no third solution

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Category Archives: Left Libertarian

The Recession is Officially Over

September 21st, 2010

Yesterday when I got home from work I flipped on the TV and heard one of the talking heads say that the recession is officially over.  And not only is it over, it’s been over, for over a year.  They said that the official end of the recession was June, 2009. Lolwut?

A catastrophic implosion of a magnitude never-before-seen, is over and nobody noticed it except the bow-ties at NBER after they had a year and a half to study, clean, analyze and massage the data?  Yeah, right (and monkeys might fly out my butt).

But look, it’s right there on the graph!

NBER-recession-overPretty sure I dropped an f-bomb or two.

What happened was that the fraudulent system persuaded or blackmailed the government in to bailing them out on the backs of the working class by theft and extortion writ large.  And guess what? The working class is still working, they’re still poor, they’re still living paycheck to paycheck, and most of them are struggling to regain whatever sense of security they might’ve held before the economy went belly-up.

If you want to pick nits and say, “Well the NBER defines a recession’s end as the low point”, I’m not going to get in to a semantic pissing match with you. The fact of the matter is that for most people, this hardly registers as an end to the recession because for most people things haven’t gotten better, they aren’t about to get better any time soon, and it will take years to get back to wherever they were prior to the implosion.

Many forecasters estimate that output needs to grow over the long run by about 2.5 percent to keep the unemployment rate, now at 9.6 percent, constant…

…The broadest measure of unemployment, including people who are reluctantly working part time when they wish to be working full time and those who have given up looking for work altogether, also was at its highest level since World War II. [NYT]

I don’t know how you interpret that, but 10-percent unemployment rate (one that is considerably higher if you account for underemployment) hardly strikes me as an end to a recession. As long as 1 in 10 people looking for work to pay their bills are unable to find work, something is terribly wrong. Until the economy has in-fact “recovered” it’s still a goddamned recession in my book.

To put this all in proper context, we need to juxtapose the fact that 1 in 10 people are unemployed and probably 1 in 5 people are underemployed, with the slave-like systematic dependence on Wall Street, NBER and their respective oracles (who throughout the years have done absolutely nothing but engineer the sort of monetary collapse we recently lived through).

This is the paradox of modern capitalism: masses of people are out of work, fighting to keep their homes if they haven’t already lost them, starving, dropping much-needed expenses like insurance policies, or prescription medications, etc., in order to stay financially afloat…

All of these people still need food, shelter, warmth, leisure, whatever. Everyone still wants goods and services; everyone still wants stuff, and those needs can only be satisfied by production, which requires people [doing work and getting paid for that work]. [link]

It is this way because they want it this way.They want it this way because this is how they maintain control: convince the masses that they can’t take care of their own, convince them that they can’t survive, convince them that they need the government or the multinational corporations of the world to “provide” them with “jobs” and paychecks, convince them that there are powers at work which are infinitely beyond their comprehension.  And every once in a while you stir up some shit, or fail to take the appropriate preventative measures, or maybe go a little (or a lot) overboard.  For a few years everything goes sideways and upside-down.

But it’s enough to remind those working idiots that they aren’t in control, there are things they don’t understand or can’t comprehend, and reinforces the illusion that they do need the parasites.

They don’t.  But until they — we — can wake up and shake the cobwebs out of our collective brains, and systematically withdraw support for such an abomination, it’s going to continue.

This concludes today’s lesson in futility.

The Terrorists are Still Winning

September 13th, 2010

I don’t do the 9/11 anniversary post. Billy Beck sums up my feelings about it pretty nicely or there’s Thoreau’s self-described “tasteless” pull-no-punches memo, in which he congratulates the winners, a list including GW Bush, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, Al-Qaeda, etc.

OK. I kindasorta did one a few years ago the crux of which was: We’re all less safe, as long as the Empire is bent on exporting its democracy, its inflation, its violence.  So, let’s stop using 9/11 to rationalize all sorts of horrible policy which is really the hallmark of terrorist victory.

