Viewpoints: It's time to pull the plug on the war against drugs
Special to The Bee
Published Sunday, Sep. 05, 2010

Sunil Dutta, Ph.D, is a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. These are solely Dutta's personal opinions.

Any strategy that has been tried for 40 years, cost almost a trillion dollars, led to numerous murders and horrendous violence, ruined millions of lives and destabilized nations needs to be re-evaluated. Unfortunately, despite the failure of our "war on drugs," our drug policy debate remains stagnant and mired in fear-mongering. Empirical evidence supporting alternative policies is disregarded or is the subject of vicious politically motivated attacks.

The war on drugs has overwhelmed the justice system and empowered street gangs who finance their activities by drug sales. It has resulted in corruption, lost productivity, environmental destruction, a lack of respect for law, a skyrocketing incarceration rate, destruction of families and a hit to taxpayers' pockets. There is no evidence that things will get better if we continue to follow the same failed strategies.

The logic behind our drug policy is punitive deterrence, which assumes that targeting the drug supply through aggressive law enforcement will deter drug use by making drugs scarcer, more expensive and riskier to buy. However, more than three decades after declaring war, passing stricter laws and packing our prisons, drugs are cheaper, purer and more easily available, and use has not been reduced.

Leading Scientists Call for Immediate Coho Salmon Protections in Marin

COUNTY OF MARIN FAILS TO PROTECT CRITICAL HABITAT FOR ENDANGERED COHO SALMON

For Immediate Release: September 7, 2010

For more information, please contact:
-Paola Bouley, SPAWN Conservation Director, 415.663.8590 ext 111, Paola@Tirn.Net
-Dr. Peter Moyle, Professor of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology at U.C. Davis and Associate Director for the Center for Watershed Sciences, Phone: (530) 752-6355, Email: pbmoyle@ucdavis.edu

Olema, CA- Leading aquatic scientists are publicly calling on Marin County Supervisors, for the 2nd time in 3 years, to take immediate action to protect critical habitat for the Bay Area’s last-remaining wild run of endangered coho salmon habitat, and end their delay tactics.

by Dan Bacher

In the most absurd episode yet in the bad action flick that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has starred in since being elected Governor in 2003, the "Fish Terminator" on Saturday morning spouted off about the need for "transparent" government in his weekly radio address.

"Ever since I became Governor, I have pushed to make California government more transparent," Schwarzenegger claimed. "Now, I don’t have to tell you that this is a time of deep recession, all around the world."

"It is more critical than ever that government be held accountable for every dollar it spends, that it live within its means, and that it show total transparency at all levels: at the local level, the state level and the federal level," said Schwarzenegger.

Les Leopold in the Huffington Post responded to the Republican "blame the victim" economic talking point that the reckless and unmotivated American working and middle classes are responsible for their own unemployed/walking-on-thin-ice economic situations in spite of the savaging of the U.S. treasury by corporate pirates.

During 2009, the worst economic year since the Depression, the top ten hedge fund honchos averaged $900,000 an hour (that's $1.8 billion each per year). And they did it only because we saved their butts from total collapse. Now it's payback time. The bankers owe the American people hard cold cash, not just the promise of a great trickle down in the distant future.

Leopold points out that these shameless and destructive (to everyone else) opportunists are not only denying responsibility for crashing the economy but are insisting they are now being unjustly threatened by even the slightest suggestion of regulation. To me this seems as outrageous as a gang of rapists demanding a thank you note from their victim. Leopold:

Incredibly, Wall Street executives are howling over every proposal to limit their profits or, god forbid, stick them with part of the bill for all the damage they've caused. They refuse to admit that they've done anything wrong. In fact they feel victimized. They seem to believe that skimming billions from our financial system via taxpayer bailouts is a good thing for everyone. Can they really believe that if we just left them alone, new jobs would flow like wine?

Video below

Archeologists Find Gateway to the Viking Empire

By Matthias Schulz

For a century, archeologists have been looking for a gate through a wall built by the Vikings in northern Europe. This summer, it was found. Researchers now believe the extensive barrier was built to protect an important trading route.

[...]

