The Bush and Obama Campaigns Were Financed with Drug Money

This will probably get me labelled as a conspiracy nut, but it is a really interesting and well-documented subject. I am not going to cite links on the specific sources of information, because they will change and go stale over time, but a person can always search for his own pretty easily. The information is also easy to obtain at any decent library if anyone prefers that over the Internet. Look up 'drugs' and 'political campaigns,' and a wealth of information can be found about how presidential and other federal elections are financed with drug money. A lot of people think the present US political situation of election financing is untenable without drug money. This is probably not the case, however, because there has always been massive political corruption at the federal level. There have also always been places to get large amounts of money fast. The US Constitution is a brilliantly-constructed document, though, and the consequences of political corruption are very certainly minimised by the system of checks and balances. Even the felonious acts of Richard Nixon did very little lasting damage, except to the dignity of the office of president. There also is not a president who can even come close to competing with everyone's favourite butcher and war criminal, President Grant, in his level of corruption. Trying 'grant, presidency' and 'political scandals,' and net enough information for years of study. Plus, I am sure more scandals will eventually come out that have Grant's name written all over them, since there were such a huge number of them. Likewise, Abraham Lincoln did not (to my knowledge) participate in an inordinate amount of corruption that dealt specifically with financial matters, but his taxation policies directly lead to the succession of South Carolina. And the second batch of four states that succeeded after the original seven only did so when Lincoln made it clear that he planned to invade The Confederate States of America (a sovereign nation) without appropriate provocation. Study Lincoln's actions directly after his election and specifically compare them to the things Saddam Hussein did when he invaded Kuwait, and you will understand the magnitude of his crimes. He is also responsible for the war crimes that William Tecumseh Sherman committed, because he sanctioned them and then failed to prosecute Sherman when the width and breadth of his crimes were publicised. Since Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace over his criminal involvement in the Watergate scandal, there has been a move in the United States toward more regulation of the ways politicians can express themselves and raise money. These restrictions are so severe that they are presently unconstitutional on their face, because political speech is both stated and implied to be involatile in the United States Constitution, The Federalist Papers and pretty much anywhere else a person can imagine. It is the most well-protected type of speech in the arsenal of the freedom that is the body of laws of the US republic, and any limitation on political speech is supposed to have to pass the highest judicial test of 'strict scrutiny.' Present campaign finance laws do not even come close to complying with that standard. If a person reads the US Constitution and gets a feeling for how the federal system it outlines works, it is pretty easy to see how conservative the system is in the sense that radical changes are typically very hard to make. That is one reason so few amendments have been made, considering the first ten were made all at once. Also, the one on alcohol prohibition was undone by a later one, so those two do not count in any significant way. Most of the others are minor clarifications like matters of succession upon the death of elected officials or term limits for the presidency. Then the remaining few are mostly to specifically grant rights to people that probably should have had those rights in the first place when the original document was written. The best one of the bunch ends slavery, expect in the case of punishment for criminal offences or when the state illegally forces parents to surrender their children to state-run internment camps that are falsely called schools and portrayed as beneficial. Read Novel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman's writing about compulsory, state-run schools if you want a real education on how horrendous and utterly distasteful childhood slavery to the state is. Prisoners on death row have many more rights to life and liberty than small children do in state run schools, and as Dr. Friedman asserts, they are less negatively impacted by the illegal, morally corrupted and corrupting drug war. My point is mainly that many laws congresspersons thought would benefit the people and make things better for everyone have done entirely the opposite of what they were intended to do. Campaign finance rules that narrow the types of funding politicians can take just tend to force politicians to accept money that is from the black-market, drug economy. This is a massive source of corruption very similar to how bootlegging gangs took over the government of Chicago in the 1920's. Imagine having the drug cartels running the United States; you do not have to imagine it, because they already do. Current political theory holds that for a political party (assuming an illegal monopoly by two parties on power) to be viable, it must be able to siphon off around half of the drug money that goes through New York, Texas, California and Florida and flows into political coffers. If a party cannot get its share of drug money, the party cannot survive. For instance, that was why the Democrats threw their most potent political muscle into New York in the form of Hilary Clinton. It is impossible to control California completely with as large and diverse as it is, and since the Republicans controlled Florida and Texas, the Democrats had to have New York to survive. So a lot of people who understand the way federal politics work at the moment think there would be no way to fund the political machines without drug money. For instance, many political fund raisers that either the Republicans or Democrats have are attended by a whole lot of people with both big money and convictions for felony dug offences. Especially if fund raisers involve the president and vice president, every person who attends has to have a background check that is pretty thorough. Is it logical that the US Secret Service is so incompetent that they misunderstand the criminal records of a roomful of people and think they have clean records? That is highly unlikely, the most sane conclusion is that the people with the drug convictions are the ones giving the big dollars to the candidates, or they would not be allowed near the president or vice