea, to do films three or four times a month. She would have several more bouts with gonnorhea and other sexually transmitted diseases during her career. She got pregnant and had an abortion. The demands on her began to escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became 'extremely rough.' They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll."
"The next day my whole body would ache," she recalls. "It happened a lot, the aching. It used to be that only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace, would once do things like anal. Now it is expected." And this is how our teen-agers are learning about love, sex and relationships?! This is how they are developing their concept of how to treat a woman!
The physical pain and numerous surgeries to repair torn vaginas and anal tissues lead most porn stars to use excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol to deal with the pain and the emptiness of their emotional lives. Most end up being junkies and alcoholics. Hedges again: "Roldan would endure numerous anal penetrations by various men in a shoot, most of them 'super-rough.' She would have one man in her anus and one in her vagina while she gave a blow job to a third man. The men would ejaculate on her face. She was repeatedly "face-fucked,' with men forcing their cocks violently in and out of her mouth. She did what in industry shorthand is called 'ATM,' ass-to-mouth, where a man pulls his penis from her anus and puts it directly in her mouth." She explained that she washed herself good so this didn't bother her too much except when the man pulled his penis from another girl's ass and put it in her mouth because she didn't know about the other girl's standards of cleanliness!
"What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?," Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity asks. "What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason that porn is so difficult to discuss is not that it is about sex - our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty are played out. And men - maybe a majority of men - like it."
Finally Hedges sums up why pornography represents the "illusion of love":
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.
Why would the Left cede this family values issue to the likes of Michelle Bachmann? Surely a libertarian attitude towards pornography acquiesces in the mainstreaming of pornography and the profits accumulated by large "respectable" US corporations like GM and AT&T. It also acquiesces in the purveying of pornography to young adolescent males who make up a large share of the audience and the attitudes that are being formed by exposure to such trash. American culture has gone in a few short years from one that was overly puritanical to one that is awash in degradation, obscenity and debauchery by anyone's definition. The sexual liberation of the 1960s, initially a salubrious renunciation of repression, has been thoroughly exploited and degraded by the commercialized pornography industry of the 2000s. It is the culture of the Roman Empire before its fall, of Caligua and Nero, a culture of debasement and depravity. Surely, it should not be left to the likes of Michelle Bachmann to point this out. While I don't agree with her on her stance against homosexuality or the definition of marriage, I do heartily endorse the fact that she purportedly is taking a stand against pornography. The American culture is so hypocritical that it outlaws legalized prostitution but mainlines pornography. I think legalized prostitution might serve an actual purpose for those who cannot find satisfaction in a normal relationship with a woman, but pornography is not helpful in formulating salubrious attitudes between the sexes nor is it protective of women who enter the industry despite the fact that they are paid well and do so voluntarily. When a "live and let live" libertarian attitude results in the degradation of a class of women and results in unhealthy attitudes towards sex, it should be prohibited while encouraging healthful relationships, not necessarily, but including, marriage.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The Dutch government on Friday said it would start banning tourists from buying cannabis from "coffee shops" and impose restrictions on Dutch customers by the end of the year.
The Netherlands is well known for having one of Europe's most liberal soft drug policies that has made its cannabis shops a popular tourist attraction, particularly in Amsterdam.
Backed by the far-right party of anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders, the coalition government that came into power last year announced plans to curb drug tourism as part of a nationwide program to promote health and fight crime.
"In order to tackle the nuisance and criminality associated with coffee shops and drug trafficking, the open-door policy of coffee shops will end," the Dutch health and justice ministers wrote in a letter to the country's parliament on Friday.
Under the new rules, only Dutch residents will be able to sign up as members of cannabis shops.
Dutch customers will have to sign up for at least a year's membership and each shop would be expected to have only up to 1,500 members, a justice ministry spokesman said.
The policy will roll out in the southern provinces of Limburg, Noord Brabant and Zeeland by the end of the year and the rest of the country next year, the spokesman said.
Amsterdam, home to about 220 coffee shops, is already in the process of closing some in its red light district. Some officials have resisted the measures, saying they will push the soft drug trade underground.
Some Dutch border towns including Maastricht and Terneuzen have already restricted the sale of marijuana to foreigners.
(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis and Gilbert Kreijger; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
MELBOURNE – Many years ago, my wife and I were driving somewhere with our three young daughters in the back, when one of them suddenly asked: “Would you rather that we were clever or that we were happy?”
I was reminded of that moment last month when I read Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” which sparked more than 4,000 comments on wsj.com and over 100,000 comments on Facebook. The article was a promotional piece for Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which has become an instant bestseller.
Chua’s thesis is that, when compared to Americans, Chinese children tend to be successful because they have “tiger mothers,” whereas Western mothers are pussycats, or worse. Chua’s daughters, Sophia and Louise, were never allowed to watch television, play computer games, sleep over at a friend’s home, or be in a school play. They had to spend hours every day practicing the piano or violin. They were expected to be the top student in every subject except gym and drama.
Chinese mothers, according to Chua, believe that children, once they get past the toddler stage, need to be told, in no uncertain terms, when they have not met the high standards their parents expect of them. (Chua says that she knows Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish, and Ghanaian mothers who are “Chinese” in their approach, as well as some ethnic-Chinese mothers who are not.) Their egos should be strong enough to take it.
But Chua, a professor at Yale Law School (as is her husband), lives in a culture in which a child’s self-esteem is considered so fragile that children’s sports teams give “Most Valuable Player” awards to every member. So it is not surprising that many Americans react with horror to her style of parenting.
One problem in assessing the tiger-mothering approach is that we can’t separate its impact from that of the genes that the parents pass on to their children. If you want your children to be at the top of their class, it helps if you and your partner have the brains to become professors at elite universities. No matter how hard a tiger mom pushes, not every student can finish first (unless, of course, we make everyone “top of the class”).
Tiger parenting aims at getting children to make the most of what abilities they have, and so seems to lean towards the “clever” side of the “clever or happy” choice. That’s also the view of Betty Ming Liu, who blogged in response to Chua’s article: “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian-Americans like me are in therapy.”
Stanley Sue, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, has studied suicide, which is particularly common among Asian-American women (in other ethnic groups, more males commit suicide than females). He believes that family pressure is a significant factor.
Chua would reply that reaching a high level of achievement brings great satisfaction, and that the only way to do it is through hard work. Perhaps, but can’t children be encouraged to do things because they are intrinsically worthwhile, rather than because of fear of parental disapproval?
I agree with Chua to this extent: a reluctance to tell a child what to do can go too far. One of my daughters, who now has children of her own, tells me amazing stories about her friends’ parenting styles. One of them let her daughter drop out of three different kindergartens, because she didn’t want to go to them. Another couple believes in “self-directed learning” to such an extent that one evening they went to bed at 11 p.m., leaving their five-year-old watching her ninth straight hour of Barbie videos.
