- Ihre Papiere, Bitte!: Are We Being Set Up For A National ID System?
Via John Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute,
You can’t have it both ways.
You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.
You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.
You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.
If you’re inclined to advance this double standard because you believe you have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide, beware: there’s always a boomerang effect.
Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now – whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again – rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.
Nothing is ever as simple as the government claims it is.
The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police.
The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention.
The war on immigration will be yet another war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”
So you see, when you talk about empowering government agents to demand identification from anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant—the current scheme being entertained by the Trump administration to ferret out and cleanse the country of illegal immigrants—what you’re really talking about is creating a society in which you are required to identify yourself to any government worker who demands it.
Just recently, in fact, passengers arriving in New York’s JFK Airport on a domestic flight from San Francisco were ordered to show their “documents” to border patrol agents in order to get off the plane.
This is how you pave the way for a national identification system.
Americans have always resisted adopting a national ID card for good reason: it gives the government and its agents the ultimate power to target, track and terrorize the populace according to the government’s own nefarious purposes.
National ID card systems have been used before by oppressive governments—in Nazi Germany against the Jews, in South Africa against black citizens, in Rwanda against the Tutsis—in the name of national security, invariably with horrifying results.
In the United States, post-9/11, more than 750 Muslim men were rounded up on the basis of their religion and ethnicity and detained for up to eight months. Their experiences echo those of 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were similarly detained 75 years ago following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to declare illegal.
Fast forward to the Trump administration’s war on illegal immigration, and you have the perfect storm necessary for the adoption of a national ID card, the ultimate human tracking device, which would make the police state’s task of monitoring, tracking and singling out individual suspects—citizen and noncitizen alike—far simpler.
A federalized, computerized, cross-referenced, databased system of identification policed by government agents would be the final nail in the coffin for privacy.
Granted, in the absence of a national ID system, “we the people” are already tracked in a myriad of ways. This informational glut—used to great advantage by both the government and corporate sectors—is converging into a mandate for “an internal passport,” a.k.a., a national ID card that would store information as basic as a person’s name, birth date and place of birth, as well as private information, including a Social Security number, fingerprint, retina scan and personal, criminal and financial records.
The Real ID Act, which imposes federal standards on identity documents such as state drivers’ licenses, is the prelude to this national identification system.
At some point, however, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white. It will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen. It will not matter whether you’re rich or poor. It won’t even matter whether you’re driving, flying or walking.
Eventually, all that will matter is whether some government agent—poorly trained, utterly ignorant of the Constitution, way too hyped up on the power of their badges, and authorized to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—chooses to single you out for special treatment.
You see, the police state does not discriminate.
It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from allowing government agents to stop and demand identification from someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant to empowering government agents to subject anyone—citizen and noncitizen alike—to increasingly intrusive demands that they prove not only that they are legally in the country, but that they are also lawful, in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books, and not suspected of having committed some crime or other.
It’s no longer a matter of if, but when.
In the case of a national identification system, it might start off as a means of curtailing illegal immigration, but it will end up as a means of controlling the American people.
We have been down this road before.
Reporting on the trial of Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker in 1963, Hannah Arendt describes the “submissive meekness with which Jews went to their death”:
…arriving on time at the transportation points, walking under their own power to the places of execution, digging their own graves, undressing and making neat piles of their clothing, and lying down side by side to be shot—seemed a telling point, and the prosecutor, asking witness after witness, “Why did you not protest?,” “Why did you board the train?,”
“Fifteen thousand people were standing there and hundreds of guards facing you—why didn’t you revolt and charge and attack these guards?,” harped on it for all it was worth. But the sad truth of the matter is that the point was ill taken, for no non-Jewish group or non-Jewish people had behaved differently.
The lessons of history are clear: chained, shackled and imprisoned in a detention camp, there is little chance of resistance. The time to act is now, before it¹s too late. Indeed, there is power in numbers, but if those numbers will not unite and rise up against their oppressors, there can be no resistance.
As Arendt concludes, “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere.”
It does not have to happen here.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we do not have to condemn ourselves to life under an oppressive, authoritarian regime.
