On The Money; The Economics of Drug Prohibition

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Economics of Drug Prohibition

I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to you that dealers of illegal drugs enjoy large profit margins on the drugs they sell. American taxpayers insure these large profit margins through a massive government subsidy known as “The War on Drugs” which costs tens of billions of tax dollars annually. Prohibition is the generic term for the policy of using laws, and law enforcement, to keep certain drugs out of the open legal market. Despite over 70 years of drug prohibition, use of illegal drugs remains resilient, and demand remains, no pun intended, high.

 

The lion’s share of this massive subsidy, gets spent in efforts aimed at the nation’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana, and the plant it comes from, Cannabis Sativa. Government expenditures for the prohibition of marijuana alone include the cost of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating over one-million Americans every year, far more than the total number of people arrested for all other illegal drugs combined. It also includes eradication efforts aimed at killing cannabis plants wherever they grow, often with chemical herbicides. Economically, this huge outlay of taxpayer dollars functions to artificially inflate the price of marijuana, or cannabis, a hardy weed that would otherwise grow wild in every state in the union.

 

Because of prohibition, this prolific annual weed has become tremendously expensive for marijuana users and taxpayers, as well as hugely profitable for black-market dealers. Despite the high prices and risk of arrest, an estimated 10-20% of all Americans use marijuana regularly, creating a tremendous demand for it. This demand, in turn, fuels a multi-billion dollar black-market industry that operates in every state, county and locality in the US, insuring that every state, county and locality spends even more taxpayer money to battle this black-market activity.

 

Thanks to grassroots organizing by marijuana consumers and advocates, several states have passed laws legalizing the use and distribution of marijuana, mostly for medical use. As more states pass these laws, both the price of marijuana, and the subsidies, at least in the states that have passed these laws, decline as well. Since the passage of California’s landmark medical marijuana law in 1996, the first of these laws, the price of marijuana has declined by more than half, nationwide. As more states pass these anti-prohibition laws, we can expect the price of marijuana to drop still further.

 

As police make fewer marijuana arrests, courts try fewer marijuana cases, and prisons hold fewer marijuana prisoners, taxpayers pay less for marijuana subsidies. While the Federal government has not budged on marijuana prohibition, and still spends billions on cannabis prohibition annually, many cash strapped states, counties and localities, even those that have not passed legalization laws, have de-prioritized marijuana prohibition to save money.

 

As these marijuana price-support subsidies decline, marijuana prices continue to slump. This comes as welcome relief to the millions of Americans who use marijuana regularly, and to taxpayers who have grown tired of subsidizing untaxed black-market profits. Still, thanks to vigorous Federal enforcement, and backlash from law enforcement, who stand to lose a tremendous amount of funding, marijuana prices, taxpayer subsidies and black-market profits remain high.

 

Although those who argue for marijuana prohibition argue that marijuana is a dangerous drug that no one should ever touch, very little evidence supports these claims. On the contrary, tens of millions of Americans use marijuana regularly, and like it. Not one person, in the history of humanity, has suffered a fatal overdose of it, nor has much evidence been found that marijuana causes long term health problems. Marijuana does not produce physical addiction symptoms, unlike alcohol, nicotine, opiates, many prescription drugs or even caffeine which all produce strong physical addictions that can be very difficult to quit. Even long-term chronic marijuana users can kick the habit without much difficulty, if they genuinely want to. This, I tell you from personal experience.

 

Clearly, the reasons for continuing marijuana prohibition are completely economic. Without the massive taxpayer subsidies involved in prohibition, the marijuana black-market would collapse, eliminating a multi-billion dollar industry. Governments would reallocate tax revenue away from law enforcement, and prisons, eliminating thousands of high-paying jobs in those fields. While, no one really likes black-market drug dealers or narco-cops, or would miss them if they learned to do something productive with their lives, they form a significant part of our national economy.

 

The pharmaceutical industry would soon feel the pinch as well. 100 years ago, half of all medicines sold in the US contained marijuana. Plenty of evidence shows that cannabis, or marijuana still works better than many prescription and over-the-counter medications for a host of conditions ranging from glaucoma and chronic pain, to epilepsy, asthma and nausea, especially nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy. Some estimate that legal cannabis, or marijuana, could immediately replace 20-40% of all prescription drugs, working as effectively, with fewer side-effects, than the drugs it would replace.

 

Since marijuana, or cannabis, is a natural plant, it cannot be patented. Because cannabis cannot be patented, patients who need it, would get it from farmers, not pharmaceutical companies. This would cut deeply into the profits of pharmaceutical companies, but drastically reduce health-care costs for patients. Farmers wouldn’t complain either.

 

Further, recent medical research suggests that humans have had a very long, and symbiotic relationship with the cannabis plant. The presence of “cannabinoid receptors” in the human nervous system seem to indicate that the cannabis plant played a role in human evolution, and that our ancestors have ingested cannabis for millions of years.

 

While it remains unclear exactly how these cannabinoid receptors contribute to human health, they clearly play an important role. Many, now common, ailments may stem from a lack of cannabis in our modern diet. Currently, doctors prescribe prescription drugs to treat these maladies, but the addition of a few green cannabis leaves into the diet, as other doctors recommend, might eliminate these diseases completely.

