Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Friday, January 29, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Oregon says YES to taxing the rich
Oregon has just passed a referendum measure that increases taxes on corporations and the wealthy in order to stop cuts to education and other public services. Both measures 66 and 67 passed by wide margins (53% in favor, 45% against).
Organizing got rolling in October when the measure got enough signatures to be placed on the ballot. The Secretary of State’s office said then that “[supporters of the measures] filed more than twice as many [signatures]. It’s unusually high for a statewide ballot measure.”
The gist of the measure is as follows.
Measure 66 "raises tax on incomes above $250,000 for households, $125,000 for individual filers. Tax rate increases 1.8 percentage points on amount of taxable income between $250,000 and $500,000, 2 percentage points on amount above $500,000 for households. For individual filers, the rate increases begin at $125,000 and $250,000 respectively. Eliminates income taxes on the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits received in 2009. Raises estimated $472 million to provide funds currently budgeted for education, health care, public safety, other services.Now, can anyone say "duh"? Doing this sort of thing makes so much sense, yet discussions of budget crises are often talked about as though they were natural disasters in which we can't do anything except try to manage damage control.
Measure 67 raises the state's $10 minimum corporate income tax.
Together Measure 66 and Measure 67 are estimated to generate $727 million, which 2009 Legislature has already put in their budget for public schools and other state services.
But the math here is really simple. When there is a budget shortfall, public institutions can do one of two things: (1) Cut services and layoff public workers, or (2) tax the rich.
If you go in for (1), then you hit the hardest-hit even harder by cutting the most essential services when they're need most.
For the majority of ordinary people, that (2) is the way to go should be a no-brainer. The people sitting on top of massive surpluses should cede some of it in the spirit of solidarity so that there are no cuts to education, public transit, and so on.
And if you're worried that you'll have a hard time convincing some of your wealthy friends that this is the way to go... don't worry. You don't have to. That is the beauty of democracy.
Those earning more than $250,000/yr are less than 5% of the population. If everyone else thinks that social justice endorses taxing the rich, that's 95% in favor.
The moral of the story: Tax the rich. And then tax them some more.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Will California Become the US's First Failed State?
That's the title of a sharp article penned recently in the Guardian. As the author points out:
From its politics to its economy to its environment and way of life, California is like a patient on life support. At the start of summer the state government was so deeply in debt that it began to issue IOUs instead of wages. Its unemployment rate has soared to more than 12%, the highest figure in 70 years. Desperate to pay off a crippling budget deficit, California is slashing spending in education and healthcare, laying off vast numbers of workers and forcing others to take unpaid leave. In a state made up of sprawling suburbs the collapse of the housing bubble has impoverished millions and kicked tens of thousands of families out of their homes. Its political system is locked in paralysis and the two-term rule of former movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger is seen as a disaster – his approval ratings having sunk to levels that would make George W Bush blush.But the most striking image in the article is the following:
Outside the Forum in Inglewood, near downtown Los Angeles, California has already failed. The scene is reminiscent of the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, as crowds of impoverished citizens stand or lie aimlessly on the hot tarmac of the centre's car park. It is 10am, and most have already been here for hours. They have come for free healthcare: a travelling medical and dental clinic has set up shop in the Forum (which usually hosts rock concerts) and thousands of the poor, the uninsured and the down-on-their-luck have driven for miles to be here.And, of course, California is in the process of cutting its "healthy families" program which enrolls millions of the poorest children in the state.
Now the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of California, for many, is "It is the Golden State: a playground of the rich and famous with perfect weather. It symbolizes a lifestyle of sunshine, swimming pools and the Hollywood dream factory."
California is a rich state.
In California, as in every capitalist economy on the planet, the amount that's socially produced by all far exceeds the amount needed to meet the subsistence needs of everyone in the state. This is called a social surplus, because it's socially-produced through a massive web of coordinated social labor that involves nearly everyone in the entire state.
Yet, given that there is a large surplus, how is it that so many Californians continue to go without the most basic needs? Why are institutions designed to meet those needs (healthcare, education, and so on) being placed on the chopping block when, despite a deep recession, there continues to be a very large (indeed much larger than most economies in the world) social surplus?
As it currently stands, a fraction of the surplus is taxed, while the majority of it is appropriated by a very small percentage of the population. Note that the state budget only pertains to that (relatively) small fraction of the surplus which is taxed and used for public spending.