Tiger mothering might seem to be a useful counterbalance to such permissiveness, but both extremes leave something out. Chua’s focus is unrelentingly on solitary activities in the home, with no encouragement of group activities, or of concern for others, either in school or in the wider community. Thus, she appears to view school plays as a waste of time that could be better spent studying or practicing music.
But to take part in a school play is to contribute to a community good. If talented children stay away, the quality of the production will suffer, to the detriment of the others who take part (and of the audience that will watch it). And all children whose parents bar them from such activities miss the opportunity to develop social skills that are just as important and rewarding – and just as demanding to master – as those that monopolize Chua’s attention.
We should aim for our children to be good people, and to live ethical lives that manifest concern for others as well as for themselves. This approach to child-rearing is not unrelated to happiness: there is abundant evidence that those who are generous and kind are more content with their lives than those who are not. But it is also an important goal in its own right.
Tigers lead solitary lives, except for mothers with their cubs. We, by contrast, are social animals. So are elephants, and elephant mothers do not focus only on the well-being of their own offspring. Together, they protect and take care of all the young in their herd, running a kind of daycare center.
If we all think only of our own interests, we are headed for collective disaster – just look at what we are doing to our planet’s climate. When it comes to raising our children, we need fewer tigers and more elephants.
Editor: This contribution by Rocky Neptun is a continuation of the debate about a new football stadium in downtown San Diego, begun by Andy Cohen here.
When I began my property maintenance business a few decades ago, I used 80 percent of my assets and borrowed an amount equivalent to another 50 percent. At that time, or even now, there was never a consideration that you, as a taxpayer, should finance my business venture.
Yet, Alexander Spanos, worth over one and half billion dollars, according to Forbes Magazine, wants you and me to subsidize his new football stadium in the East Village, downtown San Diego. The entire notion of corporate welfare for his project and the millionaire fat assed football players who smash and crash against one another chasing a stupid looking ball, would bring laughs in any enlightened social order. Yet, in our society, where single-mothers, without work or funds, are harangued and fingerprinted, treated like criminals for asking for a helping hand, the Mayor of San Diego, the city’s main major newspaper and other bought shrills would have us spend $800 million on an oversized playpen for aging adolescents who just can’t seem to get it up for cable television or internet broadcasts of this tedious brawling, called football.
Alex Spanos.
This titan of sports events would have you believe that his million dollar profit each night will bring jobs and prosperity to the region. Shades of a roman emperor, he would give us bread and circuses. Like any con artist, sovereign or not, with the precise skill of a pickpocket , the secret is to let your victim think that everything is normal, that this is the way things are done. If one’s prey is a large group of people, then, in Orwellian fashion, all the gears and levers of the corporate state, its media, politicians, advertisers, snake oil salesmen, must be put into motion to dupe the citizens into believing the lie. From weapons of mass destruction to the financial benefits of a football stadium, the process of propaganda and untruth is the same; begin with a false premise, repeat it over and over, spend a few million plastering the message on walls and between segments of Oprah Winfrey, narrow the parameters of the debate by a bought media and its cowed journalists.
Right up front, one thing must be made perfectly clear – there has never been a sports stadium which has made money using taxpayer dollars – except Miller Park Stadium in Milwaukee which is not only a multi-use facility of football and baseball, but its Green Bay Packers football team is a community owned franchise, with all profit being returned to the neighborhoods.
Football is all about money, lots of money for owners and the players. Those who cling to this wealth, like barnacles on a whale, or those who feel their macho manhood (and, increasingly, macha womanhood) is tied into a symbiotic relationship with a home team, will try to tell you that stadiums bring jobs and spending to the community.
“Wealthy sports moguls have turned bilking taxpayers into an art form,” Doug Bandow, conservative senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former assistant to President Ronald Reagan, reminds us. “Franchise owners typically win taxpayer support only through threats; pay us off, or we will leave they say, give us a new stadium, or we will go someplace else.”
“Government stadiums benefit economic and political elites,” Bandow reports. He cites a study done by two economists, Robert Baade of Lake Forest college and Allen Sanderson of the University of Chicago, who looked at 10 metropolitan areas which built stadiums and found “no net employment increase.” The study pointed out that, except for the initial construction jobs, most of which were specialists brought in from other parts of the country, the remaining jobs were low-wage, mostly part-time and lacked benefits.
Also, in terms of stadium advocacy about boosts to the local economy through new revenue “which will offset the taxes used to subsidize the new stadium,” they found that no new out-of-town attendees are attracted by a new stadium with more than 90 percent of ticket buyers local residents and that sports spending primarily substitutes for other outlays.
“Most people have entertainment budgets, and the $100 they spend taking the family to the ballgame is $100 that they don’t spend on movies or bowling later in the month,” the report said, “but nobody seriously thinks that we should raise taxes or spend millions on bowling alley or movie theatre subsidies.” This is called the substitution effect which smashes the economic multiplier effect claimed by most stadium proponents.
Conservative Bandow blasts socialism for billionaire sports moguls, like Spanos, saying:
“stadiums don’t constitute a great unmet social need, sports should be a private enterprise, privately funded.” Suggesting a far greater pull for suburban residents, he called for a string of public restaurants or “if the goal is trickle-down consumer spending and business development, why not build a new automobile factory, retail outlet, grocery store or software facility to attract and maintain companies, jobs and economic growth?”
The real reason that Spanos wants a new football stadium is not community stature or more jobs or an economic benefit for you and me, it’s because he wants more elegant skyboxes than Qualcomm has. These imperial balconies can rent for as much as $250,000 a year and, better yet, for Spanos, unlike entrance fees, he doesn’t have to be split skybox income with the National Football League.
Also, like Wal-Mart and other low-wage exploiters, who get the public to subsidize the working poor with food stamps, health care and other essential needs, public dollars underwriting stadiums help Spanos absorb the inflated payroll of millionaire football players. The city of San Diego already loses $17 million a year subsidizing Qualcomm Stadium, does anyone really think that will change with a much more expensive location, not only in terms of land costs but in day-to-day traffic delays and police outlays.
Then there are the additional unseen costs of subsidizing a billionaire’s expanding fortune. There is the obvious fact that bond money spent on a new stadium could go for much more vital infrastructure needs which serve the greater citizenry, like aging sewer lines which spew into city streets and the ocean, streets, libraries, parks, or affordable housing. Just one year after Minneapolis’ Minnesota Twins got a new stadium in 2007, the city’s I-35 bridge collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring over a hundred, because repairs were delayed for lack of funds.
