Using the Decriminalization of Drugs to Calm a Restless Nation

The parallels between the first 100 days of the Roosevelt presidency and that of Obama's have been much commented upon, with Roosevelt's first days being used as a yardstick for legislative achievement or at least activity. Now a new link between the two eras has begun to emerge: the decriminalization of marijuana.

In 1933, after Roosevelt enacted a steady stream of legislation to secure the nation's economy that would last generations, he repealed the 18th Amendment allowing for the sale of alcohol. While it was long a Democratic desire to do so, the practical reason was to generate tax receipts from the sale of liquor and expand various programs to put people back to work. It seems times have not changed much in 76 years.

Former San Francisco Supervisor and current State Assemblyman Tom Ammiano says the flailing California economy could receive a $1 billion boost by taxing the sale of marijuana. The legislation is currently in Sacramento. According to a Time article, the estimated $14 billion in sales of the drug would nearly double the state's next largest cash-crop -- milk and cream.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also signaled that the government is beginning to soften its decades-old stance against marijuana when he said that federal raids against California cannabis clubs would cease (such dispensaries are legal in the state) and states would be allowed to make their own laws on the subject.

As populist anger continues to bubble over regarding the economy, a steady stream of huge unemployment figures and the current scandal of corporate bonuses paid with taxpayer money, The Nation's Alexander Cockburn thinks making pot legal might calm the citizenry the way making alcohol legal was intended to cool pre-Great Depression America.

Ending Prohibition was functional to social control. If people head for the bars, they'd be less likely to man the barricades, calling for real change. As FDR's popularity soared, so Obama's popularity has soared for dope smokers, among them those whom the herb is the best and cheapest line of defense against pain.

The Internet has cultivated a large following of cogent pleas for decriminalization easily outnumbered by thousands of hokey ideas and conspiracy theories. The functionality of hemp seems to be quite popular on many of these sites. One unlikely voice in the crowd is noted travel author Rick Steves, who recently visited the Commonwealth Club of California to discuss not marijuana, but his film on Iran.

In a interview this week with Salon, the author gave his views on the elitism of many of our laws regarding pot.

The fact is, the marijuana law in the U.S. is a big lie. It's racist and classist. White rich people can smoke marijuana with impunity and poor black people get a record, can't get education, can't get a loan, and all of sudden go into a life of desperation and become hardened criminals. Why? Because we've got a racist law based on lies about marijuana.

It is unlikely a full repeal of many of these marijuana laws would occur under Obama -- the nation and the relative strength of many moderate Democrats and the Republican party would make it difficult even under the guise of increased tax revenue. What the attorney general's announcement indicates is a willingness to look away similar to what law enforcement already does when there are bigger problems than a high schooler smoking pot during fifth period.

--Steven Tavares

Is the GOP Sending Coded Messages to Obama and Constituents?

The House passed President Barack Obama's stimulus bill last week, despite many Republicans intimating the honeymoon is already over for the new president (here, here and here) Senate Republicans are bracing for a fight with carefully chosen words. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) told reporters today that the Democrats are pushing debilitating legislation similar to what Herbert Hoover used preceding the Great Depression. "Hoover was very interventionist," said Ensign, "He raised taxes, increased spending, and tried very much to [intervene in] the economy."

According to a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Andrew B. Wilson, Ensign's comments correctly refute a myth about Hoover's earlier handling of the economy.

Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn't reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster.

While it is true FDR merely returned confidence to the public in his first 100 days in office, but did not stem the worsening of the economy until the outbreak of war in the 1940s, Ensign may be mixing apples and oranges relating 1933 to today. The GOP, instead, is using the gambit to harpoon the stimulus bill under the rubric of small government. "A lot of us would not like to have the level of government involvement," said Ensign.

Republicans strike me as having an uncanny ability to speak in codes. For example, in GOP parlance states' rights really means allowing sovereignty to each state to legislate divisively within race and gender issues. Sometimes the coda is mocked, such as when Sen. John McCain told an audience the "fundamental of the economy were sound" the same day Wall Street said it wasn't. Well, at that point, the fundamentals were anything but crumbling, but it spoke to conservative voters differently than to Democrats. The Nation argues that President Bush famously used the landmark case of Dred Scott, the 1857 decision that ruled that blacks could not become citizens, to the same effect. The loaded message, though, perplexed liberal and moderate viewers of the 2004 debate. It flew over everyone's heads except for evangelical pro-life supporters who equate the rights of slaves to the rights of unborn children.

Republicans may be in the minority today, but their voice can still be heard even if a portion of the electorate does not quite get the message.

–by Steven Tavares

Do you believe the GOP is using messages to their constituents? If so, is it effective? Is Sen. Ensign playing politics with Great Depression imagery? Join the discussion and leave a comment below.

Recessionomics: Think Local, Act Global?

Americans are feeling the economic pinch, but, in many cases, the decisions made in Washington may effect the rest of the world more deeply. In the current edition of The American Prospect, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson calls for a "Global New Deal".

