Libertarianism Vs. Human History

On a recent segment of Sam Seder’s The Majority Report, he featured an interview with a prominent libertarian, and from listening to that sequence, I believe that I understand the basic libertarian credo, which can apparently be summed up in the following statement: No one has a right to the fruits of my labor, I have no right to the fruits of someone else’s labor, and everyone must be responsible for himself/herself and the consequences of his/her actions.

I thought Sam did an excellent job of questioning his guest about the possible legal logistics that might be necessary to establish ownership rights under the libertarian vision, and his guest could not fill in very many of the fuzzy edges, which I didn’t find surprising, but given the preceding summation of libertarianism, a couple of other, even simpler, questions came to my mind.

If a libertarian handed me the statement above, I would have to ask the speaker if he/she really meant to suggest that, in the absence of any centralized authority capable of holding the rich and powerful accountable in any way for their misdeeds, the rich and powerful would simply act in a more responsible manner? Any sort of affirmative reply would then lead me to argue that the entirety of human history would say otherwise. I learned the phrase Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely at a very young age, and whatever else I might have gotten right or wrong on my history tests, I always saw quite clearly the embodiment of that phrase in the darker chapters of every era since our early ancestors started writings things down.

My other potential question to the libertarian philosopher would be to ask what, in the absence of any centralized authority that could redistribute wealth in a more equitable way across society, would prevent the rich and powerful from naturally accruing an ever-increasing share of society’s resources, to the point where any semblance of democratic representation would effectively disappear, leading to the eventual collapse of the entire societal structure when it passes the point of sustainability due to its top-heavy aspect. In the U.S., previous generations have struggled against oligarchy to varying degrees, and that struggle continues to the present day. At the moment, the oligarchs are winning, but if we wish to have a future for our democracy, then the people will have to turn that struggle around at some point, just as previous generations in our country have done.

During my HS days, 50 years ago, I questioned Marx’s class-struggle hypothesis, but then, over the decades, I came to see the reality of that theory, although I would qualify the basic concept with the caveat that the rich and powerful, just as every other segment of society, are not monolithic, but rather, the one percent includes kind and generous types as well as the greedy and heartless jerks of various shades. The greedy heartless ones may even be a minority of the one percent, but they exert outsized influence in the service of their greed, with their money talking loudly as they try to drown out all dissenting voices that might disagree with them.

In light of this conversation about money, libertarianism looks to me like the tool of a group of one percenter greedheads, designed for the purpose of intellectually disarming a portion of potential dissenters who might otherwise pay more attention to injustices perpetrated by those greedheads. Despite its claims to Reason, libertarianism doesn’t seem to stand up well to questions of rational functionality, as Mr. Seder’s recent interview segment would appear to indicate, but to my mind, I see it resting on a foundation of pure fantasy that ignores the entirety of human history. Maybe a few of those greedy one percenters have convinced themselves that they really believe it, but even if they are fooling themselves, they’re not fooling me.

Pipeline Wars 3 — What a Blast!

In my previous post 2 weeks ago, I outlined the stories of 2 particular families who lost property rights to a pipeline. The pipeline companies in both cases wielded the hammer of eminent domain against the families, even though the resulting lines have been designed to function as export conduits, and therefore not designed to serve any public benefit, which is the supposed justification for the use of eminent domain. Both families were forced to grant pipeline companies a right of way, despite strongly opposing the presence of a gas pipeline going through their land.

In one case, the pipeline chainsaw gang massacred the maple trees that provided the basis for a family maple syrup business. In a related development that I didn’t mention in the post, a property owner along the proposed right of way faced the possibility of having to sacrifice an established Christmas tree business to pipeline crew chainsaws. Such stories, and much worse, abound along proposed pipeline routes. Not long ago, one homeowner in MI fought and lost, and had to live with a pipeline going into his back yard less than 10 feet from his back door.

That’s not all — even if you don’t own property that falls within a pipeline’s proposed path, the monster can still hurt you if it gets too close. How? By having your home fall within, or perilously close to, the blast zone.

Less than a year after a woman relocated back to her home town of Deerfield, MA, following the purchase of an expensive house there, she learned, in March of 2015, that a proposed gas pipeline, if built, would pass within 500 feet of her home, putting her inside the so-called 900-foot incineration zone. The woman had paid nearly $6K in taxes for 2014 on the place, which carries an assessed value of $382K, and she had originally purchased it with the intention of operating a Bed and Breakfast business at the location. Before learning about the pipeline proposal, she had completed a series of renovations on the place as well.

As soon as she found herself inside the incineration zone, the woman felt trapped. She believed she could no longer plan on running a B and B, due to liability concerns, yet she also couldn’t sell the place for anything approaching fair market value, because home buyers generally don’t like the sound of the phrase incineration zone. She herself would not want to stay in her home if that pipeline went into the ground, because she doesn’t want to live under the constant threat of a fireball suddenly swallowing her.

Recently the woman, and other opponents of this particular pipeline, including myself, got some good news, when Kinder Morgan announced in late April that it would suspend the project. So does that announcement end the woman’s problems? Of course not. This proposed pipeline monster casts a long shadow, and it could easily take a good half-dozen years or longer to rest assured that the beast will not reappear. In the meantime, it actually could reappear, at any moment.