 

Beyond that, hemp, a high-fiber, non psychoactive, but also prohibited, species of cannabis, has a whole range of industrial uses from textiles and cordage to paper, plastics and building materials. Hemp, an agricultural commodity widely grown in the US before prohibition, could spawn a whole new hemp products industry. This new hemp industry might generate tens of thousands of new jobs in the long run.

 

New industrial hemp products would replace or reduce the need for synthetic fiber and forest products, thus eliminating the toxic pollution from manufacturing synthetics, and the habitat destruction that results from deforestation. While this potential new industry could create thousands of new jobs and spur growth in the economy, it also threatens the profits of some well established, and very influential corporations.

 

You can see that marijuana prohibition has much more to do with controlling “the economy”, than it does with dissuading people from smoking pot. If we could end marijuana prohibition today, black-market drug dealers, narco-cops, prison guards, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies and forest products companies would all lose revenue. However, the rest of us would enjoy less expensive marijuana, better medicine, lower health-care costs, nicer clothes, cheaper paper and lower taxes, with less pollution or habitat loss. In other words, it would dramatically improve our quality of life. As Freewheelin’ Franklin of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers famously said, “Dope  will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”

On The Money; “Quantitative Easing”

On The Money

Economics for the 99%

How “Quantitative Easing” Makes Life More Difficult

Over the last few years, the Federal Reserve has pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in an effort to spur growth, through a program they call “Quantitative Easing”. Many feared that this would lead to spiraling inflation, but outside of food and energy, prices have not risen much in the last few years. How was the Fed able to pump so much liquidity into the economy without triggering Zimbabwe-like hyper-inflation, or even Carter era-like double-digit inflation?

 

Usually, when a country pumps a lot of liquidity into the economy, they put that money into the hands of the people, through government jobs programs, relief aid, etc. Poor and working people spend that money almost immediately. When you suddenly have more money trying to buy the same amount of available stuff, prices rise, fueling inflation, but that’s not what happened here.

 

While the Federal government did spend some tax dollars on stimulus projects, while extending unemployment benefits and expanding Food Stamps, that only amounted to a drop in the bucket compared to the liquidity the Fed has injected through quantitative easing. Instead of hiring tens of thousands of people for public works projects, tens of thousands of State and Federal workers lost their good paying government jobs in this recession. Benefits for the elderly and disabled shrank rather than grew, and schools felt the pinch as well.

 

Money earmarked for the housing crisis mostly went to the banks who made the bad loans, not the poor people who lost their homes. While the Fed continued to print money like Safeway circulars, the vast majority of us haven’t seen any of it. Since we still don’t have any money, we can’t go out and buy stuff. Since we can’t buy stuff, stuff sits on shelves. When stuff sits on shelves, retailers can’t raise prices, and inflation remains low, but where did all the money go?

 

According to Harper’s Index, about 90% of all new income generated since the recession started, went to the wealthiest 10% of the population. Among them, the top one-tenth of 1% took the lion’s share. The Fed carefully funneled all of this new liquidity into the pockets of the super-rich. That money went to bank reserves, bank executives, bank shareholders, financial executives and the like. Those people already have lots of money and extravagant lifestyles, so the rest of the economy hardly noticed the trillions of dollars the Fed handed them, because mostly, it got squirreled away in oversea tax havens.

 

Now, however, we begin to see that money coming back into the market, to buy up foreclosed and distressed homes. Home prices, you’ll doubtless recall, surged to astronomical heights riding a nationwide housing bubble, fueled by lender’s eagerness to loan extraordinary amounts of money against extremely ordinary homes. Somehow, this hyper-inflation in the housing market seemed like a good thing at the time.

 

Eventually, however, ordinary people failed to earn the extraordinary amounts of income that the lenders assured them they would, leading to the complete collapse of the housing market, bank failures, and a massive taxpayer bailout…of the banks, while millions of families lost their homes through foreclosure.

 

For the last few years, a huge glut of overpriced homes, that rich people wouldn’t be caught dead in, but working people cannot afford, has depressed the real-estate market. The invisible hand of the free market should cause the hyper-inflated prices of these ugly suburban homes to drop until ugly suburban families can afford to buy them, but thanks to the Fed, and their “quantitative easing”, the rich now have enough money to buy all of these homes, even though they still sell for twice their pre-bubble price. The rich can then rent these ugly suburban homes to ugly suburban families by the month or year, making them a sound investment once again

 

Do you see how that worked? First the banks created hyper-inflation in the housing market. When that went bust, the banks held a gun to the government’s head and demanded a taxpayer bailout, and we all lost our homes and our jobs, which sent the economy into a tailspin. Then the Fed printed a lot of cash and gave it to the rich, so that they could afford to buy up all of our homes and rent them back to us. That way, instead of creating new hyper-inflation with all of that new liquidity, the Fed just preserved the leftover hyper-inflation from the housing bubble, thus relieving us, as working people, from the burden of home ownership, and the accumulation of all of that pesky equity. Wasn’t that clever?

