That same year, the “war on drugs” rolled into action, executed in Humboldt County by platoons of sheriff’s deputies, DEA agents, roadblocks by the California Highway Patrol. The National Guard combed the King Range. Schoolchildren gazed up at helicopters hovering over the valley scanning for gardens. War in this case brought relatively few casualties and many beneficiaries into the local economy: federal and state assistance for local law enforcement; more prosecutors in the DA’s office; a commensurately expanding phalanx of defense lawyers; a buoyant housing market for growers washing their money into legality; $200 a day and more for women trimming the dried plants. A bust meant at least a year of angst for the defendant and at least $25,000 in legal fees, though rarely any significant jail time. It did produce a felony conviction, several years of probation and all the restrictions of being an ex-felon. There are thirty-two people serving life sentences in California on a third-strike marijuana conviction. In 2008, 1,499 were in prison on marijuana convictions; in 2007, 4,925 in county jails.
By now the cattle ranchers were growing too. Where once you’d see a battered old pickup, now late-model stretch-cab Fords, Chevys, and Dodges would thunder by. Ranch yards sported new dump trucks and backhoes. Dealerships were selling big trucks and Toyota 4Runners, purchased with cash. By the mid-’90s the price of bud was up around $2,400 a pound.
Best of all, the war was a sturdy price support in our thinly populated, remote Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties. Marijuana remained an outlaw crop. Then in 1996 came California’s Compassionate Use Act, the brainchild of Dennis Peron, who returned from Vietnam in 1969 with two pounds of marijuana in his duffel bag and became a dealer in San Francisco. In 1990, when his companion was dying of AIDS, Peron began his drive for the legal medical use of marijuana.
It was the launch point for greenhouses big enough to spot on Google Earth, plus diesel generators in the hills cycling 24/7 and lists of customers in the clubs down south. By 2005, with increasingly skilled production, the price was cresting between $2,500 and even $3,000 a pound for the grower. These days, in San Francisco and LA (the latter still fractious legal terrain), perfectly grown and nicely packaged indoor pot—four grams for $60, i.e., $6,700 a pound—can be inspected with magnifying glasses in tastefully appointed salesrooms.
The age of Obama saw Attorney General Eric Holder tell the DEA to give low priority to harassment of valid medical marijuana clubs in states—fourteen so far, plus Washington, DC—that give marijuana some form of legality. On March 25, California officials announced that 523,531 signatures—almost 100,000 more than required—had been validated in support of an initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed, no small fiscal allurement in this budget-stricken state. The initiative will be on the November ballot. Various polls last year indicated such a measure enjoyed a 55 percent approval rating.
People reckon legalization is not far off and spells the end of the thirty-year marijuana boom. The local weekly, the North Coast Journal, has made a somewhat comic effort to construct a silver lining for the county. It talks hopefully of branding the Humboldt “terroir,” of tours of “marijuanaries.” Dream on. Down south there’s more sun, more water, and very capable Mexicans ready to tend and trim for $15 an hour. The smarter growers reckon they have two years at most. Here on the North Coast the price of marijuana will drop, the price of land will drop, the trucks will stop being late-model. There’ll be less money floating around.
The New Deal began with an end to prohibition of the sale of alcohol across the United States. The individual small producers of bourbon—some good, a lot awful or downright poison—shut down, and the big liquor producers took over, successfully pushing for illegalization of marijuana in 1937. How long will the small producers of gourmet marijuana last before the big companies run them off, pushing through the sort of regulatory “standards” that are now punishing small organic farmers?
April 9
The seventeen-minute video recording the US military’s massacre from the air in Baghdad is utterly damning. The visual and audio record reveal the two Apache helicopter pilots and the US Army intelligence personnel monitoring the real-time footage falling over themselves to make the snap judgment that the civilians roughly a thousand feet below are armed insurgents and that one of them, peeking round a corner, was carrying an RPG, that is, a rocket-propelled antitank grenade launcher.
The dialogue is particularly chilling, revealing gleeful pilots gloating over the effect of their initial machine-gun salvoes. “Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” answers the other. Then, as a wounded man painfully writhes toward the curb, the pilots eagerly wait for an excuse to finish him off. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says yearningly.
Defense analyst Pierre Sprey, who led the design teams for the F-16 and A-10 and who spent many years in the Pentagon, stresses two particularly damning features of the footage. The first is the claim that Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto lens could be mistaken for an RPG. “A big telephoto for a 35mm camera is under a foot and half at most. An RPG, unloaded, is 3 feet long and loaded, 4 foot long. These guys were breathing hard to kill someone.”
May 7
Oil drilling is one of the dirtiest of all businesses, physically and politically. In recent years BP has spent many millions in the US, trying to winch its reputation out of the mud with bright advertising paeans to its green commitment. Along with its green washing ad campaigns it’s staked $500 million on a biofuel research center at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. Every gallon gushing from the holes in the ocean floor in the Gulf of Mexico sinks the company’s reputation back in the primal ooze of a reputation permanently disfigured by environmental havoc, political bribes, and ruthless campaigns against those courageous enough to blow the whistle on the company.
