You may find community organizing rewarding. Depending on your comfort level, you can try things like:
- Volunteer work
- Participating in city/town board/council meetings
- Direct action (eg the TN chapter of the DSA replaced tail lights for free, since broken tail lights are the most common reason for minorities getting pulled over)
- Canvassing for candidates, referendums, etc.
- Solidarity actions (eg joining strike members on the picket line)
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.
Note: Be very careful /how/ you invoke your right to counsel in the US:
> And when a suspect in an interrogation told detectives to "just give me a lawyer dog," the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was, in fact, asking for a "lawyer dog," and not invoking his constitutional right to counsel.
> which helps technological change, which leads to a more efficient economy
You made a leap of logic here. The technological innovations in finance directly contributed to a more volatile economy that crashed and inflicted massive losses on huge swaths of the global population, many of whom never recovered.
Singling out one causal chain in one period while ignoring the rest is not a good way to weigh "progress".
Yes the lack of oversight led to a crash, the lack of social safety net prolonged it, and the lack of effective adult education keeps people chasing low-income jobs and in poverty.
And lo and behold Basel III was signed, now systemic risk analysis is regular part of the financial sector checks, even if the current US administration tries to (and succeeded in) roll back some of these protections. That's the rent seeking regression. (And many people are happy for it, for they don't understand these processes, but they also don't trust "technological change" and economics, because it took their jobs - which is an understandable sentiment, even if incorrect.)
Not too mention, at least in America, the vast majority of American lives are far worst off than they were in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Making smart phones and personal computers just made rich people richer.
Smart phones and PCs both coincide with big shifts in global politics, the post 2001 War on Terror, Operation Iraqi/Afghan Freedom, etc. Trillions spent on insurgency control, that could have been spent a lot more effectively.
All the while the middle class shrinks. (David Autor's 'Why there are still jobs?' paper is open access and has striking graphs that show just how much happened/happening.)
Globalisation lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while the financial benefits of this economic optimization were not distributed back to those who lost their old socioeconomic status. (They only got the lower prices, but that's not much considering most of those people affected were not living in a distortion-free "free market", they had no idea what to do, they were not used to chasing new skills-in-demand, not prepared to relocate, etc.)
That said comparing healthcare outcomes, civil rights to the 70s is worthwhile, and if you think it was better then, that is mighty strange.
> Making smart phones and personal computers just made rich people richer.
With some positive sides also. Having a free encyclopedia, cheap universal access to educative videos or detailed satellite photos of the whole planet in 70s would have been mind blowing. Being poor today is more frustrating, but the DIY part is much easier, as making connections, and this has also an economic value.
Knowledge is not protected in semi-secretive guilds anymore. The counterpart effect is the disparition of entire sets of steps in the social stair. You can not make a living anymore selling printed maps for example. Poor people could climb, a little, but there is no so many stairs to grasp.
The first citation on the page[1] mentions researcher Markus Krajewski who reviewed Phoebus records and concluded "It was the explicit aim of the cartel to reduce the life span of the lamps in order to increase sales [...] Economics, not physics."
Cursory searches of Markus Krajewski yield an IEEE Spectrum article[2] with further references to his work:
> The 2010 documentary The Light Bulb Conspiracy explores the Phoebus cartel as an early example of planned obsolescence and includes interviews with Markus Krajewski. For more on the cartel and planned obsolescence, see the author’s "Fehler-Planungen. Zur Geschichte und Theorie der industriellen Obsoleszenz," in Technikgeschichte, vol. 81, No. 1, p. 91–114, 2014, and "Vom Krieg des Lichtes zur Geschichte von Glühlampenkartellen," in Das Glühbirnenbuch, edited by Peter Berz, Helmut Höge, and Krajewski (Braumüller Verlag, 2011).
The modern drug war was designed to be a cudgel aimed at political enemies, not a public health effort. Quoth Nixon's advisor John Ehrlichman:
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
That's the best you're going to find, some journalist's reminiscence twenty-some years after the fact. So I would caution anyone to be wary of whipping that quote out to make a point.
As far as I can tell, all roads lead back to that one Harper's article. I haven't bothered to try and find the book the author said he was working on. The quote is poorly-sourced enough for me to just not use it, and golly-gee-willickers is it a convenient one now that the quoted is long dead and buried. (EDIT: I will point out that I want to believe the quote is real, or close to it. It certainly doesn't strain credulity to imagine Erlichman saying that. Which is all the more reason to be skeptical. <g>)
Yea I am amazed this quote continually keeps coming up. As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
This is an amazing and explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a great deal of attention for the book. Instead Baum did not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute it.
