The War on Crime/Drugs/Poverty

Writing for The Nation, Bruce Western, a sociologist and the author of Punishment and Inequality in America, recently addressed the class component present in America's drug policy. He began by pointing out that:

America's drug policy aims to reduce illicit drug use by arresting and incarcerating dealers and, to a lesser extent, users. Whatever its merits (and there are some), the policy is deeply flawed because it is unjust. It applies only to the disadvantaged. As such, it reflects massive deficits in the areas of treatment, education and employment.

Western makes three clear and defensible claims in the quoted passage here: First, America's drug policy is punitive. It seeks neither to rehabilitate nor reintegrate a prisoner; it seeks instead to identify, isolate and punish some participants in America's underground drug economy.

Second, America's drug policy is and has long been unfair. It is unfair because, as Western puts it, "Drugs are intensively criminalized among the poor but largely unregulated among the rich." Drug sales and use allegedly is a poor black thing. Americans commonly believe that blacks use them, sell them and steal for them. The black pusher and user is a common racial stereotype. But the facts now refute this belief (.pdf). Still, if race is not the decisive factor in the criminalization of the drug economy, class is. Thus, for the poor individual who goes to court seeking a just resolution of his or her case, who believes he or she has been wrongly accused or is a victim of adverse conditions, what that person soon discovers (if, that is, he or she actually needed to discover this fact) is that it is "just us," as Richard Pryor quipped with respect to black folk, in the queue which supplies the defendant's chair. The rich and well-connected, on the other hand, can indulge their 'illicit' appetites without also immediately fearing the legal consequences of their actions. The upshot: America's drug policy is class and race biased if not also age and gender based.

Third, "In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy "[my emphasis]. It is unfortunate that, for the poor, drug control has meant being the object of aggressive policing and imprisonment. This is the kind of social policy one can expect to have when a society refuses to commit itself to providing equal opportunity to everyone. It is a kind of policy that produces low social mobility, which is to say, rigid class boundaries.

Drug policy in America has acquired social policy goals because punitive drug control directly and adversely impinges upon the already fragile and undernourished social subsystem in which the poor live and attempt to survive (Western, 2007, p. 11). Punitive drug control produces its destructive effects by removing potential and actual income earners from families; by normalizing criminal behavior, direct crime prevention and high rates of incarceration within the everyday life of the poor; and by disrupting familial and communal networks within impoverished neighborhoods. When one couples punitive drug enforcement to the pervasive and multigenerational poverty commonly found within poor areas, to the lack of opportunity available to the poor, to the inferiority of their educational, medical and service systems, it becomes clear that both the prison and the neighborhoods of the poor are little more than warehouses for America's outcasts. It is ironic that the prison today is a symbol of social order, for, with respect to the poor and their immediate environment, the criminal justice system is a producer of social disintegration. America, having rejected the public commitment to personal rehabilitation, has dedicated itself instead to the severe management of the poor (Wacquant, 2009, pp. 2-3). America has paired the poor and their habitats to its prison system.

Simply put, America's drug policy is a class thing. Unsurprisingly, it has "made an enemy of the poor," as Western declared. Because of America's drug policy, the poor embody and thereby express the stigmata (Goffman, 1963) applicable to some of the individuals America wants to hold at arm's length. These are their marks of shame. As stigmatized, the impoverished are not considered "real Americans." Rather, they sit on the far side of the boundary which separates the normal from the abnormal life in America. They are thus not like "real Americans," they are different, and are dangerous and pathogenic because of their peculiar identity (Douglas, 1966). The stigmatized represent the existence of a collective other. Their criminality reflects their impoverished lives and their intractable poverty points to the crimes they have and are likely to commit in the future. Considered differently, the categories "crime" and "poverty," "criminal" and "poor" are stigma signals (Goffman, 1963, pp.43-44). They mark an individual as a bearer of a "damaged identity." Considered together, these stigma signals are also class markers. They identify the poor as members of America's underclass. Members of the underclass are Americans that America excludes from normal social life, excluded because they typically lack work, are considered unemployable and, as a consequence, have no economic role to play. America today considers them undeserving of help and compassion.

