> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better t

> The solution is for government programs to tax me and people like me to provide simple things that can help break the cycle of poverty. It'd be even better to end institutionalized racism, institute a mass pardon program, and pay reparations to the victims of Nixon's stupid escalation of the war on plants: At the time [1994], I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20160323102916/http://harpe... edit: John Taylor Gatto [1] points out in one of his books that black families were pretty stable post-civil-war, until the governments started sending black men to prison for teh ganja. Children do better when they have a father around. [1] https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/ https://www.JohnTaylorGatto.com/