Category Archives: History

Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War

Don’t believe Latin American presidents (former and current) or a global commission including captains of industry or historic statesmen such as Jimmy Carter or major newspapers or Judge Napolitano or law enforcement professionals like Frank Serpico? Ask an economist who spells it out: the War on Drugs is an economic, public safety, and civil rights disaster, and legalization is needed right now.

Economist Art Carden wrote for Forbes yesterday, Let’s Be Blunt: It’s Time to End the Drug War,

April 20 is the counter-culture “holiday” on which lots and lots of people come together to advocate marijuana legalization (or just get high). Should drugs—especially marijuana—be legal? The answer is “yes.” Immediately. Without hesitation. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200 seized in a civil asset forfeiture. The war on drugs has been a dismal failure. It’s high time to end prohibition. Even if you aren’t willing to go whole-hog and legalize all drugs, at the very least we should legalize marijuana.

OK, why?

Continue reading →

East coast wind energy basket

Claudia Collier went to a Bureau of Ocean Energy Management public meeting yesterday at the Coastal Georgia Center in Savannah, and said:

“I suggest you designate the East Coast as the wind energy basket.”
According to Orlando Montoya with GBP yesterday, Offshore Oil Proposal Fuels Debate, she added:
“We have at least five areas out there on the shallow shelf that have designated as very promising for wind. And I just believe that once the East Coast is opened up to oil and gas, they will just take over and wind will go by the wayside.”

Oil exploration, like nuclear, is a distraction from getting on with renewable wind, wave, and solar energy independence. Let’s do the study for energy reliability in Georgia including using the large offshore wind opportunity. Remember the BP Gulf oil spill! What do you get with a wind spill? Um, wind?

The first Claudia Collier quote is by Mary Landers in SavannahNow today, Off-shore Savannah drilling talk draws support, questions. Mary Landers concluded:

The comment period on the document remains open until May 30. A decision on allowing exploration is expected by the end of the year.
Continue reading →

Importing illegal immigrants into private Georgia prisons

Ocilla, about an hour north of here, took the private prison gamble, and now is scrambling to import enough prisoners to fill it.

Jim Galloway wrote for the AJC 11 April 2012, Importing illegal immigrants — into private Georgia prisons quoting Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville in The Nation 10 April 2012, How One Georgia Town Gambled Its Future on Immigration Detention,

Deportations have reached record levels under President Barack Obama, and demand for detention facilities has increased. Starting in 2002, ICE had funding for 19,444 beds per year, according to an ICE report. Today, ICE spends about $2 billion per year on almost twice the number of beds.

ICE’s reliance on facilities like the Irwin County Detention Center has put small rural towns at the center of one of today’s most contentious policy arguments—how to enforce immigration law. A yearlong investigation by The Nation shows how much politics has come to rule detention policy. Even as Georgia and Alabama passed harsh new immigration laws last year designed to keep out undocumented immigrants, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that politicians from both states were lobbying hard to bring immigrant detainees in. ICE succumbed to the pressure, sending hundreds of detainees to the financially unstable facility in Georgia that promised to detain immigrants cheaply. That promise came at the expense of the health, welfare and rights to due process of some 350 immigrants detained daily in Ocilla.

Marvelous. Pass a low to eject illegal immigrants, except it really locks up a bunch of them, but not enough to keep Ocilla’s private prison full, so import a bunch of them back in as prisoners.

Aren’t you glad we didn’t accept a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia?

Ocilla and Irwin County didn’t just make that bad bet once, they doubled down on it:

Continue reading →

Videos @ Joint Governments 2012 03 29

Here are videos of the entire “first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting” that was held 6:30 PM 29 March 2012 in the Lowndes High School Lecture Hall. Here’s the announcement.

The meeting was introduced by Dr. Steve Smith, Superintendent, Lowndes County Schools. Lowndes County Schools had a written position statement, with everything from a broad variety of test scores and other metrics to specific examples of existing collaborations such as loaning busses to the Valdosta School System for away sporting events.

Dr. Smith clarified that:

This is not a community forum, it is not an open dialogue.
He told me before the meeting started that he was concerned that if they opened it up to questions from the audience it would take all night and it had been hard enough to get the various elected officials to show up at all without expecting them to stay for that. I didn’t see but maybe a dozen non-elected audience members, so I wonder whether that really would have happened, but I applaud the various governments for collaborating at all. He did say if you had a question you could write it down and hand it to a member of your elected government or school board. He also indicated that committees might form, not that evening, but perhaps growing out of that evening’s meeting. He reiterated this meeting was for brainstorming among the elected officials.