 

Lo and behold, now it looks like the economy is recovering. Isn’t that great? Most of us are still worse off than we were 10 years ago, but for the 1%, The Great Recession represents a major victory in their efforts to enslave the American people. Why do you think they call it “The Great Recession”, while the rest of us call it “The New Normal”? You can bet that as soon as you get used to “The New Normal”, the economy will tank again, and they’ll expect you to make even more sacrifices to prop it up. There’s a look at “Quantitative Easing” that’s On The Money.

On The Money; What Middle-Class?

On The Money

Economics for the 99%

What Middle-Class?

 

If you took a drink every time you heard a politician say “middle-class”, you could have stayed smashed since last January. Isn’t it strange that here in the US, where “Marxism” “communism” or even “socialism” have become foul language, the Marxist concept of an expanding middle-class remains hugely popular. So much so, that every politician in America constantly promises to help grow the middle-class.

For a while in the US, we had a real middle-class. Strong labor unions organized workers and wages rose for workers as a result. Thanks to unions like the Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and the UAW, working people enjoyed home-ownership and considerable creature comforts. This was the age of Levittown houses and populux consumerism, and a brand new vision of widespread middle-class affluence that came to be known as the American Dream.

Just like Marx predicted, workers organized, took control of the means of production, demanded higher wages, and the middle-class was born. And, for a while, it persisted, until capitalists found plenty of cheap, unorganized labor in China. Today, that middle-class has mostly retired. Thirty years of union-busting, outsourcing, downsizing, and wage stagnation have exacted a huge toll on the middle-class. In fact, you’d hardly recognize it today.

Today, instead of an economy based on manufacturing, we have a service based economy brimming with low-wage, high-stress customer-service jobs. Facing lower wages (the “new normal”), higher housing, food, energy and health-care costs, the standard of living for most American workers has plunged precipitously in the last twenty years. Strangely, we still think of ourselves as middle-class.

Hey, our parents were middle-class, doesn’t that automatically make us middle-class too? Like it was genetic or something, but no, you are not middle-class anymore. The fact that you have three roommates helping to pay the rent should clue you in to that. The middle-class has vanished.

In the crater left by the imploding middle-class, we find the bourgeois. That is, the landlords, lawyers, cops, and businessmen, the people who most directly serve, and emulate the super-rich, the ones who already had money before the middle-class was born. These people are happy to be rid of the riffraff, and glad to have a whole new underclass of people to exploit.

That’s why you hear politicians talk so much about “the middle-class”. They know that the term only really applies to retirees from that bygone era, and their bourgeois, landlord/cop/lawyer/businessman supporters whose asses they already kiss. They know that a lot of people, who do not own property, or stocks, or investment income, but instead work for a living, at low wages, still identify with the middle-class, even though they got kicked out of the club decades ago.

When politicians promise to help the middle-class, they don’t mean that they will help you become middle-class. They mean that they will hold you down so the bourgeois can fuck you over. If you don’t like this old French term, call them the gentry, or the property owning class, or better yet, the landlords. Would you vote for a candidate who promised to help landlords? How about a candidate who promised to punish landlords? Now we’re talking, am I right?

We have good reason to despise landlords, as we do cops, lawyers prisons and politicians, and they have all earned our contempt. Don’t dress them up in picket-fence-leave-it-to-beaver imagery, and then pretend like you live there too. The middle-class, Marxism, and the Berlin Wall all crumbled to dust a long time ago. It’s time to face facts, and call a spade a spade. The middle-class is dead, or at least retired, and the bourgeois are not on your side, and the politicians who promise to help them are not your friends. There’s a view of the middle-class that’s On The money.

On The Money; An All-Cut Solution to the Budget Impasse

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

An All-Cut Solution to the Budget Impasse

While a strong consensus exists among the American people to tax the rich, the rich themselves have enough political clout to insure that they won’t pay any more in taxes, unless they also see drastic cuts to the social safety net, already the weakest in the developed world. So really, what’s the point?

If all of our tax dollars will go to pay for more cops, prisons, guards, bombs, soldiers, drones and high-tech surveillance equipment, while it leaves millions of Americans homeless and out in the cold, why bother? Why throw good money after bad? I say it’s time to cut our losses, cut the crap, and cut to the chase.

Yes, it’s time to cut to the bone, through the bone, the spinal column, the carotid arteries and the windpipe, and the time to do it is NOW!!! There’s never been a better time, and no one has ever deserved it more. It’s time to AXE THE RICH!!

Really, what have the rich ever done for you? If you work for them, you know those jobs suck, and that they will work you to death, and destroy the whole world just to take a little more for themselves. It’s time to rid the world of this sickness called greed, and to do it, we must cull the herd. We must exterminate those already terminally infected with this pathogen so they don’t infect others, and this bloodletting will help inoculate the rest of the population.

As long as we live in a culture that protects, rewards, and celebrates greed, we live in a culture bent on ecocide. Every sustainable culture on Earth punishes greed, and every culture that fails to do so, also fails as a culture, and fails to survive. If you examine the cultures around the world that have endured for more than, say, 40,000 years, without depleting their resource base, you will find egalitarian societies that maintain their equality by punishing greed.

Sustainable tribal cultures treat greed as a childish tendency, to be scorned. Those who refuse to grow out of their childish selfishness are driven out of the tribe, or killed, though this is rare, because the benefits of living in an egalitarian society, far out-weigh any benefits one can achieve living alone with their avarice.

