In a mildly sourced report by the Huffington Post about ‘private’ conversations between a handful of senators and the Attorney General of New York, who is also a co-chair of President Barack Obama’s task force investigating the frauds carried out by the nation’s largest banks against investors in mortgage backed securities, groups including retired teachers and civil service employees, Eric Schneiderman conveyed that he is concerned that his concerns about the public’s growing concerns that the enforcement work group is nothing more than a toothless and supine act of public relations kabuki to cover for the inaction on the part of both federal and state law enforcement officials who, after more than five years, have yet to charge a high level employee of any of the nation’s most powerful banks with crimes that led to the collapse of worldwide banking system, are communicated.

Schneiderman’s critiques come as the statutes of limitation for the crimes committed by the nation’s largest financial institutions in the lead up to the new depression have, in most case, run out extinguishing regulators’ ability to prosecute the criminals.

One of the senators who met recently with Schneiderman, the retiring senator from Michigan, Carl Levin, was concerned to tell the Huffington Post that Schneiderman “expressed similar frustrations that the public has expressed,” and another senator, who was concerned to maintain anonymity, said that Schneiderman “was very clear” that he wanted to convey his “frustration”.

Schneiderman’s appointment to co-chair the Obama created work group on mortgage backed securities was announced to great fanfare during Obama’s State of the Union address in 2012, four years after the onset of the new depression and during a time in which the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve had given America’s largest private banking companies trillions of tax payer dollars, nearly interest free loans and 100 percent guarantees on trillions of dollars of worthless securities and debt held by the private financial companies.  In the speech, Obama was keen to express his concern for the millions of Americans who became homeless and jobless due to the illegal actions of these privately run companies (although the president has gone on record stating his personal belief that “no laws were broken” in the run-up to the new depression).

Consumer groups and organizations that serve communities of dispossessed homeowners advised the Huffington Post of their concerns about the appalling track record of the mortgage securities workgroup with regard to enforcement actions, spoke “on the condition of anonymity” because of their concerns about “jeopardizing their relationships” with the state-federal workgroup.  Many homeowner service agencies have received millions of dollars generated out of non-prosecution agreements reached between federal and state regulators and the nation’s largest financial institutions that involved enforcement entities absolving private parties from criminal actions for the payment of “contributions” and fines.

A review of the mortgage securities enforcement work group’s web site  today (April 24, 2013) relates that Schneiderman is joined on the task force by Obama’s hand-picked Assistant Attorney General to lead the Criminal Division of the US Justice Department, Lanny Breuer.  Breuer resigned from government service to work for a Washington DC law firm that defends banking companies and finance companies in January 2013.

In the whirlwind of concerns related by the Huffington Post in its ‘news’ story, no mention of concern was iterated for the more than 3 million families estimated to have been foreclosed upon between 2008 and early 2012, at the time that Obama appointed Schneiderman to head the mortgage securities working group.

cross posted at the demise

President Obama’s hand-picked ‘drug czar’, former police chief of Seattle Gil Kerlikowske, denounced legalization of cannabis for personal consumption by American adults at a National Press Club event.

Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowski speaks to the National Press Club on US drug policy

Kerlikowski characterized the legalization of drugs in his discussion of cannabis legalization in Washington and Colorado as an “extreme position”, and went further to state bluntly that the Obama administration opposes “drug legalization.”

“The Justice Department’s responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged,” Kerlikowske reminded reporters in prepared remarks.  He added, in what can only be interpreted as a warning to the citizens of states that have legalized cannabis through local democratic processes, “Neither a state nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress.”

Kerlikowske then attempted to append a ‘public safety’ rational to his articulated support for a federalized law enforcement crack down on states that have voted to allow adults to use cannabis recreationally by admonishing, “Nor should we lose sight of the fundamental fact that using marijuana has public health consequences, and the most responsible public policy is one that restricts its availability and discourages its use.”

