In recent weeks, beach-goers from Santa Barbara to San Diego have discovered over 1,000 dead and dying sea lion pups on the beach. Apparently undernourished from birth, these pups did not put on enough blubber from mother’s milk, and once weaned, failed to find enough to eat on their own.

Without an adequate layer of blubber, sea lions cannot maintain the body temperature that a warm blooded mammal needs to survive in the cold water, so they come up on the beach to sun themselves, and warm up. Unfortunately they don’t find anything to eat on the beach either, and eventually they expire from starvation.

Wildlife rescuers in Southern CA have been overwhelmed with calls about these poor pups, but there’s little they can do. No one has the facilities to care for hundreds of starving sea lion pups. Everyone equipped to handle sea lions, has their hands full right now. Sometimes they relocate the pups to more secluded beaches, in hopes that they will find more food. Sometimes they euthanize the animals.

Last year, persistent readers will recall, I wrote about starving pelicans here on the Northern CA coast. Pelicans and sea lions both eat fish, or at least they would, if they could find them. These deaths are not the result of some exotic new disease spreading through the ecosystem. These deaths indicate a precipitous drop in the ocean’s fecundity. It’s a very bad sign. I don’t want to call it a “wake-up call”, because so many so called “wake-up calls” have gone unheeded, so I’ll simply call it another ghastly, heartbreaking consequence of deliberate human indifference to the natural world.

At least people see them. People should have to see this kind of thing. Take your kids to the beach. Show them a dying sea lion pup, starving to death on the sand. Explain to them that because we’ve replaced most of the phytoplankton in the ocean with pulverized plastic from soda bottles, shrink wrap, plastic bags, toys, medical equipment, electronic gadgets, car parts etc etc, the ocean can’t provide enough oxygen or food to support as much life as it did fifty years ago, or even ten years ago.

Remember that famous scene in The Graduate, where the older businessman whispers to Dustin Hoffman one word of advice for his future? “Plastics”, he says. Around the same time Andy Warhol predicted “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. With the ubiquity of plastic today, it’s hard to remember a time when soda came in returnable, not recyclable, glass bottles, when they made car bumpers out of chrome plated steel instead of easily shattered plastic, and when electronic devices had metal or wood cabinets, and lasted for decades.

Fifty years later, an island the size of Texas, newly recognized by the United Nations as “Garbage Island”, composed almost entirely of plastic, has formed in the Pacific Ocean. Today, plastic has its own homeland, and it grows every day. Every day, tons of plastic debris finds its way into the Pacific Ocean to make the pilgrimage to Garbage Island. Over the course of decades, endless churning, salt water and sunlight slowly pulverize it into microscopic bits.

These microscopic bits of inorganic, non-biodegradable plastic absorb sunlight, preventing it from penetrating the ocean’s depths and choke off phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food chain, and the source of most of the world’s atmospheric oxygen. In less than half a century, about half of all the phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean has been replaced by these microscopic bits of plastic.

Oddly, considering how long plastic lasts, plastic has become the foundation of our disposable economy. Almost nothing lasts longer than plastic, and almost nothing can digest it. Yet, we produce billions of one-time-use products from it, every year. When burned, plastic produces deadly bio-accumulative carcinogenic poison, in landfills it lasts almost forever, and in the ocean, it gets ground into fine floating particles that choke out life.

No, it’s not a wake-up call. It’s too late for that. Go to the beach. Look those pups in the eye as they die of starvation, and explain to your children what has happened in your lifetime. Tell your kids that fifty years ago, they would have seen thousands of healthy sea lions, as well as seals and otters, and that there was plenty of fish for all of them to eat. Tell them that for every bird they see, there were once twenty or forty, but that they all died so that you could live a high-consumption, middle-class fantasy, and now, even that fantasy is dying.

Just let me say, right up front, that I feel for the people of Boston. I lived there myself for a while, and used to jog along the Charles River every day. I never attended The Boston Marathon, but did run a marathon once. Had I been running in the race that day, I probably would have crossed the finish line just in time to have my legs blown off. My heart goes out to all of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. The bombing was a terrible thing, a terrible despicable act, and the people responsible should be punished severely.

However, the media, rather unfairly I think, kept describing the bombs themselves as “crude devices” or “crude explosive devices” or even “generic explosives”. The best they could manage was “crude, but effective”. I take exception to this characterization. How many broadcast journalists have the technical skills to test and fix a faulty microphone cable, let alone build a bomb?

Now, if I had heard Steve Inskeep say, “Compared to this great sounding condenser microphone I made out of a nine-volt battery, a piece of wire and some tape, or this mixing desk I designed and built, or the nice FM stereo multiplex transmitter I put together, that brings you this broadcast, the Boston Marathon bomb seems like a pretty crude device.”, I wouldn’t have any beef with his description, but I’ll bet Steve Inskeep never built anything more sophisticated than a compound, complex sentence.