The existence of an underground economy driven by illegal drug distribution and use does not reflect a culture of poverty among the poor or an unfortunate genetic endowment that fatefully governs their lives; rather, the underground drug economy reflects badly on America's larger, more inclusive economic system that has long been incapable of providing a good job to everyone who wants one. By a "good job" I refer to a job that employs someone and pays them a living wage for their work. By "living wage" I refer to a wage rate that realizes this norm: "[T]hat people who work for a living should not have to raise a family in poverty" (Pollin, 2003, p. 8). The underground drug economy reflects badly on America's macroeconomy because this illicit economy is just an externality produced by a macroeconomy that inexorably fails to incorporate the jobless and working poor as fully qualified members of society, that is, as citizens in the fullest sense of that word (Marshall and Bottomore, 1992, p. 18 and Marshall's argument in general). The underground drug economy has, as it were, an economic rationale for many of those who participate within it. It generates work and income to places in which both are scarce. It sates the "animal spirits" of the would-be entrepreneurs willing to risk their lives plying this trade. It even generates utilities for those who take drugs. Nevertheless, Western reverses the terms found in the normal causal claim made about America's drug epidemic when he asserts that "America doesn't have a drug problem. It has a poverty problem."

What, in sum, does it mean to claim that America's drug problem is a poverty problem? It means:

1. That much of the unemployment found in America can be considered involuntary in nature (it is unemployment due to the structural features of the American economy).

2. Unemployment, underemployment and employment at a sub-living wage cause most of the poverty found in the United States.

3. For the poor, poverty persists across the generations. The poverty which affects one generation provides a decisive condition for the children of that cohort.

4. Poverty and joblessness facilitate participation in the drug economy.

5. The United States addresses drug economy participants with a punitive drug policy that feeds the incarceration system in the United States.

It is significant that America's drug problem is a poverty problem. For one thing, the truth of this claim speaks poorly indeed of those members of America's political elite who have turned drugs and crimes into casus belli. Their blunder can be found, as one would expect, in the general commitment to a zero-tolerance and broken windows policy (see also the source document by Wilson and Kelling, pdf), an approach that refuses to address the decisive causes of the underground drug economy and focuses instead on hiding the most obvious symptoms of the problem in prisons and jails. For another, America's punitive drug policy not only fails to provide a remedy for America's drug and crime problems, the implementation of this policy actually exacerbates the problems it is meant to address, thus make drug use among the poor and the underground drug economy inevitable. History concurs, for it has plainly demonstrated that America's punitive drug policy has only made "mass imprisonment…a fact of American life" (Western, 2007, p. 189). Today, the United States is the most dedicated jailer in the world, a fact that is wholly consistent with the astonishing inequality found in the country and with the qualitative decay of a form of life that was once the envy of the world.

*…*…*…*…*…*…*…*

Western believes that meaningful reform may become possible soon. He may be right about this. Driven by the costs of incarceration and declining state revenues, various states are seeking to reduce their prison populations. "Hard times," Western rightly asserts, "are forcing reform on a profligate policy."

Yet, he may be wrong, too. In order to assess this possibility, we ought to begin with the fact that America now confronts a divisive, critical and systemic problem, one that could undermine any drug policy reform effort: The recession. After all, the newly free will not remerge as fully qualified and working members of a well-integrated, fair and productive society. These days every boat does not rise with the tide. Some sink, drowning all aboard. An capitalist economy in its decline phase will see to that. Thus the lately-released prisoner is likely to be unemployed and to remain unemployable indefinitely. This outcome is ironic since it is the recession which now drives the various states to reduce their prison populations just as it is the recession that will severely inhibit the adoption of the social programs needed to manage the transition into society for the prisoners the cash-strapped states set free. This irony issues from the condition of the economy: America today has an aggregate real unemployment rate that exceeds 20 percent, according to Shadow Government Stats. This historically rare and high rate tells us that work is both scarce and an asset which work-blessed individuals and groups would likely defend against encroachments by putative outsiders. Given this labor market competition, which increases in intensity when the economy sheds jobs and when prisoners enter the labor market, we should not expect solidarity among the poor and insecure to spontaneously and efficiently emerge. Solidarity in this instance would be a historically significant political achievement. Nor should we expect America's capitalists and its upper-middle class to freely cover the costs for a full employment economy and a capable and humane system of social services. We know this because their political representatives in Washington are now fighting to increase their share of America's wealth. Employment policy, like drug policy, is a class thing.