But the obvious question here is: why are very, very well-off Californians allowed to sequester themselves in their gated communities and, in effect, hoard large swaths of the social surplus while so much widespread misery ensues throughout the state?
Why is it that the rich are so keen on participating in society in boom-times when they're earning large sums of cash, but when hard times hit they suddenly withdraw and claim independence?
To take a rather extreme example, imagine that there are three households in an isolated small town. Due to a serious crisis beyond the control of the town, two of those households (through no fault of their own) are facing a serious shortage of food. But the third household has a massive surplus of food stored up that far exceeds the needs that they will ever need in a lifetime to sustain themselves.
Now from the standpoint of community, say a discussion involving all three households about how best to arrange social policy in the town, the obvious thing to do is for the household with a massive surplus to cede some of it to meet the needs of those facing starvation. The thought is that although the household with the surplus may have attained it through legitimate market transactions, the human needs of the community trump the preservation of market distributions of property. In other words, the community should ask: what is more important at this moment, property titles or human well being?
California's 'budget cut fatalism' answers strongly that property titles are its priority, not human well being.
But, some will object, why should property titles be weighed against anything at all? The reason that we should weigh property rights against general welfare is because property rights are only created and made possible through social cooperation, through having a community that recognizes and legitimates them.
The people that have large surpluses of capital today, could not have amassed it apart from a massive scheme of social cooperation. Given that everyone's help was needed, in a broad sense, to make all of this possible, everyone should have a say in what the most important priorities and values of that society are.
We are already doing this implicitly, insofar as we tax the surplus, but this fact is often ignored in favor of illusory, mythical rhetoric about how "in America, we don't spread the wealth".
All governments, in virtue of what they are, redistribute the social surplus in some way. Even if we had the Newt Gingrich-favored "flat tax", it would still be redistributive (i.e. spreading the wealth) because the wealthy would pay more in real terms than the poor (i.e. 10% of a million is a lot more than 10% of 10,000/yr).
We're already cooperating and coordinating our actions on a large scale. We're already redistributing part of the social surplus. So given what's already going on, why can't we have a discussion about whether this is done effectively or fairly? Why is it that this concrete fact of our social life is masked, while we are bombarded with endless fatalist laments about how we "must" cut education budgets, throw students out on the street, lay off millions of workers, let infrastructure crumble, etc. ?
Again, California is a rich state. The fundamental egalitarian thought is that there is something absurd and profoundly unjust about a situation in which some have massive stockpiles of the surplus (far exceeding what anyone could ever need) while a large number of others go without the most basic human necessities. And, for me, it's not just that the wealth are 'failing to do their duty' in not giving more.... it's that they are actively doing something socially harmful in hoarding what they've got and refusing to cede any of it to ameliorate a massive amount of suffering.
Laying more people off, cutting more essential services, strangling one of the most effective and prestigious university systems in the world, in short causing untold amounts of misery, is not the only course of action here.
When there are natural disasters, "price gouging" (i.e. undertaking legitimate market transactions and cashing-in on human suffering) is an illegal act in many states. Although price gouging is a run-of-the-mill market transaction in most respects, it is banned precisely because the human costs of the practice far outweigh the alleged benefits (i.e. keeping markets and property rights sacrosanct). Price gouging bans, in effect, are a case of existing law in which social welfare trumps market imperatives, and human needs trump property rights. This isn't a foreign idea: there are many more "American" examples.
So given that this is already happening in so many different situations today... why not have a broader, more inclusive discussion about what our social priorities should be writ large? Why not have a big discussion about whether in hard times, the property-rights line really should trump the social well being of many members of our community? This is supposed to be a democratic society.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Change we won't get from the Obama Administration:
...anything worthy of the name 'universal health care'.
The discourse of 'lowering health care costs' is preposterous. The question is whether we should have commodified insurance policies sold primarily for profit, or universally-guaranteed insurance based on citizenship. As many have argued, while the existence of nearly 50 million uninsured Americans is a travesty, this shouldn't obscure the fact that the moral bankruptcy of our profit-driven health insurance industry extends to those who currently have insurance as well. As long as health insurance is a multi-billion dollar industry where denied claims mean higher profits, we can expect that 'pre-existing conditions', 'experimental treatments' and other loop-holes will be continually exploited by insurance firms with the result that no one can rest assured that they really will have access to health care in their moment of need.