So what should she do now? Spend more money to develop a B and B business that she may not actually get to operate? That doesn’t sound promising. Should she try to sell the place? As long as the incineration zone possibility lingers in the air, it will lower the value of the property.

But hey, how bad is it really, living in a blast zone? It might not seem so bad until the blast happens, but when it does, it can get really, really, really bad. The day after Kinder Morgan’s late April announcement, a Spectra gas pipeline in western PA blew up, totally destroyed one property, melted some sections of road and caused major problems with lots of other properties in the region. According to one of my friends who has studied the official documents, the actual blast zone far exceeded the official one, and if so, that would only deepen the dilemma of the Deerfield woman, and others like her who, through no fault of their own, suddenly find themselves too close to the potential path of a proposed gas pipeline beast.

The pipeline wars go on, with the pipeline companies blatantly abusing the right of eminent domain, and the authorities all too often siding with the petrochemical industry rather than citizen property rights, although significant exceptions do exist. The sooner we free our society from fossil fuel dependency, the sooner we’ll free ourselves of new monsters, both known and unknown, that the fossil fuel industries might want to unleash.

Pipeline Wars 2 — What Property Rights?

In Part 1, I gave the basic outline of the process by which pipeline companies routinely get the power of eminent domain handed to them by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Once empowered to steal landowner rights, those pipeline gangs quickly set to work stomping all over places where they’re not welcome. Newspapers along proposed pipeline routes have regularly carried stories over the past few years about pipeline surveyors repeatedly trespassing on properties regardless of landowner objections and opposition.

Basically, the pipeline companies do whatever they want, regardless of legal implications, and as often as not, they get away with it, though not always. In the case of Mercer Co., NJ, county officials had given PennEast surveyors permission to survey public lands in the county, and then had to revoke that permission when they discovered PennEast employees conducting soil borings, which could potentially prove harmful to the environment.

The conflict between petrochemical industry desires and essential property rights has set up an interesting dynamic among self-described conservatives who supposedly stand on an ideology of support for property rights, but who, in the real world, and in positions of political power, generally cater to industry wishes. To their credit, a Republican majority in Georgia voted about a month ago to suspend a major pipeline project called the Palmetto, mainly due to property rights concerns.

All too often, though, the legal apparatus aligns itself seamlessly with the petrochemical industry. In February, a federal judge in Scranton, PA, handed over the property rights of the Holleran family in New Milford to the Constitution pipeline gang, who showed up on March 1, with a number of heavily-armed guards, and started a chainsaw massacre of the maple trees that had for many years supplied the sap for the family’s maple syrup business, called North Harford Maple. It remains an open question as to what just compensation actually means in such a circumstance.

Similarly, at the end of March, Sunoco Logistics sent its chainsaw gang to massacre trees on the Gerhart property in Huntingdon County, PA, cutting a path for its Mariner East 2 pipeline project. This beast, designed to carry natural gas liquids from the fracking fields of OH, WV and western PA, will, if completed, terminate in the Marcus Hook, PA, area, just as the Mariner East 1 already does. The Marcus Hook terminal, not so coincidentally, serves as an export facility from which Sunoco began ethane shipments in February.

As badly as I felt over the Holleran situation, being a personal friend of some of the New Milford protestors, and also being someone who had considered making the drive to NM, I still think the Gerhart episode makes the case against the eminent domain contradictions so much more self-evident. The company seeking to build the Constitution pipeline has tried at least in part to maintain the fiction of public benefit from its proposed project, whereas Sunoco doesn’t even bother with the lies when it comes to the ME 2. The company makes no secret of the fact that it ships the natural gas liquids to Europe, and that it has large contracts to fill in that regard. No public interest gets fulfilled by the Mariner East 2 — the only thing that gets filled are the wallets of Sunoco’s executives.

So then, what gives Sunoco the right to cut down trees and build a pipeline across the Gerhart property, where the company’s presence is obviously not wanted? The Gerhart family has owned that property since 1982, and has participated in a state program to preserve forestland on their property, but such facts clearly mean nothing to a greedy petrochemical company. Butane, propane and ethane moving through a pipeline are all, by the way, quite explosive — I mentioned in an earlier piece about 2 teenagers in TX who died when a Koch Industries butane pipeline exploded back in 1996 — so the Gerharts have more than one reason to not want the Mariner East 2 running through their place.

So what gives Sunoco the right? FERC gave it to them, and a judge put his rubber stamp of legal approval on it as well, even though the Mariner East 2 will serve no public good, and therefore, no actual justification exists for the eminent domain hammer Sunoco holds over the heads of the Gerhart family, and any others who might oppose the pipeline gang. 

The Gerhart and Holleran stories are but 2 of many that revolve around the abuse of eminent domain. Some months ago an Ohio landowner walked out of a court and said to a reporter, “I thought we lived in America.” He apparently thought he had property rights, and maybe he did, until a pipeline company wanted to take them away.

I’ll have more pipeline stories to share in Part 3, but the main point to understand is that currently, pipeline companies commonly steal property rights through eminent domain, for projects that plainly do not benefit the public, and FERC empowers them to do so, all to serve a shared monetary interest. 