The elected officials included Valdosta Schools Superintendent and many VBOE members, Lowndes School Superintendent and Superintendent-elect and many LCBOE members, Valdosta Mayor, City Manager, and many city council members, and Lowndes County Manager, Clerk, and voting commissioners, but not the Chairman.

Wes Taylor, Lowndes High School Principal & Lowndes County Schools Superintendent Elect talked about finances.

Valdosta Mayor John Gayle said we’re regional now (regional hospital, regional university, etc.). He talked about how Troup County went about landing the Kia plant, which had to do with each governmental entity taking a role and collaborating. (It had nothing to do with school consolidation.)

VBOE member Vanassa Flucas said they try to put everything related to their schools on their website, in an effort of transparency for parents and students. Plus:

We noticed that since we put our strategic plan on our website approximately three years ago, it was very well received. It was very heartening; people could find the information that they wanted.
Imagine that! Continue reading →

They come to school hungry; they come to school homeless — Bill Cason @ Joint Governments 2012 03 29

Breaking from the agenda of the first annual Valdosta-Lowndes Governmental Leadership Meeting, Valdosta School Superintendent Bill Cason rose above tactics and talked about vision and the root of the matter: poverty.

Supt. Cason started talking about teenage pregnancy and drug use, and then got to the heart of the matter:

They come to school hungry; they come to school homeless. Last year we identified more than 200 homeless kids in our school district. We can talk about all of these other things, but until we can address those as a group, every public entity in this room, is willing to get together as a team and address those issues, we forgot the most important thing we deal with, that is our students.

[applause]

They will be the future leaders of this community. And if you want to see Valdosta take a backwards slide, then let this problem run as it is and you will see. I’ve seen it before in other communities, and I’m seeing it here now. This is not something we can wait on; it has to be done now. So if we want to really be serious about what we’re talking about tonight, educating our children, having a viable community, having a good community, having recreational facilities everybody can use, then you need to begin to address these problems not only with our mouths, but with our money and with our resources. And until you do this, then we’re going backwards.

Poverty is the root of the matter. It’s great that the local goverments and school boards are talking, and they can tinker around the edges all they want, but until they get serious about poverty in our community, educational improvements and the future of the community will be severely limited.

-jsq

 

 

Videos of Rally for HOPE @ LCDP 2012 03 24

Rain kept the numbers down, but the enthusiasm was strong in Lakeland at the Rally for HOPE, 24 March 2012.

The announcement said:

This will be a Rally for the Hope Scholarship and a Voter Registration. Everyone concerned about HOPE is invited. We will have guest speakers and will hear from those students and families affected by the current status of HOPE.

The featured speaker was Janice Barrocas of HOPE for Georgia, which is running a three year nonpartisan campaign to save HOPE scholarships.

Bikram Mohanty explained that there will be a shortfall of $270 million for the HOPE scholarships in 2012. Janice Barrocas pointed out there were really two HOPEs now: the other one being the Zell Miller scholarships. Bikram showed a map that illustrates that very few Zell Miller Scholarships go to south Georgia.

Janice Barrocas and Bikram Mohanty discussed that HOPE is funded by a lottery, and lottery funds are down in the recession. The blue line on the chart is deposits from the lottery into the HOPE program, the red line is expenditures, and the green line, dropping rapidly, is reserves at the end of the year.

Janice Barrocas noted that

The end users of this program were not at the table

when the recent HOPE changes were passed. Especially students mostly found out when they got stuck with bigger bills they had to pay. Students and their families may still be too polite to mention they have financial troubles, but it’s time to break the culture of silence when it’s a choice between the family eating or the student going to school. Betty Marini pointed out students loans add up to $1 trillion dollars, which is a huge drag on the economy.

Matt Flumerfelt observed that there is a push for divestiture and privatization these days, and he wondered if the silence around the quick passage of the recent HOPE changes wasn’t because it was a money grab for the lottery funds.

Tech school HOPE is grants, and most tech school students get them. If HOPE went away, the lottery would Continue reading →

Police Them and Us, made worse by War on Drugs

David Rittgers wrote for The Politico 8 June 2011, How Police Are Turning Military

The sheriff’s office in Pima County, Ariz., raided the home of former Marine and Iraq combat veteran Jose Guerena, shooting 71 rounds at Guerena and hitting him with 22. The department is now facing a serious controversy over Guerena’s death.

But the raid isn’t the real tragedy. It’s a symptom of the real tragedy: the militarization of U.S. law enforcement.

Pima County released a video of the raid and supporting documents. The video isn’t anything new — a squad of police officers dressed up for combat. But the statement of the SWAT supervisor is worth reading. After the SWAT team entered Guerena’s home, the supervisor left one or two “operators” with the body while the rest searched the house.

