I heard a report on the sad state of affairs at the Mateel Community Center on KMUD’s Local News the other day. Faced with immediate bills, and overshadowed by a looming half-million-dollar debt, SoHum’s most celebrated non-profit has very few options. Some hope that the Mateel can secure a debt consolidation loan through the Humboldt Area Foundation using the Mateel Hall as collateral. If that happens, the Mateel will have to repay the loan, plus interest, which means that our community will make payments on that debt, for many, many years to come.
The other option, it seems, requires the Mateel Board of Directors to declare bankruptcy, sell the hall and the rest of the Mateel’s assets, and if there’s any money left, after all of the creditors have been paid, they can use whatever is leftover to try to start a new community center. There’s a good chance, however, especially in today’s real estate market, that liquidating the community’s assets won’t raise enough capital to cover all of the Mateel’s debt, in which case some creditors will take a loss, and the community will have to start from scratch.
It boils down to this: Will we, the SoHum community of today, spend the next twenty or thirty years paying for the excess and irresponsibility of SoHum’s aging dope yuppies, in order to save their dream, the aging and irresponsibly excessive Mateel Hall, or will we write it all off as a total loss? Unless those aging dope yuppies dig deep into their own pockets and come up with that half-mil, right now, we no longer have a community center. Instead, we have inherited from them a yawning chasm of debt that they now invite us to throw our money and our lives into.
Did you expect anything else? Did you think the black market marijuana industry was going to leave the Mateel Hall to the SoHum community as a gift for posterity? Drug dealers throw great parties, but they don’t generally leave nice community centers in their wake. Instead, they leave gutted buildings and trashed properties. Why should the Mateel be any different?
Drug dealers often, and with good reason, feel guilty about their dirty Drug War windfall, so they sometimes donate large sums to churches and non-profits, especially when money is easy, but these donations come sporadically, and rarely continue long term. Drug dealers also tend to gamble irresponsibly and spend too much money on status symbols. Drug dealers need visible status symbols to compensate for the deep negative status of their occupation. Inevitably, the gambler’s luck runs out, and the trashed status symbols get hauled off to the scrapyard, or in this case, sit vacant, waiting for demolition or immolation. The Mateel was both a charity, and a status symbol to the black market marijuana industry in Southern Humboldt, but now that the money’s gone, it may just become part of the trash they leave behind.
Thankfully, the Mateel has had the forethought to prepare the community for this moment by discontinuing the only program people really needed and relied on them for, namely the Mateel Meal, a free lunch program, years ago. We still have plenty of hungry people in our community, but they already know better than to look to the Mateel for help. For them, nothing will change if the Mateel closes permanently. The Mateel never offered shelter to those in need. Hundreds of people in our community who sleep huddled under plastic tarps outside in the rain, because of the lack of affordable housing, will not miss the fancy dress balls or A-list reggae shows at the Mateel, so the venue will be no great loss to them.
The Mateel Hall primarily serves the dope yuppies who live in the hills, have plenty of money, and want a swanky place to party, and because of that, the Mateel feels more like a country club than a community center. I’m not really a country club kind of guy, and the Mateel has done a pretty good job of turning my partner and I off to events there. First, precious few of the events held at the Mateel Hall interest us. Second, we’ve had enough bad experiences at the Mateel that we’re very hesitant to go back. Third, most Mateel events are outside of our entertainment budget. Exclusivity achieved! So, as tragic as it is to lose the Mateel Community Center, when it comes down to it, a whole lot of us here in SoHum will hardly notice that it’s gone.
Whether you enjoy my columns or not, if you live in Southern Humboldt, and do business at the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union, I hope you will take time to read this post, which I also submitted as a letter to the editor of both local SoHum newspapers.
Beginning next month, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union will start draining your bank account every time they send you a statement, and not just a little. Your so called “free” checking account will now cost you $60 a year. Every time you get an envelope from the credit union, they will deduct $5 from your account. This fee applies to savings accounts as well. Instead of earning interest on your money, the credit union will now send you a statement every quarter showing that they’ve taken $5 from you for the service.
