As always, I hate to do this, but I just wanted to put out a brief call for donations, if anyone feels moved to pitch a few coins into the hat. Regular financial support for this site has dwindled down to almost nothing; there is now only one regular subscriber, where once there had been dozens. (Was it something I said?) People do chip in from time to time, and I’m enormously grateful for that. And of course, times are hard all over, and there are needs far greater than mine. (Arthur Silber, for one; don’t you dast give anything here without giving there first.) Still, the income once generated by my political writings has essentially disappeared, and one does feel that gap every now and then.
So if you’ve got a few pennies, and you’ve taken care of your own needs and those of others in more need, and you take a notion, we would be mighty grateful and much beholden for anything you might toss this way.
Meanwhile, pressing personal business of various sorts have kept me preoccupied of late. So in lieu of my own deathless take on various issues of the day, please take a gander at a few of these important articles which have appeared in the last few days.
War Against Humanity, Part 1
A new drive has been launched to end the so-called “War on Drugs.” A whole raft of Establishment worthies — conveniently out of power now, alas — have signed their names to a new call to end what is probably the most pernicious, corrupting, and corrosively evil movement of our time. The “War on Drugs” has doubtless done more to degrade human society — and civil liberties — than anything else in the past 30 years. It has given jet fuel to the expansion of the underworld, corrupted the “overworld” beyond all reckoning, aided and exacerbated the rise of authoritarian regimes in what were once considered democracies across the world, and generally added immeasurably to the burden of human suffering, in every corner of the globe, for decade after decade.
Yet, because it serves the interests of the powerful few so superbly, there is almost no hope that this “war” will ever end — even though some, or many, of those who once served and feasted in the gilded circles of the elite now publicly acknowledge that this relentless onslaught on liberty and reason will, in the end, devour the goose that gave them so many golden eggs.
Two recent articles address this issue. First, Peter Wilby in the Guardian; and this news piece in The Independent.
War Against Humanity, Part 2
Of course, the “Drug Wars” are only part of a much larger campaign to enclose the human community in a super-techno, ultra-modern feudal regime of servitude and dependence on the high and mighty. For some searing explications of how this pernicious dynamic operates, see this piece by Johan Hari in the Independent; and the always excellent (and harrowing) Michael Hudson in CounterPunch.
War Without End, Amen
As usual, wise man William Pfaff has much to say about the unbearable burdens of empire, in this piece on Truthout: Budget Problems, America? Try Ending Your Many Wars.
More on empire: This is what an imperial state looks like in action: not just criminalizing free speech, but putting it under a death sentence.