Abhorrent Anniversary Gifts

Chances are you forgot to buy a present again this year, after all, anniversaries are hard to remember. What with the aftermath of that whole another former Disney girl goes off the rails thing, the release of another copy of a phone that'll make your life better and the anticipation of another brown people massacre, you could be forgiven for forgetting given the buzz surrounding Miley's strange twerking, Apple's chain jerking and Obama's postponed berserking. As if that weren't enough, there's always America's monthly mass shooting, the release of a video game glorifying said killing while looting or some kind of sporting event featuring flag saluting or home team rooting. Yes, it seems the official narrative of the Great Recession™ has sanctified September 15th, 2008 as the day the GFC (Global Financial Crisis™) began with the failure of Lehman Brothers. On cue, the distraction industry inundated those still paying attention with a slew of stories to perpetuate this myth, ranging in theme from the horror of the meltdown to how it couldn't have been predicted to hagiographies of those who saved us from even greater disaster and how the world of finance has changed since, thus ensuring it couldn't happen again. Nearly all miss the point and couldn't be more wrong as all we had to do was open up the newly released Fortune 400 list of richest Americans to see the cause, how nothing's changed and that the worst is yet to come.

Though many will be cheered and applaud the newest Fortune list, the inequality in wealth that it illustrates was not only the disease at the root of the crisis but a sure sign that like a malignant cancer it is metastasizing. Hooray! Bill Gates is still the richest man in America and passed Carlos Slim to reclaim the #1 slot in the world. Mark Zucherberg's wealth jumped almost $10 billion to get him back into the top 20 so you can rest easy, all those hours you've spent on Facebook weren't wasted. Warren Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, had the biggest dollar gain while some schmoe named David Duffield, co-CEO of some outfit called Workday had the biggest percentage rise. All told, the wealth of the richest 400 in America climbed from $1.7 trillion to $2.02 trillion in a single year making them worth more than such economies as Canada, Mexico and Russia. Hooray that is until you realize where this mind-boggling wealth is coming from and for that all you had to do was notice what stock prices did this September 18th when the Fed announced it was going to continue its $85 billion monthly bond buying program, AKA quantitative easing 3, AKA printing money to buy assets from banks at book value instead of  market value, AKA providing a massive tax payer subsidy to the stock market.

Fortunately for the attention span challenged, the past couple of weeks have also seen a couple of other reports highlighting the financial situation of the rest of the country. The US census bureau's report on income and poverty was full of sobering stats, but the most telling were regarding poverty and median income leaving people angry, disgusted and frustrated. Now, I'll grant you the fact that these statistics are subject to manipulation and often don't compare well over time, but the raw numbers are shocking in themselves. The poverty rate remained above 15%, some 46.5 million people; meanwhile children are the poorest group, 21.8% (the highest in the industrial world) or 16.1 million children under 18, and the younger, the poorer as 25.1% of kids under 5, the years of greatest brain development, were poor. Meanwhile, the median household income was unchanged from the previous year, not so bad in itself until you notice this means the household that falls in the exact middle of the income range, with half the families in the country earning more and half less, earns less than they did in 1989, a quarter century of stagnation.

These details are important when one wants to discuss inequality as many free market believers will close their ears upon hearing the word as visions of Marxist hordes coming to take away their money flash before their eyes. Ironically, the previous two paragraphs illustrate Marx's theories to a tee as the former shows how well capital is doing while the latter paints a grim picture of labour's situation. As America's 2nd richest man, the aforementioned Oracle, said "[t]here's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." It's not my purpose today to get into the nitty-gritty of this war, you can check out how it was waged here, here, here, here, here or here, but to look at the conscious choice we made five years ago to continue the slaughter along with how and why things will continue to get worse if nothing is done to stem the tide.

Back to our anniversary. It's five years ago and we've been told the financial world is on the verge of collapse with the implication that there will be mass panic as bank machines refuse to spit out cash, credit lines seize up and pension plans crumble. Not only were bankers and brokers about to start jumping off window ledges, supermarkets soon to run out of food and grandma sure to freeze to death, but horror of horrors, we wouldn't be able to get the new iPhone 2.0! If anybody was to blame besides bankers it was Bush; Dubya had messed up the country and it was time for a change, brand America was due for an overhaul. Lo and behold, there was an election coming, contested between an old white guy who wanted to bomb Iran and a young, black, hip, handsome, debonair, peace loving constitutional law professor. Many (myself included) were blind to the fact that Obama was just another marketing stunt that changed the packaging but not the substance. At the same time he was surrounding himself with an economic team sure to carry on past policies favouring Wall Street and the rich, men such as Emanuel, Geithner, Bernanke and Summers, he had an all-star marketing team including a Facebook founder, a social secretary and David Axelrod who ensured the public wouldn't notice that Goldman Sachs was his campaign's biggest private contributor. Every tool in the marketing arsenal was used to create and sustain the Obama brand from the perfectly calibrated logo to viral marketing, product placement, infomercials and brand alliances.

Yes we can hope and change was nothing but cover for the great con job of the past five years. Sure, My administration," the president added, "is the only thing between you [bankers] and the pitchforks." Yes, the new president would be the greatest reformer since Franklin Roosevelt, the press sold it and the public bought it. Obama the socialist was coming to take away not only the wealth of the rich but everyone's, a fear so strong it spawned the Tea Party. The ultimate irony though is that despite all the noise, vile and bile directed against him by the rich, Obama left their great money making machine pretty much intact as he told the bankers behind closed doors "[y]ou guys have an acute public relations problem that’s turning into a political problem. And I want to help…I’m not here to go after you. I’m protecting you…. I’m going to shield you from congressional and public anger." Help and shield he did, enabling the greatest transfer of wealth, from the bottom up, in history.
Obama played the populist card when he had to with the help of the star-struck press. Stories of the president hauling in the heads of the 13 largest financial institutions to explain their actions and justify their sky-high salaries and bonuses were peppered with quotes to justify our faith: "

While millions were losing their homes and jobs, trillions were pledged to prop up the rich, the banks and corporations. TARP's $700 billion was quickly followed by trillions in loans and guarantees to the likes of McDonald's, Harley Davidson and UBS, $1.75 trillion in bond purchases in 2009 for QE1, $600 billion more the following year in QE2, another $400 billion of mortgage purchases in 2011 during 'Operation Twist' and of course the now-always-taper-threatened-in-order-to-allow-insiders-to-profit QE3, the monthly $85 billion in purchases. This back door bailout also includes six years of artificially low, near zero interest rates and the implicit guarantee that the government will step in and save them if necessary. Meanwhile, while the government plays back door man to the rich, we play the cuckold, getting screwed over, footing the bills and getting left out in the cold, some literally, thanks to the never-ending debt ceiling budget battles this profligacy along with Dubya's wars and 30 years of tax cuts for the rich have led to. The enormous shift in power away from labour has allowed capital to further squeeze jobs and wages from the lower and the middle classes. As late as 1980, economists believed labour's share of national income was pretty much fixed, but since that time it has slowly dwindled (not just in America). More money is flowing to corporate profits (and thus shareholders, ie. capital) than ever before while an ever larger slice of the smaller pie left to labour is being served to those at the top of the income scale. The result is obviously growing inequality.

Which brings us to another recently released study of note, Emmanual Saez's 2012 US inequality report, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States. Sadly, it brings no surprises, only confirmation of the suspicions of those paying attention; inequality is getting worse, itself no surprise as inequality feeds on itself in a vicious circle. After a brief drop immediately following the GFC, thanks in large part to policies that could have no other result, the top 1% of income earners have captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the so-called recovery, leaving America's income distribution more unequal than any time since records have been kept. The proportion of income going to the richest decile broke through the 50% mark for the first time ever while that going to that top 1% increased from 19.65% to 22.46% in just one year. In case you're wondering, the share going to the top 0.01% jumped from 4.32% to 5.47%, the largest percentage increase since 1927-1928. However, this inequality is dwarfed by that of wealth, perfectly encapsulated by this video. But wait, so what, right? Some people win, some lose, that's the way capitalism works.

