Maryland

Register for the Annapolis Summit January 14!

CEM — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:06:38 -0800

January 14, 2009, 7-9:30 AM
Phillips Seafood Restaurant
12 Dock Street, Annapolis, MD 21401

Your chance to ask questions that matter to you!

Join Marc Steiner for a live two-hour broadcast on the opening day of the 2009 Maryland General Assembly Legislative Session. For the 6th year, Marc will interview Maryland's leaders covering pertinent topics such as the financial crisis hitting Maryland and the country, environmental issues, the death penalty legislation and BRAC.

A breakfast buffet begins at 7:00 AM, followed by Marc's interview with Senate President Miller and Speaker Michael Busch from 7:30-8:30. Governor Martin O’Malley will be interviewed from 8:30-9:30. In each hour, time will be set aside for audience members to ask questions. The show will air on WEAA FM 88.9, in Baltimore and WSCL 89.9 FM in Salisbury.

Advance tickets can be purchased for $15 via Paypal by clicking here.

If you'd like to pay by check, please send to:

Center for Emerging Media

Attn: Annapolis Summit

3000 Chestnut Ave Suite C

Baltimore, MD 21211

Tickets will also be available at the door for $20.

For more information, call (443) 934-1111.

Marc on Legalizing Pot

CEM — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:20:30 -0700

It is such a beautiful, unseasonably cool August morning, crisp, cool and a tad cloudy. I picked up the Sunday papers on my way back in from walking our dog, Charley. I opened the Times, put it down and glanced at the front page of the Sun, below the fold on the right hand side. “Community in shock over Harford man’s drug charges … Ecologist, decades long teacher revered by residents.”

My gut told me this was not some heroin dealing, gun toting, cocaine smuggling outlaw swaggering through the Harford County landscape posing as a mild mannered teacher of our children. I was sadly right, as I read the story. Sadly right and really, really pissed off.

A sixty-two-year-old man who spent his life teaching kids about nature, our environment and love of life. He smokes marijuana and it appears as if he might consume some psilocybin mushrooms sometimes. He must really be an evil man. Pretty soon, all the kids in Harford will be smoking dope, dropping acid, snorting cocaine, having sex and god knows what else. Known as Ranger Bob to all the kids, why, if there ever was a contrived name, Ranger Bob is it. Look, he even has a beard and plays Santa Clause on his Christmas tree farm. That’s how he snares all those kids. The devil in disguise. You think he is really teaching about the earth, nature and our history, respecting life and the planet we live on...

OK, enough with the sarcasm, but this is just madness. I don’t think anyone should go to jail, or have their home or children threatened with seizure, or livelihood taken away from them for smoking, growing or even selling marijuana. Most Americans who are 62 and lived through the counter culture world of hippies, slogged through a rice paddy in Nam, were active in the anti-war movement, in some non-combatant military role or alive in 1968 smoked a joint. Presidents did it. Some folks still do it that lead functional, successful and productive lives.

Most people I know, at some point in their lives, smoked dope. There is a reason why we call it dope. So, most of us don’t do it anymore. Most of us don’t get drunk anymore. We have more important things to deal with then people’s personal behaviors.

People should not go to jail for using marijuana. We should legalize it, tax it and let it be. Grow hemp so we can stop cutting down trees for paper, and let marijuana bloom like we grow tobacco for cigarettes and hops for beer and barley for whiskey. Many Indian reservations want the chance to grow hemp for industrial uses. It could help our environment, create new jobs and new industries.

Every 45 seconds someone is arrested on a marijuana charge, and most of those for mere possession. In 2003, the last statistics I could find, there was an all time high (no pun intended) of 755,186 with 88 percent of those arrests were for possession, not the manufacture or distribution, of marijuana. The cost in imprisonment of these offenders’ amounts is conservatively $1.2 billion each year. If you are arrested for growing over 100 marijuana plants you go to jail for a minimum of five years. That is longer than for manslaughter or for grant theft auto. Conservatively, it costs $1.5 billion a year to incarcerate these folks. If you add in law enforcement and courts along with imprisonment, it may be as high as $15 billion a year. We could have spent that money to build new schools, to open homeless shelters or veterans' hospitals, to preserve the environment or even to fund anti-drug programs in schools.

Harvard Economist Dr. Jeffrey Alan Miron produced a highly acclaimed study, "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," which was endorsed by hundreds of economists, including conservative leaders like

Dr. Milton Friedman of the Hoover Institute, Dr. George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley, and Dr. Vernon Smith of George Mason University. He concludes that “replacing marijuana prohibition with a system of legal regulation would save approximately $7.7 billion in government expenditures on prohibition enforcement -- $2.4 billion at the federal level and $5.3 billion at the state and local levels for a combined savings of $10 to 14 billion dollars."

Everyone has statistics. This argument has been going on for a long time. The bottom line is that chasing down pot smokers is a waste of our time, energy and money. People should have the right to have as they wish, consume what they want and pursue their pleasures as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others, harm our children or the environment.