There is also the issue of using tax-exempt bonds to finance private ventures, like stadiums. Not only will San Diego pay a much higher rate on the municipal bond loan because of its structural deficit and bad credit rating, but because of the tax exemption on the bond the state of California and the Federal Government, reeling from the economic downtown, will lose millions in tax revenue from the Spanos family which will have to be made-up by either increased taxes or the loss of essential government services.
For every $100 million in tax exempt bonds issued, the Federal government loses $21 million in tax revenue, so, tax payers – you and me – would have to help make up the $100 million or so loss during the life of the bond. So San Diegans will get a double-whammy, while Alexander Spanos sings his way to the bank.
Now for almost a decade the Chargers have said they would build a new stadium without public money, yet recently they have said they cannot do it without corporate welfare. Why the change, especially in the middle of a recession? Could it be that it took that long for their people to be embedded in the redevelopment agency, CCDC, and city staff? Why did Mayor Sanders, who as a campaign promise, said no city money would be used for a stadium, suddenly do an about face and now parrots the notion? Could there be a consulting position in the works? Why has CCDC spent close to $200,000 and the San Diego City Council another $500,000 of public money to study how to finance the construction when Spanos should have paid for these studies? Are there bribes, kick-backs and/or campaign contributions in the mix? And how many millions will Spanos spend on distortions and lies in the upcoming referendum over the stadium?
“Corporate welfare is always unsavory business,” Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee says, “the politically connected and high profile gain at the expense of small business owners and consumers who work hard day to day but have no friends in high places, decision making is shifted from the private sector, which is guided by price and profit signals to meet and create consumer demand, to the public sector, which is guided by politics and the quest for power, taxes are increased on the many, so that resources can be funneled to a select few – in the case of subsidized ballparks, billionaire team owners and multi-millionaire team players.”
In his book, The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, J.C.Bradbury documents that there is absolutely no public economic development benefit to new stadiums. While Michael W. Lynch of the Conservative blog, Reason.com, bluntly tells it like it is:
“publicly funded sports stadiums are like crack cocaine to local politicians and business bigwigs,” he writes, “these folks are just like addicts, they deceive everyone around them for the sake of a fix, they resort to public theft to pay for their fix, forcing citizens who couldn’t care less about sports to subsidize teams.”
Rocky Neptun, who has never lasted through a full football or baseball game in his long life, is a soccer fan. He is the volunteer director of the San Diego Renters Union (www.SanDiegoRentersUnion.org)
President Obama has vowed to double U.S. exports within the next five years. That’s because exports are critical for rebooting the American economy. It’s clear American consumers can’t get the economy going on their own. They can’t restart the jobs machine. They’ve run out of money and credit.
It’s not just that one out of four Americans is unemployed or underemployed (working part-time, overqualified, or at a lower wage than before). More significantly, the Great Recession burst the housing bubble that had let American consumers turn their homes into ATMs. Now the cash machines are closed.
So the Administration figures foreign consumers will have to fill the gap.
Problem is, most other economies also relied on American consumers. Remember the trade gap? Americans used to be the world’s biggest and most reliable customers – sucking in high-tech gadgets assembled in China, car parts from Japan, shirts and shoes from Southeast Asia, and precision instruments from Germany.
With American consumers pulling back, these other economies have also been slowing down. Their unemployment is rising.
Last week I attended a conference with global business executives. When I asked them where they expected to find new customers to replace Americans who are pulling back, they all said China and India and quoted me the same number: 800 million new middle-class consumers from these and other fast-developing countries over the next decade.
Yes, but. As of now China and India are still relying on net exports to fuel their growth. Even if you think their middle classes will eventually become so big and rich they can buy everything these nations will be able to produce, that doesn’t mean they’ll also buy what the rest of the world produces.
Yes, global companies will do wonderfully well. General Motors is well on the way to selling more cars in China than it does in the U.S. But American workers won’t get the jobs, and nor will workers in Europe, Japan, or the rest of the world. GM makes the cars it sells to Chinese consumers in China.
Meanwhile, the productive capacities of China and India will continue to grow: More workers, more factories, more high-tech equipment, more offices. The buying power of their middle classes will have to expand rapidly just to catch up with what these nations will be able to produce.
This means Obama and others won’t easily find the export markets they need to create enough jobs to make up for the vanishing American consumer.
When the world’s productive capacities exceed the buying power of the world’s consumers, every government wants to increase exports and discourage imports. That spells trade war.
Last week the representatives of the world’s 20 biggest economies vowed to slash their budget deficits by half by 2013. The result will be even less domestic demand and even more pressure to export in order to avoid higher joblessness.
We’re unlikely to see a repeat of the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs that worsened and lengthened the Great Depression. But you can forget trade-opening agreements. In Toronto last week, the G-20 leaders dropped their 2009 pledge to finish the Doha round this year. In the U.S., agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia are languishing.
And watch out for under-the-radar protectionist moves. Since the start of 2008, when the Great Recession began, countries around the world have already imposed at least 443 measures to block imports, according to the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Already deprived of a steady diet of world-class triumphs, a bunch of them still refuse to properly celebrate the stunning World Team Championships victory of the Singapore women's table-tennis team.
Wins like this are as rare as the Republic's Olympic-medal wins, which occurred just twice between 1960 and 2008.
Furthermore, the opponents were eight-time defending champions China.
They might be initiating a new generation of world-beating paddlers, but it did not mean that they were any less formidable.
Yet, Singapore still prevailed 3-1 in the series, as Feng Tianwei, Wang Yuegu and Sun Beibei fought their hearts out - Feng battling from behind to win her two singles ties - to upset the favourites.
In a pure sporting sense, Sunday's victory trumped the team's Beijing Olympics silver showing two years ago, when they were thrashed 0-3 by China in the gold-medal match.
Still, some fans are critical that this team is made up of China- born paddlers and featured no Singapore-born player.
These fans will accept nothing less than a world-class sports victory achieved by a local- born athlete - preferably coached by a Singaporean, without foreign input in training.
One Yahoo! Fit To Post user, Raj, wrote: "What's the point? Most athletes are imported into Singapore anyway. It's just a sense of hollow value. Hardly any pride in it."
One Stomp user, juvenile10, also wrote: "It's China who won, not Singapore; China B Team beat China A Team."
Indeed, much of the resentment stems from the perception that Singapore table tennis took the easy route to success by importing foreign talents and neglecting to bring in local hopefuls.
While such points may be valid, it is also worth pointing out that, in this age of globalisation, the notion that a sports team comprising individuals of a "pure" nationality is preferable is getting outdated. So many countries have had foreign talents aid their sporting causes.