What would the current and future jobless Americans provide to 'their' society? What will be their contribution to the integrity of the social whole? Their contribution will be to stand apart from the fully qualified Americans, to be a sign which points to the fate of those who cannot fit in. That fate: To be members of a "surplus population," to live "wasted lives" (Bauman, 2004).

As long as the United States as a whole, and as a self-aware and minimally free society, can tolerate a stable high-employment economy and inasmuch as the political elite continually refuses to generate a credible full-employment project, then some Americans will have their lives wasted by circumstances they cannot master. This fate now threatens more than the prisoner, the undereducated, the African, Latino and impoverished. It also threatens those who believed they had earned some respect with their lives.

Terrorism in Michigan

Michigan.com reports that:

Nearly 20 black families in one Eastpointe neighborhood received viscous, threatening letters Tuesday telling them they need to "move across 8 Mile."

"We tired of u n------ keep movin in are neighborhood!!" read the letter. "you need to move across 8 mile. we just need to start killing you n------ one by one!"

There also have been terrorist incidents related to the most recent one, and these included cross burnings and hate messages delivered to black residents.

Quarantine

The ACLU is on the job in Arizona:

Senate Republicans attempt to smear Elena Kagan

Her sin, it seems, was the time she spent as Justice Thurgood Marshall's clerk and claims him as a hero! Talking Points Memo reports:

Looks like Senate Judiciary Republicans have at least one unified talking point today: Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to ever serve on the Supreme Court, was an "activist judge." As Elena Kagan kept on her listening face, multiple senators slammed both Marshall's judicial philosophy and her service as his clerk in the late 1980s.

Ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) criticized Kagan for having "associated herself with well-known activist judges who have used their power to redefine the meaning of our constitution and have the result of advancing that judge's preferred social policies," citing Marshall as his son, Thurgood Marshall Jr., sat in the audience of the Judiciary Committee hearings.

In an example of how much the GOP focused on Marshall, his name came up 35 times. President Obama's name was mentioned just 14 times today.

Sessions said Kagan's reverence for Marshall "tells us much about the nominee," and he meant that more as an indictment than a compliment.

News from the bizarro world

Socialism — paint it black

Tim Wise makes this point about the reactionary right:

Throughout the first six months of his administration, President Obama — perhaps one of the most politically cautious leaders in contemporary history — has been routinely portrayed as a radical by his opponents on the far-right. In particular, persons who have apparently never actually studied Marxism (or if they did, managed to somehow find therein support for such things as bailing out banks and elite corporations) contend that Obama is indeed a socialist. Reducing all government action other than war-making to part of a larger socialist conspiracy, the right contends that health care reform is socialist, capping greenhouse gas emissions is socialist, even providing incentives for driving fuel efficient cars is socialist. That the right insists upon Obama's radical-left credentials, even as they push an Obama=Hitler meme (something they apparently think is fair, since, after all the Nazis were National Socialists, albeit the kind who routinely murdered the genuine article) only speaks to the special brand of crazy currently in vogue among the nation's reactionary forces.

As real socialists laugh at these clumsily made broadsides, and as scholars of actual socialist theory try and explain the absurdity of the analogies being drawn by conservative commentators, a key point seems to have been missed, and it is this point that best explains what the red-baiting is actually about.

It is not, and please make note of it, about socialism. Or capitalism. Or economics at all, per se.

What, then, motivates the right's rancorous broadsides if it is not their fear of a creeping socialism?