At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
>..."Enforcement must be coupled with a rational approach to the reclamation of the drug user himself," Nixon told Congress in 1971. "We must rehabilitate the drug user if we are to eliminate drug abuse and all the antisocial activities that flow from drug abuse."
>The numbers back this up. According to the federal government's budget numbers for anti-drug programs, the "demand" side of the war on drugs (treatment, education, and prevention) consistently got more funding during Nixon's time in office (1969 to 1974) than the "supply" side (law enforcement and interdiction).
>Historically, this is a commitment for treating drugs as a public health issue that the federal government has not replicated since the 1970s. (Although President Barack Obama's budget proposal would, for the first time in decades, put a majority of anti-drug spending on the demand side once again.) ...
You can try to rehabilitate nixon as much as you want, but even if he was a Nice Guy™, the facts are that the war on drugs was designed by racists (e.g. Harry Anslinger), and along with imprisoning many generations of people of color, it was weaponized specifically and pointedly against people who challenged the establishment.
> Yea I am amazed this quote continually keeps coming up.
People on the Internet are extremely pro-drug. People like to believe things that confirm their priors, and since nearly no one on the Internet is against marijuana legalization, the quote does normally go unchallenged.
I think that's a reductive reading - the war on drugs and in particular as it relates to marijuana has been under a lot of scrutiny. And public acceptance of marijuana is steadily growing.
This more suggests to me that a critical analysis of the criminalization of marijuana has tended toward a verdict of "folly" (in the best case scenario) or "targeted mode of oppression" (in the worst).
Reading that as implicitly pro-drug is simplistic in my view.
Having a smart phone and a Facebook account does not constitute being on the Internet. In many ways, AOL users were closer to being Internet users than most people are now.
To play devils advocate, if I don’t have a Facebook/Twitter/IG/Reddit account, and I am unaware of what’s going on and being discussed on social media, am I really “on the internet”?
I was really talking about people who never stray outside of the walled garden of Facebook. In the case of someone who never enters the walled garden, but partakes of the web, email, and other such applications, I would say they are on the Internet.
Understood. I was really asking because I have deactivated my Facebook account several months ago and had deactivated my IG. I re-activated IG, but I broke the habit of compulsively scrolling the feed and rarely open the app these days.
All that aside, now that I'm not really "on social media", I feel quite disconnected with the world sometimes. Unless I speak to them directly, it's hard to keep track of what any of my friends or acquaintances are doing in life: who's having kids? who's in a new relationship? who got married? who moved to the city? who had a major career change?
Granted, not everyone posts these kinds of details, in fact most of my feed in a network of ~850 persons was dominated by a handful of heavy posters/social media addicts. Even so, occasionally seeing something from someone I otherwise would not talk to was a small window into their lives and kept me slightly aware of things. Sometimes it's people commenting on news I wouldn't otherwise see, sometimes it's pictures of kids..
All that said, the compulsive scrolling action and concern over my own internet identity became a bit much for me, so I'm still inactive on FB.
You can find the source via audio clip from a netflix special called "13TH", which is about racial injustice and the prison system, I'm almost certain this was quoted in the documentary.
EDIT:
It's about 18 minutes into the documentary, but I'm finding out their source is Harpers.
Pure Food and Drug Act did not criminalize cannabis and heroin, it merely said products containing them needed to be labeled as such. They were still available without a prescription.
I can’t imagine how any drugs like heroin or cocaine could have been sold OTC (although they were). It just seems like something that addictive that makes you feel amazing would cause problems damn well near instantly.
That’s what I was thinking but he did say “modern drug war”. But I was really thinking of earlier propaganda adverts and such although I didn’t know it was as early as 1906.
The Nixon White House used its illegality to discredit political opponents and drum up support in their base. When
and how it became illegal is irrelevant (even though, ironically enough, the original motivation was still politically and racially motivated against Mexicans).
Price lists and comparisons are available for health insurance plans. That hasn't stopped premiums and deductibles from rising to the point of popular furor.
I'm not talking about price lists for procedures, I'm talking about price lists for deductibles and premiums on health insurance plans.
Visit healthcare.gov and navigate to your state marketplace. They typically provide a detailed price comparison based on several adjustable factors (expected income, expected visits, number of medications, etc).
If readily available and detailed price comparison tools haven't stopped health insurance deductibles from tripling in the past year[1], why should we expect price comparison tools at the point of healthcare service to reduce costs?
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.