One further note: I mentioned in an earlier piece about the Koch Bros. that David and Charles do happen to be in the pipeline business, and as anti-government as they claim to be, somehow, I still feel quite certain that they’re perfectly happy to wield an eminent domain hammer that’s been handed over to their company by the government.

Pipeline Wars Part 1 — What the FERC?

A couple of comments posted on DK in response to my piece about the Koch Bros. from 3 weeks ago alerted me to the fact that I have acquired some knowledge over the past few years that may not be commonly understood, and that realization prodded me into sharing some of this acquired knowledge, which relates primarily to recent battles between landowners in various states and the companies that want to build pipelines across the properties of those landowners. Before I get to the relevant details of these struggles, though, as an aside, I do want to acknowledge the reality of actual shooting-and-killing pipeline wars, such as the current conflict in Syria, and to say that I oppose all the Middle East carnage caused by petrochemical greed, but that’s a totally different subject. In the clashes I’ll speak of here, usually no one dies, but plenty of U.S. property owners have their lives destroyed by that same petrochemical greed monster.

A few years ago, at a local presentation by former petrochemical insider Chip Northrup, he happened to share a little piece of industry exec lingo which goes, “You wine ‘em, dine ‘em, and then you pipeline ‘em.” That cute little phrase gives a pretty clear indication that the guys in the top floor offices know exactly what kind of raw deals they dish out to the poor unfortunates who happen to live somewhere along the path of a proposed pipeline project.

Every petrochemical pipeline beast draws its first breath when the pipeline company files an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). As the pipeline wars started heating up a few years ago, I began hearing the phrase, “FERC never met a pipeline it didn’t like.” As far as I know, that had been true up until early March of 2016, when the agency actually did reject a proposal for a pipeline leading to a companion LNG export terminal on the Oregon coast. I personally don’t think it’s coincidental that this rejection occurred only 4 days after a coalition of consumer and environmental groups, including Public Citizen, filed a petition with FERC demanding that the organization create an Office of Public Participation, which it had been directed to do by an act of Congress in 1978, but which it somehow has still not yet done 38 years later.

Once FERC rubber stamps a pipeline application, the pipeline builder receives the power of eminent domain, which it can then bring down on any property owner unlucky enough to own land along the pipeline’s proposed route. In theory, FERC must conclude that the pipeline project sufficiently serves the public interest in order to justify the use of eminent domain, but since the salaries of the FERC commissioners get paid by the industries that it supposedly regulates, the agency sets that bar pretty low. The majority of recent pipeline projects it has rubber-stamped are large, high-pressure natural gas lines designed to facilitate export of the product.

For instance, the 3 new projects designed to cross NYS — the Constitution, NED and AIM — would all connect with an existing line that, of course, stretches up to the Canadian coast. The fact that Canada’s National Energy Board approved 3 Canadian East Coast LNG export terminal applications in September of 2015 also doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me.

Exporting NG doesn’t serve the public interest in any way — in fact, it would undoubtedly lead to higher domestic prices for the gas, which would only serve the wallets of a handful of petrochemical fat cats. The industry knows that the reality can’t justify the use of eminent domain, but it generally must pretend to be answering a domestic public need with every project. However, a serious study of the issue, such as the one MA AG Maura Healey recently commissioned, quickly reveals the lack of domestic need for the new pipelines.

Over the last 2 years, I’ve linked to dozens of pipeline/eminent domain horror stories on a pair of Facebook pages that I handle, so I plan to share a bunch of those as part 2, and perhaps create a part 3, and maybe even a part 4 — I certainly have no shortage of stories about people on the receiving end of that eminent domain hammer from a pipeline company. If you like reading about injustice and petrochemical malfeasance, then stay tuned.

What We Do Know About The Koch Bros.

The Koch Bros. purposely try to maintain a low profile, and don’t volunteer much information to outsiders about their operations, but one thing they do want people to know about them is their libertarian philosophy, and how they genuinely believe and religiously follow their non-religious beliefs.

I don’t find it remarkable in any way that David And Charles would truly believe their bogus self-serving libertarian ideology, which asserts that their bottomless greed actually benefits society in some mysterious and undefined way. However, to cite one small example from the real world, their contempt for government regulation ties them directly to the deaths of 2 unlucky Texas teenagers who got too close to a Koch pipeline at the wrong time. If the total sum of lives destroyed by Koch malfeasance could somehow be calculated, I would bet the number, just from environmental damage alone, would easily expose the nonsense of any supposed societal benefit.

Interestingly enough, pipelines expose the circular logic at the heart of the Koch brand of Reason, in a very straightforward manner. I learned about the concept of eminent domain in school, while growing up in a conservative Republican household, and I also got to see it in action. Construction of the Interstate Highway System started around the time I entered grade school, and the program continued long after my college years. I don’t remember any fellow conservatives speaking against eminent domain or interstate highways back in my younger days, so I guess back then, it wasn’t a political issue, and among the few people I met over the years who had to sell property to accommodate one of those four-lane roads, I’ve heard only good things regarding the government compensation, so while exceptions may exist, it seems to have worked out all right for most of the people affected by the situation. I feel like I personally have benefited greatly from those interstate highways, and I believe the majority of my fellow citizens have too.