This is what universal health care looks like:
"The National Health Service Act of 1946 provides a complete medical service free of charge at the time it is required for every citizen. It will provide you with all your medical, dental and nursing care. Everyone rich or poor, man, woman or child can use it or any part of it. There are no charges, except for a few special items; there are no insurance qualifications. But it is not a charity. You are all paying for it, mainly as taxpayers, and it will relieve your money worries in time of illness."
excerpted from the Introduction to the NHS Act 1946"
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Urban life, planning, and mass transit in wide context
I have a kind of fascination with public transportation. There are so many things about it that I believe in: sharing space and seeing the faces of your fellow city-dwellers; the egalitarian spirit of everyone getting on the same trains and buses and sharing moments of inconvenience and convenience alike; being able to relax and retreat from the cut-throat mentality of drivers; never having to worry about parking; the environmental benefits. The CTA (train and rail), which I typically ride every single day in one way or another, is in many ways an example of these virtues. I feel invested in its future and the condition its in; when someone trashes CTA literally (e.g. vandalism) or figuratively (e.g. a disparaging remark), I take it personally. Despite all its problems and shortcomings, it is a resource that I've never really had access to in any other place I've lived. Unless they live in San Fran, New York, Boston or D.C., most every American doesn't have access to this kind of resource. I feel really fortunate.
But laying on the table what one is fortunate to have should in no way impact their propensity to demand more from their current situation. Like some liberal's posture toward Obama, I sometimes sense that people mistake bold calls for more audacious reform than the present exhibits as "not being thankful for what we are getting now". For instance, I can recall making a critical comment about the poverty of current ways of funding higher education (e.g. heavy reliance on loans and lotteries instead of progressive taxes and grants), for which an Obamahead mildly chastised me since my criticism suggested that I wasn't sufficiently 'thankful' for the low-hanging fruit Obama snatched by massively increasing education spending on Pell Grants and so forth. I am pleased that Obama did that, it is a huge improvement over the outlook of the last 30 years which has been cut taxes, cut education spending. But, it should go without saying, that doesn't meant that there aren't MUCH more audacious reform measures that could be undertaken were the current outlook not so circumscribed by our country's relatively business-leaning conservative political culture. This becomes very apparent when, contrary to the inclinations of most American commentators, you take a look at policy in other countries.
The two most heavily used and largest systems in the Europe are the Paris Metro and the Moscow Metro. The world's most heavily used system is the Tokyo Subway and 8 of the top-10 most heavily used systems in the world are outside of Europe. The complete list is here, and although the CTA has the third busiest rapid transit rail system in the USA (behind NYC and DC, although when you add buses, CTA is a close second to NYC in terms of overall use), it doesn't even make the top 30 worldwide. That's crazy. But not totally unbelievable when you consider how much of the metro area surrounding Chicago is car-centric, strip mall, parking-lot heavy suburbs. Nonetheless, the Chicago area does (at least) offer commuter-rail service to these areas, which is more than can be said of most US cities.
Compare this to the Moscow Metro. The Moscow Metro is the world's second most heavily used rapid transit system. Moscow has about 5 times the population of Chicago, so its really not fair to compare gross transit use (although, Chicago's metro area is roughly equal to Moscow's population, which makes me wonder what things might've looked like if greater-Chicagoland had developed in a less haphazardly suburban-centric way in the 50s and 60s which peaked with the intense 'White-flight' of the late 60s).
Structurally, the Moscow Metro is very similar to the way the Chicago "L" is set up. It has a center and spoke layout, although just glancing at the map of the rail system you can gleam that the Moscow Metro is far more comprehensive (there are more spokes and less gaps between spokes) and it has a crucial connecting rail running in a circle which links up all of the spokes with one another. Since I've lived in Chicago, I've heard murmurs about how such a development (a spoke-connecting ring) is on the distant back-burner somewhere, but there is basically no possibility of this happening any time soon. The CTA has annual budget crises (despite increases in ridership) due to an unjust funding scheme and the fact that CTA pays ever year for upkeep and deterioration allowed in years past, although funding works on a year-to-year basis. If you didn't maintain something during 1975-79, for example, and you continue to rely on it today... there is a sense in which the current yearly budget is being hit by a particular instance of neglect that occurred many years ago. I'm sure there are more recent examples, and this can become really tough when the CTA is expected to keep things running at the same time it struggles to keep up with snowballing maintenance needs.