France, for instance, won the 1998 World Cup with superstar Zinedine Zidane, who is of Algerian descent.
Germany, three-time World Cup winners, have Brazil-born striker Cacau in their current squad. And top American middle-distance sprinter Bernard Lagat was Kenyan, before becoming an American citizen in 2005.
The Singapore paddlers were still diamonds in the rough when they chose to sacrifice their Chinese nationality to train in and play for Singapore.
Their gutsy hollers and tears after Sunday's triumphs represent their dedication to bringing glory to the nation.
While one may feel blase about an "imported" victory, it is an insult to these athletes' years of hard work to belittle their current feat, for they must have spent most of their career wondering if they could ever overcome a mighty China.
That they did it in Singapore colours is the country's privilege and, perhaps, it is time to accept these foreign talents as 100-per-cent Singaporeans.
We hear a lot lately about degenerative diseases from cancer to heart disease to stroke and various others. My theory is that there are two processes going on in the body at all times. There is never a state of homeostasis where everything remains the same day after day. The body is always changing. If a person does nothing at all in terms of physical exercise, the body will gradually decay or degenerate to the point where one of the degenerative diseases will manifest itself. But long before that the body is in a state of decline or degeneration. On the other hand the body regenerates itself as a response to exercise. If one runs a mile, for example, after not too long one will be able to run two miles. That shows that the body is regenerating itself, becoming stronger. The cardio-vascular system is becoming stronger. It's not the exercise itself that makes the body stronger. It's the body's response to that exercise - regeneration.
At the same time the body's response to sloth or lazines or inactivity is to degenerate - to become weaker. These two processes are in a constant state of seesawing with one another. The crucial question is which process is taking precedence. Is regeneration outpacing degeneration, in which case the body is in a state of inclining health, or is degeneration outpacing regeneration in which case the body is in a state of declining health or disease. In addition to cardio-vascular health, muscle strength is important. If one does an exercise with a 10 pound weight, the muscles will recuperate and become even stronger to the point where one will eventually be able to do the same exercise with a 15 pound weight and so on. The body is continually in a state of flux becoming stronger or weaker.
If one exercises too much, the body will reach a state of exhaustion in which case you won't be able to recover and grow stronger. Rest time for recovery and regeneration is important. If one exercises not enough, the process of degeneration will overtake the process of regeneration and the body will become weaker and decline towards a state of ill health and disease. The human body's ability to recover and regenerate is amazing, but one has to take responsibility with a regular exercise program for this to happen. The body's natural arc is to incline towards greater health in the growing up process and then to decline downwards toward old age. The aging process can be averted to some extent by keeping the body in a constant upward spiral of regeneration and recovery.
This doesn't mean occasional exercise but a regular exercise program aimed at staying "in shape" over the course of a lifetime. There's a difference between being "in shape" and occasionally or casually exercising. If one is in shape cardiovascularly, one should be able to walk or run for 30 minutes to an hour, for example, or swim for an hour every day. If one exercises randomly and occasionally, one would not be able to do this. Being in shape means that one has built up gradually to that point where exercise becomes relatively effortless and one doesn't have to force one's self. If one stops exercising after having attained a state of "in shapeness," one will gradually decline towards a state of "out of shapeness" but the decline will be gradual. What is the optimal exercise program in order to attain "in shapeness" and stay in a state of being in shape, I will leave to others to decide. Certainly cardio-vascular health is important as well as muscle strangth. Therefore, running, walking, swimming and weight training are all important.
The aging process, in my opinion, is nothing more than a gradual decline in "in shapeness." The body will regenerate itself in response to injury or disease, but the body will also degenerate in response to a lack of exercise or use and become gradually weaker until some disease state is actually reached. Therefore, it is important to keep pushing against this gradual decline by challenging the body to regenerate itself so that the processes of regeneration outpace the processes of degeneration. At some point a state of homeostasis at which these two processes are in balance will actually occur, but it takes some effort. One must exert some effort over the course of a lifetime and not just a few years or a few months here and there. That's why athletes who stop training after their careers are finished can end up as unhealthy as those without any athletic ability and why people that don't possess any athletic ability but who exercise regularly can end up better off in terms of health than great athletes.
The problem is that most people want to live as effort free as possible. They don't want to exert themselves. If they have a problem physically or health wise, they want to take a pill or a drug to solve it. Their goal is to do as little work as possible except what they absolutely have to do. Others are simply caught up in the daily grind to the extent that they don't have the leisure time for exercise. With the need for physical exertion long gone because of labor saving devices, the processes of regeneration and degeneration have gotten completely out of whack with degeneration outpacing regeneration. The result is obesity, degenerative diseases and a sick society with mental health deteriorating along with physical health. That's why in Europe where people bicycle, walk and hike to a much greater extent than in the US, they have a much healthier society and much lower health care costs.
When human beings were hunter gatherers or even in early stages of agriculture, they had to exert themselves before they could eat. Food contributed to the regenerative process. But when one eats and doesn't exert an effort in order to eat, the result is obesity and degeneration. One is most healthy when in a state of mild hunger. That is when the body makes the best use of food. When one is satiated to begin with, food and especially food with a high fat, sugar and salt content only contributes to the degenerative process, not the regenerative one. Undereating is important in order to maintain a state of optimum health, and one should eat healthy, not overly processed or fast, foods. This simplifies the body's waste disposal jobs which a lot of the body's organs are dedicated to.
Modern life contributes to ill health to the extent that it is sedentary. If one sits at a desk in an office all day, degeneration is exceeding regeneration. Exercising after work can reverse this process to some extent, but commuting, office work and TV watching, all sedentary activities, can do more harm to the body than working in the field picking fruit, for example. Ironically, the more prestigious the profession, the more likely it is that it will contribute to poor health, and the less prestigious the profession, the more physically active one is, the more it will contribute to good health.
The same regenerative and degenerative processes also pertain to mental activities, and it is good to exercise the brain as well as the body. However, I think in general more people die as a result of a lack of physical exercise than die as a result of a lack of mental exercise. Your body is your friend. You should take as good care of it as you take care of your car and let its natural proclivity for regeneration keep you in a state of constant good health. Unfortunately, the bad news is that this takes a constant effort on your part. And needless to say, when regeneration exceeds degeneration, the cost of health care and prescription drugs is minimal. In fact the drug companies would probably go out of business.
Poor Tiger Woods. Living life in the spotlight has been very, very cruel to him. Having been judged to be morally inadequate not by a religious institution but by the National Enquirer and People magazine, Tiger's life has become a Greek tragedy. First he has a prodigious talent to play a game of hitting a tiny ball into a hole hundreds of yards away in the fewest hits. Well, that doesn't mean he's a paragon of virtue. He has a limited skill set that has earned him a lot of money and the adoration of fans who adulate him. Then commercial interests, wanting to get a piece of him, offered him millions of dollars in endorsements. Their products gain status by association. When you see Tiger vouchsafing a product, you want to immediately go out and buy it because, if Tiger says it's good, you want to associate yourself with Tiger in the consumption of the product.