Kerlikowske flanked by health professionals specializing in treating drug addiction, said that the Obama administration’s approach to drug policy was not to wage a “war on drugs” nor was it to “legalize drugs”, rather, Kerlikowske said, the Obama administration favors focusing on reducing “drug use and its consequences” primarily drug addiction.  Kerlikowske said that the key component of the Obama administration’s approach to drug control is to focus on the “disease of addiction.”

Kerlikowske also compared what he termed “substance use disorder” with “progressive diseases”  stating that intervention by health professionals who have access to addiction treatment programs sponsored by the government is a “key aspect” of Obama’s approach to drug policy.  Kerlikowske did not comment on the irony that medical professionals across America prescribe the medicine of cannabis to treat many progressive diseases, including Parkinson’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis.

Kerlikowske’s position that the federal government should take legal action because of the public dangers threatened by the addictive properties of cannabis are not shared by former US Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders who told CNN in 2010, “Marijuana is not addictive, not physically addictive anyway,” when she called for federal legalization of cannabis.  While the level of addiction that cannabis users experience is debatable, no health researcher or public health authority has stated that cannabis is more addictive than the legal consumer products alcohol and tobacco.

cross posted at mLaw

Washington State’s highest elected officials and law enforcement officials met with their federal counterparts, US Attorney General Eric Holder and top officials from President Obama’s Justice Department, earlier this week to discuss the state’s program for implementing the will of the public, who late last year voted to legalize cannabis for recreational consumption by adults.

The governor and the state’s attorney general expressed their vision for constructing a statewide system that will allow for the public’s demand that cannabis be legal be actualized and that would make the legal product available in the consumer marketplace.

Attorney General Bob Ferguson told reporters that the intention of the state’s lawmakers and law enforcers is to “move forward in implementing I-502.” Ferguson reportedly conveyed to the federal officials that, “We have assembled a legal team in the Attorney General’s Office, and I have made legal implementation of this initiative a top priority.”

The federal officials, however, did not approach the meeting expressing their honest intent to use their offices to ensure that the ship of state will do all it can to facilitate will of the public. As has been widely reported, Attorney General Holder made no public statement regarding the meeting, and nowhere in the reporting about the meeting did the US Attorney General make any statement whatsoever with respect to the intentions of the federal government to facilitate, encourage, support or cooperate with state authorities in their expressed goal to bring to fruition the will of Washington’s people.

Silence on Holder’s behalf, as identified quite clearly in all reportage of this meeting between honest state authorities (who have a vision to bring the public will to fruition in a rational way that takes serious account of public safety) and dishonest federal officials (who are not interested in the will of the public but are sycophantic to the prison industrial complex and to drug warriors who carry out the bigoted ‘war on drugs’ that imperils public safety) can only indicate that Obama’s justice department’s plan is to go ‘full bore’ in implementing the enforcement scheme that it has used in California: let cannabis be legal but, make it impossible for users, even the sick, to access the legal product.

The editors of mLaw equate the federal government’s aggressive attack on our nation’s sick patients, many of whom have lifelong debilitating diseases that cause unbelievable pain and discomfort, to what has historically taken place with respect to abortion rights in the US.  Politicians, on both the state and federal level, who personally disagree with the will of the people as expressed in court rulings as in the case of abortion rights, have abused their power to limit the ability of pregnant women to be able to access abortion services even though abortion has been a legal medical procedure in the US for 50 years.

Obama’s Justice Department’s cynical and calculated attack on medical marijuana dispensaries in California and elsewhere is as bigoted, small minded, rooted in brute political calculation and, in a word, immoral as the abusive power wielding that anti-abortionist politicians have practiced over a half a century that has led to abortion, a fully legal medical procedure in the US, being unavailable to patients in 98 percent of America’s counties in 2013.