Listening to journalists, English majors, poo-poo someones handiwork, by calling it a “crude device” really galls me. Writing and talking into a microphone is child’s play, compared to building a bomb and carrying out a terrorist attack. It takes nerves of steel to build a bomb. It takes skill, creativity, and brains to plan and execute an attack, and the Boston Marathon bombers proved that they had what it took to pull it off.

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but it figures that the Boston Marathon bombers were foreigners, because most Americans simply lack the skills, know-how or imagination to build an effective explosive. It’s not that Americans don’t want to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately; we have more mass shootings in this country than anywhere on Earth, but Americans use guns when they want to kill people. Do you know why?

Americans use guns because any idiot can go to Walmart and buy a gun and ammunition; you don’t have to build them yourself. I guarantee that if Walmart sold bombs, we’d have a hell of a lot more bombings in America. We have no shortage of hate-filled lunatics in this country, but when it comes to practical knowledge, skills, and creativity, that’s where we come up short.

So cut the “crude device” crap. A Molotov Cocktail is a crude device. You fill a beer bottle with gasoline and cork it with a tampon. If you’re a pro, you add some bits of Styrofoam to make it stick. A pipe bomb, with a fuse that you light with a match could be called a “crude device”. The Boston Marathon bombs had electronic detonators that were remotely controlled, possibly by cell-phone. That’s sophisticated. The bombs contained nails, from which the heads had been painstakingly removed. That shows attention to detail and craftsmanship. Both of the bombs worked. That shows competence.

The accused kids lived in Boston. It wouldn’t have been easy to test their design without attracting a lot of attention. Thinking back to the Judi Bari bombing. That bomber was only 1 for 2, with one bomb that just fizzled. Out here in the sticks of northern California, it wouldn’t be that hard to test out a few bomb designs. With all of the gunfire around here, no one would notice a few muffled explosions in the distance.

Besides, there’s a pretty good chance that whoever bombed Judi Bari, attended, or led, the FBI bomb workshop held on land owned by Louisiana Pacific Lumber Company in the weeks prior to the bombings. Even with FBI training, and a big piece of private land to practice on, whoever bombed Judi Bari, wasn’t nearly as competent as the Boston Marathon bombers.

So give credit where credit is due. The Boston Marathon bombs were ingenious, well crafted and diabolically effective devices, and the people who made them, and carried out the attack were smart, resourceful and competent. It figures that they weren’t born and raised here.

CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

This Friday, May 3 at the Hemp Connection in Garberville, I’ll debut my new album of Circuit-bent music titled Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

For younger readers, and others who might miss the rather obscure musical reference, the title and cover parody what is widely regarded as the worst (at least excluding the post-Roger dreck) Pink Floyd album, titled Ummagumma, a double album originally released in 1970.

A careful observer, or anyone with nothing better to do, can spot many parallels between Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and my new album Um… Uh… Gum Eh? For instance:

Both albums contain a song about a guy who cuts people up with a sharp object:

Ummagumma has Careful With That Axe, Eugene

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Mr. Whisker.

Both albums include songs about outer space:

Ummagumma has Astronomy Domine

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Saucer People Speak

Both albums have songs about knowledgeable beings:

Ummagumma has The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Orb of Omniscience

Both albums have long, spacy pieces where the only lyrics are “Oooh, Aaahh, and Ohhh”

Ummagumma has A Saucerful of Secrets

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Interzone Transit Authority

Both albums have collections of unrecognizable sounds, combined with spoken words:

Ummagumma has Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has I Made A Collage

Both albums have song titles that reference Greek mythology

Ummagumma has Sysyphus

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Sirens of Space, and here’s what it sounds like:

While Pink Floyd is famous for using gobs of state-of-the-art music equipment, I recorded Um… Uh… Gum Eh? With instruments I made out of tin cans, cigar boxes and second-hand childrens toys. That’s the state of my art, extremely low-budget and uniquely homemade. Even though Ummagumma is probably the worst Pink Floyd album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is undoubtedly my best album to date.  Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is my seventh solo album, btw.

Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sound better than Pink Floyd at their worst? Yeah, I think so. Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? Sound like Pink Floyd? Not really, but like Pink Floyd, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sounds great when you are really high. It’s a trip!

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? will make you smile, take you on a tour of the cosmos and bring you to the brink of insanity, before safely returning you to Earth.  Here’s the first video single from Um… Uh… Gum Eh? titled: Falling

So come out to The Hemp Connection in Garberville

on Friday, May 3rd to hear more from Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, see and hear my homemade circuit-bent instruments, and to hear me play electric didgeridoo, for free, as part of Arts Alive.  Also on the bill will be Patchy Fogg, playing musical saw.

The real issue is that the business owners downtown, especially the real estate agents, don’t want their customers to see poor people hanging around town.  Of course, they don’t want to admit that the real problem is declining wages and rising housing prices.  Instead, they want to blame the victims, and use taxpayer resources to drive poor people out of town, even though they constantly complain about paying too much in taxes.