So Tiger has earned millions of dollars in endorsements, and in a sense has sold his soul to the devil because in return for those millions of dollars he has given over his private life almost completely to the likes of People magazine and the National Enquirer. Was it worth it, Tiger? The tabloid media is only too happy to drag someone like Tiger with a squeaky clean public image through the muck and mud as just another human animal with clay feet, just another idiot who doesn't live up to his squeaky clean public image. But is it really anyone else's business except Tiger's? Arguably, yes, because he sold his "public image" - or soul if you wish - for those million dollar endorsement deals. And Tiger Woods, the admitted philanderer, probably wouldn't have merited the endorsement deals if the truth was on the table.
So Tiger was living a double life. On the one hand his problems are just between him and his wife. On the other, since he is a public figure with millions of adoring fans, they are between him and the public. If Tiger had been single and having sex with a different cocktail waitress every night, who would have cared? This would have been perfectly acceptable behaviour by present day standards. Athletes do it all the time without adverse consequences. Take Wilt Chamberlain, for example. But the fact that Tiger was married with marriage in western culture assumed to be monogamous, this created a big problem for him. In many other cultures it would have been considered perfectly normal to be married to one or more wives and to have one or more girlfriends on the side. So Tiger ran into problems essentially dealing with the assumptions about marriage in western culture.
In many Muslim societies polygamy is perfectly legal although some require the consent of the first wife! Here's a partial list: Egypt, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, South Africa. Heck, the President of the US' African father himself had multiple wives, and President Obama has numerous half brothers and sisters although, I hasten to add, Obama really is a US citizen! So what's the big?
Tiger in his televised apology actually came right out and said what the problem was. Because he was wealthy and famous "temptations weren't hard to find." Well, that's true. There are an unlimited number of females who are willing to throw themselves at anyone who is wealthy and famous, and those without wealth or fame, to a more limited extent, don't really have many problems finding extramarital sex if they are so inclined. So Tiger characterized his infidelities as "temptations" putting the whole scenario in a religious context. But the root of the problem is really this: Tiger really wanted to have sex with all those cocktail waitresses regardless of the fact that he was married. Here was a guy with unlimited wealth and fame. He could have bought anything he wanted. But what he wanted was something that couldn't be bought - sexual fulfillment. Actually, it can be bought but not in the legitimate marketplace. So this was Tiger's dilemma. One of the things he craved was off limits despite all his wealth and power. But as Tiger said, he felt like, after all his hard work, he was entitled. A lot of rich and powerful people feel that way. They feel like they should be able to play by different rules than the average slob plays by, and most of them do play by different rules, but without the adverse consequences if they are not in the public eye.
But then they have to deal with that moral arbiter - People magazine. I wanted Tiger to come out and cut through all the hypocrisy and crap and just say, "You know, that's the way I want to live - having sex with a different cocktail waitress every night. That's what floats my boat. And the rest of you who follow me around like lemmings - get a life." But this still leaves Tiger with the dilemma of dealing with his wife who evidently was not OK with all of Tiger's extracurricular activities. In another culture, a wife would be expected to be OK with it, but not in western culture where marital jealousy rears its ugly head. Married women in western culture expect their husbands to be faithful except those who declare themselves to be in an open marriage.
Mo'nique, for example, in an interview with Barbara Walters after she won her Oscar declared herself to be in an open marriage.
In Barbara Walter's annual Oscar Special, nominee Mo'Nique revealed her open marriage with husband Sidney Hicks isn't quite so open. "Let me say this," she said. "I have not had sex outside my marriage with Sidney."
But the same might not be true for him, NY Daily News reports. "Could Sid have sex outside of his marriage with me?" the 'Precious' star asked. "Yes. That's not a deal-breaker. That's not something that would make us say, 'Pack your things and let's end the marriage.'"
It really gets down to the marriage vows. Instead of this "to have and to hold" stuff, the bride and groom should really be clear and incorporate words like "absolute fidelity" or in some cases "we don't expect absolute fidelity of each other." Make it clear what the marriage is about - vows of fidelity or vows of open marriage. It's really between the marriage partners and is nobody else's business. But in western culture absolute fidelity is expected unless, as in Mo'Nique's case, one of the partners says in effect "ahh, screw it."
Tiger has chosen to go the route of contriteness for his past behaviour and treat it as a sex addiction stating his intention to get back to his Buddhist roots, sort of a slippery slope for someone whose main sin was a violation of western traditional culture norms. Buddhists don't require absolute fidelity.
Buddhism is not a family-centered religion. For a variety of reasons, it does not possess doctrinal standards or institutionalized models of the family. Some of these reasons include the role of renunciation, detachment, and the individual's pursuit of enlightenment. The virtue of renunciation derives from Siddhartha's Great Going Forth, at which point he forsook his family and familial obligations as son, husband, and father. The monastic lifestyle and the role of the religious community (sangha) formalized the renouncing of familial relationships. The goal of detachment also impinges negatively upon family life. The inherent nature of families and family relationships produces attachments that constitute formidable obstacles to achieving detachment from worldly affairs and desires. Finally, the practices for pursuing enlightenment are adult-oriented disciplines requiring significant amounts of time and effort in solitary study and meditation. Although these three factors adversely affect the role of family life, the vast majority of Buddhists are lay people with immediate and extended families.
Because Buddhism does not espouse any particular form of the family or family relationships, Buddhist family life generally reflects pre-existing cultural and religious values, customs, and socially sanctioned modes of expression. Within Asian Buddhist cultures, this typically translates into a traditional, patriarchal family structure with clearly defined familial roles. Buddhism's primary contribution to the family consists of five ethical prescriptions that inform all aspects of family life, including marriage, roles and expectations, sexuality, children, and divorce. Originally composed by the Buddha for families and laity not capable of adopting monasticism, the Five Precepts are binding ethical mandates promoting personal virtues. They are (1) abstaining from harming living beings; (2) abstaining from taking what is not given; (3) abstaining from sexual misconduct; (4) abstaining from false speech; and (5) abstaining from intoxicants. Although none of these precepts directly addresses the family, by governing social and interpersonal relationships they provide an ethical framework for family life.