We do not have to become our own jailers.
We do not have to dig our own graves.
We do not have to submit.
- De Blasio Vows To Spend $300mm On NYC Shelters As Homeless Crisis Spirals Out Of Control
It’s fairly safe to say that Mayor Bill de Blasio has fallen ‘slightly’ short of his original campaign goal to remedy the homelessness crisis in New York City. In fact, The New York Post summed up the current situation in NYC fairly succinctly back in July 2015:
Unfortunately, particularly for a man seeking re-election later this year, the following stats on NYC homelessness are fairly damning.
So what do you do when you’re up for re-election in about 8 months and realize that you oversaw a massive expansion of a problem you previously vowed to eradicate? Well, you throw as much taxpayer money as necessary at that problem to make it go way, of course. Per the New York Daily News:
Mayor de Blasio unveiled an ambitious new plan Tuesday to address the vexing challenge of housing the homeless, vowing to build dozens more shelters but saying little about where he’d put them and acknowledging it won’t solve the crisis.
In a speech in lower Manhattan, the mayor promised to stop using the expensive hotels and the private apartments in “cluster sites” that the city has been reluctantly utilizing to house a homeless population that grows each year.
Instead, the mayor said he would move the homeless now staying in these places — many of which are plagued by decrepit conditions — into 90 new, traditional city shelters across the city.
Although the mayor said nothing about funding during his hour-long speech, his aides said later the city will spend $300 million over five years to build the shelters.
Meanwhile, even members of De Blasio’s own party blasted his lack of details and obvious attempt to just throw money at the the problem it hopes that it simple goes away.
Assemblyman Erik Dilan, a Brooklyn Democrat who as a city councilman was chairman of the Housing Committee, raised concerns about the high number of shelters.
“It’s going to be very difficult,” Dilan said. “There’s going to be an uproar in neighborhoods because they’d rather see people in permanent housing.”
“I am disheartened. I see more aspiration than reality,” said Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx), whose district has the highest concentration of cluster sites in the city.
“The city has been throwing the kitchen sink at the crisis, expending hundreds of millions of dollars, and none of it seems to be working,” he said.
“Our community wants to be respected,” he said. “We’ve sort of heard this story before, so the proof will be in the pudding.”
We sense an opening for you, Hillary.
- The Fed's Dependence On The Consumer Will Backfire
Via C.Jay Engel of The Mises Institute,
The story is that it is consumers that are going "to push the economy to grow more than 2 percent this year." That's Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan's recently expressed view. It's the old fallacy of spending — rather than saving — our way into growth.
It's remarkable that no one talks about the fact that the economy since 2008 was built on little but cheap debt, and therefore depends on the continued flow of such debt.
To raise interest rates in that environment, will lead to the very conditions that the Fed fears the most. Of course, Austrians would praise such a blessed blow to the artificial boom. However, since the Fed, operating through a Keynesian lens, sees no inherent instability in such an economic environment. They don't see how much this would severely undermine the alleged stability they think they've achieved.
Kaplan and the rest of them are depending on indebted consumers, exhausted by their credit levels, to push the economy all the way up to 2 percent growth. That it's come down to this speaks volumes about the Fed's alleged success over the years. Aside from the terrible labor participation rate is the fact that we are now supposed to be impressed by a GDP growth print above 2 percent. And even worse, the economy is so bad that in order to hit this 2 percent mark, we have to rely on the consumer.
Beyond this, we just got the 2016 fourth quarter GDP numbers and guess what: it came in at a seriously lousy 1.9 percent. The "expectations" were in the 2.1 percent range. It gets even better: this low number was in spite of a 3 percent increase in consumer spending. This of course means that the spending isn't helping. And without it, where would economic growth be then?
If the Fed raises rates, where will the "recovery" go? Or more accurately, where will the facade of a recovery go?
- House Democrats Delayed Dismissal Of IT Staff 'Hackers' Because They Were Muslim American
A month ago, three Muslim American brothers who managed office IT were barred from congressional computers (on suspicion that they accessed computers without permission). While many congressmen immediately relieved them of their duties, two House Democrats decided to delay the firing (until today) because their Muslim background, some with ties to Pakistan, could make them easy targets for false charges.
