We’re mostly stoners now

I am not a marijuana smoker myself, so I don’t have a horse in this race. And I might add that if I were to actually try marijuana, it might make me claustrophobic and cause me to wander the pavement at night, startled by sounds such as kids on skateboards, and afraid to go indoors. Then I might see fit to eat every frickin’ morsel of carbs in the house. That’s what I think might happen, so I don’t mess with it.

But here’s a new poll, done by “conservative leaning” O’Leary, that shows that 52% of the public favors legalization of pot.

These 52% are free to join the 70% or so that favor single payer health care. They may now stand in the hall and wait for class to end. They are no longer relevant.

Drug policy is not health policy. Some drugs, like crystal meth, are truly harmful, and we should educate people about them. Others, like pot, are merely recreational. I’ve known potheads – people whose brain seems to be saturated in ‘don’t give a shit’ juice. That’s not good, but they don’t belong in prison any more than the habitual drunk or gambler. That cross-section of society will always be with us. Perhaps they are people who are simply not a fit in our agricultural society – hunter-gatherer remnants who don’t regiment easily. Maybe they merely yearn to breath free and cannot, and so take refuge in mental escape. Maybe they just like a buzz. Whatever. Leave ’em be. They are not hurting (or helping) anyone.

I’ve heard various stories about criminalization of pot, from the Hearst effort to suppress production of hemp (see here, scroll down to 1898) to Chomsky’s assertion that it is done to take control of the pesky minority populations. (Suburban white people don’t have to worry about their doors being busted in while they snort cocaine. But in poor and minority neighborhood, people have to be extremely vigilant, as the cops are looking to bust anyone who sneaks a joint.)

Others simply say that we need some reason to get rid of surplus population of young males, and we can’t put them all in the military. So we throw them in prison.

This I know: Marijuana will remain illegal, and millions of people, mostly minorities, will be kept in prison because of it. It’s not drug control. It’s people control. Government will not easily give up its hammer.

PS: Here’s a fascinating Glenn Greenwald piece on his experience with legalization of drugs in Portugal. It’s been an unqualified success, with drug use down, treatment up, imprisonment nonexistent, and money formerly used for prosecution and incarceration freed up for other uses. Greenwald and CATO are in league on this.

The Sellout

Sen. Max Baucus is in the process of cutting a deal with the insurance industry, and of undercutting the movement for health insurance reform that has gathered so much momentum in these last four years. I don’t know what the final product will be – I only know that unless Democrats can mount severe and direct pressure on Baucus, he will not change his ways. That is, they have to threaten to hurt him.

They have never done this before. I doubt they will do it now.

First, a word about private health insurance: It is structurally incapable of offering universal care. It does a fairly good job of covering people in the workplace. This is because people in the workplace generally are not there because they need health insurance. Consequently, adverse selection is avoided. I have no doubt that, job insecurity aside, most people who have insurance through their job would like to keep it. I have had it myself, and coverage was very good.

Outside the workplace, it’s a different story. There are professional organizations, such as engineers or accountants or small business owners, who are drawn together for reasons other than health insurance. These groups sometimes offer health insurance to their members. But more and more these groups are denying insurance to members due to adverse selection – people joining solely to get health insurance. I was turned down for insurance by the Montana Society of CPA’s because of my preexisting condition. I no longer belong to that group.

Individuals trying to buy insurance on the open market are pretty much screwed. Either they are fairly well-to-do and healthy, or they will not be offered coverage. If they can afford insurance but have one of the hundreds of conditions that qualify as “preexisting”, they’re out of luck.

The health insurance companies are running a business. They have to do what they do, otherwise claims will skyrocket. Premiums will follow, and people will drop coverage, and eventually they’ll be left covering the already-sick at enormous cost. Health insurance companies are not run by bad people – these are smart people who are selling a product that simply cannot meet our needs. I don’t wish ill on any of them. I only want them to find a new profession.

Private insurance is heavily bureaucratic and expensive. They have to pay high commissions to sales people to sift through the population to find profitable clients. They have to generate a profit for investors. They have to avoid paying claims, requiring expert staff to justify the practice of formally denying benefits. And they have to dump their costs – on patients, hospitals, doctors, government, and other insurers.

But there two ways that private health insurance can both meet our needs and be profitable: 1) If coverage is mandatory; and/or 2) if government subsidizes it. But to demand that people buy their product is neither fair nor wise; to subsidize it is to institutionalize their inefficiency.

There is really only one solution in our diverse country: Single payer. But that won’t happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we need a mixed system, with private insurance operating in the employed workforce, and government insuring anyone who wants coverage (with subsidies for the elderly and the poor). This is called the “public option”.

