NAACP vs. THE ZOMBIES

We just listened to Richard and Mimi Farina’s”House Un-American Activity Blues Dream,” an electrified and electrifying musical offering that preceded Bob Dylan’s more famous “Bringing It All Back Home”  by several months, and marks the initial cross-fertilization between rock and folk music.  Although it’s  almost fifty years old, it continues to resonate–one recent commentator on Rombama/Obomney even went so far as to note that

Both Obama and Romney stay fit, dress sharply and look vaguely out of sync when wearing blue jeans.

certainly an odd echo of Farina’s line about “Presidential candidates in new Levi jeans.”

And Farina’s solution to his feelings of alienation in the USA–a trip to Cuba–continues to raise American hackles, as Ozzie  Guillen discovered to his dismay.  Talk about getting “banged hard on the head”!

But most of us are not going to pick up and go elsewhere.  “America, love it or leave it,” the reactionaries used to say in the sixties, and a lot of us lefties, from old SDS types like me to the youngest Occupiers, have picked up that gauntlet and said, “yeah, I love America and I ain’t leaving.  What are you gonna do about it?”

The answer has been, “do everything we can to disfranchise as many left-wingers as possible, so we can continue to hold the reins in this country.”  Some people have been directly disfranchised, like the five million or more Americans who cannot vote because they have been convicted of felonies.  The US is one of the only countries in which felony conviction results in permanent loss of voting rights, at the same time as it has, both by percentage and in raw numbers, more of its population in jail or under control of the penal system through probation and parole than any other country in the world, largely for “victimless” crimes such as drugs–mostly marijuana–pornography, prostitution, and traffic violations.  The allegedly felonious percentage of our population picked up markedly when Reagan declared the “war on drugs,” which, as I commented last month, turned the “war on poverty” into a war on the poor.

this is your prison population on a “war on drugs”!

Even if they have never suffered legal consequences from the herb’s contraband status, marijuana users who wish to remain free will tend to keep a lower political profile due to their vulnerability, an effective form of “passive-aggressive” repression that, I believe, is one of the deliberate consequences of the government’s unrelenting efforts to keep marijuana illegal.

But there are subtler ways to disfranchise people than by outright busting them.  The NAACP has written an excellent report on this subject, and I’m going to summarize it for you. It’s called “Defending Democracy:  Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights In America.”

The NAACP starts by pointing out that the non-white population of the US is increasing faster than the white population.  I was surprised to learn that heavily white Republican-ruled Texas is now a “majority-minority” state–one in which non-whites outnumber whites.  This is also the status of California, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.  I was also surprised to learn that five other states–Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Maryland, and Nevada–are likely to join that category by the next census.  in this context, the extraordinary efforts of mostly white Republicans to limit ballot access and civil rights that have been so prominent  in Arizona, Florida, and Georgia make sense–the old order is indeed crumbling, and those who have reaped its benefits are determined not to surrender them without a fight.  In those states and others, the NAACP lists several common tactics:

1 )Tighter restrictions on voter registration drives, such as the extreme penalties imposed in some states for getting registration details wrong or failing to return  petitions in a very narrow window of time.

2 ) Greater limitations on where and when citizens can register to vote.  State legislatures have moved to shut down “same day registration,” which allows citizens to register and cast a ballot at the same time.  Other states have simply never complied with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which required state public assistance agencies to provide voter registration services.  “Public assistance agencies” doesn’t just mean “welfare agencies”–it includes motor vehicle and drivers’ license bureaus.

3) Stricter laws about proof of eligibility, such as demanding “proof of citizenship.”  Many older African-Americans were born at home and never had a birth certificate, thus cannot “prove” they are citizens.  Another way in which white Republicans are limiting the right to vote is by instituting longer residency requirements.  This has a heavier impact on non-whites, who, since they are less likely to own their own homes, move more frequently than whites.

4 )Some states are reversing more liberal policies about re-enfranchising ex-felons, which has, according to the NAACP, removed “hundreds of thousands” of–primarily non-white–voters from the rolls. This has been most egregious in Florida, whichis one of the states teetering on the brink of being “majority-minority,” while Iowa has some of the strictest anti-drug laws in the country.

5) States are purging voters from the voter rolls on the allegation that they are dead, have moved out of the district, or are felons, when in fact they may merely have the same name as such a person. Frequently, those purged are not notified and only find out they have been erroneously disqualified when they show up to vote. According to the NAACP  “in Florida, a flawed purge program erroneously flagged and purged 12,000 voters (mostly due to typos and other obvious clerical errors). Over 70% of those flagged voters were African-American or Latino.”

6) Many states have substantially reduced the days and hours when early voting is allowed.  Since people of color are more likely than whites to be working jobs that will not allow them to take time off to go to the polls for a Tuesday election, this has a disproportionate impact on non-white, low-income voters, who are likely to favor candidates espousing more liberal social policies–i.e., candidates who are not Republicans.

7) Many states have passed laws requiring voters to present a photo ID.  According to the NAACP’s report, “Eleven percent of U.S. citizens nationwide—approximately 22.9 million people—do not have government-issued photo IDs. Twenty-five percent of African-American voting-age citizens (over six million people) and 16% of Latino voting-age citizens (nearly three million people) do not possess valid government-issued photo ID. “  Note that the average is one in ten, but among African-Americans, it’s one in four.  When you factor in the one out of every eight African-American men who can’t vote because of a felony conviction (and granted there’s some overlap), the trend gets kind of obvious, doesn’t it?

And why is this happening?  Proponents of tighter restrictions on voter eligibility blow a lot of hot air about “voter fraud,” but even their best efforts have turned up only an insignificant number of unqualified people attempting to vote, certainly not enough in any district to actually influence an election, and most cases are due to clerical error or misunderstanding.  On the other hand, advocates of stricter voter ID laws in South Carolina were honest, or foolish, enough to come out and say, according to the NAACP’s well-footnoted document, “that suppression of the African-American vote was ‘why we ‘need [voter ID laws in South Carolina].”

And that wasn’t just an isolated, fringe opinion.  The NAACP also quotes American Legislative Exchange Council founder Paul Weyrich, who said

“our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

This sounds like a job for the U.S. Department of Justice, which has the 1965 Voting Rights Act to use against such blatant racism.  But there’s good news and bad news there.  The good news is, Section 5 of the Act requires the DOJ to  “preclear”  any changes in the voting laws in 15 target states that have reputations for discriminating against minorities. That is, the Department of Justice has to OK changes, including redistricting plans, before they can be implemented.  The bad news is, that only applies to 15 states, while the American Legislative Exchange Council’s henchmen and henchwomen have pushed through restrictive legislation in 31 states.  The further bad news is that the DOJ’s enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has grown increasingly anemic through the years, and came to a virtual standstill  during the Cheney administration.  Despite rhetoric to the contrary, under the Obama administration the DOJ has not focused on this area, seemingly preferring the easier pickings of going after medical marijuana providers, while the restricted-voting cabal pushes several cases on the Constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act through the Courts, probably figuring that, if they can persist long enough to get it all the way to the Supremes, that fascist body will grant their petition. The court’s stance has pretty uniformly been “more rights for rich corporations, fewer for the average Joe, or, as George Orwell put it in Animal Farm,  “Some animals are more equal than others.”

And, even if the Supreme Court, Inc. doesn’t take the case or decides in favor of the Voting Rights Act, the corporatists will keep on coming, just as they have kept on coming about abortion, climate change denial, and every other issue that might imperil their control or their profits.  If you’ve been thinking,” if this is an Apocalypse, where are the zombies?” you need look no further.  They Who Cannot Die are in the Republican Party, propelled by the profit motive and dysfunctional belief systems.  If it wasn’t so serious, it would be pathetically humorous to watch the Democrats attempting to reason with them.   The NAACP’s report concludes with a call to return to the tactics that initially advanced the Civil Rights movement, which, considering the many differences between America 50 years ago and America now, may or may not be effective, especially since corporatism has largely displaced populism in the halls of power.  They–no, we–had better gird up our loins.  It’s going to be quite a struggle.

music:  Ani DiFranco, “Which Side Are You On?” (1st link is the recorded version, 2nd is a wonderfully spirited live one)

TRAYVON MARTIN AND THE CULTURE OF FEAR

OK, today is Easter, and it’s time for the latest crucifixion news.  I just wish I had some resurrections  to report on along with them, but, alas, I don’t.  By now, it is hardly news that Trayvon Martin, unarmed and in fear for his life, was murdered in cold blood by an armed neighborhood watch volunteer who, as of this writing, has not been charged with any crime, apparently on the grounds that he acted in fear for his own  life, which, according to the “stand your ground” law promulgated in Florida and many other states, including Tennessee, by the American Legislative Exchange Council, excuses murder if you’re afraid of the person you kill. How’s that for a ‘get out of jail free” card?

