Ethan Nadelmann provides an excellent overview of the factors underlying the violence in Jamaica in a May 27, 2010 interview on The Kojo Nnamdi Show on Washington, DC's WAMU-88.5 FM. Ethan's interview starts at about 07:00 minutes and lasts for 12 minutes.
Jamaican authorities began an operation on May 21 to seize Christopher Coke, a.k.a. "Dudus," widely believed to be a "drug lord" who had been fighting extradition to the United States. The operation was resisted, and 60 civilians and officials were reported killed by May 27. The Jamaican government had been resisting the extradition, he was being represented by former top government officials, and the Jamaican government hired a major Washington, DC law and lobbying firm to help fight the extradition. See a Times of London account of his indictment in the U.S. here.
Coke's organization, the Shower Posse, is one of a number of entrenched drug trafficking and crime organization in Kingston, Jamaica and various U.S. cities. The story of the rise to power of these posses is told in the excellent ethnographic study, Born Fi' Dead, by Laurie Gunst, who earned a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University. (The book was one of the principal texts in the course I taught in 1996, Violence and Values, for the Washington Lutheran College Program.)
The posse's political power and initial stock of weapons arose as the U.S. CIA meddled in Jamaican politics in the October 1980 election to support the campaign of Edward Seaga's party, the Jamaican Labour Party, to win the Prime Minister's seat from Michael Manley's more leftist Peoples National Party. The posses played critical roles in that election, and soon were deeply enmeshed in the cocaine traffic to the United States, and the distribution of crack cocaine in American neighborhoods.
Today, Christopher Coke's posse is a major prop of political power for current Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding -- which he denies.
Monday, June 07, 2010
Violence in Jamaica as police and military seek alleged drug trafficker wanted in the U.S.
Friday, June 04, 2010
Justice Souter's explanation of Constitutional judging
Retired Justice David Souter spoke at the Harvard University commencement recently after receiving an honorary degree.
He shared a very important challenge to the notion that the Supreme Court can and should always decide cases simply by fairly reading the words of the Constitution, and knowing what the men in Philadelphia in September 1787 intended. Simple.
I think there are quite a number of things wrong with that "original intent" claim, even though it is very appealing.
However, on its face, I like the idea that the Constitution does not change unless it is amended. For me the most powerful instance of the improper evolution of the meaning of the Constitution has been the reworking of the commerce clause, Article I, section 8, clause 3
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;This clause is the constitutional foundation of the Controlled Substances Act, and the meaning of this clause, or the extent of its reach, was the issue in the case of Gonzales v. Raich. In that case, a seriously ill California woman who used California-grown marijuana successfully to treat her life-threatening maladies, upon the recommendation of her California doctor, pursuant to California law sued the Attorney General to enjoin the Justice Department from prosecuting her and her caregivers who grew marijuana for her in California without any compensation. She said that the circumstances of her marijuana possession were not commerce and were not commerce with a foreign nation, an Indian tribe or among any states.
In advance of the argument in Raich, I moderated a forum on the case sponsored by the SSDP Chapter at Georgetown University Law Center and read all of the many briefs filed in the case. You could not call her possession and use of marijuana "interstate commerce" if there were no money involved and no other states involved. With these facts, her circumstances were outside Congress's constitutional power to regulate. I was convinced that it would be wrong to apply the interstate commerce clause to Angel Raich.
But the Supreme Court ruled against Angel Raich in a six to three decision. The dissenters were Justices O'Connor and Thomas, and Chief Justice Rehnquist. The majority explained that to effectively regulate the true interstate commerce in marijuana, Congress needed the authority to regulate any commerce that might have some effect on that commerce. Allowing all the Angel Raich's of California to obtain and use marijuana would have an impact on the other interstate and foreign commerce in marijuana, even if their use were to reduce that illegal commerce.
I was disappointed and acquired a greater sympathy to the original intent argument.
However, as Stanford historian Jack Rakove has observed, to understand the original intent of the Constitution, you need to look at the volumes of writing that accompanied the arguments in each state on whether to ratify the Constitution. And he notes that the meanings began to change. You need to read not only James Madison's Journal of the Constitutional Convention, and the Federalist Papers of Madison, Hamilton and Jay who supported the Constitution, but the arguments of those against the Constitution. And then you need to read the first court opinions that attempted to interpret the Constitution.
