We're Doing It Wrong

Chapter 9 Mile

Detroit is bankrupt. Or not. Or it is. Regardless, the city that provided the American Dream's 20th century engine has fallen victim to the 21st century version. By now you've likely heard most of the stats: it was the 5th most populous city in America in 1950 with over 1.8 million (and only a couple hundred thousand short of 3rd), today only about 700,000 remain, nearly a quarter million have left in the past decade alone; half the parks have closed since 2008; 78,000 vacant structures and 60,000 vacant land parcels; 40% of the streetlights are out and the city has just 36 ambulances, of which generally no more than 14 are in operation at any given time, and there about 12,000 fires a year to go along with the highest violent crime rate in the US (why not bust a cap in someone's ass for a few bucks when you can get a pizza delivered faster than it takes the cops to respond, about 58 minutes compared to the 11 minute national average and only 8.7% of the cases are solved compared to 30.5% nationwide); tax collections are down 20% over the past five years and the official unemployment rate stands at 18% which is misleadingly low as less than half of those over 16 are actually working. Oh, and there's $18 billion in debt growing by a few hundred million a year. You know the script by now, cue the neoliberal-agenda-advancing blame game chorus of big government, corrupt politicians, greedy unions and gold-plated pension plans because, as we know, this is an isolated incident that the free market will clean up with its invisible hand, just another black swan, nothing that even an awful Hollywood movie could've predicted:

Er, you mean..., no, it can't be so simp..., seriously? ROBOCOP 2! It couldn't have at least copied the script from the original? Is it really just a transparent attempt to sell off what remains of the commonweal and maybe establish an Ayn Randian tax-free "commonwealth" for our modern day John Galts on Belle Isle selling citizenship at $300,000 a head in hopes of becoming a 'Midwest Tiger' to compete with the Asian Tiger of Singapore? Wait, no, this just seems like a thinly veiled attempt to impose an anarcho-capitalistic future on all of us, after all, $37 million, that's just monopoly money, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) doesn't really exist and we all know there's no such thing as robocops to come and save the day! Alas, that's the point, science fiction isn't meant to read as an instructional manual but a warning. The dream has become a nightmare we must wake from and realize that Detroit is but a microcosm of the defunct American model that celebrates profitability rather than society, individuality over solidarity and conformity but not equality. Otherwise, they'll keep turning up the heat by adding zeroes to the bill, turn OCP into an acronym for Oligarch Controlled Polity while their semi-autonomous drones circle the skies keeping us in line.
 
What's Going On? First off, there is a lot of blame to spread around and it's easy to get lost in detail and fail to separate cause from effect, especially as so many of the latter are easily packaged and sold as the former. Corrupt politicians such as Kwame Kilpatrick taking kickbacks or a city run by a one-party government sure look like causes, but they're not. Even the more obvious culprits such as the '67 race riots and the resultant white-flight or the cities susceptibility to disaster due to the lack of economic diversity that comes with being a one-industry town were nothing but manifestations of the root of the problem. Ditto the city's 60% poverty rate for children and the 50% of the population reported to be functionally illiterate. No, we've gotta go way back, maybe not as far as Adam Smith or David Ricardo as it isn't capitalism itself we need to castigate nor even to Henry Ford's first assembly line to find the cause of Detroit's decline. It might seem a bit unfair and facile but let's simplify things and point the finger at poor old Simon Kuznets and his work developing the first comprehensive set of measures of national income, what we know today as GNP and GDP.

Wait, bear with me a moment as not only will it take at least that long to explain how something as mundane and seemingly practical could be the cause of Motown's meltdown but the reality is Simon saw the great danger of his work from the get go and therefore seems a very good place to start the explanation. In his first report to the US Congress in a section titled "Uses and Abuses of National Income Measurements" he warned:

The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification. [...]

All these qualifications upon estimates of national income as an index of productivity are just as important when income measurements are interpreted from the point of view of economic welfare. But in the latter case additional difficulties will be suggested to anyone who wants to penetrate below the surface of total figures and market values. Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.