At a press conference Friday, Tummuscheit's team announced a further find -- one that they are calling a "sensation." The researchers have discovered the only gate leading through the Danevirke, a five-meter (16 feet) wide portal. According to old writings, "horsemen and carts" used to stream through the gate, called "Wiglesdor." ...

[...]

New calculations as to the age of the construction indicate, however, that the earliest parts of the wall might have been built by the Frisians and not by the Danes. Archeologists now think the foundation stone might have been laid as early as the 7th century.

[...]

The Frisians, who lived on the west coast of what is now Denmark and on a number of islands in the North Sea, were fighting for supremacy in the region with three other peoples: the Danes, the Slavs and the Saxons (see graphic). "It was the Kosovo of the early middle ages,"

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100902_salmon.html

Media Contact
· Kevin Griffis 202-482-4883
· Jim Milbury 562-980-4006

Secretary Locke Extends Disaster Declaration for California Salmon Fishermen
September 2, 2010

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced today an extension of the disaster for California salmon fishermen due to the low numbers of spawning Chinook salmon returning to the Sacramento River and the subsequent reduction in commercial fishery revenues. Today’s announcement continues the disaster declaration made in 2008 for the fishery.

“Low Chinook salmon returns to the Sacramento River predicted again this year are causing significant economic hardship to commercial fishermen and their families in California,” Locke said. “Many fishermen are finding it extremely difficult to make a living during the limited fishing season this year.”

This is an urgent action alert from Craig Tucker, Klamath Coordinator for the Karuk Tribe, urging people to support approval of the Klamath TMDL by contacting the State Water Resources Control Board.

Dan

Urgent Action Alert: Support Approval of Klamath TMDL

Please support the approval of the Klamath TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) by the State Water Resources Control Board by contacting the Board by phone, fax and email.

The TDML is a limit on how much of different pollutants are allowed in a river. The water board will considers approving the Klamath TMDL on Tuesday September 7 at their meeting in Sacramento at the EPA building at 1001 I Street. The meeting is set from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

NEW RELEASE 1 September 2010
By: Patrick Porgans
Further Info: Contact Planetary Solutionaries at pp [at] planetarysolutionaries.org, 415-306-3317

Government Data Raises 'More Doubts About the Drought'

California Agriculture Cashing In at Record Breaking Highs

The Golden State’s agricultural earnings have reached historic highs during the so-called three-year drought.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture, (USDA), California’s cash receipts from crop and livestock sales, in billions of dollars, are as follows: 2009- $34.841; 2008- $38.407; 2007- $36.386; 2006- $31.426; 2005 - $32.4; 2004- $30.939; 2003- $28.232; 2002- $26.544; 2000 - $26.206; and 2000- $25.185.

California’s Governor Schwarzenegger, state water officials, 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl, and Fox Cable TV host Sean Hannity, were among those espousing their “Dust Bowl” drought rhetoric for the past three years, depicting images or fallow fields, orchards being ripped out and projections of the state’s agricultural industry going under. It appears their doomsday predictions were all wet.

Government data released yesterday by the USDA, does not support their draconian doom and gloom prophecies reminiscent of the “Great Drought – Dust Bowl” of the 1930’s, and their predictions that billions of dollars in lost revenues were imminent.

In fact, in 2008, the second year of what officials proclaimed may be the state’s “worst drought ever," agricultural “cash receipts” (revenues realized from all agricultural commodities produced in the Golden State) reached a record-breaking high of $38.4 billion (just recently revised from the initial 2008 estimate of $36.2 billion), up from the previous all-time high in 2007 of $36.4 billion.

As President of the local chapter of Veterans For Peace, I submitted this response to Obama's speech as a letter-to-the-editor to the Sacramento Bee.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The President announced the end of "combat" operations in Iraq, but there really haven’t been many real combat operations for U. S. Soldiers this whole year - and we still lost more than 40 soldiers in 2010. The remaining 49,700 troops are supposed to be in non-combat roles, but as Veterans For Peace President Michael Ferner points out, "Non-combat troops is simply the latest in a long line of military euphemisms meant to obscure painful reality."

