DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

John Roberts, a fascist, is now leading the United States Supreme Court, and two of the Democrats that I still had some respect for—Pat Leahy and Howard Feingold—helped put him there. Thanks, guys…So much for the two-party system.

Fascist? ! Fascist?! What do you mean, calling him a fascist? Didn’t we fight World War Two to stamp out fascism? No, sweetie, we fought World War Two to stamp out German/Italian/Japanese fascism and make sure American fascism would prevail. Sure, “fascism” is a loaded word—but it was Mussolini himself who defined it as the collaboration of government and big business for their mutual benefit—and that’s what’s going on in America today, and that ’s what John Roberts and Harriet Miers are all about. Sure, they’re both anti-abortion (unless it’s for one of their kids, I’d bet), but that’s just a subset of their belief that people need to be tightly controlled and predictable for the sake of a better business climate. Gay rights? Hey, if that’s what it takes to keep you a satisfied citizen of the corporatocracy, they’ll give you that. Don’t be fooled.

A lot of people are wondering why on earth Mr. Bush has asked Ms. Miers to be on the court. They must be blind. As criminal investigations unravel the administration, as the Valery Plame affair points more and more at Rove, Cheney, and Bush, any potential felon who could would put his lawyer on the bench that might judge him.

The Republicans like to talk about the importance of impartial judges—but they’ve got a funny definition of “impartial.” To them it means, “someone who agrees with us.” Just look at the Native American Trust lawsuit, which I reported on in an earlier show. Judge Royce Lamberth is being taken off the case because it seemed likely that he would find for the plaintiffs—the Native Americans who have been ripped off by the U.S. government, which would result in the government having to pay billions to the tribes, who overall are some of the poorest people in America. But I digress.

And the Democrats? What are they doing about unindicted co-conspirator Bush stacking the courts in his favor? The Democrats are just playing along. Harry Reid even suggested Miers for the court! Not a word about impeachable offenses, not a word about war crimes, give the man what he wants. I am disgusted. I am glad I have a Green Party to turn to—but I sure hope we grow up fast.

A friend of mine learned something surprising from a psychotherapist he befriended. “If I knew that some of your friends smoked marihuana, and I didn’t report them to the police, and it came out that I knew they used marihuana and hadn’t reported them, I could permanently lose my license.” As he inquired, he discovered that she was likewise obligated to turn in to the police any client of hers who admitted using marihuana.

Let’s leave aside for the time being the issue of the efficacy of what I would have to call Big Psychotherapy and its arsenal of prescription drugs, and just look at the question of what it means to be obligated to report marihuana use among people with whom you are supposed to be building trust in a a therapeutic relationship.

Something the government never seems to “get” is that you can’t expect to hear the truth from people if they know you will punish them for saying it. If you threaten people, they will tell you what you want to hear. That’s why physical torture doesn’t work. So why were they doing all that ugly stuff at Abu Gairab? Because humiliation breaks people better than pain does, that’s why. But I digress.

I am amused sometimes at the number of self-styled herbalists who don’t use marihuana and even talk against it—because it appears to be a herbal medicine that really, truly, unarguably, don’t need scientific statisitical studies to notice, WORKS. Those who have done scientific studies on it have found that it loosens neural pathways, making it harder for users to behave habitually—for better and for worse. Inasmuch as neurosis is basically ingrained habit, this should be tremendously interesting to psychologists, but inasmuch as it’s an unpatentable herb whose effects derive from the synergy of a complex array of compounds, and not simply the action of THC, there is no money in researching it, so the research is not going to happen. Thank you, for-profit medical system.

It seems that the law regards marihuana users as ipso facto incompetent—marihuana smoking parents are unfit to raise children, marihuana smoking judges are incompetent to interpret the law, and even minor traces of cannabis metabolites, which stay in one’s bloodstream for up to a month after ingestion, are evidence that one is too inebriated to drive a motor vehicle….like having “one drop” of “negro blood” in the old south, cannabis is considered a contaminant in any quantity.

That’s an interesting comparison, isn’t it? Pretty much everyone agrees it’s wrong to discriminate or even just mouth racial slurs about anyone anymore, except for a very few hard-core Republicans clustered around Bill Bennett, but most people, including most Democrats and even some who consider themselves to the left of the Democrats, have no problem characterizing all marihuana smokers as incompetent degenerates—in spite of the fact that about a third of the country has tried it and someplace between ten and twenty percent of us still smoke it, in spite of widespread drug testing that probably does more to cut consumption than peoples’ experience with the weed itself. And the country is not overrun with weed-puffing incompetent degenerates—the majority of incompetent degenerates I encounter are card-carrying members of the Republican and Democratic parties, lifting their cocktails high as they toast the prospect of a drug-free America.