Right. But wrong. Huh? Well, the thing is, capitalism and thus society works better when inequality isn't so severe as can be seen in many ways. The first and most obvious is to look at the history of income distribution, the chart above that practically forms, in the words of Robert Reich, a suspension bridge. Before a new standard was set last year, inequality had peaked in 1928 and then again in 2007. It's no coincidence the Great Depression followed the former in 1929 and the GFC followed the latter in 2008 as the majority of the population simply don't have enough purchasing power necessary to maintain a consumer economy. Worse, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pinkett convincingly demonstrated the link between inequality and a wide range of social ills such as teenage births, homicides, obesity, lower educational achievement, drug use, mental illness and infant mortality rates in their book The Spirit Level. Not only do they show the link, they dispell the "correlation is not causation" complaint by showing the same effects between countries as well as within countries finding the same correlation among the 50 US states.

Perhaps most ironically of all, as America moves its way up the inequality charts, the most American story of all, the rags to riches, Horatio Alger, land of opportunity parable, slowly dies. As "The Great Gatsby Curve" illustrates, the more unequal the economy, as measured by the GINI index, the more closely children's income is tied to that of their parents. The US already has one of the lowest earning elasticities (how much a father's income affects their offspring's) in the developed world, and as it becomes more unequal this affect will only worsen. Social mobility has become a thing of the past in much of America, the chances of someone born into the lowest economic quintile in Atlanta has a 4% chance of reaching the top 20%. One study suggested that the loss of life from income inequality in the US in 1990 was the equivalent of the combined loss of life due to lung cancer, diabetes, motor vehicle accidents, HIV infection, suicide and homicide.

The reason for the negative economic and social effects of inequality is bundled up with why the phenomenon seems to feed on itself, getting worse and worse. Inequality increases economic insecurity for those at the bottom while transforming wealth into political power for those at the top. The proletariat, er, the 99%, er, well, the majority of us are forced to fight for fewer jobs, which pay less and offer less security, thus upping the stress. The official unemployment rate may be down but the labour-force participation rate is also down, at a 35 year low, as new jobs haven't kept up with population growth. The jobs created are paying less on average, with less hours than those lost in the GFC. Those who kept their job have most likely had their hours and benefits cut and are probably earning the same or less as five years ago but are happy now just to have a job. If you don't have a job you are shamed as being lazy, someone gaming the system, a taker (or skiver for you Brits) coasting on the beneficence of the rich. These makers (yeah, there's a British version too, strivers), ensure the only legislation that passes protects their power and/or expands GDP, like blowing brown people up, creating a crazy health care system centered on insurance or passing new free trade deals such the upcoming TPP which will lower wages for 90% of workers.

There were of course a couple other significant anniversaries that have passed in the past couple weeks that illustrate the corrosiveness of inequality on empathy and imagination: 9/11, both the 12th and the 40th and Occupy Wall Street's 2nd. Whether created or not, the only answer to the fear that was produced by the terrorist strikes in America a dozen years ago could ever be blowing stuff up as not only does it enrich those buying the election but also because those at the top are no longer able to understand the Other. Mirror neurons, which allow us to get into the heads of others, seem to reflect better for the powerless but much worse for the powerful. In simpler terms, the rich and powerful have less empathy helping explain the results of a study last year showing the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and even take candy from children. Amassing great wealth breeds an arrogance made even more harmful given the with us or against us atmosphere of the GFC and war on terror. Worse, those in power thanks to their wealth know they won't need to sacrifice anything as only poor people's children fight and die in wars. Thus the public ignores both the epidemic of returning GI suicides and the near doubling of suicide rates in the past 10 years for the general public aged between 50 and 59; used up by war and used up by the GFC.

The CIA helping Pinochet take out Allende in Chile in 1973 turned another possible socialist success story (I know there haven't been any yet) into a laboratory for the Chicago Boys to study free market economics. Ever wonder where economists got their field research to test and try to prove their wacky theories? Chile was the real ground zero. Allende's mistake was trying to give the wealth of the nation back to the people when everyone knows mulinational corporations are the only actors rational enough to control it properly. Er, wait, that's right, thanks to folks like Gary Becker, people are rational actors constantly making rational economic choices in a world of equal knowledge and power as we make our way through a world filled with attempts to alter our decision making process, ie. advertising. How is that supposed to work again? Wouldn't it be great if we all really did have equal information and power to make this fiction possible? Oops, that sounds like socialism, sorry guys. By the way, why didn't many people notice that John Kerry met with Henry Kissinger, a man intimitately involved with the events of September 11th, 1973, on September 11th this year to discuss Syria?

In What Money Can't Buy, Michael Sandel puts forward the argument that without realizing, debating or noticing it we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. What was once a tool for organizing productive activity has become a way of life allowing market values to usurp moral values. Particularly in America, but more and more around the world thanks to austerity, market values have penetrated every part of our world, from education to politics, health to war. Students are paid to get good grades, admissions to elite universities are auctioned and the whole idea of education has been transformed from gaining knowledge into job training. The arts, philosophy and non-financially lucrative scientific fields are shunned in favor of finance, public relations and programming. With student loan debt of almost $30,000, the average graduate can't afford to believe in anything that won't get them a well paid job. Seems like slavery to me but instead economic freedom is being able to bet on people dying by buying people's life insurance; the gamble lies in the higher payoff the sooner the insured die.

Obscene wealth and growing inequality have separated us from each other creating an ever growing empathy deficit. It's not only gated communities, private beaches and exclusive restaurants anymore as barriers are being thrown up all around us. Sports have traditionally been about competion but also about bringing people together, be they teams, cities or nations, societies large and small. As recently as 1980, we'd go to a ball game at a stadium named for a public figure where one would rub shoulders with Joe Six pack and Richie Rich as tickets prices ranged from a couple of bucks for bleacher seats to a few dollars for the best seats in the house and root for our home town heroes. Today we go to InsertCorporation™ Stadium, segregate ourselves according to wealth to the bleachers, box seats or luxury boxes, to cheer for a team threatening to change cities if their owners aren't granted more public concessions, made up of free agents who change teams for raises of tens of millions. While there, we're as likely to be discussing transfer fees and salary cap restructuring as we are ERAs or wins and losses. An institution that was a source of civic pride and social glue has been transformed removing a bond that held us together, in the words of Sandel -

In fact, for most of the twentieth century, ballparks were places where corporate executives sat side by side with blue-collar workers, where everyone waited in the same lines to buy hot dogs or beer, and where rich and poor alike got wet if it rained. In the last few deades, however, this has changed. The advent of the skybox suites high above the field of play has separated the affluent and the priviliged from the common folk in the stands below.

As for Occupy, another potential source of human contact and feeling of community, well thanks to the wilting of the collective imagination, how you view it solely depends on where you get your news. They might have just been a gang of smelly hedonists looking for a good time as evidenced by their lack of a coherent message or the nudge that awoke a glimmer of public consciousness to the problems of inequality. The reason for the ferocity of both the media propaganda machine and the coordinated nationwide military style attacks on the movement was the importance of convincing people, particularly those who would be activists, that there's no hope to change anything, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than entering the humanities to expand their minds, today's youth, the imagination of tomorrow, are streaming into the indoctrination machine. In 2006, just before the GFC, 25% of graduating seniors at Harvard, 24% at Yale and a mind blowing 46% at Princeton were starting their careers in financial services. The creation and maintenance of a reality where everything is only about profit and there's nothing else to believe in.