Dear Supervisor Fennel,

As the county considers what to do with the area formerly known as “The Jim Demulling Memorial Grove”, I urge you to consider a few facts about Southern Humboldt that you seem to have forgotten:

1. Everyone in Southern Humboldt, without exception, urinates and defecates. Many, if not most of them, do it in a fashion that does not comply with county codes. As the former executive director of Hum-CPR, you actively lobbied to protect the rights of land-owners who choose to use non-standard and unapproved sanitation.

2. Most of Southern Humboldt’s adult population consumes alcohol on a regular, if not daily basis, and at least half-a-dozen business establishments sell alcoholic beverages in Garberville alone, to accommodate Southern Humboldt’s alcohol consumers.

3. Illegal drug use is not only tolerated in Southern Humboldt, it is celebrated as a proud and cherished tradition, and it has become the main driver of our local economy.

4. Willits Towing and Recovery recently removed hundreds of thousands of pounds of of junk cars and other scrap metal from rural parcels in Southern Humboldt, cheerfully, and at no cost to rural land-owners, a quantity that dwarfs the amount of garbage begrudgingly, and disparagingly removed by Eel River Cleanup. As I recall, you yourself took advantage of a subsidized program to eliminate unsightly and hazardous waste from our rural environment, by bringing in over 100 discarded tires. Clearly this community tolerates people who do not take responsibility for their garbage.

Were Federal, State and County laws strictly enforced, especially on the rural properties in Southern Humboldt, law enforcement would find flagrant violations of the law on nearly every parcel. While most of Southern Humboldt is poorly suited to agriculture, it is remarkably well suited to concealing ugly and illegal activity, a fact that has contributed greatly to its economic vitality.

As a public servant who represents a lot of ethically-challenged, full-time criminals, talk of “intolerable behavior” rings especially hollow. We tolerate a lot of ugly behavior here in Southern Humboldt, and a lot of people around here have grown obscenely rich as a result of it. That’s what makes this community special. I don’t think it fair to condemn the same behavior, only for those who endure poverty and have no place to go.

If you have managed to find a way to speak respectfully with and about the rest of your constituents, you should be able to speak respectfully about the members of this community who lack the resources to secure for themselves, the privacy of a home in which to engage in the same kinds of activities as the rest of your constituents.

If you want the poor and the young to have any respect for county government, you must first demonstrate that the county has respect for them, and their needs. As their representative, I urge you to refrain from using terms like “vagrants” to describe any of your constituents in the future. Instead, I hope you will work for a compassionate solution to the problem of greedy people, who lack compassion, intent on pressing their economic advantage against the poor and the young.

Sincerely, John Hardin

P.O. Box 2301, Redway, CA 95560

Introducing: The lygsbtd Smart Phone App

(Thanks to Fanny Oakley for this brilliant idea)

I know that, these days, a lot of you do most of your web browsing on your smart-phone. I’ve never used a cell phone myself, smart or otherwise, but I see you out there, entranced by your little glowing slab, completely oblivious to anything else happening around you. Yes, I see all of you hot, sexy young people, obsessively fondling your little gadgets, and it occurred to me that you could be fondling me. That’s why I invented the Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do smart-phone app.

Now we can share the intimacy of the tiny touch screen. I can feel the gentle caress of your nimble fingertips as you zoom in and out, perusing my weekly posts, comforted by the soothing warmth of your body heat as you cradle me in your delicate hands. Tight against the supple curve of your hip as I ride around in your pocket, you’ll share all of the most intimate details of your life with me, your browsing habits, the phone numbers of all of your friends, your account numbers, passwords and PINs. I’m so eager to meet all of your friends, and to get to know you better.

Yes, I’m really looking forward to moving into this deeper phase of our relationship through your personal mobile device. For years now I’ve put myself out there for you. You can read what I have to say and enjoy free entertainment, but I’ve never asked you for anything in return before. Now, we have the opportunity for a little more give and take in the relationship, and I think you will find it a much more satisfying experience for both of us.

You just have to take the next step. Download the Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do app to your iphone or Android based smart-phone, and we can begin this new phase in our relationship. The Like You’ve Got Something Better to Do app only costs $1.99, but don’t hesitate at the price. It’s a mere pittance really, and I need to know that you really want to take the next step. Believe me, compared to what lies ahead for us together, $1.99 will seem like nothing at all.

Of course, you have to agree to the terms of the user agreement, but it’s nothing to worry about. I’m sure you’ve clicked through dozens of similar agreements without even reading them, and I encourage you to do the same with this one. It’s just a formality really, and the quicker you agree to it, the sooner we can get to the content you so passionately desire.