When we drop back from the immediate facts of this case, it becomes another link in a long chain of black men who have been killed by whites, generally with impunity.  This chain stretches back through the many murders visited on the Civil Rights movement, to the notorious case of Emmett Till in the early 1960′s, to pogroms that destroyed entire African-American towns and neighborhoods in the twenties, to the brutal repression of African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction South, to slave owners’ desire to break the will of any person of color who was perceived as “uppity,” or likely to fight back against oppression, back to the Nat Turner revolt and the forced origin of African-American immigration to the Western Hemisphere–virtually every African-American’s ancestors were kidnapped and sold into slavery.  Oh, but that was centuries ago.  No way our conscience could still be bothering us, right?  Yeah, right.  What in the world do they want “reparations” for?

the late Eric Perez

Let’s put Trayvon Martin’s murder in perspective, by examining some similar incidents.  Let’s start with the death of Eric Perez.  One of the ironies of life in America is that this young man with a Hispanic name looks African-American, while George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer, bears a German name but looks Hispanic, not African, but still would almost certainly be discriminated against by any white racist who had the opportunity.  Poop, as they say, rolls down hill, and here’s the story of how it hit the fan for the unfortunate Eric Perez.  On July 9th of last year, 17-year old Eric was riding his bicycle after dark, and the bicycle didn’t have a light on it, so the police stopped him, frisked him, and found a small amount of marijuana.  Because Eric was still on probation for crimes committed when he was 13 (and who isn’t crazy when they’re 13?), his probation was immediately revoked, and he was taken to the West Palm Beach Juvenile Detention Center.  That night, under the guise of making sure he wasn’t taking any food back to his cell, guards at the jail roughed him up, banging his head on the concrete floor.  When the dazed young man obeyed their orders to stand up, he fell and hit his head on a table.  Within a few hours, he was nauseous and hallucinating, but the guards didn’t call 911, because they didn’t want to go to the trouble of filing an incident report, and the nurse who was ostensibly responsible for after-hours medical care at the jail didn’t return the guards’ phone call.  Next morning, Eric Perez was dead, executed by neglect for the terrible crimes of riding a bicycle without a light and having a small amount of marijuana on his person–and it’s worth noting that defenders of George Zimmerman have attempted to slander Trayvon Martin by pointing out that he had been suspended from school for having a baggie with traces of marijuana in his pocket.  People, America is not Singapore.  Yet.

And what happened to the killers of Eric Perez?  Well, they lost their jobs, after five months of paid ‘administrative leave,” but they were not prosecuted, because, the Grand Jury determined, “no existing statute applies to the facts of the matter.”  Apparently, Eric’s death somehow does not fit any definition of murder, homicide, or manslaughter.  However, in an official statement,the Grand Jury did urge  “… the Florida Legislature to enact a statute that criminalizes the neglect of anyone in the custody of the Department of Juvenile Justice.”  Just the thing Rick Scott and his Tea Party buddies in the Florida legislature will jump right up and do…not.  In a further insult to Eric’s family, the state offered $5,000 to help with burial expenses, then stopped the check, before reissuing it.  Talk about “jerking people around.”

So that’s the murder of Eric Perez–killed by prison guards because he didn’t have a light on his bike and he did have a baggie in his pocket, and might be taking food to his room.  Next, let’s look at the murder of Kenneth Chamberlain, who actually did have all his ducks in a row–and was shot dead in his own home by police at point-blank range anyway.

the late Kenneth Chamberlain

At five o’clock in the morning last November, the African-American former Marine and prison guard, who was under treatment for a heart condition, rolled over in his sleep and accidentally set off a “life-aid pendant” used by many older Americans so that, wherever they are, they can alert 911 in the event of a medical emergency, and so 911 operators dispatched an ambulance and police car to see what the matter was.  Perhaps because Mr. Chamberlain lived in a public housing project, where common prejudice has it that crime is more prevalent than elsewhere,  the police were not satisfied when Mr. Chamberlain told them he was fine and declined to get out of bed and let them into his one-room home at such an early hour.  “I know my rights,” he told them, and asked them to leave.  The police, apparently, did not know theirs, and cursed at the accidental object of their unwanted attention, demanding that he let them in.   They called for reinforcements, until there were eleven officers in the hall outside the apartment, and then they broke in and tasered the unfortunate but completely innocent occupant, who was clad only in his underwear and making no attempt to resist their unlawful entry.  When tasering didn’t knock him down, one of the officers ordered the minicam on the taser shut off, and shot him twice.  The second shot killed him.  He had done no wrong. There was no contraband of any kind in his possession.  And he was dead, just like Trayvon Martin, Eric Perez, and so many before them, and,  as has all too often been the case, no criminal charges have yet been filed.

Another irony emerges in this story.  Many people, including me, have expressed concerns about the increasing intrusion of security cameras into our lives.  In this case, the entire incident was caught on tape by security cameras, not just on the taser, but in the hall of the apartment, and by an audio recorder on Chamberlain’s 911 device, which did not get turned off, giving the lie to the police story that the 5’6″ heart patient had threatened them, and for that reason they had used deadly force.  Like Trayvon Martin, Chamberlain had been on the phone as he felt his doom approach.  Chamberlain was talking to the 911 operator, pleading with authorities to call off their attack dogs–er, police officers, and letting the 911 operator know he was in fear for his life.

When I took a break from writing this story, I discovered that Chamberlain’s murderer has been identified, thanks to Democracy Now! reporter Juan Gonzalez, as Anthony Corelli, who, in spite of being indicted and about to go to trial on Federal civil rights violations in another case, was still on duty.  And I also learned that the white New Orleans police who shot peaceful, unarmed African-Americans trying to escape the city after Hurricane Katrina have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms….seven years after the fact.  I wish I could take some satisfaction in that, but I can’t.  What we are dealing with here is widespread and systemic, and punishing individuals for acting on the basis of conditioning that was instilled in them when they were too young to think, and that they were never encouraged to question, is not an answer.  Jail time is unlikely to change anybody’s mind, and more likely to simply breed deeper fear and resentment.  We need a more creative solution, a way to transform people.  Except in rare cases, putting people in jail doesn’t transform them, it deforms them even further.

I could spend the rest of this radio show, and many more, detailing the European-American-generated tragedies that have unravelled the lives of people who just happened to be born African-American.  And much has been written already about the deep cause–the seemingly insatiable European drive to conquer, exploit, convert, and control every person and acre of ground on this little blue ball we call home.  The question is not so much “what’s the problem?” as it is, “what can we do to heal this ongoing, world-wide wound?”  As a human being of pretty nearly unadulterated European descent, this is an extremely personal question for me, one that I have grappled with ever since, in my early teens, I began to become aware of just how much privilege I took for granted.

I didn’t quite realize where this story was going when I started writing it.  My head was full of the switcheroo in the early 80′s, when big corporations responded to the expansion of ecological and social justice consciousness in this country by moving their operations beyond the reach of American law, thus beginning the destruction of the middle class, leaving people less time for reflection and activism, and the linked switch from the War on Poverty to the War on Drugs.  The War on Poverty was offensive to the corporatocracy because it empowered people and led them to question the status quo.  The War on Drugs changed the government’s primary focus from empowering the poor to imprisoning–and disenfranchising–them.  The U.S. prison population is now seven times what it was in 1980, despite a dropping crime rate–thank you, Ronald Reagan!  Thank you Bill Clinton!  But I digress…that story will have to wait for another time.  We’re going deeper than that.