…[W]hat differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing — his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope. Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor. In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

"Racism — the socialism of fools," to use an updated version August Bebel's celebrated aperçu.

The color of welfare?

One might gather that the racists within the Republican Party believe welfare to be black, and this confluence of a collective identity and a political institution includes health care measures like Medicare and surely a single-payer health care system. This, in any case, is Leslie Savan's point:

With every passing day it gets harder to think of this sudden dialing-up of whiny hate speech as sheer coincidence. Instead, it's beginning to look inevitable — so much so that maybe the real question is, What is it about health care that brings out the latent racism in the GOP?

The answer is simple: For two or three generations, Republicans have defeated progressive reform of the health care system by hinting that it would mean redistributing wealth from whites to blacks. As Beck himself said, practically redefining "welfare queen" as "healthcare queen": "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill, are transforming America, and they're all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea: reparations."

To be sure, this race-based backlash has driven the Republican Party since the election of 1968. During its gestation racism clearly damaged Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Richard Nixon's Family Assistance plan and reached its bi-partisan nadir when Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1966. Yet it is ironic that America's exceptional condition, namely, that as a modern industrial economy the United States also lacks an adequate social safety net, will fall heavily on the white middle class — Nixon's infamous "silent majority" — during the current depression. The irony derives from the reversal effected by this racist politics: The downwardly mobile white middle class needs or will soon need the kind of programs it wanted to destroy when they were seemingly targeted towards a minority.

The optimistic Savan believes the new situation includes a political opportunity:

But watching the Republican Party morph into the National Association for the Advancement of White People should give us all hope, not despair: Anything that brings 'em out of the closet and gets 'em running naked through the streets shouting, "I'm the victim here, dammit!" will only ensure their minority status over the long run.

It is unfortunate, though, that the Democratic Party is not worth a damn…. After all, the Democratic Party spells "pragmatic" as "crude opportunism."

ColorOfChange organizes a Glenn Beck campaign

You can let Beck's advertisers know that you disapprove his antics by clicking here.

A new whine from bug-eyed Pat

It looks as though the Sotomayor confirmation hearings set off Pat Buchanan:

Republicans have been given fair warning.

Should GOP senators treat Sonia Sotomayor as contemptuously as Democrats treated Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, they should expect Hispanic hostility for a generation.

The chutzpah of this Beltway crowd does not cease to amaze.

It also appears that bug-eyed Pat believes the Hispanic population of the United States takes orders from his "Beltway crowd" or that his Beltway crowd includes the Hispanic population of the United States. I say this because he links the two categories, ambiguously, I would add, in the passage quoted above. Rational people may safely doubt the truth of this one.

It also seems that Buchanan, a Washington dead-ender if such a person exists, does not belong to the Beltway crowd or at least he does not belong to this Beltway crowd, although he may belong to another Beltway crowd (the Washington faction of the Irish-Catholic KKK wannabes?). What is clear is bug-eyed Pat's logical inconsistency in this matter does not bother him any more than his hypocrisy does. Thus, he continues:

They [Buchanan's Beltway insiders] archly demand that conservatives accord a self-described "affirmative action baby" from Princeton a respect they never for a moment accorded a pro-life conservative mother of five from Idaho State, Sarah Palin.

First, does Buchanan wish his readers to infer that he believes it proper to heap abuse on Judge Sotomayor? Why, after all, does he associate the opportunities Judge Sotomayor received — and acknowledges receiving (on which, see this) — from affirmative action with what he believes to be a questionable demand for respect. If Sotomayor's career indicates anything pertinent about affirmative action, it provides a bit of evidence demonstrating the need to use affirmative action programs as a mechanism of rectifacatory justice.