Bob Chance, by all accounts from the former Mayor of Bel Air to the head of their county library, is a good soul who loves children and a defender of our environment who loves teaching. He should not have his life destroyed because he likes to smoke pot on his own time. He should be able to wake up on this unseasonably cool August morning not worrying about going to jail or losing his beloved farm.

Lea Gilmore: With Spies Like Them, Who Needs Enemies?

CEM — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:34:47 -0700

We're pleased to bring you a special guest blog today by CEM contributor Lea Gilmore.

When 10 Maryland citizens showed up on March 16, 2005 for an anti-death penalty meeting in Takoma Park to coordinate activities on behalf of Maryland death row inmate Vernon Evans, I am sure they didn't think they had a spy in their ranks. As they mobilized volunteers, worked on flyers, and discussed their peaceful protests, I am sure it did not cross their minds that they were doing something so subversive that it warranted secret attendance by Maryland State Police (MSP) undercover agents.

Click here to read more.

Well, that's what they got.

Documents obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) lawsuit revealed that the MSP engaged in covert surveillance of local peace and anti-death penalty groups for over a year from 2005-2006. In a press release distributed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, the organization expressed alarm at the incomprehensible spying revealed in 43 pages of summaries and computer logs, none of which refer to criminal or even potentially criminal acts, other than a few isolated references to plans for completely nonviolent civil disobedience.

ACLU of Maryland Executive Director Susan Goering blasted the program stating, “The documents show that the MSP engaged in surveillance operations against peaceful activists similar to those abandoned in the 1970s with the end of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program. The ACLU will soon file additional requests under the Maryland Public Information Act to assess other activities and targets of the MSP’s ‘Homeland Security and Intelligence Division’ and will seek legislative reforms to ensure this kind of improper spying never happens again.”

So I ask, just what were the Maryland State Police looking for? Did they think that folks were planning to peace us to death? Did they believe these dangerous peacenik gatherings and rogue anti-death penalty groups must have required extra special undercover surveillance in order to save us from “the tuurist”? Or maybe they are saving us from uh...tourists? That must be it. Rabid tourists are descending on local peace gatherings inspiring and plotting destruction of family values and our way of life.

OK, let me stop being facetious.

I understand completely that when Thomas Jefferson said “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” that that really does mean something. We must remain vigilant in the presence of real threats and real enemies, but we must not abandon and throw out our civil liberties in the process. We must be careful to weigh our fear with reason, and be ever so ready to question the motives of government when our rights start sliding down that slippery slope towards injustice.

It's a curious thing. Republicans are always complaining about “big government.” That being said, former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich and his administration, in this secret folly, seemed to embrace their “bigness,” with a warm bear hug, with Bob taking on the awesome responsibility of becoming a “big brother” to us all.

The fact that the Ehrlich administration expended funds to spy on groups that may disagree with them ideologically, and in the process trampling on their and our constitutional rights, is beyond egregious.

Is this just the tip of the proverbial iceberg? How many other innocent groups and individuals in Maryland and beyond have fallen victim to these intrusive and unconstitutional practices?

These actions are now receiving the national attention they deserve. According to The Baltimore Sun, the US Congress will seek to ascertain the Homeland Security Department's role in this spy game, and whether federal tax dollars were used in the process. With economic collapse happening all around us, dedicating significant funds on this unwarranted chase is just sad and shameful. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, in a letter to the department stated, “These allegations are extremely troublesome and bring to light past domestic covert operations, which were found to be not only unconstitutional but also damaging to the rule of law and America's democratic principles.” He continued, "Funding of the state police actions with federal taxpayer dollars would constitute a waste of valuable resources, both human and financial."

I love this country. What I most love about this land of ours is that I can scream from the rooftops about how ridiculous and Un-American I believe these actions are, all the while knowing I will not be sent to that mystery place of no return because I did – well, at least not yet.

From creepy and insidious Patriot Acts, to our government leaders having serious conversations about the details of defining torture (torture!), this post “911” political climate has lent itself to allowing us to accept the chipping away of our civil liberties by those who manipulate our reasonable fears in unreasonable ways for political gain.

The political tide is turning. This has spurred something in Maryland's electorate and beyond, and is quickly becoming a catalyst for change. The bipartisan outrage at these actions is a sign of life that there are limits to how much and what we will allow done in our name. The ACLU of Maryland is continuing to mount efforts to find out what other organizations and activists have been singled out for this wrongful spying. US Senator Benjamin Cardin and Maryland State Legislators are calling for hearings to delve deeply into these unconstitutional actions. This is not going to be swept under the political rug.

The old folks used to sing a song while marching for equality that rings so true today, “I ain't gonna let nobody turn me around...gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom land.” We will not be turned around by generated fears and covert power plays. We will keep those flashlights pointed in the face of injustice -- Now that's eternal vigilance.

-Lea Gilmore