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...

 

A Corporate Death Penalty

Here at In Case You Missed It we like to fess up to our mistakes, errors, follies and bone-headed pleas whenever we can. A couple of years back we published one of our most popular posts titled Rent Seeking Parasites which accused the financial industry of parasitism, getting a free ride on the backs of its host, society - you and me. While this seemed a reasonable metaphor at the time operating as we were under the assumption that regulation and taxes would have to be reintroduced to curb their feeding excesses eventually, it has proven wrong. Parasites they are not - they are parasitoids, creatures that similarly live off the back of their hosts but eventually return the favour by killing them.

Don't you dare roll your eyes at the thought of another climate change, anti-oil screed, I promise to not even go there, even though it's the easiest path to prove our faith and reliance on crony capitalism and corporations is suicidal. No, instead we'll start in Greece, a country that's been forced to live under the indignity of not only being labeled one of the PIIGS but the worst of the bunch, a profligate, lazy, early-retiring, ouzo-swilling, tax cheater that built a shack out of straw. Despite the falsity of the stereotype or how they actually got in over their heads in debt, the Greeks have been pushed into debt-slavery, a no longer sovereign nation forced to accede to the austerity demands of the troika, the EU/ECB/IMF.

Strangely enough, these policies have not only led the Greek economy into a vicious debt trap circle - reduced spending leading to lower growth and the need for more borrowing to bridge the budget gaps provoking further calls for deeper cuts - but they've also effected people in the same depression-inducing way. Gross domestic product in the second quarter was down more than 7% from last year amid government spending cuts and tax increases that, combined, will add up to about 20% of GDP while unemployment is over 16%. Predictably, crime, homelessness, emigration and personal bankruptcies are on the rise. Tragically, as a result of these market forces, recorded suicides have roughly doubled since before the crisis to about six per 100,000 residents annually according to the Greek health ministry and a charitable organization called Klimaka.

The Greeks aren't alone in the suffering being induced in order to pay off the often fraudulent debt incurred in order to keep the financial ponzi scheme afloat while suffering under the humiliation of taking orders from the financial markets and their lackeys. Ireland's pot-o-gold bank guarantees led to overnight insolvency and a double austerity dose causing another mass emigration, Portugal's ignominious acceptance of the same troika treatment will produce the same cure as Ireland, Italy had their debt downgraded despite cutting, re-cutting and then cutting the budget some more to please the market wolves while Spain not only had a gun held to their head by the same hit men until they changed their constitution to 'limit' debt without a referendum a month before an election but also had to increase 'labour market flexibility', an Orwellian moniker which will somehow create more employment by making it easier to fire young workers. When markets attack French banks, rules are changed to protect them, but the assault on society causes lives to be lost when fruit stand owners use gasoline to light themselves on fire to draw attention to problems in Tunis or mix it with beer to literally drown their sorrows in Athens or when there's riots on the streets of London. The worst off seems to be Latvia, the anti-Iceland of Europe, a country that could become the first murder victim of neoliberal austerity measures.

Yet German bank inspired bailouts provided by the European Financial Stability Facility and the European Financial Stabilization Mechanism won't solve the problem, it will continue indefinitely without debt forgiveness. Ironically, these obligations being forced on the public will serve the same function as that of the war reparations forced upon Germany after the Treaty of Versailles when John Maynard Keynes warned the world that the "policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable...even if it does not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe". I think we can all still remember the seeds that were sown and how many lives were reaped thanks to that plan. 