No wonder wealth reduces compassion. The self interest needed to survive in a system of such extreme inequality not only drives financially measurable crimes from petty theft to hiding $32 trillion in tax havens forming a fraction of the tax evasion industry or pseudo-financially-measurable-for-bank crimes such as laundering terrorist money and world wide interest rate manipulation, it rips at the fabric holding societies together. Gun nuts are right, it's not just guns that kill people, it's a system that glorifies greed driving people over the edge. American exceptionalism in terms of inequality is becoming as dangerous to itself as their military version is to the world yet strangely much of the world seems to want to emulate their uniqueness. Chilean economist Manfred Max Neef has claimed that "[t]his economy can go on no longer…because it has become absolutely criminal…this economic model is killing more people in the world than all the armies put together" and has proposed an economic crimes tribunal to mete out justice. He's also part of the King of Bhutan's General Assembly working to develop a new economic paradigm based on well-being, happiness, ecological stability, adequate distribution of wealth and intelligent use of natural resources. Basically, the opposite of what we do now so it must be worth a shot. 

Chances are, however, nothing much will come of it as most people are trapped in a never ending cycle, forced to work to simply survive and are voiceless in a world where power only listens to money. We were given the opportunity five years ago to change the world for the better but were instead fed a pipedream of hope and change. It seems a type of madness to try sustain a broken system, our current suicidal economic model of infinite growth, in a manner that seems designed to fail, but that's just what's happening. Budgets need to be cut when it's spending that goes to the needy, yet the US government continues to subsidize the rich to the tune of over $1 trillion per year. Capital is winning the struggle with labour, whose spending drives the economy. Left with so little, labour can simply survive, not thrive. In 1947, labour's share of US nonfarm business income was 65%, in 2000, 63%; in 2013 it's 57%. This shifts about $750 billion annually from the workers to the rentiers. The age of austerity offers little hope for today's youths, burdensome tuition indebtedness, worklessness, homelessness and powerlessness, virtually guaranteeing mass shootings will become a daily occurrence, in fact America's almost there already. If only this infection was contained to the US it may not be so bad but in a study of 22 other advanced countries it was found labour's share of income fell from 73% in 1980 to 65% in 2011, a trend occurring in poorer countries as well.

Perhaps the decades of shared prosperity in America from WWII until the late 70's that created a thriving middle class was simply a historical fluke due to unique circumstances, after all, most of human history has featured but two classes, the aristocracy and the peasants. We've forgotten the battle that took place in order to create the institutions that enabled this historical anomaly known as the middle class and are passively allowing the system to be dismantled as we stare blankly into our propaganda screens, be they TV, tablet or telephone. The tension is all around us; politically, partisanship rules the day as the likes of Citizens United has made the voice of the few louder than the many; economically, finance rules the day as the rentiers extract rents from the rabble; socially, we've become zombified by those aforementioned screens, disillusioned by a dollarocracy masquerading as democracy and indebted by an economic system that forces you to borrow to eat, sleep, learn or even get sick. The World Economic Forum (you know, those rich guys who meet in Davos every year) listed severe economic disparity at the top of their Global Risks 2013 report. President Obama was forced to admit that "[t]he folks in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the last three, four years, but over the last 15 years," only to have it suggested later in the same interview that "[m]aybe a president just can't stop this accelerating inequality?".

This is exactly what the elite want us to believe, that no one can do anything about inequality, that it is a natural occurrence that 'incentivizes' effort. What if we could show them that even their lives would be better in a more equitable society? Woah! Wait, if you could do that what would the cognitive dissonance of working against their own self interest do to their brains? The same thing that should happen to the rest of us when we realize the neoliberal fairy tale of supply side, trickle down economics is just that, a fable, and scream the emperor has no clothes. Bankers shouldn't earn more than teachers and nurses, four members of one family shouldn't have more wealth than the combined wealth of just under the 50 million poorest American families and resources need to be allocated to those who are forced to start behind others. Intuitively, absolute poverty causes negative health and social outcomes, but unfortunately it is slightly less so regarding inequality leading to the 'so what' attitude of so many. Yet, 'status anxiety' or insecurity seems real enough in a society that places people in a hierarchy which increases competition for status and causes stress, leading to poor health and other negative outcomes such as the falling life expectancy of poor white women in the southeast of America, surprise, where inequality is highest. Too bad we seem to have lost our empathy, otherwise we might try to do something about it. Well, at least tell your friends to go see this movie -

The Year of Leaking Dangerously

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all. - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

Edward Snowden didn't tell us anything most of us didn't already sorta-kinda know, but instead just confirmed our creepy totalitarian state surveillance nightmares. Wait, no, actually he made them a bit scarier by exposing the corporate complicity giving the whole thing a fascist twist. Similarly, the character of Yosarian lying in the hospital bed at the outset of Catch-22 had already experienced holding another Snowden in his arms. This one spilled his guts too, literally onto the floor forcing Yossarian to confront his own mortality and the realization that death can, and will, take any of us, at any time, anywhere, and that survival is made all the harder by the catch-22s thrown up to block and muddy our path.

Both Snowdens just passed on information which is meaningless in itself yet has value; in fact it is the most valuable thing in the world to governments, corporations and us because of what we can do with it. However, our brains, as our bodies, are all different and subject to manipulation due to freezes, failures and farts. Vituperative voices will try to convince us everything's okay as it's only metadata their gathering about us, there's only a few thousand pedophiles with top-level security clearance to your kids' Facebook feed, everyone's doing it and you know, it was only Iran they launched the cyber weapon Stuxnet against. Turn off your TV, disconnect your internet and lobotomize your smartphone cause you won't find the true meaning of Edward Snowden's revelations to the world on any propaganda screen. All you've got to do is open a book, or just talk to an old lady, to figure out Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. What? Don't have the time or the attention span? Who's this 'they'? No worries as in this case it's so simple all you'll need is the Cliff's notes version of the major themes of Catch-22: the concept of Catch-22, the distortion of justice, the influence of greed, and the issue of personal integrity.

"All my options are bad" - Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden's caught in a sorta catch-22 though it's starting to look more like a no-win situation after watching the US order their western European 'partners' to close their airspace to Evo Morales' presidential jet after receiving some, um, bad information that Snowden was on board. He may have been granted asylum in quite a few of the countries he applied to but he had to be in the granting country for them to consider his request which is difficult, er, impossible if you're stuck in passportless limbo in transit at an airport in Moscow. In the book, Yossarian is introduced to the concept of catch-22 by Doc Daneeka who explains the problem, or catch, involved in requesting a psych evaluation which Yossarian hoped would find them unfit to fly dangerous missions:

"You mean there's a catch?"
"Sure there's a catch", Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy.

They've had each of us by the balls like this at some point, trapped in a bureaucratic black hole, looping around a Möbius strip application process or stymied by the slave labour internship motto: you can’t get hired unless you have experience; but you can’t get experience unless you’re hired.  Now we're all supposedly caught in one, er make that two or three, in which we seem to be damned if we do and damned if we don't: the new security versus liberty balance that needs to be struck thanks to the Information, the global war on terror (I know, it's not called that anymore and that it has become the global war on you), and economic austerity. All three are examples that governments and their corporate cronies are presenting as catch-22s that their wisdom will guide us through but are nothing but false choices forcing us into vicious circles.

"Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." - Michael Rivero

You can watch then-senator Biden debate president Obama on government surveillance but it's probably more illustrative to watch the the present double good duckspeaker in chief debate his candidate self from 2007 regarding the security versus liberty balancing act:


Thanks O, you almost convinced me that I didn't have to haul out the old Ben Franklin "[t]hey who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety", but not quite. Still, if you're an Obamabot or a terrorism fearmongerer, cognitive dissonance won't allow you to see the danger the slide from freedom to security, ever accelerating post 9/11, poses to us. They don't seem to have a problem with giving General Keith Alexander, who seems to have mistaken 1984 for an instruction manual instead of a warning, near complete control over their information lives and Strangelovian powers to wage cyberwarfare. Americans celebrate the Fourth of July without a Fourth (or Fifth) Amendment, air travellers the world over submit themselves to ever greater humiliations, home school advocates are classified as potential domestic terrorists by the DHS and now we know that everything we say, type and text is being gobbled up for analysis in the hope of finding the next Paul Revere, er, I mean terrorist.

