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...

 

Ranting Like Rand Paul or Proving Godwin's Law?

Xenophobia. Sweden. Two words you probably wouldn't put together in normal conversation. How about these two: Intolerance. Holland. Probably not. Let's try again: Atheism. Nazism. Hmmm, getting warmer I suppose if you listened to the pope in England last month. Last one: Uncertainty. Extremism. Yeah, I know, both terms are a little more vague and therefore easier to associate, but what are you gonna do? Random thoughts while I ease into post-vacation life back here in Poland where holocaust deniers take people on their vacations. As I get caught up on the happenings around the world those last two words, uncertainty and extremism that is, seem to pretty much sum up what's been going on as we sit around waiting for something bad to happen.

It seems the UK elections in May, resulting in a hung parliament with no party taking half the vote, foreshadowed the ballot counting to be done for the rest of the summer. People just don't seem to know what to do or who to blame. They have an inkling deep down that the neoliberal, free market movement spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher 30 years ago is responsible for many of the problems facing the world today but at the same time don't trust the left wing to fix things after watching their governments around the world throw good money after bad into a bottomless pit of technocratic waste. The extreme right UKIP may have siphoned off just enough of the Conservative vote to force them to seek a coalition with the Lib Dems. Pity Nick Clegg as he's forced to apologize for all the coming cuts after betraying his base by joining Cameron's party in government, not. A twisted good cop-bad cop routine. The Polish presidential election had a resurrected duck almost snatch victory from the jaws of certain defeat as the eastern rural vote almost swept another Kaczynski into power after he had already conceded defeat. The left of centre label on President Komorowski's forehead (like a Washington state apple with a Kiwi sticker?) means he'll smile for the cameras with Merkel while supporting bailouts to pay back banks who enabled Greece's profligacy that we can just blame on the unions.

In Australia, where there is a compulsory Alternative Vote system to deliver decisive results(?!), voters were forced to choose who they disliked the least: a  power hungry, unmarried, atheist living with her boyfriend without plans to have a family or a Jesus saves budget creationist. Both were anathema to voters as Julia Gillard's Labor party and Tony Abbot's Liberal/National coalition failed to secure half the seats, each getting 72 seats out of a possible 150. The biggest ballot winner was the informal vote - being forced to vote, this is the best way not to do it down under - doodling and blanking one in twenty ballots . Not even tasty pork promises were enough to help the right as the green and independents joined Labor to form a government for awhile. French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement and German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats both suffered ringing defeats in recent local elections. Um, yeah, who wants to keep the Euro afloat forever? The Democratic Party of Japan won an historic election victory in September last year but promptly lost its majority in Japan’s upper house of Parliament and barely avoided naming their third prime minister in the past year as perpetual deflation sparked the non-shooting currency war. The world is still in an economic rut that will get worse before getting better and voters are throwing darts trying to pin the blame.

You can't really blame folks for being so unsure of what to do in the current economic climate but really, Sweden? The Netherlands? It can't be a good thing when two of the countries that first come to my mind when thinking of paradigms of coexistence and tolerance have the election results they did. No, I'm not despairing over the fact that the Social Democrats, the party most responsible for building Sweden's society having governed for 65 of the last 78 years, suffered their worst electoral defeat in 90 years thus handing the conservative alliance their first consecutive electoral victory. No, it gets worse as the parliamentary door has been opened to the extreme right. The Sweden Democrats (SD), a far-right, anti-immigrant party that emerged from neo-Nazi groupings in the 1980s, overcame the minimum electoral barrier of 4% to gain access to the governing process. They received 5.7% of the vote, meaning they will occupy 20 of the 349 seats in Parliament. Oh, the uncertainty? Well, the alliance failed to secure a majority and though they along with all the major parties ruled out working with the SDs, to form a government, they seem to be the alliances only 'natural' ally.