Becoming a hippie solved some of my conflicts about being born into such a privileged situation.  The exploitation and destruction of the natural world is driven largely by clean-cut white guys in business suits, and so from an early age I did my best not to be one of those.  I can’t do anything about the color of my skin or the y chromosome in every cell of my body, but being clean-cut and wearing a necktie are two things that a white guy can abandon, and, in the process, get at least a little taste of what it’s like to be a member of the powerless, dark-skinned underclass.  And hey, all it takes is a shave, a haircut, and a suit, and you are once again indistinguishable from the oppressor class!

But being powerless has its own difficulties, especially when coupled with a desire to make the world a better place for everyone.  In the early 70′s, my fellow counterculturalists and I hoped to prevail by sheer force of numbers and the fact that we were having more fun than our square, bought-in counterparts, but time, fear, and financial fetters conspired to erode those attractions for far too many of my unindicted co-conspirators, many of whom (including, some would say, me) have taken the easy way out and accepted the privilege of our heritage.  Since the 70′s, the crisis we perceived then has only snowballed in severity, and there is no sign of any let-up.  Were we wrong to bail on the lives we could have led, to attempt the creation of a counterculture in which black men, and everyone else, young and old, need not fear for their lives, rather than to fully enter the mainstream and attempt that same work in the belly of the beast?  Was Margaret Thatcher right?  Is no alternative possible?

No.  Margaret Thatcher was wrong.  Not only is an alternative possible, it is imperative.  The only way to change a society as steeped in fear and domination as ours is to do all we can to create a real, living, breathing, wake-up-to-it-in-the-morning alternative, to the very best of our admittedly limited ability.  Patience, tolerance, and flexibility are core values for this new society, and one way to practice them is to apply them to the limitations we all have due to our deep conditioning to, and inescapable links with, the impatient, intolerant,inflexible culture that confines us.  It’s not an easy job, but it’s the only game in town, besides the one that is so afraid of its own shadow and the evil it has visited on others that it excuses the murders of innocent people whose skin happens to be the wrong color, or who happen to maybe smoke the wrong kind of cigarettes, or who happen to live in places where fossil fuels or other deadly drugs could be produced.   Our success is not certain–but if we don’t try, our failure is inevitable.

music:  Eliza Gilkyson, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

THIS IS YOUR GOVERNMENT ON DRUGS

In addition to blowing off its entire ostensible base–the liberals, the middle class, labor unions and the underprivileged–the Obama administration also recently went out of its way to antagonize that eternal bete noir, America’s marijuana users.

And it all began so hopefully, so changefully.  Candidate Obama had spoken out in favor of loosening the country’s drug laws. calling marijuana prohibition “a failure.”  When asked if he had “inhaled,” he said, “of course I inhaled.  That’s the point, isn’t it?”  Entering the White House, he called for the government to make judgments “based on facts, not ideology,”  a statement that brought hope for change to stem-cell researchers, climate change activists, and marijuana users alike.

Well, at least the stem cell researchers got what they wanted–but hey, they’re part of big pharma, unlike the rest of us peons.  I’ve already talked about Obama’s extremely disappointing record on climate change.  Now, let’s turn to the bad news about marijuana.

Just as the importance of short-term profits (which is, after all, an ideological and not a scientific prioritization) has trumped taking steps to curb carbon emissions, so has the ideology of “just say no” remained firmly in place in Obama’s  Drug Enforcement Agency.  The first signal was his reappointment of Michelle Leonhart, a Bush administration leftover, as head of the DEA.  Ms. Leonhart has a long history of not only enforcing drug prohibition, but obstructing any attempt to end it, whether by allowing research into possible beneficial effects of the herb, allowing other research facilities besides the University of Mississippi to grow it for scientific investigation, or rescheduling marijuana out of “schedule 1,” the government classification for drugs with “no medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

This is your government on drugs!

Speaking of which, last month, the DEA finally ruled on a nine-year old petition to change that schedule one status.  I’ll let NORML tell the story:

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on Friday formally denied a nine-year-old petition calling on the agency to initiate hearings to reassess the present classification of marijuana as a schedule I controlled substance without any ‘accepted medical use in treatment.’

A coalition of public interest organizations…, filed a comprehensive rescheduling petition with the DEA on October 9, 2002. This past May, the coalition filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to compel the Obama administration to respond to their petition to reclassify marijuana under federal law.

DEA administrator Michele Leonhart posted a letter denying the petition in the July 8, 2011 edition of the Federal Register. Leonhart stated that cannabis has “a high potential for abuse; … no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States; … [and] lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”

She added: “[T]here are no adequate and well-controlled studies proving (marijuana’s) efficacy; the drug is not accepted by qualified experts. … At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.”

Responding to the DEA’s rejection, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “The DEA is predictably maintaining its decades-old ‘flat Earth’ position in regards to the otherwise well-acknowledged therapeutic properties of cannabis. It is a shame to see an administration that pledged to be guided by ‘scientific integrity’ engage in such blatant politicization.”

Coalition advocates will be appealing the decision in federal court.

Since this announcement, the government has announced that it will step up prosecution of medical marijuana providers in states where medical marijuana is legal, a total reversal of the Obama administration’s initial position, and a return to the “just say no” ideology of the Cheney junta, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.  The DOJ is also sending letters to states that have or are contemplating medical marijuana programs, telling them that state officials who help implement medical marijuana programs may be prosecuted. So much for hope and change, eh?  Oh, and to ice the cake, they’re going to try to crack down (you should excuse the expression) on so-called “stoned driving,” in spite of repeated studies that show that marijuana use does not significantly impair driving ability, and the inability of urine testing for marijuana metabolites to determine when the marijuana was ingested.  So much for a scientific approach.

This is ideological nonsense of the worst sort.  Not only does marijuana have thousands of years of history demonstrating its safety, it also has a snowballing body of scientific evidence in its favor, not only as medicine for the sick, but as a tonic for the healthy, as well.   More and more countries, not just US states, are recognizing marijuana’s therapeutic value, and on the legal front, it’s the rare official study of current policy (the latest headed up by that notorious stoner, Kofi Annan) that doesn’t conclude that continued drug prohibition is unworkable and unwinnable, and that, ultimately, marijuana use is no more dangerous than the use of, say, coffee.  I mean, consider the percentage of crimes that are committed by people under the influence of coffee vs. the percentage committed by people under the influence of marijuana.  Of course, they don’t keep statistics on coffee, but if they did, you can bet that more criminals are jacked up on coffee than chilled out on herb–whether we’re talking simple traffic offenses, assaults, or white-collar crimes.   Think about it!

So, what’s going on with our government’s insane intransigence on marijuana?

I think there are two reasons why the U.S. government is so staunchly, and apparently illogically, opposed to legalizing marijuana–not to mention other drugs, but especially marijuana.  It has to do with two kinds of control issues.

At a pharmaceutical level, marijuana is a plant which contains a complex web of interacting chemicals.  As anyone who has tried marinol can tell you, it’s not all about THC.  There are many “non-stoning” compounds that, alone or synergistically with other compounds, have a wide range of positive effects on our bodies–anti-inflammatory, neuroprotective, antispasmodic, analgesic, and a whole lot more.

Here’s where it gets kinky.  It costs a lot of money to tease out all these relationships, and so the research is not worth doing in our current, for-profit paradigm unless there is the possibility of a patentable–i.e., highly profitable–drug coming out the other end of the research.  And, the way new drug and new supplement approval procedures work, not only is it much easier to approve a patented new drug made from a natural substance than it is to gain approval of the natural substance itself–once the patented drug is approved, it is illegal to market it as a supplement.  That’s why, for example, any “Red Yeast Rice” marketed in the US has to have the statin drugs removed from it, even though Chinese food products that contain Red Yeast Rice don’t have to have their statins removed.  And…the funny thing is, even with the ostensible “active ingredient” removed, Red Yeast Rice is still effective at lowering cholesterol and inflammation.  But, I digress…

It seems to me that what the government wants to do is allow big pharma to dissect marijuana  and concoct expensive, patentable pharmaceuticals from its constituents.  Patenting  chemicals derived from marijuana will open up a treasure trove for the pharmaceutical industry, at the same time as it reinforces marijuana prohibition–”you can’t grow that plant–it contains patented substances!”  Patented substances that won’t have the side effect of pleasantly altering your consciousness, you can bet–because that’s the other kind of “control issue” the government has with marijuana–not to mention mushrooms, peyote, ayahuasca, MDMA, DMT, and that ol’ bugaboo, LSD.