Imran Awan seen below with Bill Clinton
As we previously reported, the three brothers (Abid, Imran, and Jamal Awan) who managed office IT for members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other lawmakers were barred from computer networks at the House of Representatives Thursday, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.
Three members of the intelligence panel and five members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs were among the dozens of members who employed the suspects on a shared basis. The two committees deal with many of the nation’s most sensitive issues, information and documents, including those related to the war on terrorism.
The brothers are suspected of serious violations, including accessing members’ computer networks without their knowledge and stealing equipment from Congress.
The three men are “shared employees,” meaning they are hired by multiple offices, which split their salaries and use them as needed for IT services. It is up to each member to fire them from working…
While many congressmen did fire them immediately (and barred them from congressional systems), Politico reports that, one month after being barred from congressional systems, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) have finally fired the IT staff…
Meeks said he isn’t convinced Alvi and Imran Awan, both of whom worked in his office at different times, are involved in the alleged procurement scam but that Alvi was dismissed because the investigation was interrupting the day-to-day functions of his office.
“As of right now, I don’t see a smoking gun,” Meeks said. “I have seen no evidence that they were doing anything that was nefarious.”
Meeks said he was hesitant to believe the accusations against Alvi, Imran Awan and the three other staffers, saying their background as Muslim Americans, some with ties to Pakistan, could make them easy targets for false charges.
“I wanted to be sure individuals are not being singled out because of their nationalities or their religion. We want to make sure everybody is entitled to due process,” Meeks said.
“They had provided great service for me. And there were certain times in which they had permission by me, if it was Hina or someone else, to access some of my data.”
Fudge told Politico on Tuesday she would employ Imran Awan until he received “due process.”
“He needs to have a hearing. Due process is very simple. You don’t fire someone until you talk to them,” Fudge said.
On Wednesday, Lauren Williams, a spokeswoman for Fudge, wouldn’t provide details about Imran Awan’s firing but did confirm he was still employed in Fudge’s office as of Tuesday afternoon.
The bottom line is simple – these House Democrats decided it was better to be at risk of hacking and extortion than to be accused of racism.
And just for good measure, Politico reports that Awan has long-standing relationships with Meeks, Wasserman Schultz and Fudge. Meeks was one of the first lawmakers Awan worked for after coming to Capitol Hill in 2004. He joined Wasserman Schultz’s office in 2005 and started working for Fudge in 2008. In addition, Meeks and, to a larger extent, Wasserman Schultz, are said to have a friendly personal relationship with Awan and his wife, according to multiple sources. Awan made nearly $2 million since starting as an IT support staffer for House Democrats in 2004, according to public salary data. Alvi, who worked for House Democrats beginning in 2007, earned more than $1.3 million as an IT staffer during that time.
- Van Jones Crushes College Safe Space Crusaders
Via Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Nothing that Van Jones states in the clip below is novel. Many of us have making the exact same point for many years. Nevertheless, he delivers the argument in such a passionate and eloquent way, it is indeed worth applauding and sharing.
This clip got me thinking about why those who oppose Trump seem so incapable of offering thoughtful, empowering resistance other than to quote George W. Bush or engage in CIA worship. I think part of the problem goes back to the fact that we’ve been telling young people that they’re victims for pretty much their whole lives. If you convince everyone that they’re a victim, they’ll start acting like victims.
Victims are the last thing this society needs. We need strong, ethical, courageous men and women who are willing to step up the plate, challenge authority and make this world a better place. College safe spaces are simply assembly lines for creating future victims, and we’ve got more than enough of those.
* * *
Finally, as we have noted previously, and hope it is slowly being drummed into the small closed minds of millennials…
The Only Safe Space Is Your Home
No matter where you go in life, someone will be there to offend you. Maybe it’s a joke you overheard on vacation, a spat at the office, or a difference of opinion with someone in line at the grocery store. Inevitably, someone will offend you and your values. If you cannot handle that without losing control of your emotions and reverting back to your “safe space” away from the harmful words of others, then you’re best to just stay put at home. Remember, though: if people in the outside world scare you, people on the internet will downright terrify you. It’s probably best to just accept these harsh realities of life and go out into the world prepared to confront them wherever they may be waiting.