In America we need to be granted a little bit of poetic license to expand the metaphor a bit, after all it is the land of the ever-expanding waistband. According the the General Accountability Office, the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and around the world over the past couple of years. This goes along with the $1.2 trillion in slightly less secret back door loans we later found out about last year or the (only) $700 billion TARP money a couple of years back that everyone talks about. Hurray, the corporatocracy was brought back to life thanks to the politicians they paid for! Funny thing is this transfer of wealth hasn't trickled down to the people yet, nor have the efficiency gains of the past 30 odd years of economic growth. No, the result of the neoliberal free market driven policies of major tax cuts for high-income Americans, union-busting, aided and abetted by federal policy, and financial deregulation such as the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which has fed inequality because very high incomes come disproportionately from that sector, has strangely enough only benefited those the policies were meant to help, the rich and the corporations. Median incomes adjusted for inflation have fallen over that time while the number of Americans below the poverty line has reached 46 million with 21.6% of American children now living in poverty (predicted to hit 25% soon; it's 3.7% in Denmark). The very corporations who the Fed helped out instead of people are often making record profits from this poverty and play a part in the bloodbath, as this poverty is a death sentence.

Instead of using this infusion of cash along with the access granted to US and non-US banks and corporations to near-zero financing at the Fed window to you know, create jobs, financial firms have used it to increase our suffering while lining their pockets. They've thanked the people who cover their losses by betting on their death and creating new casino-like commodity markets, hurting the poor most as increases in the price of rice and gasoline hit them harder. The flip side of the profit prospect created by wheat price volatility for a corporation is starvation for the world's dispossessed thanks to the increased price of bread. A food system where Americans waste enough food everyday to fill the Rose Bowl is great for those who can afford the luxury. For those that can't, well, you know. Worse, a McDonald's corporation that took part in the $1.3 trillion short term lending bonanza gets to serve $5 Big Mac meals thanks in large part to the billions in corn subsidies lavished by the government in support of the unholy alliance of agribusiness and science to produce high-fructose corn syrop (HFCS) and ethanol to put in everything from french fries to feed for filet-o-fish or filling the Ford Fiesta.



The subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that budget wary consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit". This Super-Size-Me economy leads to early death through obesity, diabetes and heart disease. This lifestyle non-choice has played a big role in the decline of life expectancy for women over the past 20 years in 313 counties in the United States, a problem exacerbated by poverty, with the proof played out in the fact that those in the top 20% of American incomes live, on average, at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group. So you see, privatizing both profits and losses of corporations is paid for in not only gold but also lives by society. It's become more than a crime to be poor - poverty is a death sentence and corporations, who we're told over and over are job creators, are in fact, executioners.

In a culture where Orwellian political vocabulary turns the idea of universal single-payer health care into "death panels" while advocating actually killing grandma and rationalizes disenfranchisement of "non-productive citizens", it should come as no surprise that Obama's faux-populist promise to veto any budget proposal that doesn't contain tax increases can be turned into a class war, when, in fact, the war has been hot for decades and it's pretty clear which side is winning. The reality is this war doesn't differentiate between innocent and guilty when choosing its victims though it does discriminate based on race just like capital punishment. Just imagine the cognitive dissonance involved in being both pro-life and pro-death. Murderous spectacles are put on to appease the mob with circenses as if the panem killing them weren't enough. Maybe this explains the indifference to executing possibly innocent men like Troy Davis in Georgia or the Tea Party cheering for the straight shooting style of killing kids, the mentally ill and the innocent among the 234 people Rick Perry has executed in Texas:



It's a death sentence to be poor, especially if you're among the 49.9 million Americans who lack health insurance, a number that soared by 13.3 million since 2000. The main driver in both the national and personal bankruptcy story is a health care system whose costs are spiraling out of control thanks to corporate greed in both the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. State enforced patent protection of the latter isn't only killing AIDS babies in Soweto while thanks to the former, the only evidence that really matters in determining treatment based on evidence-based medicine is what's in your wallet. Tea Partiers like to cheer on this corporate killing too (listen for it at 0:55):

Killing requires a large staff

Poverty is also the best recruiting tool ever invented by the ultimate killing machine, the armed forces, and thus provides the fodder to feed the military industrial complex. Again, corporations are there to innovate new ways of killing and can even fill the void with corporate mercenaries when volunteers run short. The stark contradiction between the money making mantra of murder and Christ's advice, "If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me" lends a dark layer of irony to our present wars justified by condemning Islam as a death-glorifying cult. Even though we know innocent people will die when we're bombing, droning or whatever we call trying to kill brown people we've labeled terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan or Libya, it's somehow different than when those terrorists kill innocent people when they blow themselves up on buses in London or trains in Madrid. We're Americans celebrating the illegal killing of the most-wanted criminal of our generation thanks to our culture of death or out of relief from a false belief they wouldn't be called to die as the perpetual war on terror would end with Osama bin Laden's death? USA! United States of Assassination! Woo hoo death to international rule of law!



