Seed ’em for Freedom

The other day, I found myself stuck behind two, empty, 25 yd dump trucks, returning to Redway, waiting for two more 25 yd dump trucks, full of soil, to clear the one-lane bottleneck in the middle of the redwood grove between Lower Redway and Ruby Valley on Briceland Rd. Between the four of them they completely engulfed that remarkable fragment of ancient forest in a thick cloud of diesel exhaust. Ah, the smell of a Spring day in the forests of Humboldt County.

I must have passed two dozen trucks, of various sizes, loaded with soil, or components thereof, in my sixteen mile trek into town. It reminded me of fire season, with soil trucks instead of firetrucks. You can literally watch our roads crumble beneath their weight. Meanwhile, the forests echo with the crass flatulence of chainsaws, bulldozers and ATVs all day, and the endless roar of generators, that fuel the UFO-like glow of brightly lit greenhouses, all night.

This is crazy! I love marijuana as much as the next guy, but it’s not worth destroying the planet over, and it’s not worth destroying Humboldt County over, either. It’s just pot, for God’s sake. If it weren’t for prohibition, you could hardly give the stuff away. If our pot had seeds in it, weed would be sprouting up everywhere by now, and everyplace in the country would have its own variety, adapted to the local environment and local tastes.

Pot doesn’t need special soil. I once found a fully mature sinsemilla plant growing in the expansion groove of a sidewalk in downtown Akron, OH. Thousands of people must have trampled on that plant over the course of the Summer. No one watered it, fertilized it, or mulched it. No one brewed tea for it, dusted it’s roots or sprayed it with neem oil, and no one strung lights over it, turned a fan on it or put a heater near it. It grew there, all on it’s own. Why? Because pot used to have seeds.

Weed should be as common as blackberries, and as full of seeds. No one should ever get shot over it, go to jail for it, or fork over a days wages just to enjoy a taste of it. By the same token, no one in their right mind would bulldoze a forest, trash a truckload of plastic film and sink a lot of money into soil and amendments, thinking they were going to get rich off of it, either. Our entire cannabis industry is built on the lunacy of prohibition. It was born crazy, and it’s only gotten crazier.

We shouldn’t build on prohibition. We should end prohibition. We shouldn’t white-wash the black market. We should end the injustice of it and let nature take its course. We can replace the trucks and the soil and the generators and the lights and the pollution and the growers and the dealers and the cops and the lawyers and the prison guards and the laws and the prisons and the money with the gentle motion of the breeze and a card on an album cover. Pot for the people, period. Anything less is a graceless scam that needlessly destroys habitat, generates pollution and creates poverty.

A lot of people around here have no appreciation for this place at all. They measure everything in dollars, so they know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. They know that the price of marijuana is high, all over the country, right now, and the risk of going to jail for growing a lot of it here in Humboldt County, is low, and that was all they needed to know about Humboldt County.

Salmon streams and old-growth forests don’t interest them one bit. Deer, bear, raccoon, skunks, gophers, rats and mice all fall under the category of: “pests,” and the rest of the community of life is just “roadkill,” dead stuff that got in the way. For them, regulations serve no purpose. To them, regulations are nothing more than bureaucratic “red tape” to be avoided, resisted, and opposed politically, rather than complied with, and because of them, regulations will not protect wildlife, preserve habitat or even insure our rural quality of life. Regulations won’t stop this madness. Regulation created this insanity in the first place, and new, more or better regulations will only make things worse. This is a concocted problem with a natural solution.

If you love living in the forest, and you’re sick of the green-rush, grow some seedy pot this year. Let a patch of your favorite seed-stock go feral on your land. Seed ’em for Freedom! Seed ’em for Freedom, because it’s the only way we’ll ever really put prohibition behind us. Seed ’em for Freedom to put cannabis in the hands of the people who need it the most, and wrench it from those who would rather destroy the world first, and Seed ’em for Freedom because seeds are life, and life knows what it’s doing.

 

Who Buys All of This Weed?

I hear a lot of talk around here about the potential impact to our local economy from the impending legalization of cannabis. Suddenly, dope yuppies who, just a few years ago, weren’t even registered to vote, now spend money on lobbyists to convince lawmakers to construct a legalization framework that keeps the money pouring into the pockets of the same people who have profited from prohibition for more than 30 years.

Dope yuppies have never cared about anyone but themselves, and the bankers and merchants who make dire predictions about our local economy, would be every bit as concerned about the potential loss in revenue if this county’s chief economic export were underage prostitutes and child-pornography. Money is money, after all.

I don’t hear any mention, however, of the people who buy and consume all of this weed. As one of those proud pot smoking Americans, I am even more fed-up with the outrageously high price of black-market weed than I am with cops sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. While everyone pays for narco cops and prison guards, only cannabis consumers pay these ridiculous prices. Let’s take a look at the people who buy the cannabis grown in the Emerald Triangle, to see where all of this economic prosperity we enjoy, comes from.

A recent study found that half of all cannabis consumers have not graduated from high-school. Some of those kids don’t have a high- school diploma because they are still in school. I mean. why do you think they call it “high” school?

Some of those kids dropped out of school to grow or sell cannabis as a career, but most of them end up in shitty low-wage jobs. The people who cook and serve your food, wash your dishes, change your oil and clean your offices and hotel bathrooms all smoke weed, and they all pay way too much of their hard-earned money for it.

The people who work at Walmart smoke weed. The people who work at McDonald’s smoke weed. Almost every low-wage worker in America smokes weed, or they would, if they could afford it. Low-wage workers often spend more money on pot than they do on food. They do without basic necessities like clothing, like housing, so that they can afford marijuana, because marijuana makes their lives tolerable. High prohibition prices keep them poor and insures that they can never afford to buy their own home, start their own business or get more education. The people who buy marijuana today pay for it with their lives. They pay for it with their futures.

Other low-wage workers turn to alcohol, because under prohibition, a few dried cannabis flowers costs more than a big bottle or brewed, fermented, distilled and bottled liquor. People literally choose to sacrifice their health to alcohol, rather than the precious income it would cost to switch to cannabis. A lot of people have quit drinking, by switching to cannabis, and it has saved their lives.

A lot more people would do the same, if cannabis didn’t cost so much. All across America, the people who can least afford it, pay way too much money for marijuana, or do without, when it could really help them. High cannabis prices cause an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering especially among the poor.

People all over America consume cannabis to relieve stress, but high prohibition prices make cannabis itself, unnecessarily stressful. Artificially inflated, prohibition pricing completely undermines the ability of cannabis to relieve stress in the vast majority of it’s consumers. Unless you grow your own, or have more money than you know what to do with, you don’t know what it means to have plenty of weed, and not to have to stress about how much it costs. Cannabis is only effective as medicine, if people can easily afford it.

Millions of Americans enjoy cannabis, millions more rely on cannabis for medicine, and still millions more of us do both. We deserve a break! We are the ones who dragged this state, and the unholy cadre of drug-dealers turned special interest group, kicking and screaming towards legalization. Both the state, and drug dealers have taken advantage of us for decades. We’re sick of it! Now that legalization will finally happen, no thanks to them, they act as though they are still entitled to our money.

The Nerve!

On The Money; What Middle-Class?

On The Money

Economics for the 99%

What Middle-Class?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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