photo credit: aforero

So in all the chaos and confusion going on, people are starting to talk crazy.  I don’t mean the usual crazy, self-gratifying circle jerk that is the news.  I mean really crazy–as in legalizing pot.  If you happen to be a sane, rational person who thinks for yourself and disregards the horribly written and factually incorrect “Above the Influence” ads our government was so kind to pay for with our tax money, you couldn’t care less.  When the average person thinks about the drug war, they think of Colombian drug cartels, crack heads, and the cluster fuck that is Mexico right now.  When it comes to some guy smoking pot in his living room while playing rock band, or Rush Limbaugh popping pills, I seriously doubt people support SWAT raids and life sentences.

Quite frankly, if it was just about easier access to pot, 99% of pot smokers wouldn’t care either.  Lets face it; it’s not hard to get.   It’s a plant that grows quickly and easily, it doesn’t require any equipment to process when it’s ready, and most people could grow a plant or two in their backyard without anyone noticing.  Few people will ostracize you if you ask around about it, and most likely there’s a connection you can acquire it through within your circle of friends.  Marijuana is not something that causes people to rob liquor stores and perform sex acts in alleys to get money to buy more.  Right now it’s cheap, usually good quality, and easily found.  So why in the world would these people want to bring it out in the open?

Well for one, they are every day people leading every day lives, and they smoke to deal with stress.  They aren’t just college students and hippies.  They are professionals, business owners, entertainers, and athletes.  All types from all walks of life.  The added cost of taxation would be cheap compared to stress over the local police looking to pad their pockets.  A lot of people smoke and there’s a lot of it around, so it’s easy for cops to find.  They kick down someone’s door and find a couple of plants, then start seizing cash and property.  Now they have a bigger budget.  No, I don’t think most law enforcement officers consciously make this decision, and if you ask any of them they’d probably rather be busting real criminals.   However, when politicians want to say they are responsible for a drop in crime they put pressure on the police, and if there aren’t too many crack heads around some crime needs to be created.

The reason this is coming up now is mostly because of the economy, and many people are making the comparison to FDR ending the prohibition on alcohol.  Ending prohibition was great, because it taxed something that people were doing anyway.  Plus it had the added bonus of taking revenue away from organized crime.  If people are out of work everywhere and the only ones making money are the gangs, where do you think people are going to look for work?  Prohibition helped make crime a growth industry, and by legalizing it they took that industry and injected it into the economy.  Of course, the depression dragged on long after people got their drink.  However, there are many differences between marijuana and alcohol–beyond how they make you feel–and those differences are important.

As far as law goes, there was never a constitutional amendment to ban drugs as there was with alcohol, so it’s a lot easier to legalize.  It is harder on a Federal level though, given the staggering amount that has been and continues to be spent convincing everyone that weed is evil.  Not just the Above the Influence commercials that make stoners laugh so much.  The US has not only tried to get rid of marijuana here, but in other countries as well.  Our government has used billions of dollars to help other countries stamp out drugs, as well as significant political pressure on anyone that looks like they might be straying from our War on Drugs.  Boy, would their faces be red.

There is a silver lining to the massive amount we have spent on the War on Drugs.  We can stop paying to lockup pot smokers.  This is bigger than most people think.  Right now we pay local and federal law enforcement to hunt down, prosecute, and incarcerate pot smokers and growers.  This includes everyone, from the confidential informant who gets to make accusations without having to face the accused to the court stenographer.  Don’t worry about these people losing their jobs, because there is plenty of work for them to do.  Without all the non-violent drug offenders in the system maybe people can actually get efficient and effective justice.  No more public defenders dealing with fifty cases a week.  No more rape victims having to wait a year before they even get to testify at trial.  When given the choice between having the police investigate the break in they had at their house or investigate the cancer patient growing a couple of pot plants, it’s not hard to guess how people would choose.

Then we get to the bonus marijuana legalization offers everyone.  Right now people are just talking about the added revenue from the sales tax, but it’s a different world than when alcohol prohibition ended.  Look at the alcohol industry today compared to then.  We are talking about a major industry that employs a lot more than beer brewers and bartenders.  You have everyone from the people that grow hops, to the factory workers, brew masters, tasters, shipping managers, IT staff, accountants, facilities managers, facilities maintenance, bar staff, marketing, sales, and so on.  You get all this by legalizing pot.   Everything from the new business owner who starts a new Amsterdam style coffee shop to the botanist working on a new strain.  All paying taxes on the income they make by being a part of the marijuana industry.