The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union takes in hard-earned money from working people like me, and they loan it it out to dope growers in the hills, to finance all of the environmental destruction going on in the forest, including special low-interest loans for water tanks. Then they launder all of that drug money and turn it into legally owned land, vehicles, phony businesses, and interest paid to the credit union, but instead of paying me interest on my money, they now have the nerve to charge me $5 every quarter for loaning it to them. That’s an outrage.
Not satisfied with the revenue they receive from the millions of dollars worth of black market income they launder, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union has stooped to ripping off working people who live paycheck to paycheck, and need a place to cash their paycheck. A credit union is supposed to be a safe place for working people to keep their money, but if your money evaporates while it’s there, the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union is clearly NOT a safe place to keep your money.
When I complained about these new fees, the teller told me that there was an exception. If I was sixty-two years old or more, I would be exempt from these charges. That didn’t make me feel any better, because, first, I’m a long way from 62. Second, because it means that the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union has structured these fees so that we working age people, in our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, who didn’t get here when land was cheap, will now subsidize the cost of written statements graciously provided, at no cost, to the aging Baby Boomers who own most of the land and control most of the money in Southern Humboldt.
Believe me, I don’t need another reason to resent Baby Boomers. Their greed is insatiable, and their stupidity, boundless. We’ll be paying for their extravagantly indulgent lifestyle for generations to come. They’ve already cost us enough, and I don’t feel particularly charitable towards them right now.
The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union is trying to force us all to do our banking online. Not everyone wants to see all of their personal financial information dangled around in cyberspace waiting for hackers to strike. Not everyone in Southern Humboldt has a secure internet connection to do their banking on. Internet connectivity costs a lot in Southern Humboldt, especially if you live off-the-grid, and you certainly don’t want to do your banking at the library or at a wifi cafe.
When I complained to Shon Welborn at the credit union, she suggested that I to go to the Board of Directors meeting, this Wednesday, May 18th at 3:00 pm at The Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union in Garberville to voice my complaint. Of course, most of the working people effected by this policy change, can’t afford to take off of work early on Wednesday. I hope you will attend the meeting if you can, but whether or not you can attend the meeting, please call, email, write or visit the Southern Humboldt Community Credit Union and tell them to dump these outrageous new fees before they go into effect on June first. Their number is: 707 923 2012 Thank you.
In the latest evidence of the moral bankruptcy of my community, a standing room only crowd turned out to pressure the Redway Community Services District into permitting a new brew-pub to suck water from Redway’s already overtaxed water system. If there’s anything this community needs less than another industrial scale water waster, it’s more beer, and encouragement to drink it.
We have a huge problem with alcohol abuse here in Southern Humboldt, and you don’t need statistics to see it. It hits you in the face everywhere you go. Homeless alcoholics litter our streets from one end of town to the other, but the people with homes drink even more. Just attend one of the many non-profit fundraisers, and watch how fast people suck down those $6 beers. Try showing up, sober, at around 10:30pm. See if you can find one person who’s not too drunk to talk to. Most community events around here feel like a college frat party, except that half of the drunks are old enough to have kids in college, or grandkids.
Read the papers. Without DUIs, alcohol related traffic fatalities, disorderly conduct arrests and editorial complaints about public drunkenness, our local papers would have to investigate our corrupt county government just to fill the pages. Can you imagine that?. Linda Stansberrry reports, in her recent story in the NCJ, that people die of drug and alcohol related causes here in Humboldt County at THREE TIMES the state average. We’re so drunk here in Humboldt that even our statistics are staggering.
Do we care? Fuck no! I guess we like it when our neighbors and our kids die, or when our kids run people over and leave them to bleed to death on the street. That’s just part of growing up, right? Funerals give us another excuse to get sauced, and there’s too damn many of us around here anyway. Let’s build a new brew pub so our kids can get drunk and run people over a little closer to home.