Marijuana, however, is the easiest of these to use, because its effects are, relative to the other substances I mentioned, fairly short-term and low-key.  But, like its higher-powered relatives, marijuana stimulates the mind.  It helps people overcome established patterns of thought and behavior–which can make the same task easier or more difficult, confusingly enough–but the government emphatically does not want people who think for themselves. Keeping marijuana illegal gives the government an easy way to suppress free thinkers. The government does not want you to be a citizen, it wants you to be a consumer–a passive sucker at the corporate bottle–yes, I know I used this image before–but that’s how it is.  Marijuana is just too good for you, and too easy for you to grow yourself, for the U.S. government to ever loosen up and let it be.  Legal marijuana would undermine corporate culture at every level, and they won’t allow it to happen, no matter how popular it is, no matter how impossible it is to enforce the law.     It’s gonna take a revolution in American politics to make that change.

Not everybody in the Green Party uses marijuana, and maybe not enough people in the Green Party use it, because some of us take ourselves way too seriously, but everybody in the Green Party is committed to ending cannabis prohibition. I have a hard time with folks I know who use marijuana but support the Democratic Party.  They are like abused spouses, pledging allegiance to a political party that treats them as if they are incompetent to raise children, hold jobs, drive, or run for public office simply because of their body chemistry, a party that will cheerfully confiscate these peoples’ land and other property  and even outright imprison them because of their marijuana use.   I guess the herb isn’t quite that good at breaking habitual thinking and reaction  patterns, or these folks would have come to their senses long ago!  Well, the first thing about breaking habits is, you have to want to do it.

music:  Richard and Linda Thompson, “Hokey Pokey (The Ice Cream Song)

IT TAKES THE LACK OF A VILLAGE TO RAISE A JARED LOUGHNER

Well, I suppose I owe Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly and all those guys an apology.  When I first heard the news about Jared Loughner’s shooting spree, it seemed natural to blame the hysterical gaggle of right-wing rabble-rousers who have come to dominate our national discourse.  So, sorry, guys, for my knee-jerk reaction.  Jared is not one of yours.  In fact, it seems to me he could just as easily have shot John McCain.

After all, when you get beyond the blustering rhetoric,  tea partiers and neo-liberal Democrats are both part of the problem, not part of the solution, and I think Jared Loughner’s perception of the problem–the meaninglessness and irrelevance of government–was, in some ways, 20-20.  It’s his solution that was deeply flawed.  His “logic” was pretty schizophrenic, and violence? Violence, like mainstream politics, is part of the problem and not part of the solution.  But nobody was close enough to Jared to convince him of either the flaws in his logic or the futility of violence.

Several fingers have been pointed in the search for the answer to how this young man came to shoot 18 people.  Some say it means Arizona’s gun laws are too loose.  Some say it means the “mental health safety net” is stretched too thin.  And some say the fact that he smoked marijuana means that we need to tighten up our drug laws.  I think all of these miss the point.

Tighter gun laws?  As long as firearms are being manufactured, there will be a market for them.  If it becomes more difficult to buy guns legally, there will be a bigger black market, and they will be even more out of control than they are now.  Look at the war on drugs, for an example.

“Better mental health care” is another non-solution.  Mental health care in America has become largely a way for the pharmaceutical companies to sell more drugs and make more profits.  Judging by the record, hese pharmaceuticals don’t seem to be very effective in keeping people from going on shooting sprees, nor have so-called “mental health professionals” been able to spot those with the potential to run amok.

Jared’s use of marijuana, likewise, is no reason to tighten up marijuana laws.  After all, President Obama, ex-President Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and Clarence Thomas all used marijuana when they were more or less Jared’s age.  If marijuana helped make Jared what he is, it also helped make them what they are–for better or for worse.

But the mental health and marijuana issues do intertwine to point to how Jared Loughner ended up going off the deep end.

Jared and his entire generation are staring into the void.  There is no imaginable decent future for them, and many, many of them are painfully aware of that.  The American dream of a house in the suburbs, a plethora of consumer goods and high-end vacations, and a no-sweat job that pays the bills is increasingly hollow and unattainable.  The college education our youth are urged into as “preparation for life” is a debt trap, which cannot even be shed by bankruptcy.   Politicians, including Gabrielle Giffords, do not address this; they spout meaningless platitudes and dodge the real issues.  Jared is not alone in noticing this, by any means.

So, how does this relate to mental health and marijuana?

Several ways.  First, unless Jared was growing his own, he was getting his marijuana from a dealer.  If you are engaged in the illegal business of selling marijuana, in order to protect your own ass, you need to make sure that all your customers are sane and responsible enough that they will not get you in trouble.  Clearly, whoever was selling herb to Jared Loughner was being far too “whatever” about his customers.

The dealer’s responsibility to vouch for his customers’ state of mind is about the only shred of the wisdom tradition that is still attached to marijuana culture in this country.

You’re probably wondering what I mean by talking about “wisdom tradition” with reference to marijuana.  Here it is:  in cultures in which cannabis is historically embedded, marijuana use occurs in certain contexts.  In India, for example, many people only use cannabis when they are visiting their spiritual teacher, to make their minds more open to his influence.  However it is used, a tradition of thought, belief, and certain standards of behavior is passed on along with the chillum or hookah.

That is not the case in America.  Due to our restrictive, punitive drug laws and attitudes, parents and children hide their marijuana use from each other, and the wisdom chain is broken.  If Jared Loughner had lived in a culture with a better understanding of the proper use of marijuana, he would have been more likely to sort out his saner thoughts from his crazier ones, and learned not to believe everything he thinks, through the simple mechanism of long, marijuana-inspired talks with not just his peers, but his parents and other elders.

Of course, if he were in a saner culture, he wouldn’t share with most of his contemporaries the uncomfortable feeling of having nothing to grow up for.  It took the lack of a village to raise a Jared Loughner–and thousands more just like him, who have yet to bring themselves to our attention.

music: Tom Robinson, “End of the Rainbow” (written by Richard Thompson)

FOOD FIGHT

When 20 federal agents show up at a farm and seize farm products and computers, the first thing most people would think is, “marijuana.”  All too often, these days, it’s a different m-word:  milk, and also, sometimes, meat.

In response to demand for better-quality dairy and meat, farmers and local food activists across the country have set up private buying clubs, similar to  fruit-and-vegetable-oriented “Community-Sponsored Agriculture” groups.  Under this arrangement, which is a private agreement among consenting adults and not an open store, raw dairy products and freshly butchered meat move directly from farm to home, with no middleman, resulting in increased returns to the farmers, who need all the returns they can get.

State and federal regulatory agencies are starting to raise hell about this.  It’s hard to say how many farms and co-ops have been raided for “illegal” milk and meat, but the frequency of these raids seems to be increasing.

Illegal milk and meat–who woulda thunk it?  This is the latest bump in the road for the local food movement, and provides a prime example of two things:  first, laws passed because of a certain kind of dangerous behavior are being used to suppress a different, far more benign activity; and, second, big food’s use of the government to enforce its monopoly when other methods fail.

The rise of mass civilization over the last three or four centuries produced many unintended consequences–for that matter, the whole thing was an unintended consequence of unbridled selfishness as an organizing principle for society, but let’s keep it to the milk and meat department for now.

Not so long ago, the main way people had access to dairy products was from owning a milk cow, or knowing somebody who did.  Without refrigeration, fresh milk was a rare and transient treat, and ice cream an even rarer treat for the very wealthy.   Most milk became  yogurt and cheese, which store much better than milk.  Not so long ago, too, people had no clue about the germ theory of disease, and so contamination of fresh, raw milk was easy, unintended, and all too common.

A little more recently, dairy went from being a farm product to being an industry. As with any large capitalist enterprise, it involved underpaid, alienated workers who were not concerned about the quality of what they produced, and management looking for any corner it could get away with cutting.  Not surprisingly, this resulted in frequent contamination of the milk supply, widespread public illness and outcry, and, ultimately, regulation requiring refrigeration and pasteurization in an attempt to  insure safety.