Anyway, the difference between the respect offered to Sotomayor and Palin might be attributable to the fact that Judge Sotomayor has excelled in her life's work while ex-Governor Palin recently entered the national political stage as a McCain peace offering to the reactionary right and then quickly became America's poster girl for the Babbitts and Gantrys among us. In fact, Palin's witlessness was only one of her qualifications for national office. Another qualification issued from the attacks made on her from those sitting to her left (as suggested by this). Saint Sarah — victim. To be sure, bug-eyed Pat would never let injustice such as this stand without comment. As a part of his fearless and ongoing work intended to promote equality of opportunity for all of God's children in America, Buchanan offers the following counsel to the Republican Party:

What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.

Senate Republicans tried to do just this; they have failed so far. I wonder why?

White like me…

Michael Steele — blockhead

Limbaugh on Sotomayor

Bug-eyed Pat rides again

TPM kindly provides this gem:

Obama stands with Israel

The requirements of empire prevail

The Washington Post tells us that:

The Obama administration appears to be standing by its decision to boycott the World Conference Against Racism next week in Geneva, despite efforts to focus and tone down language in a draft conference document viewed as hostile toward Israel.

The preliminary conference document ran 45 pages and called for reparations for slavery, condemned the "validation of Islamophobia," and asserted that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is grounded in racism.

In response to objections raised by negotiators from the Obama administration, the document has since been dramatically shortened and many of its sharp statements have been removed. Still, the administration seems uninterested in attending, stoking frustration among activist groups who have said that it is ironic that the nation's first black president would choose that course. [link added]

Apparently the United States could not tolerate even an empire-friendly version of this anti-racism document!

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said that although progress has been made in revising the draft text, concerns remain. "We hope that these remaining concerns will be addressed, so that the United States can reengage the conference negotiations in the hopes of arriving at a conference document that we can support," he said.

Clearly the United States opposes racism without qualification except in those instances where it benefits from racist attitudes and practices. Given this iron commitment, Obama's defense of Israel appears ironic only if the observer ignores America's long-standing commitment to Israel and Obama's sturdy dedication to the American political system. The President is, after all, a product of that system, and it would be imprudent to expect him to undermine a key element of that system, such as thoughtless support for Israel's imperial and genocidal policies.

Some crisis links (11.20.2008)

The election of Barack Obama: How did this improbable event come about? M. Shahid Alam addresses the question and rightly argues:

The answer is sobering. We can thank the financial meltdown and, in some measure, the threat of an Armageddon — likely to follow Palin's succession to a geriatric McCain — for Obama's victory. There was no shifting of tectonic [racial] plates on this continent.

If anything, America's unquestioning identification of Obama as a 'black' candidate is deeply problematic. It demonstrates that the United States remains firmly rooted in ideas of race that go back to the era of slavery and Jim Crow Laws.

Indeed, first of all, Obama clearly was the best of the duopoly candidates. Moreover, he revealed his comparatively greater worth when he ran a strong and disciplined campaign to get the Democratic nomination and to win the Presidential election. Despite the quality of Obama's campaign, McCain and Palin, two dim bulbs burdened with much baggage, were making a go of it until America's "Black September" provided the electorate with the motive it needed to avoid making another ghastly and costly mistake. More significant still is the fact that Barack Obama's candidacy posed no threat at all to America's elite, despite the specious claims made by the McCain campaign and its fellow travelers. Obama, with his charisma, popular support and his intrinsic conservatism, may have been the best choice for the elite given the mess the Bush regime will leave for the next administration to manage.

Nonetheless and contrary to Alam's final judgment, it remains the case that a racially divided country, one with race-based slavery and genocide in its history, did elect an "other" instead of the candidate with the "politically correct" skin color. It also chose the well-educated and sophisticated man over his cartoonish, faux populist opponents. This, I believe, can and ought to be considered a victory for good sense, albeit a much smaller triumph than first appearances tend to suggest. I believe there is no harm in recognizing it as such.

Jobless claims rose to a 16-year high last month, according to the New York Times and Department of Labor reports (see this and this). And the recession is likely just beginning.

Some pertinent observations (11.6.2008)

Binoy Kampmark asserts that "Obama's victory, if nothing else, allows Americans to claim that their state is more democratic than it is, and more tolerant than it might be."