But what does a libertarian have to say about eminent domain? If you don’t believe in the concept of public benefit from government, then you certainly could not favor granting any government agency the power to take away individual landowner rights, could you? David and Charles, then, surely must oppose eminent domain, right?

Well, actually, they’re in the pipeline business, among other things, aren’t they! Without eminent domain, you can’t build highways, and you also can’t build pipelines, can you? In the libertarian paradise of David’s and Charles’s dreams, a couple of landowners should be able to hold out for $1 million apiece, just to grant 2 acres worth of Right of Way (ROW), right? According to the libertarian philosophy, the landowner should be able to ask, and receive, whatever price he/she wants, and the buyer should either prepare to pay the price or give up on trying to get the land. So, to be true to their libertarian philosophy, the Kochs must have instructed the executives at their pipeline subsidiaries to forego the option of eminent domain whenever the need for new ROWs arises, and to simply negotiate on price alone without the additional governmental leverage, right? Right?

I’ll freely admit that I’ve never attended any Koch executive sessions or business discussions, and yet, somehow, I feel like I know the answer to that question: “Screw the landowner, use eminent domain, get your hands on the ROW ASAP, ACAP (as cheaply as possible).” Even though I’ve never met them in person, I would bet that if any circumstance in their lives presents a conflict between their supposed libertarian ideals and the possibility of more money, I already know which choice David and Charles will make, and it’s not the ideal one.

None Dare Call Him “S”

“The chainy snake will get you if you don’t watch out…”

When I wrote that line back in the final year of W’s presidency, I wished I had thought of it a few years earlier, because I expected the resulting song to soon lose relevance. Little did I know that in the final year of the next 2-term president, who would be a Democrat, the song’s subject would still cast a long, dark shadow in D.C. In fact, when that Dick started tossing around his pronouncements against Obama’s historic nuclear agreement with Iran, I truly wished that my song had lost relevance. Even if the song had some kind of hit potential, I would, for the good of the country and the future possibility of peace, gladly give up any chance of personal gain from it. Please let this man become irrelevant, and I’ll happily let my song go down into the dust with him.

But what would you call a man who’s been so wrong about so many things? For about a decade, beginning in the late ‘70s, he raised and spent a lot of money trying to convince the U.S. defense establishment and the general public of the threat posed by a super-secret and incredibly-advanced Soviet Union anti-missile system. The CIA could find no proof of its existence, but he said that this just showed how well the Soviets had hidden it. I saw a Committee for the Present Danger video on TV, and at first it impressed me, but the more I thought about the premise, the less believable it seemed. I soon decided that no such system existed, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 proved me right, and proved the CIA right, while proving Dick wrong.

Does that remind you of anything? Like, maybe, Iraq’s phantom WMDs? I had concluded, after Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N., that Iraq had no WMDs. People with a logical thought process, looking at the Iraq invasion, quickly concluded that the military action had more to do with oil and U.S. regional hegemony than it did with possible WMDs, but what would you call someone who really believed Iraq had WMDs, despite the complete lack of evidence?

Many people have also wondered how Dick could possibly have sounded so smart when he spoke in 1994 about the reasons for not invading Iraq, and then could have shortly pulled a full 180 to advocate for the deeply-foolish strategy he had previously opposed. At first it mystified me too, but then I concluded that in 1994 he had recited, as the official position of an administration he had worked for, a memorized script written for him by someone much smarter than himself.

So what would you call a man who can’t tell the difference between a 1% threat and a 100% one (the famous 1% doctrine)? How about a man who utters a simplistic phrase like “We don’t talk to evil” in response to a genuine offer of diplomatic cooperation? Or someone who could believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, despite all evidence and logic to the contrary? What word would describe someone who remains convinced that removing Saddam was the right thing to do, despite the huge expense, the death and destruction, the resulting chaos and the ongoing civil strife, because otherwise Mr. Hussein would have become the modern-day equivalent of Hitler? Can you think of a word for someone who could link Saddam to the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen as well? What if that person speaks in a seemingly-rational manner, but in doing so, presents nonstop irrationality in the content of his speech?

HW reportedly referred to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz circle in his administration as the crazies, but I think there’s a word that better describes them — it starts with an s and rhymes with cupid. The sometimes laughable phantoms that haunt their simple minds don’t exist, though it’s hard to prove it to them because their minds don’t respond to logic and facts. The good news is that this contingent of our political adversaries are not malevolent, but just dumb, and sometimes even very dumb people can be persuaded to go along with smart policies, but the bad news is that they can be extremely dumb, which can make the job of persuasion to smart policy an extremely difficult task. The first step to success, though, is to correctly understand the nature of the challenge.

How I Helped to Get Nixon Elected

If confession is indeed good for the soul, even if that soul grew up in a Protestant family that didn’t have a structured confessional environment, then it might be a good time for me to finally admit publicly, for the first time, that I did a bad bad thing: Back in the election season of 1968, I told a lie.