Using the example of the American Insurance Group (AIG) and the ability to use its global tentacles to effectively be a company without a country to regulate its business, Meyerson constructs an argument that has received little attention nationwide.

Barack Obama may well seek a new New Deal to right a profoundly dysfunctional American economy. But he faces one constraint that Franklin Roosevelt didn't have to confront in the 1930s: The economy that Roosevelt saved was fundamentally a national economy that could be altered by national policies. The economy that Obama must fix, by contrast, has national dimensions that can be altered by national policies, but in matters ranging from corporate conduct to consumer safety to Americans' incomes, not to mention global warming, purely national solutions no longer suffice. To fix America today requires fixing global systems. The next New Deal won't work if it's only American.

Under the concepts of globalization, a multinational corporation is able to evade basic regulatory oversight that a nationally-based business would have to cooperate.

A report from the Center for American Progress deals more closely with the topic from the standpoint of foreign economies, saying Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression needs to be applied globally.

This common political imperative has created the conditions for an unprecedented exercise in international economic cooperation aimed at stabilizing the world economy and placing it on a stronger and more sustainable footing through a series of structural reforms. This is precisely the approach the creators of the New Deal took to our national economic crisis in the 1930s.

Americans may have a narrow view of the global ramifications of its own financial demise, but this fact need not preclude the newly elected president from scratching it from the national dialogue.

The European economies of Germany, France and England are searching for ways to stimulate their economies, while reports this past weekend say that Greece, Ireland and Spain may have their AAA-credit ratings downgraded because of worsening recessions. Of course, these are relatively rich nations as compared to say, Latin American countries, which are relatively stable, but are all encountering lowered gross domestic product figures in the new year.

Some economic isolationists may deny the inevitability of globalization, yet it exists. The effort to fix the U.S. economy needs to add the discussion of world markets in our national dialogu, because people around the world are beginning to argue that what is good for the United States is not necessarily good for the rest of the world.

FDR Called for the Rights of the Individual; Will Obama Do the Same?

FDR'S FAMOUS COMMONWEALTH CLUB SPEECH REVERBERATES TODAY

President-elect Barack Obama has not saved the economy yet, but his victory last month is going a long way toward saving the publishing industry.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's two-year-old book Team of Rivals has becoming a bestseller on the heels of countless references to it and Obama's desire to create the same open-ended discussion in his own cabinet. (Listen to Kearns Goodwin discuss the book at The Commonwealth Club.) Of course, newspapers and magazines around the country couldn't keep enough copies on newsstands with the visage of Obama during the days after the election.

Now, it's all about making the link between the Depression-era beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency and Obama's today.

One of the better and most specific books concerning our current period of economic upheaval and presidential transition is Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.

Alter posits that FDR's common jibe of being a "traitor to his class" was born out of his battle with polio. This debilitating illness forced him to gain an understanding with those less fortunate. It could be said that Obama's background and his fight with race in America would allow for the same empathy.

One interesting chapter in the book details how FDR broke convention tradition by accepting the nomination the day after. Though flying by aircraft was not particularly safe in 1932, FDR flew to Chicago for the mere spectacle of such arrival. Recall how Obama, on short notice, chose to accept the nomination in an 80,000-seat football stadium instead of at the convention hall and packed nearly 100,000 into Chicago's Grant Park on election night.

But it is one of FDR's most famous speeches that reveals a plausible connection between the two leaders.

On September 23, 1932, he gave what Alter calls "a dividing line in his political evolution." during a speech at The Commonwealth Club of California. The speech ranks as one of the club's most famous moments. (Read the entire speech here.)

The address has been characterized as un-Roosevelt-like in its clarity and bluntness. Alter says this was because the speech was barely read over beforehand by FDR; therefore, the candidate was unable to "sand the edges and apply his usual caution."

The Commonwealth Club speech is now seen as the first clear rationale behind the New Deal and, more important, redefined the idea of the individual. Some of FDR's rhetoric seems pedestrian today, yet it was revolutionary to a country set in an economic free fall and wallowing in self-doubt.

Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime decline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him. We have no actual famine or death; our industrial and agricultural mechanism can produce enough and to spare. Our government formal and informal, political and economic, owes to every one an avenue to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his needs, through his own work.

University of Chicago professors Jane Dailey and David Nirenberg bring the speech and the current state of our financial atmosphere into perspective in an article in Dissent magazine from last September.

As we watch (at current estimates) more than a trillion dollars in collective savings disappear into the whirlpool that was once Wall Street, we are already hearing calls for such restrictions and regulations. These calls are not misplaced, but they are not enough. We also need what Roosevelt provided three-quarters of a century ago: a politically convincing and principled way of imagining a relationship between the economic and political rights of the individual and those of the collective, which he called the “economic constitutional order.”

They go on to urge this simple bit of advice: "In order to know what we want to regulate or whom we have to bailout, we first need to know what and whom we want to protect."