Pretty prescient stuff for an economist. Unsurprisingly, we failed to heed his warnings and this one number (well, two, GNP and GDP are different) and more specifically making sure it's constantly climbing has become the primary purpose of public policy. In fact, as economics and finance have come to completely rule our lives it's become an unhealthy obsession, the disease of our civilization.

Again, we need to pause and explain ourselves. Growth is good up to a point; there is no denying that life has been improved for billions thanks to the benefits accrued by advancements owed to growth. However,  we need to ask ourselves what is the point of growth if not to improve our quality of life? Now, there's a tricky term, "quality of life", how to measure growth against something so seemingly subjective? Living standards quickly devolves to "material living standards" and how many iPads everyone has. Happiness? Sounds good, but tough to quantify. Satisfaction? Ditto. All equally slippery. So let's start simple and graph the relationship of life expectancy versus per capita GDP in various countries. (More complete country chart can be found here.)

The first thing that jumps out is the near vertical rise on the left side as life expectancy quickly rises along with GDP. However, it's hard to miss the diminishing 'bang for the buck' we get from raising GDP, to the point that it seems to not have much effect after as little as $10,000 per head, hello Costa Rica. Interesting but so what, right? Well, we were originally trying to find the cause for Detroit's demise, but this is our first peek into the likely cause of not only the troubles there plus in Greece, Stockton, CA, Portugal, Jefferson County, Al, , Cyprus and those to come from Baltimore to California to Italy but also into what ails much of the west as efforts around the world for the past 75 years have focused on one thing: increasing GDP.

Superstition

Us humans are amazing in so many ways but one of our biggest failings is the inability to let go of strongly held beliefs, especially when they've explained so much, and worked so well, for so long. GDP and economics is no exception as cognitive dissonance and groupthink combine to create blind spots. Especially in America where after first beginning to recover from the Great Depression and then emerging virtually unscathed from World War II to find itself the only running engine to power the world's economy, GDP continued marching upwards. A key to remember at this point is that much of this period of strong growth coincided with a huge reduction in income (and wealth) inequality as much of the fruits of growth was spread from the penthouse executive board room to the basement boiler room. Also worth noting are the words of the foremost economist of the era, John Maynard Keynes, who upon seeing the tremendous opportunities made possible by growth, predicted that the working week would be cut to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure time as their material needs were satisfied. Incredibly, his optimistic prediction that (material) living standards in "progressive countries" would be between four and eight times higher was made in 1930, a year into the Great Depression! Sadly, this latter prediction has proved true (living standard in developed western economies will have risen about eightfold by 2030) while the former has fallen flat on its face.

You're probably wondering what all this has to do with Detroit, right? One word, hyphenated or not, like Jay Z: neoliberalism. It has not only robbed us of real progress but also ensures there will be many more Detroits and Greeces to come. See, growth, like so much that tastes good at first but eventually turns poisonous, became addictive. All was good up to the 1970s when the United States' unchallenged position as the colossus of the capitalist world came under assault. Rising international competition (read: Japan) as other nations had finally recovered their industrial base after the war coupled with multiple oil shocks as the Arab world awoke to the rape of their resources in return for peanuts led to declining productivity and profitability along with rampant inflation and unemployment, stagflation. Oh, there was a little war they lost too. The corresponding loss in confidence in the dollar also forced Nixon to end its convertibility to gold and take the world into the little understood world of fiat currencies. About the same time as growth seemed to be stalling, the Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth was making Malthusian claims on the unsustainability of infinite growth. The US was ripe for a revolution and they got it in neoliberalism.

The popular myth is that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher rode in to save the day. Of course they were nothing but marionettes and we all know that a marionette's puppeteer is called a manipulator and so it should come as no surprise that they also manipulated us. From neoliberal prophet Friedrich Hayek and his Mount Pelerin Society the poison oozed through Milton Friedman into the University of Chicago to spill out into the world via thinktanks spewing propaganda to be transmitted by their media lackeys and forced onto the rest of the world by the IMF, World Bank and WTO. America has the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute while the UK's versions include the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies founded in 1974 by Thatcher's mentor, Keith Joseph. Despite their benign sounding names, these are radical organizations with almost nothing to do with the likes of Adam Smith who understood something about Moral Sentiments and the dangers of private monopolies and everything to do with Hayek, Friedman and Rand and their belief in extreme individualism or social Darwinism. Freedom could only be achieved through economic liberalization meaning free trade, privatization, deregulation and relying on markets to provide public services.