Oh, speaking of traitorous heroes, Obama sure loves using the 1917 Espionage Act, a measure intended to prevent anti-war speech during WWI by treating it as sedition (note to Pelosi, Boehner et al. the word you're looking for is there in the act, sedition, not treason). Edward Snowden became the eighth to be charged under the act under Obama, double the number of times it was used by all his predecessors. Defenders of surveillance overreach invariably trot out the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about" canard. If you, as an individual, non-threatening person, have nothing to hide then, yes, they’re probably right, until they're wrong, you personally may have nothing to fear. But those people who do put their heads above the parapet on your behalf, they will be the ones that feel the heat…It’s not about your personal privacy, it’s about the privacy of those who would stand up and fight for you.

"It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret… But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead… Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace." - Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus

Ah, where would America be without the global war on terror now approaching it's twelfth anniversary. Without it they'd never be able to justify the imbalance of having an economy that produces about 20% of the world's GDP while their bloated defense budget forces them to maintain a 40-50% of global military spending. Yeah, they spend more on defense than the next 13 nations combined. The non-stop invocation of the word terrorist has not only brewed up an alphabet stew of new freedom protecting acronyms but also given us a whole new dictionary to interpret the altered bearings of our moral compass: wars of choice, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, indefinite detention, disposition matrix, black sites, signature strikes, they all sound nearly benign. It's all forced on us, a catch-22: we love our freedom, they hate our freedoms and will do anything to take them away, so we allow our freedoms and theirs to be taken away to wage a war to stop them from taking away what we've already given away. Or something like that. Yet the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of combatting terrorism are creating the terrorists those policies are designed to combat. It is not their hatred but ours, US policy and aggression in the Muslim world, that creates terrorists as shown in the American government's own 2004 report. Indeed, the American government has been providing arms, money and logistical support to Al Qaeda in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia and related Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries. What's that you say? It goes back even further, like this:

Did you hear the one about the Harvard economics professors whose research found a close correlation between high levels of public debt and slow economic growth? No? Oh, boy, it's a doozy of a joke. How does it go, um, let's see, ok, so Rogoff and Reinhart do their research, economic research that is, and then wrote a paper, an economics paper you know, and governments around the world used their findings, economic findings believe it or not, to lend the cover of  intellectual rigor to justify their policies, yep, economic policies, which have caused untold, immeasurable damage to lives around the world leaving millions worse off, or you know, deader than they needed to be thanks to class war weapons of austerity such as the sequester in the US, the fantastical belief in a magical creature known as the confidence fairy or even an oxymoron as blatant as the UK's expansionary fiscal contraction. What? You don't get it? Well, let me explain. First, economics is a joke, a fraudulent pseudoscience dreamed up to justify class warfare, a war in which the punchline is a catch-22 designed to keep the rich, rich and the poor, well, poorer.

How did it work? Easy. You see, though the whole kerfuffle is being sold as a simple Excel spreadsheet error, the truth is it isn't a bug but a feature. It works a little like the whole WMD thing in Iraq: you dream up a plan that seems suspiciously like a modern day Crusade and then come up with a whole bunch of reasons to put it into action, throw them at the wall by having your media stooges, er, Judith Millers, pound the drums of war and see which ones stick. You remember, right? Niger uranium forgeries courtesy of the Italian military intelligence SISMI (another oxymoron?), aluminum tubes for enrichment and a dosier sexed up by a lap dog ally to fit Americas claims which all lead to 16 words and a million or so casualties. The same playbook was used for austerity. In both cases we're seemingly left in a catch-22, one designed to find scapegoat for a manufactured crisis to enrich those at the top and control, crush or kill those down below. Ah, sweet confirmation bias, what havoc will you wreak next?

We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." - Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From a Birmingham Jail

One of the most amusing aspects of the Edward Snowden saga was the reaction, indignation and mocked the irony and hypocrisy of seeking help from countries known more for their repressive regimes than civil liberty protections. Secretary of State John Kerry wondered "if Snowden chose Russia or China for assistance because they are such bastions of Internet freedom?", Dick Cheney was "deeply suspicious obviously because he went to China" while freedom fries TV taunted him with "I don’t remember Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks running off to China". Unless your deaf you should be able to pick up the echoes of the McArthyite red baiting techniques described in Heller's Catch-22 and understand why our modern Snowden chose to get out of Dodge before the sheriff showed up.
consternation to the fact that he chose to flee the idyllic paradise of Hawaii and protection of American law for first Hong Kong and then Moscow. They

The perfect foil to our Snowden is Heller's Clevinger, who trained with Yossarian at cadet school. A gangling, scholarship prize-winning, petition signing, discussion group attending, committee organizing Harvard undergraduate certain to go far in the academic world: "In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains...In short he was a dope". In describing Snowden, our fourth estate, those who should serve as a check on power but instead are subservient to them, having found they couldn't refute the message have gone after the messenger just as they did with Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and everyone else the public needs to know are guilty. Anyway, thanks to our distract-at-any-cost press we know Snowden seems handsome to both the Chinese public and Russian spies, is obviously weird as well as a grandiose narcissist, wasn't very neighbourly, didn't visit his mother enough and was a high school dropout who couldn't even make it through community college. Oh where would the world be without the infinite wisdom of the likes of Megan McArdle, Jeffrey Toobin and David Brooks? That's right, maybe debating the legitimacy of surveillance programs, their creepy government/corporate ties and the secrecy surrounding them instead of playing at armchair psychologist in order to incriminate a man before he's even had a trial.

In our catch-22 world, Snowden, like Clevinger, is guilty, otherwise he wouldn't be accused, of what it doesn't matter. Both men pointed out problems hoping for improvement, but Clevinger didn't understand that tripping while marching to class would bring accusations of "breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart guy, listening to classical music, and so on" while Snowden knew the price of exposing his superiors errors. Bradley Manning, found guilty by his president before his trial, waited over a thousand days  for his trial, nine months of which he was forced to withstand torture in order to break his will. Clevinger faced a trial in which his accuser, Lieutenant Scheisskopf, was not only prosecutor, defender and one of the judges but also earned a promotion to colonel during the proceedings. Manning's is little different. Make no mistake, Snowden's civilian status wouldn't make a difference, neither would have alerting his authorities through the 'proper channels', one need look no further than the example of another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake and the persecution he has endured.

Finally, the key word has been whispered, whistleblower. There will never be a concensus opinion as to whether or not the term applies to Snowden, in fact there will never be an agreement on what constitutes a whistleblower. To my mind it is someone who releases materials or information that is of greater value to the public than the value of keeping it secret while the definition in the law refers to someone who "reasonably believes" he or she is disclosing a violation of law or rule or gross mismanagement, gross waste or abuse of authority. Snowden pulled the curtain back on the panopticon surveillance methods that contravene the protections of the Fourth Amendment which affirms "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Thanks to a judicially created exception to the ammendment in 1989 and the necessities of perpetual war, the definition of what is reasonable has been lost forever.

However, it is a moot point. In America, legal justifications can be invented to start wars, torture, kidnap and kill at will in order to keep war criminals walking the streets, laws and court ruling are made to protect corporations from charges of fraud, mislabeling, side effects, accidental death, destroying the food chain or blowing up the financial world, or failing that, those same corporations can just pay a fine and deny responsibility for defrauding millions while earning billions or aiding drug lords and terrorists. However, if you're an intelligence worker you were left out of the fig leaf of protection proffered by last year’s Whistleblower’s Protection Enhancement Act. Likewise, intelligence workers were excluded from whistle blower protections offered to military contract employees under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Meanwhile, So, faced with the information he had, Snowden was left with the choice of saying nothing or reporting the abuses to his superior at Booz Allen and crossing his fingers he wouldn't get fired. Kinda sounds like a catch-22 again, doesn't it?

