[Powerline] A friend from California sent me a document from the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. It’s called "Cannabis Equity Grants Programs For Local Jurisdictions."
As I read the document, California’s program will provide $2 million to help localities establish a "cannabis equity" program. An additional $13 million will be used to help "equity applicants" set up and operate cannabis businesses. "Equity applicants" include (and seem to be limited to) people who have been convicted of using and/or selling cannabis.
Far out!
Here’s the justification:
Cannabis prohibition and criminalization had a devastating impact on populations and communities across California. Individuals convicted of a cannabis offense and their families suffer the long-term consequences of prohibition and criminalization. These individuals have a more difficult time entering the newly created adult-use cannabis industry due, in part, to a lack of access to capital, business space, technical support, and regulatory compliance assistance.
Thus, granting preferential treatment to drug criminals, including dealers, is a kind of reparation.
Naturally, race and ethnicity figure in the analysis:
During the era of cannabis prohibition in California, the burdens of arrest, convictions, and longterm collateral consequences arising from a conviction fell disproportionately on African American/Black and Latinx/Hispanic people, even though people of all races used and sold cannabis at nearly identical rates.
The California Department of Justice data shows that from 2006 — 2015, inclusive, African American/Black Californians were two times more likely to be arrested for cannabis misdemeanors and five times more likely to be arrested for cannabis felonies than Caucasian/White Californians. During the same period, Latinx/Hispanic Californians were 35 percent more likely to be arrested for cannabis crimes than Caucasian/White Californians. The collateral consequences associated with cannabis law violations, coupled with generational poverty and lack of access to resources, make it extraordinarily difficult for persons with convictions to enter the newly regulated industry.
(Emphasis added)
Accordingly:
The purpose of the Cannabis Equity Grants Program for Local Jurisdictions is to advance economic justice for populations and communities harmed by cannabis prohibition and the War on Drugs (WoD) by providing support to local jurisdictions as they promote equity and eliminate barriers to enter the newly regulated cannabis industry for equity program applicants and licensees. By issuing these grants to local jurisdictions, GO-Biz aims to advance the wellbeing of populations and communities that have been negatively or disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition and the WoD.
The document’s wording makes me wonder what alleged barrier to entry into the cannabis business is actually driving the "cannabis equity" program. California cites "collateral consequences associated with cannabis law violations" and "generational poverty." But which is the main barrier?
In other words, is California really trying to offset the effects of criminal convictions or is this just another, albeit particularly bizarre, racial preference dressed up as justice for war on drug "victims"?
Racial preferences are bad enough. But giving preferential treatment to criminals — rewarding drug dealers, including those who sold to kids, for their past crimes — seems crazy.
Crazy, but not unprecedented. The left wants to reward millions of people who violated our immigration laws by granting them legal status and, indeed, citizenship. Those who took our laws seriously and followed the correct procedures for entry and citizenship take a back seat. Same, now, with those who didn’t turn kids on to drugs for profit.
The left has an understandable motive for rewarding violators of our immigration law. Doing so will create millions of new voters to support its agenda.
What’s the motive for "cannabis equity"? Maybe it’s not entirely dissimilar — funneling money to two favored Democratic constituencies, Blacks and criminals.
In the name of equity, of course. My tax dollars at work.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/15/2021 00:00 ||
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#1
Maybe the police need to start tossing HEMP Grenades instead of Tear Gas?
Imagine a crowd of Mellowed out Stoned Protesters trying get emotionally hyped-up to riot. ☺ ☻
[The New Republic] On February 11, 2020, public health and infectious disease experts gathered by the hundreds at the World Health Organization’s Geneva mothership. The official pronouncement of a pandemic was still a month out, but the agency’s international brain trust knew enough to be worried. Burdened by a sense of borrowed time, they spent two days furiously sketching an "R&D Blueprint" in preparation for a world upended by the virus then known as 2019-nCoV.
The resulting document summarized the state of coronavirus research and proposed ways to accelerate the development of diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. The underlying premise was that the world would unite against the virus. The global research community would maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery. The group also drew up plans for global comparative trials overseen by the WHO, to assess the merits of treatments and vaccines.
One issue not mentioned in the paper: intellectual property. If the worst came to pass, the experts and researchers assumed cooperation would define the global response, with the WHO playing a central role. That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down—from research and development to manufacturing scale-up—does not seem to have occurred to them.
#4
In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines.
[Lawfare] Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released the U.S. intelligence community’s unclassified 2021 Annual Threat Assessment today. The 27-page document details “the most direct, serious threats to the United States during the next year.” The report identifies China, North Korea, Russia and Iran as countries that have “demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its allies.” The threat assessment also notes that “the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to strain governments and societies, fueling humanitarian and economic crises, political unrest, and geopolitical competition.” The document covers a wide range of threats facing the United States, from transnational issues like climate change to the conflict in Afghanistan to the potential for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. You can read the report here and below.
[Conservative Journal Review] So, we have reported before on how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband has cashed in on what appears to be insider information.
That report focused on the Tesla shares that Paul Pelosi had made.