Obama now wags his finger at BP and vows that it will pay for every penny of the clean-up. He actually took more campaign money from BP than did his Republican opponent in 2008, Senator John McCain.
June 4
Israel regrets? But no! Israel doesn’t regret. It preens and boasts and demands approval, which it duly gets from its prime sponsor, the United States government, and most of the press. The attack on the Mavi Marmara was carefully planned.
Israel is plunging into deeper darkness. As the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy recently told one interviewer: “In the last year there have been real cracks in the democratic system of Israel. It’s systematic, it’s not here and there. Things are becoming much harder.” And Levy also wrote in Ha’aretz, “When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn’t fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North Korea. When right-wing parties increase their number of anti-democratic bills, and from all sides there are calls to make certain groups illegal, we must worry, of course. But when all this is engulfed in silence, and when even academia is increasingly falling in line with dangerous and dark views, the situation is apparently far beyond desperate.”
June 11
Aggrieved British politicians denounce the Obama administration for throwing heavy emphasis on the formally discarded “British” in BP. What do they expect? Here in Petrolia, California (site of spec oil drilling back in 1864) someone asked me at the post office yesterday was it true the Queen owned BP.
What goes around comes around. One of the greatest bailouts in history came in 1953, when the Eisenhower administration authorized a CIA-backed coup in Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owned by the British government, had been expropriated and nationalized in 1951 by unanimous vote of Iran’s parliament. The ’53 coup evicted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and installed Shah Reza Pahlevi, the creature of the West’s oil companies, with full tyrannical powers. The AIOC got back 40 percent of its old concession and became an internationally owned consortium, renamed? British Petroleum.
July 2
There’s been ripe chortling about the spy network run in the US by
the Russian SVR, successor to the KGB in the area of foreign intelligence. The eleven accused were supposedly a bunch of bumblers so deficient in remitting secrets to Moscow across nearly a decade that the FBI can’t even muster the evidence to charge them with espionage.
All of the defendants who appeared in the New York court except one, the fetching Anna Chapman, are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of twenty years of prison. Assuming their lawyers don’t get them off, a doubtful proposition, we can assume the Russians will round up eleven Americans, accuse them of spying and then do a trade.
Then both sides will start again, the Russians training fresh sets of agents to spout American baseball records, burn hamburgers over the backyard grill, jog and do other all-American things like have negative equity on their houses and owe the IRS money. Meanwhile the Americans are forcing their agents to read Dostoevsky.
July 9
It’s the worst of times. America is plunging back into Depression. Only one out of every two Americans of working age has a job. Across the last two months, more than a million Americans simply gave up seeking employment, even as benefits are running out.
Somewhere near ten million Americans without work aren’t getting any kind of check. One in every five children is living below the poverty line, sometimes by as much as 50 percent, classed as “extreme poverty.”
The stimulus has failed. The housing market is in free fall. A couple of months ago market analysts predicted there would be five million more foreclosures between now and 2011 and it looks like they’re on target. Forty percent of delinquent homeowners have already loaded up the SUV, thrown the plastic chairs in the swimming pool and tossed the house keys back at the bank.
For tens of millions of Americans the house is as central and crucial a financial asset as a pig was for an Irish peasant family in the nineteenth century. The pig, as the old Irish saying goes, was “the man beside the fire.” It had the place of honor. The pig died, the family starved.
People are down. I meet young people every day who say they’ve simply given up watching the news. It’s all too depressing.
August 6
It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the courthouse. His ruling was the first in the country to strike down a marriage ban on federal constitutional grounds.
A final judicial verdict is years away, because appeals will now wend their way slowly through the system until they reach the US Supreme Court, six of whose nine current members are Catholics.
Judge Walker marshals the testimony mustered by the plaintiffs, those challenging Prop 8, into a veritable thesaurus of the miracles wrought by the marriage ceremony. At the mere overture of “Wilt thou take” it seems that anxieties about self-worth, the burdens of low self esteem, the shadows of social ostracism, dissipate in the warm glow of the marriage contract.
In fact the drive for gay marriage is against the trend of the times, which is the single state, or people increasingly united—depending on the state they live in—by some form of civil union for the purpose of benefits, pensions, health care, wills, inheritances and so forth. Across America, on the last Census, there were 100 million unmarried employees, consumers, taxpayers, and voters who headed up a majority of households in twenty-two states, more than 380 cities.
Gays are crowding to board a sinking ship. Married couples with kids, who filled about 90 percent of residences a century ago, now total about 20 percent. Nearly 30 percent of homes are inhabited by someone who lives alone—no doubt awaiting foreclosure.