The noose is tightening around the neck of freedom yet its incremental nature has us all playing the part of boiling frogs (I think that's what you call a mixed metaphor). Even as the heat has been turned up recently with new revelations coming daily of IRS targeting of special groups, reporters being hounded, Americans being monitored and now even the whole world, most seem happy slowly cooking to death blissfully unaware of what is happening. If the US government wants to spy on someone they must ask permission from the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a court made up of 11 judges appointed by one man without oversight or confirmation. When that man is an ideologue such as John Roberts, well, you get a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp as the only possible check on the Panopticon denies a whopping .03% of requests, 11 of over 33,900. Here we'd do well to remember poor Clevinger as once you're a suspect, well, they'll find something, "[t]he case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with."

Sure, the majority of even Americans see Snowden as a whistleblower, the world is more informed thanks to his bravery but unless you're a pro-Israeli lobbyist, the security state will punish you to send a clear message that government codes of conduct supercede those quaint moral ones. When trillions of new pages are classified each year and millions have security clearance (about 4.8 million potential Snowdens) under an administration intent on waging another war, this one on leakers (notice the parallel creepiness of Obama's the Insider Threats program and Captain Black’s "Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade" in Catch-22), you have a recipe for confrontation. Whether it leads to a world heralded by today's mainstream media in which even journalism becomes a punishable crime or we wake up to the threat and heed the words of a real journalism, Edward R. Murrow, "[w]e must not confuse dissent with disloyalty" is shaping up to be the ideological battle of our time.

"When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy." - Yossarian

It's the cancerous influence of greed that makes the whole thing tick and so once again we not only need to look at the avarice displayed in Catch-22 to get a better idea of what's going on but the disease of esurience plaguing modern society. Marx called them rentier capitalists which sounds a bit too French so modern economists call them rent-seekers but are more easily understood by the monikers given to them by Adam Smith: indolent maggots, moocher-elites and parasites. The Wall Street code word would be extractionists but no matter the label, their rise to dominance clearly marked the transition from industrial capitalism in which production was reliant on extracting profit from labour to financial capitalism which is entirely reliant on squeezing profit out of existing assets. Heller's Milo Minderbender, the embodiment of modern business with no allegiance to any country, person or principle unless it pays him, represents the extreme out of control nature of capitalism in a catch-22 world where profit trumps ideology. The other characters' acceptance of and support for his M & M Enterprises mirrors modern society's moral complacency regarding sustaining power and gaining profit at the expense of the individual.

Much as the main function of the war on terror is to produce more terrorists to justify more war, the security state has become a self-perpetuating machine to substantiate the need for ever greater surveillance with the end result of both being less freedoms for most and greater profits for the few. What else can they do with all the data but hire more people to analyze it and discover the data set is broad but shallow which will necessitate gathering even more data. Why do you think they're building a facility able to store 20 terabytes a minute and capable of storing 5 zettabytes, about 5 years of global Internet traffic. A near forgotten element of the Snowden affair is the exposure of the links between the public and private sphere. Sure, we've known of the dangers of the military industrial complex since at least 1961, the same year Catch-22 was published, thanks to Eisenhower's prescient warning but have sat back and watched the privatization of war reach ever more dangerous extremes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, we should be shocked at the close and still growing relationship between the NSA and Silicon Valley, a relationship that sees the same information, our information, feed the two-headed monster for government surveillance purposes and private business so as to stimulate desires and sell goods and services. The military industrial complex has morphed into the corporate military technological complex.

Thus far we've turned a blind eye to private mercenaries such as Blackwater, or should I say Xe, no wait, I think it's Academi now I think (it's so complicated avoiding prosecution!), Halliburton and DynCorp gorge from the public trough afforded by perpetual war as it's only about killing brown people in faraway lands. Now we know that we are in the sites of companies like Booz Allen just one of hundreds of private contractors employing over half a million people with the same access as Snowden. Oh, each of them are making six figure salaries to spy on you at your cost. In the fiscal year ended in March 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton, majority-owned by the nefarious private equity Carlyle Group (even the neoliberal apologist Economist agrees!), reported $5.76 billion in revenue, 99% of which came from government contracts. In fact, along with companies such as Science Applications International Corp, CACI and BAE Systems, private contractors suck up about 70% of the $75 billion US intelligence budget, a budget that has ballooned since 9/11, growing 250% between 2000 and 2010. Oh, and just like every other sector of the economy, that money isn't trickling down to you and me but to those who get to ride the revolving door. Again Booz Allen is the perfect example as the former director of US national intelligence John "Mike McConnell is now a Booz Allen vice-president while his successor in the director's chair is James Clapper, a former Booz Allen executive. Just like the banking, energy, agriculture, you name it sector, the same story can be told over and over again.

Just as we at first cheered Milo Minderbender's seemingly harmless profiteering at the expense of the ridiculous bureaucracy that perpetuates war, many would (and probably still do) defend such privatization as beneficial, perhaps even paraphrasing Milo's catchphrase claim that "everyone has a share" with something along the lines of "a rising tide lifts all boats". Much as the one time president of General Motors when asked if he could make a decision that would adversely affect his former company during the confirmation hearings for his nomination as Secretary of Defense answered affirmatively but added he could not conceive of such a situation "because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa", Milo believed "[w]hat's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country". While this may have had a grain of truth in the productive phase of capitalism, the casino style financialization of the economy destroys wealth for all but the few and eventually begins to cannibalize itself. A cash-strapped Milo winds up contracting the Germans to bomb his own squadron resulting in the death and wounding of many men; a cash-strapped financial sector blew up the economy and blackmailed the public to bail them out, exploding national deficits which was then used as an excuse for austerity programs resulting in the death and suffering of many.

Um, where was I? Right, Snowden. Well, those who hadn't noticed that our wealth is being bled for the benefit of the few in a bottom-up transfusion before Edward shone his spotlight are more likely than not still in the dark. As Yossarian watched Catch-22's Snowden bleed to death he could do little more that say "there, there" as the morphine supply in the bomber's first-aid kit had been absconded by Milo for sale on the black market. Milo sold the squadrons parachutes and we sacrifice our social safety net. Even after Milo seemed to have gone too far, with American newspapers and congressmen denouncing the German bombing, all he had to do was open his books and show what a wonderful profit he made. Just as bankers and other members of today's elite, he gets away scot-free, keeps his ill-gotten gains and all is forgiven.

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases."- George Orwell; Reflections on Gandhi

Finally we get around to the final issue of personal integrity. Throughout most of the novel, (spoiler alert, go read the damn thing already!), before we have redefined Snowden's secret through Yossarian's conversion, self-preservation at all costs seems to be his paramount concern. Just as he knows the number of missions he'll need to complete will always be increased by his superior Colonel Cathcart until he winds up dead, we also know our freedoms will be diminished one by one until they are all gone. Yossarian's increasingly damaging acts of sabotage and disobedience make it clear to Cathcart he won't be promoted as long as Yossarian is around, and worse, the more he gets away with, the more hope he gives to the less powerful: "Say, if they do let you (Yossarian) get away with it (not flying missions), they'll have to let the rest of us get away with it, won't they?...I hope you do get away with it". Likewise, our Ellsbergs, Mannings, Schwartzes and Snowdens commit acts on our behalf that not only expose the wrongdoings of our leaders but also raise our hopes.
 