Perhaps this wouldn't seem so bad in isolation but one has to look no further than neighbouring Denmark to see the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party has virtually dictated immigration policy since 2001. April elections in Hungary, where the crisis hit so hard the IMF had to step in (cue evil Darth Vader music) the ultranationalist, explicitly anti-Semitic Jobbik party took 17% of the vote, capturing a quarter of the 18 to 29 vote. Things are even worse in Holland. I'm not talking about the red light district closing or the smoking ban's effect on coffee houses, no, unfortunately it's even worse - another whack job taking advantage of people's fears. The June 9th national election results saw no party attain a majority like everywhere else. No party received over 2 million votes yet 7 parties got over half a million each. The Christian Democrats tumbled from power to fourth, the Muslim vote propelled a party led by a Jew into second picking up one less seat than a party committed to repeating all the same free market economic liberalization mistakes of the past 30 years. That People's Party for Freedom and Democracy 'won' taking 31 of a possible 150 seats simply by recycling the neoliberal economic policies of the past 30 years. Meanwhile a one-issue candidate devoted to hate managed to garner the third highest total of seats. That one-issue candidate's name is Geert Wilders.

Wilders Freedom Party (what a great propaganda name!) grew from nine seats to 24 of the 150 possible. While this amazing growth is due in part to the neglect of the traditional parties towards the issues of immigration and the future of the welfare state, the true roots of the appeal of his racist hate lie with Pim Fortuyn. A proud, openly gay politician, he had energized Dutch politics by convincing a significant portion of the electorate that the conservative values brought by Islamic immigrants weren't compatible with traditional Dutch values. Well, after turning tolerance into intolerance by 'unmasking' the others hate of their society's openness, he was killed in 2002 by a radical leftist animal-rights activist. While we'll never know if he would have become the first openly gay prime minister, he was voted greatest Dutchman of all-time two years later. His death was followed by the murder of film maker Theo Van Gogh after making Submission, a film critical of the treatment of women in Islam. Not only did the Dutch-Moroccan Mohammed Bouyeri shoot Van Gogh in the head eight times as he cycled to work, he also tried to decapitate him, leaving the blade along with another stuck into the body with a five page Jihad manifesto attached. These kinds of things tend to leave a mark on society.

There is a lot wrong with the immigration systems everywhere, not just Europe and Holland. Canada is grappling with Australia's 'boat people' dilemma by hoping that everyone forgets there have been 500 Tamils sitting in a dock for a month and a half; scream 'terrorists' while mothers give birth in custody. Never mind they were victims on the losing side of a genocidal civil war; it's more important to brand losers terrorists than condemn the victors, even if their president decides to give himself dictatorial powers. In Arizona you better be carrying your papers if your foreign looking, 70% of voters had had enough of Mexicans and supported the bill that forces law enforcement officers to check ID if they sense foreign blood. Racial profiling isn't a good thing when a Gallup poll revealed that 39 percent of Americans supported requiring Muslims in the country, including US citizens, to carry special identification. Maybe a green crescent moon instead of a yellow star?

Switzerland voted in a national referendum to ban the construction of minarets due to the obvious threat posed by the four found in the whole country. Belgium has passed a law banning the burqa, a garment estimated to be worn there by at least a hundred women. In Italy a woman was fined €500 for wearing a veil on her way to a mosque. The European backlash is almost understandable as newly arriving immigrants are simply herded through friend or family connections into established neighbourhoods, breeding pockets of life where non-Muslim women feel intimidated walking next to burka clad Fatima on her way home to be beaten. Classrooms where 3/4 of the students are from immigrant families, often without command of the language of instruction and going home to a world where forced marriages and honour killings are part of life. Neighborhoods such as Berlin's Kreuzberg are run by Arab and Albanian family clans that control crime syndicates and receive welfare benefits. Populism and xenophobic backlash is to be expected in times of economic uncertainty and blaming the other is the easiest and quickest way to win a vote. Here in Poland the first presidential election campaign following the IMF takeover from communism was influenced by a "secret Jew" whispering campaign against Prime Minister Mazowiecki that played along next to Lech Walesa's promises to "sweep the Jewish cabal out of the Warsaw Government". The uncertainty of the time allowed a populist movement to power an unknown 42-year-old Polish emigre holding Peruvian and Canadian citizenship into second place. With Polish troops having taken part in Iraq and now stationed in Afghanistan it's more in vogue to scream in protest against mosques than whisper about Jews.