That is how sustainable cultures deal with greed. They recognize that violence is a natural part of life, and while they do not undertake it lightly, they do not shy away from it when violence becomes necessary. For them, violence is sometimes necessary to feed and clothe themselves and to preserve their culture and way of life. Sustainable cultures embrace and celebrate this kind of violence, but they do not tolerate greed. If we wish to live sustainably on this planet, we should emulate the people who do it best, and have been doing it the longest.

We cannot afford to continue to coddle, cultivate and incubate the most virulent disease to ever afflict humanity. We must wipe greed off of the face of the Earth, and we need to do it now. We can learn to live differently, but we must first stop the spread of this plague. If we love our children, and want a better future for them, we must not shrink from this responsibility.

That, my friends, is a plan to solve our budget crisis, entirely with cuts, that’s On The Money.

On The Money; Soaring Over the Fiscal Cliff

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

Soaring Over the Fiscal Cliff

Here we go again. Last year we hit “the debt ceiling” this year we go over “the fiscal cliff”. It’s like Congress has devolved into a game of Super Mario Cart, and any minute we’re going to slip on that banana peel called “entitlement reform” and go careening out-of-control. It’s ridiculous. There’s no cliff, there’s no ceiling and there’s no such thing as “the debt crisis”.

Don’t get me wrong. We have crisis. We have plenty of real crises that demand our immediate attention. Here’s a short list:

Global Climate Change

Global Ecosystem collapse

Human Overpopulation

Loss of Biological Diversity

Loss of Cultural Diversity

Nuclear Proliferation/Waste

Homelessness/Poverty

Out-of-Control Health Care Costs

Call me when you get a handle on those, will ya. I mean, if you got nothing better to do, put your attention where it might do some good.

Seriously folks, we didn’t mind sailing right past the tipping point on global warming. We barely blinked when human population surpassed 7 billion, and over a hundred species of living creature disappear off of the face of the Earth every single day without any acknowledgment whatsoever.

It’s not like these crises don’t have real implications for us, our future, and our kids future. Life will get harder. The crises they face will be greater. Their standard of living will suffer and we will leave them a much less beautiful and more poisonous world.

And it’s not like things are so much better for us because we ignore these real crisis. Wages continue to decline, housing costs continue to rise, and health-care costs go through the roof because how we live makes us sick. We’re already killing ourselves, to kill the planet to make the greediest one-tenth of 1% of our population even more obscenely rich, but that doesn’t bother us. No, the real crisis, they expect us to believe, is that someday… someday, China might not loan the Federal Government enough money to fight another stupidly adventurous, unpopular foreign war, unless we chop what’s left of our social safety net, to bits, now. Either that, or we could tax the rich, but that seems to be a non-starter, unless we cut the safety net too.

Either way, Congress set a deadline, and unless we meet that deadline, a lot of people will lose their jobs, a lot of people will lose their benefits, and everyone else’s taxes will go up, and since none of those people are congress-people, there’s not much chance that Congress will meet that deadline.

Unless…

Obama can put together a “Grand Bargain”. Watch out for this “Grand Bargain”, where the rich pay a little bit more in taxes, they stick an apple in the mouth of the middle-class, and the poor and the young take a spit up the ass.

It’ll be just like Obamacare. It’ll take a complete ripoff, and make it mandatory. Obamacare didn’t reign in health-care costs, Obamacare just fed the healthy and the young to the insurance industry sharks. When politicians talk about serving the American people, that’s what they mean. Politicians serve us to the 1% for dinner, and that’s what this imaginary “fiscal cliff” is all about.

So forget about it. Forget about the “fiscal cliff”. Do you own any Treasury bonds? Then what are you worried about. If someone is buying you drinks, what do you care about their credit rating, and if they’re not buying you drinks, why hang out with them. If government isn’t doing anything good, why throw good money after bad.

Don’t worry about burdening your kids with a huge national debt. You’ve already stuck them with enough real problems, and sold them so far down the river that you’d better hope they grow up as stupid and gullible as their parents, or else you are going to have a lot of explaining to do. There’s a view of the “fiscal cliff” that’s On The Money.

On The Money; What’s Wrong With Economists

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What’s Wrong With Economists

Most economists write for policy wonks, not regular people. While they study consumer behavior and worker productivity, they have little, if anything, to say to consumers or workers. They might have something to say to voters, but only because they endorse a policy favored by a particular candidate. Economists write their books for the candidates, the political think-tanks, the rich and powerful and their advisers, but not for us, the 99%.

 

While economists may have some respect for you as a voter, as a worker, producer and consumer, you are simply a pawn to them. Something to be pushed around by fiscal policy, corporate coercion, and government taxation. Your life, energy, time, creativity and spirit mean no more to them than so many barrels of oil, tons of molybdenum or bushels of corn, and they don’t write economics books for bushels of corn.

 

To economists you are just a commodity to be bought and sold, consumed and discarded, just another anonymous drone, toiling away at meaningless work, in an empty life that you fill with pointless consumption. They don’t want you to read their books. They want you to go shopping, and let them, along with Americas smartest and greediest, worry about what’s best for the economy.

