Ian Welsh explains how the right thing morally is usually also the best thing practically

This is so true, and the fact that it's commonly ignored is so sad...

The right thing to do

2010 August 25

by Ian Welsh

What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the “hard decisions”.

This spans the spectrum of issues. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about foreign affairs, where the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, where everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the financial crisis, where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about drug policy, where the “war on drugs” has accomplished nothing except destabilizing multiple countries and giving the US the largest prison population proportional to population in the entire world and where legalizing marijuana, soft opiates and coca leaves would save billions of dollars, reduce violence, help stabilize Mexico and would help tax receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about food, where we subsidize the most unhealthy foods possible and engage in practices which have reduced the nutritional content of food by 40% in the last half century. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about environmental pollutants, which have contributed to a massive rise in chronic diseases so great it amounts to an epidemic.

And on, and on, and on.

Now the fact is that there is no free lunch. When you spend money on war, you can’t spend it on education or health or crumbling infrasture or civilian technology. When you allow oligopolies to control the marketplace and buy up politicians, the cost of that is a decreased standard of living. When you refuse to deal effective with externalized health pollution, whether from soda pop or carcinogens, you pay for that with the death of people you care for from heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

The response is “we have to do this to protect ourselves/to make a profit”.

No, you don’t. America would be more prosperous and just as safe if you didn’t waste trillions on wars and a bloated military whose purpose isn’t to protect you but to beat on foreigners (who is going to invade the US? No one. Next.) You would be happier if you did not allow health pollution because you and your loved ones would be healthier and it’s damn hard to be happy when you or your loved ones get cancer, or diabetes, or asthma and so on. Cheap consumer goods do not make up for it and the costs are so high that it’s questionable that the consumer goods ARE cheap—you’re just paying for them in illness and health care bills.

All of these things are moral wrongs. We know it’s wrong to invade other countries that haven’t attacked us. We know that it’s wrong to put illness inducing substances into the air or food. We know that we shouldn’t subsidize high fructose corn syrup and that if we’re going to subsidize food we should subsidize healthy food. We know that’s immoral, yet we do it anyway.

One of the great ironies of human society is that we create it ourselves, but as individuals and even groups we feel powerless to control what we created. We forged our own chains, and can’t get out of them.

But the first step to freeing ourselves from our chains is to stop telling ourselves that the moral thing to do isn’t the right thing to do in practical terms. The right thing to do… is the right thing to do. When we refuse to do the right thing, instead we impoverish ourselves and our loved ones, we make ourselves sick and we kill ourselves. When we do horrible things to other people, we make them hate us, and then they try and do horrible things to us.

Doing the wrong thing, the immoral thing, is almost never the practical thing if you care about the well-being of yourself, your children, your friends and your family. It always blows back. If you’re lucky, you may die before the cost comes to bear, but that’s only if you’re lucky, and in the American context, if you aren’t dead yet, you probably aren’t going to get lucky.

So do the right thing. Not just because it is the right thing morally, but because it’s the right thing to do for you and your loved ones in a very practical way.

Wikileaks.org

While perusing Catherine Austin Fitts's blog I found this statement:

"Watch for a continued failure of traditional media in 2009 … and a continuing loss of market share due to public disgust at such censorship. Go, Wikileaks!"

I think I've heard of Wikileaks, and maybe even checked it out once. But just now I browsed through it's extensive list of documents, and was amazed. I picked one almost at random,

"The end of the Affair? The BND, CIA and Kosovo's Deep State."

What a story! More about Kosovo, drugs, organized crime, and intelligence services than than you really wanted to know.

DEA complicit in drug trade, says Morales

I'm shocked! Shocked, you hear! Next thing you know, he'll be saying the CIA was in on it...

Agence France-Presse via RawStory:

Morales says evidence will be presented to President Obama

Bolivian leader Evo Morales on Thursday accused the US government of encouraging drug-trafficking as he explained his decision to banish the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Morales, a staunch opponent of the Washington government, said the staff from the US agency had three months to prepare to leave the country, because "the DEA did not respect the police, or even the (Bolivian) armed forces."

"The worst thing is, it did not fight drug trafficking; It encouraged it," the Bolivian leader said, adding that he had "quite a bit of evidence" backing up his charges.

Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana presented a series of documents and press clippings at a news conference, which he described as "object data" that had influenced Morales' decision to suspend DEA activities last week.

Quintana said Morales was ready to present the evidence to incoming US president Barack Obama "to prove the illegality, abuse and arrogance of the DEA in Bolivia."

Throughout the 1990s, the DEA in Bolivia "bribed police officers, violated human rights, covered up murders, destroyed bridges and roads," said Quintana.

Morales earlier Thursday said that after a 1986 operation in Huanchaca National Park, it was determined that the largest cocaine processing plant "was under DEA protection."

He also charged that the DEA had investigated political and union leaders opposed to neoliberal economic policies, which he said amounted to political persecution.

On Wednesday, he had accused the DEA of shooting and killing Bolivians during their anti-drug operations, including members of the coca farmers' movement.

Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, has served as the leader of the Bolivian coca-growers union. The coca plant, from which cocaine is derived, has many uses in traditional Andean culture.

The Bolivian leader announced last Saturday he was suspending the work of the DEA in the impoverished Andean nation, and accused it of having encouraged political unrest that killed 19 people in September.

"From today all the activities of the US DEA are suspended indefinitely," the Bolivian leader had said in the coca-growing region of Chimore, in the central province of Chapare, where he was evaluating efforts to combat drug trafficking.

The DEA has denied Morales' accusations.

US President George W. Bush, in a finding released in September, added Bolivia to a list of countries that have "failed demonstrably" in anti-drugs cooperation.

an anonymous comment on the Catherine Austin Fitts Blog:

anonymous because of content..

Oct 10th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

Catherine,

After steering this person to your writings, he replied:

I’ve read excerpts of her writings, which are as detailed and insightful as any you’ll ever read regarding the symbiotic relationship between our government, “mainstream” economy, and crime (and virtually all that it entails, including covert “nation building”… or destroying depending upon how you look at it)

Allow me to provide a narrow example. One of my best friends is a Federal Drug Enforcement agent. He did a tour in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, XXXXXX . He was there for X years.

His primary job while there was to raid the Columbian forests of cocaine farms and labs. They’d get “tips”, and then they’d be given the “green light” to go in, flying low over the canopy by helicopter, and to do “jumps” so as to seize these properties, drugs, etc. (but very rarely people).

In doing so over the years, my friend always told me that it was far more dangerous being off-duty in the cities than it was doing “drops” into the jungle. Occasionally, a jumper would get hung up in the canopy, but I think in eight years their choppers were shot at once. Moreover, “every single time” they seized a farm or lab it was clear that the occupants “knew they were coming”. On many occasions, while flying through the jungles they’d discover camps or farms that were occupied – where they could actually make arrests. However, they were not allowed to raid these camps, without “proper authorization”.

At first my friend was terribly frustrated by this, but it didn’t take him long to realize that much of this exercise was “choreographed” by the Columbian government and our own, which if looked at from the perspective of someone such as Fitts makes perfect sense (as well as anyone with half a brain).

While my friend’s job remained very dangerous, it was in essence a public relations job as much as anything else, designed to give the appearance of a “war on drugs”. They could have seized more property and made more arrests, but they were not allowed to.

This is a simple, but perfect example of how it works. Not just in South America, where it’s as rampant as anywhere in the world, but virtually everywhere – and represents a critically huge part of our global economy – as many well known American corporate brands benefit directly from the drug trade, by laundering their moneys.

Think about it, remember when the war on drugs was being described as the “scourge of America ” and out nation’s biggest problem. Well, it hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s gone relatively unchanged. We’ll circle back as the media will jump on it a bit, they’ll be a hearing on Capitol Hill, then we’ll legislate and throw some money at it with a press conference to follow – to re-convince everyone that there is, indeed, a “war on drugs” – and then we’ll all forget about it again.

Interestingly, up to this point we’ve done little to undermine the Heroine trade in our ‘war’ in Afghanistan, which represents more than 50% of the Afghan economy – and the lifeblood of the Taliban, and to a lesser extent Al Qaida. Wonder why that is?”

I met a man who was in the military and refused a mission because he was expected to kill people who were disrupting the drug trade. He was thrown in the brig and discharged. He refused to murder innocents. He told them that he signed on to protect the Constitution and this was not protecting the Constitution.