What? Killing bin Laden didn't solve that war on terror problem? You mean, it's all related, people blowing themselves up at outdoor cafes, creating terrorists by raining death down on Tripoli, Kabul and Baghdad or being the only vote in the UN to support Israelis killing Palestinians, allowing illegal settlements on their land or even denying them statehood next month. Killing is killing, whether in the name of good, Zeus, protection, defense or Allah. Once you accept it as no more than collateral damage you think differently, become indifferent to death and probably think it's ok to torture while praying in a church that covers up for pedophiles. Another victory for Oceania over Eurasia or Eastasia won't alter the course in the perpetual war because there's money to be made for McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, BAE and IBM from death.

But if, as the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations are people then shouldn't they get the death penalty for killing people? Even at a time when slavery was legal, America had the morality to realize corporate killing wasn't. The corporate death penalty could be applied in cases of "operating contrary to the public interest" or those that saw "a pattern of abuses" and result in their charters being revoked. Ah, those were the progressive days, the very time today's right-wingnuts would like to take us back to with its lack of child labor laws, clean water protection and such. Trials might go something like this if such a world still existed I suppose:



Yeah. We not only wage war and trample human rights for oil companies' drilling rights, we just make them pay a fine for destroying entire ecosystems and spraying chemicals with unknown long-term effects to clean up the surface for the cameras. We enable through our continued consumption and ignorance of corporate evasion of responsibility for less visible murder via contamination or explosions in places like Ecuador or Nigeria. Move on to do the same in the Arctic while other gas companies extracting using hydraulic fracturing which pollutes the very water table we rely on for life will make sure we don't figure out how their harming human life. Car companies? What better way to kill millions than by rigging the game to ensure we drive cars forever? Big tobacco serves as a role model for the Catholic Church on how to cover up scandals after killing millions more. Obfuscate, donate and litigate.

Wait. All this and no mention of Bhopal. Yeah, that's right, when 3,800 people are killed almost immediately when tonnes of toxic gas escape and today more than 100,000 people remain chronically ill from exposure, it's more of the same, obfuscate (corporate takeover of Union Carbide by Dow Chemical - it's not our fault!), donate (maybe a stadium for the Olympics!) and litigate. Rinse and repeat. How about Monsanto? Who could have foreseen that allowing a corporation to patent life would have, well, life-ending consequences, right? DeBeers, turning blood diamonds into love? The beverage industry from Coca-Cola to Red Bull and Budweiser, the fashion industry or even Hollywood for toxification, body image distortion and indoctrination? As long as there's an app for you iPhone to keep you connected who cares how many Apple kills to make them. What about the billions of people whose lives are threatened by the ecological disaster sure to come about as a result of the greed for profit written into the DNA of the corporate psychopaths we've created. Oh yeah, that's right, I made a no climate change promise. That would be controversial and might give someone the idea to protest, maybe even occupy Madrid's Plaza del Sol or decide to march to Brussels or, heaven forbid, occupy Wall Street in the heart of NYC if perhaps the corpocracy's killing of the middle class and slaughter of the poor weren't enough. Oh, some people have already done that, are heading there and doing that (see below for live stream when available), fighting our fight. If they need a suggestion for one demand mine is to bring back the corporate death penalty - capital punishment for corporations!