Ultimately, Yossarian is offered a choice between saving himself but having to lie about his experiences of war and saving his squadron by facing a court martial. His concern for others creates a new catch-22 as the secret hidden in the entrails of Snowden finally becomes clear: life is not worth living without a moral concern for others, but this moral concern endangers one's own life. In a way, Edward Snowden has helped show us that as a society we are being offered a similar choice: to continue on our path accepting (or, as ever, denying) a life of diminished freedoms in exchange for safety or to risk our comforts in search of something better. Every day that we accept what is being done to us we choose to save ourselves while leaving everyone else out to dry. Yossarian's choice of a third option, desertion, makes him an anti-hero, but his intent is made clear when he says "I'm not running away from my responsibilities. I'm running to them. There's nothing negative about running away to save my life".

We never learn if Yossarian ever makes it to Sweden but he left the army a free man. Our Snowden may never make it to Venezuela and has been stuck in a Russian airport for weeks but at least he's a free man. There comes a moment in Catch-22 when both the reader and Yossarian come to feel shame for our amused tolerance of the evil characters and indifference to what is occurring, first laughing at the absurdities then looking back in horror at what we laughed at. Patriots are those who protect us from governments which only feel the need to be "the least untruthful". If the very definition of treason and/or espionage involves the participants interaction with an enemy, then just who is the enemy with whom Snowden interacted? In this case it is everyone that is being spied on. We are the official enemy of the Corporate Controlled Government. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing. It is this simple, and this terrible. Catch-22 means whatever they want it to mean and it's no longer a laughing matter.

H/T to my wife for remembering random snippets of reality!

And a few more random quotes:

"The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean." - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

 "The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine

"This is the truth. You should decide whether we need to be doing this." - Edward Snowden

"Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation All the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it" - Mark Twain; The Czar's Soliloquy, 1905.

"I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," - Jeremy Hammond

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair." - H.L. Mencken

"We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world." - Aaron Swartz

"In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People." - Eugene Debs; Voices of a People's History of the United States

"I want people to see the truth, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public." - Bradley Manning

"Catch-22 did not exist, he was positive of that, but it made no difference. What did matter was that everyone thought it existed, and that was much worse, for there was no object or text to ridicule or refute, to accuse, criticize, attack, amend, hate, revile, spit at, rip to shreds, trample upon or burn up." - Joseph Heller; Catch-22

The Audacity of Dope

There's a million and one reasons Willard Mitt 'Mittens' Romney shouldn't be elected the 45th President of the United States November 6th, but only one reason he won't when looking at the presidencies of the past 20 years. Unfortunately, being a flip-flopping liar who will shapeshift into anything the polls say will help curry favor with a few voters won't hinder him as Obama has proven. Being a plutocrat whose success was solely predicated on winning the genetic lottery thus helping dispel the illusion of the American Dream of social mobility won't hurt him either as the silver spoon he was born with in his mouth was only slightly shinier than Dubya's. Nor will his business record of buying up companies with borrowed money, loading them with debt in order to siphon off as much cash as possible before breaking them up to sell off the pieces and ship the jobs overseas disqualify him as an entire economy based on this kind of short term financial gain for the few at the cost of long term wealth creation for the many is exactly what Clinton created during his time in the White House. Not even belonging to a crazy cult that believes wearing magic underwear marks them off from other mere mortals will make a difference in the land of religious fanaticism. No, being a man around fifty years old with an Ivy League degree and having been a governor or senator, Mitt near perfectly fits the job description to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet Mittens won't win as he hasn't broken one federal law that all three of his predecessors did; he's never smoked a joint.

Who's to say if it was the stoner vote that put Clinton, Dubya and Obomber over the top, but it's as likely as anything else to have swayed the few votes that actually matter in the undemocratic electoral college system of selecting the US president. Bill Clinton may have claimed he didn't inhale, but he did enjoy pot brownies. Dubya never denied it, saying, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible" meaning he did plus lots more. Obama came right out and said, "When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point." In fact judging by the legendary exploits of Dubya and the fact that Obomber and his buddies smoked so much ganga they nicknamed themselves the Choom Gang, the next president in 2016 is probably going to be chronic.

Of course Americans have a lot of practice dealing with the cognitive dissonance involved in having a president who has broken the same law that sees about 750,000 people arrested every year. War is peace thanks to such mental gymnastics as preemptive, preventive or preventative war, freedom is slavery thanks to the debt servitude necessary to propel an economic system dependent on financialization and ignorance is strength thanks in large part to the informational overload of the technological revolution. Thanks to the primacy of obedience and the related reverence for authority drilled into them at a young age they don't mind casting their vote while blindfolded to the other choices whose beliefs most likely better align with theirs thus turning their election into a quadrennial Pepsi Challenge where choosing Coke or Pepsi doesn't matter as either way you're still going to get diabetes and die.

Sure, much of the US election circus is nothing but a choreographed carnival to coronate an Obomney or Robama, where only a handful of votes in a thimbleful of states will matter, but Americans in many states do have direct democracy: ballot initiatives and referendum. This November 6th there are ballot measures in seven states to either legalize the sale of medical marijuana or legalize it altogether if you're over 21, taxing and regulating it as they do with alcohol. This is an issue where representative democracy is clearly failing the American people, but fortunately direct democracy takes the power out of the hands of vested interests and returns it to the people. Washington (Initiative 502), Colorado (Amendment 64), and Oregon (Measure 80) will decide whether to legalize the drug's production and sale for recreational use. Massachusetts and Arkansas (first in the south) will vote to catch up with the previous trio and the 14 other states where medical marijuana use is already legal. Meanwhile, in Montana they will be voting to reinstate the 2004 citizen-approved medical marijuana law the state legislature recently repealed. Legalization just missed getting on the ballot in Michigan so the City Commissioners in Kalamazoo voted unanimously to decriminalize weed, saying the new ordinance will help police respond to serious crimes even faster than before based on how it has gone so far in Chicago. Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids will also ask their citizens whether they'd like to decriminalize possession

How did we get to this wacky world? Constructing elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines to destroy our planet or Nobel Peace Prize winners composing kill lists and remotely killing American citizens, innocent women, children, wedding guests and their rescuers with drones in faraway lands without any declaration of war are less controversial than letting people smoke weed to improve the quality of their lives or just for fun. Even when laws have been passed to legalize medical marijuana and with a president we believed to be progressive sitting in the Oval Office, medical dispensaries and training schools are raided by the feds while state troopers stand by and wave good day to the staff, clients and students. Despite Obomber's 2008 promise "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws [on medical marijuana]" his Attorney General, Eric Holder has been doing just that. It was the same Eric Holder who may have helped sink California's Prop 19 to legalize marijuana when he vowed to "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana laws and warned that the government would not look the other way and allow a state marijuana market to emerge a month before the 2010 election. In a rational world we'd design laws that improved our society, finances and health but far too often, and especially in the case of cannabis, it seems these ideals are trumped by politics, emotions and special interests.

"Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could."
- William F. Buckley Jr

While hard numbers are hard to come by, the drug war costs well over 6,000 lives a year in the US while in Mexico drug cartels have killed more than 55,000 people in the past six years. Prohibition not only raises prices thus increasing incentives to capture market share, it renders contracts unenforceable and makes it impossible for competitors to use the courts or the police to challenge intimidation or settle disputes; the war on drugs has given us decapitated corpses hung from bridges while the cola wars has simply given us all diabetes. Worse are the number of lives lost to the prison system as half of the 2.5 million behind bars in the US are there for drug offenses, many of them of the low-level, nonviolent variety. In 2010, 1.64 million people were arrested for drug violations - 80% of them for possession. Even worse, it has become a new form of Jim Crow as though blacks use and sell drugs at the same rates as whites, thirteen of them go to jail for every white person who does. It seems obvious but many still don't get that sending potheads to jail destroys lives and families and creates hardened criminals who get turned by the prison culture. Members of the now militarized police force see the senselessness close-up which is why Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), a national organization of cops and criminal justice experts dedicated to “speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies” have become legalization advocates.