So, my first impression glancing at the Moscow rail is that it is extremely well-planned and comprehensive, in a way that Chicago's system aspires to be.
Began in 1931 with the first line opening in 1935, the Moscow Metro still bears many of the aesthetic characteristics of Stalinism and the ideology of that era. The Moscow Metro has a large number of excellent examples of socialist realism, and is world-renowned for its astoundingly ornate stations. It's not difficult to place these characteristics within the logic of Stalinism (traditionalist reaction against modern forms of architecture, regression to neo-Baroque and neo-Classical forms, etc.). But I will say that there is something impressive about the unabashed exaltation of public space (setting aside the ways in which this facade function under conditions of Stalinist oppression) and the almost opulent decorative quality of the stations. You could almost mistake some of the stations for pictures from the halls of a 18th century palace.
Its as though the idea was that, in repudiating the privatization of this sort of opulence (inside the guarded walls of the Palmer House, or the Waldorf Astoria, etc.), the stations were meant as an intense reminder that what was supposed to matter was people sharing these spaces together in public settings. I'm not trying to defend any sliver of Stalinism on its own terms, only pointing out that (despite the opulence Stalin surrounded himself with while many others suffered) when we compare the ethos of theses structures (I mean, quite literally, the stations themselves) with capitalist counterparts of the same era (especially in the US) there is not the same audacious push to celebrate public space as the pinnacle of where the social surplus should be invested. Probably the only time that we see similar developments in the US were during the New Deal (take a look at a post office built during this era, or a school, and tell me it doesn't strike you as a building struggling to win over public enthusiasm and cast itself as a monument to civilization itself). But we shouldn't forget that this was an era when the US lived under the shadow of the USSR in the sense that it felt it had to compete economically and socially with a regime that was basically immune to the Great Depression and was, by means that were brutal and savage, able to provide full employment, comprehensive health provisions and education services for free.
I don't think you have to accept any aspect of Stalinism as such to look at some of the things (technologically, logistically) that the Soviet regime was able to accomplish in the 30s and 40s in terms of public amenities and structural urban planning and wonder in an exploratory spirit, if these things were accomplished then and there, why couldn't they also be accomplished here and now? Why can't we have full employment, unconditional and universal provision of health services and comprehensive education as well as a system of public space and transportation that is commensurate with the best technological and productive capacities civilization has to offer? Many people wondered similar things in the 1930s in the US, and most of them weren't Communists or committed Leftists but rather, like the caste of bureaucrats who ran the Soviet Union at the time, technocrats and economists who were after any instrumental value embodied in the Soviet economic/technological model.
To make sense out of the Soviet system, we have to totally abjure the Cold War logic of good/evil and take a sober look at the economic details of different sytems (different worlds?) that had elements of overlap. I'm not calling for some crude 'half-way' between Soviet-style Communism and the US captialism of the 1920s, I'm only pointing out that on the side of technical organizing and producing schemes, there are important lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Soviet economy, particularly for anyone interested in the possibility of an alternative to capitalism.
Whatever else we may say about the Soviet system, the social surplus was not siphoned off by capitalists and reinvested in frivolous consumerist undertakings (e.g. Coke, Pepsi, Hersheys, et al. who spend billions each year in advertising alone) in order to make as much profit as possible. Despite the myriad inefficiencies and misallocations that comprised the Soviet model, the social surplus was invested heavily in social institutions that corresponded to social needs (education, transporation, housing, healthcare, etc.) rather than the imperatives of proit maximization. One thing that frustrates me about US Cities is that all too often, our government allows them to crumble and deteriorate, after which the haphazard opportunism of private developers and gentrification are billed as the only path to economic and structural recovery. In what comprised a nation-wide pattern in the 60s, nearly every single major US city experienced a peripheral suburbanization and "White flight" from urban centers which meant in concrete terms that money, tax revenue, capital investment, and economic activity fled from urban centers to the white-washed, detached, sprawling Suburban dystopias such as Levittown and the like. This also meant that housing stock, roads, municipal institutions, schools, infrastructure, and mass transit declined in major cities while crime and economic hardship rose. The result is that much of the lifeworld in the US underwent a structural transformation that changed the way people get around (i.e. during the same period the personal car was billed as a 'must have' for every American), the way we conceive of public space (if there is any... the closest thing in many locales are shopping malls), the way we interact with other people and view our fellow human beings, the way we consume, even the aesthetic and visual landscape of our surroundings. Is it any surprise that Suburbs are, by electoral standards, bastions of reaction, conservatism and individualistic 'me-first' types shouting at each other from their Suburbans and Tahoes? Is it surprising that there is basically now an entire genre of films dealing with the deadening social landscape of the American suburb and the alienating circumstances they create? The draining of life and particularity out of every corner of the US is a process that is well underway, leaving a suffocating trail of Wal-Marts, McDonalds, Applebees and massive parking lots in their wake.