Here in SoHum, all we care about is getting drunk and making money. That’s why we think the marijuana industry should look like the wine industry. So, when the Redway Community Services District raised concerns about how this proposed new brew pub might negatively effect the small town’s water supply, greedy drunks came out in force to express their outrage, in an all out effort to ram the project through.
No one expressed concern about how this new brew pub, proposed for the Meadows Business Park, might lead to more traffic fatalities, especially since the proposed location lies halfway between SoHums two most densely populated residential areas, but not within easy walking distance of either.
The out-of-the-way location, in an industrial park, will not attract tourists, or promote shopping in downtown Garberville. Instead, the proposed new brew pub would cater to locals who like to drink and drive, and it would encourage us all to drink and drive more. How is this good for us as a community?
Thankfully, the Redway Community Services District stood up to the pressure, and the brewmongers went home angry, and got drunk. We may be famous for our cannabis, but the cannabis industry supports a destructive alcoholic lifestyle. Cannabis has the capacity to alter consciousness, but in SoHum’s dope yuppies, greed, and the thirst for alcohol, clouds their thinking so completely that even the best cannabis doesn’t reach them. They grow weed, but they think like alcoholics.
No, weed is not wine. Weed is nothing like wine, but SoHum’s dope yuppies think like alcoholics everywhere. Alcoholism is the disease that spawned our unsustainable culture of violence and environmental destruction to begin with, and alcoholism shapes our culture to this day. That’s why we inhabit such a cruel, heartless society, and face a looming environmental crisis. Alcoholism destroys lives. It destroys families. It destroys communities, including ours, and it is destroying the world.
Cannabis is the solution, but SoHum’s alcoholic dope yuppies are just part of the problem.
Besides offering a thought provoking, phenomenological analysis of our current economic system, On The Money: Economics for the 99% contains some of my best and funniest writing. The fact that Savage Henry Magazine and Fifth Estate Magazine have both published essays from the On The Money: Economics for the 99% series, should tell you that On The Money: Economics fro the 99% is both funny enough for stupid people and radical enough for smart people.
Essays from the On The Money: Economics for the 99% series remain some of the most popular posts here at lygsbtd, and you can still find them highly ranked on my “most read” (“Stuff People Read”) section in the right-hand column. My new book, On The Money: Economics for the 99% contains classics like:
You owe it to me too! For three and a half years now I pour myself out for you. Every week, thousands of you come here for some little respite from your miserable lives. You slurp up whatever I have to offer, and then you slink away. Well it’s time to pay the piper!
What’s it worth to you folks?
We’re only talking about $5 here! That works out to about 14 essays, or 14,000 carefully chosen words, for each dollar. That’s a hell of a bargain if you ask me, and you’ve had plenty of opportunity to sample the wares, so don’t tell me you’re not interested, because you’re here, for God’s sake.
Please, if my work means anything to you, and you want to see this blog continue, buy a copy of On The Money: Economics for the 99%. You won’t regret it. On The Money: Economics for the 99% is a great book. You’ll love reading it. I love reading it, and I hate to read. I guarantee that you will not find a more entertaining or informative book about economics anywhere, at any price.
You need to know this stuff. On The Money: Economics for the 99% examines our modern economy from the perspective of someone who has to live in it. This book explains how the economy consumes you, your world, and your future.
To save yourself, you need to know how the economy really works. Your future depends on it. I know you don’t want to think about it. That’s why I always look for the weird angle, and try to keep it playful. If you can laugh at it, you can beat it.
Come on folks! I am your writer. I tell the truth, and I make it entertaining. You may not always agree with me. Hell, you may not ever agree with me, but something brings you back, week after week. Well, if you want to keep coming back, and finding new stuff here, show some appreciation for the three and a half years of my life I’ve already given you. Even if you can’t read, and just come here to look at the pictures,PLEASE, BUY MY FUCKING BOOK! It has a great cover!