Costing this war is as slippery as those waged in Iraq and Afghanistan but it is every bit as expensive. According to Harvard drug economist Jeffrey Miron: "Legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. Of these savings, $25.7 billion would accrue to state and local governments, while $15.6 billion would accrue to the federal government." Yet according to The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society, last published by the Department of Justice in 2011, enforcing illegal drug laws imposes an annual cost on the American criminal justice system of $56 billion; while incarceration of drug offenders imposes an annual cost of $48 billion for a total of over $100 billion. Back to Harvard's Miron who claims drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion, annually, assuming legal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco. Approximately $8.7 billion of this revenue would result from legalization of marijuana and $38.0 billion from legalization of other drugs." Whatever the exact figures, in these times of austerity in which California spends more on its prison system than all higher education this is a huge burden. So big in fact that many states are turning to privatization of prisons which will guarantee occupancy rates, forcing states to maintain or toughen drug and immigration laws in order to keep the beds filled.

Here's what we know about marijuana's impact on our health. Not much thanks to prohibition. In fact we were more aware of its benefits over a century ago. Sure there seems to be a few negatives, heavy use in your teens may shave a few points off your IQ, smoking has been tied to testicular cancer and 9% of those who try marijuana eventually fit a diagnosis of cannabis dependence. But few would advocate teens smoking a few joints a day, cannabis compounds have been shown to stop metastasis in aggressive cancers and the corresponding dependency rates for alcohol and nicotine are 15 and 32%. The "gateway" drug argument claims use leads to more dangerous substances as most people who use other illicit drugs had used marijuana first. Not to bore you with the old causation is not correlation trope but the illegality of weed forces people to come into contact with harder drugs in their illegal dealings and don't forget people often smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol before they latch on to marijuana. Meanwhile, marijuana has significant upsides for individuals with certain illnesses. In glaucoma patients, it can reduce the dangerously high eye pressure that can lead to vision loss. In addition, pot can provide relief from chronic pain, reduce nausea and vomiting from cancer chemotherapy, and limit the severe weight loss that results from AIDS and other diseases. Alcohol abuse kills 75,000 people a year. Legal prescription drugs kill 100,000 people a year. Marijuana kills zero. The statistics for violent crime and accidental death follow the same pattern.

"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson

The path from being a simple plant mandatory to grow in 1619 Jamestown colony law to Samuel Caldwell and Moses Baca becoming the first Americans busted for pot just over 75 years ago, Oct 2, 1937, is as hazy as the air at a Dylan show in 1966. In between, hemp was the principal crop at George Washington's Mount Vernon, secondary at Jefferson's Monticello, used as part of medicinal preparations beginning in 1839 and "fashionable narcotic" by 1853. Control came slowly over the next 80 years, culminating in prohibition with the passage of the federal Marihuana Tax Act in 1937. First came poison laws in an attempt to regulate pharmaceuticals through labeling to indicate harmful effects of the drugs or prohibiting sale outside of licensed pharmacies and without a prescription. Basically, trying to combat this type of snake oil salesmen.

At the turn of the 20th century, between 2% and 5% of the US population were drug addicts, more than today, the majority hooked on morphine, a legacy of the Civil War and bored housewives duped by door-to-door con artists. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 did more than any subsequent law to fight addiction. In addition to creating the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) it also said certain drugs could only be sold by prescription and habit forming drugs had to be labeled. As Congress did not possess the power to create general criminal laws, a plan was devised to masquerade the regulation and persecution as a tax, leading to the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. It created the template for using criminal sanctions to deal with the non-medical use of drugs but only applied to opium, morphine and its various derivatives, and the derivatives of the coca leaf like cocaine; there was no mention anywhere of amphetamines, barbiturates, marijuana, hashish, or hallucinogenic drugs of any kind. More importantly, it did nothing to outlaw possession but set such a high tax on non-medical exchange of the drugs that it made it defacto illegal to have certain drugs.

Control was tightened ad hoc, state by state to restrict all narcotics, including cannabis, as poisons and limit their sale to pharmacies requiring doctor's prescriptions. From 1915 to 1937, some 27 states passed criminal laws against the use of marijuana driven by three factors. Racism, fear of substitution and religious fanaticism. Out west, the influx of Mexican immigrants made them easy prey for populist politicians. Overheard on the floor of the Texas Senate, "All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy." Proponent of Montana's first marijuana law said, "[g]ive one of these Mexican beet field workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette and he thinks he is in the bullring at Barcelona." In the northeast of the country, the fear was marijuana would be taken up by those who could no longer drink or do morphine. And of course the religious fanatics were in Utah, where the Mormon Church's opposition to euphoriants of any kind was codified by the state legislature as the first criminal law in the US against the use of marijuana in October of 1915. On what should be known as international drug cartel day, the turning point came February 19, 1925, when the International Opium Convention was revised to include among other things, Indian hemp, while leaving the low-THC European hemp uncontrolled.

"Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men."
 - Harry Anslinger; US Drug Czar

The mythology surrounding marijuana prohibition has only grown with time. Who hasn't run into a conspiracy theorist blaming it all on William Hearst's use of Yellow Journalism to protect his lumber interests (hemp can also be used to make paper) or a hippie happy to harangue Dupont and the cotton industry for their role in demonizing the hemp plant (yes, makes pretty good clothes, too). The fact is marijuana's current status in America and the world has more to do with one man than all else combined. Harry J. Anslinger was the drug czar under five presidents becoming the first the first Commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) on August 12, 1930 and serving until May 1962. By 1936, Anslinger was convinced that America was under assault by a reefer invasion and therefore launched a two-pronged counterattack: a legislative plan to seek from Congress a new law that would place marijuana and its distribution directly under federal control alongside a media campaign to turn a near-harmless, potentially life saving plant into loco weed. His gore file was filled with stories of mild-mannered youths being turned into axe-wielding mass murderers, white female students into sex slaves, and of course Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers seeking the company of those innocent white girls after a single puff of the stuff. The culmination of this propaganda was of course the now infamous film, Reefer Madness.

His legislative assault led to a hearing on national marijuana prohibition in 1937 in which three bodies of testimony were given; Anslinger himself representing the government as head of the FBN, spokesmen from industries that would be affected by a ban on hemp, and representatives from the medical profession. Anslinger's testimony is easily summed up with "Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." There were three industrial spokesmen, from the rope, paint and varnish, and birdseed people. The first testimonial irony came from the rope people who told of the cheap supply from the Far East making homegrown uneconomical. Of course shortage of rope to supply warships less than five years later required the government to become the biggest growers in history. The paint and varnish folks said "we can use something else" while only the birdseed people balked and gave us irony number two. When asked "Couldn't you use some other seed?" the birdseen man said, "No, Congressman, we couldn't. We have never found another seed that makes a bird's coat so lustrous or makes them sing so much." For this reason, birds, not people, have been able to enjoy some of the benefits of the plant under the name "denatured seeds".

The two pieces of  medical testimony prove the most puzzling, one from a pharmacologist, the other, a doctor/lawyer representing the AMA (American Medical Association). The former claimed to have had three dogs die after he injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 canines. Unfortunately, the active component, THC,  wasn't isolated until 1964, so who knows what he shot into their craniums. When asked by a Congressman, "Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?", the pharmacologist replied, "I wouldn't know, I'm not a dog psychologist." The latter medical testimony, from Dr. William C. Woodward was short, sweet and succinct, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana is a dangerous drug." To understand why the two Congressmen then told him, "Doctor, if you can't say something good about what we are trying to do, why don't you go home?" and "Doctor, if you haven't got something better to say than that, we are sick of hearing you", one must remember the political situation of the time. Both Congressmen were Democrats who held a grudge against the AMA as they had opposed every piece of Roosevelt's New Deal legislation introduced from 1932 through 1937.

