by Ralph Nader
22. Rethink the war on drugs.
This failed program has been drawing serious critiques from both the Left and Right for years. Running from Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jr., Ron Paul, and George Will to former Baltimore mayor and dean of Howard University Law School Kurt Schmoke and legal scholars like Kevin Zeese and numerous judges, the malignant folly of trying to criminalize profitable markets in addictive products has been documented. Decades of lost lives, broken users, broken families, waves of homicides, devastated societies, and violence in other nations, all without denting the overall flow of the products, have woken up thinkers and doers on all sides. Viewing drug addictions as health problems, as they are viewed for addictions manifested by tobacco users and alcoholics, seems the height of prudence, instead of viewing them as crimes whose perpetrators overfill our prisons. The classification and prosecution of drug use as a crime has activated and corrupted law enforcement, encouraged a truly self-defeating form of big government, endangered urban neighborhoods and many thousands of lives, and drained tens of billions of dollars a year from taxpayers. The war on drugs has crowded our overloaded court dockets and given our country the highest incarceration rate per capita of nonviolent offenders in the world. With decriminalization, a portion of these costs can be devoted to humane treatment of addicts, once the addictive products are brought to the surface and regulated in astute ways. We have seen repeatedly that outright prohibition does not work and breeds systems of ever-profitable crimes committed by suppliers and dealers, who produce both official corruption and serious mayhem in maintaining their turfs.
The Left-Right consensus on seeing the criminal justice system as broken is more than verbal and more than recoiling against the excessive cost to taxpayers from locking up so many nonviolent offenders for so long. It has blossomed into a regular reform drive, manifested at the state legislative levels and spreading to the federal prison system. These reforms have not yet affected the abysmal, often sadistic conditions in these crowded prisons. Rather, they are focusing on changing the mandatory-minimum sentencing system that has stripped judges of any discretion and caused a huge arbitrary explosion in the prison population over the past thirty years, even as street crime has declined substantially.
Early on, conservative Chuck Colson, a former special assistant to President Nixon and a former inmate, having been convicted as a result of the Watergate scandal, sounded the drums against the incarceration reflex—lock ’em up and throw the keys away—through his prison ministry. Other conservatives now favoring proven approaches toward rehabilitation, education, and prevention include former Reagan attorney general Ed Meese, former congressman Asa Hutchinson, Republican Party mass mailing pioneer Richard A. Viguerie, “ethics czar” William Bennett, and, the Washington Monthly reported, “even the now-infamous American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). These efforts, the Monthly avers, give political cover to Democrats terrified of appearing soft on crime before voters.33
Of course the longtime work on rational criminal enforcement, incarceration, and prevention policies by groups such as the ACLU, the NAACP, the Open Society Foundations, and the Public Welfare Foundation is made easier with such operating convergence or even parallel, separate efforts.
Presently, the leadership of increasing numbers of Right and Left state legislators is passing juvenile justice legislation replacing draconian law with constructive interventionist programs of education, training, close counseling, and due process to reduce incarceration. Further, states like California (SB 26) are now passing legislation that gives prisoners who committed crimes as adolescents an opportunity to work toward lower sentences if they can demonstrate remorse and rehabilitative behavior. These laws are receiving support from police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, and judges who would call themselves conservatives.
The waves of change are touching Congress. The federal criminal justice and prison system has been sharply criticized by Attorney General Eric Holder as “broken.” In August 2013, Mr. Holder declared “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law-enforcement reason.”34 He has proposed reforms, many of them similar to successful enactments made a few years ago by arch right-winger and Texas governor Rick Perry.
The facts overwhelmingly back up Mr. Holder’s criticisms. The Economist reports that “drug offenders are nearly half of all federal prisoners, and most people convicted of federal drug offences received mandatory-minimum sentences.” Possessing five grams of crack cocaine requires a sentence of five years in prison for a first-time offender. From 1980 the federal prison population has increased nearly tenfold, going from 24,000 inmates to 219,000 inmates, while the violent crime rate is one-third lower than what it was in 1982 and less than half that in 1997.35
An unprecedented alliance of Left-Right and Middle is building around the demand of “no more drug war.” A full-page notice in the New York Times on December 20, 2012, asserted that “we strive for the day when drug policies are no longer motivated by ignorance, fear and prejudice but rather by science, compassion, fiscal prudence and human rights, with education and treatment available for everyone.”36 It featured a Drug Policy Alliance Honorary Board ranging from former chair of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker to former attorneys general, cabinet secretaries, mayors, and judges.
