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.

Doping Hurts Everyone, Especially Drug Enthusiasts

Doping Hurts Everyone, Especially Drug Enthusiasts

 

Well they stripped Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France titles, leaving those races unwon in the annals of international cycling. As a recreational drug user, you might think that since I take drugs myself, it wouldn’t bother me so much that athletes use steroids, human growth hormone and god knows what else to improve their performance, but you’d be wrong. I find this explosion of the use of performance enhancing drugs particularly insidious, and it really pisses me off.

Like life doesn’t suck enough for people of normal abilities, now they have to worry about everyone else using drugs to edge them out of jobs, sports, college, game shows and even dates.  I remember cocaine as the first popular performance enhancing drug, and look at what a nightmare that turned into. I don’t think we have recovered yet, as a society, from the damage it caused.

Before cocaine, we took drugs to impair performance, or at least we accepted that side-effect as part of the experience. No one thought of partying as particularly competitive. We took drugs because they made us feel good, not because they made us feel better than other people.

Cocaine changed all of that. Suddenly, partying became a competitive sport. It wasn’t enough anymore, to smoke a joint, have a few drinks, relax and unwind with your friends. Instead, while you got quietly shitfaced, your friends all started talking faster than a caffeinated auctioneer. They were still dancing at 2:00 AM, when most decent people have already passed out in a puddle of their own vomit.

Most of them didn’t even dance before cocaine, but after the cocaine, if you wanted to hang with them, it was going to cost you. Then, all of these cocaine people started to get really competitive at work, because they needed more money to afford all of the cocaine they took. They started identifying with the boss’ greed more than with their coworkers interests.

Cocaine had as much to do with the collapse of labor unions in America as Ron Reagan, and the two worked together, hand in glove. Instead of standing together, we were all too busy running back and forth to the bathroom, trying to get the edge on each other, selling each other out, and screwing each other over.

All of those cocaine idiots eventually crashed and burned, but we’ve never recovered, as a nation, from the moral decay we suffered as a result of the cocaine epidemic. To this day, we remain a nation of greedy, superficial, backbiting egomaniacs. That’s real damage, folks! Cocaine turned us into a nation of assholes who systematically exterminate human decency for profit.

It’s not enough just to show up for work anymore. Now, they expect you to push yourself to exhaustion, just like a coke-head, and they’re always pushing you to improve your performance, because everything is so competitive these days. Why, do you suppose, is everything so competitive these days? It’s because cocaine turned us all against each other, and we’ve never been able to trust each other since.

I still enjoy drugs, but I take them because they feel good, or because I want to have a drug experience, not because I think they give me an edge over other people. People like Lance Armstrong, who strive to be exceptional, and especially those who juice themselves with performance enhancing drugs, make life harder for the rest of us who just want to show up, go through the motions, and draw a paycheck. For that, they should be punished severely.

Poem, Summertime in SoHum

A Poem: Summertime in SoHum

 

They say this is a lovely town

Its reputation quite renowned

It’s where the hippies made a stand

When they got back to the land

Where now are these proud stout folk?

Or is this just some kind of joke?

Surely you don’t mean the dealers

Driving ’round in their four-wheelers

Maybe perhaps you mean the growers

You couldn’t set your sights much lower

They cause all of our diesel spills

And make a mess up in the hills

They drain the river for their crop

While salmon populations drop

Just so they can make a buck

Those people never gave a fuck

Or do you mean those Humboldt Hotties

So eager to show off their bodies

Perched atop their high-heel shoes

In little more than their tattoos

Somehow I don’t think they’re the segment

‘Cause by age 18 their mostly pregnant

Or do you mean the other ones

The ones who really love their guns

They love to shoot them night and day

Just to prove they are not gay

Or perhaps I am still wrong

What of the others in the throng?

