Title: CPR Monthly Meeting with CAUSE
Location: Foster Library\’s Topping Room
Link out: Click here
Description: Join CPR and CAUSE in learning how to build grassroots power for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Start Time: 15:00
Date: 2009-04-05
End Time: 17:00

The nation watched in amusement this week as Republicans laid out their plans promised an April Fool’s Day Budget complete with incomprehensible Kindergarten garbage they call charts. Some of us laughed. I hope that some of us cried; certainly, were I a conservative Republican, tears would be my reaction at the ineptitude of my so-called “leadership”.

But if you were like me, the presentation of such pre-adolescent tomfoolery was deeply offensive in a way that seemed to elude immediate articulation. Offensive in such a way that even outright mockery seemed insufficient in response.

After a day’s contemplation, I think I understand. The offense lies in the juvenility of the response; the utter rejection of seriousness as even a pretended modus operandi for one of our two great political parties; the seeming abdication of any real responsibility for actual participation in the purported governance of our great nation.

But more even than that, it lies in the brazenness of the GOP’s assumption that anyone with a sensible eye toward policy outcomes is even interested in their ideas or “solutions” at this point.

The GOP has been grounded. They trashed the American house, flooded the basement, broke nearly every piece of furniture we own, went on a spending spree with the parents’ credit card pretty much forcing us into bankruptcy while handing out party favors to their friends , and should by all rights be locked up in Juvie for assorted crimes petty and great.

And the American People said Enough. You’re grounded. Go to your room and don’t come out until you think about what you’ve done. Oh, and while you’re at it you can start by cleaning your room.

Because these proud ignoramuses can’t even get their own act together. Their own leader pwns himself on national television again and again, then says it was all part of some secret diabolical plan on his own part. The Republican Idol is a drug-addicted legend-in-his-own-mind radio star with an approval rating lower than dirt. Someone should seriously ask the GOP whether, if all their friends went out and jumped off a cliff, they would, too. Heck, these are people so emotionally stunted they’ve got posters of Chuck Freaking Norris hanging over their beds and Ayn Rand drivel on their bookshelves to make them feel tougher than their real emo, weepy, tantrum-throwing selves. The rest of us grew out of that phase when we turned 14. They can’t even manage to clean up their own backyard. And don’t even get me started on your girlfriend Sarah. The only person who sees starbursts when they look at her is you. It’s just…pathetic.

And these punks think anyone wants to hear anything they have to say? Why? As any responsible parent knows, respect is earned. And these two-bit jokers haven’t earned a shred of it. I mean, seriously now…Joe the Plumber? Dungeons and Dragons nerds live in a fantasy world more realistic than that.

The sheer notion that these delinquent ne’er-do-wells would interrupt adults attempting to fix the messes they created to take a gander at their cartoon drawings isn’t risible. It’s infuriating.

Just…go to your room, GOP. Don’t come out until you’ve had a chance to put on that dunce cap that suits you so well, think about all the damage you’ve done, and atone for it. You might want to try cleaning yourself up a bit and straightening your own room while you’re at it.

The nation watched in amusement this week as Republicans laid out their plans promised an April Fool’s Day Budget complete with incomprehensible Kindergarten garbage they call charts. Some of us laughed. I hope that some of us cried; certainly, were I a conservative Republican, tears would be my reaction at the ineptitude of my so-called “leadership”.

But if you were like me, the presentation of such pre-adolescent tomfoolery was deeply offensive in a way that seemed to elude immediate articulation. Offensive in such a way that even outright mockery seemed insufficient in response.

After a day’s contemplation, I think I understand. The offense lies in the juvenility of the response; the utter rejection of seriousness as even a pretended modus operandi for one of our two great political parties; the seeming abdication of any real responsibility for actual participation in the purported governance of our great nation.

But more even than that, it lies in the brazenness of the GOP’s assumption that anyone with a sensible eye toward policy outcomes is even interested in their ideas or “solutions” at this point.

The GOP has been grounded. They trashed the American house, flooded the basement, broke nearly every piece of furniture we own, went on a spending spree with the parents’ credit card pretty much forcing us into bankruptcy while handing out party favors to their friends , and should by all rights be locked up in Juvie for assorted crimes petty and great.

And the American People said Enough. You’re grounded. Go to your room and don’t come out until you think about what you’ve done. Oh, and while you’re at it you can start by cleaning your room.