Growing up in a conservative Republican family, watching events unfold during that summer, with Nixon making it clear why he was smiling as he issued his appeal to the silent majority, I felt that Dick simply had to win in November. I was certain that if Hubert Humphrey took the oath of office in January of 1969, the United States would go Communist before the end of that year. I believed this so strongly that I even thought of writing a book about the looming Communist threat, and how HH and other prominent Dems didn’t take it seriously enough, although now I can’t imagine what kind of factual data I would have presented to support such an assertion and fill out an entire book, let alone how I would have gotten a book published in that long-ago era which predated the wonderful self-publishing tools currently available.

That era also predated our modern partisan polarization, and a significant percentage of voters who identified with one party still felt the need to vote for moderate candidates of the opposing party, at least in part to assure themselves, and their personal circle, of their own political moderation. I saw an opportunity when my friend Brian’s mother said, during a political discussion, that she would be open to voting for a Republican that year if the party put up somebody reasonable (as opposed to Goldwater, from the previous presidential contest). I knew Brian’s family was Catholic, and they usually voted for Democrats, which back then seemed connected in my mind, but I figured I could get his mother to vote for Nixon if I presented the case properly.

What case did I make? I told her that Nixon would end the Viet Nam war quickly, and peacefully. Lyndon Johnson’s VP had little credibility at that point in terms of how he might settle the conflict, whereas Dick claimed to have a plan to accomplish this seemingly-impossible goal. While RMN hadn’t revealed quite how he intended to pull off this feat, the Republicans did have some plausibility in this regard, since Tricky Dick served as the VP for the man who ran in 1952 on a promise to end the Korean War and who kept that promise. Eisenhower also spoke openly about his personal hatred of war, the financial toll it takes on taxpayers, and the danger of the growing military industrial complex.

This Nixon peace case seemed to have worked, since Brian’s mother did vote for Nixon, and perhaps his father may have done so as well, but at the moment when I forcefully presented the argument, did I really think Dick would genuinely conclude peace negotiations over the Viet Nam war? Not for a second. I felt quite sure that he would soon mount a more aggressive military engagement that, I believed, would somehow resolve the situation. I worried about the dominoes falling, and I knew RMN would keep that from happening. I obviously read his intentions correctly, though I couldn’t have had any concept of the living hell he would unleash, or the lingering human and environmental toll it would take in southeast Asia.

I remember meeting Brian in a school hallway on the sunny November morning after election day, and how we smiled and celebrated Nixon’s victory. Little could we have guessed at that instant how much we would both be cursing the man’s image in less than 2 years, and the negativity that his win would set in motion. The racist War on Drugs that I wrote about last week is but one facet of an enduring legacy of malfeasance that will take many more years to unwind, and much greater effort to undo. We have Nixon to thank, or actually to curse, for helping to launch the D.C. careers of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, along with many other monsters he let loose. 

Fellow progressives, bless me for I have sinned. My last confession was never. 48 years ago I told a political lie that changed someone’s vote for the worse, and that helped Nixon win a close election. Oh, my God, am I sorry with all my heart! Even 46 years ago I had realized that I had sinned against people and causes that I held dear, and I long since pledged to never commit such a sin again. Amen.

Quote From The Diary: “… the whole problem is really the blacks.”

“Bad boys, whatya gonna do when they come for you?” While I had plenty of respect for Bob Marley already, during the ‘90s that respect widened, particularly due to that song. I heard it many times, and never tired of it — in fact, I quickly concluded that it was the best part, and perhaps the only good part, of the TV show Cops. I had no interest in the show, but during that decade, all too often those episodes came my way during my frequent visits to my family, because a certain family member — the one who hogged the channel changer — really liked watching it

Early on, I noticed that officers on the screen showed a bit more respect than what I had experienced in a few of my interactions with some local policemen. On the whole, I certainly wouldn’t complain about my treatment, especially because some officers have treated me very well, including one NY State Trooper who gave me a short ride back and forth to a filling station when my van ran out of gas on a four-lane highway. I have met a few bad cops, though, and I definitely know they’re out there, though I didn’t see any of them onscreen in Cops. However, I also don’t want to overemphasize my own bad experiences, because long before I knew the names Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, I was quite convinced that people of color routinely experienced much worse than my own personal worst.

After watching a few more episodes, a different thought popped up: Take away The War on Drugs by making the controlled substances legal and regulated, and then 95% of the activity in the plot line disappears. Cops would have few, if any, reasons to detain, search, frisk, harass, follow, chase, intimidate, handcuff, beat, shoot and arrest the vast majority of those who fall prey to these actions. Clearly, some Cops like this system, and the excuse it gives them to do these things, because they like doing them — those Cops would almost always be the Bad Cops, the real authoritarian types, but many officers do understand that this system does little to serve and protect most citizens. I personally am in no danger from a person smoking a joint, any more than from someone downing a shot, unless they get into the driver’s seat of a car, in which case, just as DWI can trigger serious legal consequences, presumably, in a properly-regulated environment, so would driving under specific kinds of drug influence. I feel quite certain that legal professionals could craft appropriate penalties and standards to address such a situation.

George Soros, through his organization Drug Policy Alliance (which I am a member of), points out that the War on Drugs is a perfect example of authoritarian government policy in action. This authoritarianism has taken its heaviest toll on the black community in the U.S., although it has racked up countless other victims inside and outside of our borders. I had imagined that prior to crafting the War on Drugs policy, the Nixon cabinet had discussed how to create a system to monitor and assert control over those people, and, as it turns out, what I imagined did occur. One of Nixon’s 2 German Shepherds, as identified in All the President’s Men, was John Ehrlichman, who told journalist Dan Baum in an interview, “Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue … that we couldn’t resist it.” The other German Shepherd, H.R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary in 1969, “[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that while not appearing to.”