Now comes Max. He’s already taken single payer off the table. Fair enough – it’s not going anywhere no matter what. But yesterday, he had doctors arrested for trying to butt into his private circle of friends. He’s really gotten to be an arrogant dick.

According to Open Secrets, Max’s top contributors, 2003 to 2008 are as follows:

Securities and investment ($1,003,018); Health professionals ($851,141); Pharmaceuticals and health products ($850,131); Lawyers and law firms ($791,004); and Insurance ($784,185).

I didn’t see a listing for “the uninsured and people abused by insurance companies”. So we’re screwed. We spend a great deal of time trying to analyze the impact of campaign contributions – do they influence a politicians vote? I can answer that: Duh. It’s worse than that – every dollar has the impact of two dollars: If Baucus doesn’t collect these dollars, they will go to a potential opponent. He too is a smart business man.

So what is coming down the pipe? Probably we are going to get some sort of universal plan with a mandate that people buy insurance from private companies. Unless 70 House Democrats prevail, there will be no public option. Insurance companies will be required to cover people with preexisting conditions, but this is key: They will be subsidized. Government will pay them to do so. Add one more layer of costs to our already-overburdened system.

Ordinarily a piece like this ends with the words “Write or email Senator Max Baucus. Tell him you want health insurance with a public option.” That’s bogus. First of all, emails are pointless – they are too easy to generate and submit en masse. And letters take weeks to get to him due to the anthrax scare. And anyway, he’s not listening.

Instead, I ask the following of Democrats:

Turn against Max Baucus. Punish him. Hurt him. Call his local office. Don’t even think about being civil. Write nasty letters to the editor. Organize groups to picket his offices, letting the newspapers, who generally support him, know what you are doing. (That way, they can ignore you too.) Vote for his opponent when you get a chance, even if that opponent is a Republican or a whack job. Above all, be nasty to him. Let him know he is a schmuck.

Max is extremely vain, and treasures his image. Tarnish it. Face him head on, tell him what you really think. Don’t stutter.

Max is not a sellout. He never had to sell out. He’s bought, from the very beginning.

Disabused …

Craw: The thin-walled expanded portion of the alimentary tract, used for the storage of food prior to digestion, that is found in of a bird or insect

I must have an expansive craw that is as big as the bladder of an elephant. Yesterday two statements lodged. Explosive dislodging is in order.

From David Crisp at Billings Blog, writing about a post by Professor Rob Natelson at Electric City Weblog: :

I am not as far to the left as Mr. Natelson is to the right, but I admit that I saw elements of what looked like fascism to me in the Bush administration. We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us; we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests. We suspended, without admitting it, habeas corpus. We adopted torture for the first time in American history. We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs. We ignored and insulted allies. It’s the closest thing to fascism I have ever seen in America.

American journalists need to be focused and attentive, but there is more to it than that. They also have to wear blinders, and steadily focus only on acceptable subject matter. Otherwise, they move on to a new profession, say, house painting.

The most important part of the job of the American journalist is not to know certain things, and most of them are very good at their jobs. Crisp is one I have always thought saw those things he was not supposed to see. I thought of him as a man with a good eye and a flare for a pithy phase.

Yesterday I shed my illusions. Crisp noticed things under Bush that he hadn’t seen before:

We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us…

Just in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Bosnia. Afghanistan. All before Bush. I’ll shorten the list by not mentioning those countries we attacked without full scale invasion.

we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests.

This strains credulity. I’ll limit my scope to one small area where we have run the affairs of other countries with that seamless marriage: The Western Hemisphere. Every single country, including Canada, who we harassed and invaded on several occasions in our early history. It’s been going on since the days when John Quincy Adams said that Cuba would fall into our hands like “ripe fruit”.

We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs.

OK – I’ll give him this one. This is an area where I suspect Crisp may be right – in the past, the U.S. has not been racist nor has it picked out any one religion or culture for special humiliation. We’ve been indifferent as to whether the target of our animus was white or black or Hispanic, Christian or Muslim or Hindu. We go after everybody.

Finally,

We adopted torture for the first time in American history.

Crisp’s blog, like mine, is not widely read. Were it, there’d be guffaws and explosive snot rockets from Panama City to Khartoum, Hanoi to Athens. It’s a long way from here to tiger cages, and none of those poor Vietnamese schmucks who were dropped from helicopters after interrogation lived to tell their story.