Because these proud ignoramuses can’t even get their own act together. Their own leader pwns himself on national television again and again, then says it was all part of some secret diabolical plan on his own part. The Republican Idol is a drug-addicted legend-in-his-own-mind radio star with an approval rating lower than dirt. Someone should seriously ask the GOP whether, if all their friends went out and jumped off a cliff, they would, too. Heck, these are people so emotionally stunted they’ve got posters of Chuck Freaking Norris hanging over their beds and Ayn Rand drivel on their bookshelves to make them feel tougher than their real emo, weepy, tantrum-throwing selves. The rest of us grew out of that phase when we turned 14. They can’t even manage to clean up their own backyard. And don’t even get me started on your girlfriend Sarah. The only person who sees starbursts when they look at her is you. It’s just…pathetic.

And these punks think anyone wants to hear anything they have to say? Why? As any responsible parent knows, respect is earned. And these two-bit jokers haven’t earned a shred of it. I mean, seriously now…Joe the Plumber? Dungeons and Dragons nerds live in a fantasy world more realistic than that.

The sheer notion that these delinquent ne’er-do-wells would interrupt adults attempting to fix the messes they created to take a gander at their cartoon drawings isn’t risible. It’s infuriating.

Just…go to your room, GOP. Don’t come out until you’ve had a chance to put on that dunce cap that suits you so well, think about all the damage you’ve done, and atone for it. You might want to try cleaning yourself up a bit and straightening your own room while you’re at it.

El Torito Mexican Grill; 449 N. Moorpark Rd. (North of Hillcrest), Thousand Oaks, CA 91360. 

$12 per person includes tax and tip.  (Pay cash or with a check at the door. Checks are payable to DCCV.)

Choice of one entree:  Enchiladas Rancheras with Chicken or Beef; Mexican Caesar Salad and Tortilla Soup; Lunch size portion of Grilled Chicken Mexican Caesar Salad; Soda or Ice Tea (Order at the table.)

SPEAKER:    Dr. Frank P. Barajas, Associate Professor at California State University Channel Islands

TOPIC:      “A Curious (Re) Union:  Cesar Chavez’s Organizing in Ventura County, 1958 – 59.”

Reservations are a must. RSVP by Friday, March 27 by calling 805-675-8785.  Please clearly say your name, phone number, email address and number of people in your party.

Title: Town Hall with John Burton
Location: Santa Monica Library, 601 Santa Monica Blvd. Santa Monica
Description: John Burton is running for Chair of the California Democratic Party. Yes, he supports single payer health care and clean money!
Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2009-03-23

More Notes From The Inauguration of Barack Obama – Monday

We took group pictures on the Capital Steps in the morning. Our group included Rep. Capps and about 30 folks from Santa Barbara and Ventura Counties.

This evening 50 friends and community organizers from Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties met for dinner at La Tomate in Dupont Circle. Thanks to the management for a wonderful evening. Everyone had a chance to introduce themselves and tell the group what brought them to the inauguration. Most of us did take the opportunity to share our stories. Each story was heartfelt and special. The common thread was a chance for a new future and the excitement to be here to witness it.

To Jason Hodge, yes I am actually here in DC!

Happy Inauguration Day to all my friends, to the citizens of our nation and the world.

You are the change we have been waiting for! Enjoy!

Until next time, Jay.