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Further reading:
Occupy Wall Street 
March to Brussels
Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe 1919-2009
US Poverty figures
IMF inequality report
US Uncut / UK Uncut
Further Viewing:
Sugar: The Bitter Truth
Food Inc. (It might take an extra click)
Clip from Inside Job
Interview with Josh Fox - maker of Gasland

Democrazy

"Choosing between AIDS and cancer"

So maybe not every democratic election is as bad as that in Peru. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, these were the alternatives facing Peruvians as they decided where to mark their ballot in last Sunday's presidential election. Yet, a closer look at the state of democracy around the world reveals an unsettling picture. Not only do most voters usually face a choice between bad and worse but those who we select seem to be wielding ever decreasing power. While disenfranchised peoples across much of the Middle East are dying for the opportunity that we take for granted, many of us are waking up to the realization that we really don't have any choice either. As elected politicians lose power to our unelected corporate masters, democracy is more and more resembling the pancurium bromide anesthetic in the lethal injection which paralyzes the condemned inmate before the potassium chloride of debt slavery stops the heart of the hitherto free people of the world.

Perhaps we should save a little room at our Peruvian pity party for the poor Portuguese. At least the voters in Peru had a choice, albeit a rather unappetizing one, between a fascist and Chavista (they went for the Chavista); the voters in Portugal on Sunday could vote for the incumbent PS, the "socialist" party to implement the austerity measures commanded by the troika, or the Social Democrat Party to, um, implement the austerity measures ordered by the troika. In case you missed it, the troika isn't a new Russian vodka, but the frontmen for the sovereign debt holders, the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. They dictate the terms of the austerity reforms that the overly-indebted nations must abide by in order to qualify them for more debt. Yep, the program that's working so well in Greece and Ireland has come to Portugal. Half a million people marching the streets to protest the program in March were ignored much like the millions who screamed their disapproval of the Iraq war in 2003. Our voices no longer matter as much as the bomb makers or the bond holders.

Portugal's Geração à rasca (or "generation of junk") proved no more effective in getting their message out and attaining their goals than Spain's Indignados last month. Real Democracia Ya! demanded political reform that would break the two-party rule and convinced much of the youth to withhold their vote in May's regional elections, votes that normally would have gone to the "socialist" PSOE party, to show they don't support the austerity program being installed there. Over 20% unemployment (43% for those aged 18-25) should be the priority of a government that calls itself socialist. The result? A near clean sweep for the PP, or Partido Populaire, the descendants of Franco's fascist regime. Fittingly, the righwing Social Democrat Party won in Portugal as well. It's the slow creep towards complete loss of autonomy that has lulled the majority to sleep. One step at a time, one country after another, eventually we will all wake up to a reality in which our future has been monetized and securitized in order to keep the interest payments flowing to the banks who own us. Organize and the government will declare it illegal. Protest and the state's security apparatus will be deployed against you.



Choice? When the Harper regime was forced to call a national election in Canada last month after being found in contempt of parliament, many Canadians decided to try to break the Conservative-Liberal duopoly by voting for the NDP or Greens. The result? While the hardcore rightwing voters remained faithful to the Conservatives, the leftwing vote was scattered which allowed the Conservatives to claim a majority 52% of seats with just 39% of the vote. The hocus pocus of the first to the post voting system stuck it to the UK just as bad last year. Many voters, fed up with more than a decade of Labour rule but unable in good conscience to vote Conservative, opted for the Liberal Democrats. The result? A Cameron Conservative minority government which asked Nick Clegg's Lib Dems to join a coalition, and presto change'o' - ConDem'ned to a failing austerity future. Woohoo, at least Vodafone and the banks are happy!



But it's that great bastion of liberty and freedom that is proving once and for all what a failure democracy can be. Anyone who didn't become disillusioned by the Barack Obama hope and change candidate turned corporate war monger president just isn't paying attention. Branded as a man of and for the people, few noticed that his biggest campaign donors were in fact Goldman Sachs et al who have got more than they paid for. What happened to single payer/public option health care? Remember financial reform, foreclosure protection, bank bailouts, and jobs-jobs-jobs? Remember Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, civil liberties, ? Remember global warming, offshore drilling, clean coal, and nuclear energy? Remember immigration reform, the Pentagon budget, repair of the infrastructure, military commissions, the suppressed torture photos, education reform, the US-enabled coup in Honduras, the continuing Cold War sanctions on Cuba, the Palestinian situation and the Obama wars, wars, wars? Remember restrictions on abortion, the Employee Free Choice Act, the Bush-Obama millionaire tax cuts? Me too. Well, after all, he was the lesser of two evils, right?