The same thing happened in the meat-packing industry, with Upton Sinclair‘s famous novel “The Jungle” galvanizing public and legislative support in an attempt to clean up the business of keeping America supplied with meat.

But none of this changed the fundamental dynamic.  Workers remain underpaid and alienated, management still cuts every corner it can get away with, and the result is repeated episodes of contaminated products reaching the market, and widespread public doubt about the safety of officially approved practices, such as the use of  the hormone rBST to increase milk production.

Creating alternatives to mainstream meat and dairy products is not as simple as growing your own fruit and vegetables. XX Legally, meat and milk that are sold must be processed in government approved facilities–but the practices in those facilities, and indeed to some extent, their very existence, is the problem for many seeking local, healthier food.  To compound the problem, the regulations have been designed to favor large production facilities, and place onerous, unnecessary burdens on small producers–such as the detail that slaughterhouses have to provide a separate bathroom for the inspectors.

And so, people have formed private buying clubs to circumvent this.  They buy a portion of a milk or dairy cow from a farmer, so that when the cow is milked or slaughtered, it is already “theirs” and the farmer is merely performing a service for them.  This situation is far removed from the alienated, profit-seeking “industry” model that prompted the need for regulation.  There is a bond of trust between farmer and eater, and the farmer wants to give his customers the best quality he can, not the least he can get away with.

The law in many states, however, does not recognize this, and we have the spectacle of state attorneys and department of agriculture personnel roaring self-righteously about shutting down dangerous operations–which may be perfectly legal in a neighboring state.  In fact, some level of raw milk sales is legal in most states–but the federal government prohibits interstate commerce in raw milk, and has actively worked with law enforcement to shut down raw milk sales whenever it could.

There’s an eerie resemblance to the current patchwork state of medical marijuana here.  Another parallel with marijuana is health benefits.  Just as marijuana advocates propound its health benefits, which are vigorously denied by the DEA and some uptight academics and conservative social critics, so advocates of raw milk say that, overall, it’s much healthier for you than processed milk, claims strenuously contested by  many of the same people who oppose marijuana legalization.

But I’m a vegan.  Why do I care about this issue?  They’re not restricting my right to raw beans!  Well, actually, they’ve restricted my right to eat raw almonds.

And that’s where the wider implications of this food fight come in.  The blanket ban on raw almonds was instituted because of a salmonella outbreak that occurred in the almond crop of a large-scale, “factory” almond farm, and this is the same pattern we are seeing all over the “food industry.”  Factory-farmed foods have contamination problems, but the regulation that is introduced in response to these problems makes it much more difficult and expensive for small-scale operators, who are not the source of the problem.

Moreover, this continues the precedent, again, set through the drug laws,  that the government can control what we choose to put into our bodies, for reasons that have more to do with who controls the government than with human health. There are lines that can be drawn, but prohibiting private transactions among consenting adults is not the place. Banning commercial tobacco sales, for example, would be a good idea.  Prohibiting individuals from growing tobacco and giving, or even informally selling it, to their friends, outside a commercial framework, would not be a good idea.  But I digress.

Is it perhaps mere paranoia to think that the government would persecute the raw milk/fresh meat movement at the behest of Big Ag, rather than to protect innocent, misguided citizens from poisoning themselves?

Consider that Obama’s appointments to Ag Department posts look like he did his recruiting almost exclusively at Monsanto, the Fox News of agriculture. Consider that big agriculture, although it would be bad PR to admit it publicly, is concerned about having their market monopoly undermined by local food.  Consider the way corporate policy tends to become government policy, through the irresistible attraction of campaign funding arrangements.  The interwoven media-government-big business cabal will take advantage of every illness that can possibly be attributed to local food to make it seem dangerous, and use every mass release of contaminated food by a multinational food producer to create regulations that are full of loopholes for the big guys and hurdles for the little guys.

It’s about scale.  Raw milk is distinctly local.  It is not a mass-marketable product.  It cannot be transported cross-country, or across a continent, like pasteurized milk. (Most of the store-sold milk in Mongolia, traditionally a big dairy country, is now imported from Europe–but I digress.)  If a batch of raw milk is contaminated,  a few dozen people may be affected. But when the industrial food complex fouls up a batch, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are poisoned.  Cargill, one of the companies concerned about the dangers of local foods, recently had to recall a million pounds of beef tainted with an antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella.  How many people got sick from this?  Who knows?  Most of the  people who ate it were ignorant of its origin.  And of course, the resistant salmonella developed because factory-farmed cows are routinely fed antibiotics.  But that’s another story.

Factory-farmed eggs have had a long history of salmonella contamination.  The FDA has put new rules in place that will not eliminate contamination, but cut it by 60%.  Looking on the bright side, the official announcement says

79,000 illnesses and 30 deaths due to consumption of eggs contaminated with the bacterium Salmonella Enteritidis may be avoided each year with new food safety requirements for large-scale egg producers.

So…that means that there will still be 52,000 illnesses and 20 deaths every year due to salmonella-contaminated eggs, and that’s OK.  But raw milk!?  Send in the tac squad!

And don’t get me started on all the lawbreakers who are getting away with it while the government packs heat to bust people with milk cows.  OK, I’ll start a little:  Alberto Gonzalez will not be prosecuted for pushing US Attorney Generals to start cases just to make the Democrats look bad, or for helping John Yoo blow a lot of hot air about why it’s OK for the US to violate the Geneva Conventions and torture people, or just kill them outright.  John Yoo’s not getting prosecuted for that, either.  And not only are the boys at Goldman-Sachs not getting prosecuted for ripping off the rest of us, they’re getting to run the government.

I’m going to close with a quote from farmer and local food activist Joel Salatin:

“This food safety is a very subjective thing. If there’s one thing that stands between freedom and tyranny it’s the choice of being able to decide what to feed our own bodies. If that isn’t the most basic human freedom I don’t know what is.  By what extreme notion has it been decided that it’s perfectly safe to feed our kids Coco Puffs, Twinkies and Mountain Dew but it’s not safe to feed them compost-grown tomatoes and raw milk?”

music:  Greg Brown:  “Canned Goods“

TEA PARTIES: BOSTON….OR WONDERLAND?

When I read about the shenanigans perpetrated by the Republican Party lately, I don’t just wonder “What are they thinking?”  I wonder if they are thinking at all, or if they are merely DNA-powered robots in an extremely reactonary, defensive response to the fact that everything that has ever given them security and a sense of self is vanishing like smoke.

There’s plenty of evidence that there is no thinking involved here, most prominently the “Obama is a Marxist/Socialist!” movement, which I commented on last month.  That post, in which I decried the absurdity of calling Obama a “socialist” and pointed out some of the many ways he does the bidding of the capitalist, corporatist masters of America, prompted a reader who identified himself as “Commieblaster,” from College Road in Olive Branch, Mississippi (oh, the irony!), to comment “Obama isn’t a socialist, he’s a Marxist,” and direct me to his website, www.commieblaster.com.

Well, fair is fair.  If Mr. Commieblaster is open-minded enough to read me, I owe it to him to pay a visit to his domain, and so I did.  Oh, my.

“Eighty members of Congress are Socialists!”  he warns.  What, in his book, makes them “socialists”?  Primarily, it seems, association with an organization called “Democratic Socialists of America,” whose website opens with these words:

Democratic Socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives.

So….the tea partiers, who are reacting to what they perceive as an autocratic government, also feel threatened by the idea that “ordinary Americans” ought to be able to “participate in the many decisions that affect our lives”?   Go figure….

DSA’s site also features a number of articles complaining about Obama’s rightward course  and an interview that specifically addresses “Why Obama is Not a Socialist.”  Other criteria for being a “Socialist,” according to Mr. Commieblaster, include supporting Hamas rather than Israel (which was once described as “the most socialist country outside the Eastern Bloc” and where the government still has far more influence on the private sector than in the US), and entertaining the possibility that Mumia Abu-Jamal was framed.  So…does that make sense to you?

Shortly after hearing from Mr. Commieblaster, I ran across an article written by that ol’ devil Commie, the last Marxist left standing, Fidel Freaking Castro himself, in which Castro said flat out

BARACK Obama is a fanatical believer in the imperialist capitalist system imposed by the United States on the world. “God bless the United States,” he ends his speeches…..