USER AGREEMENT

BY DOWNLOADING THE “LIKE YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING BATTER TO DO” APPLICATION FOR MOBIL DEVICES, YOU, HEREAFTER IN THIS DOCUMENT, REFERRED TO AS “THE USER” (IRONICALLY), AGREE TO THE FOLLOWING:

USER AGREES TO ALLOW THE PURVEYOR OF THIS APPLICATION, HEREAFTER REFERRED TO AS “THE PURVEYOR”, COMPLETE AND UNFETTERED ACCESS TO ANY AND ALL INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THE MOBIL DEVICE ON WHICH THE APPLICATION RESIDES, AS WELL AS ANY AND ALL INFORMATION ON OTHER DEVICES, WEBSITES, SERVERS, ETC THAT THE PURVEYOR CAN ACCESS BY MEANS OF UTILIZING THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THIS DEVICE.

THE USER AGREES THAT ALL PHOTOS VIDEOS OR OTHER MEDIA STORED ON THE DEVICE ON WHICH THE APPLICATION RESIDES, OR ANY OTHER DEVICE THE PURVEYOR MAY ACCESS THROUGH THE DEVICE SHALL BE HENCEFORTH DEEMED THE SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE PROPERTY OF THE PURVEYOR. THE PURVEYOR MAY FREELY USE, COPY AND DISTRIBUTE SAID MEDIA IN IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM, FOR ANY PURPOSE, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. THE USER HEREBY RELINQUISHES ANY AND ALL RIGHTS TO SAID MEDIA AND GRANTS EXCLUSIVE WORLDWIDE COPYRIGHT OF SAID MEDIA TO THE PURVEYOR.

IN SUCH CASE AS THE USER DID NOT PREVIOUSLY OWN THE EXCLUSIVE COPYRIGHT TO SAID MEDIA, THE USER ACCEPTS FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY LOSS, LIABILITY OR CLAIMS MADE BY THE RIGHTFUL OWNER OF THE COPYRIGHTS FOR ANY USE OF SAID MEDIA BY THE PURVEYOR.

THE USER HEREBY GRANTS PERMISSION TO THE PURVEYOR TO UTILIZE THE DEVICE FOR COMMUNICATION PURPOSES, UTILIZING ANY AND ALL MODES THAT THE DEVICE IS CAPABLE OF, FOR WHATEVER PURPOSE THE PURVEYOR DEEMS APPROPRIATE, USEFUL, CONVENIENT, PROFITABLE, OR ENTERTAINING. THE USER FURTHER AGREES TO KEEP THE DEVICE CHARGED, WITH SUFFICIENT BATTERY POWER, OR DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO A POWER SOURCE AT ALL TIMES.

THE USER AGREES TO MAINTAIN AT LEAST 30GIGABYTE PER MONTH DATA PLAN AND RESERVE AT LEAST 25 GIGABYTE PER MONTH FOR USE BY THE PURVEYOR. THE USER AGREES TO KEEP THE DEVICE WITHIN STRONG SIGNAL RANGE AT ALL TIMES, AND NOT TO INTERFERE IN ANY WAY WITH THE PURVEYORS USE OF THE DEVICE.

THE USER AGREES TO ALLOW THE PURVEYOR ACCESS TO ANY AND ALL BANK ACCOUNTS, LINES OF CREDIT, EXPENSE ACCOUNTS, FINANCIAL ACCOUNTS, REAL ESTATE HOLDINGS AND OTHER INVESTMENT ACCOUNTS HELD BY THE USER OR JOINTLY BY THE USER AND ANY OTHER PERSONS, FOR ANY REASON. THE USER HEREBY GRANTS THE PURVEYOR PERMISSION TO MAKE ANY AND ALL TRANSACTIONS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO BALANCE INQUIRIES, DEPOSITS, WITHDRAWALS, OPENING OR CLOSING OF ACCOUNTS, PURCHASES OR SALES OF ITEMS OR ASSETS ON ANY AND ALL SAID ACCOUNTS AND HOLDINGS.

THE USER SHALL CREATE NO OBSTACLE TO PREVENT THE PURVEYOR’S ACCESS TO SAID ACCOUNTS AND HOLDINGS. THE USER SHALL NOT TRANSFER FUNDS TO OTHER ACCOUNTS, NOR MAKE CHANGES PIN NUMBERS OR PASSWORDS, WITHOUT PROVIDING THE PURVEYOR WITH ALL INFORMATION AND PERMISSIONS NECESSARY TO ACCESS ANY AND ALL ACCOUNTS AND HOLDINGS HELD BY THE USER, OR JOINTLY BY THE USER AND ANY OTHER PERSONS.

THE USER AGREES TO PROVIDE THE PURVEYOR WITH ENTHUSIASTIC SEXUAL GRATIFICATION AT ANY TIME, ON DEMAND OF THE PURVEYOR, AND TO PRESENT ANY AND ALL SEXUAL ORIFICES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE USERS MOUTH, VAGINA AND ANUS IN A LUBRICATED AND RECEPTIVE MANOR FOR SAID GRATIFICATION, ANY TIME OF DAY OR NIGHT FOR THE NATURAL LIFE OF THE USER. FURTHER THE USER AGREES TO PROVIDE THE PURVEYOR WITH THE USERS COMPLETE SEXUAL HISTORY, AND TO ANSWER ANY AND ALL QUESTIONS REGARDING SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES TRUTHFULLY.