August 18
I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes while the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today who’s headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing. ‘There’s no work around here and I’ve got a family to support.’ When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: ‘Too late. I’ve signed up.’ ”
Millions are plummeting into total destitution, having reached the end of their ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits. Their only option then is the soup line at a church and getting on the waiting list for a homeless shelter.
The nearest big city north of me is Portland, Oregon, where the downtown area is filled with homeless people, napping on steps, bedding down on cardboard in doorways. Along the Willamette one can see colonies of the destitute all along the river bank, from the shipyards to Willamette Falls, sleeping under thin plastic and gray skies.
Frank Bardacke, who lives in the farm town of Watsonville, a couple of hours south of San Francisco, recently described a bank robbery by one young, desperate immigrant:
Several months ago Jario took his father’s pickup truck, drove 20 miles to the upscale tourist playpen Carmel by the Sea, and walked into the local branch of the Bank of America. He waited in line to see a teller, and, when his turn came, he pretended to have a gun under his shirt and quietly demanded that the teller give him her cash. As she was passing out the money, he apologized for frightening her; meanwhile, she was hiding a GPS device among the bills.
He left the bank, his crime apparently unnoticed, and returned to the truck for the drive home. On the way, he got confused and took a wrong turn through Monterey before he got back on the right road home. Twenty police cars from four different police jurisdictions followed the GPS signal and stopped him 45 minutes after he left the bank. He immediately confessed, explaining that he needed the money to help his dad pay the family mortgage. When his case came to trial, the DA pressed for two years in State Prison. The judge decided that six months in the county jail and five years probation would be enough.
In Texas or anywhere in the South the fellow would probably have got twenty-five years. But in desperate times one can expect people to do desperate, stupid things, and this decent judge showed compassion and understanding.
We can probably expect more laid-off workers going postal. On August 3, at 7 a.m., Omar Thornton showed up for a disciplinary hearing at the Hartford Distributors, a Budweiser distribution warehouse in Manchester, Connecticut. Thornton had been caught on video pinching some beer. They asked him whether he wanted to be fired, or just quit. Thornton pulled out a handgun and killed seven fellow employees before shooting himself dead. Before he loosed off his last shot into his head, Thornton, a black man, called a friend on his cellphone and said he’d taken care of some racists who’d been giving him a hard time. Unemployment means fear and fear nourishes racism, all the more because we have a black President. Racism is drifting across America like mustard gas in the trenches of World War I.
And, final token of hard times, we have Bonnie and Clyde on the run. In their latest guise the duo consists of John McCluskey and his cousin and fiancée, Casslyn Welch, who’s no Faye Dunaway. She threw some wire cutters over the fence of her man’s Arizona prison. Cops suspect them of killing a couple of retirees, then stealing their truck and heading north up to the Canadian line through Glacier National Park. That’s the last sanctuary in America of Ursus horribilis, the American grizzly.
Behind them the cops, ahead the bears. It could be the first movie of a new era.
August 29
If the attack on Iraq was a “war for oil,” it scarcely went well for the United States.
Run your eye down the list of contracts the Iraqi government awarded in June and December 2009. Prominent is Russia’s Lukoil, which, in partnership with Norway’s Statoil, won the rights to West Qurna Phase Two, a 12.9 billion-barrel supergiant oilfield. Other successful bidders for fixed-term contracts included Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas. O
nly two US-based oil companies came away with contracts: ExxonMobil partnered with Royal Dutch Shell on a contract for West Qurna Phase One (8.7 billion barrels in reserves); and Occidental shares a contract in the Zubair field (4 billion barrels), in company with Italy’s ENI and South Korea’s Kogas. The huge Rumaila field (17 billion barrels) yielded a contract for BP and the China National Petroleum Company, and Royal Dutch Shell split the 12.6 billion-barrel Majnoon field with Petronas, 60–40.
Throughout the two auctions there were frequent bleats from the oil companies at the harsh terms imposed by the auctioneers representing Iraq, as this vignette from Reuters about the bidding on the northern Najmah field suggests: “Sonangol also won the nearby 900-million-barrel Najmah oilfield in Nineveh. Again, the Angolan firm had to cut its price and accept a fee of $6 per barrel, less than the $8.50 it had sought. ‘We are expecting a little bit higher. Can you go a little bit higher?’ Sonangol’s exploration manager Paulino Jeronimo asked Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani to spontaneous applause from other oil executives. Shahristani said, ‘No.’ ”
So either the all powerful US government was unable to fix the auctions to its liking, or the all powerful US-based oil companies mostly decided the profit margins weren’t sufficiently tempting. Either way, “the war for oil” doesn’t look in very good shape.
The left—or a substantial slice of it—snatches defeat from the jaws of a victory over America’s plans for Iraq by proclaiming that America has successfully established what Milne calls “a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region.” Iraq is in ruins—always the default consequence of American imperial endeavors. The left should report this, but also hammer home the message that in terms of its proclaimed objectives the US onslaught on Iraq was a strategic and military disaster. That’s the lesson to bring home.
A Colossal Wreck Page 51