So The War on Drugs has only been a miserable failure if you believe, as We the People were told, that the purpose was to reduce drug use. If you understand that the purpose of The War on Drugs was to criminalize a lot of black people, plus some other poor and young people, then it absolutely has succeeded in doing that. Plus, it has lowered the competition for tobacco, alcohol and prescription meds, which accounts for why major corporations in those industries fund anti-drug programs, like Drug-free Kids. And, last but not least, it has picked the pockets of the U.S. taxpayers to the tune of well over $1 trillion, creating some very comfortable careers for authoritarian types in law enforcement, the prison system, government bureaucracy and related endeavors. 

In theory, conservatives ought to oppose much of this for the same reasons as progressives, but I suspect that, despite what they might say, a significant percentage of those who self-identify as conservative would agree with what Nixon said back in 1969, as recorded in Haldeman’s diary. Still, I take it as a hopeful sign that some conservatives these days do agree that The War on Drugs has failed, that too many nonviolent drug users are currently sitting in jail, and that our tax dollars shouldn’t keep on funding this failed and counter-productive policy. Maybe one day soon the entire War on Drugs edifice will fall, as the Berlin Wall did, and will take its place in the dustbin of history.

Give Me a Break, John — Part 2

When Give Me a Break John aired his 10 libertarian grievances on his ABC 1-hour special back around the turn of the millennium, the most memorable moment for me came when he suggested that regulation of air and water pollutants serves no purpose, asserting that the air and water in the NYC vicinity are amazingly clean, and would be so with or without such regulations. To demonstrate his water point, he took a dip in the Hudson River.

Mr. Stossel’s got a few years on me, but not many, so his youth roughly spans the same era as mine, but evidently he either doesn’t remember certain details of that time, or perhaps he never knew them in the first place. George Carlin used to do a very funny bit about swimming in NYC waters during his childhood, and he certainly wasn’t talking about clean water. I also noticed that Mr. S. didn’t catch and eat a Hudson River fish, and most residents along the Hudson know that no matter how much cleaner the river is now than when George Carlin was growing up, the fish swimming in those waters still carry inside themselves deadly PCBs from that river water.

As clueless as John apparently was about the water pollution stories, which included the Cuyahoga River fire and similar tales, I still have to wonder how he missed the air pollution. Various school groups from my upstate area took visits to NYC, and I remember that looking downriver while crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, you couldn’t see any of the Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon, but you could always clearly see the smog cloud.

Following my HS visits to the NYC smog cloud, I headed to the midwest for college, getting to know the Chicago smog cloud much better. As one of my colleagues said, “The air in this city starts 100 miles out.” For most of the 1970s I lived in that metropolitan area, and had occasion to return to it from every major point on the compass. Without planning to do so, I had the experience of seeing that smog cloud when approaching from N, S, W and E, plus a few other variants as well.

Early one morning I also got to experience how the sun rises, or actually doesn’t, when living inside the smog cloud. As a consolation for pulling an all-nighter in preparation for an exam at Northwestern, I thought, “Well, at least I’ll get to see a sunrise, for the first time in my life.” But actually, I didn’t. As I sat, book in hand, glancing out the east-facing window, twilight slowly gave way to full daylight, but the sun never appeared on the horizon. About an hour after the official sunrise time, the sun slowly appeared above the smoggy haze, and around 8, I walked over to the dining hall on a bright, sunny morning, prepared for my exam but disappointed by the hazy sunrise episode.

Fast forward a few decades, and in 1998 I set out from Brooklyn with a companion on my way to visit Wyoming. Along the approach to Chicago, I spoke to my companion about the smog cloud, and I kept a watchful eye. We got closer, and closer, and I never saw it. Then somehow we got by the city, and looking in the rearview mirror on that partly-sunny afternoon, I didn’t see any smog cloud. Slowly, as we cruised through western IL and into IA, I came to the realization that the Chicago smog cloud of the 1970s was gone. Later, after returning to Brooklyn, I made a similar observation on a return trip to NYC from upstate, noting that I no longer saw a smog cloud on the horizon when looking downriver from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

I would not give the all clear sign the way Mr. S. does, because combustion engines running on petrochemicals still spew poisonous toxins, especially those running on diesel fuel, but I would assert that the air quality in major U.S. cities improved remarkably between 1970 and 1998. John wants to tell us that whatever change occurred in this period happened naturally, and not because of the environmental regulations that began taking effect in the early 1970s. Strangely, at least for John, this natural air renewal hasn’t happened in foreign cities that, coincidentally, lack strong air quality regulations. Perusing the list of cities worldwide with the worst air quality, you have to get down the page quite a ways before you find a U.S. metropolis. We still have plenty to do, but we have made significant progress, and I feel quite certain that without those clean air regulations, that old smog cloud would still be visible looking downstream from the Tappan Zee Bridge.