- Stockman: "Trump Will Create A Debt Crisis Like Never Before"
Having warned that "everything will grind to a halt on March 5th" due to the under-appreciated debt-ceiling debacle that looms over Washington, and exclaiming that "what is going on today is complete insanity," former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman is rapidly losing faith that anything can be done…
"I've thrown in the towel because he’s not paying attention and he’s not learning anything and he’s making ridiculous statements."
Reflecting on Trump's address to Congress, and what we know of The White House agenda, Stockman told Fox Business' Neil Cavuto:
"We don’t need a $54 billion increase in defense when the budget already is ten times bigger than that of Russia. We don’t need $6 trillion of defense spending over the next decade because China is going nowhere except trying to keep their Ponzi scheme together."
Stockman rejected Trump's dynamic scoring hope…
"Trump is so deep in fiscal la-la-land, he won't even find the wrong envelope… he is saying crazy things."
And wasn’t sold on Speaker Ryan’s Obamacare plan.
“If you look at the Ryan draft that came out over the weekend, it’s basically Obamacare-like. It’s not really repealing anything,” he said.
“It’s basically reneging and turning the Medicaid expansion into a block grant, turning the exchanges into tax credits [and] it’s still going to cost trillions of dollars.”
Last week, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, told FOX Business the administration is “focused on an aggressive timeline” to produce a tax reform plan by August Opens a New Window. , but in Stockman’s opinion, tax reform won’t happen this year.
http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/embed.js?id=5341550706001&w=466&h=263
Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com
He also warned that the administration’s run up against the debt ceiling this summer could lead to a debt crisis.
“I don’t think we will see the tax cuts this year at all,” he said.
“There is going to be a debt ceiling crisis like never before this summer and that’s what people don’t realize. They’ve burned up all the cash that Obama left on the balance sheet for whatever reason.”
Stockman added that "…by the time we get to June or July, we are going to see a debt ceiling crisis like never before."
As a reminder, Stockman warned last week:
“I think what people are missing is this date, March 15th 2017. That’s the day that this debt ceiling holiday that Obama and Boehner put together right before the last election in October of 2015. That holiday expires. The debt ceiling will freeze in at $20 trillion. It will then be law. It will be a hard stop. The Treasury will have roughly $200 billion in cash. We are burning cash at a $75 billion a month rate. By summer, they will be out of cash. Then we will be in the mother of all debt ceiling crises. Everything will grind to a halt. I think we will have a government shutdown. There will not be Obama Care repeal and replace. There will be no tax cut. There will be no infrastructure stimulus. There will be just one giant fiscal bloodbath over a debt ceiling that has to be increased and no one wants to vote for.”
Stockman also predicts very positive price moves for gold and silver as a result of the coming budget calamity.
- AG Sessions Accused Of Lying To Congress Over Contact With Russian Ambassador
Just when you thought the 'Russians-did-it' meme was fading, WaPo reporters manage to find DoJ officials who say then-Senator Jeff Sessions spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States – encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts with Moscow during his confirmation hearing to become attorney general.
//www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/5350986c-fed4-11e6-9b78-824ccab94435
At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.
“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded.
He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
And now, as The Hill reports that according to The Washington Post report, President Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, spoke twice with Russia's ambassador to the United States while Trump was on the campaign trail.
Justice Department officials said one of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in Sessions's office. The private meeting reportedly took place during the same time intelligence officials have said Russia was interfering with the U.S. presidential election through a hacking campaign.
Officials said Sessions did not consider the conversations relevant to the lawmakers’ questions and did not remember in detail what he discussed with Kislyak.
“There was absolutely nothing misleading about his answer,” said Sarah Isgur Flores, Sessions’s spokeswoman.