Yes, Mr. Crisp, the U.S. does not torture. Never did before, doesn’t now, and won’t continue to do so in the coming decades. I’ve got a bridge in my backyard … give it to you for a song ….

The saddest part of this is not just one lonely editor in Billings – it is the entire Democratic Party who thinks that Obama has cleaned up our act. All the tricorders have now been turned off. All is calm on the starship. We’re not curious anymore.

Enough. Here’s the other insect caught in my craw: “Just a Citizen” writing at Electric City Weblog:

Not sure the age of empires is over. They may look different but still be an empire.

This might actually be insightful and observant. JAC might see something that none on the right or the housebroken left can see. The United States is an empire. However, read further:

Think what the cultural Nation of Islam might look like in 40 years, given current demographic trends in Europe and N. America.

‘Nuff said.

Liberals Not Allowed

From Bloomberg:

Senators from both parties said the Democratic president should avoid filling the [Supreme Court] vacancy with an “ideologue.”

Allow me to translate: No liberals, please. Roberts and Alito, ideologues, are conservative ideologues, and therefore not ideologues. Are you getting this? It’s easy once you understand how we talk without saying what we really mean.

Here’s more: It is said that conservatives cannot handle nuance. Here is Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) on the coming appointment:

“I think the criteria should be to follow the law, not to make the law.”

Once again, translating: “Don’t upset the existing power structure.”

But the idea that the Supreme Court should “follow the law” is absurd. Cases come before the court because of differing interpretations of the law, which is vastly complex. If “the law” were written down somewhere so we could look it up when we needed to, we wouldn’t need a Supreme Court.

Where is Power?

This is an academic exercise, but I think worth doing. It is a contrast between our perceived system of governance, and the real one. Here’s perceptions:

The people are all-powerful. We elect representatives who write and execute laws, and who appoint judges who interpret those laws. We have three branches of government, each held in check by the other two.

Obama recently said that in approaching Iran, it is important to know that “Iran is a very complicated country with a lot of different power centers.”

True about Iran and true about our country as well, as Obama well knows. What I am trying to do here is to recognize various power centers that exist in our country, and put them in order of the amount of power they exercise. It’s a useful thought exercise.

The corporations – these are a wide variety of entities that operate in different sectors (finance, oil, communications, etc. ) but who often enough support one another. Their power extends far beyond our borders, and our military often does their bidding under the guise of humanitarian interventions.

The mainstream media Since it is owned by the corporations, it is a merely subset.

Military and intelligence agencies – these are vast, mostly secretive, and are largely funded in secret.
The president, or the executive branch. It is powerful, but submits to the will of the corporations and the military. Mainstream media, owned by the corporations, ‘vets’ presidential candidates and determines who is “viable” and who is not.
Wealthy families and individuals these are people with massive fortunes who exercise great sway over tax policy and are usually virtually in control of the localities where they live. Most people do not recognize their names, for instance, ask any Montanan who Denny Washington is.
Think tanks These are intellectuals who are funded by and serve corporations and wealthy families. They are a safe harbor for government officials while they are out of power. They also have large sway over favored opinions of government officials, providing pseudo-science to support public policies that favor their funding sources.
The Senate – more powerful than the House because its members have longer terms, and because a minority there can usually thwart a majority in the lower house. Cannot be ‘gerrymandered’.
The House of Representatives Our most democratic body, and most susceptible to swings in public temperament. Gerrymandered.
Large land owners This is odd, as they could also be called a subset of “wealthy families”. Ownership of land conveys power, as in Montana, where though ranchers are a minority, and not our wealthiest citizens, they usually hold a large share of seats in the state legislature, often the governorship, US Senate and House seats as well. They are, in Montana, also known as the “Department of Livestock”, an unelected organization the elected governor never trifles with. Interesting.
The “courts” Oddly, ordinary citizens still have the ability to challenge power centers through the courts, and often do so. Corporations are trying to bring this source of power under control with their campaign to demonize “trail lawyers”, that is, people who sue corporations.
State Governments Powerful, but no power beyond their jurisdictions, and little sway over federal officials.
Municipalities Mini-fiefdoms having locally focused power, but little beyond city limits. These tend to be very democratic.
Public opinion As of this moment, public opinion means virtually nothing in our democracy, as it is easily swayed and manipulated by the other powers. But if it is focused and enraged, it can thwart every other power center. Witness: The USSR. Not the USA, however. Odd that the USSR was more democratic than us.
Other communication sources This would include the “alternative media”, the Internet, town halls and public meeting forums. Note that the Internet was once seen as a great source of organizing power, as when protesters used it to upset the corporate apple cart in Seattle in 1999. But it has largely been neutralized, and corporations are hard at work to bring it under their control.