 

As a result, we now have an economy engineered entirely to help the richest and greediest acquire more. This economy demands that the rest of us sacrifice more and more of our lives, and our planet, every year, for their benefit. No, economists don’t want us to read their books, they want us to spend more time at work, more money for housing, and more money for health care. They want us to accept lower wages, give up job security, and to get used to being disposable.

That’s how they save “the economy”. As soon as we get used to working longer and harder for less, accept the destruction of the environment as a necessary evil, and learn to step around the human garbage left in their wake, the economy will be fine. Isn’t that great! As long as we’re willing to sacrifice our lives for it, the economy will be just fine.

Yet, too many of us still worry about “the economy”. Is it growing? How fast is it growing? Are prices rising? How’s the stock market? Who worries about us?

Why does it cost so much, just to have a place to live? How do the long hours I spend at work affect my family? How much of my current lifestyle would I choose, were I not economically coerced into working full time? How will global climate change affect my quality of life, or my children’s? Mightn’t I appreciate a clean environment more, if I had more time to enjoy it? Should I participate in a system in which I have no value, except as an exploitable resource? Why should economic growth trump all of these real human concerns? Whose job is it to think about these things? Not economists, that’s for sure.

How can you leverage maximum productivity from employees? How will environmental regulation effect energy prices? How does depression and suicide effect corporate earnings? That’s how economists look at these problems, and that’s why economists suck.

In On The Money, Economics For the 99%, I take the radical position that economics is about people, and how they interact with each other and the environment. Instead of simply looking for ways to help the rich and powerful increase, and accelerate the flow of money into their own bank accounts, On The Money; Economics for the 99% exposes the fundamental flaws in the capitalist system that have led to the gross inequality, and catastrophic environmental destruction that define our time. On the Money; Economics for the 99% shows you how to reclaim your life and liberate the world from the greedy clutches of the 1%, one step at a time.

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

Kirk to Enterprise, What Planet Are We On?

I listened to Eric Kirk’s radio show, this past Thursday night at 7pm on KMUD. I read a facebook post in which Eric let us know that he had invited Andy Stunich to talk about his fears that our elected officials might commit economic suicide by government. 

As a financial advice columnist, (look for my column “On The Money; Financial Advice for the Working-Class” in the current issue of Fifth Estate Magazine) I like to entertain a diversity of opinion on economic issues, but I also tire quickly of listening to the same old conventional stupidity regurgitated and rehashed.

 

I know from listening to Eric’s show in the past, and from occasionally reading his blog, that he specializes in rehashing regurgitated stupidity, and Thursday night’s show found Eric practicing his specialty yet again. Why do you fill your head with this crap, Eric?

Every time I hear you on the radio, or visit your fetid little corner of cyberspace, I feel my soul being sucked into a vortex of empty rhetoric, going nowhere. Thursday night’s show provided a prime example.

 

This show reminded me that, while “people who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it”, people who study history don’t have a clue either. If, as Frank Zappa said, “Rock music journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read”,

then the study of history is people who write too much about people who talk too much for people who read too much. While there’s always more that you can learn about history, there’s only so much that you can learn from history, especially if, by “history” you mean the history of our culture, from about 10,000 years ago to the present.

 

In reality, the ones who learn the most from “history” are the ones most eager to repeat it. Hitler learned how to engineer a genocidal holocaust by studying American history. Since the primary concern of “history” is the rise and fall of megalomaniacs, megalomaniacs can learn a lot from “history”, but what the rest of us learn from “history” is how to think like a megalomaniac.

 

We think like megalomaniacs when we imagine that we could solve the problems of society if we were in charge. Imagining that we could solve the world’s problems if we were in charge leads to pointless, inane discussions like the one I heard on KMUD Thursday night; armchair megalomaniacs endlessly debating economic policy in the most abstract terms, completely removed from the reality of life on planet Earth.

 

What do I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”? Like I said, “history” is the story of the rise and fall of megalomaniacs. Historians endlessly examine the strategies, policies, and operational models of every megalomaniac that conquered and enslaved enough people to make the news, since written records began. On the other hand, “history” tells us almost nothing about the first three million years of the human experience, or about the thousands of tribal cultures, which survived for tens of thousands of years, until they were conquered, enslaved and annihilated by a megalomaniac and his minions.

 

Hence, American “history” begins with the “Discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus, and tends to gloss over the genocide, the slavery, the wholesale slaughter, the economic oppression and the environmental degradation, to instead focus on “The Constitution” the founding fascists, and “Democracy”. People who read too much of that crap start to believe that only megalomaniacs matter in life.

 

They start to speculate about how “history” might have gone differently if the megalomaniacs had made different decisions. For instance, they ask themselves, “What would have happened if Hitler decided not to attack Russia?” That’s what I mean by “armchair megalomaniacs”; people who aren’t particularly charismatic, or psychotically driven themselves, but like to imagine what they would do if they were Hitler, or Stalin, or Churchill, or Kennedy. As if fantasizing about being Hitler weren’t sick enough, “armchair megalomaniacs” also like to fantasize about ruling the contemporary world too.

