Police state Amerika is now targeting stores that sell alcohol

Article first appeared in thecrimereport.org:

Baltimore has become the latest U.S. city to target liquor stores in an effort to curb crime in troubled neighborhoods.

A proposed change to zoning laws would force liquor outlets to move to sites especially zoned for liquor sales, to sell their liquor licenses, or to convert their businesses to non-liquor stores. The city council is expected to vote on the measure by this fall, officials say.

With two liquor retailers for every 1,000 people, Baltimore has twice the number of liquor stores than is considered a reasonable standard nationally, says David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The overabundance results partly from population decline, he says.

“In Baltimore, what happened is that people left but the liquor stores didn’t,” adds Jernigan, whose center has been collaborating with city officials.

“And Baltimore’s problem is not atypical across the county wherever there are large, urban populations: The more outlets there are, the more you’ve got homicides, the more you’ve got assaults …

“What Baltimore is saying is, ‘OK, enough is enough.’”

Citing what he describes as one of the most glaring signs of Baltimore’s overload of alcohol outlets, Jernigan says 97 such retailers are situated within a mile of the Johns Hopkins campus in the Homewood neighborhood.

“There is a striking difference between neighborhoods where the per capita income is higher and neighborhoods where it’s on the lower end ... It seems like there’s a liquor store on every corner,” Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city’s health commissioner, tells The Crime Report.

“Our approach is … revamping the zoning code and going back to the fundamentals of the zoning, which is to promote and protect the health of the community.”

The range of cities that have altered land use laws to curb alcohol sales and the troubling activity associated with them—from rowdy crowds and loitering to crime—include Madison, WI and Oakland, CA.

In 1993, Oakland imposed “public nuisance standards”—gauged by nearby drug sales, noise, and calls for police to intercede against those and related problems—that, if un-addressed, will cause a liquor retailer to lose their sales license.

Since then, according to a 2008 report by Alcohol Policy Consultations in Felton, CA, 15 other California municipalities have adopted Oakland’s model.

Several studies—including ones that have reshaped laws on where liquor stores can open—have cited the link between “alcohol density” and violent crime.
 
Among them, a 1995 study focusing on Los Angeles County, led by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Department of Preventative Medicine, concluded that three additional crimes per liquor store were committed in connection to liquor sales.

In 2001, Texas A&M University studied the trend in impoverished Camden, NJ and conducted follow-up research in 2004, spotlighting overwhelmingly poor, black and/or Latino sections of Austin, TX and San Antonio, TX.

In 2010, researchers from Morehouse School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health conducted a similar study of Washington, D.C.

Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, they concluded that, in 2006, a third of crime victims were under the impression that their victimizer was drunk.  They also concluded that for every additional alcohol outlet, violent crime—including rape, shootings and other assaults—rose 4 percent.

“Compared to other categories of violent crime, alcohol-related violence is most prevalent in homicidal violence,” that study of D.C. concluded.

More recently, a 2013 Indiana University study in the non-metropolitan "college town” of Bloomington, the university’s home, concluded that both simple and aggravated assaults were linked to alcohol density.
http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2013-05-alcohol-and-crime 
http://designinghealthycommunities.org/closing-liquor-stores-reduces-crime-and-violence/
http://www.preventioninstitute.org/index.php

Reporters are afraid to speak out against the Obama administration, fear they'll be monitored and surveilled:

The Obama administration’s targeting of journalists and their sources is an assault on the First Amendment, a former National Security Agency official and prominent whistleblower says.

“Reporters have shared with me privately that some of their most trusted sources within government are increasingly afraid to speak with them, even off-the-record, for fear that they will be monitored and surveilled,” Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency and a whistleblower who was prosecuted by the Obama administration, told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview.

“That’s self-censorship,” he said.

Drake explained to TheDC that he sees a “soft tyranny” enveloping the United States through the federal government’s targeting of journalists and their sources.

Such a fear of speaking to the press, he said, interferes with the freedom of association —  recognized in the First Amendment as an essential component of free speech.

Reporters are then left with talking points and privileged access to government officials, he explained, all amounting to government propaganda.

Drake was first caught up in the whistleblower investigations of the second Bush administration, but was indicted and prosecuted under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration in 2010.

Drake passed along unclassified information about wasteful spending on the development of the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 secret surveillance program. For that, he was singled out by the Obama administration for indictment and prosecution.

“We were the canaries in the coal mine,” Drake said.

Drake fought the charges leveled against him, which were ultimately dropped in 2011 in exchange for a guilty plea to a misdemeanor, but the damage was done.

“I became a criminal and was labeled an enemy of the state because I was calling out government wrongdoing and illegality,” he said.  http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/27/former-nsa-official-this-administration-is-exhibiting-narcissistic-tendencies/

Dear graduates: Tyranny is right around the corner

A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard against tyranny, because voters can be counted upon to elect democrats (lowercase "d") not tyrants. His argument defies logic and 20th-century history. It reveals an ignorance of the tyranny of the majority, which believes it can write any law, regulate any behavior, alter any procedure and tax any event so long as it can get away with it.

History has shown that the majority will not permit any higher law or logic or value -- like fidelity to the natural law, a belief in the primacy of the individual or an acceptance of the supremacy of the Constitution -- that prevents it from doing as it wishes.

Under Obama's watch, the majority has, by active vote or refusal to interfere, killed hundreds of innocents -- including three Americans -- by drone, permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, bombed Libya into tribal lawlessness without a declaration of war so that a mob there killed our ambassador with impunity, attempted to force the Roman Catholic Church to purchase insurance policies that cover artificial birth control, euthanasia and abortion, ordered your doctor to ask you whether you own guns, used the IRS to intimidate outspoken conservatives, seized the telephone records of newspaper reporters without lawful authority and in violation of court rules, and obtained a search warrant against one of my Fox colleagues by misrepresenting his true status to a federal judge.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/23/dear-graduates-tyranny-is-right-around-t 

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the politicians, by the military, for the corporations

President Obama’s declaration that “America is at a crossroads” in the fight against terror, a fight that is increasingly turning inwards, setting its sights on homegrown extremists, should give every American pause.

We have indeed reached a crossroads. History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal. Don’t believe me? Let me take you on a brief guided tour, but prepare yourself: the landscape is particularly disheartening to anyone who remembers what America used to be.

By and large the term “law enforcement” encompasses all agents within a militarized police state, including the military, the police, and the various agencies such as the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Having been given the green light to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts, America’s law enforcement officials, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead84.1.html