The current administration’s militarist policies, its plunder of natural resources and unequal exchange with the poor countries of the Third World are in no way different from those of its predecessors, almost all of them extremely right-wing, with some exceptions, throughout the past century.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?

Perhaps Commieblaster would say that Castro is dissembling (the devil is, after all, “the father of lies”), but actions speak louder than words, and the evidence still stands that, with every move they have made, from bailing out banks in the financial crisis to promoting coal and nuclear energy development to subsidizing for-profit health insurance to creating a nationwide broadband system by helping out Comcast, the strategies that Obama and all those “socialists” in Congress have employed have propped up the capitalist system, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that highly centralized, private, for-profit systems are the least sensible, efficient, and economically viable means to promote the common good of the American people.

But I’m not going to talk about that right now.  I’m going to keep examining the reactionary, right-wing mindset that looks at Democratic party corporate shills and sees Marxist-Leninists.  Commieblaster is, as far as I know, just another guy on the street like me.  Let’s look at what happens when the people he supports are elected to office and actually get to act on their vision.

We don’t have to look far to do that, because our own state legislature here in Tennessee is dominated by tea-party types.  What have they been up to lately?

Exhibit A:  A committee of the Tennessee House recently sent four bills on to the whole legislature.    To quote Jeff Woods of the Nashville Scene:

Two .. measures are state constitutional amendments …to ban the individual mandate and the other to decree that the free enterprise system will live forever in Tennessee.

(The other) Two… are identical–both bills that supposedly would nullify the law’s mandate that all Americans buy insurance. There are two of these bills because their respective sponsors, Rep. Susan Lynn and Sen. Mae Beavers, are running against each other in August’s primary and anxious to take sole credit for this monumental achievement.

They all passed by voice votes to loud cheers from tea partiers…..

And…two things stand out about this example.  The first is that our country’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, fought and won a civil war in this country  over the question of whether states have the power to nullify Federal law.  The decision was, they can’t do that.

Well, times have changed, you might argue.  OK, how about this one:  our most recent Republican administration likewise argued strongly that states did not have the power to nullify Federal law….in the words of that notorious socialist, Antonin Scalia,

The regulation of an intrastate activity may be essential to a comprehensive regulation of interstate commerce even though the intrastate activity does not itself “substantially affect” interstate commerce. Moreover… Congress may regulate even noneconomic local activity if that regulation is a necessary part of a more general regulation of interstate commerce. …The relevant question is simply whether the means chosen are “reasonably adapted” to the attainment of a legitimate end under the commerce power.

In other words, the Federal Government can tell the states to sit down and shut up.

But hey, Scalia said that in the Raich vs. Ashcroft case, which was about whether the federal government had to recognize California’s medical marijuana laws, and everybody knows that anything goes when you’re trying to stamp out the evil weed…but the Bush junta also successfully swatted down Oregon’s assisted suicide  law and California’s attempts to raise mileage standards on cars. So….states can nullify federal law if Republicans want to fight the gummint, but when Democrats try to insist on states’ rights, it’s not OK.  That seems to be the underlying principle here, does it not?

Exhibit B:  Our state legislature has, by overwhelming majorities and without debate, passed a law requiring all medical facilities that perform abortions to post the following language prominently (in 40-point type) in their waiting rooms, or face serious fines if the signage is absent:

“Notice: It is against the law for anyone, regardless of the person’s relationship to you, to coerce you into having or to force you to have an abortion. By law, we cannot perform an abortion on you unless we have your freely given and voluntary consent. It is against the law to perform an abortion on you against your will. You have the right to contact any local or state law enforcement agency to receive protection from any actual or threatened criminal offense to coerce an abortion.”

Lawmakers soundly rejected an amendment that would have included language pointing out that it is also against the law to force anyone NOT to have an abortion.  In their perception, pro-abortion pressure from Planned Parenthood and domineering husbands is much more of a threat than anti-abortion pressure from fundamentalist churches and domineering husbands. Senator Beverly Marrero, one of the only two State Senators who had the courage to vote against this bill (the other was Andy Berke), said of it

We all know this legislation is purely political, designed to increase the anti-abortion bona fides of lawmakers up for re-election this year.

I couldn’t agree with her more.

Exhibit C:  My state representative’s “weekly update” informed me about HB 3280 which, to quote from the bill summary

..revises the substances that give rise to the offense described above in (1), so that it would be unlawful to operate or be in control of a motor driven vehicle while under the influence of any intoxicant, marijuana, “drug, substance or combination thereof, affecting” the central nervous system instead of a “narcotic drug or drug producing stimulating effects on” the central nervous system.”

“Any substance that affects the central nervous system”?  What substance that we take into our bodies doesn’t affect our central nervous system?  The bill was aimed at making it illegal to operate a motor vehicle under the influence of anything that might negatively affect a person’s judgement and response time, but, taken literally, makes it illegal to drive under the influence of coffee, food, or any of the many prescription drugs that have “do not operate heavy equipment” warnings on their labels.  I take one of those, metoprolol, and I can’t say that I or anyone close to me has observed it affecting my judgement or co-ordination.   Of course, this  It will  probably be used mostly to persecute people whose urine tests positive for marijuana, in spite of overwhelming evidence that marijuana metabolites in urine are not an indication that one is “under the influence of” marijuana, and despite research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Board that pretty well exonerates marijuana as a cause of hazardous driving.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t get my dander up too much about this, just yet.  Although it passed the House unanimously, so far it’s bogged down in committee in the Senate, which is taking up more important things like allowing mountaintop removal in Tennessee, in spite of the fact that the state generates far more revenue from people coming to appreciate our scenery than it does from people destroying the scenery to pull a little coal out from under it.  And that’s just one argument.

And there’s a bill that will insist that all driver’s license tests shall be conducted in English,unless the applicant’s stay in the country has been

approved and authorized by the United States department of homeland security for a specific purpose, including investing, overseeing investment, or providing needed services to companies or businesses in Tennessee, and for a specified period of authorized stay,

In other words, rich foreigners are welcome; poor ones are not.  This one, too, has yet to emerge from the committee thicket, and the state’s business interests are speaking up against it, so sense may yet prevail in this case.

We also have the spectacle of our supposedly Democratic governor worrying that more people will find out they’re eligible for Medicare and sign up for it, easing their own medical expenses but increasing the state’s.

I could tell you more, but I think I have gone on just about long enough.

Into this tea party atmosphere, more reminiscent of Wonderland than Boston, strides Howard Switzer, who is once again the Green Party’s gubernatorial candidate.  I wish we had a horde of people running for state legislature positions to back him up, but alas, it ain’t happening this year.  You can find Howard’s blog at switzer4governor.blogspot.com/

Naomi Wolf, author of The Shock Doctrine, has found a new popularity among the tea partiers, and in a recent interview she said she has some faith that their questioning of authority will, in the long run, be beneficial.  I hope she’s right.  I am concerned that the tea partiers will turn out to be the 21st century version of the SA, the “brown shirts” who provided the populist muscle that brought Hitler to power and were quickly disposed of as a political force once he and his corporate conspirators consolidated their hold on Germany.  On the other hand, Hitler did not have to contend with shrinking resources and a shifting climate, both forces that are more than equal to the task of toppling a civilization.

Unless they do come to their senses, the tea partiers, who seem to have the momentum in US politics at this point, will continue to spend their energy in irrelevant, illusory, paranoid pursuits, codifying intolerance and ignorance, and squashing any dissent other than their own.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

music:  Greg Brown, Worrisome Years“

TRUTH IN STRANGE PLACES

It’s been a while since I made any “Truth in Strange Places” awards, so I’ll make up for that by giving out three of them this month, to Nashville’s Congressman Jim Cooper, former President Bill Clinton, and current “Drug Czar” Gil Kerlikowske.

Cooper gets his award for this quote:

But when you look at TN Blue CrossBlue Shield you see a company that claims to be non-profit but just built a brand-new $400 million headquarters in Chattanooga, and they leveled a small hill to build their headquarters. And I’ve discovered the Blues(BCBS) nationwide get a billion dollars every year from the federal government. You see those sort of abuses and you think, ‘Can’t we do better than this?’ There are countless tens of thousands of people in our area and millions across Tennessee who need a fairer, better deal. Why can’t we do that? Truth is, the insurance lobby has the most powerful lobby in all of American history. They’re so powerful there really isn’t an oversight committee in Congress. They got in 1946 a provision that basically banned congressional oversight, which is the catbird seat if you’re an industry. Very few industries if any have had that sort of privilege. Plus they get exemption from antitrust laws. I think they should be competitive, private businesses — not favored with all these government perks, and that’s the way they’ve been for a long time.