 

“Armchair megalomaniacs” refer to their vast knowledge of “history” and “economics” (another crock of shit), and try to imagine what a megalomaniac could do to solve the world’s problems, and what kind of megalomaniac they’d like to see do it. Soon, they have pretty good idea of just what kind of megalomaniac we need in charge, and usually, its someone pretty much like them.

 

The problem with this whole line of thinking, is that “ruling the world” has been an unmitigated disaster right from the beginning, and its not getting any better. Megalomaniacs have done a terrible job of managing the Earth. The idea that we can solve the problems caused by unchecked megalomania, by putting a megalomaniac more like us in charge, is the founding fallacy of democracy, and it leads to pointless , arcane discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, like we heard Thursday night. In the case of last night’s show, the dancing angel was “the economy”.

 

Didn’t Eric and his guest seem to know a lot about “the economy”. They talked about “the economy” like it was a sick friend, in desperate need of immediate attention. Neither of them seemed to have a clue about the state of the global ecosystem, or the scale of environmental devastation resultant from economic activity, let alone the incredible sacrifices we all make in our quality of life, just to support unbridled profit-taking by the insatiably greedy, nor did any of that seem to matter much to them.

 

In the eyes of our “armchair megalomaniacs” Eric and his guest, the real problem we face is not the dying oceans, the melting ice-caps and the destabilization of the Earth’s climate, it’s not the growing underclass of people denied access to the basic resources of survival, and cast aside like garbage while the opulent use their economic power and influence to exploit the rest of us. No, the real problem, is that their sick friend, “the economy” might stop growing.

 

What is “the economy” anyway? “The economy” doesn’t measure the quality of people’s lives, only how much money they spend. “The economy” doesn’t measure the wealth of the planet, it only tells us how much money we got for what we stole from mother Earth, and how much we spent trying to clean up our mess. “The economy” measures how fast we liquidate the planet and our lives. “The economy” tells us how much we got paid to sacrifice our children’s future. “The economy” is a measure of how much of our lives and our birthright will be sacrificed to keep megalomania alive and well.

 

Ultimately, “the economy” is nothing but an extremely abstract set of statistics that could hardly be more difficult to gather, and couldn’t be less relevant to our day to day lives. The only reason they gather statistics on “the economy” and promote its unbridled growth, is to help megalomaniacs exploit the rest of us.

When you look at it that way, you realize that “the economy” is not your friend. The economy is an out-of-control monster ruining more of our planet, and our lives, every day. The last thing any of us really want, is for “the economy” to grow any larger. We want “the economy” off our backs.

If we survive this century, as a species, it will only be because we dramatically reduced our economic activity. Yet, as if “the economy” hasn’t already consumed enough of the world’s resources, and, as if “the economy” doesn’t already consume enough of our lives, Eric Kirk used the community airwaves to present to us, Andy Stunich’s dire warning that our current crop of megalomaniacs might slow the growth of “the economy” by spending money we don’t have on the popular programs that only exist, not unlike “the economy” itself, to serve the interests, and insure the stability of, their own regime.

 

This is like being trapped in a car with no brakes, driven by a rabid monkey at 100mph on the Pacific Coast Highway, and being warned that we might not have enough gas to keep accelerating. Running out of gas would be a blessing, but we’re not running out of gas, we’ve gone over a cliff, so the amount of gas in the tank only matters in determining how big of a fireball it will make when we crash. It’s time to stop looking at the gas gauge, turn off that idiot on the radio, and look out the window.

 

What planet do these guys live on, anyway? Obviously Eric Kirk and his guest speak to us from a world inhabited by armchair megalomaniacs, who subsist on a diet of corporate exploitation and reside in a jungle of empty rhetoric. Please Scotty, beam them back.

 

The King of China

The King of China

 

Apparently, the trend towards outsourcing jobs overseas, extends even into the, seemingly sacred, realm of our national monuments. I mean, sure the Statue of Liberty came from France, but that was a gift, not a contract. Maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned but I expect our national monuments to be built from New Hampshire granite, with love, pride and American craftsmanship, by chubby white people who speak English exclusively.

 

Not that I think Blacks, Hispanics, or Native Americans should be excluded from these jobs, especially if they pay well, I just don’t imagine them getting so excited about yet another marble monstrosity on the National Mall, to celebrate the empire that enslaved, and/or nearly annihilated their ancestors, and continues to abuses them to this day. That’s just me.

 

But Martin Luther King is different. I know lots of Black artists and craftspeople who would love to have a part in the design and construction of the Martin Luther King Monument. Today, I’ll bet a lot more people wish the Federal Government had taken that route. But, alas, the job of constructing the massive statue of Dr. King, along with the plaque identifying King and inscribed with one of his most powerful quotes, went to a very competent, and competitively priced, Chinese firm.

 

While the Chinese firm, quite competently, built the monument to specifications, as it turned out, someone on this side of the world, kind of paraphrased Dr. King’s famous quote. Apparently, a lot of people were not happy about having some low level bureaucrat’s interpretation of Dr. King’s famous quote, attributed so conspicuously, to Dr. King himself.

 

Almost certainly, Black American craftspeople would have caught the error, and fixed it, before casting it in bronze, saving a lot of embarrassment. In China, however, they simply filled the order to specification, and enjoyed embarrassing the incompetent US government. Sorry, no refund.