It gets worse as no longer will children want to grow up to be firemen or teachers as their unions will be broken and their professions downgraded to rent-a-cop status. No, they'll dream of being corporations when they grow up. After all, corporations are people, so why can't people be corporations? The Supreme Court's Citizen United decision was the final nail in the coffin for electoral fairness as the floodgates were opened wide to corporate sponsorship of candidates. We've made fun of the farce that is the Republicrat-Demopublican duopoly that is the American coin toss in the past but it's sure to get worse. The race for the White House in 2012 should more appropriately be called the race to a billion. As in, who can raise a billion dollars first, Obama or whichever monkey the Republicans manage to pick. Seriously, it seems the party of Lincoln is throwing out clowns like Bachman, Santorum and Gingrich in a vain attempt to make Sarah Palin look electable. Good luck with that America.

There's much to like about democracy in theory but we have to wake up the fact that it needs an overhaul or at least a tuneup as the cons begin to outweigh the pros. A misinformed electorate, abstruse voting systems designed to confuse and favor the incumbent alongside a devolution of powers to unelected bodies to name but a few. More dangerously, in many people’s eyes, certain government functionaries may legitimately take actions that would be condemned as criminal if anyone else were to take them. If I were to send a private Predator drone to Pakistan to fire explosive missiles into villages, killing women, children, and other innocents, I would be seen as a monstrous mass murderer. How did Barack Obama come by the right to kill innocent people? By democratic election to the presidency of the United States, of course. "When the president does it," Richard Nixon insisted, "that means that it is not illegal." Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command, nobody demands that the technician who sits comfortably in the United States and directs the lethal drone be brought to justice; he, as the saying goes, is "only following orders."



As much of the west heads for the austerity inspired double dip recession, spin control will go into overdrive. This time will be worse than 2008 as government debt loads have exploded everywhere leaving little fiscal policy maneuvering room, so in order to keep the bond holders happy and the interest payments flowing, more cuts will be demanded, leading to further slowing of the economy leading to, more cuts and, well, you get the picture. The corporate controlled media will dutifully report deceptive economic statistics about green shoots or some such nonsense all the while ignoring the one way out - actually asking the people what to do like they did in Iceland. Yep, home of Bjork and unpronounceable volcanoes that erupt whenever Obama comes to Europe, was also the first country to guarantee its banks debts back in October of 2008. Virtually unheard of in the west thanks to a media blackout, the Kitchenware Revolution, so-called because of the pots and pans used by protestors, forced the fall of the government.

Then Iceland did the unthinkable and asked her people if they really wanted to spend the next 15 years paying back $3.5 billion at 5.5% to British and Dutch banks thanks to the gambling losses of a few bankers. In American and the UK they turned on the printing presses, in Iceland they had not one, but two referendums in which they voted not to force every man, woman and child to pay back over $10,000 each. Instead, they voted in a new government, now led by the first openly gay Prime Minister, (Saint Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir), convened a constitutional assembly made up of non-politicians to draft a new constitution and most importantly, began arresting the banksters who caused the crisis.

Democracy gives a free pass to those who rape and pillage African, Asian, South American and now European nations, in fact we call them socialists and wait until they rape hotel maids until we finally decide to prosecute them for their crimes. Until being caught with his pants down DSK, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was the leading candidate to run for the presidency of France under the socialist banner. When democracy offers the choice between a neoliberal right winger in favor of cutting corporate taxes, services, pensions and regulations to support the gilded class and their banking buddies or, well, the same but with a different name, like socialist, no wonder much of the world is in fact turning away from democracy. Yep, the last five years has seen the world become less democratic. It's not hard to see why. While those who have languished under authoritarian regimes for decades fight for what they think will be a brake on unbridled greed and power, democracy in fact is fulfilling the iron law of oligarchs and doing the opposite. As Robert Michels stated, all organizations, no matter how democratic or autocratic inevitably develop into oligarchies, in the case of western democracies, one formed by the corporate class, the corpocracy, controlled by a sociopathic elite.