Another big difference between the legalization of alcohol and the legalization of marijuana: no doctor I know of has ever prescribed alcohol to a patient.  It’s been proven that pot has medicinal benefit and is safer than alcohol.  In an economic cluster fuck, when one of the people’s main concerns is the cost of health care, wouldn’t a safe and cheap alternative to expensive pain medication be good for everyone?  Weed’s ability to be used as medicine will also impact the market.  It would create everything from research grants to scientists studying its effects to, again, jobs for botanists creating new strains.

It would also clear up the laws regarding hemp, and allow farmers to grow it without wondering if they are within the law or if the DEA will be raiding their house. Farmers would love the flexibility of a crop that can be used make paper, clothes, food, and all the other shit that hippies claim it can do. That, along with how easily and quickly it grows, makes it perfect for farmers in financially unsure times.  If a farmer is suffering and needs quick cash to keep going, throwing some hemp in the ground and being able to harvest a couple of months later would be a huge boon.  The fact that it has multiple uses allows the farmer to sell it to the textile company or the paper mill.

People work in those textiles factories and paper mills.  Engineers maintain the equipment and create new machines to process hemp more efficiently.  Companies build and sell that equipment.  Salesmen market and sell that equipment.  Factory workers use that equipment.  Communities service those workers.   Shipping companies move those raw materials to companies that work it into items for consumers.  Clothing makers, graphic designers, clothing designers, silk screeners, and all the other people that take that paper or cloth and make something out of it.  We are talking about rebuilding America with manufacturers again, and not just being consumers.   What better way to do that than with a brand new (very old) commodity?

As far as stimulus goes, this would be much more efficient then giving several million construction workers temporary jobs with money created out of thin air. They could even take all the tax revenue from weed and hemp, then set it permanently aside as revenue only to be used on infrastructure creation and maintenance. That way those people would be permanently employed, rather than worrying about when the stimulus bill is going to run out.  We could also have an infrastructure that’s constantly maintained instead of ignored till it’s politically convenient.

In the end it’ll be a race to see which state defies the federal government first.  Whoever does will get a jump on the rest in building the infrastructure necessary (some already have that).  Then it will pretty much be a landslide as everyone notices people flocking to a state so they can freely smoke.  This will boost that state’s economy from tourism, and from professionals moving.  The multitude of people looking to start a business in a new market with easy entrance will actually put the power to get ahead back into the hands of people, which is probably the thing this country needs most right now.  If you look around, you can see there are fewer and fewer places where an individual can step up to the market and throw a hat in the ring without a billion dollar’s worth of investors.

I could go on about the many benefits, like getting paper from a plant that grows over several months, as opposed to trees which take years. Or point out the absurdity of spending money outlawing a plant instead of using that plant as a resource, but in the end the argument is much simpler than that.  Do your average Americans mind someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his own home so much that they will refuse whatever jobs that it creates?  Is the substance that has been proven less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes such a threat that they will watch as people’s lives are ruined and the economy burns around them?  Does their insistence on telling someone else what to do with their own body supersede being able to use the infrastructure that tax revenue will create?  In the end, it’s not up to the pot smokers. Legalization isn’t necessary for them to continue enjoying pot.  It’s up to all the other Americans out there to realize that it’s just a plant.  A plant that will, if not save our economy, at least definitely help it.

photo credit: Daveybot

It’s amazing to me the amount of knowledge that was left out of my education.  As a victim of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I have many times commented that I would like my money back—or at the very least, my parents should receive a tax refund.  I’m not saying that I should have walked out of high school knowing everything about everything, but considering the amount of time spent there and the amount of false or misleading information that I did get, it was at best a horrible misuse of my time.  I think about this whenever I come across new or interesting information that is relevant to life, or just plain interesting.

An example is the book His Excellency: George Washington, which I loved.  One of the concepts from the book that stood out for me was debt.  There were a multitude of reasons for the American Revolution, and each one could take up its own book; but debt is one that is especially interesting to think about considering what’s going on today.  Pre-revolution, many Americans were suffering from substantial debt, and many landowners were going broke off the system created by the English.

Washington was one of the few that realized this and tried to prevent it.  He had, like many, gotten into trouble buying overpriced goods from England.  He decided to live more frugally.  Even then, it was hard to just get by, let alone prosper,  while being forced to buy seeds and equipment from England.  A lot of colonists ended up so far in debt that they lost everything, and there were really no other options.  The British were content to sell second-rate goods at twice the price while passing laws and taxes to ensure their monopoly.  The revolution for many was just a very complex form of bankruptcy.