Thanks for coming so  close to telling like it is, Jim, even if you don’t agree with me that these corporate persons deserve capital punishment for contributing to the death and suffering of so many  real human beings.

And Bill Clinton?

He called U.S. free trade policies in Haiti, which helped destroy the country’s ability to feed itself and pushed hundreds of thousands of people out of the countryside and into the cities, as well as into illegal immigration to the U.S., “a devil’s bargain,” and said

Since 1981, the United States has followed a policy, until the last year or so when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food, so, thank goodness, they can leap directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did. Nobody else.

Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg as far as this country’s interference in Haiti, not to mention all the other blowback from NAFTA, which he campaigned against as a candidate but then supported as President.  (Barack Obama is not the first Democrat who ran to the left and governed to the right!)  NAFTA, after all, had the same consequences in Mexico and the rest of Latin America as it did in Haiti, collapsing self-sufficient local economies and displacing millions of people, who went streaming to the big cities of their own countries and across borders to this country, where the Faux News approach has been to blame these refugees for what our government did to them. Blame the vicitim….right.

And lastly, Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, when interviewed, of all places, on Faux News, about the possibility that California might legalize and tax not just medical but all marijuana use, responded

Why would anybody pay taxes on a substance you can grow in your back yard?

Good point, Gil.  Let’s hear it for the local option!  That’s all for tonight!

Greg Brown–Spring Wind

CALLING ‘EM CRAZY FOR FUN AND (MOSTLY) PROFIT

In this story from Alternet, clinical psychologist Bruce Levine writes about the medicalization of teenage rebellion, to the great profit of the pharmaceutical industry.  One thing he doesn’t specifically mention, but that certainly falls under this rubric, is the medicalization of recreational drug use.  “Marijuana-caused  admissions to treatment programs are skyrocketing,” the drug warriors shreik.  “It’s a dangerous drug!”  How disingenuous–courts are mandating drug treatment for people without regard for whether the problem is psychological or legal…this is a question that needs to get cleared up if we are going to have any kind of universal health care.  I don’t want it if it means universal pee tests!  But I digress…

In every generation there will be authoritarians. There will also be the “bohemian bourgeois” who may enjoy anti-authoritarian books, music, and movies but don’t act on them. And there will be genuine anti-authoritarians, who are so pained by exploitive hierarchies that they take action. Only occasionally in American history do these genuine anti-authoritarians actually take effective direct action that inspires others to successfully revolt, but every once in a while a Tom Paine comes along. So authoritarians take no chances, and the state-corporate partnership criminalizes anti-authoritarianism, pathologizes it, markets drugs to “cure” it and financially intimidates those who might buck the system.

It would certainly be a dream of Big Pharma and those who favor an authoritarian society if every would-be Tom Paine — or Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Emma Goldman or Malcolm X — were diagnosed as a youngster with mental illness and quieted with a lifelong regimen of chill pills. The question is: Has this dream become reality?

HOMEGROWN KAFKA

If you want to gauge how far out of kilter our country’s legal system has gotten, consider my friend Bernie, who was busted for growing marijuana to give to people with medical needs. The feds tried to put him away for a five year mandatory minimum, but for reasons I will go into shortly Bernie pulled eighteen months in a halfway house (which my informants tell me is actually tougher than jail) and two and a half years of “supervised release,” plus the federal government wants to effectively fine him a million dollars by confiscating the farm where Bernie has lived for the last forty years. And, they have appealed his parole and are asking that he be given even more than five years. Please notice it’s the feds doing this. If Bernie’s case had stayed at the state level, he would have been dealing with two years of probation and an eight thousand dollar fine, and would not be faced with losing his home. Those are the broad outlines. The more I ponder the details, the more I have to mourn what a Kafkaesque mockery “justice” has become in this country.

OK, here’s some homegrown Kafka for you. First, the complaint. The person who turned Bernie’s name over to the drug task force was was allegedly disgruntled because Bernie wouldn’t sell him any marijuana for recreational use. A certain form of popular justice did catch up with this guy, though, as he finally had to leave the area due to the negative force of popular opinion as word of his role in Bernie’s bust got out. I can only hope a similar fate awaits the rest of Bernie’s persecutors, I mean prosecutors, but so far it hasn’t caught up with them.

Irony of ironies: at the time the helicopters, ORV’s, and SUV’s descended on Bernie’s farm, he was in the final stages of preparing a report for the State of New Mexico on how to implement a medical marijuana program—a medical marijuana program that has just been passed, as written by Bernie, and signed into law by presidential contender and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Way to go Bill! I mean, I love Dennis Kucinich’s ideals and his willingness to tilt at windmills but Bill Richardson actually got something done about this crazy kink in America’s consciousness.

And here’s the interesting wrinkle in Bernie and Bill’s excellent plan to provide medical marijuana: it will be grown by the State of New Mexico, not by individuals. Now, I think everybody should have the right to grow their own, BUT—in this confrontational day and age, in which the feds have been busting individual growers and private dispensaries right and left in California, New Mexico is setting up a system where the feds will be up against—not individuals, but the State of New Mexico. What a scenario: the feds trying to bust a New Mexico State grow room while the New Mexico State Police deploy to defend the marijuana growing facility…. but, I digress.

So, the state heat came down and busted Bernie, hauling away his plants and his computer (including his draft of the aforementioned New Mexico Marijuana Law). Always back up your work outside your computer, folks! The next thing that happened was…nothing. For three months, nothing. And then, although it had been a state raid, Bernie found himself facing federal charges, allegedly due to the amount of marijuana involved, even though that amount was grossly exaggerated—like, they counted the dirtballs around the roots, not to mention the stalks, as part of the weight, which even violates their guidelines.

At this point, the plea bargaining began. Do you know about plea bargaining? It’s pretty diabolic. The feds figure out everything they could possibly charge you with, which, in most people’s cases, is quite a lot. You have no idea how complex our web of laws is until you become entangled in it. In most of the cases of which I am aware, friends of mine began by facing decades in jail on open-and-shut cases. (The thing about being a prisoner of conscience is, the law does not recognize your conscience in any kind of positive way. You’re lucky we’ve gotten past burning people at the stake.) The upshot of plea bargaining is, you give them some piece of your soul and they drop most of the charges, and a jury never hears the case.

So, the bargaining began. Bernie’s lawyer was adept, and managed to nail down one controversy by getting the evidence reweighed—and discovering that the actual amount was one-quarter of what Bernie had originally been charged with—and that STILL included the freakin’ rootballs, fer cryin out loud! In fact, the usable amount of herb that Bernie was busted for growing came to seven pounds—about as much as the feds legally provide to each one of the five people who are legally getting medical marijuana from the U.S. government. (The original charges against him claimed that the confiscated plants weighed a total of one hundred and forty pounds.) Things were looking good for our boys—Bernie would only have to deal with probation and he’d get to keep his farm—but, when he and his lawyer showed up to sign the agreement they thought they had made with the feds, they had a big, ugly surprise—the feds had gone back to demanding a five year minimum and confiscation of Bernie’s farm. Problem was, thinking he knew what he was agreeing to, Bernie had already entered a guilty plea, and the court denied his petition to revoke that plea, even though the feds had lied to Bernie about what they were going to ask him to plead guilty to. And—the judge set Bernie’s sentencing hearing only two days after that decision, effectively denying him the chance to appeal. How’s that for Kafka?

Fortunately, Bernie drew a sympathetic judge, who allowed sixty character witnesses and medical marijuana testimony and ultimately reduced Bernie’s sentence below the five year mandatory minimum. But yeah, the feds have court action going to get Bernie behind bars, and they’re angling to confiscate his farm. For marijuana he had been demonstrably giving away for years. The guy was a consultant with a six-figure income. He was most emphatically not in it for the money. And if this had been a state case, as many cases of this size are, Bernie would have drawn two years probation and an eight thousand dollar fine. Kafka enough for you?

