Lorraine Redig: Drug war is damage control WinonaDailyNews / Lorraine Redig / 1,22,2012 Our leaders almost habitually use damage control to fight serious problems caused by prioritizing profits before human rights. Damage control isn't designed to correct anything. On the contrary, it maintains the leadership and unjust policy goals, that cause the damage. In the Dec. 10 Winona Daily News, Craig Westover, Republican activist and member of the Republican Liberty Caucus, explained that the Republican Party upholds the "primacy of individual sovereignty, the sanctity of private property and the preservation of the rule of law." Free-market capitalism is conservatism's "profits-first" materialistic faith in living action. It is a publicly supported religion. Jesus called that "the way of the world." Jesus taught that God has primacy and individuals are to love our sovereign God above all else and to love all of our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jesus said: "By their fruits, you shall know them." Without new wealth, there would be no food, no life and no economy. Capitalism gives great advantage to a few at the expense of those who produce new wealth from natural resources and enter it into the economic stream. The markets use those who produce the new wealth as cheap resources instead of regarding them as honored partners in production. The drug problem is just one of the hellish fruits of an unequal opportunity market system that our nation tries to regulate through damage control. Love of God and neighbor and respect for life are missing from the conservative faith-belief, but capitalists gain wide-spread Christian support with the "outlaw-abortion" damage control battle. The only way 1 percent can remain our leaders is if we choose to follow them. Damage control is following them, because it acknowledges capitalists as leaders, while we fight to regulate the results of their ungodly policy to make it more livable. The solution is the opposite of damage control. It is love and cooperation for the common good. In Christian terms, it is to love our incredibly wonderful God of Love above all else and to love all of our neighbors as we love ourselves, without regard for skin color or religious preference. This is significant,,Christians are beginning to look past the rhetoric and that is rare. This is the first Christian based argument to end the wod that I can recall. And as the tentacles of the wod are exposed,there will be more.