That’s all I can think of right now. I expect that others would add others, such as state and local police, labor unions, and the NFL? You tell me. Also, I expect everyone would re-order and re-word what I wrote.

Add: Organized crime -not sure where it fits, but it exists everywhere. As noted in comments below, I overlooked religious institutions, academia, lobbying groups. Academia is largely subordinate to other power groups, as it is merely training the next generation of managers of the existing institutions. (There is constant pressure exerted on colleges to avoid dabbling in freedom of expression – i.e. – Horowitz.) Non-corporate lobbying groups exert their power on Congress, but Congress itself is subordinated to other more powerful forces. But they are very good at getting money out of the treasury. Religious institutions don’t appear to me to have much power over government, though fundamentalists that vote en masse to exert more influence than those that merely attend to spiritual needs of followers.

Journalists: You lead, we’ll follow

An entry at MetaFilter provides the following quote, but does not give its source:

“The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet.”

It then links to a new online literary magazine, the Wag’s Revue. It looks interesting, and I hope it satisfies the gist of the quote leading us there.

Those words capture some small part of truth. Another field, journalism, has long endeavored to install professional rigor on the business of collecting news. They are serious people. However, they have largely failed. And more so than any other profession that I’m aware of, journalism seems on the far edges of fogginess about itself, almost completely lacking self-awareness. They give out more awards to one another than Carter’s famous pills.

At the same time, they fail to do the one thing we hired them for: To report to us what powerful people are doing. The reason is obvious: They must answer to those powerful people, and not us. As a result, most news, even in the vaunted print media, is a distraction.

Many people have noted how shallow TV news coverage is, how they operate like pack animals and pounce on trivialities instead of important stories. There’s a reason for that – it’s like squeezing a balloon – the air goes to the place where there is least resistance. Bush/Cheney et al … desk murders, torture, illegal invasions, wiretapping all of us and all of the news media … don’t go there. OJ? All over it! The New York Times used a woman who appeared to be no more than a CIA plant – Judith Miller – as their lead reporting on the attack on Iraq. They sat on the wiretapping story in 2004 – a story that probably would have changed the outcome of the election that year. Not only are they not reporting to us, they seem in league with the powerful.

News reporters chose not to challenge Bush on Iraq. (Better said: They knew better.) They brought in the generals, fired Phil Donohue, and before that Bill Maher (who are not journalists but who are willing to say things that might be true). They didn’t question the motives of the leaders. Instead, they repeated lies. They failed us, utterly and miserably.

On some level, they know this. That’s why they have awards for door stops. They do what most of us do in response to anxiety-causing problems in their lives … compensatory behavior. Award banquets.

That’s broad-brushing, I know. There are many people of integrity in the business. Probably most of them. The paradox is this: How do they put that integrity into print or on air? The answer is that mostly, they can’t. So they dance around the the edges of power, mostly looking outward, and intuitively understanding their own failures. They affirm! their integrity to one another. Pass the salt, please, and the Pulitzer too. I’ll have a Peabody while you’re at it.

I work in a less glamorous profession that is riddled with similar conflicts of interest. Accountants are called upon to audit public corporations, yet those corporations are allowed to hire and fire auditors at will. As a consequence, the early part of this century was littered with accounting scandals like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. It’s a principle known by all to be true, yet systematically ignored: “conflict of interest”: we cannot serve two masters.

In the case of journalism, they cannot both report on powerful individuals and corporations and yet be owned by them. And when powerful corporations have a stranglehold on government, we have a double-conflict: Not only do we get no reporting on the corporations, but none either when governments are serving the corporate will, as with the Wall Street bailout – perhaps the Iraq invasion itself. Instead, government reporting is reduced to the slavish, drooling White House press corps.

So when I read about the web failing to live up to journalistic standards, of failing to marry the “editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the internet”, I can only agree. All I can say in response is please, show us the way. You start, you lead. We’ll follow.

Today would be a good day.

Free Markets at Work

Wilson is a city in North Carolina of about 48,000 people. Its residents were fed up with Embarg, a Time Warner company, and the poor service it was providing for internet, TV, and wireless phone signals. They decided to do for themselves what Embarg would not do for them – provide low cost high-speed wireless services.


Brian Bowman, the city’s Public Affairs Manager: “I have a 10Mbps up/down connection at my house. Can’t get half that from the cable company. I buy it directly from the City of Wilson. After less than a year of residential service, almost 3,000 Wilson citizens are subscribing to Wilson’s fiber optic network. Local businesses can get up to one Gbps.”