What did he mean by operator? Well, a police officer. But the term connotes something entirely different.

“Operator” is a term of art in the special operations community. Green Berets, SEALs and other special operations personnel often refer to themselves as operators. It’s a recognition of both the elite standards of their units and the hybrid nature of their duties — part soldier, part spy, part diplomat. But importing operator terminology into domestic law enforcement is not a benign turn of the phrase.

Perceiving yourself as an operator plasters over the difference between a law enforcement officer serving a warrant and a commando in a war zone. The former Mirandizes, the latter vaporizes, as the saying goes…. Targeted killing is legal in a war zone but not on the streets of Anytown, USA.

Why is this happening?

The war on drugs has done incalculable damage to the character of law enforcement by encouraging police officers to forget they are civilians.

The police should be us. The War on Drugs has turned them into them against us.

-jsq

USA #1 in youth detention

The U.S. locks up far more juveniles per capita than any other country, and our country and our state cannot afford that any longer: not economically, and not in the cost of incarceration turning children into criminals.

Pete Brook wrote for Wired 11 April 2012, Uncompromising Photos Expose Juvenile Detention in America,

States have turned away from punishing acts such as truancy and delinquency with detention; acts that are not criminal for an adult but have in the past siphoned youths into the court system. Less detention has been accompanied by less violent crime among youth.

“It may seem counter intuitive, but if you look at the types of offenses for which we’re no longer detaining youth, it is not,” says Sarah Jane Forman, assistant professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and director of the Youth Justice Clinic which provides legal counsel to indigent youth. “The kids who have committed serious violent crimes; they remain locked up.”

Not only is being locked up ineffective as a deterrent in youths who have not reached full cognitive development and don’t understand the consequences of their actions, it can actually make a criminal out of a potentially law-abiding kid.

The U.S. has far more juveniles per capita locked up than any other country, according to Cross-national comparison of youth justice, by Neal Hazel, 2008, www.yjb.gov.uk.

And Georgia has a large proportion of those locked-up youth. On this map of prisons in Georgia, Continue reading →

Mars and Arizona Public Service flee ALEC: 10 and counting

Mars makes Skittles. Suddenly it doesn’t want to be associated with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Ditto electric utility Arizona Public Service (APS). That makes 10 if you count the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with Pepsi, Coke, Kraft, Intuit, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Reed-Elsevier. Keep ’em goin’!

Rebekah Wilce wrote for PRWatch Thursday, Mars and Arizona Public Service Dump ALEC,

Mars had been an exhibitor at ALEC’s 2011 annual meeting in New Orleans. Mars is the maker of Skittles, the snack Trayvon Martin had purchased before he was shot by George Zimmerman, whose arrest was delayed due to an NRA-backed gun law that became an ALEC “model” bill.

APS had been a member of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, which adopted such “model” bills as the “State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives Act” and the “State Data Quality Act.” News of its breaking ties with ALEC comes on the heels of a new updated report on ALEC in Arizona published by People for the American Way, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Common Cause, and ProgressNow.

There’s more about Mars saying it merely decided not to renew its ALEC membership, as part of a general review of memberships. Yeah, right.

Here’s another petition for companies to leave ALEC.

I’m still rooting for UPS, based in Atlanta, to escape ALEC.

-jsq

Wendy’s and Reed-Elsevier flee ALEC: 8 and counting

Companies with customers care about “the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC”. Two more just left, making it eight and counting.

Reuters reported an hour ago: Reed Elsevier, Wendy’s drop conservative group,

Reed Elsevier is the latest company to drop out of a conservative national advocacy group in the United States that has been a lightning rod for gun laws.

The Anglo-Dutch professional information service provider said on Thursday it resigned its board seat and dropped its membership of the American Legislative Council (ALEC).

…

Hamburger chain Wendy’s Co said late on Wednesday that it decided in late 2011 not to renew its ALEC membership for 2012.

That’s Pepsi and Coca-Cola, followed by Kraft and Intuit, plus the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McDonald’s, and now Wendy’s and Reed-Elsevier. Eight and counting. Pretty close to one a work day.

Why?

“We made the decision after considering the broad range of criticism being leveled at ALEC,” said a Reed Elsevier spokesman.

The council has faced a push-back in recent weeks because of its involvement in voting laws and in “stand your ground” gun laws such as one under scrutiny in the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida.

Let’s not forget private prisons, such as the one CCA wanted to build in Lowndes County. Even though that one is “shelved” due to lack of customers, others are still sucking up tax dollars that could go to education.

I’m still rooting for next to leave ALEC to be UPS, based in Atlanta.

-jsq