A Sessions spokeswoman said Sessions was acting as a member of the Armed Services Committee, not as a Trump surrogate, when he spoke with the ambassador, and was not trying to mislead senators when he said during his confirmation hearing that he had not had contacts with Moscow. She added that Sessions last year had more than 25 conversations with foreign ambassadors as a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, including the British, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Indian, Chinese, Canadian, Australian and German ambassadors, in addition to Kislyak.
When asked to comment on Sessions’s contacts with Kislyak, Franken said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday:
“If it’s true that Attorney General Sessions met with the Russian ambassador in the midst of the campaign, then I am very troubled that his response to my questioning during his confirmation hearing was, at best, misleading.
Franken added: “It is now clearer than ever that the attorney general cannot, in good faith, oversee an investigation at the Department of Justice and the FBI of the Trump-Russia connection, and he must recuse himself immediately.”
And just like that, the "russians-did-it" meme is back on top of the news cycle into the weekend.
We leave it to WaPo to conclude (with the narrative of choice)…
The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.
We suspect Trump will tweet-splode again soon on the back of this – so much for the conciliatory "end the small-thinking" tone he called for in his congressional address.
- McDonald's Cunning Plan To Recover Millions In Lost Customers: Home Delivery
Earlier today, the world’s biggest fast food retailer spooked its investors when it briefly halted trading in its stock ahead of its annual investor day. However, instead of some dramatic M&A deal revelation, McDonalds had a far less exciting announcement: it had decided to go back to basis in an attempt to recover some 500 million U.S. orders it had lost over the past five years to competition as a result of failed attempts to widen its customer base. So, after some deep soul-searching, the fast-food chain said it would finally embrace its identity as an affordable fast-food chain instead of a fancy coffee store or an all day diner, and stop chasing after people who will rarely eat there.
In recent years, critics slammed the fast food chain to focus on its core customers, at a time when McDonald’s added more salads, snack wraps and oatmeal to its menu to attract health-conscious customers. Such gimmicks worked for a while then failed, resulting in an even bigger drop in the core client base. In recent months the chain pulled many of those slow-selling products. It also had experimented with higher-priced burgers that failed.
During the investor day, CEO Steve Easterbrook said the company is more focused now on its core customers. “We’re not the same McDonald’s we were two years ago or even six months ago,” said Mr. Easterbrook, who marked his two-year anniversary as CEO on Wednesday.
McDonald’s is not the only one scratching its head over how to stop its declining market share: chasing new customers is a pitfall that’s hurt other fast-food restaurants such as top competitor, Burger King, which after efforts to appeal to a broader, more health-conscious customer base failed, decided in recent years to return to its fast-food roots.
The fast food chain’s decision to stop faking came after it conducted its largest-ever customer survey last year to understand “why it was losing customers.” The study showed that it was losing customers to other fast-food chains, not to fast-casual restaurants serving healthier fare. Chief Executive Steve Easterbrook said the company is more focused now on its core customers. “We’re not the same McDonald’s we were two years ago or even six months ago,” said Mr. Easterbrook, who marked his two-year anniversary as CEO on Wednesday.
So what are the core pillars of McDonald’s restructuring?
- First, it would focus on improving the quality of its food to retain existing customers and regain lapsed ones according to the WSJ. One of its biggest challenges has been getting its burger offerings to resonate with people who have grown accustomed to better burgers from rivals, i.e., the food sucks. Alas, MCD didn’t share specific plans for making a better burger or provide a timeline but said it is testing new cooking methods to improve the texture and taste of its classic Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. The chain is also testing burgers made from fresh, rather than frozen beef, in Texas and Oklahoma.
- Second, it will try to make coffee a top priority globally to take advantage of customers’ snacking habits. It plans to improve how its coffee is served and presented and to upgrade the pastries at its McCafe coffee stations within restaurants. Many would likely say that its time would be far better spent on the first point above.
- Third, McDonald is planning to roll out mobile ordering and payment in 20,000 restaurants in some of its largest markets, including the U.S., by the end of the year. The chain also is testing curbside pickup in the U.S.