There is a long trek ahead, however. In March 2013, Senator Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the new senator Rand Paul introduced the Justice Safety Valve Act of 2013, allowing judges to impose sentences below mandatory minimums. This joint Democratic–Republican filing needs far more public mobilization if it is to be more than just a filing and a joint press release. But the groundswell is at least visible on the horizon. As conservative George Will described in his column, “they hope to reduce the cruelty, irrationality and cost of the current regime of mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.”37
Driving such a groundswell is the National Campaign to Reform State Juvenile Justice Systems, which works daily with twenty state-based efforts “to provide strategic resources to end the reliance on punitive responses toward juvenile crime and delinquency and move toward evidence-based rehabilitative and restorative approaches. Founded by large nonprofit institutes, led by the MacArthur Foundation and super-organizer Donald K. Ross, the effort, supported active campaigns in eighteen states by 2013 and retained twenty-five lobbying firms and other support structures. Mr. Ross crisply asserts that legislative successes in state after state embody Left-Right alliances inside and outside state legislatures.
This subject has already called up enough polemical fervor on both sides for convergence, but it will take more than that to lift the heavily policed hand of government so as to replace our current drug war with a much smarter set of public policies. Here convergence, once it gets underway, will tap deeply into the historical philosophies of conservatism and liberalism. (See the documentary The House I Live In at http://www.thehouseilivein.org.)
23. Prioritize the protection of our environment.
The need for ecological consciousness to preserve the planet Earth and its posterity seems to be common sense. Instead, it viscerally divides Republicans and Democrats. Thank the Republicans in Congress for desiring to close out the EPA and OSHA in a corporatist-encouraged rage, an example of truly ignorant nihilism. The science and evidence of climate change and global warming are casualties of this rejectionism. Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) repeatedly calls global warming one of the greatest hoaxes of the century. He does not say it’s exaggerated or partially erroneous, but a hoax—something completely made up.
Many self-described conservatives do show little care for the environment, that is, except when they are outdoors with their families as tourists. This is at least partially based in partisanship, since they insist on attaching the liberal or Democrat label to the occasional governmental initiatives to enforce the environmental laws, the ones that so anger industry.
Still, earlier cons
ervatives often embraced environmentalism. In the appendix to his book Conservatism Revisited, written in 1974, Peter Viereck called the young people in the early seventies who were marching and acting for environmental protection “unconsciously conservative . . . even when under radical slogans,” as they protested “against what [Herman] Melville called ‘the impieties of progress.’”38 Today when we are beset by such problems as recessions, wars, bailouts, and credit crises, it may not seem to some to be a good political climate for working on ecological advancement or even for staying the course to avert us from sliding ecologically backwards for lack of public investment and regulatory compliance. But for considering the possibility of convergence in tough times, like now, a little looking backward is a good start.
If there were ever an argument to be made on the importance of historical knowledge, it could be made by looking back at the Republicans’ heritage as a way of cutting through the ideas of the present self-styled Republican conservatives in Congress and other elected officials, who stand adamantly against most environmental and consumer regulations. It’s as if they didn’t recognize that they too are breathers, drinkers, eaters, and motorists!
Our first historical lesson is to remember that the conservation movement against despoilment of land, air, and water started in a big way with President Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Republicans. Over a hundred years ago, they were the activists who established the national forests, the great national parks, and other reserves for posterity to enjoy.
Other than through an extension of their nineteenth-century belief in the need for husbandry of our resources and from biblical wisdom, where did they get such foresight and such a sense of the necessity—not just pleasure—of the communion between nature and the human spirit? It helped, of course, that they had a lot of land and beauty available, having wrested it from the Native Americans. But critical also was the legacy of conservative philosophers, who preached a conservation ethic and had a sense of holding a public trust for those who followed them. Perhaps not always explicit, these were the views that animated Roosevelt’s doers from Gifford Pinchot to John Muir and that maintained a lasting influence, though more diminished, right down to the Nixon administration.
Under President’s Nixon’s tenure, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed the major environmental laws of our generation, bolstered by his signature and eloquent supporting statements. Besides being deeply impressed (or alarmed) by the massive, all-American turnout for Earth Day in 1970, Nixon also knew that poll after poll showed Republicans themselves favored saving the natural world from plunder and pollution. He was reading both the philosophic and pragmatic tea leaves. It was absurd to keep soiling our own nests!
About this time, Russell Kirk, a grand savant of modern conservatism, was writing that “the issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks and middle class straights.”39 Recently, John Gray, the British political philosopher, declared, “Far from having a natural home on the Left, concern for the integrity of the common environment, human as well as ecological, is most in harmony with the outlook of traditional conservatism of the British and European varieties.”40 To which Mr. Kirk added, “Nothing is more conservative than conservation.”41
These and other ecumenical judgments should not be surprising. Common human biological inheritances and an aesthetic appreciation of nature transcend ideologies. People naturally want health, safety, and beauty. They want nature to last and be bountiful. They do not abide pain, filth, and having their children and grandchildren degraded and deprived of the memories they or their grandparents and great-grandparents had when rivers, streams, and lakes were there to enjoy and forests were there to explore.