We can't explain this phenomenon on locale-by-locale basis, nor can we rectify it on such a basis. This is a widespread transformation that has fundamentally altered the social, cultural and political landscape of life in the US. As Mike Davis explained in a different context, one reason that the sort of labor militancy of the 1930s is so unfathomable today is literally physical: the working classes are no longer to be found living in tight-knit urban communities in dense areas where the sort of quick-mobilization and organizing tactics of that era were part of daily life. In other words, there is something thoroughly disempowering about the actual way that suburbs are physically constructed.
Sticking to this theme about seeing these trends as part of larger economic and social forces occurring over long periods of time, this suggests to me that any deep changes will have to have a similar kind of breadth (although this hardly precludes local struggles against gentrification, zoning parks for parking lots, etc.). One thing that hurts city governments all around is that they are at the mercy of state governments for funding, and they face the threat of "White flight" tactics by the rich should they try and raise city-taxes (consider what happened when Chicago tried to institute a living-wage ordinance and Target claimed it would simply move all of its stores a half-mile outside city limits). There has to be a commitment from the Federal Government to support cities and urban development, so that the threatening tactics ("we'll close factories and leave if you don't do what we say") of capitalists and the wealthy lose their sting.
Whew. I guess I've rambled on long enough.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Bernie Sanders introduces Single Payer senate bill
via Healthcare-Now!: Read it here.
Of course, its Bernie Sanders, and its unlikely that much will come of it. Still... it can't hurt to have a single-payer bill on the table in some sense. If nothing else it's a rallying-point.
Monday, March 23, 2009
GritTV: Brian Jones on the Crisis of Public Education
Socialistworker.org columnist Brian Jones asks: "why is it that when banks fail, they get billions of dollars in bailout money, but when schoools fail the get less money?"
See the video here.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Fear-mongering bullshit
From a recent controversy over a book published in the UK, this an excerpt from a recent article in the Guardian:
"This is cannabis. It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it. And this is why we have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer. You Do Not Write About Your Children...you do not ever lay out their genuine, raw problems on the page. You fictionalize them, you do not present it up-front and true...This is an emergency. True, the city is not aflame, plague is not afoot. But there are too many families whose home life has been shattered by a teenage son (it is nearly always boys) who is losing it as a result of cannabis. Maybe not as badly as ours has lost it, but nevertheless creating chaos and distress."Not exactly. The blathering continues:
"Imagine if you could wave a wand and instantly all the spliffs and baggies were transformed into bottles of gin. You leave for work on Wednesday morning and suddenly you see kids on the way to school with a quarter of Gordon's sticking out their rucksack... and if you saw that daily, all around you, you would say there's a genuine problem. Except it's worse than that. Because skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot. Cannabis remains in the bloodstream for up to 10 days and, let me tell you, the mood swings continue for every one of those days. And that's not all. In your early 20s, the legacy returns in the form of schizophrenia. Professor Robin Murray at the Maudsley Hospital estimates that at least 10% of all people with schizophrenia in the UK would not have developed the illness if they had not smoked cannabis. That's 25,000 individuals at current figures. With stronger varieties being smoked at a younger age, this figure can only rise. So tell me, Daily Mail, why are you treating this story like "a bit of pot"?Now I think that drugs are very serious business (and by the way: alcohol is most definitely a drug). But for precisely this reason, we should refrain from fear-mongering non-sense and hysteria when discussing drug use. I don't doubt for a moment that this couple's child was smoking unjustifiable amounts of pot, which contributed to his allegedly withdrawn, lifeless, callous, careless, directionless behavior. I don't doubt that it was an extremely difficult time for the family and I understand that in order for him to recover from his afflictions he needed to lay off smoking for the time being.