ANY OFFSPRING RESULTANT FROM SEXUAL INTERCOURSE BETWEEN THE USER AND THE PURVEYOR, OR ANY OTHER PERSON SHALL BECOME, AT AGE 18, THE INDENTURED SERVANT OF THE PURVEYOR FOR THE NATURAL LIFE OF SAID OFFSPRING. THIS AGREEMENT EXEMPTS THE PURVEYOR FROM ANY OTHER LIABILITY OR OBLIGATION TO THE USER OR SAID OFFSPRING FOR ANY REASON.

THE USER AGREES TO HOLD THE PURVEYOR BLAMELESS, HARMLESS AND EXEMPT FROM ANY CLAIMS, CHARGES, LIABILITIES, OR LAWSUITS MADE BY THE USER, THE USER’S AGENTS, FRIENDS, CONTACTS, SPOUSES, BUSINESS PARTNERS, OR ANY OTHER PERSONS AGAINST THE PURVEYOR FOR ANY REASON, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO: DAMAGE TO THE DEVICE CAUSED BY THE APPLICATION, LOSS OF DATA, FAILURE OF THE APPLICATION TO MEET USER EXPECTATIONS, FINANCIAL LOSSES, PROPERTY LOSSES, ANY APPLICABLE FEES, LOSS OF CREDIT, PHYSICAL HARM, MENTAL ANGUISH, EMOTIONAL DISTRESS, LEGAL FEES, OR DEATH STEMMING FROM THE PURVEYORS USE OF THE DEVICE, THE INFORMATION OBTAINED THROUGH THE DEVICE, THE USER, THE USERS OFFSPRING OR FOR ANY OTHER REASON. FURTHER, THE USER AGREES TO REIMBURSE THE PURVEYOR FOR ANY AND ALL EXPENSES THE PURVEYOR MAY INCUR RESULTANT FROM ANY SUCH CLAIMS.

On The Money;

Economics For the 99%

Foie Gras

Edit

Despite their fat books, and complex economic models, economists fail to comprehend the nature of economic activity. They don’t realize that the economy is an organic part of a greater organism known as society, and an even greater organism known as the environment. In other words, the economy is not a thing in itself. Instead, it is a part of our lives, and our lives are part of life on Earth. Ideally, the economy should be a much smaller part of our lives, and much less of a burden to life on Earth.

To illustrate this relationship, you could think of the economy as the liver of a goose. The liver of a healthy goose is about the size of a human thumb, and at that size it serves the goose very well. In a healthy goose, this small organ helps the goose digest and process all of the seeds, plant material, bugs and small fish that a healthy goose eats, and turns that food into strong goose muscles, shiny warm goose feathers, healthy goose eggs, and gives the goose all of the energy that it needs to fly thousands of miles each year as part of its annual migration. That’s what a goose’s liver is supposed to do.

However, some people who raise captive geese, don’t care about the health of their geese. They don’t want their geese to fly, or lay eggs, and they don’t care if the goose is strong or if it has shiny warm feathers. Instead, they want their geese to grow the biggest liver possible, in order that they might dine upon a French delicacy known as Foie Gras.

They’ve learned that if they nail the goose’s feet to the floor, so that it can’t get any exercise, and they put a tube down the goose’s throat, so that they can force feed it huge quantities of leftover pasta, bacon grease, and lots of other fatty, high carbohydrate food, they can make the goose’s liver grow until it is larger than a human fist. So, this is what they do to their geese.

As you can imagine, this doesn’t make the goose very happy at all. The goose shows many signs of distress, but the people who raise geese this way, simply ignore those signs. The goose then becomes very ill, but the people who raise geese this way ignore that too. Instead of the liver serving the needs of a healthy goose, the people who raise geese for foie gras, sacrifice the goose in order to produce the largest liver possible.

Before long, the goose is near death, and the goose’s liver, by this time about eight times as large as a healthy liver, has become so distended and diseased that it barely functions at all. At this point, the people who raise geese for foie gras, kill the goose, and remove the huge diseased organ, for which they have sacrificed what was once a beautiful, healthy bird. This is the ugly truth behind that popular French delicacy.

Unfortunately, this is also the ugly truth behind economics. For far too long, a small number of people who enjoy “the finer things in life”, have eagerly sacrificed the health of society and the environment in order to force economic expansion. For them, the quality of our lives, our health, our strength, and our culture only exist to deliver to them, the largest possible economy, so that they might enjoy the largest quantity of the richest possible delicacy.

Do not be fooled by fat books, sharp suits or white lab coats. Economists, businessmen and scientists generally do not have your best interest at heart. Instead, they seek to preserve, and improve their positions of authority and privilege, while they serve the interests of the 1%. Unless we overthrow the tyranny of objective science, escape the clutches of the 1%, and remember how to live our own lives, despite our fallibility, our goose is cooked. There’s an economic analogy that’s On The Money.