I just wish there was some way to tie the events in Europe with those happening in the US of A. If only there were a group of people looking to exploit the current environment of uncertainty for some kind of political gain. Well, I guess this clip of the above mentioned Geert Wilders speaking at a 9/11 remembrance event organized by Ayn Rand disciple (motto: the only good poor person/Muslim/liberal is a dead one) Pamela Geller in New York to protest the building of an Islamic cultural centre will just have to do:



You see, America also has its own tradition of intolerance and hate to build on. While it's Muslims today who are the main target due to their inability to integrate and accept democracy, the same arguments were leveled in the 19th century by the Know Nothing movement who spread lies of  “the Catholic menace”. There's always been Glenn Becks to stir up hatred against the Irish, Germans, Italians or Chinese. Fear of the other seems to be a genetic legacy from caveman days which may make it easier to understand but doesn't lessen the danger that led folks to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

A perpetual war on terror, the economic crisis, Faux News and the Internet have combined in a perfect storm to incite racism and hatred of the other to greater levels than those in the immediate aftermath of the horrific events of September 11th, 2001. Amazingly, Dubya was more level-headed then than Joe six-pack is today declaring, "The Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion". Seems George just wanted to love them to death through invasion and occupation to even the score and grab their oil. Yet, here we are nearly a decade into invasions and occupations and we're still being bombarded almost daily with stories of pending terrorist attacks. A once proud and confident superpower sits around and watches as their country crumbles around them while resources needed to cover the cracks are siphoned overseas. Sending troops to die in faraway lands to kill or be killed creates pressure to believe that the lives of brown people in those lands are somehow less valued. See General William Westmoreland's infamous statement in the 1974 documentary "Hearts and Minds" that "the oriental doesn't put the same high price on human life as does the westerner." (It's at about 1:35 in the video.) After eight years of fighting a war without a frame of reference to judge victory it becomes ever more difficult to justify killing if you think the others' lives are as valuable as our own. In order to resolve any doubts we may have about the value of human life it's almost natural to want to degrade the value of that other.

After a 30 year binge celebrating the individualistic consumer spirit we woke with a vicious hangover in 2008 that made the millenium headache seem quaint. An economic crisis that seemed to require a collective response coming when it did, after a generation had been drilled to believe that less government equaled greater opportunities for growth, created cognitive dissonance. It seems incongruous to put our well being in the hands of a government that had seen every president since Carter run an election campaign against Washington, only to watch over as committees grew more numerous, more specialized and less reflective of the public. Seeing as successive governments proved to be increasingly incompetent at fixing problems while corporations flourished, we decided to hitch our carts to the express train to riches by electing those officials who could get us there quicker. Economic shocks may have been coming at shorter and more powerful intervals but who cared? Then, an economic catastrophe that no one yet fully understands forced governments that we no longer trust to intervene and prevent a worldwide collapse. But after 30 years of being told we could deal with things better as individuals, from health care to retirement savings and our children's education, this isn't what people wanted to hear. It must be someone's fault. The Mexicans picking vegetables in Arizona for way less than American citizens would was fine when everyone was on the gravy train of the real estate bubble. Now they're under attack, right-wingnut TV impersonators are forced to defend them in Congress because no one else will, which is a problem apparently as it takes time away from more important things, like Lindsey Lohan. A joke many sadly don't seem to get. Economic uncertainty may be even stronger than fear of attack. Super Sarkozy suddenly has to bribe Roma to get on planes to go home (so they can come back a month later) to appease the clamouring of the far right elements of society. Um, yeah, those communities are burning because there's no jobs for dark-skinned people with an accent.

Faux News has been the bullhorn of hate. The most watched news channel in America is a round-the-clock loudspeaker to deliver the wacky stuff dreamed up in the proliferation of "research institutes" that feed the press their trial balloons. The 24/7 consistency of both ideology and story selection more than amplifies the conservative message; it builds momentum for a story by hammering it over and over for days or weeks until the mainstream media finally feels compelled to discuss it, from birthers to truthers and all points in between. In a world where getting information has become part of a contest between iPads and Blackberries to deliver it faster and sleeker along with Facebook updates, it's no wonder our 140 character attention spans don't even notice the slander and revisionism. It slides by mostly unnoticed that Harvard gives awards to magazine editors who write "frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims". Evangelical ministers tell us the seed of Islam was passed to Obama through his father while once respected magazines run front page stories claiming Obama is fulfilling the dream of his Muslim, socialist, anti-colonial drunken Kenyan father. The scary part is that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world”. Bill O'Reilly is considered calm and moderate now that we have Glenn Beck.

