This morning we covered the continuing battle over contraception, the lack of Republican support for the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, and Rick Santorum's recently unearthed 2008 statements that Protestantism is "gone from the world of Christianity". We also continued our commitment to discussing topics that aren't getting talked about on the campaign trail, including the "War on Drugs", the Obama administration's deportation policies, and more.
We'll continue posting all of our shows' discussions each week, just click on the first video and you'll see the entire show in order.
-Brett Brownell (@brettbrownell) is video and web producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes which airs Saturday and Sunday mornings on MSNBC.
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Comparing the current drug laws with alcohol prohibition in the US is kinda thin.
It has grown clear to me that prohibition in the U.S. was directed entirely by Big Oil. Standard Oil first funded and organized disparate church groups which had made no progress in over a half century of fighting to gain alcohol prohibition in the U.S., and they then funded a sufficient number of U.S. Congress members to make sure these church groups were given a voice to change U.S. law in 1920. The singular goal of prohibition was to get ethanol out of cars and trucks, and church groups provided the distraction campaign needed by Congress to accomplish this task. That alcoholic beverages also needed to become illegalized should be seen simply as collateral damage.
Henry Ford's first cars ran on corn alcohol (ethanol), as did every one of his cars into 1932. In 1925 Henry Ford declared ethanol was the fuel of the future and continued to offer ethanol as a fuel option in every one of his cars and trucks, even though prohibition had begun a half dozen years earlier. In 1932 Ford released the Flathead V8, the first Ford automobile engine which was not designed to run on alcohol, and in 1933 prohibition ended.
Since 1860, gasoline had sold for 3 cents a gallon as an unwanted by-product of kerosene production, with surpluses often taken out to sea and dumped. With a growing automobile market, gasoline outsold kerosene for the first time in 1910, with gasoline rising to 10 cents a gallon. Standard Oil faced the world's first gasoline shortage in 1913 when demand exceeded supply, driving the price to 17 cents in the U.S. and 50 cents in Europe. This shortage caused many drivers who had selected gasoline to switch to ethanol which could be readily made on the farm.
In 1914 Standard Oil developed a fractionating process for oil and within a few years would be able to produce all the gasoline the market required. Standard Oil's initial effort at reclaiming market lost to ethanol was to fund Congress such that ethanol became heavily taxed while gasoline was nearly untaxed, however taxing ethanol simply caused more farms to become ethanol producers. The failure of taxation to reduce ethanol use is what drove Standard Oil's decision to monopolize the automotive fuel market by funding alcohol prohibition from 1920 until the job was complete.
What's not so thin is the clarity that Congress could be as readily bought back then as it can be bought now. Free energy markets meant as little back then as they do now. It has grown clear to me that Congress is not in business to represent the US voter, it is in business to create wealth for itself by providing special government access to moneyed interests. Congress employs a continual barrage of distraction campaigns designed to keep voters fighting each other and looking away from their greedy goal of profiting from back-room deals. From this perspective, legalized insider trading makes sense. Congress has a different idea of "capitalism" than we do.
Congress can sustain this greedy modus because they know only a small percentage of voters pay close attention to politics and a vast majority will always vote based on edgy sound-bites they acquire from campaign commercials and through friends. The U.S. voters, particularly angry voters, always vote to keep Congress members swimming in wealth.
Also: It's great to see this show now posted as individually selectable topics that run sequentially!
Dave-- I have no information about the automotive industry and prohibition...
But I DO have historical information of the drive from the Temperance Leagues... up to the signing of the Eighteenth Amendment.
Prohibition was a grass roots modification. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It lead to some of the most violent, most horrific gang wars ever seen.
Lifting the ban on drugs, codifying and regulating access-- as was the case before the drugs were banned; purchases had to be signed for in a drug store, were age restricted, and were tracked. Some still have this caveat...will allow us to direct our tax dollars and attention to education, addiction treatment, and minimize the number of prisons and prisoners.
If you were to compare prohibition to the privatization of prisons in your thesis, I could see the connection-- as the use of prisons as a profit-driving enterprise more closely aligns to your suggestion.
Lifting the ban on drugs will undercut the black market. That Congress resists suggests to me that there is more about profit going on, than has to do with crime.
Iran-Contra demonstrated our CIA was perfectly willing to 'poison our youth' in the interest of funding their pet projects.
The temperance movement was long established in America, and still has political party, all of which were momentarily funded by John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) at the time Standard Oil was pushing for the 18th Amendment (prohibition).
It is fun to note that overtaxation of ethanol demonstrated free enterprise energy was preferred over monopolistic energy market forces (Small farms were common in America a century ago). A monopolistic campaign applied to Congress was required to crush free market energy, and this campaign continues to be employed today. Having said this, I recognize I am partly off topic from the drug wars, but I've been mulling this over since a recent TRMS segment on prohibition.