- Fourth, the company said it would spend about $1.1 billion to renovate existing locations, including about 650 in the U.S. About 2,500 U.S. restaurants in all will be “Experience of the Future” restaurants that include self-order kiosks and table service by year-end. In other words, robot servers and virtually no (minimum wage) staff.
Finally, and perhaps most amusing, McDonald’s will soon provide in-home delivery. McDonald’s, which has been offering delivery for many years in Asia and the Middle East, is now testing delivery in the U.S. and Europe and more Asian markets. In Florida, it has partnered with ride-sharing service Uber to deliver food. McDonald’s said that 75% of the population in its top five markets live within 3 miles of a McDonald’s and that more than one billion people globally live within five to 10 minutes of a McDonald’s.
“Delivery is the most significant disruption in the restaurant industry in our lifetime,” Ms. Brady said.
And so, as McDonald’s prepares to spend millions to “return to its roots”, supposedly by imitating a pizza delivery company, millions of Americans will get even fatter as the only effort required to get to that Big Mac will be to dial the nearest McDonald’s restaurant. And yet in a decade or two, there will still be many confused economists asking why America’s largest “GDP component” and government outlay is healthcare spending.
Finally, it is fascinating how nobody has yet made the simplest connection: perhaps the reason why increasingly more lower income Americans are no longer frequenting even such a low-cost retailerlike McDonalds, is that those same “lost clients” simply don’t have the disposable income.
- "Dear President Trump: If You Want To Cut Healthcare Costs & Stem The Opiate Death Spiral, Legalize Marijuana"
Via Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
You say you want bold solutions that unite us: start by fully legalizing marijuana.
If there is anything the left and right, progressives and conservatives, and everyone in between can agree on, it's ending the counter-productive, destructive "war on drugs" that has generated crime and violence, a "we're number one in Gulags" prison complex and pushed people into harder, far more dangerous drugs (see chart of "legal" opioid deaths below).
Dear President Trump: if you're truly serious about lowering healthcare costs and stemming the rising tide of opioid addictions and death, then fully legalize marijuana via executive order now.
The usual justifications for continuing the criminalization of marijuana have moved from threadbare to completely disconnected from reality. We're told that marijuana is surrounded by violence–well duh–the violence is the direct consequence of Prohibition.
What happened when alcohol was prohibited? Crime and violence exploded around the production and distribution of the outlawed drug. What was peaceful when legal becomes violent when outlawed. This is so obvious, yet we have "leaders" who are blind to the dynamic.
By outlawing medical marijuana, we have pushed everyone with chronic pain into extremely addictive and increasingly deadly "legal" opiates. This is the height of insanity: outlaw natural substances with pain management potential while legalizing highly addictive and often deadly synthetic opiates.
Legalizing marijuana would eliminate the violence, lower the costs of operating the Drug War Gulag and lower healthcare costs by reducing the dependence on addictive opiates for pain management. Yes, there are circumstances that require opiates–but does it make sense to make opiates the next step above over-the-counter pain relievers?
The social, human and financial costs of the opiate pandemic are skyrocketing. Adding marijuana products to the spectrum of choices would reduce these costs and the death toll. Regardless of whatever critics may claim about the negative effects of marijuana, the truth is death by marijuana overdose is essentially non-existent.
Compare that to the tens of thousands of deaths caused by "legal" opiates and the millions of lives destroyed by the "war on drugs" and its American Gulag. While those benefiting from operating the "war on drugs" and the American Gulag propagandize a completely false pathway from marijuana to opiates, the reality is grandmothers are benefiting from medical marijuana and it is the sick-care/Big Pharma cartels that are the pathway to opiate addiction and death.
Dear President Trump: you say you want bold solutions that unite us: start by fully legalizing marijuana. Listen to your young advisors and those in law enforcement who see the counterproductive insanity of the "war on marijuana" first-hand. Listen to the elderly who are benefiting from medical marijuana.
Do the right thing and fully legalize marijuana. It's time to move beyond addled fictions and deal with the ugly realities of a system that actively promotes "legal" opiate addiction and death while outlawing marijuana.
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