To: carranza2 who wrote (69590 ) 12/16/2010 10:30:12 AM From: bull_dozer 5 Recommendations Respond to > Forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran, the battle starts at the Rio Bravo. We were never a people to miss a chance to turn a buck, even on drugs, hopelessness, fear, poverty, criminality and misery. These days there is plenty of misery to go around, especially since drugs generate the other others. None of which is news to most of the lefties reading this. However, to the average American watching Jay Leno crack Tiger Woods jokes, the fact that a sizable portion of our national economy depends upon keeping the drugs flowing across our borders would come as surprising news. Not surprising enough to get up off the couch for, but nonetheless surprising for a moment.Well, $50 billion makes just chasing the dopers an industry the same size as the movie business, and slightly bigger than the telecom industry. Furthermore, the narco cop industry is joined at the hip with the American prison industry -- the world's largest -- a $45 billion enterprise based on drug convictions. Which of course entails the court systems and billions to the syndicate of lawyers, the state's officially recognized commissars of peasant conflicts. Standing in the wings are the rest of the commissariat, such as the drug rehabilitation professionals. With such a fat hog of public funds there for the cutting, it was only natural that the Department of Homeland Security would increasingly focus its 225,000 employees and $42 billion budget on the drug wars. As for the working slob who has never even seen a bag of weed, he gets his chance to contribute to the drug war industry too, through drug testing in the workplace (25 million tests per year at between $25 and $50 each). With America now panhandling on the global street corner for international loans, nobody is about to cut loose the domestic profits of the drug war industry -- profits sustained, of course, by its dedicated lack of success. Message 27029858
