And yet they were eager to punish end users, with Reagan signing into law a 1986 measure which penalized possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine with a mandatory minimum of 5 years. One year for each gram of crack. Meanwhile, the law assigned the same 5 year term to the possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine (consumed more by affluent, white users), establishing a 100:1 ratio for possessors of cocaine vs. crack.

Later in the report, the Senate investigation reveals that the CIA Central American Task Force chief confessed before an Iran-Contra committee:

With respect to (drug trafficking by) the Resistance Forces…it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people.

That may very well be. It was not Reagan who personally dealt the missiles to Iran or the weapons to Nicaragua.

The report, however, offers the admission by the CIA Central American Task Force director that Eden Pastora, a leader of the Contras, was funding the Contra effort with cocaine sold into the United States.

We knew that everyone around Pastora was involved in cocaine…His staff and friends [REDACTED] they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.

The report finds later:

It is clear that individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.

Is it not? Then what you’re proposing is not a modification of capitalism as much as a radical reconsideration of capitalism’s foundational assumptions–chiefly, that we are purely self-interested economic actors.

Here is the most influential capitalist economist of the past 50 years explaining it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

The old models of social contract-keeping are eroding, they say, leaving only the capitalist corporation to govern.

The passage into this new form of totalized capitalism and its replacement of democratic governance is most notably described in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which can be gotten for free here.

It’s hard not to get the impression that these business leaders understand themselves to be the only saviors, that the people can’t do anything for themselves, that as governmental power has been eroded by business, business is now the seat of governance.

Before a series of misunderstandings and intellectual blunders, the group gets one thing right: a wide range of global trends is leading to a crossroads. Just to tick off a few of the phenomena:

• Global climate change
• The globalization of capitalism
• The depletion of natural resources to sustain a growing population
• The continued erosion of American power and the resultant parity among multi-polar global powers
• Democratic movements across resource-rich regions
• The mutation of warfare from the conventional battlefield to terrorism, surveillance and police actions.

Unemployment is not frightening at all to corporations: the more desperate people out of work, the less they’ll work for.

It’s supply and demand: the higher the supply of workers, with demand remaining constant, the lower the price of those workers, i.e., the wage.

David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald, in their book The Wage Curve, used “data on approximately three and a half million people, from twelve countries” to find that “a worker who is employed in an area of high unemployment earns less than an identical individual who works in a region with low joblessness.”