I’m serious people! I need your help right now. $5 from you will make a huge impact on my life, and you’ll get a great 70,000 word ebook, that I put a hell of a lot of work into, to read at your leisure. Put it on your card, charge it to your pay pal account, however you want to do it is fine, just DO IT NOW!! Please.
And buy a copy for a friend. Surely you know someone who really needs to see things from a different perspective. Give On The Money: Economics for the 99% as a gift. Infect others with these ideas, don’t just let them fester inside your own head. On The Money: Economics for the 99% has the potential to change the economy, by changing the way people see it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The L.A. Times recently ran a story about Humboldt County and the marijuana industry here, and the story echoed a common myth about this area that really deserves some analysis. You will hear this myth often repeated on KMUD, and reflected in Kym Kemp’s blog Redheaded Blackbelt. They both do their best to disseminate propaganda for the marijuana industry, and between them they’ve done a pretty good job of putting their spin on things. After all, the marijuana industry is still a pretty secretive business, and news gathering has become a relatively passive activity these days, so it’s not surprising that this myth gets so much traction in the press, but it’s about time someone took a closer look at it.
So, here’s the myth: The people who moved to Southern Humboldt in the late 70’s and early 80’s, like to paint themselves as the “back to the land” movement. They moved here to escape Babylon, and built little cabins, grew organic veggies, made arts and crafts, and raised a family. They grew just enough marijuana to pay their taxes, support their favorite non-profit, and put a pair of used tires on their old truck.
On the other hand, the myth continues, if you moved here during the 90’s or, god forbid, this century, you’re only here for the money. It’s these “newcomers” who brought in the big diesel generators, and started these giant industrial mega-grows. It’s these “newcomers” who spill diesel fuel in the creeks, pump our rivers dry, and spread rat poison all over. It’s the “newcomers” who drive like maniacs on our roads, bring hard drugs into our community, and dump trash in the river.
You see, according to this myth, it’s only the people who’ve been here 30 years, not the people whose families have been here a hundred years, or the people whose ancestors have been here for thousands of years, who form the true “community” around here. If you’ve been here longer than them, you are a redneck, if you’ve arrived since them, you are a carpetbagger, but if you’ve been here for 30 years, no longer, and no shorter, you are part of the twelfth tribe of Israel. The myth tells us that the people who’ve been here 30 years, take impeccable care of their land, manage it wisely, and use the money they make to fight injustice all over the world. Don’t they sound like awesome people?
The truth is a very different story:
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, most of the people around here bought their land from a guy named Bob McKee. They all love Bob because he would buy large tracts of logged over timber land, dirt cheap, and then break them up into parcels small enough that pretty much anyone who wanted one could afford one.
You could never make a living logging these small parcels, and there weren’t any jobs, to speak of, anywhere in the vicinity, so this low priced land became attractive to artists, who don’t have to worry so much about their commute, but also don’t make much money. At one time Humboldt County had more artists per-capita, than any county in California. That’s why Summer Arts Fest is older than The Mateel. The artists in SoHum needed that outlet, more than they needed a place to party. That was 37 years ago.
Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan disrupted the flow of marijuana from South America and Mexico, and very suddenly, people started buying up those cheap parcels, specifically to grow marijuana. Bob McKee got rich, and all of a sudden, almost anyone with a green thumb, and bit of chutzpah, could make a living from the privacy that these forested mountains provide.
So, these people who moved here 30 years ago, all moved here to grow pot. They bought cheap, logged over timber land, built homes with outhouses without permits, diverted streams, and grew marijuana illegally to make money. They made pretty good money growing pot, so they started buying up the parcels around them. Their drug-dealing friends in the city, who came up here for the lavish parties these folks threw, started buying parcels as well.
Some of these people were greedier than others, some of them were more competent than others, but they all partied a lot. They brought hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth, which have remained epidemic ever since.