No party on either side of the Atlantic has a monopoly on this evil. Democrat Jimmy Carter began the deregulation of the banking and transportation sectors. His party's Bill Clinton tag teamed with Labour's Tony Blair in devising the "third way" in a failed attempt to reconcile neoliberal economics with a commitment to social justice. This was always just smoke and mirrors to fool the unwashed masses as neoliberalism is inimical to the public good as it is always secondary to the market, an ideology wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social and economic considerations. As the benefits of citizenship are allocated on the basis of perceived economic utility to the state, corporations are considered the primary citizens while individuals are seen as consumers first and citizens second, peripheral ones at that. Corporations and those in the 1% are portrayed as job creators while the bottom 20% are framed as economic leeches siphoning off financial benefits they don't deserve when it is the opposite that is true as economic policy is designed to distribute wealth upward. Tax breaks and subsidies for corporations and the wealthy are called market incentives while benefits to the poor, aged or disabled are framed as entitlements. However, rather than withering away, as neoliberal theory would have it, the state has instead grown as it plays an active role in the introduction, implementation and reproduction of neoliberalism.

The Tracks Of My Tears
Yeah, yeah, you're still wondering what all this has to do with Detroit going from being the city with the highest median income to bankruptcy in half a century and what it means to America and the rest of us. History has already been rewritten to tell us high wages and benefits were Henry Ford's idea when in fact they were fought for and won through struggle and solidarity. World War II had cemented Detroit's industrial importance as the Arsenal of Democracy and it seemed a place which was proof of capitalism's ability to generate and maintain a large middle class. The illusion was short-lived as jobs were already flowing out of the city to the suburbs in the 1950s just as the migration of African Americans to the city was increasing, lured by the promise of freedom and opportunity denied to them in Jim Crow's last, desperate days. Instead they were welcomed by white flight, residential segregation and deindustrialization; rising racial tension, ghettoization and joblessness was a recipe for disaster which erupted in the 1967 rebellion. In addition to dollar loss this of course kicked white flight into high gear resulting in the loss of much of the city's tax base. Throw in the oil shocks of the early 70s and their influence on changing consumer requirement and the failure of the auto industry to adapt and you had a city that needed a saviour but instead got no succour.

It's no coincidence that Detroit's decline coincides with that of America as the US had the most wealth for the parasite of neoliberalism to feed off and Detroit was its richest and most vulnerable city. Back in 1960, GM was not only the city's but the nation's largest employer and paid an average hourly wage of $50 in today's dollars, including health and pension benefits; today Walmart has assumed the mantle and pays $8.81 and a third of the workers work less than 28 hours a week and don't qualify for benefits. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has ballooned more than 1000% since 1950, from around 20 to 1 to over 200 to 1 (1,795 to 1 at JC Penney). Not only that but the highest tax rate faced by those CEOs was 91%; today it's under 40%. It was those CEOs at the big 3 who made the decisions that sped the demise of Detroit (GM’s Geo Metro 40 miles/gallon for $9,740 in 1991; today GM offers the Volt for $39,145 that requires you to plug it in AND put gas in it to only get 37 miles/gallon) aided and abetted by the neoliberal policies of maintaining short term growth at the cost of long term prosperity. Specifically, it was the financialization of the economy, the pursuit of 'free trade' policies and the war on drugs which sealed the fate of the city.