With the huge, and growing, variety of new drugs available today, you can’t possibly try them all. Information about drugs, always impenetrably technical, and mostly written in impossibly small type, dissuade most drug users from even trying to learn anything about the drugs they take, beyond the street name. So, how can you tell if a new drug is right for you?

Nearly everyone takes drugs of some kind, at least at times, and for many, drugs form a regular part of our daily routine. This is nothing new. You could argue, as I have in the past, that civilization itself, began as a dysfunctional adjustment to support an alcoholic lifestyle, that took hold some 10,000 years ago. Indigenous hunter/gatherer cultures have used hallucinogenic plants and other plant medicines ceremonially for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. Even animals, from songbirds to elephants imbibe from time to time, and some, like the koala, have cultivated their addictions for so long that evolution has shaped their bodies to accommodate their habits.

Economically, in the US alone, the pharmaceutical drug industry accounts for trillions of dollars in business activity annually, and forms a large portion of US GDP. Despite generally terrific profit margins, the pharmaceutical industry enjoys huge government subsidies as well. Yet, despite downturns in the rest of the economy, and growing government debt, drug use, drug profits, and drug subsidies continue to grow at an alarming rate.

Paradoxically, we, as people, continue to get sicker and poorer. We cannot lay this epidemic of disease completely at the feet of the pharmaceutical industry. Other factors, like an environment increasingly polluted with persistent toxins, poor diet, dangerous food additives, and long hours at stressful, yet sedentary, jobs all contribute to our general poor health. However, the drug industry itself contributes greatly to the proliferation of disease in our modern society.

A single drug can have many dangerous side effects, which often trigger new and serious health conditions. The explosion of new drugs has created an exponential growth in side effects, and with them a host of new conditions, which in turn, require more medication. Toxic pollution, generated in the production of drugs, cause disease in humans as well as in the animal kingdom. Disposal of drugs, usually in the urine of drug users, take their toll on human health and aquatic wildlife as they inevitably find their way into our nations waterways and water supplies. Addiction and overdose only add to legacy of disease that we can attribute to our remarkably vibrant Health-Care industrial complex.

No amount of spending, public or otherwise, no amount of new drugs, and no number of new doctors will solve this looming crisis. You might find this fact very depressing, and it might make you anxious about the future. If so, the drug industry has many drugs specifically formulated to treat those conditions. Still, how do you know if a new drug is right for you?

Here, I offer few general guidelines that I, a layperson, use to determine if a new drug is right for me:

1. If I see a commercial on TV that includes the words, “Ask your Doctor if…is right for you.”, I assume that drug sucks. I assume that if a company has to advertize their drug on TV, it must be a waste of money, like everything else I see advertized on TV.

2. On the other hand, if I read a headline like: “Nude Man Who Hijacked City Bus and Crashed Into Downtown Restaurant, Claims He Was Under the Influence of New Drug” I will probably try that drug.

3. If I see the name of a drug on anything in a doctors office, like the pen he writes with, the pad of paper he writes on, the lanyard around his neck holding his ID, anatomical models, lamps, tissue boxes, drapes, posters, etc., I will definitely not ask for any of those drugs. If a doctor does recommend a drug, any drug, I always ask if he has any free samples on hand, and if he can recommend a generic alternative.

4. But, if I see someone babbling incoherently, while writhing in a puddle of their own vomit, I will definitely ask around to find out what drug they took, and probably try some myself.

5. Finally, if a beautiful young woman asks me if I have a particular drug, I will do everything I can to find that drug immediately.

Of course, these are only general guidelines that reflect my own personal predilections, but they are informed by this statistical fact: You are significantly more likely to die of an overdose from a prescription drug your doctor recommended, than you are from a recreational drug you bought from a street dealer.

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.”

Economics for the 99%

The Economics of Addiction

Intro:  Since Joe brought up the subject of addiction in his comment to last weeks post, I thought I’d share my economic perspective on the subject.  I’ve been very busy finishing up the book, On the Money; Economics for the99% which I hope to complete very soon.  this is an excerpt.

Alcoholism has touched everyone’s life in one way or another. If it hasn’t happened to you, someone you love, or at least someone you know, has suffered tremendously, or perhaps even died from their inability to control their alcohol addiction, so I don’t need to tell you how awful it is.

Narcotics, like heroin, morphine, and other opiates, as well as most prescription pain medications quickly become habit forming, and produce strong physical addictions.

Nicotine, the active ingredient in tobacco products produces an even stronger physical addiction that alcohol or narcotics.

Cocaine, methamphetamine and other stimulants, through a completely different mechanism, have strong addictive potential because of how they alter brain chemistry.

Even caffeine, the active ingredient in coffee and soft-drinks, produces physical withdrawal symptoms, including headache, nausea and irritability, but not as severely as the previously mentioned drugs.