Marihauna users, if they were not threatened by prosecution, would freely admit that most of the time the effect of marihuana is not much stronger than that of coffee. Like coffee, they would say, it helps them in a thousand different ways with energy and insight around work, family, creative endeavors and recreation. So just what is it that the government is so afraid of?

Almost fifty years ago, the CIA did widespread testing of a wide variety of psychoactive susbstances, from marihuana to LSD. Their final report on this research was so secret that all known copies of it were destroyed. I believe that if we could find out what was in that document, it would state that marihuana and the stronger psychedelics are too good at increasing peoples’ sense of self-worth and autonomy and too good at sharpening their insights into the foolishness of authority and are therefore too threatening to the corporate hegemony that the CIA is dedicated to protecting, and therefore must be suppressed at any cost.

The Green Party is dedicated to fostering individual self-worth and autonomy. That’s the only real way to build a stronger America—to allow people to find their own insight and inspiration, and band together as equals rather than as the ignorant minions of some charismatic know-it-all like George Bush or Bill Clinton. In the name of honest discourse, the drug laws must change.

Continuing our look at global warming news, scientists announced in late September that Arctic sea ice was at the lowest level in recorded history, covering a little over two million square miles, off nearly twenty percent from the long-term average coverage, which is about 2.4 million miles. The date when the melting begins has moved forward about 17 days from when accurate observations began to be taken in 1978.

On land, the snow has melted about 2 and a half days earlier in each of the last several decades, leading to the tree line moving northward and the growth of small shrubs in what was formerly open tundra.

Trees act as solar collectors and help heat the ground, making it warmer. Bare ground absorbs more heat than snow-covered ground, making it warmer. Open ocean absorbs more heat than ice-covered ocean, yes, making it warmer—and the details of the observations I cited reveal that the thaw is not just happening earlier, it’s happening earlier and earlier—the momentum of global warming is picking up speed. Long-term climate records found in the Greenland ice cores disclose that climate change tends to start with small fluctuations that build, cross a threshold, and then move rapidly—over a few decades—to a new equilibrium, sometimes radically different from the climate that prevailed before. To give a concrete example, the last ice age didn’t feature glaciers grinding slowly down from the north. They were built up by twenty or thirty years of really bad weather. That’s why the Russians used to find mammoths frozen to death with flowers in their mouths.

We don’t have enough experience with the weather to really know what will happen when, say, the arctic ocean melts off, but here’s one scenario: the ice cover has prevented the evaporative cycle that creates precipitation on the shores of oceans. When it is gone, there will be increased precipitation in the Canadian and Russian arctic, but the temperatures will stay cold enough that most of it will fall as snow, which will reflect sunlight instead of absorbing it, and it will get deep enough to turn into ice and we’ll be launched into another ice age, made particularly pernicious by the greenhouse effect, so that the planet will be warming in many places as it cools off in others. This highly polarized climactic scheme will cause extreme weather conditions—how about category 8 hurricanes, with winds over 250 miles an hour?

And all for short term gain, from using coal and oil to have a more materially comfortable way of life…..who woulda thunk it?

The rising star of the Democratic Party in Tennessee, Rep. Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis, showed his true colors again when he voted for the revisions to the Endangered Species Act, revisions introduced and avidly pushed by the Bush junta and its fascist supporters in Congress. I have a certain sympathy with the property-rights question that this new bill allegedly addresses—as one advocate pointed out, the government pays you when it takes your land for a highway, so why shouldn’t it pay you when it takes your land for a bird?–but the law as passed is wide open for abuse–”I was just about to put a fifty-million dollar resort hotel on this previously barren, worthless stretch of prairie, but now that the golden-crested whatzit has been discovered nesting here, I can’t do that, so please pay me fifty million dollars instead of the ten thou the land is worth without a hotel on it.”

Other provisions of the act are even less consciensable—the end of critical habitat designation, allowing pesticide spraying in endangered species’ habitats (which is what almost killed off the bald eagle), and designating the politically-appointed secretary of the Interior as the person who decides what science to follow, rather than leaving it to—duh—scientists.

Ford, who is angling to replace Bill Frist in the Senate, is doubtless trying to position himself sufficiently to the right to attract Tennessee voters, many of whom find “property rights” a hot-button issue. Too bad animals can’t vote or own property, eh?

Ford’s record is mixed, at best. While he voted against CAFTA, he voted for the Bush administration’s bankruptcy reform bill, which makes it much harder for individuals to get out from under overwhelming debt—which, as I have pointed out before, is frequently generated by the shortcomings of our economic/social system, and was certainly not a vote that helped his predominantly poor constituents.

Ford has also been a strong supporter of the invasion of Poland—excuse me, Iraq, and has been supportive enough of Bush’s attempt to destroy Social Security that, when Bush came to Memphis to try and raise support for “privatization,” he gave Ford 100 tickets to the event to distribute and hailed Ford from the stage. And this is the guy the Democrats are going to run?

