How did we get in this financial mess?

According to just about every talking head, including the president of the United States of America, the U.S. of A. is looking down the long barrell of a shot gun, a barrell not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930's when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed, buisnesses, banks, and farms were closing daily, the Midwest was sufficating in an ecological distaster refered to as the "Dust Bowl", and millions of American were homeless, starving, and squating in shanty towns.

So what is wrong with the economy and how did we get into this mess?

To begin with, view this short film about the causes of the great depression from the Discovery Channel.
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/13433-american-history-causes-of-the-great-depression-video.htm

Here is also this short clip that you gives you a real sense of the misery that pervailed during those 11 years (Oct 1929-December, 1941).

Next, view this 60 Minutes news report that does an excellent job summarizing the sub lending practices and greed that are now currently rotting our financial market from the inside out.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Finally, review the previous blog entry that gives a brief run down on the War on Drugs, which has been a money sucking waste of time that individual states and the federal government have been pissing away billions on for 30 years. You should also refer to the notes you took on the episode of Freedom Files: War on Drugs that we watched in class.

Consider how people factor into this scenario. Is this crisis a failure on the part of people to work together to prevent another Great Depression, or is this crisis a result of people working together for the prupose of individual enrichment at the expense of the domestic and global community?

Your task is to construct a thoughtful position on the interconnectedness of domestic policy(policies that regulate markets and private sectors and policies that determine what and where the various state and federal governments funnel tax dollars), the state of the US economy, and the individual priorities of the American people.

Is the War on Drugs a worthwhile cause?

My students put together marvelous podcasts for their final projects in Criminal Justice Administration and Organization during the Summer 2008 quarter at the ITT Tech campus in Culver City, CA.

The assignment required students to select an issue, research the original problem that caused the community to get involved and demand a remedy, the process the community went through to create and pass a law to remedy said problem, what the law entails, and what is necessary to actually administer the law. From there, the student was required to discuss the success or failure of this law for systemic or administrative reasons. Finally, the student needed to cover the consequences of the law, which of course is a systemic question. They could also have discussed the philosophical problems with the law, as some laws are just a bad idea from conception.

Ultimately this was to be a case study on the humanity behind ideology. We dream up these ideas on how to fix society, but we often do not think through the logistics, or the reality, of the situation. For example, prohibiting minors from drinking sounds good in theory, but what are the logistical realities of making it happen? And once a system is put in place, what does it actually do to a society?


Jose Vasquez explores this law and discovers whether we accomplished our mission of reducing teen deaths in car accidents and what it really takes to police this issue. Good work Jose!

The War on Drugs is a good case in point. We don't want people to use certain substances that are physically harmful, but the laws that have been passed in the name of the War on Drugs has resulted in much human misery. Millions have been jailed, our corrections facilities are bursting at the seams, we have pissed away billions of dollars collectively on passing legislation, rounding up and jailing offenders, and maintaining them in correctional facilities thereafter. There are also costs for probation and parole and an increase on our welfare budget as the families left behind struggle to make ends meet with the loss of a wage earner. And of course, we cannot ignore the fact that people's rights have been disastrously violated when these multi-jurisdictional task forces that have to justify their budgets each year storm into minority communities and round up citizens by the truck full. This has happened more than once.


Adriana Cervantes's podcast attempts to grapple with a portion of this issue and she did a fantastic job. Bravo Adriana!

War on Drug Resources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/cron/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/video/
http://www.salon.com/news/special/drug_war/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/walter-cronkite/telling-the-truth-about-t_b_16605.html
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17438347/how_america_lost_the_war_on_drugs