Now when I say the terrorists won, it’s not necessarily or exclusively the Al-Qaeda.  Remember, there are plenty of terrorists at work within the US government, too. And their machinations are that much worse, because what they do, few people notice. And of those, fewer recognize as acts of terrorism.

The entire official line is a lie. I’m not talking about “There were no bodies at the crash site of flight 93” or “It was a missile that hit the Pentagon” conspiracy-theory crap. I’m talking about the “official” version of the truth, basically a series of lies by omission spanning decades, at least back as far as the end of WWI.

William Blum’s Anti-Empire Report for September 1, 2010 challenges the official line:

[E]ven if one accepts the official government version of 19 Muslims hijacking four airliners — the question remains: Why did they choose the targets they chose? If they wanted to kill lots of American infidels why not fly the planes into the stands of packed football or baseball stadiums in the midwest or the south? Certainly a lot less protected than the Pentagon or the financial center of downtown Manhattan. Why did they choose symbols of US military might and imperialism?

[9/11] was not a religious act, it was a political act. It was revenge for decades of American political and military abuse in the Middle East.

If you’re willing to ignore a century of meddling in the Arab world, pesky details like those are easy to sweep aside.

Medical Pot Clinics Raided in Michigan

August 27th, 2010

I suppose it was only a matter of time, given that this sort of thing has happened everywhere pot has been legalized for medicinal purposes…

On Wednesday night, two medical marijuana dispensary in Ferndale and Waterford, Michigan, were raided. Interestingly enough, Ferndales mayor was surprised by the raid, citing the fact that Clinical Relief (the city’s only licensed dispensary) was in “full compliance” and that there had been no complaints, “zero problems” with the clinic.

pot bustOne man who called a local talk-radio show this morning witnessed the raid on his drive home from work. He said he thought it was a hostage situation or something, and didn’t learn the truth until he read about it in the paper yesterday. According to his account, law enforcement was in full commando attire with ski masks and automatic weapons.

Ryan Richmond, co-owner of Clinical Relief, described the raid thusly:

They had patients on the ground. There were cancer patients on the ground, senior citizens on the ground and staff on the ground. They raided all of our partners’ homes while their kids were home. They were taking their TVs like we were drug dealers.

Allegedly this raid had to happen because the dispensary may have been distributing reefer to people without the proper paperwork (a claim that the owners deny). So, this is essentially a licensing issue — and it’s now OK I guess to send SWAT teams for that. There is no indication in any of the sources I’ve read to suggest that they were backed by a violent gang of uzi-wielding rastafarians, or anything else that would warrant assault weapons and commando attire.

Richmond continued,

…I heard them say they want a test case. That’s what a detective said at the store.

A “test case”. That makes sense in light of Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard’s vendetta against the demon weed. As I’ve noted previously (see here) Bouchard is not at all interested in the will of the people when his own personal agenda is at stake, and he has said as much. In a better world it would be grounds for popular revolt, but at the very least should be grounds for immediate dismissal. But I digress.

Citing an (admittedly) unscientific poll when this was still a ballot issue, I said at the time that Bouchard’s outpsoken disregard for the will of the people is evidence that he has somehow managed to lodge his head inside his anus. Then, in November 2008 when the ballot initiative legalizing pot passed by an overwhelming margin, the people spoke with what little voice the system allows them.

It’s not about what the people want. It’s not about the public welfare. It’s not really about addiction, dependency, or gangs, or any other side-effect of the war on drugs. It’s about power. And Bouchard, like other petty tyrants, doesn’t want to cede an inch.

I wouldn’t doubt for a second that Bouchard staged a raid like this, for the purpose of obtaining a “test case”, either to directly challenge the law, or more likely as a show of force and exercise of dominance, a masturbatory display of power-tripping ego.

Thomas Smith suffers chronic pain from two deteriorated discs in his spine, he says marijuana helped him end an addiction to prescription painkillers. “Those drugs kill people.  It’s the drug companies who are the drug dealers,” he said, lamenting the fact that law enforcement treats people like him as criminals.

The real criminals are all around, Thomas.  They just happen to be wearing the deupty’s brown uniforms and driving squad cars.

no third solution

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