To be fair, I’ll have to tell you that when Harold Ford realized how unpopular Bush’s plan was, he lost interest in it—demonstrating that he’s either a realist or an opportunist, depending on how you look at it.

CBC monitor, an internet site that styles itself “the watchdog of the Congressional Black Caucus,” gave Ford the lowest rating of any caucus member—by their lights, he voted in the best interests of black Americas only 5% of the time, in contrast to the likes of John Lewis, Cynthia McKinney, Barbara Lee, and John Conyers, who all earned scores of 100%. But hey, if you’re a black man angling for statewide office in the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan (you knew that about Tennessee, didn’t you?) then politically it may pay off not to be too black.

This little story about Harold Ford illustrates why I’m working to build a strong Green Party here in Tennessee—it’s too hard to tell the Democrats from the Republicans. I like having a party that’s based on principles, not just on a strong desire for power and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get it.

I said last month that the United States has as much right to invade Iraq as the Germans had to invade Poland. I would like to expand on that theme a bit. The United States invaded Iraq without the sanction of the UN, although the spin Herr Bush and his junta put on it convinced a lot of Americans that the UN did approve our invasion. Here’s the skinny: UN resolution 1441 ordered Saddam Hussein to “disclose or destroy” his weapons of mass destruction. He, as everyone knows by now, played by the rules: he didn’t have any, he said he didn’t have any, and he invited the UN inspection team in to prove it. He knew full well his army couldn’t stand up to the US army—what was he going to push his luck for?

Bush and co. claimed that there were weapons hidden, told the UN inspectors to get out, and invaded—only to find that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction—and the evidence that has emerged since, from the Downing Street memo to Joseph Wilson, points to the probability that the Neocon cabal knew they were lying all along—”fixing the intelligence and the facts to fit the policy” is a, um…diplomatic way to say THEY LIED.

So, the United States Government–Bush, Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Karl Rove, Don Rumsfield, et al, launched a war of aggression against a country that was fully in compliance with the UN resolution the US said it was violating. If a smaller country did that, there would have been serious, immediate consequences—look at what happened to the Serbs, for instance–but since the US really is the only military superpower on the planet, we’re a little hard to take on.

Satisfying as it is to fantasize, we’re not likely to see Bush and Cheney in chains before the Court of International Justice in the Hague, where the Serbs ended up—much as the Bushies deserve it, for killing thousands of innocent civilians—bombing a restaurant in Bagdad, for just one example, because it was rumored that Saddam was going to be there—now doesn’t that sound like a terrorist act? Just because it was done by a government with a missile instead of an angry man with a backpack full of explosives, it’s no less of an act of terrorism. But, I digress.

Nobody is going to take on the United States with brute force, and win, at least nobody from this solar system. What other countries can do, however, is undermine us, or rather help us undermine ourselves, since the Bush junta’s economic policies effectively do that.
Alan Greenspan, the high priest of the American Church of Economics, recently admitted to England’s finance minister that debt in America is “out of control,” and this while everyone’s still being nice to us. Well, almost everyone. Hugo Chavez recently announced plans to take all of Venezuela’s money out of the US financial system and start taking Euros rather than dollars for oil. Now, Venezuela’s 30 billion in assets in American markets is a drop in the bucket—tho for me personally, it’s hard to think of 30 billion dollars as a drop in the bucket—but he could start something—an avalanche that leaves the US economy out of the world loop, and in ruins.

Of course, the last person to try that was Saddam Hussein, and we all know what happened to him. But, I digress.

So, if the Bush Junta invaded Iraq in contravention of international law, that not only makes them criminals in the eyes of international law, it makes them criminals in the eyes of the laws of the United States. We’re talking a much more unimpeachably impeachable offence than a come stain on a dress here, folks. We are talking high crimes and misdemeanors. Maybe even treason. No wonder he wants to put his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court!

And all those congresspeople who go along with Bush, Democrats and Republicans alike, are complicit and criminally liable. This means you, John Kerry. This means you, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. I am simply aghast that the alleged opposition party in the US congress isn’t raising hell—they’re politely debating the merits of Bush’s proposals and nominees. If they had any spine, they’d have walked out of congress and refused to play along. At this point, they might as well be the German Reichstag in 1942, debating the merits of SS appointees and drawing up regulations for the proper conduct of concentration camps. Let me say it again: the United States has as much right to invade Iraq as the Germans had to invade Poland.

I think this whole ponderous mess is collapsing of its own stupid weight—but I’d like to think there’s something positive I can do. That’s one of the reasons I’m involved with the Green Party. It’s a party for people whose moral standards are too high for conventional politics in this country. When the smoke clears and the dust settles, we will need some kind of overarching political philosophy to guide us, and for me the Green Party is an excellent way to discuss, develop, and propagate that philosophy. Can we talk?