Taken together, business in these addictive drugs forms a central pillar, if not the central pillar, of our modern economy, with the alcohol and tobacco industries forming the fattest slices of the addiction pie. Marketing addictive drugs makes excellent business sense because of the repeat business they generate. Few businesses enjoy the kind of reliable customer loyalty as do the purveyors of addictive drugs, and although highly profitable, these drugs produce almost unimaginable suffering for their users, their loved ones, and society as a whole.

The powerful physical addictions these drugs produce, can easily enslave users to the degree that they will often sacrifice everything, including their health, dignity, family relationships, home, and environment to feed the physical cravings these drugs create in the people who use them habitually. Most drug addicts however, function very effectively within society and the economy, and suffer no such indignity Everyone knows a few cigarette smokers, habitual heavy drinkers, and people who do both. While these behaviors are quite common, and socially acceptable, many more imbibe secretly, or at least with some degree of discretion, so their addictions remain mostly unnoticed by the people around them.

Most addicts treat their addictions as part of their basic living expenses, like food or housing. They simply budget for the additional expense associated with their addiction, by working more than they would otherwise need to. Few earn so much that they don’t notice the cost of their addiction. Most, on the other hand, require significant extra resources to satisfy their craving. Contrary to the popular myth that drugs make people lazy, drug addiction is, in fact, the true source of our modern “work ethic”, and all of this extra work, does take its toll.

People living in tribal hunter/gatherer cultures generally work very little, by modern civilized standards, to meet their physical needs. At times, however, hardship may demand considerably more from them, and evolution has provided for that. Humans have evolved considerable reserve capacity to cope with these occasional hardships, and in good times hunter/gatherer tribes expend considerable energy socializing, dancing and in other activities that they enjoy, and that promote group cohesion.

Drug addiction adds significantly to a human being’s perceived daily physical needs, so addicted people use more of this reserve capacity, usually considerably more, just to cope with the added cost of the drug. As a result, addicted people work harder, feel more tired, and have less energy for the kind of social activities that build group and family cohesion. On the environmental side of this equation, trees, plants, and animals don’t grow any faster, or reproduce any more prolifically, just because humans have adopted a drug addicted lifestyle, so this additional human neediness leads to additional stress on the natural environment.

So, addicted people put in more hours at work. At first, this meant clearing land for drug crops, as the ancient Sumerians did in Mesopotamia, to grow barley and wheat for their beer. This gave rise to farm life, a lifestyle defined by endless toil. As tribal people fall under the influence of addictive drugs, they hunt more than they need, and trade the surplus for drugs.

Ancient City of Ur. Used to be a cedar forest, cleared to grow barley and wheat for beer

As game becomes more scarce, addicted people make more clothes, baskets, drums, arrows, or any other craft items they previously made only for themselves, in order to trade them for drugs. All of this extra work further depletes the natural environment, so addicted people then go further afield to find the resources they need to feed themselves, and their addictions, which brings them into conflict with tribes who inhabit those areas.

In this way, drug addiction produces physical, social and environmental stress, that eventually leads to physical, social and environmental collapse. There in a nutshell, you have the economic history of civilization. It’s not pretty, (or funny I’m afraid) but its On The Money.

Economics for the 99%

A New Game Piece in Monopoly

I heard recently that Milton-Bradley Corporation, makers of the ubiquitous board game Monopoly, has retired the iron. If you haven’t played Monopoly for a while, I’ll remind you that to start the game, each player chooses, from among a handful of miniature metal objects, one of them to represent them on the game-board.

The iron, never popular as a game piece, has finally retired. My mother retired her iron in the ’70s. I’ve certainly never owned one, and I’d have no idea how to use it if I did.. I’ll bet a lot of young people today wouldn’t even recognize an iron, or have any idea what it was used for.

In its place, M-B has introduced a new game piece, the cat, a brilliant move if you ask me. I love cats. I would much rather be a cat, than an iron, any day of the week. The cat might get chased around a bit by the Scotty dog, or get run over by the race car, but I think the cat will do well in the game of Monopoly, maybe a little too well.

The cat just might undermine the the entire premise of the game of Monopoly, and none too soon, frankly. Think about it. Can you imagine a cat ever paying rent? I can’t. If you’ve ever been to the real Atlantic City, you can’t help but notice that the closer you get to the Boardwalk, the more cats you see. I’ll bet not one of them pays rent.

Even though you’ll find hotels galore on the real Boardwalk, you’ll also notice dozens of cats, strutting up and down and under the Boardwalk, like they own the place, without a care in the world. I think they have the right attitude, and as newcomers to the game of Monopoly, that attitude just might save the cat, and us.

The game of Monopoly is an exercise in what economists call, “rent-seeking behavior”. In the game, you “buy” a “property”, say “Baltic Ave.” for instance. Then, when other players land on a “property” you “own”, they pay you “rent”. When you “own” all of the “properties” in a particular area, you can charge the unfortunate players that land there, higher “rent”. If you spend some more money on those “properties”, buying “houses” and “hotels” you raise the “rent” still further. You win the game, when other players no longer have enough “money” to pay the “rent” they owe.