When you think about it, relief from debt to banks was just as important as relief from a tyrant king.  Debt is essentially a marker against your production.  Your debt can only be worked off by producing.  If people were to actually look at it that way, we’d have less debt.  If someone went in to buy a flat screen TV and was told it would take ten months of his life to pay for it, he might reconsider.  When you get to the point where you are talking about years or more of your life it gets even more depressing.   People don’t think of it that way, though, which is why we are paying so much for shitty products these days.

If enough people decide to say fuck that, then businesses can’t get away with insane markups on products.  The business will have to lower its prices.  That’s where we would be, if it were not for government.  Using government officials to create favorable conditions for companies is nothing new.  It’s been going on since the railroads backdoored corporate person-hood into law, and it continues to this day.  If you want an example, look at the recording and entertainment industries and their repeated attempts, with some success, to use litigation to force people to buy into their monopoly.  CDs and DVDs were cheaper to make than their predecessors, yet both were sold at substantial price increases, which have not gone down even though production cost has.

The MPAA and RIAA offer great examples of how we are not and haven’t been using free markets.  For example, the MPAA is using its stooges in congress to introduce backdoor net neutrality-killing legislation into the stimulus package.  These industries rely on people not having other options, and the people have responded.  If you think I’m condoning pirating, I’m not.  Neither do I condemn it.  The best reasoning, and the main point companies don’t get, was explained to me by a guy I knew that pirated excessively.  He told me that he was completely willing to pay for content, but found the prices to be unreasonable.  It can be a pain to pirate content: you have to find it, download it, make sure it’s a good copy, hope it’s not infected with a virus, find a crack, etc.  To him this was more reasonable then paying $50-100 for a game or program that cost the producer a couple of bucks to make.

If prices went down then debt would go down, and people would have more of their own production to use in whatever way they see fit.  Right now, this doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.  People aren’t going out and buying overpriced useless crap as much, so businesses are panicking.  They too have been living off debt, borrowing against projected profits— so they are screaming at the banks to give them money, and the banks are screaming at congress.  They can no longer get people to willingly give up their production to them, so they go to congress to tax the production from people and give it to them.  Even though people aren’t buying shit, they are still paying for it.

photo credit: The Doctr

Programmed cell death is pretty much what it says: the end of the life cycle for a cell.  Not due to damage or injury, but the natural end of a cell so another can take its place.  One of the shitty things about cancerous cells is that they have protection against programmed cell death, which combined with hyperactive growth and division makes them a nasty piece of work.

As I was reading the latest on our economic downward spiral it made me think of cancer.  Mostly because of our government’s reaction in propping up companies that are “too big to fail.”

Dead animals provide nutrients for soil.  Dead plants and animals are consumed for energy.  Nothing is really permanent, and even rocks are worn away by wind and water.  Making something permanent is impossible, and trying to is responsible for more then a few fuckups.   Business is no different, and even the companies that have been around for a while have been through significant changes.  Mergers, buy-outs, acquisitions, etc. have made many of the big companies completely different animals over the years.  No business model or strategy will work forever; and if a company isn’t able to adapt it needs to be allowed to die,  its remains consumed.  Permanency is impossible, but recycling works.

The problem with the bailout is the same problem with the congress.  Too many people have been living fat as parasites in a system that favored them.  Some would say that it was the parasitic overreaching with legislation like the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act of 2005 that caused this mess in the first place.  In effect, it made it harder for struggling people to let their bad debt die so they could rebuild.  Instead, the credit card companies wanted to go after the person’s house and alimony payments.  Society benefits from well-employed people growing and interacting financially with others.  Creditors found they made the most with people on the edge of collapse from a mountain of debt and fees.  They paid off politicians, bent, and just plain broke rules to squeeze as much as they could.

Not passing that act would have given some people a respite from foreclosure.   Not bailing out AIG would have put more pressure on banks to refinance loans that were no longer insured.  Not giving bad companies the unregulated capitol to buy up their competition wouldn’t create zombies that bring down good companies.  The government being led by those who created these problems reminds me of early, poorly thought-out conservation attempts, where people who worked tirelessly to save one animal found out that the newly revitalized critter was overtaking and destroying its environment.  Thankfully, we have mostly learned our lesson there.

The new stimulus act doesn’t look much better, even discounting all pet projects and delayed money.  If it works like it’s supposed to, it will create 4 million new jobs at $200,000 a pop (800 billion divided by the number of jobs).  Even if that were somehow, in some universe, the most cost affective way to create jobs, you have to wonder how much of that will make it into workers’ pockets.  There’s a lot of construction in there, so who gets to do the building?  There will probably be a multitude of factors, the main one being money.  So any company will have to account for political contributions as a cost to even get a foot in the door.  After that, it will probably be whoever is most creative with their books.  In the end, I seriously doubt workers will even see half of that.  Beyond all that though, creating 4 million jobs in country with 306 million people doesn’t seem like it will have the sweeping impact that most people seem to think, especially when the job creation is in only one or two sectors.