As Justice Souter points out very effectively in his speech, the Solicitor General in the Pentagon Papers case of 1971, when faced with the simple words, "Congress shall make no law," effectively argued that nevertheless that Congress can indeed make a law.
But interpreting the "meaning" or "intent" that a legislative body had when enacting a law is a necessary but tricky business. I spent nine years writing law as staff to the U.S. House of Representatives. In some instances the words in the law are words I chose. In many instances, most Members of Congress had no idea about the details of the law. I was on the Hill in the era in which computers were introduced. Thus staff had the ability to generate enormous bills on behalf of the Congress with thousands of provisions that appeared to be seamlessly harmonious. The old technology of scissors, tape, typewriters, pens and pencils was largely abandoned in the processing of amendments.
I like the idea that judges look at the words, but I know that too often the word choice was accidental.
I wonder to what degree, in the crunch to get opinions completed in the hours before the Supreme Court adjourns, the wrong word or phrase gets used. Sphere: Related Content
Rep. Mark Souder's moral failings -- the Michael Gerson version
Michael Gerson's thoughtful commentary in his column in The Washington Post on June 4, 2010 on human nature and virtue uses the fall of Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) as its "text." Rep. Souder, former chair of the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources announced on May 18, 2010, his imminent resignation from Congress acknowledging his long-term affair with a part-time staffer.
Gerson notes that he and Souder both worked for U.S. Senator Dan Coats (R-IN). Gerson went on to be a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. His regular column in The Washington Post often addresses "values" issues in the political realm.
What is striking is the virtue that Gerson is most concerned with -- mercy -- is the one that was most absent from Souder's amendment to ban on federal financial aid for persons with drug offenses on their record added to the Higher Education Act. Souder's ban denied scholarship aid to nearly 200,000 (as of 2006) otherwise qualified potential college students.
Souder's ostentatiously faith-based crusades used Congressional resources (listen to a broadcast on Sept. 4, 2004 of an interview on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday) to harass programs that educated sexually-active gay men on the need to protect themselves from HIV in an era in which AIDS no longer seemed so deadly. Souder attacked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for co-sponsoring an important 2005 conference in Salt Lake City to address the methamphetamine crisis because "harm reduction" was on the agenda.
In July 2009, Souder was the Republican lead on the amendment to the HHS appropriation (H.R. 3293) to try to continue the ban on Federal funding of needle exchanges to fight the transmission of HIV and Hepatitis by needle sharing among injecting drug users. His amendment was narrowly defeated, 211-218.
Certainly when it came to the common foible of young Americans using, possessing or distributing an illegal drug, Souder exhibited neither the humility, nor the mercy that Gerson thinks Rep. Souder somehow exemplified.
I do not celebrate Souder's fall due to his hypocritical indulgence in his sexual appetite (well analyzed in Gerson's column by means of long quotation from C.S. Lewis). But I am greatly relieved that national policymaking is now free of Souder's indulgence in the greater sins of "the pleasure of power," and being a "self-righteous prig" exemplified by the counterproductive anti-drug policies that he authored and fought for.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Speaking of Barry McCaffrey...
Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who is an embarrassment to many of the faculty of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, presented this Powerpoint slide at an anti-marijuana conference in California on May 10, 2010.
On page 7 he notes the terrible role of Mexican criminal gangs in the marijuana trade. But brilliant military tactician that he is (a "hero" general of the first Gulf war), this is one of his arguments against the initiative in California to control and tax marijuana to get the criminals and violence out of the business.
If you are not already familiar with Gen. McCaffrey's work from 1996 to 2000, I think you will be amazed by these 16 pages of non sequiturs.
He proves, for example, that marijuana does not have any scientifically proven medical value by quoting two court cases and a 40-year old statute.
Silver or Lead
William Finnegan has a terrific report from Michoacan, a state in Mexico that has long been a source of drugs in The New Yorker magazine, May 31 2010. One of the newer cartels, the notoriously bloody La Familia Michoacana, has penetrated the society and the government. He describes how the organization has "captured" the state, not that the state is a "failed" state as former U.S. "drug czar" Barry McCaffrey has written.
This is a very carefully researched and very disturbing view of the situation in Mexico.
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