All these commonalities did not go unnoticed by the corporatists, for whom nature was to be exploited for profit or off-loaded to cut costs. They had become accustomed to using our air, water, soil, and natural patrimony as free goods or, some would say, free sewers for disposing wastes and emissions into our biosphere. They did not want to invest and internalize the monies that would be needed to be spent for safe disposal or reuse or to drop unsafe procedures altogether. Suddenly, within two years (1970–1972), they were confronted by federal and state laws that told them they no longer would be the sole deciders in how fatally toxic the human environment would be either outside (the Environmental Protection Agency) or in the workplace (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). This legislation came with an awakened public consciousness that change was overdue, necessary, and urgent. Fully twenty million people participated for at least a few hours in their communities during the weeklong celebration of Earth Day in 1970. The mass media widely headlined this historic civic event.
Presently, the networking of convergence in relation to environmental pursuits comes when an occurrence in any locality threatens neighborhoods, which face the danger in common, untroubled by competing economic interests. Lois Gibbs, inspired by her grim experience during the 1970s raising her family unknowingly over the toxic soil of Love Canal, New York, created a national grassroots environmental group in 1981 that organized thousands of small communities threatened by such problems as toxic leaks into their basements and drinking water or gaseous fumes around their homes and schools. She says that, whether during her visits to polluted “hot spots” or during her large convocations, which draw grassroots activists from around the country to Washington, DC, she does not detect any ideological divide. The people working with her are activists. They want healthful conditions for their children, and they want polluters to stop, laws to be enforced, courtroom doors to be opened, and honest disclosures to be made about environmental conditions. Common threats invite common ground.
On the other hand, sailing is not so smooth when there are severe local controversies over competing material interests that do not break down by political persuasion. The struggle to end mountaintop removal by people in the Appalachian hollows pits the downstream people against the coal companies, their suppliers, and a dwindling supply of workers. The burgeoning struggle over natural gas fracking is another case. Communities have also been riven when a large corporate project, such as a new nuclear power plant, entices a locality with property tax reductions, thus solidifying supporters against others who fear the risks of radioactive leaks and accidents and taxpayer bailouts more than they desire any short-term advantages.
On more macro-environmental disputes, such as over global warming or acid rain, ideologies become divisive. These disputes feature the different groupings presenting pro and con regulatory actions or proposals. “Big Government” and “Big Business” accusations come into play here, with the sides accusing each other of promoting one or the other.
Convergence is needed here, particularly in decision-making forums like Congress, where systemic decisions would have to be made. There, however, the division between Republicans and Democrats has hardened to a point that proactive politicians worried about global warming have become mostly silent. They have made the calculation that a subdued attitude loses fewer voters than a clarion call for action that their opposition—the deniers—can tie to incurring huge taxpayer and consumer expenditures for what, the deniers still assert, is an unsubstantiated prediction. The climate change believers marvel at how, by manipulating propaganda, the deniers have swayed a sizable segment of public opinion. Yet those worried about warming have made little attempt themselves to publicize, with supportive companies, including the insurance industry, the persuasive rebuttals that exist of these deniers’ ideas, such as the one by energy expert and long-time converger Amory Lovins. He shows that conversion from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewables and conservation efficiencies will be a profitable investment for society, save consumers money, save on taxes, create more jobs, advance national security, and generate a safer environment for communities and workers. Yet the “Inhofing”—
Senator James Inhofe is a blatant anthropogenic climate change denier—of public opinion continues unabated among conservatives, even as evidence piles up about the reality of global warming, including a 2004 Pentagon study,42 which concluded that the coming climate change from human activities constitutes a major national security risk.
As we’ve seen, this entire subject is infused with both economic interests and ideologies. That makes for a volatile cocktail. At the moment it is particularly inimical to attracting convergence. However, as the visual and empirical evidence mounts, the foreboding and storming reality may start to dissolve the hardened congressional opposition that is stalling a nation’s organized sense of the need for precautions and remedies.
On the ground, events can move more quickly. In Arizona, Barry Goldwater Jr., son of Mr. Conservative, has formed an organization opposed to monopoly electric utilities trying to “extinguish” rooftop solar installations by reducing credits for excess solar power transferred to the utility. To Goldwater and Tea Party groups, the issue is greater consumer choice.
24. Advance health.
Health, as distinguished from insurance or health care, is as perfect an objective process for local convergence as anything. A concise description of the possibilities was expressed in 2008 by Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, then director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Right now, 75% of our current health expenditures target treatment for preventable conditions caused by tobacco use, poor diet and inactivity, alcohol and drug use, motor-vehicle crashes, firearms and other risks. It’s time to broaden our conversation about reform to include the entire health system. Public health agencies, businesses, community groups, teachers, and above all, parents have a strong stake in our success.43