What happens to all those construction jobs a couple of years from now?  We will pretty much be in the same situation.  As far as I know, there is no plan for sustained maintenance of our infrastructure.  If there were, we would not need the massive infusion of cash.  Infrastructure is important; but if we are going to pay for it, it should be tied to a source of revenue that is constant.  This plan just throws money at the problem with no thought of what happens next.  Where will those 4 million workers go after the stimulus runs out?  Isn’t this just creating another problem with a huge number of people jumping into construction because that’s where the money is?  This doesn’t make sense to me, and the main problem is that there is no dialogue going on.  The simplistic way that congress debates these issues reminds me of a 4th grade book report more than an intelligent debate on a large-scale economic system.  In essence, congress is bent on the same parasitic course as the banking system: keep people on the edge of disaster and dependent on you.  That way you can do what you wish under the protection of the enormous disaster you created.

The best idea I’ve actually heard came from the Daily show guest Lawrence Lindsey.  His idea is to cut the payroll tax and increase the top limit.  This would immediately put money in the pockets of workers and businesses.   People walk away every payday with more money to pay bills and pay down all the bad debt in the system, because that’s supposed to be the problem—right?  All the bad debt in the economy?  Business would also get a break and have a little more money to work with, and more importantly it would decrease the cost of hiring new workers and keeping existing staff.  Would it work?  Maybe or maybe not, but it’s got a better shot then the opportunistic pile of crap that just got passed by the Senate.  At least it’s addressing the problem instead of growing more cancerous business, and lining more pockets.

Able to leap logic in a single bound.

Yesterday marked the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.  Although this was admittedly an historic event, the hype surrounding it has gone too far.

One of the headlines at the top of the sports section of the msn.com page yesterday read “Five ways Barack Obama can fix sports.”   Fix sports? Is that part of his presidential responsibilities?  Maybe he can also make sure I never get the wrong order at Starbuck’s and fix the plumbing in my house.  Maybe Obama can bring peace to the Middle East, put a stop to international terrorism by force of personality, and make my farts smell like peach cobbler.

This up swelling of emotion is patently absurd.  It has gone beyond self-parody.  Monty Python couldn’t write a skit as inane as what surrounded yesterday’s inauguration.  Previous inaugurations have gone by relatively unmarked in comparison.  I understand this is the first black man elected as President, but that shouldn’t matter.  The fact that it does is by its very definition racist.  This is still all about color of skin taking priority over content of character.  I am by no means impugning the character of our President, but he is untested and untried and the emotion surrounding his fledgling administration is premature.  Congressman Jose Serrano of New York even proposed repealing the 22nd amendment so that Mr. Obama can be President indefinitely without dealing with those pesky term limits.  We don’t even know if he’s going to be any good yet and already some folks want him to hold the office permanently.

For all of you folks who are enjoying the multiple Obasms from the inauguration, keep reminding yourself that Obama is just a man.  Repeat after me:  “He’s just a man.  He is not a messianic prophet.  He’s just another politician with no other marketable skills.”  Repeat that mantra as many times as you need.  Keep in mind that this also applies to your fondest JFK memories.

In addition, I have one question for the truther conspiracy nuts out there.  What the fuck man? What’s the deal?  You guys told me President Bush would declare martial law before Obama was inaugurated and seize power permanently.  What happened?  Did Mr. Bush oversleep?  Maybe Obama is “in on it” too.  That must suck for you guys.  I’m sure you were convinced Obama wasn’t under the influence of the Freemasons and the Bilderburg Group.  Oh well, at least now you nutjobs have a new scapegoat to kick around for at least four more years.

It would be nice if Obama’s administration heralded peace and prosperity for America but I doubt that it will.  We aren’t in a position to extricate ourselves from most of the conflicts where our military is currently involved.  As far as prosperity goes, Obama’s plan of increasing the federal budget by $800 billion is not likely to do the U.S. economy a lot of good in the long term.  I predicted that if Obama became President that he would be Carter 2.0.  Now that it has come to pass, it’s time to brace ourselves.  I’d like to be as hopeful as the masses of the faithful who have made the pilgrimage to Washington D.C. this week, but I can’t.  I know better.  History has shown that Keynesian economic policies do not work, and right now that’s what we have to look forward to for the next four years.