By Richard D. Erlich

Okay, here’s an angle on the Michael Phelps marijuana debate you haven’t seen yet: grammatical.
Consider the following sample sentence: “The police broke in and saw in the sordid, sinful scene alcohol and drugs, a bong and drug paraphernalia, a pistol and weapons, and an editor and human beings.”
In approximately 16,500 instances on the World Wide Web the name “Michael Phelps” was associated with the phrase “alcohol and drugs” or “drugs and alcohol,” and, I am certain, most readers read over the phrase with no problems.
There’s a problem, a problem my sample sentence should make clear.
A bong is an item of drug paraphernalia; pistols are weapons; editors are human beings — and beverage alcohol, drunk to induce pleasure or avoid pain, is a drug.
To correct the phrase, one can say “alcohol and other drugs” or “alcohol and illegal drugs. Such corrections are easy, and that “alcohol and drugs” is a common phrase is important for the debate on marijuana and other drugs.
Alcohol use as beer is about as old as human civilization. If alcohol is a drug, drug use is at least as old as civilization. And looking at beer, wine, mead, marijuana, coca, opium, psychoactive mushrooms, caffeine — etc., one can say that the great majority of human cultures have had drug use as a normal activity. You can say it’s pathological or sinful, but drug-use is statistically normal; people who don’t use some drug are unusual, in a statistical sense, abnormal.
“The exception proves the rule” means that exceptions test rules (compare “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”), and honest debaters should test generalized and sensationalized assertions about DRUGS!! by taking as an example of a drug something like a good Merlot or, for fun with conservatives, Coors beer.
If alcohol is a drug, statements about the risks of drug use must contain references to the personal risks and social costs of alcohol. From there we can go to the history of drug control in the USA, including the capital “P” Prohibition of booze in the early 20th century. And from there we can trace the social effects of Prohibition and compare them with the effects of our current drug prohibitions.
For example, my mother and her sister found themselves avoiding bullets behind a car during a drive-by shooting on a street in Chicago. That was during Prohibition, and Chicago-area gangs were working out disputes over, primarily, booze-distribution territory.
Sound familiar? Well such “Capitalism by other means” made economic street-sense during Prohibition, and violent gang competition continues to make such sense today, with high costs for society. My mother and aunt could’ve been killed, and gang members and other people are killed.
Further, Prohibition denied the American State tax monies desperately needed during the Great Depression, so it should be no surprise that Prohibition went into effect in the expanding economy of 1919 and got repealed in the depressed year of 1933. “The Great Experiment” became too expensive, both in direct costs and foregone revenue.
In 1919, however, the US was going Isolationist; in 2009, we’re up to our figurative corporate butt in two wars. And in one of those wars, in Afghanistan, the figurative “War on Drugs” is getting in the way of a literal struggle against extremists.
Michael Phelps has some things to apologize for. He should apologize again for driving drunk at age 19. And he should apologize for inhaling. Cooled smoke taken with a water pipe is less harmful than hot smoke from a reefer, but Phelps still set a bad example, and set himself up for betrayal, by so openly putting any smoke into his lungs. He should have taken his marijuana in dope tea, banana bread, or bran muffins (brownies are mostly empty calories).
If we remember that it’s “alcohol and other drugs,” we can see that occasionally getting zonked is normal human, adult behavior. And it’s not a bad idea — a sober driver having been designated — for a compulsive athlete like Michael Phelps.

Richard D. Erlich lives in Port Hueneme.

By Richard D. Erlich

Okay, here’s an angle on the Michael Phelps marijuana debate you haven’t seen yet: grammatical.
Consider the following sample sentence: “The police broke in and saw in the sordid, sinful scene alcohol and drugs, a bong and drug paraphernalia, a pistol and weapons, and an editor and human beings.”
In approximately 16,500 instances on the World Wide Web the name “Michael Phelps” was associated with the phrase “alcohol and drugs” or “drugs and alcohol,” and, I am certain, most readers read over the phrase with no problems.
There’s a problem, a problem my sample sentence should make clear.
A bong is an item of drug paraphernalia; pistols are weapons; editors are human beings — and beverage alcohol, drunk to induce pleasure or avoid pain, is a drug.
To correct the phrase, one can say “alcohol and other drugs” or “alcohol and illegal drugs. Such corrections are easy, and that “alcohol and drugs” is a common phrase is important for the debate on marijuana and other drugs.
Alcohol use as beer is about as old as human civilization. If alcohol is a drug, drug use is at least as old as civilization. And looking at beer, wine, mead, marijuana, coca, opium, psychoactive mushrooms, caffeine — etc., one can say that the great majority of human cultures have had drug use as a normal activity. You can say it’s pathological or sinful, but drug-use is statistically normal; people who don’t use some drug are unusual, in a statistical sense, abnormal.
“The exception proves the rule” means that exceptions test rules (compare “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”), and honest debaters should test generalized and sensationalized assertions about DRUGS!! by taking as an example of a drug something like a good Merlot or, for fun with conservatives, Coors beer.
If alcohol is a drug, statements about the risks of drug use must contain references to the personal risks and social costs of alcohol. From there we can go to the history of drug control in the USA, including the capital “P” Prohibition of booze in the early 20th century. And from there we can trace the social effects of Prohibition and compare them with the effects of our current drug prohibitions.
For example, my mother and her sister found themselves avoiding bullets behind a car during a drive-by shooting on a street in Chicago. That was during Prohibition, and Chicago-area gangs were working out disputes over, primarily, booze-distribution territory.
Sound familiar? Well such “Capitalism by other means” made economic street-sense during Prohibition, and violent gang competition continues to make such sense today, with high costs for society. My mother and aunt could’ve been killed, and gang members and other people are killed.
Further, Prohibition denied the American State tax monies desperately needed during the Great Depression, so it should be no surprise that Prohibition went into effect in the expanding economy of 1919 and got repealed in the depressed year of 1933. “The Great Experiment” became too expensive, both in direct costs and foregone revenue.
In 1919, however, the US was going Isolationist; in 2009, we’re up to our figurative corporate butt in two wars. And in one of those wars, in Afghanistan, the figurative “War on Drugs” is getting in the way of a literal struggle against extremists.
Michael Phelps has some things to apologize for. He should apologize again for driving drunk at age 19. And he should apologize for inhaling. Cooled smoke taken with a water pipe is less harmful than hot smoke from a reefer, but Phelps still set a bad example, and set himself up for betrayal, by so openly putting any smoke into his lungs. He should have taken his marijuana in dope tea, banana bread, or bran muffins (brownies are mostly empty calories).
If we remember that it’s “alcohol and other drugs,” we can see that occasionally getting zonked is normal human, adult behavior. And it’s not a bad idea — a sober driver having been designated — for a compulsive athlete like Michael Phelps.