In real life, rent-seeking behavior has become epidemic, and it represents a major shift in our economy. You can expect to see more rent-seeking-behavior as the economy shifts away from manufacturing and resource extraction, towards this more coercive and direct form of blood-sucking.

For generations in the past, capitalism must have seemed rather magical. Markets brimmed with consumer goods that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Fish from distant ocean fisheries, cheap redwood patio furniture, harvested from remote forest habitat, radios, toys, clothes and other products manufactured in distant lands, from materials mined in far-flung corners of the Earth, surely amazed the American consumer, eager to have them all. Most consumers didn’t see the devastation that capitalism left in it’s wake. They just saw a seemingly endless supply of shiny new things to buy.

In the future, our economy will look very different. Instead of a magical place where shiny new things appear out of nowhere, the economy will look like your landlord, and the sheriff’s deputy who comes to evict you. The economy will be breathing down your neck constantly, not letting you get too comfortable anywhere. Instead of extracting resources from distant lands, the economy will extract them from you. Even now, the economy looks, and feels more like the game of Monopoly, than it did to your parents generation, but the Baby Boomers really enjoy playing Monopoly, especially since they got a head start.

Because of their large numbers, the Baby Boomers already occupy a large portion of the available housing. Because they grew up at the very pinnacle of American consumerism, they have wildly unrealistic expectations for their lifestyle, and because they got into the housing market well before the housing bubble, they were well positioned to acquire “investment properties”, and hold on to them even as younger families lost their overpriced homes in the foreclosure crisis.

Since the Federal Government taxes the money they make from renting those investment properties, at the low “capital gains” rate, rather than as “earned income”, tax policy strongly encourages this kind of “rent-seeking behavior”. Think about this when you hear politicians talk about the “capital gains tax”. They’ll say that keeping the “capital gains tax” low, creates jobs. In reality, the low capital gains tax rate screws young working people out of their chance to own a home and drives rent prices up.

Isn’t it ironic that the Baby Boomers, who introduced terms like “crash-pad”, “hippie commune”, and “intentional community” into the general lexicon, have turned into some of the greediest landlords in the history of humanity. The Boomers like playing “Monopoly” with these “investment properties”, and they’ve read dozens of books about how to “win” at it. Even as wages stagnated through most of their working careers, many of them have done quite well for themselves by engaging in this kind of “rent seeking behavior”.

While they never stop congratulating themselves for the Civil-Rights Movement, the Boomers now harbor as much prejudice and hostility, based on income, as their bigoted, racist parents did, based on skin color. The Boomers especially despise the homeless, who conspicuously avoid paying rent. I’ve heard the same kind of derogatory slurs, and vile comments hurled at the poor and homeless from former hippies, as I heard from the bigoted, racist drunks my Grandparents hung with, about Blacks and Hispanics, 40 years ago.

Today’s large poor and homeless population remind them of just how badly they’ve failed as a generation, something they remain in deep denial about. They don’t want to face the fact that the problems in our society run far deeper than the superficial changes they’ve made to the status quo, and that many of those changes only exacerbated the real problems we face as a culture.

The Boomers also expect to finish their lives, enjoying the same kind of excessive consumption that characterized their youth and middle age, but having lived at the very pinnacle of American consumerism, they long ago outstripped the carrying capacity of the planet, and have been consuming your future ever since.

They really don’t want to face this fact. They can’t face this fact, and they can’t face life without their lattes, luxury cars and lots and lots of things to buy. So, they blame the poor and the young, victimizing them with their hostility, defensiveness and denial, as well as their excess.

The Boomers don’t understand, or care, why you don’t have the money, or why you don’t want to pay it to them. They know that the law, and market forces are on their side, and they intend to press their advantage. They won’t face the reality of their unsustainable lifestyle, so long as they can extract more from you. They intend to win this game of Monopoly, and they don’t care what’s left for you when they’re done.

In the future, rental properties will fall increasingly into the hands of the 1%, who will form large faceless property management companies to run them. They will hire thugs and creeps to manage these properties who will bully tenants, steal their belongings and skimp on needed repairs even more than the Boomers who own them now.

While the constitution guarantees privacy rights to home owners, tenants increasingly sign these rights away when they sign a rental agreement. As home ownership becomes less affordable, the terms of rental agreements will favor landlords even more. Rentals will become less secure, less private, and more expensive, as the 1% uses them to squeeze even more blood out of their tenants.

Enter, the cat. Cats play by their own rules. Cats hunt ferociously. Cats scavenge effectively. Cats beg endearingly. Cats hide invisibly and cats howl incessantly. Cats are inscrutable. Cats are unpredictable, and cats are the most effective killing machines nature ever unleashed on planet Earth.

Cats know how to get their way, but cats never pay rent. As a newcomer to this game, you don’t stand a chance if you play by their rules, but as a cat, you can strut up and down boardwalk like you own the place without a care in the world. Take what you need and stay out from under foot. There’s some Monopoly advice that’s On the Money.