John calls himself a libertarian. Coincidentally, so do David and Charles. And what business are those 2 Koch Bros. in? They’ve got fingers in different pies, but many of their revenue streams connect to fossil fuels in some way. As the Porter Ranch gas leak reminds us, a large proportion of pollution can be traced to fossil fuels, without even touching on the climate change discussion. David and Charles would like the freedom to pollute the air and water without any pesky government regulations interfering with them in any way. John wants to tell us that such air and water pollution won’t do us any harm. Could there possibly be a connection between the rich guys who want a certain message trumpeted in the media, and a guy coming along and playing the exact tune that the rich guys want? 

Oh, and about climate change, David and Charles, whatever they actually believe, still obviously want to confuse the issue and make everyone question it, if possible. Then John comes along recently with his media opinion piece suggesting that the climate scientists have a financial interest in exaggerating the threat. Personally, it sounds to me like a certain media mouthpiece might have a financial interest in dismissing the threat of climate change, and of air and water pollution. John, you say we don’t need regulations to keep our air and water safe? You say air and water magically clean up pollution and renew themselves without us doing anything? John, give me a break!

Give Me a Break, John — Part 1

Back during the Bill Clinton era, I sat through a number of 20/20 episodes, and along the way, became acquainted with a host named John and his “Give Me a Break” opinion segments. At the time I didn’t identify a particular pattern to those segments, but I would sometimes agree with the viewpoint expressed, and sometimes I wouldn’t agree.

Then, around the turn of the new millennium, ABC aired an hour-long special by Mr. S, during which he expounded on not 1 but 10 grievances. Somewhere along the way, between his suggestion that the 1970s DDT ban constituted self-disarmament in the war against malaria and his assertion that environmental regulations aren’t necessary because the air and water are just fine, and would be so even without such regulations, I concluded that going forward, i wouldn’t need to waste time giving serious consideration to anything he said. Though John obviously doesn’t know it, DDT, over 4 decades after the ban began, still causes harm to certain wildlife species, and may also negatively affect the health of humans who unknowingly come in contact with trace amounts. For an example of the fallacious reasoning behind the libertarian view of air and water pollution regulations, see Beijing, if you can.

So then, not so long ago, John reappears on the radar, in the form of a syndicated newspaper opinion column. This time around, Mr. S wants the climate scientists to give him a break. While John himself evidently hasn’t quite decided whether to believe in climate change (as if it’s some kind of article of faith), he’s quite sure there’s no cause for alarm, or even cause for lowering fossil fuel use.

While I’m no climate scientist either, I could tell John one thing — if, 50 years ago, when I was in HS, someone had told me that within my lifetime, there would come a point at which, during the northern hemisphere late summer, the Arctic Ocean would be completely devoid of ice, even if for only a short period of time, I wouldn’t have needed a climate scientist to tell me that such a change constitutes a really big deal. Yet, concurrent with Mr. S’s opinion piece, I also read such a prediction by a climatologist, who expects that this late summer iceless phenomenon could begin before the end of this decade.

During my HS years, one science teacher spoke about the concept of global warming as an ongoing topic of discussion and study for the scientific community, but one without definitive answers or conclusions back then. When I related this to a distant relative who I recently reconnected with on Facebook who also had attended the same school, he jokingly admitted that he hadn’t paid much attention in certain classes. Not long after, though, like a true climate-science denier, he asserted that carbon dioxide doesn’t trap heat from the sun in the atmosphere, to which I replied that from everything I knew, Tyndall’s work was still considered foundational in that regard, though if he had evidence to the contrary from some other valid source, I would certainly look it over. This reply of mine, unsurprisingly, got no reply from him.

In addition to learning about the possibility of global warming 50 years ago in HS, I also learned and understood the fundamental greenhouse-gas concept, which was settled science from a hundred years earlier, but my relative must not have paid much attention in class that day either. If you understand this piece of science, then it doesn’t take much to add in the possibility that oxidizing fossil fuel sources containing significant percentages of carbon could increase the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which in turn would increase the greenhouse-gas effect — not all that different from adding 2 and 2 to get 4.

Before the late 1980s, the climate change discussion had no political element, but then some members of the Big Oil gang started blasting propaganda to confuse the issue, although, to the best of my knowledge, that only happened in this country, which explains why only in the U.S. does a sizable percentage of the population, mostly belonging to a certain political party, question the science of climate change. That propaganda continues, as evidenced by Mr. S’s opinion piece, although it also loses efficacy over time as the weight of the truth tips the scales. 

Perhaps John should give all of us a break, and go back to school for a bit so he can learn some genuine science, but then, maybe that might be too scary for him, because the teacher might also belong to a union, which is another thing that bothers John a lot. Who knows, possibly Mr. S has himself suffered from some trace exposures to DDT that have blunted his reasoning capacity, in which case it would be pointless to try to explain to him a simple concept I learned in HS biology, which is that all living creatures on this earth share some basic chemistry, meaning that what’s poison to an insect is also poison to a human being, if ingested in a large enough quantity. I suspect that, just like my distant relative, John might have had better things to do in HS than listen to his teachers, but his ignorance of elemental science is no excuse, so when he asks us to give him a break, we can — a break from any sort of media credibility, since he shouldn’t have any.