Frank Menetrez warns his readers about the dangers inherent in an Obama personality cult:

Obama will undoubtedly be better than Bush was and better than McCain would have been, and the differences matter. But a realistic assessment of the scope of those differences is imperative. Without it, people who really care about changing this country's direction will end up counting on one man, Obama, instead of on themselves to bring about the change we need. Those people will inevitably be disappointed.

Tom Engelhardt assesses the nearly completed election spectacle thusly:

Sometimes, reality simply outruns the words meant to describe it. Historically, when a new Chinese dynasty came to power, the emperor performed a ceremony called "the rectification of names" — on the theory that the previous dynasty had fallen, in part, because reality and the names for it had gone so out of whack, because words no longer described the world they were meant for.

After the Bush years, we desperately need such a rectification. And perhaps we need a new word — maybe a whole new vocabulary — as well for the "election season" that never ends, that seems now something like a grim, eternal American Idol contest.

He continues:

I can't help but think, despite the quality of the man who somehow ended up atop our world, that this was indeed an imperial election, far too supersized for any real democracy. Yes, Americans crudely expressed the displeasure of a people who had had enough, and thank heavens for that, but… our will? The People's Will. I doubt greatly that the People's Will is going to make it to Washington with Barack Obama.

It is unfortunate but altogether true that elections in the United States are meant to neutralize the "people's will," divided and inarticulate as it mostly is. They accomplish this by reconciling the decision-making power invested in the electoral mechanism and those who use this mechanism with the demands and powers of those who run America's empire. Elitism is an inherent feature of a modern society. Elections work to legitimate this system and those who sit at its apex.

Timothy Garton Ash wrote:

Mark carefully, however, what the Obama model is. It deploys civic nationalism to transcend ethnic diversity. Many of Tuesday's revellers were waving the stars and stripes, or sporting it on some part of their dress. No right-wing Republican could insist more than Obama does on American uniqueness, exceptionalism, manifest destiny. His proclaimed purpose is "to make this century the next American century". If George W Bush said that, we from the rest of the world might regard it as rank nationalist arrogance. Because it's Obama, we somehow accept it.

I suspect many outsiders (non-American observers of the world) accept Obama's nationalism because they believe — wrongly, perhaps — that the President elect will refuse to transform his sentiment into an aggressive militarism as President Bush had after 9.11. Their hope may issue from a wish that the United States will return to being a just empire — an enlightened despot! — just like the global superpower they believed had existed in the past. Yet, the American empire was never benign. America has often supported dictators when doing so suited its purposes and has cruelly opposed the peasants, working and middle classes whenever members of these categories dared to hold their heads high by meddling in affairs that concerned Uncle Sam. George Bush did not invent America the genocidal killer; he inherited the force needed to commit this kind of crime and the will to carry it out the criminal deed. Obama's greatest challenge will be to reject the intentions embedded in this sorry history. Making this refusal will be Obama's greatest challenge because it is America's greatest challenge.

James Ridgeway on President Obama

Ridgeway's judgment nearly sounds right to my ears:

If the United States today elects an African American man to the presidency, that event will mark a turning point in US history and culture. It will genuinely represent a triumph of hope over fear — all the more so because Barack Obama for the most part ran a dignified and inclusive campaign, in the face of the hateful and divisive rhetoric of John McCain. It's significance cannot be overstated. Yet, as Ken Silverstein of Harpers observes, an Obama victory is "not about politics but about the man." Ironically, Obama may transform the face and spirit of a nation, without dramatically changing the substance of its policies.

I would only add that an Obama victory would belong not just to Barack Obama, the man, but also to America's citizens as a whole. I would include the latter since, in order have this specific man as their President, these citizens will have had to have rejected centuries of race hatred by electing the best duopoly candidate for the job without caring a damn about his race. This will be a victory — a small victory, but a victory nonetheless — for the country.

Double Yikes….

Using the N-Word at a Palin rally

Via the Red State Rebels.

The 'squads' at work in Johnstown, PA