Also on today’s menu:
Christie Wants People-Focused Drug Plan, Not Punishment
‘Excellent Student’ Kills 15 At Prague University
An Argument For Local News Coverage
Couching it in terms of helping to make the “promise of equal justice a reality”, President Joe Biden Jr. announced that he is pardoning thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia. Biden also is granting clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
“As I often said during my campaign for President, no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana,” he said. “Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit. Criminal records for marijuana possession have also imposed needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities. And while white and Black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, Black and brown people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates. Of course, the disproportionately long sentences that some people have been serving was never right.”
Biden extended the call to state and local government officials, saying, “Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the use or possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.”
Discussion: The decision makes sense, now that many states have made personal possession of marijuana legal, but the timing of the announcement, as the presidential primary season is gearing up, raises the question of whether it is a strategy to regain the support of young voters who are put off by the president’s age. (Age alone should not be disqualifying, but it has become a factor in this race.) However, Biden noted that it was a position he had taken long ago, while campaigning for the presidency in 2020.
Christie Wants People-Focused Drug Plan, Not Punishment
While campaigning in New Hampshire on December 20, Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie said other Republican presidential candidates have focused too narrowly on preventing drugs from getting into the country rather than focusing on the people affected by drugs.
“This is a test to see who we want to be as both a people and as a country,” he said while visiting the Hope on Haven Hill wellness center, which serves pregnant women and mothers struggling with substance use disorder. “We need an approach that remembers and reflects on the very basic humanity of every single one of those 100,000 victims, as well as the treasures each one of them could have brought to this country.”
In 2017, Christie led a White House commission on opioid misuse. Despite his open dislike of former president Donald Trump, Christie praised him for endorsing all 56 of the commission’s recommendations. His complaint is that only half of the recommendations have been enacted, and he said both Trump and Biden have treated the problem “as a crisis in name only”.
Discussion: In deciding whether statements made during a political campaign are genuine, it helps to look back at a candidate’s record. In 2017, as New Jersey governor, Christie supported a $200 million plan to expand the state’s role in addressing the opioid abuse crisis after meeting with people recovering from addiction, policy experts, and grieving families. “We’re addressing the widespread toll that addiction is taking not only on those with the addiction or use disorder, but just as importantly, on the families and the loved ones around them every day who suffer just as much as those who are going through the addiction themselves,” Christie said at the time.
‘Excellent Student’ Kills 15 At Prague University
A man described as “an excellent student with no criminal record” killed 15 people and injured 24 others when he opened fire on December 21 in the philosophy department building of Prague’s Charles University in what is said to be the Czech Republic’s worst mass shooting. Prior to the rampage, he apparently killed his father in his hometown of Hostoun, and is suspected in the killing of another man and his two-month-old daughter in Prague on December 15.
The gunman, whom police did not identify, suffered “devastating injuries” but police did not make it clear whether he killed himself or was shot to death in an exchange of gunfire with officers.
Police said there was “nothing to suggest that he had an accomplice” and they did not suggest a possible motive for the shootings.
Discussion: What is there to say about another mass shooting? Such incidents, which have become common in the United States, are now spreading to other countries, but the reasons are not always clear. One can speculate about the shooter’s mental state, given that he apparently killed his father and two others before going on to kill others at Charles University, but at this point, it is another unexplained tragedy.
An Argument For Local News Coverage
Steven Waldman wrote an article published by The Atlantic that spoke of the importance of local news coverage. Noting the collapse of papers covering local news over the past two decades (on average, he writes, two newspapers close each week; some 1,800 communities no longer have local news coverage, and many of the existing papers operate with skeleton staffs, with the number of employees falling by 57 percent between 2008 to 2020), he makes the case that not only is something lost, but the affected communities end up losing money to corruption:
Funding local news would more than pay for itself.
Unlike other seemingly intractable problems, the demise of local news wouldn’t cost very much money to reverse. Journalists are not particularly well compensated. Assuming an average salary of $60,000 (generous by industry standards), it would cost only about $1.5 billion a year to sustain 25,000 local-reporter positions, a rough estimate of the number that have disappeared nationwide over the past two decades. That’s two-hundredths of a percent of federal spending in 2022. I personally think this would be an amount well worth sacrificing to save American democracy. But the amazing thing is that it wouldn’t really be a sacrifice at all. If more public or philanthropic money were directed toward sustaining local news, it would most likely produce financial benefits many times greater than the cost.
What do government officials do when no one’s watching? Often, they enrich themselves or their allies at the taxpayers’ expense. In the 2000s, some years after its local paper shut down, the city of Bell, California, a low-income, overwhelmingly Latino community, raised the pay of the city manager to $787,637 and that of the police chief to $457,000. The Los Angeles Times eventually exposed the graft, and several city officials ended up in prison. Prosecutors accused them of costing taxpayers at least $5.5 million through their inflated salaries. These salaries were approved at municipal meetings, which is to say that if even one reporter (say, with a salary of $60,000) had been in attendance, the city might have saved millions of dollars.
Sometimes the work of journalists prompts government investigations into the private sector, which, in turn, produce fines that go into the public’s bank account. After the Tampa Bay Times found that a battery recycler was exposing its employees and the surrounding community to high levels of lead and other toxins, regulators fined the company $800,000. A ProPublica investigation into one firm’s questionable mortgage-backed securities prompted investigations by the Security and Exchange Commission, which ultimately assessed $435 million in fines. A review of more than 12,000 entries in the Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards found that about one in 10 triggered fines from the government, and twice as many prompted audits.
In other cases, local-news organizations return money directly to consumers by forcing better behavior from private institutions. MLK50, a local newsroom in Memphis, teamed up with ProPublica to report that Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare had sued more than 8,300 people, many of them poor, for unpaid hospital bills. In response, the faith-based institution erased nearly $12 million in debt.
The New York Times’ “The Morning” wrote, “digital news publications may be more feasible than it once seemed,” operating without the high overhead of traditional newsrooms, but support of local print publications also is important. “We also hope you’ll consider supporting a local news organization in your community through a subscription or donation. Find one whose work you admire, and then help them do their work strengthening your community.”
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