The lack of criminal prosecutions for the vast and coordinated illegality and fraud carried out by financial services companies and the nation’s largest banks that led to the New Depression, and the abandonment of our nation’s cherished legal requirement to afford due process to citizens accused of a crime illustrate that the Obama government has continually demonstrated its fealty to industry and the national security state and shown a predisposition to ignore, abandon and frustrate the will of the people as expressed through the ballot.

We have a Democrat in the white house who has used all of his power and the power of the state to make it impossible for sick Americans to access beneficial medicine, a stance that is anti-science, anti-patient, anti-small-d-democracy, anti-human and at the same time, pro-private prison complex, pro-racist drug war and pro-private drug company profits. In light of Obama’s vigor to make it impossible for sick Americans to access medicine, and, of much less import but still of significance, for adults to use cannabis recreationally, many Americans are now, quite reasonably asking, “who does this jackass work for, anyhow?”

cross posted at mLaw

As American adults take action on their awareness that cannabis, though demonized by propaganda from industrialists with a financial stake in preserving prohibition and politicians who have depended upon using scare tactics to forward their political careers, is substantially safer than America’s most used drugs (tobacco and alcohol), policy creators are expressing concern that today’s youth simply will no longer be cowed into submission by the reiteration of factually biased and medically disproven scare tactics.

America’s youth, just like adults in the US, are fully aware that what they have been told by parties that desire to maintain the prohibition of cannabis over the course of 75 years amounts to factually inaccurate, unsubstantiated propaganda.

The wielders of this three-quarters-of-a-century old propaganda are now coming to the realization that the youth in America can actually educate themselves on the issue of ending cannabis prohibition, can effectively and honestly assess the differences between the prohibited substance cannabis and alcohol, tobacco and other drugs that are widely prescribed by physicians in the US, and have determined that the vast majority of what they have been told by police authorities, political leaders, their churches and schools, is not simply wrong, but is intentionally misrepresentational and supports agendas beyond the oft repeated mantra of prohibitionists; “it’s all about the safety of the children.”

In recent public statements, President Obama’s ‘drug czar’ expressed alarm that teen use of cannabis has gradually increased at the same time teen use of alcohol and tobacco have gradually declined. A recent study from the National Institutes of Health found that teen use of cannabis has grown over the past years, but use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, both prescription and illicit, has declined. In the case of alcohol usage by American teens, use has declined to its lowest point since the federal government began tracking alcohol use by minors forty years ago.

Some have analyzed this change as being a positive expression of today’s youth’s ability to decide for themselves whether to use legal drugs that are promoted constantly in American media and culture or to use cannabis, a substance that has been demonized for 75 years by American media and culture. The study results can perhaps signify that America’s youth are aware of the very real dangers of tobacco addiction and alcohol abuse, and are choosing marijuana, a drug that they know presents less risk. Choosing a less harmful drug over more harmful drug could and should be met by our leaders as a very positive sign that indicates a thoughtful choice made by weighing the facts.

The leaders of America’s drug war, when faced with these statistics have instead concluded that the study rather shows that today’s youth are falling under a type of mystical spell that is causing them to “forget” all the propaganda now that adults in this country have demanded that recreational cannabis use be legal.

In recent statements, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the federal agency that performed the survey, opined that teens’ new attitudes about the dangers of tobacco and alcohol compared to cannabis reflect that our young people’s thoughtful choice is rather a reaction to the fact that recreational use of cannabis is no longer prohibited in Washington and Colorado and that “the deterrent” of illegality “is no longer present.”

Volkow’s belief that young people cannot assess the relative dangers between the legal and constantly promoted drugs alcohol and tobacco and the illegal but much less harmful cannabis is an indication that the enforcers have come to believe their own propaganda. The theorem being promoted by Volkow can be framed thusly; “If it is illegal, it must be wrong, bad and immoral.” The thought process that Americans both young and old may be currently operating under may rather be; “The illegality of cannabis was unnecessary and wrong, and predicated upon bigoted stereotypes dreamed up by industrialists who sought prohibition and, carried forth for seven decades by supine and captured politicians and police authorities for reasons that had nothing to do with public safety.”

