A century of a propaganda as specious as it is mendacious has had its effect ... this system will not soon change!

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: The US administration proposes not only to fight still more war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to continue the so-called Drug War in the homeland and in Latin America.

Of course, having so many US resources deployed 8,000 kilometers from our shores in West and Central Asia is a terrible war crime, but it does have the useful effect of tying down those forces in places remote from Venezuela and other Western Hemisphere targets ... and nothing saving its complete and utter bankruptcy will prevent my country from smashing up others as its elites determine suits their pecuniary motives.

• Thus to have them exhausting their military resources in areas so far removed from the historic schwerpunkt of their empire is the best we can now hope for.

The drug business still retains its utility in the United States of America as the favored tool of destabilizing minority and working class communities. And abroad it is the handiest of mechanisms for justification of more aggressive war. The big victims of the drug traffic are the subject people of this empire -- minority and working folk at home, the Iraqis, where a flourishing drug traffic now afflicts the nation, Afghanistan now the center of world poppy cultivation, Colombia, the center of cocaine production and Mexico the favored land route for drug trafficking northwards.

Police and prison bureaucracies, public and private, enjoy at the expense of the general public immense revenue from the arrest of nearly 900,000 persons per annum for marijuana offenses (this sum alone surpassing all arrests for real crime) plus tens of thousands more for abuses related to other controlled substances.

Literally, as prison or jail space becomes available, the authorities in many towns and cities in the USA launch new sweeps of their communities to fill the empty, and unprofitable cells in their gulag with various classes of drug offenders. And a gulag it is in the words of no one less than General Barry MacAffrey, the former "Drug Czar" himself.

Many local jurisdictions, especially in the poorer portions of the American south finance their police departments by money, goods and real property seized from those arrested ... and, of course, it is in the nature of things here that those who fill these cells have committed the additional offense of being overwhelmingly black or brown of pigmentation. Even more so than their cruel and inhumane treatment of gay people, good Christians here overwhelmingly approve of these measures.

A century of a propaganda as specious as it is mendacious has had its effect ... this system will not soon change ... but kicking the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) out of the various US diplomatic missions to the different states of Latin America is an excellent way of limiting the damages to the imperial motherland only.

• US authorities are locked into their present course, but there is no good reason why anyone else should continue to obey their weird version of morality...

Unless like Mexico or Colombia you too like the idea of being at war with your own people.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
chris.herz@vheadline.com