RICO is a powerful and useful tool when properly applied. The key word being properly. Some crimes can be so diffuse that the only way to bring the guilty to justice is to build a case on the pattern behavior many RICO cases so tightly hinge upon. If the DOJ were properly run, RICO is a prime tool that could and should be used against the RNC and their masters.

Now the War On Our Own Citizens But Especially The Poor, er, um, War On Drugs, that’s a separate issue. Yes RICO has been used for drug related crimes (especially money laundering) but the real failure is that the War on Drugs is simply Prohibition in lipstick, or camo as the case may be. History taught us this lesson once and recently comparatively speaking with alcohol. The best way to make crime flourish is to criminalize natural human behavior. Humans have been taking drugs for entertainment for at least 2400 years. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3225729/Stone-Age-man-took-drugs-say-scientists.html I’m pretty sure they’ve been doing it since Ogg the Caveman figured out that odd little mushroom made him see things. Hell, the Egyptians paid the labor in bread and BEER. If all the drugs in the world magically vanished today, including cigarettes and booze, people would be spinning around in their yards to get dizzy instead and someone would be illegally selling Sit And Spins and lazy susan’s for $1000 a piece. The inverse lesson Prohibition should have taught us is that the best way to reduce crime is legalization and taxation. It cuts into profits and reduces both crime and motive while generating revenue and allowing for access control for minors and quality control (a health and safety issue). It also costs us money to treat what is in fact a health issue as a criminal issue. I haven’t seen numbers, but I’m sure it’s more cost effective to treat a heroin addict than it is to incarcerate him for 30 years because his personal stash was above an arbitrary weight set to decide who is and isn’t a “dealer” by people with a vested interest in having as many prison beds filled as possible. But then the private prisons would go out of business. And they should. Their lobbyists are partly and greatly responsible for the draconian drug laws here. And to those who say a liberal drug policy doesn’t work, try to find meth in Amsterdam. I recently saw a documentary called “The War On Drugs: The Last White Hope” where they tried exactly that. And could not do it. Most people hadn’t even heard meth in the land were natural substance drugs (marijuana/hashish, mushrooms, etc.) are tolerated if not totally legal. Meth, a drug uniquely American cobbled together from legal substances. A drug that will eat dime sized holes in your brain. A drug any doctor will tell you that if you take it that it’s not a matter of if it will make you schizophrenic when will it make you schizophrenic. A drug created by prohibition. The Dutch also have lower incidence in the general population with addiction overall than America, where we put sick people in prison as to assure they’ll be criminals afterward if they were not before. Legalization takes the “romance” out of it. The War On Drugs. Brought to you by Nixon, perfected by Reagan and the lobbyists for Fingerhut. It was a bad idea when Elliot Ness was alive. It’s a bad idea now.

But RICO can be a useful tool in the right hands. Expect to see it used on some of the companies on Wall St. currently under investigation by the FBI.

It is hypocrisy to have to bail out supposedly solid financial organizations, literally engaged in macho gambling operations that put our nation in financial jeopardy, while chasing comparably petty criminals. We see little impetus to use the available prosecutorial weapons to punish those in charge of these financial institutions and the all too complicit rating agencies for jeopardizing our futures. Yet we will be able to have police officers remove the jackets from Mongols on motorcycles, while charging them with trademark infringement.