Issue 3: Marijuana Terrorism and Bleeding Juarez

I.

I remember the campaign mentioned in the first video. It was not too long after 9/11 and, just like the economic crisis, everything had to use the attacks as a reference point. Negative wasn't negative enough unless it was terrorist negative. So the ONDCP put out these ads and were ridiculed; whatever truth there was to the claim, it was obvious their intent wasn't to prevent drug money from funding terrorism. It was an attempt by people who were philosophically anti-drug before anything else to ride the wave of sentiment, and it was just these attempts that devalued the event's currency, that created this sickly anti-Americanism that rises in me with the words "nine-eleven", the artificial callousness of an event perverted.

But the point stands, I think, and is illuminated by the continuing drug wars in Ciudad de Juarez over the last year or so, where 2,000 people have been murdered in a drug war unparalleled in its viciousness. This war is funded by wealthy nations' drug habits, and marked by Hezbollahan terrorism (beheadings and behandings) while contributing cash to the continued destabilization of a pluralistic, vital Lebanon.

I want to qualify this first, before it becomes a moral or absolute issue. I want to make it clear that I would dispute any claim to responsibility on the part of any drug users for the actions of their dealers, as well as any attempt to lay it on the shoulders of the Government's prohibition. In the first case, individual culpability within any economic sphere is limitless and marked by an all-too-common tendency toward distortion. In the second, I don't see the resolution of appetites or a capacity for substantive policy change, and so I see no point in discussing abstractions or impossibilities.

Having said that, there is a need to move beyond glib and reactionary dismissals of Bush Era rhetoric. There's nothing about either the violent and theocratic belligerence of Hezbollah or our specific case of a city gone mad with drug murder or the criminalization of soft drug users that is acceptable to any working notions of justice or ethics. Which means that we have an oppotunity: we can begin to be driven by an ethical dedication to human life above right-wing rhetoric, while retaining the legitimacy to speak to those communities that have an effect on the issue (i.e. drug users), above all avoiding juridical or authoritarian solutions to the problem.

My first set of questions concerns this issue. Do we you agree that we have a need to respond to the problem, or is this only a more insidious version of the same old rhetoric? Can we consider the problem of Hezbollah in the western hemisphere without being drawn too far onto a certain side in the foreign policy debates, namely that of the neo-conservatives, and therefore we should avoid involvement in the issue? What, if any, is the ethical responsibility of the American drug user to the issue?

II.

I'm proposing two ideas (and relating both of them to marijuana use, for ease and scale):

1) Certified Canadian
Some form of loose self-regulation that verifies the nation of origin, and sets a premium on the drugs that come via less violent trafficking routes. In this case, Canada seems an ideal example because of a greater laxness in marijuana enforcement (which the cooperation of drug dealers within the more punitive United States seems unlikely). A loosely organized verification system could be set up, with enough holes to prevent law enforcement tracking back up the chain but enough legitimacy to ensure that a large percentage of the product is accurately labeled. Here my ignorance of the chains of marijuana distribution shows, perhaps too seriously to consider this other than the barest sketch of an idea and the actual mechanisms or possibility of the idea are beyond my ability to judge. Perhaps this means the idea is equivalent in abstraction and uselessness to "legalize it", but I'm not so sure. In any case, if possible it could operate as a market-driven pressure against the violence of the cartels, so far the only type of pressure that appears to have an effect.

2) Rest Up for Juarez
This one is more plausible. A single day where all Americans would stop buying or smoking marijuana. Like the Earth Hour, the effect would be negligible, but it would raise awareness of the violence of the Mexican market. Ideally, we could pair it with 4/20, something like "Save It For Tommorow/Juarez", actively associating any non-puritanism with a heightened awareness of the violence.

Do you think these are plausible? Do they avoid the trap of puritanism? Is this the way the problem should/could be dealt with? Do you have any alternative ideas?

Issue 2: Whining

I don't want to harp on the financial news, but its toxicity is not limited to the markets; our discourse is in jeopardy as well.