Today, we found out that Paul Pelosi made another huge stock purchase, conveniently, with a company that landed a huge government contract, making him millions in the process.
BIG PURCHASES, BIG PROFITS
Last month, Paul Pelosi exercised options to buy 15,000 shares of Microsoft at a strike price of $130 per share.
Additionally, his venture capital firm purchased another 10,000 shares of the stock at $140 per share.
Since Pelosi made the purchase, the company’s stock has risen by more than 11 percent, up to roughly $255 per share.
By my math, that is roughly $3 million in profits since he made the purchase.
Conveniently, about two weeks after Pelosi made his purchase, the government announced a massive $22 billion contract going to Microsoft to supply the Army with augmented reality headsets.
Pelosi also purchased 10,000 shares of a company called Roblox Corp.
This purchase was made on March 10, and the stock has since gone up from $64.50 per share to about $80 per share.
Now, Nancy Pelosi can make any statement she wants, but there is simply no way anyone can convince me that Paul Pelosi was not told about the government contract that Microsoft was getting.
This is the utter definition of insider trading and it is a safe assumption that the majority of Congress are making trades like this all the time.
You simply cannot accumulate tens of millions in net worth making $150,000 a year unless you are a virtually perfect trader or you are getting inside information.
#5
I guess it's a simple matter of choice. On the one hand you have hours of scanning, support/resistance, volume and news catalysts. On the other you could be married to San Fran Nan. Back to those screens!, boys.
#6
Ah, that's actually not insider trading. An 11% rise is nothing really.
An inside trade would be one where the stock goes up 40, 50, 100% in a day or two based on the release of dramatic news that radically changes the market's i.e. everyone else's expectations for the company. That didn't happen with $MSFT. They sign billion-dollar transactions every week of every year.
#7
Which also begs the question, was that contract awarded based on merit or base on personal profit?
And if on profit - how many solders will die due to failing second-rate headsets?
[American Thinker] After appearing on milk carton memes from Republicans mocking her as AWOL in being Joe Biden's border crisis czar, Kamala Harris has dropped her crocheting, snacking, and home decor battles to bring herself out of the woodwork.
Wednesday, she held a press conference and Zoom-like roundtable on just what she plans to do about the migrant surge at the border, looking for all those "root causes."
Here are some choice bits from the White House transcript. The first reporter's question got right to the point:
Q Madam Vice President, will you visit the southern border. Do you have a trip planned? Will you plan one in the future if the situation with migration doesn't resolve itself?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: So, as I mentioned to the experts, the President has asked Secretary Mayorkas to address what is going on at the border. And he has been working very hard at that, and it's showing some progress because of his hard work. I have been asked to lead the issue of dealing with root causes in the Northern Triangle, similar to what then-Vice President did many years ago.
But I will tell you that these are issues that are not going to be addressed overnight, in terms of the root causes issue. A large part of our focus is diplomatic, in terms of what we can do, in a way that is about working with these countries.
So, for example: I have talked with the President of Mexico, the President of Guatemala. We have — well, I'm probably saying too much — we have plans in the work to go to Guatemala as soon as possible, given all of the restrictions in terms of COVID and things of that nature.
But these are areas of focus for a very important and good reason. We must address the symptoms, and that is what is happening with the team of folks who are working on the border, led by Ali Mayorkas. But we also have to deal with the root causes, otherwise we are just in a perpetual system of only dealing with the symptoms.
So, our focus is to deal with the root causes, and I'm looking forward to traveling, hopefully, as my first trip, to the Northern Triangle — stopping in Mexico and then going to Guatemala sometime soon.
No border visit — too politically hazardous to be associated with it, for sure. Let Mayorkas do that unpopular job exposing the administration's incompetence.
But Harris's claim that there's nothing to learn at the border about the "root causes" of illegal migration is nonsense. On the contrary, there's a hell of a lot to learn firsthand at the border from the actual participants about the root causes of why, exactly, they are entering the U.S. illegally in surges. In a report published yesterday, a Politico correspondent went to Tijuana; interviewed actual wannabe illegal aliens; and, sure enough, found out a lot.
Here's Politico correspondent Jack Herrera's nut graf and what immediately followed:
#3
The root cause is the USA has long had an economic system that created more wealth than most of the rest of the world, so the rest of the world wants to come here. And change that system to be what they came here to escape.
#4
While we figure out travel restrictions with the Covid in Honduras, I will travel the country visiting niche shops in order to build my brand.
See, did you know I'm a professional crotcheter? Oh, its crow-shay? Well I am good at it, taught my kids even. And like all you fellow Americans I, too, like snackies. For real though, as you can see HII HACKLE HACK HACK HOO!
#6
Cackling Kamala as usual does not answer the question. Just waffles on with saying nothing concrete. At least Sleepy Joe has cognitive decline as an excuse.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Powerline] A friend from California sent me a document from the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development. It’s called "Cannabis Equity Grants Programs For Local Jurisdictions."
[Conservative Journal Review] So, we have reported before on how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband has cashed in on what appears to be insider information. 