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
-Winston Churchill

Meanwhile, so sure of the superiority of our democratic values we've spent much of the past decade (ok, maybe a little more) justifying bombing and killing brown people by claiming the moral high ground of spreading democracy. It's a useful fiction as many are duped into believing that somehow their quadrennial ballot box charade lends consent of the governed and thus legitimizes government when in fact it is the corporate overlords and their lobbies who write the laws for the governed. Strategic voting along with voter apathy, stupidity and cupidity are minor problems when compared with the damage done by those given the moral pass to commit the crimes they do once elected. Sadly, democracy, "rule of the people" has become "ruling the sheeple". I wonder if we were warned this would happen?

Lepre-conned

It's somehow fitting that the €600 million giant glass and steel new airport terminal in Dublin opened on the very day the army of technocrats sent by the IMF and EU arrived to take over Ireland. A white elephant to symbolize how quickly a Celtic Tiger can be transformed into one of the PIIGS. Floating in and out of the international news stream I keep seeing the financial world in terms of a dystopian fairy tale where the bad guys always come out winners while the public is left to pick up the tab and we never seem to learn the moral. The Big Bad Wolf outwitted the littlest of the pigs earlier this year which forced the rest to scurry to a house made of wood while the Greek straw hut went up in flames. This week saw Ireland give up its wooden shack offered by the nationalization of her banks' debt as the growing storm forced her to surrender independence to Mother Europa and her IMF advisers. In Europe it's two PIIGS down and three to go, Portugal, Spain and Italy, meanwhile much of the western world is also looking for a brick house to give us shelter from the storm.

Ireland's path to financial purgatory has been predictable. Greece's problems came from many sources, rapacious banks taking advantage of financial rubes, politicians on the take and of course the MSM's favourite scapegoat, the lazy, sponging, early-retiring, Greek workers. Ireland's problems stem from one source - greed. Both the banks and the public were caught up in a collective euphoria brought on by the belief that shiny new buildings and playthings meant perpetual growth and wealth for all. A pot o' gold at the end of every rainbow. Ireland became an economic success story between 1994 and 2007 as GDP growth regularly touched 10% a year with the boom ascribed to reasons as varied as the success of U2 to the legalization of contraceptive sales in 1979. More prosaically, economists generally credited the rise of the Celtic Tiger to a combination of EU development funds and low corporate taxes with a global shift to a knowledge-based economy for which the Irish education system was ready to provide the skilled workforce all at a time of strong global expansion. The sudden success soon turned to hubris; while the main proponents of unconstrained financial globalization may have been American, it was Irish (as well as other European) banks that really became too large relative to their economies, taking risks that paid off big in boom times but exploded in their faces when the rainbow faded. As long as new Starbucks were being opened on Dublin's Grafton Street, it didn't seem to worry anyone that it had become the fifth most expensive street in the world.

When the inevitable financial crash came a couple years ago, it was the Irish who unsurprisingly woke up with the biggest hangover as they had partied harder than everyone else. Seems even property prices have to follow the laws of gravity and unfortunately the country had staked its future on Newton being wrong. In a decade, housing prices quadrupled making for a painful drop. Compounding matters, like many governments around the world, the decision was made to save the banks at the expense of the country, by guaranteeing the Irish banks' debt for two years. An excuse could be made acting as they did in the midst of a crisis, but extending the guarantee to the end of the year in September was inexcusable. The government gambled that the credit market somehow hadn't noticed that the six debt-guaranteed banks (Anglo Irish Bank, Allied Irish Banks, Bank of Ireland, Irish Life and Permanent, Irish Nationwide and EBS) had been hemorrhaging billions of euros a month and lost the bet. If it were only the Irish with anything to lose, the EU and the world may have stood by and watched the stuck pig bleed herself to death, however, not only do foreign banks have a huge stake in Irish debt, the remaining PIIGS financing costs are also tethered to Ireland's woes.