Aimless drifters, shiftless thugs

Junkies all strung-out on drugs

Homeless people and their dogs

In a schizophrenic fog

If there’s anyone that I’ve left out

Please stand up now and give a shout

‘Cause I’d love to meet these rumored folks

And learn that they are not a hoax

Still this place it suits me right

Not because of, but in spite

Of the industry that’s changed the face

Of this charming little country place

The saving grace, this is no lie-ee

In winter time they’re in Hawaii

Or perhaps in Mexico

What do I care where they go

So Summertime please hurry by

I really hope that time will fly

‘Cause when again it starts to rain

These folks will all get on a plane

then I can go and buy propane

Without them driving me insane

 

postscript:

There’s just one group that I’ve left out

The folks that I can’t live without

They’re always there in sun and rain

And do their jobs without complaint

Those are the folks who work in town

And make our little world go ’round

On The Money, The Medical Model v Prohibition

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

The Medical Model vs Prohibition

 

I love marijuana. I think it’s a marvelous plant. I love smoking it, and I hate that it is still illegal. I’ve been involved with marijuana activism since the late 80′s. A picture that includes me in a tricorner hat, at Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, MI, appeared in at least half a dozen issues of High Times in the early 90′s. I co-founded Mass. Cann., the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, started their newsletter, Mass Grass, and I beat the pavement door-to-door canvassing for medical marijuana in the mid-nineties, so I celebrated the passage of Prop.215 as much as anyone. However, while marijuana has stepped out of the shadows a bit, under the medical model, modern medicine has become a much darker place.

 

Much as I enjoy recreational drugs, I generally dislike drug dealers. I don’t dislike them because they sell drugs. No, I like them because they sell drugs. I dislike them because, invariably, they love money more than drugs. That’s just wrong!

 

That’s what’s wrong with most drug dealers. They don’t sell drugs because they love drugs, and find them interesting. No, most drug dealers sell drugs for the high profit margin. They’re real interest is money. That makes them stupid and boring in my book. You may find some interesting characters at the bottom of the drug-dealing totem pole, but the further up you climb, the more boring and stupid the people, but today’s medical industry makes drug dealers look brilliant and interesting.

 

The modern medical greed machine even makes banksters and real estate bloodsuckers envious. Now that they wrecked the economy with the phony housing bubble, the only thing they can make money on these days is student loans for people going into the medical industry. There’s as much big money in sickness as there is sickness in big money, and you don’t even have to see a single patient to cash in.

 

Look at the city of Hartford, CT. They don’t have any big factories with spewing smokestacks, nor do they have any coal mines or clear-cut forest land. Yet ringing the city of Hartford, you will find dozens of tony suburbs full of well-manicured, chemically-treated lawns and clogged with late model Beemers, Camrys and SUVs. Where does all of this wealth come from?

 

Hartford isn’t world-famous for its underground marijuana industry. That explains all of the new rolling stock around here, but they’ve got a better racket than marijuana in Hartford. It’s called health insurance.

 

The money you, and everyone else, spends on health insurance, pays all of those Beemer driving, Chemlawn spraying salaries in Hartford, CT, and produces billions of dollars, that’s billions with a B in profits for corporate shareholders, besides. They might eventually shell out some money to your health-care provider, if you get sick, but that depends on your policy. The policy that they wrote, and you never completely read or understood.

 

Health insurance makes big money, but it’s incredibly dull work, so it tends to attract dull, greedy people, even duller and greedier than the people who deal illegal drugs. In Hartford, CT, even more so than here in Humboldt County, CA, greed and tedium feed on each other producing rising rates of conformity and consumption.

 

As people increasingly seek entertainment to relieve the boredom and status symbols to bolster their failing self-worth, dull, greedy people require increasingly obscene incomes just to cope with the misery of their empty lives. They become a plague upon the planet, and a danger to themselves. In other words, they become middle-class.

 

This lethal combination of greed and tedium, or “greedium”, as I call it, has spread to all aspects of the medical industry. People infected with greedium believe, falsely, that if you endure tedium, you should be paid more than people who do what they enjoy. If you sat through four years of boring classes, you deserve more money than someone who did something more interesting with their time. Greedium says that tedium, and only tedium, deserves compensation, and the more tedium you endure, the more money you deserve to make.

 

So it goes, that Hartford, CT has become a black-hole of greedium, bent on sucking the life out of the rest of the country, and it has infected the entire medical industry. Our small town hospital just approved a $30,000 dollar a year raise for our hospital administrator, so that he can maintain a residence in a nicer community, with better schools in another state.

With an annual salary just shy of $150,000, he makes more than pretty much everyone else around here, even most of the dope yuppies, but doesn’t see a single patient. Yes, greedium is the real epidemic in this country, and it’s spread through contact with the medical profession.