It was August 20th at 5:45pm in the pre-air-conditioning world of Washington, DC when the debate on national marijuana prohibition took place in Congress. No one was there. Well, a few Republicans, one of whom from upstate New York stood up before the bill was passed on "tellers", "Mr. Speaker, what is this bill about?" To which speaker Rayburn replied, "I don't know. It has something to do with a thing called marihuana. I think it's a narcotic of some kind." To which the New Yorker, a Republican as much on the side of the AMA for the last 5 years as the Democrats were against, followed up, "Mr. Speaker, does the American Medical Association support this bill?". At which point a committee member jumped up and said, "Their Doctor Wentworth [remember it was Woodward] came down here. They support this bill 100%." Good enough for the Republicans. Good enough for America as the bill then passed on and when the bill passed the Senate without debate or recorded vote and President Roosevelt signed it, the US had national prohibition with the federal Marihuana Tax Act.

More irony? Well, the La Guardia Report (yeah, the mayor of NYC La Guardia), the first in depth study into the effects of smoking marijuana came out just seven years later, it systematically contradicted claims made by the U.S. Treasury Department that smoking marijuana results in insanity, and determined that "the practice of smoking marihuana does not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word." The next big surge in this war came with Nixon who not only upped the ante on the war in Vietnam but more egregiously committed the country to wage "total war against public enemy number one in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs" regardless of the cost, in dollars or lives. Not only did he oversee the implementation of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, he also ensured the war would be well funded and armed with the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 1973. Republicans continued to bask in the law and order glory under Reagan, when Nancy was handed the skillet in the Just say no, This is your brain on drugs campaign. The same story continues to this day with millions of lives lost or destroyed simply to uphold an outdated, falsely propogated belief that profits the wicked, just as any war. Despite all the propaganda, a record-high 50% of Americans said last year the use of marijuana should be made legal, up from 46% the year before.
 
Marijuana prohibition keeps police officers busy on the beat, courts jammed with marijuana offenders, and jails packed with prisoners convicted of violating marijuana laws. Unquestionably, these laws have helped make America great, nay, the greatest in the world... at penning people in cages. Not only does America lead in sheer number of prisoners, it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, too. The prison-industrial-complex that has grown to catch, judge and accommodate the millions behind bars along with the tobacco, pharmaceutical and alcohol industries, have a lot of profit incentive to keep things the way they are. It should come as no surprise that the biggest financial contributor to Smart Colorado, the supposedly family-friendly group leading the fight against the marijuana legalizing Proposition 64, is Save Our Society from Drugs, a Florida-based nonprofit founded by Mel and Betty Sembler who once led drug rehab centers shut down over wide-ranging child abuse scandals. With the coming votes in the western trifecta of states comes the hope of a domino effect and an end to a system that destroys lives to fill up treatment centers and pad private prison profits.

Alcohol offers a good parallel with weed though its trajectory from legal euphoriant to not and back again was much steeper. Though the US didn't go completely dry until the 18th Amendment came into force at midnight, January 16, 1920, after being ratified by 36 states, about 65% of the country had already banned alcohol. Just as alcohol can lead to strange bedfellows, so did the prohibition movement: xenophobes, industrialists, women's rights activists and religious zealots. Anti-German wartime sentiment tied in with the push to use grain to make bread for soldiers instead of beer turned Milwaukee's brewers into "the worst of all our German enemies," and the Anti-Saloon League dubbed their beer "Kaiser brew." Henry Ford described prohibition as "the greatest force for the comfort and prosperity of the U.S." while John D. Rockefeller saw it as a way of strengthening the monopoly of his Standard Oil by eliminating the alternative of ethyl alcohol to power cars. Alcohol's obvious link to wife beating and child abuse drove the development of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 

Of course history has shown that turning temperance into prohibition was a big mistake as thirteen long violent years followed in yet another sad parallel with modern drug policy. While most of the gangland style violence and overt corruption spread by bootleggers of the prohibition era played out at home, most of it that has resulted from drug laws takes place south of the border, out of sight of middle America. Perhaps this explains why the anti-prohibition forces only took thirteen years to win while the perverse drug laws have been around almost a century. The Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) formed in 1919 even before prohibition and was so successful that by the time the 21st Amendment ending national alcohol prohibition went into effect December 1933, more than a dozen states had already opted out. This same slow creep is hopefully being emulated by the marijuana legalization movement. A final parallel: the spark for the repeal movement was the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Could the not-so-great depression do the same? "Beer For Prosperity" became the anti-Prohibition battle cry as few could deny the obvious truth that legalizing beer would create thousands of new jobs virtually over night. At the same time, desperately-needed new government revenue would be generated in the form of beer taxes. Sounds kind of familiar doesn't it?

If legalization comes to the US, they won't be the first. Everyone knows about the Netherlands being a drug haven but few speak about the annual prevalence of marijuana use for people age 15-64 being just 5.4% there compared to 13.7% in the US. The contrasts in figures are even starker for heroin, cocaine and opiates. Even fewer talk about the success of decriminalization in Portugal. Quietest of all is the revolution being seen in Central and South America, where most of the loss of life in this war has occurred. It's not just the leftist governments either; Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, a 30-year military veteran whose campaign slogan was "Iron fist, head and heart", angered Washington in September by proposing drug legalization at the UN General Assembly. This came on the heels of a dozen Latin American leaders avoiding using the term legalization by calling to reduce demand for drugs by exploring "regulatory or market oriented options", an act of linguistic prestidigitation favored by Mexican President Felipe Calderon to avoid pissing off Uncle Sam. Even President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, which has received almost $9 billion in aid from the US to fight the cartels, has said he's open to legalization. However, the race to sanity seems set to be won by Uruguay where a bill has been introduced to legalize the production and sale of marijuana under a state monopoly thanks to its flower-farming former leftist guerilla president, Jose "Pepe" Mujica.
 
So while the world watches the presidential returns November 6th to see who will be sleeping in the White House for the next four years, the people of Colorado, Oregon and Washington will be choosing whether to not only make their lives better but also those in Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa, the three Mexican states where drug cartels will be most harmed by legalization, losing up to 30% of their earnings from traffic to the US. There's a few other interesting citizens' initiatives to keep an eye on, particularly California's Proposition 37 which would require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Opponents, Monsanto that is, are spending millions to argue that giving people information would scare them into buying non-GMO products. Well, um, yeah, I guess that's the point. Maine, Maryland and Washington will be having up-or-down votes on legalizing same-sex marriage while Minnesotans face a measure to constitutionally take away gay couples rights as 30 states have already done. And don't forget Florida and Maine choose whether to tighten control over women's uteruses (uteri?). 

"When you return to this mundane sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter - to quit paradise for earth - heaven for hell! Taste the hashish, guest of mine - taste the hashish!"  
 - Alexander Dumas

Polls show Washingtonians and Coloradans likely to vote yes while Oregonians might not be ready to make the leap. What will it mean if these states legalize marijuana? The Obama administration has already showed its disdain for the will of the people by raiding medical dispensaries all over the west, so one can imagine an even stronger reaction to people smoking pot for recreational purposes and given his religious zealotry, Romney has predictably made it clear he'll fight weed tooth and nail. While parroting the same old refuted marijuana myths,  former drug warriors predict a constitutional showdown between the states and feds. With so many powerful forces profiting from prohibition, yes votes in any or all three states will only be a victory in one battle with many more to come. Hopefully the anti-prohibition movement will continue down the same successful path as the last 70 years ago when Beer Day parades saw 100,000 turn out in NYC and 40,000 in Detroit to cheer the legalization of beer, Obama will magically turn into the progressive we believed him to be four years ago and the media will turn from demonization to pressing for legalization. Just as scientists are now restarting research into LSD, MDMA and psilocybin (found in magic mushrooms) after a 40 year federally imposed hiatus and discovering new benefits, new medical uses for marijuana will also help the push. Regardless of the vote, it'll be a cat and mouse game for the foreseeable future in which the cats have the guns but the mice have the reason...