 

So, after enduring this humiliation, the US government scrapped the misquoted plaque, and ordered a replacement. Did the Federal Government learn from its mistake, and hire a Black-owned American business to make the new plaque? No, they went back to China.

 

This time, a firm from Shanghai, with a checkered reputation, Plack Shaque, won the contract with a bid much lower than the competition. With the deficit crisis raging all around them, and catching a lot of heat for the budget overrun caused by the misquote, who could blame them for trying to save money.

 

As a result, if you visit the Dr. Martin Luther King Monument on the National Mall, you will see a plaque that reads:

 

Rev. Dr. Martian Luthier King

(1929-1968)

“I Have Dreem”

Close enough for government work, if you ask me.

On The Money, Who’s Default is it Anyway

On the Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

The Sovereign Debt Crisis, Who’s Default is it Anyway?

Now that governments around the world have bailed out their “too big to fail” banks, many of them, including our own, have taken on so much sovereign debt that they now teeter on the brink of default. Now these governments turn to the working people, who just got screwed out of affordable housing by the mortgage bubble, saw their wages shrink because of global outsourcing, and watched their benefits disappear because of runaway health care costs, and announce “austerity plans”. Working people are justifiably outraged.

 

Somehow, the richest people in the world managed to do fabulously well the whole time. The wealth of the world poured into their pockets at the fastest rate in the history of humanity, leaving poverty, squalor and pollution all around the world. While governments struggle to deal with massive unemployment, widespread homelessness, hunger and environmental crisis, they find themselves hamstrung by the sovereign debt crisis.

 

So, instead of massive public works projects, we lay off government workers. Instead of taxing capital gains, we cut social programs. Instead of investing in the future, we pay for past mistakes. But not our mistakes, and you can’t really call them “mistakes” if the people who made them, got rich doing so.

 

We didn’t ask for the mortgage crisis. We didn’t beg to pay three times what a house was worth, just to have a place to live, because the banks would loan that much to an incarcerated criminal to buy the same house, if you didn’t. Some people made a lot of money ruining the housing market for everyone. They made a lot of people homeless, and broke. A lot of people were in on that crime, and none of them have paid. Instead, you and I, the people who got screwed out of affordable housing, the taxpayers, bailed them out.

 

Now we teeter on the brink of default. In the media, they make default sound like a terrible thing. They warn us in the most dire terms about what would happen if the US defaults on its sovereign debt. Bank failures, stock market crash, markets seizing, the world economy grinds to a halt. Really, what has the world economy done for you lately?

 

On the other hand, they don’t tell you about the dire consequences that will happen if we do pay down the debt. For instance, if we pay down the debt, you will work longer hours for less money. You will not be able to afford a home. You will not be able to afford to see a doctor. Food prices will rise. Gas prices will rise, and the planet still gets destroyed. You will be trapped like a rat, and ground to dust under the foot of the very bankers and shareholders you bailed out. That’s what happens to you, if we pay down the debt.

 

So screw the debt! Why throw good money after bad? Cut your losses now. We have enough challenges facing us now, and we owe more to future generations than we do to the debts of the past. Besides, let’s look at who really defaulted here anyway.

From my perspective, every major institution on earth has completely failed to deliver on their basic obligation to future generations. Every generation owes it to future generations, to leave the planet in as good of shape as they found it, and to pass on a culture that offers a sustainable way of life that meets basic human needs. That’s what they owe us! How well do you think they did at that? Would you say they lived up to their half of the bargain? Or, would you say they could hardly have failed more spectacularly. Or perhaps you might think they intentionally screwed us over. Either way, they have a heluva nerve to tell us we owe them anything for it.

 

So, what do we actually lose if we just write it off. Nothing we really need, two pointless wars, several thousand aircraft that don’t carry anything but bullets, missiles and bombs, superpower status, the stars and stripes, our elected officials, a couple thousand nuclear warheads, NASA, the CIA, NSA, FBI and DEA. Who couldn’t live without them? Anyone? I didn’t think so. Is it worth working the rest of your life away, just so you can hear another infuriating State of the Union address full of BS every year?

 

Frankly, I don’t see a down side to defaulting. Face it, the US is a failed state. You can spend your whole life trying to bail it out, for the benefit of the bastards who wrecked the world, or we can just write it off and start from scratch. So long New World Order, hello Disorderly New World.

Some Tips to Help the GOP “Mainstream” the Tea Party

Disclaimer. You know, if I had ever seen Jersey Shore, or knew who Justin Bieber was, I would probably make jokes about them, just like everyone else, but I have a low tolerance for popular culture. On the other hand, I don’t want to turn this into a political blog. I really don’t think anyone in the political arena deserves more attention than “Snooky”, whoever she is. However, The Professor suggested I take a look at this year’s crop of Republican presidential candidates.

Helping the GOP “Mainstream” the Tea Party

Michelle Bachmann Entertains Donors in Iowa

The Professor is right. What an amusing crop of GOP presidential candidates we have this year. I really like this new “Tea Party” wing of the GOP. They’re passionate, colorful, incoherent and rebellious, like hippies used to be. They don’t care if people think they are crazy. They don’t care if people think they are stupid. They drank the kool-aid and now they’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. I’m totally with them there.