Here’s Embarg’s reaction:

Embarg: “We would love to deploy DSL everywhere. We try to make smart financial decisions not only for shareholders but customers. In the very rural areas, sometimes it would take two, three or more years to even pay for the investment.”

This is odd – two or three years to pay for an investment is not outlandish. But Embarg is up against it, in that Wilson can quite easily do for itself what Embarg will not do. It’s not new technology, not rocket science. It’s something any community in the country can and should do. But right wing economics demands that if a private concern cannot make money providing a public utility, the public has to suffer.

So, Embarg and Time Warner did what any free-market loving company would do – the went to the state legislature to shut down Wilson’s city-provided services.

Rather than admit defeat to the pesky local service and go quietly, Time Warner Inc. and Embarq decided to take the fight to the state government, lobbying for several years to get the state government to pass laws to try to destroy the local effort. And sure enough, thanks to a lot of hard work (and money), the cable companies are close to getting their wish — North Carolina’s State Senate have proposed bills to not only effectively crippling or banning the local service, but also to prevent such services from getting funds under the broadband portion of the national Stimulus law.

Says Bowman:

“If the cable/phone companies really want a level playing field, they’d open their books just like we do in the spirit of open meetings and open records law. They don’t want a level playing field. They want to be the only team on the field.”

This is not untypical right wing thinking – private companies know all about free markets, and don’t much like them. They use their money and influence to 1) get regulations protecting themselves from competition; 2) prevent regulations that affect them negatively, and 3) buy access to the commons.

It should come as no surprised that Wilson could provide itself with better service than Embarg, and at a lower price. The rest of the world is years ahead of the American telecommunications industry in providing high speed wireless services. Our companies are too busy in a turf war to think much about customers.

The Magic Bullet

Arlen Specter has switched parties, and is now a Democrat. He was one of two or three remaining moderate Republicans. Since the Democratic Party has a whole wing full of moderate to rightist Republicans, he’s in good company.

I wondered for years about Specter – he’s the man who originated the “Magic Bullet” theory in the JFK assassination. It’s plainly ludicrous, but since it’s official truth, it’s probably in all the kids’ history books now, and Lee Harvey Oswald will officially be the assassin forevermore.

Lately I came to understand the nature and need for a cover-up of the true events of 11/22/63, and realized that Specter was operating on a higher plane than I ever gave him credit for. So no more mystery.

The switch is politically motivated, and hardly philosophical. And liberals are a far cry from holding any kind of majority in the senate, so sixty or 59 votes means nothing. It’s mostly a move designed to save the career of an aging senator, a good and smart man who will probably die in office.

A Game

The object of this game is simple – creative writing. Just let it flow. Come up with the most disjointed logic you can to get to a totally offbeat song that you really want to hear anyway, and do it by writing a special request to Kasey Kasem.

I’ll go first:

Dear Kasey, Last week I was playing ‘go fetch’ with my dog Sinbad. We play in the street here in front of our house in Millard, Arkansas. Sinbad is an Irish Terrier, and I got him for my tenth birthday. He’s ten now, and I’m twenty.

Sinbad enjoys running after the stick – in fact, he’ll do anything to get that stick. He’ll run in front of a truck or go down a sewer drain. One time he even went through the open window of a passing car. Boy was that scary. The driver stopped and threw Sinbad out and then said some very bad words before driving on.

Yesterday we were playing fetch. I had a new stick, maple. It had just come in the mail. Sinbad was anxious, like something was wrong. I threw the stick, but he didn’t run after it. I went and got it myself, and threw it again, and he still didn’t go after it. I thought something was wrong. I looked into his mouth, checked his paws. Nothing. I sniffed around his rear end. Nothing unusual. Then I heard it. Next door at the Hamilton’s, there was a loud pop.

Sinbad barked and went running off, and I followed. He went to the front door of Mrs. Hamilton’s house and barked some more. No one answered. I knocked. Nothing. I opened the door. There on the floor was Mrs. Hamilton, covered with blood. The back door was open. The garage door was too. I heard a car speeding off. Sinbad went to the body and sniffed around her face, and sure enough, Mrs. Hamilton was alive! I called 911, and the ambulance came and took her to the hospital. She’s recovering now, and is going to be all right. And we owe it all to Sinbad.

Kasey, would you play “Lady Godiva’s Operation” by the Velvet Underground? It’s for Mrs. Hamilton, who’s lying in her bed today recovering from her wounds. I think she’d really like it.

And Sinbad is fetching again, just like before. Sinbad, go fetch!