Buddhism does not regard marriage as a religious act, duty, or obligation. Instead, marriage is viewed as a civic or secular matter. Therefore, wedding ceremonies are not considered religious events, and Buddhist monks do not officiate during the service. Monks may, however, attend weddings, and they often pronounce blessings and recite protective rites for the couple. Depending upon cultural traditions, marriages are either arranged between two families, as in many Eastern cultures, or decided upon and entered into between two consenting adults, as in the West. While monogamy is the principle form of marriage, Buddhism does not prohibit other forms, such as polygamy, polyandry, and group marriages. In fact, although not common, marriages of each of these types have existed within Asian cultures. Again, it is important to remember that the mode of marriage depends not upon a paticular Buddhist ideal or teaching but upon pre-existing and prevailing cultural attitudes.
Most religions and moral codes of the West draw a clear, bright line around marriage. Sex inside the line, good. Sex outside the line, bad. Although monogamous marriage is the ideal, Buddhism generally takes the attitude that sex between two people who love each other is moral, whether they are married or not. On the other hand, sex within marriages can be abusive, and marriage doesn't make that abuse moral.
So it gets down to who does Tiger love? Well, obviously, he loves his wife and children. Otherwise, he would just decide he would be better off being single and pursuing cocktail waitresses to his heart's content. But it also may be true that he loved at least for a period of time some of the cocktail waitresses. After all it is possible to love more than one person at the same time, isn't it? But I don't think it's possible, once you're in a marriage based on certain assumptions, whether explicitly stated or not, to alter the nature of those assumptions. For instance, I don't think it would be possible for Tiger and Elon to renegotiate their marriage contract to allow for Tiger to have sex outside the marriage, in effect having his cake and eating it too. So Tiger has to basically decide to be the proverbial committed faithful western cultural husband renouncing all those cocktail waitresses or to be single and pursue cocktail waitresses galore. And it's clear he's chosen the former. In either case Tiger doen't need any endorsements. Endorsements be damned! After all, he's a billionaire. He can just go out and play golf and make plenty of additional money that way as if he really needed it.
The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.The U.S. incarceration rate on December 31, 2008 was 754 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents.The USA also has the highest total documented prison and jail population in the world.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS): "In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year-end — 3.2% of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults."
2,304,115 were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails in 2008. In addition, according to a December 2009 BJS report, there were 92,854 held in juvenile facilities as of the 2006 Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP), conducted by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million inmates, while having four times the population, thus having only about 18% of the US incarceration rate.
A large percentage of those incarcerated are black men. In 2003, 68 percent of prison and jail inmates were members of racial or ethnic minorities, the government said. An estimated 12 percent of all black men in their 20s were in jails or prisons, as were 3.7 percent of Hispanic men and 1.6 percent of white men in that age group, according to the report. According to the New York Times:
Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.
Those black men not incarcerated have a huge unemployment rate. 34.5 percent of young African American men are unemployed. When you add the number of incarcerated black men to the number of unemployed you have the astounding figure that almost half the adult black male population is either incarcerated or unemployed. And those coming out of jail, the parolees, are not likely to find jobs. When there are six applicants for every job, who's going to hire a black man with a prison record? So it's back to the streets and the continuation of a life of crime. After all five or ten years in prison is a time to network with other criminals and plan and research other more successful exploits when one is released. What other alternative is there? It's not like there is an effort to reintegrate parolees back into society and to find them jobs.
The jobless rate for young black men and women is 30.5 percent. For young blacks -- who experts say are more likely to grow up in impoverished racially isolated neighborhoods, attend subpar public schools and experience discrimination -- race statistically appears to be a bigger factor in their unemployment than age, income or even education. Lower-income white teens were more likely to find work than upper-income black teens, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, and even blacks who graduate from college suffer from joblessness at twice the rate of their white peers.
At the same time that unemployment is hitting Depression era heights, government is doing little or nothing to create jobs specifically for the black community and specifically for black parolees. Blacks usually grow up in impoverished areas and attend sub-standard public schools. At the same time they are exposed to the life of the streets from an early age. They are exposed to black men who have a lot of money but who have made it in a life of crime. There are large incentives for following in this mode. Pimps, drug kings and assorted thugs seem to be the successful ones while routine salarymen are a rare breed. While opportunities diminish in "straight" society, opportunities flourish on the streets.
In addition black culture seems to glorify the street thug. Gangsta rap is ubiquitous. Some black men have made a lot of money rapping about life on the streets - not behind a desk. Life on the streets is more glamorous and attractive. Even going back to Porgy and Bess, you had Sportin' Life, a little disguised character who was most likely a pimp and a drug dealer.
All leave except Bess and Sporting Life, who asks her again to come to New York with him and tries to give her more dope, which she refuses. Porgy chases him away and he and Bess sing about their new happiness. (“Bess, you is my woman now”). All except Porgy leave for the church picnic.
At the picnic, Sporting Life sings about his own brand of religion (“It ain’t necessarily so”). All are getting ready to leave when Crown, hidden in the bushes, calls out to Bess. She tells him she’s Porgy’s woman now, but he won’t let her go. (“What you want wid Bess?”). He pushes her off into the thicket as the boat leaves without her.
And then you have the ubiquitous crime shows on TV like CSI which glamorize criminals. With all these bad influences and incentives and lack of legitimate opportunities, it's no wonder that for many black men the two choices are a life of crime or hanging out on Mama's sofa.
This is from the Washington Post article linked above:
The Obama administration is on a tightrope, balancing the desire to spend billions more dollars to create jobs without adding to the $1.4 trillion national deficit. Yet some policy experts say more attention needs to be paid to the intractable problems of underemployed workers -- those who like Spriggs may lack a high school diploma, a steady work history, job-readiness skills or a squeaky-clean background.
"Increased involvement in the underground economy, criminal activity, increased poverty, homelessness and teen pregnancy are the things I worry about if we continue to see more years of high unemployment," said Algernon Austin, a sociologist and director of the race, ethnicity and economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, which studies issues involving low- and middle-income wage earners.
Earlier this month, District officials said they will use $3.9 million in federal stimulus funds to provide 19 weeks of on-the-job training to 500 18-to-24-year-olds. But even those who receive training often don't get jobs.
"I thought after I finished the [training] program, I'd be working. I only had three jobs with the union and only one of them was longer than a week," Spriggs, a tall slender man wearing a black Nationals cap, said one afternoon while sitting at the table in the living room/dining room in his mother's apartment. "It has you wanting to go out and find other ways to make money. . . . [Lack of jobs is why] people go out hustling and doing what they can to get by."
"Give me a chance to show that I can work. Just give me a chance," added Spriggs, who is on probation for drug possession. "I don't want to think negative. I know the economy is slow. You got to crawl before you walk. I got to be patient. My biggest problem [which prompted the effort to sell drugs] is not being patient."
