Why I defend NAFTA on DU, in four charts

[JonLP24]

211. In the video he describes it as 'war on the poor' but he also says this

Simon took no prisoners. In his vision, the war on – and the curse of – drugs are inseparable from what he called, in his book, The Death of Working Class America, the de-industrialisation and ravaging of cities that were once the engine-rooms and, in Baltimore's case, the seaboard of an industrial superpower.

The war is about the disposal of what Simon called, in his most unforgiving but cogent term, "excess Americans": once a labour force, but no longer of use to capitalism. He went so far as to call the war on drugs "a holocaust in slow motion".

Simon said he "begins with the assumption that drugs are bad", but also that the war on drugs has "always proceeded along racial lines", since the banning of opium.

It is waged "not against dangerous substances but against the poor, the excess Americans," he said, and with striking and subversive originality, posited the crisis in stark economic terms: "We do not need 10-12% of our population; they've been abandoned. They don't have barbed wire around them, but they might as well.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/25/the-wire-creator-us-drug-laws