president. Now for the wildest part of the entire thing. I want to write about drug smuggling and the Kennedy murder. Cuba has not had a robust economy since Castro's revolution and US investments dried up, so a lot of drugs go through Cuba on their way to the US and other destinations. If you think the Castro and post-Castro governments did and do not take their cut, you are badly mistaken. I am not going to make some kind of wild speculation, because it is useless and almost always incorrect. Also, I am going to stick to the official government conclusion of a lone gunman, because some things I have read lately make that the most obvious conclusion. James Hosty was the FBI agent in charge of investigating Oswald right before the assassination, and his conclusion has always been that the government told the truth, just not the entire truth. It is why everyone thinks the Warren Commission, in particular, was populated entirely by pathological liars. The federal government has the same problem when it comes to whatever happened in Roswell, New Mexico. So far, there are three official explanations of what happened, and all three are obviously lies. Likewise, there is the Warren Commission Report on what happened when it comes to the Kennedy assassination, and then later on there was the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Both commissions came up with ridiculous conclusions. All these committees were also christened to supposedly find the truth and disseminate it. They never have, and people loose more faith in the federal government each time a committee of people creates a slightly different lie. Back to Hosty, Johnson and Ford. Hosty makes the most credible case that explains why the government was trying to cover up facts about the assassination. He states that Oswald killed Kennedy to try and impress Castro and with Castro's full knowledge, but the US government could not make that fact known. The US people would have caused a nuclear war by insisting on the invasion of Cuba. We all know how well an invasion of Cuba worked the first time, anyway, because the Bay of Pigs invasion was a disaster after Kennedy called off the air cover. And it was what lead the Soviet Union to put nuclear missiles in Cuba initially. Also, raise your hand if you know that planes were scrambled immediately after Kennedy was shot and were almost over Cuban airspace before they were called back. Can you say World War III? Johnson always stated 'President Kennedy tried to get Castro, but Castro got Kennedy first.' or something very similar, and Ford said something to the effect that the Warren Commission told the truth but not the whole truth. What I think he meant was that the Warren Commission told the truth that Oswald was the lone gunman who shot Kennedy and Officer Tippit, but they totally omitted the Castro connection. Hosty also states that Oswald was trying very hard to get to a plane that would have left the United States, taken him to Mexico and to safety in Cuba. That was why he was willing to shoot Tippit, because Oswald thought he was close to making his flight. It would have been pointless and useless to kill the officer if he planned to stay in the United States and try to hide somehow. The death of the officer just brought more attention to him in the short term and ultimately, too. All this Kennedy assassination business may seem far afield of the subject of drug smuggling, but the United States still has an embargo against Cuba for no good reason that the government is willing to admit. The Cubans do not have enough capital to invest in a candy bar and a soft drink without drug money, and they already offended the United States in the ultimate way. Only when Fidel Castro is dead and Raul Castro or one of his approved successors is out of office will the United States begin trading with Cuba again. My guess is that with all the expatriate Cubans around, the United States will finally annex Cuba, too, but that is another discussion. I went through all that to make the point that the Castros could care less how much the United States hates their regime, so they have absolutely no compunctions when it comes to supporting drug smuggling to the United States. They have nothing to loose and everything to gain from drug transit transactions and providing a safe haven for smugglers. Most countries are afraid of US pressure and how easy it would be to make an issue of international treaties on narcotics enforcement. There is also another very obvious point when it comes to all this. Someone is always going to be willing to smuggle drugs into the United States. The pay off is just too big for it to stop unless the economics of the situation change dramatically. Many people in this country think harm reduction measures are being soft on drugs. They are the opposite, because they work to reduce crime and the impact of the crimes that are committed. The traditional notion of being hard on drugs is really being soft on crime, because it encourages corruption and the breaking of laws as well as huge drug profits. During Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas, it was the only state in the union that issued bearer bonds. That type of bond allows a person to buy it with no questions about the legal-status of the money used for the purchase, and the anonymity of the user is total unless he cares to make himself known. When the bond matures and is cashed in, the money is fully laundered and ready to invest in legitimate business. A lot of people who would otherwise never go near a recreational drug will run the stuff over international borders if the mark up is thousands of percent or means the difference between being president and some unknown lawyer from Chicago. It was true of alcohol prohibition decades before, too, and the Canadian government even set up special laws to allow for the export of booze into the United States. People picked up the alcohol, said they were going out of the country, and they went on their merry way. Then they came to the United States, made a fortune, paid off police and turned them corrupt, and they many times cut bottles of alcohol with dangerous additives in an attempt to make more money. The similarities to the present drug black market are so apparent that there is no need to even mention them. Why would any free, intelligent and civilised people be so soft on organised criminal activity and promote such a horrible situation that reaches to every level of society and even to the White House? We, as a people, have to do anything it takes to clean up the drug mess and the cloud of criminal activity that follows it. Half measures will not do and police will not work. We have to make the difficult choice to totally legalise possession of all drugs and completely embrace harm reduction instead of continuing to wander aimlessly in circles fruitlessly for decades.