TX Gov. Rick Perry Knows It Will Take More Than "Tea-bagging" to win the Presidency

Most pollsters concur, however, that the extreme positions of the Tea Party contingent fall outside of mainstream public opinion. I know how they feel. But, I’ve got a few ideas on how the Tea Party could hone their message in a way that it could attract a broader support base, because with a few small changes, I could really get behind them myself.

We already have so much in common: I’m for smaller government. I’m vindictive and full of hate. I like guns and want to kill people. I’d vote for a candidate who would cut spending, especially if he did it this way:

Eliminate veterans benefits, the GI Bill and the VA. Let’s just eliminate these entitlement programs once and for all. Why should military personnel enjoy these “Cadillac” pensions and benefits packages, paid for by taxpayers? People working in the private sector have mostly conceded to volatile 401K plans and high-copay minimal coverage health insurance, at best, just to “keep America competitive”. Just because you went to Afghanistan to kill brown people for Dick Cheney, don’t expect any favors from me. If we can’t afford pensions for teachers, construction workers, office managers, factory workers, or line cooks and wait-staff for that matter, why should they be forced to pay these exorbitant taxes to cover the pensions of people who’s only real purpose is to destroy life and property. Taxpayers should not “incentivise” this kind of destructive behavior with these excessive and unwarranted benefits.

Lay-off the military. Remember, “A gang is a weapon that you trade your mind for, and the military is the biggest gang of all” Perry Ferrell said that, and he knew what he was talking about. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. We can stop 90% of all gang violence in the world by just cutting military spending, not just “to the bone”, but through the bone.

Not one more dime! Clean out your office and go home. We’re selling the Pentagon off as condominiums, renovation starts tomorrow. Troops still on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan will have to pay for their own ticket home. If they decide to stay, they’ll have to get a fucking job! As for their weapons….

Free Guns. I say, “The American people paid for those weapons. Those weapons belong to the American people, and the American people should have them.” Disband the military and give the American people the weapons they paid for. From hand-grenades to nuclear submarines, we’ve got something for every American man, woman and child. We the People can defend our country!

No more unpopular wars in obscure places, thousands of miles away, that most of us couldn’t even point to on a map! Let’s have popular wars, against the people we really hate, the Mexicans, and the Canadians if they step out of line. If the American people are going to pay for a war, dammit, the American people deserve to experience it first-hand, not just see it on TV.

Lay off Congress. If we eliminate the military, and we stop paying taxes, Congress won’t have a hell of a lot to do. So why pay for all of those offices and salaries and “Bentley” benefits packages. Let the bastards get real jobs in the real economy.

The Supreme Court too. We could live without the Supreme Court, no problem. Mostly, they uphold the founding American principle that “Might makes Right”. We don’t need courts to uphold that principle. So, why should we pay for them?

Make Miss America President. Of course, we need a president. Every country needs a figurehead to entertain foreign dignitaries. We need someone who is a picture of decorum and poise, and knows how to work a room. In other words, we need Miss America. This annual beauty pageant faces declining TV ratings lately. Adding the title of President of the United States, and residence in The White House to the prize would pump some life into this venerable American institution.

By combining the title of Miss. America, with that of President of the United States, we can insure that most other countries will want to have friendly relations with us. We can also show women everywhere that the “glass ceiling” has finally shattered. Every American girl will grow up knowing that she could, one day, be President of the United States, so long as she looks really hot, and doesn’t act too slutty.

If I could trust these Tea Party Republicans to drown government in a bathtub like they promised, I’d be partying with them now, but all they want to do is punish poor people. That’s just stupid. How do you punish people who have nothing?

What would you do, make them sleep outside in the elements, wake them up whenever they fall asleep, and force them to keep moving? That’s how we treat them already. We already torture the poor, and blame them for everything from global warming to to the bank bail-out. Somehow this fails to dissuade people from becoming poor. Every year we have more and more poor people. Angry poor people, like myself, are a growing demographic that the GOP can no longer afford to ignore.

The Republicans need a new scapegoat…Like, maybe the super-rich. I already hate the rich. I can easily believe that the rich caused the housing crisis, global warming, the bank bail-out, the immigration problem, 911, even poverty. You don’t even have to provide me much evidence. I know it’s true. I can feel it in my bones. It resonates. Punish the super-rich. That’s an easy sell if ever I heard one.

Punish the “job creators”. Jobs suck! Jobs just discourage entrepreneurship, innovation, and the kind of independence that made this country strong. We don’t want a nation of drones who expect a fat paycheck just for showing up at work every day. We want a nation of imaginative, self-motivated people who act on their own ideas and can build the kind of nation we all want to live in.

Close schools. We don’t need schools. Schools just teach the same outdated ideas that got us into this mess.

Fuggetabout roads. We don’t need roads. If you’re not going to work, and you’re not going to school, where the hell do you think you are going? We just need Freedom, Liberty, Free Guns, Crazy Ideas, and a really hot President.

DRILL!!!! SARAH!!!! NOW!!!!

That’s a vision of America I could get behind, and the Tea Party should too.