Sirota: 5 ways GOP can shrink government

Make GOP end the drug war

By David Sirota

March 5, 2013 | Salon

URL: http://www.salon.com/2013/03/05/beating_gop_at_its_own_small_government_game/

Obama Admin. confirms that banksters are above the law

The banksters run the world. Even when they break the law, their TBTF banks are too "systemically important" to the financial system to prosecute them, even if it's for something as blatant as laundering drug money:

Nor have any individuals been charged at the five other big European banks that have also managed to dodge formal money-laundering charges in recent years, including British bank Standard Chartered, which entered its own deferred prosecution agreement on Monday. Apparently, all of this constant money laundering was done by robots.

"The message this is sending is if you want to engage in money laundering, make sure you're doing it within the context of your employment at a bank," [Notre Dame law professor Jimmy] Gurulé said in a phone interview. "And don't go small. Do it on a very large scale, and you won't get prosecuted."

By contrast, in 2010, the U.S. Congress took it upon itself to impose a mandatory sentence of 5 years in prison for possessing 28 grams of crack cocaine (that's down from 5 years for 5 grams in the 1980s).  So why isn't laundering billions of dollars of drug money or Iranian embargo money worth a mandatory sentence in prison?  Maybe I sound like an angry black man, but when you make these simple comparisons then you see who writes the laws, and for whom. The game is fixed.

UPDATE (12.14.2012): My man Matt Taibbi also made the obvious banksters-drug users comparison on prosecutions and mandatory sentencing on his Rolling Stone blog a day after I did.

Obama Administration Essentially Admits That Some Banks Are Too Big To Jail, Which Is Troubling

By Mark Gongloff

December 11, 2012

URL: http://huff.to/YXKOpr

Costas, Belcher and gun-rights idiocy

Yeah, I agree with Will Bunch, the whole, "It's too soon," line after NFL player Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend and then himself in order to put off public discussion of overdue gun control measures annoys me as well, since multiple-victim gun crimes happen all the time in America. What's too soon for the latest shooting is indeed just a few days or even hours prior to the next shooting. Indeed, a multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the U.S.  So it's always appropriate and timely to ask why Americans need so many damn guns -- especially semi-automatic handguns and big ammo clips.

In preemptive response to this latest shooting, conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and AEI's John Lott (FOX's go-to gun apologist after high-profile shooting rampages) have been trotting out the usual statistics about the high rate of gun crime in cities with stricter gun control, like New York and Washington, DC, hoping that we'll pretend America isn't wide open, as if somebody couldn't easily buy a gun in another city or state and take it into NYC or DC... which is exactly what they do.  

They also point to relatively lower gun crime rates in right-to-carry (RTC) states; however, they fail to cite gun crime statistics before & after concealed-carry or RTC laws were passed, so that we can analyze the before-and-after effect. In fact, these were places with lower incidence of gun crime beforehand as well. Based on all the evidence, Yale Law School professor John J. Donahue concluded that:

All we can really say is that we know that there is no evidence of reduction in violent crime when RTC laws are passed, and that, although there is evidence of increases in property crime, the theoretical basis for such a finding is weak. We do know that anything that increases the number of guns in circulation will increase the number of guns in the hands of criminals, since about 1.5 million guns are stolen every year. [Emphasis mine. - J]

These same conservative commentators are also lying to us that countries with stricter gun control see gun crime increase. It's simply not true. According the PolitiFact, the U.S. has about 3.0 firearm homicides per 100,000 population; while other affluent nations like Great Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan, etc. "typically have rates...far less than one-third the frequency seen in the U.S."

So once again, there is no debate if you're not cherry-picking your facts. People who want guns simply want guns. Their selfish desire for a gun is the only non-BS justification for their ownership, besides our antiquated 2nd Amendment. 

And let me throw in another factoid to stir up to pot. Yes, most gun murders do occur in urban areas, as conservatives love to point out, and they are mostly committed by racial minorities in drug-related disputes. However, most multiple-victim shooting rampages -- those evil, senseless murders that leave us shaking our heads and questioning human nature -- are committed by white guys (or white boys) in suburban and rural areas.  I'm not ready to say one crime is worse than the other, but at least in the case of drugs crime, we can say that there is some kind of reason... and some hope to mitigate it, like legalizing some drugs, fighting gangs or encouraging drug-addiction treatment. However, there is no such hope to stop multiple-victim shootings, because they happen everywhere, and, almost as a rule, they are committed by white guys with no prior criminal history. The only uniting factor in all multiple-victim shootings is easy, legal access to deadly firearms.

Bob Costas Learns the Right Time to Talk About Guns in America: Never

By Will Bunch

December 4, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/bob-costas-jovan-belcher-guns_b_2234732.html

'Invisible Men': Overlooked black inmates

My goodness, what an oversight: 

[Professor of sociology Becky] Pettit realised that many surveys conducted by government agencies exclude people in the prison population from their research and findings. When Pettit added them in, she found that it dramatically altered the picture of the status of black America, as the number of black Americans in jail is disproportionately high. About half of the 2.3 million people in US prisons are black.

[...]  When prisoners are included, the employment rate for young black men who have dropped out of school sinks from an already low 42% to 26%.  

[...]  "We have developed a distorted view of how black Americans are faring in our society," Pettit said. The reason given for this in Pettit's work is the high rate of incarceration of black Americans. The rate is so steep that government estimates suggest that eventually one in three of all black male adults will spend some time in prison if current trends continue.

So why are so many black men locked up? The failed War on Drugs:

In the 1930s, blacks were three times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, but the figure now is seven times more likely. Some experts put this down to the "war on drugs", which has affected black communities far more than others, seeing increased arrests of blacks, often for non-violent offences. "There is no evidence that drug use is dramatically different by race or ethnicity, but the pattern of arrests is very different," said Ernest Drucker, author of a recent book, A Plague of Prisons.

Barack Obama's presidency 'has not helped cause of black people in US'

By Paul Harris

October 13, 2012 | Observer

URL: http://gu.com/p/3b4pb