The Donald and The Dreaded F-word

We certainly don't need this guy running a reality TV show 

in the Oval Office, especially considering how 

he might f-up the country (and by f-word, 

I mean one with 7 letters, not 4).

Back in the early to mid-‘70s, my friends and I had no difficulty tossing the dreaded f-word around amongst ourselves, whenever we thought it fit — if we thought someone was an f, we wouldn’t hesitate to use the term, as had been the fashion among young hipsters like us for probably a decade. If someone acted like a control freak, then he (almost always he, rarely if ever she) was an f. Generally, back then, I might guess that those f types voted Republican, but not know for certain, or even bother to give it much thought, often enough. If someone came across as a control freak, then he needed to lighten up, and loosen up. I didn’t think much then about the possibility that a control freak I knew might harbor actual fascist sentiments in favor of rounding up particular ethnic or religious minorities en masse, confining them to concentration camps and/or inflicting harm on them.

The word slowly fell out of fashion, and when I would hear someone tag Reagan, Goldwater, or certain other right-wing Republicans with the term, it sounded to me like a bit of a stretch. As the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to W, the partisanship of the Republican majority in that case didn’t surprise me, but the extreme behavior of his administration did — when I saw Rumsfeld do his “We know where they are” bit, I had difficulty adjusting to the fact that a sitting Secretary of Defense would lie so openly and blatantly with the TV cameras rolling. Still, in that summer of 2003, when I saw a t-shirt with W and Adolf side by side, I smiled, understanding the message (Same S**t, Different A***ole), but it didn’t bring that f-word to mind, and to give W credit, whatever his faults, at least he did not demonize Islam or Muslims during his time in office.

At some point in the warmer months of the following year, that a-word came back to mind. I had heard about the new Trump TV show, and at some point I actually sat through an entire episode, to see the reality behind the buzz. I even gave it a second chance a few weeks later, although ten minutes was about all I could stand that time around, and it confirmed my earlier conclusion — I’d known enough egotistical jerks in my life, and I didn’t need to watch one on a reality TV show.

Then in the late fall, that f-word came bubbling back up, in the wake of a second stolen election. All the malfeasance of the first term seemed to multiply, and map out dark roads ahead for our representative democracy. As the second term disasters unfolded and built on each other, I started thinking about the word a lot more, and what it might mean in the modern era. I also began to grasp the fact that the fight against fascism didn’t begin and end with the Second World War. I read a treatise that identified the basics of fascism, and I made mental check marks as I moved down the list, feeling very strongly that if people like myself didn’t get more involved in expressing our dissatisfaction with the direction the Bush/Cheney gang was taking the country, we might lose our representative democracy completely.

As the opposition grew and gained momentum, the Ds won back both houses of Congress in the fall of ’06, and I felt a sense of hope that citizen involvement could and would prevent a slide into total f-land. I breathed a sigh of relief in January of ’09 when Obama took the oath of office, feeling that we had gotten past the possibility of looming war with Iran. Fast forward to the spring of 2011, and as the next presidential election started to gather focus, I began to hear whispers about that reality TV barker trying to move to a much different stage, though some political pundits labelled those rumors as cynical self-promotion for his TV career, which his quick turn towards the exit door seemed to confirm.

With that history in mind, and not knowing of his other earlier political flirtations, such as his attempt at the Reform Party nomination in 2000, I initially dismissed the clown’s suggestions of a genuine political move as more of the same empty self-promotion. However, over the previous year or two, I had connected the dots between the simplistic empty-headed mindset of such vapid self-promoters and the fantasy world where so many modern D.C. Republicans seem to dwell, so when the Donald made his official announcement, I could believe that perhaps he meant it this time, and that he had meant it 4 years earlier as well, but had promptly packed it in the last time around because he could sense that he didn’t have the necessary momentum in that cycle.

When Trump began his 2016 run with a xenophobic rant directed at Mexicans, it didn’t surprise me. The Donald, same as the Republicans who applaud him, lives in the fact-free magical-thinking Fox News primitive-brain sphere where logic and reason do not intrude, and where the world doesn’t turn according to established scientific principles but spins around huge dark clouds of fear. Watching his reality TV show, one might have quickly pegged him as an authoritarian control-freak type, but when you understand what makes someone act that way, then you recognize how all the pieces fit together, from the annoying egocentric pronouncements to the joking suggestions of murdering reporters. What the Donald doesn’t realize when he hits full fascist mode is that when he says, “We need to round up all of them,” whoever they are (fascist flavor of the month — could be Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, etc.), what he’s really saying is, “All of those people look alike to me — I’m so dumb, I can’t tell the difference.” When someone uses phrases such as the blacks or the Muslims, what they’re actually admitting, without realizing it, is that they lack the mental faculties needed to distinguish one member of the group from another. 

And so, as you might expect, the fearful control freak feels the need to try to control not just what reporters might say about him, but likewise, to the extent he can, he wants to control how the people who inhabit his world look and act, so they’re the same as him, as much as possible, and therefore less of a threat.

Making one final connection, at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on 12/15/15, as a protester was being removed, a middle-aged man in the audience shouted, “Sig heil!” I would guess that in one form or another, Trump’s entire following shares that sentiment, even if they wouldn’t all express it in that way.