If it’s true that this mindset is behind the increase in cannabis use by teens in America that the study identified, then America’s propagandists are themselves coming to new understandings. One is that propaganda no longer will suffice to brow beat thinking people into subordinating their experiences, and, perhaps more frightening to these custodians of culture, that many Americans now understand that they were lied to by their government to support the private wealth of business owners for seventy five years.

Being aware of the nearly century long history of lying and propagandizing may inculcate an awareness in our youth that they should aggressively question some of our nation’s other ‘preordained’ policy assumptions. I ask young Americans to do the research and find out if it is true when our leaders tell us that “we have to kill children in the Middle East to protect our “special relationships” with outlaw regimes”, that “torture is an effective method to gain intelligence”, or that “big banks can never be held to account for the crimes that they commit”. The list of queries is long indeed.

If government officials like Volkow say to you that these preconceptions are unchallengeable and have a quality of ‘religious truth’ to them, you can simply advise that, “torture is illegal by international standards”, that “occupying sovereign countries for 60 years is illegal by international standards”, and that “fraud is a criminal violation throughout the world”. Maybe if the prohibitionists hear that these things are illegal, they will be “deterred” from supporting these anti-human policy pogroms.

cross posted at the marijuana legalization awareness wiki Read the rest of this entry →

From the ‘choomer in chief’ straight down to the phony fact peddling Frums of this world, all “reasonable people” are trying their hardest to deflect and project in their “very adult discussions” about how to navigate the turbulent waters caused by adult Americans expressing their opinion that cannabis is safe and the drug war is harmful, bigoted and wrong.  In general, both sides of the political perspective are gung-ho about expressing their “concerns for our children” when someone asks what the feds intend to do now that cannabis is legal in the US for the first time since 1937.

Strangely missing from all legacy parties’ analysis of the citizen’s initiatives in WA and CO are the facts that cannabis is a medicine, that cannabis has never in recorded medical history killed anyone, that one out of every 5 deaths yearly in the US is attributable to cigarettes, and that alcohol is involved in 37% of all traffic deaths among persons aged 16 to 20, and that’s not even getting into the deaths, injuries and lasting psychological trauma caused in families where alcohol is the “approved by Uncle Sam” destructive and debilitating drug of choice.

Whether it is to dry dopers like Obama, whose devious targeting of suppliers serves somehow to polish up his “I’m lookin’ real tough” head-fake to propagandized suburbanites, or it is to paid-off-by-parties-that-are-very-interested-that-cannabis-remains-”not legal”-for recreational-use-by-adults squalkers like Frum, why doesn’t anyone point out in these “on-going serious people” confabs that cannabis is safer than America’s legal drugs (alcohol & tobacco).  These “discussions” seem always to devolve into all “reasonable people” agreeing to use discredited faux statistics (whether medical or…wherever one would guess Frum’s boogie-man-misrepresentations to emanate from) for the purpose of instilling fear in Mr. and Mrs. America about cannabis.

If these fake cogitators (but very real cultural custodians) were to be honest, we would be on the way to rescheduling tobacco and alcohol and opening the doors to Amsterdam style coffee shops in every city in the US, given the fear-mongering lies that they proffer as they wring their hands in the face of Americans deciding, knowing and acknowledging that cannabis is both safer than America’s favorite drugs and is also medicine for sick people here in our country (that’s what the doctors really, really say and think).

How about this question for either the fox-enabled republicans or the dominated-by-a-dry-doper by their last 2 presidents democrats:

“When I grew up, I was told that totalitarian dictatorships are the kind of governments that willfully withhold known medicines from their populations, why does our country keep medicine from sick and suffering Americans?”

…cue crickets

cross posted at the marijuana legalization awareness wiki