I recognize that prohibition of recreational drugs generates market forces which drive the prices artificially high, thus feeding more highly destructive social issues than if recreational drugs were legal. It makes sense that awareness programs and legal caveats should be applied to recreational drug use, such that recreational drug use is subject to the potential for mutually-agreed reductions in the level of the users rights. I'll never be good with social/political topics, as it takes all I've got to bridge from my technology base into politics.
Having qualified myself as being partly off-topic, I'd like to append the final paragraph of my opening post to read: Congress can sustain this greedy modus because they know only a small percentage of voters will ever pay close attention to politics and they also know the vast majority will always vote based on edgy sound-bites they acquire from friends and through campaign commercials. The corrupt segment of Congress knows they need only focus on dividing the country down the middle such that they pit their distraction campaigns completely opposite the latest liberal ideologies, thus empowering the angry masses with soundbites which rally against the (so-called) evils of liberal change. Bigotry is a popular theme in politics right now because it is an effective way to engage the masses against an intellectual President like Obama. Employing bigotry as a dividing tool may backfire, but it is only one of many tools and the sum of the tools may succeed. I worry this will be a much closer election than many realize, and the outcome can by no means be predicted.
You should start calling the 1% "the-shrinking-1%", because it's the reason the GOP are so desperately trying to protect them, they need more people to rob in order to maintain their status, and that correct term puts things into perspective.
RE: Violence against Women
It was mentioned that immigration is part of the denial of re-certifying this bill...
LGBT is part of what makes the bill unpleasant to many-- they don't understand that there is a problem in relationships... That said, the inability of our Congress to reasonably deal with immigration- Maybe we need to do a bit of history, guys (team UP), and be very specific how the mood has changed. During the '40's... when we were desperate for labor, a $5 fee for a green card... and *POOF*, you were free to work in this country.
I understand the cost of tracking, etc... fraud, terrorism, etc... but a reasonable cost for an application, a reasonable amount of taxation for maintenance of tracking... and it would stop being something folk would need to do illegally. Folk are flocking across the boarder. It isn't just Mexicans... we get a boatload of Canadians... but they don't 'stick out' in our culture, because their speech and dress is so similar to 'American' they can blend right in.
I love your show. Would be great if it was available on iTunes as a free video podcast like Rachel's show. It's awesome that you post the complete shows online, but would be even better if I could take it on the go.
I tried posting comments twice yesterday with no luck, maybe the third time will be the charm. I am DEEPLY saddened by your conversation about the legalization of drugs. I have enjoyed your detailed look at many topics since you first arrived on the air. Yesterday was awful.
1. You paint all drugs with the same broad brush. Legalizing cannabis and regulating it may (and I don't agree) be worth examining, but you support the legalization of heroin, cocaine, and meth?
2. It is a long established premise that the government has a responsibility to protect it's citizens. When we deem drugs to be dangerous, the government has a responsibility to protect citizens from them.
3. Probably the most disturbing of all the discussion was the fact that you Mr. Hayes allowed a guest to spew at least grossly biased and most likely racist views that were exceptionally ill informed without stopping him or injecting. After commercial break you allowed the "ex cop" author a rebuttal. he was selling a book and his rebuttal showed it. Cops are out there every day working to keep the community safe. They are not seeking "more power". They respond to what our legislative bodies pass as law and the supreme court decides as case law. Most offensively, you allowed your guest to paint the drug problem as a "black" issue. Drug violence, addiction, and many other problems sweep across race, gender, and socio-economic status.
4. Finally, as you consider legalizing dangerous drugs, consider the immense problem we have now with LEGAL AND REGULATED drugs. Diverted pharmaceutical drugs are such a problem now that they challenge cocaine and cannabis in scale.
Mr. Hayes, the discussion of this topic was uncharacteristically shallow, uniformed and hideously biased. I enjoy your show. I enjoy opinions that differ from mine have made your show a staple. That segment however sickened me.
I have the opposite problem with this discussion. I would like to see somebody challenge the status quo on Marijuana's "schedule". As things stand medical researchers in the USA are prohibited from doing SCIENCE to determine if there really are medical benefits to marijuana use. This is because Marijuana is defined by law to have no medical benefits, therefore (catch-22) no research is permitted. That is crap, and not the way we should be doing things here in the USA. Meanwhile European researchers are developing medicines using marijuana derivatives and are attempting to sell it to Americans.
Can we please let scientists do their thing without political interference? Marijuana needs to be re-scheduled ASAP so researchers here in the USA can determine what kind of medicinal properties it does or does not hold.
Occupy... you should have opened the show with the Occupy SEC. Maybe you should mention Clinton/Gore had a Republican controlled Congress that had been threantening him since 1994 and pushed for deregulation the while way... while the news media was covering the all important Monica Lewinsky bjs...