Many young black men want to do the right thing. They want opportunity to knock. But society is telling them that unless they have a squeaky clean record, there will be few opprtunities for them, and even with a squeaky clean record they will only have a chance of getting a job. When it comes right down to it, there are seemingly more opportunities on the street. But here's the thing. Obama doesn't want to spend taxpayer money to create jobs directly for black men. There are two taboos going there. One, you can't do something directed just at one ethnic group, and, two, you can't spend taxpayer money creating jobs in the public sector like FDR did with the WPA because there would be a huge hue and cry from conservatives that that would be socialism. So whatever Obama does, it has to seem like he's trying to encourage job growth in the private sector.
But, guess what? The private sector doesn't want undereducated, young black men with prison records. I don't think anyone would disagree with that statement because it's the absolute truth.
Some studies examining how employers review black and white job applicants suggest that discrimination may be at play.
"Black men were less likely to receive a call back or job offer than equally qualified white men," said Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Princeton University, referring to her studies a few years ago of white and black male job applicants in their 20s in Milwaukee and New York. "Black men with a clean record fare no better than white men just released from prison."
Society would rather pay the huge costs of incarceration than it would to pay the costs to reintegrate young black men back into society even if it meant creating jobs directly funded by the government. Government programs equal socialism. Government jobs equal socialism. So the price to be paid for avoiding socialism is to have a large black underclass of parolees and unemployed. When life on the streets is too tough, you can always get three square meals a day in prison. No health care insurance? No problem. You can get free medical care in prison. Also you get free health club membership. You can buff up your body lifting weights. And you can get a college education or the equivalent if you so desire. Plenty of time to study. Out in society you get none of the above.
So the US prefers to go on incarcerating people rather than to pay the costs of providing government funded jobs because the private sector sure doesn't want them. The US would rather extend unemployment insurance, which allows the unemployed to sit on their asses on Mama's sofa, than to use the same money to put them to work as FDR did with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. US society would rather pay them to do nothing, to be unproductive, than to pay them to be productive and actually accomplish something and contribute to the betterment of society. A WPA worker could point to the schools or bridges that he actually built as opposed to those collecting unemployment insurance who are essentially on the dole acquiring neither job skills or a sense of satisfaction in a job well done. But then FDR was a socialist. He only saved capitalism, but he was still a socialist. Basically young black men with spotty records are given two choices: join the Army or take your chances with life on the streets. There you either make it big or die or end up in jail with three squares a day and a chance for a buff body.
WASHINGTON – Of all the bitter pills Americans are swallowing nowadays, from joblessness to home foreclosures to runaway national debt, it might come as no surprise that a pill of another sort is flying off the shelves at a recession-defying pace – the antidepressant.
(flickr photo by Antanith used and adapted under Creative Commons license)
It's an easy jump to conclude that hard times are turning the country comfortably numb, as the Washington Post suggested in a weekend report on the sales of the drug Cymbalta, up 14 per cent since the summer of 2008 and now among America's most popular happy pills.
Drill deeper and you will find that the U.S., though far and away a world leader with its $10-billion-a-year antidepressant habit, is not alone.
Over the summer, British politicians fretted over the impact of recession on mental health amid data showing a spike of 2.1 million antidepressant prescriptions last year, when the downturn took its first precipitous dive.
Same in India, where pharmaceutical firms reported a 20 per cent expansion of the antidepressant market in the year ending December 2008. And in New Zealand, where the global plunge was linked to reports of a near doubling in antidepressant prescriptions between 2002 and 2008.
But drill down deeper still and the story behind the flurry of cause-and-effect headlines is far more nuanced.
While many researchers acknowledge there is likely an uptick in med sales as a consequence of the poor economy, most say it is driven as much or more by trends decades in the making.
There is no question America loves its happy pills, but consumption was skyrocketing long before the Dow melted down.
The real story, in fact, may be that the link between recession and mental health points in precisely the opposite direction – the possibility that people in the most dire straits today are also the most likely to be suffering depression but without access to any medical help.
That is what Dr. Craig Pollack of the University of Pennsylvania discovered during a study of 250 Philadelphia homeowners on the brink of foreclosure. Pollack's findings, published last month, showed 37 per cent of the distressed homeowners suffered from major clinical depression. But nearly half of his study group said they were too poor to buy prescription drugs.
"Clearly for some, poor health leads to foreclosure. And for others, foreclosure may be leading to poor health," Pollack said.
Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a Maryland anaesthesiologist and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, warns that to make too much of the recession's role in prescription drug-taking is to wildly underplay the larger story of how the country has swarmed toward the pill bottle every since the 1970s, when Valium hit the scene.
"America is all about the gratification of pleasure. We are the kings of pleasure and proud of it," said Dworkin, author of Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class.
"But the other side of it is that we're not very good at preparing for or dealing with unhappiness, which of course is an inevitable part of life. And what we've done since the '70s is to transform into a culture that treats unhappiness as a disease."
Dworkin says primary-care doctors wrote about 75 per cent of the more than 164 million antidepressant prescriptions dispensed in 2008 in the U.S., a fact he says gainsays the notion that psychiatrists and big pharma are to blame.
But however one tracks the evolution, Dworkin contends the practice of "stupefying ourselves to cure everyday unhappiness" treats the symptom, not the cause.
And that is a bigger problem today than it used to be, given the surfeit of unhappiness associated with recession.
"There is a paradox: taking antidepressants makes people feel better, thereby reducing their interest in actually doing something about the things in their life that cause the unhappiness," he said.
"Research indicates that people in bad dept or a bad relationship stay where they are on the medication. The urgency of change fades away."
Older people need to diet just to maintain the appropriate weight. What that weight is will vary with the individual, but the weight a person had in high school is probably close to ideal. At that weight most people's blood pressures will come down to normal so rather than eat whatever you want and take blood pressure medicine to get your blood presssure down, it's probably healthier to get it down by natural means which would be to get your weight down! At least that's the way it worked for me. Doctors were ready and willing to give me blood pressure medicine when my blood pressure was 160 over 100. My weight was 185. Instead I decided to get my weight down before the heart attack instead of after it, and so I dieted my weight down to a window between 170 and 175. At that weight my blood pressure is 115 over 75 which is actually lower than normal. I don't know if this would work for everyone, but at least for some, including me, blood pressure is highly correlated with weight. Even a modest loss of weight - 10 to 15 pounds in my case - led to a drastic decrease in blood pressure.
Gaining or losing weight is directly related to your caloric intake minus calories burned in exercise and in maintaining normal bodily functions. It's totally mathematical. If one is gaining weight, that person is taking in more calories than are being burned. It's that simple. So to lose weight one needs to consume less calories and burn more. The sad truth of the matter is that this will cause discomfort in terms of hunger for most people although this discomfort can be somewhat ameliorated. It can't be eliminated altogether, however. So to lose weight, a person has to be willing to undergo discomfort. This is the truth that no one who is trying to sell you diet pills or exercise equipment or diet plans will ever tell you.