Neoliberalism is predicated on decreasing the individual's reliance on the state thus increasing their initiative to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The problem is it is impossible for those mired in poverty to do this when they don't even have any shoes - ie. education, healthcare, adequate nutrition, employment opportunities. Meanwhile, those with closets already overflowing with footwear have their shoes shod whenever they need it. Er, let's try to explain that a bit better starting with the election of Ronald Reagan and the belief that income inequality was a prerequisite to growth. Not only was it seen to provide incentive to work harder but it raised the savings rate at the top and as the rich have a lower marginal propensity to consume than the poor it would therefore accelerate investment. Additionally, demand for new products almost always emerged from among the rich and it was them alone who could afford the cost involved in research and development thus enriching them should augment innovation. In 1981, the Budget Reconciliation Act along with the Recovery Tax Act introduced across the board tax cuts favoring the redistribution of income to the rich, deregulated monopolistic industries and began the war on the poor by reversing many of the social gains made over the previous 50 years. The shooting war, however, came with his war on drugs.

War (What's it Good for?)
Sometimes numbers are staggering enough on their own and require no explanation. When the explanation is every bit as distressing, well, then you've got the American prison industrial complex. Only China comes close to the US in prison population and only Russia approaches them in percentage of the population incarcerated. Though only comprising 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners, about 1% of the population is trapped in the system and the total number has increased 700% since 1970. Yes, it's been a booming industry that's seen $300 billion spent since 1980 to expand the prison system. Not only does it provide employment for the gatekeepers, it reduces the eligible workers counted in the unemployment rate. The poor, worth almost nothing to our corporate masters on the streets, can generate revenues of $30-$40 thousand a year behind bars. Unsurprisingly, almost half of federal prisoners are in for drug related offenses. The bipartisan love of war is illustrated by Clinton's signing of the crack cocaine sentencing guideline bill which targeted the poor black community by making crack cocaine convictions exponentially longer than those for powder cocaine. It gets even worse when you realize it was the CIA who introduced crack into inner-cities to fund waging war in Central America. Prison privatization has brought the market into play with the law while prison labour is a pretty attractive alternative for those looking for a, um, captive work force.

We shouldn't ignore that more traditional method of sacrificing the money and lives of the poor for the glorification and enrichment of the wealthy. Much like neoliberalism, the idea that war is good for the economy and therefore beneficial is a societal sickness that has been perpetuated by myth makers who mysteriously profit from this delusion. Here we should pause once again to consider the suicidal tendency involved in believing that GDP growth is a good thing. Did you know for example that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill added about $300 to the average Americans income? The bloated prison system adds about $125. The US medical system isn't the most expensive in the world (while getting worse results than most of the 'advanced' economies) because they like having millions die for lack of basic care (we hope), but because it adds more zeroes to the bottom line and GDP. Add in a bit of conspicuous consumption, insanely priced education and the trillions wasted on war and suddenly it's pretty easy to understand why even though the size of the US economy has doubled since 1970, overall well-being has declined. Reagan pumped up the gravy train flowing from the public to the private purse, Bush the elder began the family tradition of bombing Iraq, Clinton, though he oversaw a reduction in military spending still indulged in some explosions, Dubya, yeah, he almost doubled the amount spent to kill people and Obama has put a smiley face on murder by remote control.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered
It was Bush the elder who got the NAFTA ball rolling and kept the Uruguay Round of trade talks alive but it was Clinton's signature that brought NAFTA and the WTO to life and sealed Detroit's doom. The agreement turned North America into a 'free' trade continent which Clinton promised would promote "more growth, more equality, better preservation of the environment, and a greater possibility of world peace". Oh, and it would create 200,000 jobs. Well, he was only a little over a million off as a report by the Economic Policy Institute documented that 879,280 jobs were "displaced" due to the deal. Thanks to it and other free trade deals pushed on the public to promote growth, the exciting game of labor arbitrage has been played for the past few decades, a game always won by big business as profits are padded at the expense of labor as salaries are slashed and jobs outsourced. While employment protections are rarely included in these deals, NAFTA provided a template for investor protections which effectively remove sovereignty from signing states.When you wonder why neither the public nor your government can ban Monsanto crops to prevent the loss of agricultural diversity or Bayer from killing the bees we depend on for pollination or Chevron from poisoning the water table by fracking you'll be sure to find a clause in one of the corporate written free trade deals one of your governments sold to you as necessary for economic growth.