And so it was that Irish sovereignty was traded for another shot at providing bankster security. Even though the government was fully funded until the middle of next year, bondholders of Irish banks realized their security window could close anytime after the new year and therefore began a vicious attack on Irish bonds, bidding up the spreads versus German rates, stoking fears in the credit market. The tragicomedy was scripted from the moment the EU bailout fund was created after the Greeks ceded their sovereignty earlier this year. Ireland following suit was a self-fulfilling prophecy - when was the last time that available credit wasn't used? Those squeals of protest that a bailout wasn't needed we heard from the Irish Prime Minister, or Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, were drowned out in the media by those who insisted it was needed in order to maintain confidence in the debt market. Somehow it passed as normal that a country can be forced to take a bailout to pay the debts of profligate banks. Ireland had to be convinced they needed help but families trying to feed their kids wouldn't need much arm twisting. Instead, welfare will be slashed, public health services will deteriorate, children, the disabled and the elderly will lose the already inadequate services that afford them some hope and dignity. But the €100 billion that is owed by the Irish to German banks and the €109 billion owed to British banks will be secured.

Instead of the banks borrowing money from the European Central Bank at one per cent interest to fund their operations, the Irish public will borrow it for them at perhaps five per cent. The banks and their corporatist enablers have done a masterful job, not of banking, but of keeping the public confused and therefore impotent to do anything. The possibility of senior bondholders actually sharing in some of the cost of the bailouts by taking a haircut isn't even mentioned, funny, seeing as default risk is priced into the cost of debt for the borrower. No, the lenders are allowed to keep any profits they got from taking too much risk but are exempt from taking any losses when they actually occur. Such a situation creates moral hazard where financial institutions seeking to increase profit simply turn up the risk knowing full well that if their bets go sour, governments will step in and save them. Private gains and socialized losses, but, only for the banks. Now that's capitalism!

More than two years into the financial crisis and were still uncovering the filth and rot at the core of the world's financial system. The Irish case may be magnified in scale relative to its population but those that caused their banking collapse have doppelgangers all over the world and none of them will ever feel an ounce of guilt for what they've done. The names and acronyms of destruction may change but it's those in the know, on the take or at the table who are able to feed at the trough of asset bubbles created and fed by the banks who the public will be paying to support for years, as much as €200 billion in Ireland alone with a population of 4.5 million (and shrinking again) - €44,444.44 a head! This mass delusion was enabled by a culture of greed and avarice which glorifies the rich regardless of their social cost. Most of those who gorged themselves walk the streets free, able to enjoy the fruits of their deception. Bernie Madoff was no worse than Seán Quinn who built a pyramid scheme of CFDs which allowed him to control 25% of Anglo-Irish Bank only to see it inevitably collapse when the stock price went south. ASIC, the Australian SEC, describes CFDs, or contracts for difference, as "much riskier than a flutter on the horses or a night at the casino" much like psychopaths who recognize no limits and ignore the damage they do to others; CFDs continue to be traded and psychopaths continue to walk the streets and run our most powerful and influential institutions.

Seán FitzPatrick, former chairman of Anglo-Irish, a man who hid hundreds of millions in loans to himself, oversaw the bank which established a precedent of reckless lending the other banks were forced to follow in order to keep pace so as not to lose market share and thus see their stock price plummet. Ah, the irony. No longer seeing themselves as bankers but risk seeking entrepreneurs, in their eagerness to woo property syndicates the banks became both the lenders of equity and providers of debt in the same deals, resulting in absurd loan to value exposure of up to 100%. Even once it was clear the game was up and the government had stepped in to save them, the banks continued to deceive everyone around them hoping to continue the party a little longer. A stream of false information has been fed to the very entity created to take the non-performing loans off the banks' hands, NAMA, meaning the extent of damage the banks have done may take years to figure out. The incestuous relationship between banksters and government is most blatant in the US but Ireland has its own government protected "Golden Circle" who will escape punishment as the details of their deception are impenetrable to the normal person and so will become fodder for legend and lore, circular transactions being better than fairy tales at putting the public to sleep.