Meanwhile the pointless death, injury, and maiming of American soldiers continue in Afghanistan, and it gets worse every year. And for what? To prop up a corrupt government in a place with no strategic importance to America? Afghans have resisted outside interference for thousands of years. Our efforts will be no more successful than the Russians, the British, the Persians, the Greeks... Time to end the pointless sacrifice of young American lives.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yours for a better tomorrow,
John C. Reiger

by Dan Bacher

The recently formed Ocean Access Protection Fund (OAPF) announced on August 31 the launch of its online contribution program through www.OceanAccessProtectionFund.org, allowing this division of United Anglers of Southern California (UASC) to collect online contributions for legal challenges against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative as well as future threats to recreational access to ocean and coastal waters.

The new site was designed to make it easy for individuals, fishing clubs and businesses to make secure contributions to the OAPF using major credit cards or Paypal. “Contributions to the OAPF will be used solely to support legal action against the MLPA and other policies that restrict recreational fishing access to California waters,” said Steve Fukuto, UASC president, in a press release.

While the OAPF is being spearheaded by UASC, Fukuto said it will be representing the interests of anglers, businesses and others frustrated with the MLPA implementation process across the Southern, Central and North Central California regions.

The OAPF was created to support legal causes of action against policies that do not recognize the conservation efforts of fishermen and impact recreational anglers’ access to the ocean, according to Fukuto. The MLPA Initiative, a process ridden with conflicts of interests, mission creep and the corruption of the democratic process, is the first project being undertaken by the organizers of the fund.

Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
by Jane Mayer

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

September 2010 has been designated as “Salmon Month" by the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco. To celebrate salmon month, SalmonAid (http://www.salmonaid.org) will be sponsoring a month-long series of exciting events, creating an opportunity to educate the public about what has gone so terribly wrong with California’s once bountiful salmon runs.

"Salmon Water Now could not let Salmon Month start without adding our two-cents to the educational process," said Bruce Tokars, the relentless producer of Salmon Water Now videos. "So we have a new video, actually, two new videos."

“Bullies of Westlands” is Salmon Water Now's answer to the reason that wild salmon in such dire shape. The video runs 20:44 minutes and is available on Vimeo uninterrupted and in two parts on YouTube.

"You knows a bully when you see one," said Tokars in introducing his latest video. "They use their strength and power to get their way or to influence an outcome."

Tokars said a bully can be a person, or an organization. "In California’s on-going struggle over water, the biggest bully of them all is the Westlands Water District on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. We believe that in the last couple of years, the once mighty runs of wild salmon have been decimated by the self-righteous bulling tactics of the Westlands Water District," he stated.

This Salmon Water Now video looks at the words and deeds of Westlands, the "Darth Vader" of California water politics, as they push for more and more water to be shipped south of the Delta to irrigate subsidized crops on selenium-laden soil that should have never been irrigated.

Bill Noxid in Enough of the Myth of American Morality -- Awakening the Global Slave:

"“They hate our Freedom” was all it took to convince the people of this county that brown people 5,000 miles away in caves with box cutters defeated the NSA, CIA, and United States Military, and ten years of evidence has yet to dissuade them from their delusional belief. The ignorance and hate emanating from the @Park51 Community Center ‘controversy’ demonstrates conclusively that just as it was ten years ago, still no evidence is required to demonize an entire race or religion of brown people because American White people ‘feel’ violated based on their self-delusion and lack of historical knowledge. The whole world is expected to capitulate to American unreasonable and outrageous demands because the people are too ignorant and fearful to know the truth of anything."

"The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate slavers’ intention..."

"The real conversation gets lost in the lowest common denominators of hate and ignorance, and that is the corporate slavers’ intention." If you read on in Noxid's article, you will discover his desired "conversation" involves the real truth behind 9/11. Right now I would settle for a conversation that simply grazes the reality of the massive wrongs perpetrated in our name by our leadership.

I yearn for a national conversation that is willing to begin to explore and process the scope of immoral, illegal and exponentially expanding violence committed by the United States in the name of democracy and security, which has more to do with imperialist aggrandizement and craven cronyism. A conversation with a citizen majority not in a moral coma. Citizens with potential for rationality and empathy, not in what Richard Kim in the Nation estimates is an unreachable eighteen percent that sports tinfoil caps in full-blown racist paranoia.