I am beginning to suspect that this is not some random case of prosecutorial insanity. As I mull over Bernie’s story, especially in light of the current controversy over politicization of the US attorney system and direction of it from the executive branch for the purpose of punishing political enemies of the administration, I connect certain dots and suspect I am seeing Karl Rove’s pasty finger pushing its way up my poor friend Bernie’s ass. I mean, if these people outed Valerie Plame, America’s number one anti-WMD undercover agent, why wouldn’t they go after a vocal, credentialed proponent of medical marijuana like Bernie? This is not the first time he has come to their attention, after all. On one page in the save Bernie’s farm website, he admits that, when he helped win the first big tobacco case against RJ Reynolds in 1984, “Reynolds thugs torched a car in my driveway to send me a message.”

Consider that some of what the junta stands accused of in the prosecutorial meddling affair is dropping the fine against the tobacco industry (of which R.J. Reynolds is, of course, a major part) from a hundred and thirty billion dollars to ten billion dollars, and that the politically appointed Justice Department official who directed this had for many years been a lawyer in a firm that worked for—R.J. Reynolds, a major contributor to the Bush campaign. Kafka, anyone?

I got pretty excited to learn that the current US attorney for middle Tennessee, Craig Morford, who is pressing the appeal of Bernie’s sentence, is one of those interim, without-Congressional-oversight Bush loyalist appointees that constitute another wing of the current Justice Department scandal, but actually it was his predecessor, Jim Vines, who worked most of the flimflam on my friend Bernie. Jim left the job highly praised by the DEA, and has not gone public about the “real” reasons for his departure, but it is worth noting in his favor that he was responsible for prosecuting bribery scandals in the (Republican) Sundquist administration. On the other hand, he was part of the Tennessee Waltz sting, which was so blatantly aimed at discrediting Democrats that the only Republican snared in it was not charged . So would he have prosecuted Bernie on orders from the Justice Department, R.J. Reynolds, or the White House? We may never know, but…

I have often commented that the marijuana laws are in place largely to curb dissent in this country. I think I have just made my case.

In closing, our Truth in Strange Places Award goes once again to freshman Senator James Webb, who recently gave the following response to a question about whether he would accept the position of Vice President on the Democratic ticket:

“I am still finding my way around the Senate and I’m having a really good time in the Senate. We’ve — this is a chance to put a lot of issues on the table. One of the issues which never comes up in campaigns but it’s an issue that’s tearing this country apart is this whole notion of our criminal justice system, how many people are in our criminal justice system .. — I think we have two million people incarcerated in this country right now and that’s an issue that’s going to take two or three years to try to get to the bottom of and that’s where I want to put my energy.”

Senator Webb, I’d like you to meet my friend Bernie….

music: REM, “Welcome to the Occupation”

THE SCARLET “M”

A recent Nashville newspaper featured a story about a young teenager who went to a party where she was offered marijuana, which she tried. She decided she didn’t like it, and when she went home she told her ma about it—ma rewarded her honesty by grounding her and taking away her cell phone. Thanks, ma!

Should be end of story, right? Wrong. Girl is waiting for schoolbus Monday morning, reaches into backpack for lip gloss, and pulls out—a baggie of weed! Surprise! Must have been a surprise—no kid in his or her right mind who was intentionally bringing a baggie to school would pull it out and wave it around at the bus stop, for cryin’ out loud!

So, some of the kids waiting with her saw it and reported her to the principal, who showed up at the girl’s first period class with two police officers, took her out of class, and, in accordance with the school’s “zero tolerance” policy, suspended her from school for a year. Since there was no dispute about the fact that she had a baggie of marijuana in her possession, her mother’s appeals on behalf of this honor roll student were denied. This has also led to her losing her driver’s license, so she’s mostly sitting at home reading books and thinking things over. She certainly has a lot to reflect on. She’s really been taught to respect authority, hasn’t she? Authority sure respected her, by golly, didn’t it? Welcome to the machine, kid!

This story does a lot to demonstrate how the “war on drugs” has turned America into a police state. Just for openers, she was snitched off by the other kids at the bus stop. Then, instead of calling her quietly to the office and asking for an explanation, the assistant principal showed up with two uniformed police officers, took her out of class, and cut her no slack for the accidental appearance of a baggie in her backpack. I’m inclined to believe her. I mean, why would she tell her ma she didn’t like it and then bring a bag to school? Unless mom and daughter are presumed to both be lying, it doesn’t make sense!

So, now she has a one-year suspension for “drug possession” in her permanent record, which will make leading a normal life difficult for her in many ways. Hopefully, she will respond to this monstrous injustice not by buckling under, but by devoting her life to changing the inhumane system that has branded her with a scarlet “M” for something she didn’t even intend to do.

So this starts as a story about America’s descent into being a drug-induced police state, but at a deeper level, it illustrates our country’s incredible schizophrenia about illegal drugs. It’s been said that marijuana is a drug that causes panic attacks and irrational behavior in people who hear about other people using it, and that’s certainly what we’re seeing here, and in many other cases where “zero tolerance” has wrecked teenagers’ lives for utterly trivial reasons.

Because–meanwhile, millions of completely functional Americans use marijuana regularly, all the while going to school, working, and raising families—just as millions of people all over the world have used marijuana for thousands of years. What is it about “getting high” that the current world order is so afraid of? Why are marijuana users (not to mention mushroom eaters, etc.) demonized?

Let’s just leave that question sitting there and go to what might at first seem like an unrelated issue—abortion rights. Immediately, though, we see parallels. Some people who would not have an abortion themselves firmly believe that it is wrong for anyone to have an abortion, and want the law to reflect their religious belief. Forget secular government! My religion is the only true one! In fact, some are so deeply committed to what they call “respect for life” that they will murder people who perform abortions. (Does not compute? Try harder!)

Another parallel is that, ultimately, the anti-abortion movement is an anti-pleasure movement—based in the concept that if a woman is going to have sex, she should be prepared to have a baby as a result. That’s the real reason the “abstinence only” and “anti-abortion” messages often go hand in hand—with “just say no” as the third major right-wing control message (and in many ways, their most successful)—because, as everybody admits, getting high and getting laid both feel good—the argument is over whether it’s OK to feel good thataway or not.

The issue of control is where the drug and abortion pieces lock in to the Iraq piece of the puzzle. When Bush crowned himself as “Il Duce,” excuse me, I mean “The Decider,” he wasn’t just talking about Iraq. He was talking about drugs and abortion and education and welfare and social security and the environment and every other issue where his rule has meant windfall profits for the wealthy. And this is where we see the grand scheme of things. If the powers that be can convince enough people that marijuana is a terrible scourge even though it patently isn’t, if enough people will believe that abortion and loose sexuality are terrible scourges even though they aren’t, then it’s that much easier to sell war in the Middle East when it’s really as justified as the Nazi invasion of Poland. If they can get you to buy one lie, it’s that much easier to sell you another, and another, and another….

Green Party politics—what does any of this have to do with Green Party politics? It has to do with the need to change the discourse in this country, to change the view, to change the—dare I say it?–paradigm. Is that word too “New-Agey” for you? Tough beans! The old paradigm is running the planet over a precipice and we gotta do something radical to deal with it really soon—prevention is no longer an option. We’re going to have to settle for damage control.

“Ecological wisdom” and “Future focus” are the two key values of the Green Party that come to mind. “Ecological wisdom” in this case, means getting our priorities straight and refocusing our cultural attention from peoples’ private lives to the overall health of the Earth. Future focus, in the case of the young Nashville schoolgirl, means that we do not make what should have been a minor faux-pas into an incident that’s likely to skew the rest of a kid’s life. You should have to be smarter than that to run a school system.

music: Joan Baez, “The Story of Isaac“

Comments

While reading thru your posts I noticed that there weren’t alot of comments, and I began to wonder why not? After long consideration I have concluded that the reason must be that your logic is so thoroughly sound that nothing more can be added. Have an iced ay!
Posted by revelation on 02/12/2007 03:16:34 PM

geez…i hope i’m not the smartest guy in the room! thanks…
Posted by brothermartin on 02/14/2007 05:35:27 AM