Mitt Romney? Ohm like we didn’t hear all this Romney bs during the week on MSNBC. It’s been BORING for weeks now but I guess you people haven’t realized yet…and the same guest pundits over & over & over &… I know, I KNOW, “UP” is different because you have different pundits… lol
So this is what passes as NEWS nowadays, huh? A bunch of privileged silver spoons getting a chance to use their creativity while 50 MILLION Americans could only dream of such a life. ( …and couldn’t afford theater tickets anyway, not if we need to eat or fill up our gas tank.
Speaking of gas tanks, I’m visiting here in Western New York (Buffalo, Niagara Falls, Syracuse) and I can’t even believe the price of fuel here. Be nice if one of NYC a-holes could come on this side of the Empire State and find why these fine, hard working, honest blue collar Americans are being gouged.
I think gas prices are on the rise because the Republicans got big oil to help them. I’m sure the GOP is ready to jump on Obama/Biden for the high gas prices when in reality BIG OIL is sabotaging Obama much like they did to the Carter Administration with manufactured oil shortage crisis. WOW, IF ONLY Concerned, average Citizsens like ME were doing the news… The PEOPLE would be a hell of a lot more informed, right?
Wait that’s the original purpose of the 4th Estate, right? Why the PEOPLE handed over their PUBLIC BROADCAST AIRWAVES to you journalistic sell-outs. I am somebody who fights back cyberbitchslap2.blogspot.com
I love the show, bright guy, informative, articulate. One thing though - get new glasses that are deeper toward your cheeks, the ones you wear don't fit (too small and shallow!) Sorry, my wife has said it so many times I just had to point it out.
Crime in 1900 Vs. now, during prohibition: I wish someone had mentioned that in 1900, heroin and cocaine were available in pharmacies; Sigmund Freud was an ardent consumer of coke.
Just want to add my praise for the show, generally, and the format of sequential segments for the streaming works great. More ads, but thanks for keeping the sponsors more on the ethical side, as opposed to defense contractors and big oil whose ads run during most of the other shows on NBC, esp MTP. This aspect mirrors the other valuable and obvious difference between UP and most of the other political talk shows. Keep it UP!
It was interesting that the PBS liberal (Greenfeld I think) was blaming the Dems. for every instance of bad governance in the US. I understand you need to have interalized the idea that GOP are not responsible for bad governance to work at PBS. It is okay PBS to insist that GOP is part of the governing process and responsible for their behavior. Also the PBS person said (something like this): "hey I know let's have a debate between the opposing views of Wall Street reform on a program that can devote the time to it..." What did he say? He works for PBS, what are they doing over there at PBS if they don't have time to debate important public policy issues? What is the point of "public" TV if they make silly excuses about not having time?
Gotta get the word out:
Excerpt from journalist Noel Weyrich's article from Feb. 2006 entitled "Springtime for Santorum:"
"....It's not just Santorum's silly rhetoric — that the "right to privacy" may lead to court-approved infanticide, that career women have been brainwashed by radical feminism, that unmarried couples are "wrong" to live together. His actions speak even louder. In recent years the Santorums have been caught supplementing their income with methods popular among desperate low-lifes: They cheated the government, and they filed a back-related medical malpractice claim.
Two years ago, while our rugged individualist Senator was penning a book that extolled the value of homeschooling, his family was getting free online curriculum services worth about $30,000 a year, courtesy of the small school district in Western Pennsylvania where the Santorums claim residency. When the Penn Hills school board noticed that the putative Santorum homestead outside Pittsburgh has only three bedrooms and was rented out to someone else, it demanded a refund. A legal technicality over filing dates sank the school board's case, and Santorum claimed, absurdly, that he was being persecuted by liberal Penn Hills Democrats. He was right about one thing, though. It takes a family to rip off a village.
Even more strangely for Senator Self-Reliant, in 1999 Karen Santorum filed a $500,000 medical malpractice claim — the exact kind of claim Senator Santorum has long fought to outlaw in Washington. In testimony redolent of bleeding-heart-liberal whining, Santorum told a court his wife's chiropractor-induced back troubles caused her to gain weight and damaged her self-esteem. The jury of softies, touched by the Senator's tales of having to drag the family laundry upstairs for his afflicted spouse, awarded Karen Santorum $350,000. An indignant judge cut the award in half, but the fact remains that the Santorums scored tens of thousands of dollars on Karen's achy back, while the Senator demands legal caps on pain-and-suffering awards to amputees and quadriplegics..."
article seems worth sharing--left reach
A few of the videos stop working when playing on an iPad. For example, in this loop the VAWA clip stops working at around the 3 minute mark. The Sunday show also had the same problem with the video.