They drove like maniacs, like their kids do today, and they made huge messes up in the hills. They buried piles of car batteries. They changed their oil in their driveway, letting the spent oil seep into the ground, and they abandoned thousands of vehicles all over the hillsides of Southern Humboldt, and that was just the beginning.
People who’ve owned their property since the eighties don’t really need much income anymore to cover the basics. They paid their land off decades ago, and thanks to proposition 13, many still pay less than a thousand dollars a year in property tax, at least on the parcel they actually live on.
For most of them, however, the basics were not enough. They like to party. They want to go to a dozen festivals every summer, winter in Hawaii, ride around on quads, watch movies on their big screen TVs, and if their local non-profits can pour beer, they want to support them too. You see, they just want regular “middle-class” stuff, and marijuana provides that for them, but it gets to be a chore.
Growing all of that marijuana starts to feel like work. So what do you do if you own a few parcels of land, and you want the income from all of them, but you don’t actually want to do the work of growing the marijuana? You want to hire people, but you don’t really want them show up at your place and punch a time-clock, and you really don’t want to cut them a check every week. You want them to grow pot for you, sell it, and give you the money, and you want some insulation from the risky side of the business. Here’s what you do.
You “sell” them a turnkey business. Here’s how this works. You find an up and coming drug dealer, who’s already moving a lot of weed for you. You teach him how to grow, introduce him to your clone supplier, and help him set up his generator, pump, lights and fans. You offer to “sell” him one of your SoHum parcels for a price based on the expected profits from the weed grown there in the next ten years. You draw up a land contract, and you “loan” him, the money that you expect to be payed for your share of the weed. Then you turn the operation over to him.
You see, you “sold” that parcel, that you originally traded a motorcycle for, for $250,000, to a 28 year old guy with no job, and $50,000 in small bills. There’s now a big ugly diesel scene and a giant, water sucking industrial mega-grow on it. You get all of the profits, and some drug dealing kid from the city takes all of the risk and does all of the work. He’s in possession of the land, should the cops ever raid it, so you can deny any knowledge of what goes on there, and you can legally repossess it, if he ever fails to make the payments.
Not that long ago real estate agents around here sold land, generators and lights together as a package, and advertized them in local papers. For decades now, all of the land sold around here, sells at a price based on the value of the marijuana that can be grown there, and the county happily appraises this land at the inflated prices.
So, if you moved here recently, besides paying through the nose for your land, you likely pay three times what your neighbor pays in property tax. You still can’t make a living from the timber on one of these parcels, and there are still very few jobs in the vicinity, but these parcels no longer sell at prices that artists or writers can afford. No, every parcel sells as a prime marijuana gold mine, with a price determined by how much marijuana the buyer and seller think they can pull out of it.
The people who sign those land contracts, often as not, get busted, shot to death in a drug deal gone bad, or simply fail to deliver the cash, so they lose the property, and we never see them around again. It’s a huge ripoff, and it’s just one of the ways that the people who’ve been here thirty years, feed on young people like vampires, growing ever richer, and more smug about themselves, while they destroy habitat, drive endangered species to extinction, and enslave the young.
Most of the rentals in SoHum work the same way. Landlords expect tenants to grow for them, and use the lease as legal insulation. The dope yuppies who’ve been here thirty years know how few opportunities there are for young people, and they look for desperate young people to take advantage of.
The people who’ve been here thirty years have engineered the marijuana industry here. They employ, and exploit the army of young growers, share-croppers, dealers, mules and trimmers that you see around town. They are responsible for the giant mega-grows, the water diversions, the rat poison, and all of the problems and pollution that goes along with them, and they make sure that no young people today, ever get the kind of deal that Bob McKee gave them.
Its time to legalize marijuana, and drive a stake through the heart of the dope yuppie lifestyle. Legalization would help the salmon. Legalization would help the fishers, and legalization would help everyone who likes to smoke herb, or needs it for medicine. Legalization will only hurt a small clique of people who moved here thirty years ago, got lucky, exploited the land, took advantage of people, and have gotten way too smug about it. Really, no one deserves it more.
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