But none of the above has anything whatsoever to do with: 1. The actual effects of the drug on different individuals, 2. how the drug should be controlled (if at all) or regulated, 3. the alleged 'problems' with Tetra-Hydro-Canibinol as such. Yet spreading misinformation about 1-3 is the raison d'etre of this couple, this appears to be why they have written their book and began their foray into the public.
I find it very interesting that the author compares pot to gin. Now alcoholism is a serious matter. Moreover, alcohol is a potent drug which we all know is abused in multitude ways. As a society, we should be extremely weary of the ultra-commodification of alcohol such that its consumption is encouraged as though it had no consequences. From an early age, we must be educated about how to drink responsibly. Some people, given their tendencies,backgrounds and psychological state, probably shouldn't drink at all.
But these days nobody ever suggests that the way to deal with this problem is to make alcohol consumption a criminal offense. The suggestion isn't even worthy of assembling arguments against; its a non-starter. But why, then, do sensible people have to expend so much energy making the analgous (and extremely-plausible case) that cannabis should be dealt with in a similar fashion to alcohol? Well, one reason has to do with trash like the above-quoted article.
Let's consider more closely the bit in the article about Schizophrenia. Combine this with the pervasive "concerned parent" tone that targets other "naive on-the-fence parents" who simply might not be aware of the "horrifying truth" about pot. Now what's going on is that they are suggesting that we accept urban myths as scientific facts. THC is a mild hallucinogen; if you have a family history of schizophrenia or a predilection toward various kinds of mental illness, its true that taking hallucinogenic drugs can exacerbate what lurking problems you may have. (By the way, every prescription drug has an extensive list of risk-factors which suggest whether or not you should take it... were pot legalized presumably similar research could be conducted in order to head-off rare adverse reactions). But this is a far-cry from the non-sense claim that cannabis "makes you more likely to go nuts!". This is false. The author's personal history does nothing in the way of changing this medical fact.
I completely agree that the "its just pot" attitude must be more critically examined. People should figure out extensively what the hell they are putting into their bodies. Addictive behaviors should be dealt with, not tabled because "pot is no big deal" or "alcohol is no big deal". But this doesn't mean that we should discard the unreflective "its just alcohol" or "its just a few drinks" or "its just pot" with hysterical non-sense like "these are devilish substances that should be locked away and banned, lest our society turns into complete chaos!!". Moreover, the last thing we should do is stigmatize and criminalize (and incarcerate) people instead of creating ways that they can easily get access to help if they need it.
While we're at it, let's debunk a few other falsehoods in this article:
"Except it's worse than [gin]. Because skunk gets you as high as gin but has psychotropic effects to boot."Alcohol and caffeine have psychotropic effects as well. True, neither are mild hallucinogens, but the effects the former has on mood, motivation and behavior are every bit as severe (if not worse) than cannabis. Pot is not simply "worse". Teenage alcoholism should be dealt with in the same way that pot over-consumption should be.
"It stops you, it rips out normal reactions, normal kindness, normal motivation. It draws a line and you stand patiently behind it."Again this is false. It doesn't have these effects on everyone. In fact the nature of the drug (psychedelic) means that it's effects are extremely dependent on the psychology of the person taking it. The effects and first-personal experience can vary wildly, because people are wildly different. There are some people who will become extremely anxious and have terrifying panic attacks. Some will hardly feel as though the drug has any effects. I'm not saying that we can't make any generalizations about the effects (especially bodily effects)... but let's make sure that we're making scientifically sound generalizations. Moreover, let's be clear that we're making generalizations. Lipitor commercials, after all, do not say "this drug will have the following identical side effects on everyone".
"cannabis creates chaos and distress".Hysterics. This is about as good of an argument as "homosexuality will undermine civilization and create social chaos".
"Cannabis remains in the bloodstream for up to 10 days"Not precisely. Some metabolized form of THC probably does, but this does not necessarily mean that there are marked effects. Cannabis (i.e. the genus of psychoactive flowering-plants), however, should not ever literally float around in your bloodstream unless you've done something terribly wrong.
"With stronger varieties being smoked at a younger age, this figure [the number of teen smokers] can only rise."This "stronger varieties" non-sense is a favorite talking-point of the anti-pot crowd. I cant remember how many times I've read Gordon Brown or some other high-ranking official blathering about how the "street-pot" is getting stronger every week. I wish they were right. Perhaps then smokers wouldn't have to ingest as much tar just to get blazed!
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