So, once again, who cares? When Greece was taken over six month ago at least it made the cover of the newspapers. This time, unless you were paying attention, you might not have even noticed that Ireland is now being run by EU and IMF bureaucrats. Trouble is we should care, but can't seem to bother. Even if someone does dare to bother, here's what we supposedly know: Ireland is not Greece and Greece is not Ireland, Spain is not Greece and of course Portugal is not Greece, and obviously Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal so it follows that Neither Spain nor Portugal is Ireland. Thanks, but that's exactly how much the financial ministers and their puppet master banksters want us to know, because we are all destined to become Greece and Ireland soon enough. After all the public has already forgotten how the Spanish opposition leader was calling on his country to follow Ireland a short three years ago or that today's Polish prime minister wanted his country to emulate the Irish model at the same time. Next on the list is Portugal. Again, meh, whatever, it's just Portugal. That's when things get interesting however, as next on the list will be Spain and that's when we learn that in addition to TBTF, Too Big To Fail, there is such a thing as TBTB, Too Big To Bail.

Unsurprisingly, the wolves are already circling, bond holders smelling fresh kill wasted no time in turning their attention to the next victim. Spain's sovereign bond spreads over German Bunds hit euro-era highs the day after markets were supposedly pacified by the Irish takeover. What a shock! Set to steepen Ireland's economic nosedive is the new round of austerity measures, a condition of the EU/IMF rescue package. Huh? But surely cutting €15 billion out of the economy should help, right? Nope. Just look at the negative market reaction, they noticed what the first round of austerity two years ago did to the country, when the Irish tightened their belt while the rest of the world opted for stimulus spending. Having already raised taxes and cut salaries for nurses, professors and other public workers by up to 20 percent last time, round two will see even deeper cuts, making one wonder just where economic growth needed to balance the books will ever come from. Just a taste of some of the demands to come from their new masters, as the IMF/EU have demonstrated in offering what they try to spin as advice, like cuts to health and the railway, in exchange for life sustaining installments of the Greek bailout.

It's easy enough to keep the public numb with an overload of information, caffeine, sugar and pornography for awhile, but will we all simply roll over and keep taking it? Chances are we will as the public has barely lifted a finger as governments on both sides of the Atlantic have bent over backward to make sure their banking buddies earn every penny on their wagers while the public has paid the price of their losses through bailouts paid for by doubling down on debt and 'austerity measures'. A debtcropper society is being created as the biggest transfer of wealth ever seen from the bottom up occurs while, like sheep to the slaughter, most continue to march in step to their banking masters. Political opportunists try to convince us that we should blame the euro or even the poor for the financial meltdown when it's clearly a corrupted system of risk and reward that is at fault. Our financial fairy tale has turned into a horror movie where a zombie population is manipulated into supporting zombie banks operating thanks to zombie governments of zombie nations. So should we take to the streets in protest? Write an angry letter to the editor? Write another blog post or better yet, start a Facebook protest page? Sit around waiting for a real life Tyler Durden? No, the only thing these people understand is money and the power it gives them, so the only way to limit their power is to take away their weapon, cash. December 7th I'll be in line to take my money out of the bank, hopefully joining thousands around Europe and maybe the world taking part in Pearl Harbor commemorations that will try to sink the banks instead of the Pacific fleet. Sparked by an interview given by former Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona, Bankrun2010 hopes to dent the money creation power of the world's most corrupt. The more who join in, the more likely they'll at least hear our voice. After all, thanks to the US Supreme Court, money is speech.