As mentioned a few hundred paragraphs above, it's rarely those on the throne making the decisions; therefore, its the stories of those who do that make for the grist in this modern day cautionary tale. Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin was one such Grima Wormtongue. Time Magazine would have us believe he was part of the Committee to Save the World (that's him on the left) when his face should have instead been pasted on a wanted poster. See, the crowning blow in this whole story was the financialization of the economy, a process that has allowed the illusion of economic growth to continue by simply feeding off existing wealth and borrowing from the future. For his service in the creation of the TBTF, TBTJ (too big to fail, too big to jail) bank, he was paid $126 million by the same financial institution whose very existence his policies made possible, Citigroup. Clinton's signing of both the Rubin championed Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed Glass-Steagall which had kept gambling separate from banking, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which prevented the regulation of financial derivatives delivered the coup de grace for Detroit and the rest of us leading us as they did directly to the 2008 financial crisis.

A spike in prices at the pump killing demand for the SUVs that had temporarily saved them combined with the financial crisis bankrupted two of the three Detroit automakers, GM and Chrysler. The same crisis collapsed the Ponzi scheme run by banks that relied on a constant stream of new mortgages to be bundled and securitized and left millions homeless. As this predatory lending targeted African Americans, both Detroit and its residents were among the hardest hit. With an ever-shrinking tax base to support an immutable city infrastructure, budgetary problems have plagued Detroit for the last 20 years. Besides a brief respite in the mid-90s when it was falsely believed that new casinos and stadiums could reverse the city's fiscal problems, the city has been burdened with a junk debt rating. In an attempt to balance the budget, the combination of rising taxes and cuts in services drives out residents and businesses while the erosion to basic social services leads to a drop in home values and rising crime. Desperate politicians become an easy mark for the wizards of Wall Street who seem to offer a way out, and besides, when the bills come due they'll most likely be out of office. While the sheer audacity of the fleecing of Detroit is dwarfed by that of Alabama's Jefferson County bankruptcy tale courtesy of JP Morgan, Detroit could have done without a $2.7 billion bill for borrowing $1.4 billion in 2005 thanks to bankster interest rate swaps and derivatives.

Here's where the morality tale gets good. This financing deal was needed to fill a gap in the city's defined benefit pension funding, the kind that provide a guaranteed annual income after retirement. Public employees paid for those pensions with lower wages while working; n other words they accepted less then to get some later. But get this: governments consistently underfund their pension plans. In Detroit, the gap's about $3.5 billion, but nationwide all levels of government are about $1 trillion short. Not so bad, as Paul Krugman would have us believe, until you consider to come up with this figure necessitates an 8% average return on invested pension assets. D'oh! Not that whole growth thing again. It gets worse. Listening or reading to much of the MSM hype (always stating the $9.2 billion shortfall which includes unfunded health care obligations) one could easily get the impression that there is a movement afoot to convince the public these pensioners are greedy bastards who don't deserve a dime. The bankruptcy process will determine which creditors get paid back and in what order, pension plans justifiably fear they may fall to the bottom of the pile, because you know, society thinks giving $19,000 a year to someone who picked up garbage his whole life isn't as important as paying off banks and hedge funds.

There's the rub. It's true. Go read the comment thread on any article about the Detroit bankruptcy and you'll soon see that Joe Sixpack has been convinced that bailing out banks is/was good as they add to the economy while pensioners are bad as they subtract. They wouldn't consider the continuing bank bailout, as in the quantitative easing program that sees the Fed give banks $85 billion a month in interest free green pieces of paper in exchange for other pieces of paper, could pay off Detroit's debt four times over each month. Nor do they see anything bizarre about a city entering bankruptcy subsidizing a billionaire's hockey team's arena that will see the city pick up almost half of the $650 million tab because corporate welfare is called market incentives and I'm sure that the money sucked out of schools, parks and you know, quality of life things to build Ford Field for the Lions and Comerica Park for the Tigers in the past dozen years has worked out great; a bunch of spanking new stadiums for those who fled to the suburbs and therefore not paying for them  to come in to the city and enjoy while the only chance to see the inside for those paying for them will be if they're selling foam fingers and foamy beers.