Think about it. Our bodies are essentially the same as they were 140,000 years ago when the human species, homo sapiens, was born. Food supplies were unreliable so the purpose of weight gain in terms of adding fat to the body, was so that, if the hunt wasn't successful for a few days, calories in the form of stored fat were burned from the body instead of from caloric intake and, when the hunt was successful, people overate in terms of their daily caloric needs, and fat was added to the body. So fat was a good thing because it was a storehouse of calories, and people ate irregularly, not 3 meals a day, day in and day out like today.
One thing a person who wants to maintain an ideal weight has to realize is that you have to give up the notion of eating 3 meals a day, day in and day out. You have to impose on yourself what was imposed on the cave man by nature and that is the idea of going hungry or at least reduced calorie consumption for several meals a week - whatever it takes to lose weight gradually and then to maintain something approximating your ideal weight whatever you decide that should be. The scales are the objective decider and everyone should weigh themselves on a daily basis. The proof is in the pudding and the moment of truth is when you step on the scales. The scales don't lie.
In my opinion, most food is comfort food. We eat because it's a comforting experience. As we get older it takes less calories to run our bodies so that more and more weight is added to our bodies, and we get the degenerative diseases associated with aging: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes etc. If we are willing to keep our weight down, it is less likely that we will become a victim of stroke, heart attack and cancer. Good genes are also important, but the best way to keep our bodies in good condition, in addition to keeping our weight down, is exercise. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all systems run down with time. It is thought by a lot of people that this applies to the human body as well. As we age, our bodily system inevitably runs down until something critical happens, and we die. However, exercise has the opposite effect. It causes physical resources to be deployed that actually build up (rather than tear down) the body. Muscles that are used in exercise actually get stronger instead of weaker. Cardiovascular exercise actually builds up the cardiovascular system whereas doing nothing but sitting in front of the TV causes it to degenerate.
For millenia, the ideal life has been thought to be one in which no physical work was necessary and we had everything we wanted to eat or drink. This is the life of the very wealthy and was aspired to by everybody else. Actually, this is the worst possible situation we could be in. Over-consumption of calories and under-utilization of our physical bodies will hasten the degenerative diseases of aging. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable in terms of hunger and to the extent that exercise is uncomfortable ands requires self-discipline, we have to be willing to undergo discomfort in terms of that too.
My diet plan is very simple. Once my weight exceeds my upper limit in terms of the 5 pound window I give myself (175 pounds in my case), I add more diet meals to my week. My diet meal consists of a scoop of soy protein powder in a cup of apple juice as well as 4 brewer's yeast tablets and 4 dessicated liver tablets. It has zero fat and calories and is high in nutritional value. I actually feel better and less hungry than if I had consumed a reduced calorie regular meal. The rest of the time I eat normally and don't count calories which is a waste of time because different people's bodies treat the same number of calories differently. The truth is when you step on the scales not in how many calories you consume. You can't measure how many calories you burn which varies from day to day so counting calories is a waste of time. The scales should be your feedback mechanism.
Ideally, if we were designed differently by nature, we would not get fat no matter how much we ate and how little we exercised. Actually, since life is unfair, there are some people who are this way. But for most of us, especially as we age, we tend to put on weight as a direct result of over-eating and under-exercising. What those limits are vary with the individual and with time. Some people can exercise quite a bit, eat very little and still gain weight. Others are at the opposite end of the spectrum. But the scales are the truth-teller in terms of how much a person can eat and how much a person needs to exercise to maintain their ideal weight. Don't think in terms of dieting to reach your ideal weight and then eating normally 3 meals a day from then on. That's how you gain it back! Instead think in terms that you may need to diet in some form for the rest of your life just to maintain your ideal weight.
Some days I know I should be having a diet meal for breakfast, but for some reason I yield to temptation and go to Starbucks for a Grande Mocha and a maple scone instead. Some days you're just feeling down and need some comfort food. The important thing is not to feel guilty, not to feel like a failure, but to keep trying. On other days you'll feel mentally stronger, and it will be easier to contemplate only eating normally for one or two meals instead of three meals on that particular day. After all, you're yielding to temptation at a fairly high level compared to the person who is fighting an addiction to drugs or alcohol. We're all addicted to food or else we would just give ourselves injections of nutrients every day that would keep our bodies at an optimum level. Since not many of us are willing to do that, look forward to that one comforting meal a day instead of three, the other two being diet meals.
It is important to realize that the flip side of this system is being careful that your weight does not fall below the lower limit you have set for yourself. If this starts to happen, you will actually have to increase your calorie consumption so you don't become anorexic. This is easy for me to do. I just go to Starbucks more often! Or stop at Wendy's for lunch.
As far as exercise goes, I swim 5 days a week and work out with weights 2 days a week. The swimming is good for low impact cardiovascular exercise and the weight training is good for keeping your muscle and bone mass up. Older people tend to have both their bone and muscle mass diminish. But they don't need to. I use light weights, weights for which I can do 10 to 20 repetitions. Heavier weights are not advisable for older people, in my opinion, because it is too easy to strain something as we get older. I have found that I actually get stronger using lighter weights although it is a temptation to see how much we actually can lift. Walking is also good as is bike riding. I don't recommend running since it is high impact on the knees and joints.
Most people age because of degenerative diseases brought about from too little exercise and too much calorie consumption. There is no need to invest in expensive exercise equipment or diet plans. Just join the YMCA or other gym. My diet drink meals are probably the cheapest meals I consume! I get a huge jar of soy protein powder at Trader Joe's for $10.00, and the yeast and liver tablets are relatively cheap. I buy mine online from Puritan's Pride where they are always running 3 for the price of one offers. If you are on a budget, you can actually save money on this diet. You don't need Jenny Craig unless you want someone to hold your hand. By the way, a lot of women seem to want personal trainers to hold their hands while they exercise. If you can afford it, fine. If not, it takes a little bit more self-discipline.
So it's really very simple. People want an easy way out. They don't want to have to have any self-discipline and they don't want to have to undergo any discomfort. This opens the door for all kinds of diet and exercise con artists who, for a price, are willing to sell them on the fact that they can reach their health goals without having to suffer. People can live a longer life just from following two simple admonitions: 1) keep your weight approximately what it was in high school and 2) daily cardiovascular and bi-weekly weight training exercise.
![[(flickr photo by Antanith used and adapted under Creative Commons license)]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/pills_americans-b.jpg "pills_americans-b.jpg")
(flickr photo by Antanith used and adapted under Creative Commons license)
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