So it’s good news, bad news. The good news is that marijuana has finally become part of the medical industry. The bad news is that the medical industry has become a bigger rip-off than prohibition.

On The Money, The Poverty Line

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working-Class

The Poverty Line

“The poor will always be with us, but it wouldn’t take that long to exterminate the rich.”

WJSHS (What Jesus Should Have Said)

 

We hear about “the poverty line” a lot on the news. The number of children living below the poverty line, the number of families below the poverty line, jobs that pay “below poverty line” wages have all made headlines recently. What does “the poverty line” really mean?

Allegedly, this is how much it costs to get by in this country. “The poverty line” is an official statistic compiled by the OECD.  The poverty line doesn’t take into account things like the cost of housing, food, health care, utilities, transportation.  No, instead, the poverty line is based on 60% of median household income.  Ultimately, it adds up to a pretty good chunk of change.  In 2010 the poverty line for a single adult under 65 was $11,344, a lot more than I made that year.

 

While people need housing, no one needs a landlord. So a lot of the income it takes to reach “the poverty line”, just goes to greedy bloodsuckers bent on taking advantage of us. If we could get rid of greed, I think poverty would evaporate before our eyes. Really, we don’t need a metric to tell us that we are poor, especially if it only tells us that we make less than other people.  We need a metric that tells us when we are being greedy.

I suggest we use the same metric, but call it “the greed line”. Certainly “the poverty line” doesn’t cut it as a gauge of economic hardship. Some people living at the poverty line have miserable lives, while others, like myself, enjoy an enviable lifestyle. Ultimately, income doesn’t have as much to do with how happy you are, as does your health, or how you spend your time. So, we might as well call it “the greed line”, and get some practical use out of it.

 

If we want to know about economic hardship in this country, I suggest another metric all together. Call it “the slavery line” “The slavery line would take into account how much of your time and energy it takes to reach “the greed line”. If you can make “the greed line” income in less than 25 hrs a week, you’re living pretty well. If you have to work 40- 50 hours a week to reach “the poverty line” your life sucks. If you work more than 50 hours a week, at any income, you qualify as a slave. If you earn an income above “the greed line” you are a slave to greed. If you earn below the greed line, you are just a slave. It’s about time we call a slave “a slave” in this country, and it’s about time we abolish slavery in this country as well.

 

In cultures that have survived for tens of thousands of years, greed is considered a very bad thing, at best, a childish thing to be outgrown before adulthood. It’s time we outgrew it too. To outgrow greed, we need to understand it. To understand greed, we need to know where it begins, and greed begins where poverty ends. So, it makes as much sense to call it “The greed line” as “the poverty line”.

 

Actually, both of these terms have too many negative connotations. Both “the greed line” and “the poverty line” make you want to move away from them. You don’t want to be anywhere near “the poverty line”. Heavens no! You want to be well above it, but you don’t want to be accused of crossing “the greed line”. No, you want to stay below that. So, how can you live above “the poverty line” but below “the greed line? You can’t. That’s capitalism’s dirty little secret.

No, we need to call it something else altogether. Let’s just call it “enough”.

SoHum Suffers From Shortage of Homeless People

SoHum Suffers From Shortage of Homeless People

The most recent Point In Time survey of Humboldt County found only 4% of the county’s total homeless population, in the So Hum area. That’s an area comprising about a third of the total acreage, and home to about one fifth of the total population of Humboldt Co. While SoHumers take credit for powering the economic engine of Humboldt County, they remain under-served by the homeless population.

 

The homeless people surveyed cited open hostility from merchants, lack of infrastructure and “greedy dope yuppies who would happily spend millions on yet another concert venue, but can’t find the resources for a shelter, campground, or even a public restroom” as reasons for the shortage of homeless people in SoHum. Others point out that SoHum’s clandestine economy attracts shiftless criminals, bent on gaming the system, who don’t care about anyone but themselves. Not many homeless people fit that profile.

 

While the survey suggests no mitigating measures to correct this imbalance, recent trends suggest that as marijuana prices continue to fall, SoHum may generate enough new homelessness, locally, to fill the gap. That’s the SoHum spirit of self-reliant resourcefulness that turned these logged over hills into forests littered with waterline, fertilizer bags and chicken wire.