Money (That's What I Want)

The press reports unemployment is falling, which is true, but the warped measurement is meaningless as employment isn't rising enough to even keep up with population growth. It's not just an insufficient number of jobs, it's the kind of jobs being created; the low-paying, menial, dead end sort without any benefits. In fact, 60% of the jobs lost during the recession were classified as mid-wage while 58% of the job gains since are low-wage. This wage suppression is great for companies like WalMart who get to have their workforce subsidized by the government as most of their worker earn so little they often qualify for government assistance; tax payers pay on average almost $1 million per store. All this means wealth is flowing up at an ever-increasing rate; 121% of the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% (yes it's possible as they've scooped a portion of the rest of the population's pie) while corporate profits are at all-time record levels and wages are at all-time lows. Zooming out from America, the wealth gap between countries is also widening, globally the richest 300 people own more wealth than the poorest 3 billion; the richest 1% have accumulated some 43% of the world's wealth, while the bottom 80% of the planet's inhabitants have just 6% between them. Guess which group is stashing up to $32 trillion in tax havens, effectively removing wealth from circulation.

Cognitive dissonance seems to be hiding the realization that the American Dream is dead, at least in the old idea of each successive generation living better than the previous. This is because neoliberalism is great at pumping up bubbles upon which the rich float while the rest sink with the pop; it's no longer true that a rising tide lifts all boats. Privatization, deregulation, globalization, robotization, computerization and financialization have transformed western capitalism from industrial to financial. In other words we've moved from a system which produced nothing in itself but derived profit from the value created by the exploitation of labour to a system that simply squeezes profit out of existing assets. The former system was able to thrive using the old panem et circenses gambit but with the latter, present system, eventually they'll be no more crumbs to toss to the masses. Suicide rates are already skyrocketing among baby boomers as economic insecurity pushes people over the edge and now their pensions are being circled by the sharks. Meanwhile the young face the choice of fighting for a job at McDonald's or going to university so they can add to the $1.2 trillion in student loan debt and cross their fingers they can get an unpaid apprenticeship position when they're done.

Instead of realizing we're all in this together though, those manipulating puppetmasters will pull our strings using the old techniques of, among many others, media manipulation (I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine), fear (terrorists!), divide and conquer (it's those greedy unions and pensioners!), patriotism ('Murica, F#ck Yeah!) and of course debt servitude to maintain control of the flock. Lockeed was bailed out because they build stuff to blow people up, Chrysler's been bailed out a couple of times, GM once, they build Godcars don't you know, the airlines had to be because of, you know, terrorism and the banks, well, without the banks, we know the whole world as we know it would have ended. What about New York City's bailout in 1975? Well, that's different than Detroit, because, well, it would create moral hazard this time, or something. What's that? What about Mexico? No, they didn't bailout Mexico in order to save face after NAFTA was signed, did they? Yep. But not Detroit.

ABC
Solutions? Well, there's a few out there. The first step, however, is the realization that we're doing it wrong. An economy based on debt (issued by bankers, not government) inevitably collapses on itself. Henry Ford himself said "[i]t is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning". New money is continually lent into existence at the push of a button so that existing debt can be repaid, but by necessity there is always more debt than money to pay it back. The dog chasing his tail leads to the need for infinite growth, an impossibility on a finite planet thanks to our enemy of diminishing returns, entropy. We've got to realize we already have enough known oil and gas reserves to kill ourselves and stop exploiting tar sands, shale gas and the Arctic. We need to refuse to pay a 280,000% markup for our most important resource, water. The purpose of economic policy shouldn't be to stimulate growth but to facilitate life. A transition to a steady state, non growth economy must eventually occur, the question is do we want to move that way gradually of our own choice or have it (or far worse) foisted upon us by the inevitable collapse of the system.