Richard D. Erlich lives in Port Hueneme.

by Carmen Ramirez

Before the Taliban take over more of Afghanistan and set their sights on Pakistan and its nuclear arms, before Mexico becomes an open battleground for the drug trade in the United States, before the State of California is nudged further toward bankruptcy because we can’t afford room and board for a huge prison population, and before another generation of American young men of color find themselves more likely in prison than a university — before things get even worse, can we Americans finally have an adult conversation about drugs and drug policy?
Such a conversation might begin with a story I heard from a cop who had brought a truant schoolchild home to her mother. The girl had missed a lot of school because she was often drunk. The mother’s reaction: “Well, at least she’s not on drugs!”
The cop resisted the temptation to shake the mother and scream at her that her little girl was an alcoholic; the girl was on drugs and a drug addict: by any honest definitions of “drug” and “addict.”
Honesty is a good place to start: alcohol is a drug, and so are nicotine, caffeine, Viagra, aspirin, antibiotics, and anabolic steroids.
Once in a literature class we needed a formal definition of “drug,” and a student said a drug was a substance, often manipulated by people, that has a psychological and/or physiological effect when introduced into the body. I noted that such a definition and would include even white sugar; the student replied only, “Well?”
He had a point. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, there’s a reference to a “poor pennyworth of sugar-candy” that’s both a snack and a drug to make one “long-winded” (3.3). In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney W. Mintz has sugar as a “food-drug.” And seeing sugar as a drug as well as food is useful for seeing how important drug production has been in the history of the Americas and for how long there’s been an intimate connection among drugs, the state, and organized crime.
Sugar and molasses, and the sugar-product rum — along with tobacco — were crucial parts of the triangular commerce that had as its most notorious portion the trade in slaves from West Africa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade>.
Many Americans were in the drug business from our beginning, and, by historical standards, the narco-crime lords of today are small-time hoods when put against evil on the scale of the slave-trade.
So we’ve got a culture heavily into drugs, a culture that has known sin, and we’re going to have to deal with that — but we can deal with it.
A student who’d become a drug counselor asked me if I remembered the fears of a heroin epidemic when US troops came home from Vietnam. We had a fair number of soldiers who used heroin in ‘Nam, and we’d been warned that many would bring their habit home.

Right after last November’s stunning victory of Barack Obama, I decided that I had to be at the Inauguration. As a child of the 60’s and a direct beneficiary of the civil rights movement, this election was extremely meaningful to me. Added to that was the exhilaration that our country was finally headed in a new direction after eight miserable years that our country and the world endured under the folly and destructive policies of the Bush administration. Before this, I have never considered going to an inauguration, despite my involvement in every single presidential election since I was ten years old. And, I know Washington very well as I have visited my sister and her family who live close by in Maryland frequently during the past twenty years. Winter is not fun in DC.

Happily, I won the lottery for tickets from Congresswoman Lois Capps’ office. The tickets were for standing room in the purple section, and it looked as if we would be relatively close to the capitol steps. With about ten layers of clothing, including hats and gloves, Lisa, my nephew James and I left for DC from the train station in Germantown MD, at 8:00 am. We arrived about 9:00 at Union Station. Enthusiasm, joy, anticipation were in the air. At the station we joined thousands of people spilling out from the trains in all directions. We headed across the street, where even more of the almost two million people were congregating on the mall. We stood in line for almost two hours to get through security. Once through the line, everything was orderly and we went to our appointed area along with many thousands of others in the purple section. It was standing room only everywhere, hardly room to turn around and you had better not drop anything. The day was bright, sunny and freezing cold. People skated in their street shoes in the reflecting pools.

I was disappointed that our view of the podium where Barack Obama would take the oath was totally obscured by the capitol steps; and trees obliterated the huge television screen that had been set up near us. So in fact we didn’t “see” the inauguration proceedings until we were back home many hours later. But, we could hear everything clearly, including Aretha’s song and the wonderful inaugural speech by our new president. It was inspiring; we were jubilant! People all around us cried, laughed, sang…and chanted…”O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma, etc., etc., and so did we. Without exception we encountered no one among the millions that we shared the mall with that day who created any problem. Later we heard that not one person had been arrested and that no one had been hurt except by the 20 degree weather.

By Richard D. Erlich

There was no epidemic.
Heroin use was fairly common among troops in Vietnam because pain was common. The great majority of apparently addicted soldiers left their pain in Vietnam and with it their more powerful painkillers. If they came home to a decent neighborhood and a decent life, they left their drug as easily as people leave even more power painkillers when they leave the hospital. If the ex-soldiers came home to pain, in areas where heroin was easily available, then there was a good chance they’d go back on heroin.
As the my ex-student taught me, it’s never “The Addict” and “The Drug” — abstractions worse than useless — but real-world addicts with different metabolisms in complex social contexts interacting with a wide range of drugs.
With an honest definition of “drugs,” we can look at history and sociology, and then take two important steps to deal with America’s drug problems. First, we should lump drugs together and consider the role(s) of drugs in our society from aspirin to heroin to alcohol to antibiotics; and then we must very carefully distinguish among drugs and their uses and abuses.
Graham Nash notwithstanding, we cannot really “change the world — / Re-arrange the world”; but we can stop lying to ourselves about “A Drug-Free America” and get on with what can be done to minimize harm from drugs and maximize their usefulness.
In an earlier time of economic distress — and none too soon — America gave up on the capital “P” Prohibition of beverage alcohol; we can be equally smart about easing or eliminating many of our current prohibitions, however much Americans hate to quit, even when we’re quitting banging our heads into walls.
We can, though (maybe) be smarter than the Americans who ended alcohol Prohibition. If we deal with psychoactive drugs as a group, within a broader consideration of drug use generally, I think we’ll conclude that we can more than make up for any problems with legalizing drugs like marijuana and heroin if we forbid their advertising and marketing and apply similar prohibitions to alcohol and nicotine products. As funny as the Cheech and Chong routine is, it would be bad to have commercials touting, “Acapulco Gold Is Bad-Ass Weed”; even so, it’s probably a bad idea to have great commercials and attractive packaging for alcohol products.
To update a point from John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859), a product can be legal, but pushing the product can be strongly regulated.
Beer and wine will have to remain widely available, but anything stronger can go into clean and safe, but definitely stodgy, “Drug Stores,” where the single malt scotch can sit next to liquid THC — smoking marijuana should be discouraged — in plain black-on-white packages telling adult customers, as honestly as bureaucrats can, what the drug will do for them, and what it might do to them.
That’s one possible outcome, one you might not like, especially if your drug-of-choice is fancy scotch. I won’t press the point. What I will press is that we have to move now to serious discussion.
We cannot afford narco-terrorists winning in Afghanistan or in Mexico. We literally can’t afford to maintain a large and aging prison population. And we never could afford the dishonesty, nor the class, race, ethnicity, and generational conflict at the corrupt heart of “The War on Drugs.”
It’s not a war with drugs; it’s a set of social issues, including problems in public health. Let’s quit the war and get to work on the problems.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor, Miami University (Oxford, OH), who retired to Port Hueneme, CA.