It's no coincidence that all those Tea Party types have a thing for dressing up in retro garb screaming about socialism, authoritarian movements often pretend to be grassroots movements. Their words would have a lot more meaning if they had voiced them while the Bush administration launched two wars and a new entitlement, Medicare prescription drugs, while cutting taxes on the economic side all the while allowing Osama bin Laden to really win by destroying America's civil liberties. Now, suddenly, they're mad as hell about the deficit and won’t take it anymore from what they see as a foreign born capitalist hating Muslim? By the time Obama ran for president, "Muslim" was a slur, an accusation about his faith he felt compelled to deny. Racism is the only way to understand many of the attacks that have come out of the right-wingnut fear factory.

The public being fed so much garbage masks the real problems. Note that the Obama administration has undone not one of the powers that Bush arrogated to himself and is adding more all the while. The fact that Guantanamo is still open, US troops are still running Iraq and Afghanistan continues to spin further out of control costs more than just lives. State secret claims are being invoked to cover up plans to hunt and kill citizens. The magnet of hate that gave us Abu Ghraib and messed with people's ethical compass on the subject of torture, now has some questioning if Muslims even deserve First Amendment protection. Oh, Heretz isn't the only one spewing this hate and if you try to defend their freedom of religion you'll be attacked for being an apologist. Governors can invent stories about decapitated bodies in the desert to justify racist laws while others invent new racial epithets like "anchor babies" to justify repealing the 14th amendment, birthright citizenship. Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos?

None of these political movements represent a danger in isolation, but when taken together with the global economic situation and the meh attitude of the populace it strikes fear into the heart that once we notice how far we've fallen, it's usually too late. Rand Paul, he of the Kentucky primary Tea Party win, likes to whip up fear of the coming rise of the next Hitler with stories of people carrying money in wheelbarrows. He's right, there are parallels, but it's not wheelbarrows that scare me so much as, say, a Glenn Beck joking about poisoning the speaker of the house or talking about choking the life out of a filmmaker or fantasizing about beating a congressman “to death with a shovel” (Nancy Pelosi, Michael Moore and Charles Rangel, respectively). Chanting about death panels while spitting on and intimidating legislators doesn't bode well either. Mandatory vaccinations, anyone? Or a new war of aggression (after a false flag attack of some sort, c'mon Iran!). More government intrusions of the most intimate and controlling nature, internet, hello. Or arresting people without warrants. In America the best way to control the people is to get on the TeeVee and the best way to get on the TeeVee is to threaten to burn the Koran to protest a community center being built a few blocks from ground zero.

Mussolini said that "Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power". Smoot-Hawley was no more of a beggar-thy-neigbbour policy than today's currency war that will pull any recovery chances into a protectionist pit. Privately owned militias such as Blackwater, or should I say Xe, may not wear brownshirts but they are bringing the same freedom that the 1920s Freedom Party brought Germany. Setting off club in hand in search of scapegoats may soothe our caveman urges but it keeps us occupied when we could be trying to solve the problems facing us. Once promising progressive presidents seem to be expanding wars, trying to assassinate American citizens, targeting peace activists, spying on Americans, dismantling public education; it almost makes one long for the good old days of George W. Bush. In some mosques, imams are encouraging the faithful to engage in Islamist terror while praising past attacks. Fanatics try to decapitate filmmakers fanning the flames of hatred in a perverse merry-go-round of one upmanship while banks are bailed out with taxpayer money which forces governments to cut back while people are thrown out of homes and jobs as they're not as important to the economy as those banks. It's no surprise we don't know who to vote for anymore. If only this were 19th century Salem and all we had to worry about were angry mobs burning witches.