Alternatives to the constant drum beat of growth have been proposed such as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, the New Economics Foundation's Happy Planet Index, and the Social Progressive Imperative's Social Progress Index. No growth or steady state economic policies need to be explored if we want to get off our suicidal treadmill. Perhaps once the US has been knocked off its perch atop the global GNP rankings by China sometime in the next decade we'll finally de-emphasize its importance. The chant of 'We're #2!" just doesn't have the same allure. America will still lead in such prestigious areas as anxiety disorders, obesity (well, Mexico might have passed them), incarceration rates, small arms ownership, health care cost, and energy use. Huh, taken together with the other effects of Detroit's problems mistaken for its cause, such as that 50% literacy rate and other societal diseases prevalent in America, one can make a case for simply finding a way to better spread the wealth than grow it. It seems we should take a lesson from the extreme wealth of Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe and extreme poverty of most of Detroit co-existing in an urban metropolitan area. Yes, in fact if I remember right there's a chart that shows the relationship between income inequality and an index of health and societal problems constructed by a couple of epidemiologists. Yeah, perhaps we should look at this a little closer, or maybe we'll save that for next time.

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...

 

Green Revolution

So much has been written about the bailout and Michael Phelps that I'm loathe to add to the blog-o-mess. Can't seem to avert my eyes though, staring at America as it goes supernova these days is too much like the irresistible pull of the solar eclipse, truly blinding. However, I'm not going to waste your time by going on about the fact that weed is less harmful than many government sanctioned drugs, well maybe a bit. Nor will I bitch about the incessant bickering between the Democrats and Republicans over the stimulus package...well, that too a bit. In fact, let's talk about the two together, here's my plan.

Legalize marijuana. Period. That's your stimulus plan. None of this medical weed debate where 72 year-old milk carriers bring relief to dying patients. It's legal for everyone. By doing this you can save enough money to pay for the green energy investment that is necessary to pull the world economy out of depression. Oh yeah, it is a depression, even Gordon Brown says so. Depression is a euphemism created in the 30's, collapse is more descriptive (FYI the word recession was also invented in the 30's, during the 2nd downturn in '37). Anyway, the math is relatively straight forward. The savings to government spending would include enforcement, incarceration and social programs. There were 872,720 arrested on cannabis charges in the US in 2007, 89% of those for simple possession. Not thinking about police manpower savings, court time savings of these arrests would be $8 billion plus the US spends more than $1 billion/year to incarcerate only those convicted of weed crimes. Simply taking that $9 billion plus the $6 billion in taxes we could make on the sale of marijuana, say 16% tax rate on the approximate and conservative $36 billion in US production, (lots more coming in from Mexico and Canada) would bring a cool $15 billion total. California already makes over $11 million (as high as $100 million) on medical pot sales alone, America has a little jail overpopulation problem having the highest per capita jail population in the world, sounds like a perfect fit.

Of course, this is the green revolution, so we invest this stimulus solely in renewable energy. I'm talking bio-gas, solar, wind, geo-thermal, tidal, the works. The creativity of our newly empowered workers will aid in this as well. Both alcohol and tobacco are more harmful than weed. The Lancet journal (the Lancet for crying out loud, Britain's big medical journal) released a report in 2007 that ranked marijuana less harmful than the two based on harm to the individual, society and dependence inducement (addictive power). Heroine and coke lead the pack, alcohol and tobacco at 5th and 9th respectively, weed in 11th - my Yemeni favourite, khat, came in 20th. Not to mention the relief, even life saving benefits, it brings to those suffering from many chronic illnesses. Unfortunately, marijuana has been the victim of a propaganda war for a couple of centuries, from cotton producers who wanted to get rid of the more versatile and easier on the soil hemp as a competitor, to Mexican haters and even Mormons. The first federal US regulation was the Narcotics Act of 1914, which regulated heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. The only trouble is that cocaine and marijuana are not technically narcotics; the word "narcotic," when used in English, has historically referred to opium derivatives such as heroin and morphine.

Overcoming this disinformation, as when discussing many subjects these days is the biggest barrier. Logistically it would be difficult, but not as difficult as the hangover we're in for in a few years from the stimulus package that the government is going to feed the country. Guess that's the difference between whiskey capitalism and the green revolution, another benefit to smoking over drinking, no hangover. Somewhere around 6% of the US population smokes grass regularly (half the population has tried). Michael Phelps just lost his Kellogg's deal, hello, can we say perfect spokesman. With him on board we should be able to grab at least 10% of the market to grow revenues a bit, 14 gold medals dude. Go Reefer Man: