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I'd be more sympathetic if people here didn't act like they knew what they were saying when they were saying something very much wrong.
Commenter Brendan Rizzo is an American (still living there) who really, really hates America. He used to make posts defending his country from anti-American attacks but got fed up with it all.
That may be the single gayest thing I have ever read on this board. Or the old one.
Sorry for the resurection, but I found this; Even though it isn't political, it is kinda scary:
o The assets of the world's top three billionaires are greater than those of the poorest 600 million people on the planet.7o Globally, there are seventy thousand people who possess more than $30 million in financial assets-enough to fill a large sports stadium. Half of the world's 587 billionaires (enough to fill a large disco) are Americans, whose wealth increased collectively by $500 billion in 2003 alone. They possess the same amount of wealth as the combined gross domestic product of the world's poorest 170 countries combined.8o More than a third of the world's people-2.8 billion-live on less than two dollars a day.o 1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day.9The statistics for the United States reveal a society that is certainly rich-but only for a minority:o The average compensation in 2004 for the CEOs of the top 367 U.S. companies was $11.8 million, up from $8.1 million in 2003. On average, CEOs in 2004 made 431 times what a production worker made, up from a 107:1 ratio in 1990 and a 42:1 ratio in 1982.10o CEO pay has increased by 300 percent over the last fifteen years, whereas wages have increased in the same period by only 5 percent (and minimum wage workers have seen their pay fall 6 percent). If wages had kept up with the percentage increase in CEO pay, in 2004 the average pay for production workers would have been $110,136, instead of $27,460.11o The top 20 percent of American households control 83 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 80 percent of Americans control only about 17 percent of the nation's wealth.12o A total of 34.6 million Americans in 2002-12.1 percent of the population-lived below the official poverty line (which is set absurdly low), and 8.5 million of them had jobs. Overall, Black poverty is double that of whites.13
Do you know where the stats from that graph come from Cataclysm. Because that is a powerful representation on the effectiveness and usefullness of the 'war on drugs'
In a tight production schedule, I utilized a data set that I thought most accurately illustrated the nature and growth of the costs of the War on Drugs and that data is US federal drug control spending. But the $1.5 trillion figure ... accounts for many more costs, including state level costs, prison costs, lost productivity costs due to incarceration and others.