But we cannot avoid this boring recession or boring-recession, so I will take a different tack and attempt to smear and defame a large group of people using raw recessionary materials. The video above, of the illustrious Dr. Paul, for example. His squealing, inarticulate repetition of economic terms he picked up on last night's Kudlow aside, there is a beautiful moment, right there at the end. After attempting to educate these fools on the basics of economics, on the rule bound structures they are attempting to circumvent with their "collectivist" politics, Chairman Frank cuts him off at his five minutes, and he whines, "Oh Geez, Mr. Chairman, YOU are touuuugh."

It's irresponsible, prejudiced and inaccurate to apply this to all sticklers for rules, but I'm doing it anyway. Isn't this attitude something prevalent in these types, a demand that everything go according to a master plan, but with a little leeway for them and their foibles? And doesn't this reveal some other expression, where their whining and shrill voices are heard, not to ask for the rules to be followed, but for their expectation of the world that is rooted in these rules? He doesn't want capitalism anymore than anyone else can "want" an abstract structure, he wants his world to match the hypothetical plan he's got laid out. The rules are just one weapon to achieve this result, but so is his whining, so is his cheap populism, so is his racism and his dishonest campaigning all to the end of the great vision of society, held only by him. Is Ron Paul the only totalitarian in this bunch, or is it the ultimate circumstance where totalitarians are made? Or is this too far, totalitarianism, and the real answer is much smaller, they're just incredibly selfish goons? And what do we do about it? Should we embarrass them, confident in the knowledge that they are a strain too virulent to be eliminated by argumentation or logic or thought, should we instead ignore them, and ignore all the anger they manufacture, or should we accept their wonderfully idiotic opinions into our pantheistic, discursive society and have actual conversations with them?

Issue 1: The Libertarian Mechanisms of the Socialist State

I've been reading the Geithner plan and as I understand it (though feel free to dispute this as well), the plan is on one hand a Keynesian influx of money designed to increase the price of toxic assets so banks don't fall below capital reserve requirements, and on the other hand, using the last 15% of the investment that remains in the hands of private investors, and moves the decisions regarding distribution of those assets (within parameters set by the Treasury) to a market mechanism that then prices those assets in the aftermath of the influx of capital.

It seems like they're splitting the difference on the welfare state here. They seem to have introduced a mechanism I find very interesting but foreign, whereby the state contributes largess into specified areas while allowing capital markets to continue to give relative valuations within that segment, allowing the differentiation of a bad crop into better and better segments until finally somebody can finally say, out loud and unironically, "I have the best toxic asset!"

Now, I'm pretty curious about this idea because my economic study has been on the extremes of the spectrum, Marxists and libertarians mostly, influenced by mainstream economic reporting. Therefore, I think I understand the arguments and critiques of the libertarians and the Marxists, but what they share is their relative failures to connect with real market conditions (Marx's success with a new valuing mechanism marred by his failure to create the necessary pricing mechanism, Hayek and Friedman's difficulty reconciling principles of "freedom" with the a) lack of will in a democratic society to endure true capitalist recessions, b) failure of that democratic society be more interested in freedoms than securities). Maybe this is common knowledge that I didn't know, but does this actually remake the Keynesian injection of capital into a non-bureaucratic mechanism, where negative pressures are alleviated but markets aren't overincentivized and become drags on production? Where, instead of a minimum wage, for example, I could provide a government fund that would pay up to a certain percentage of a wage increase on a certain population of low wage earners. The money would come from a tax increase on employers equal to the difference between any workers wage and a point that would have previously been defined as the minimum wage, thereby removing incentives to drive wages down. Employers who don't pay minimum wage or below would remain untaxed, costs to the effected employers would be equivalent, but employers could pay the better caliber of minimum wage workers at a rate above the minimum wage by paying those lower caliber workers less, spreading the flattened increase into a distribution curve. Now, excluding other pressures both on and from the minimum wage (for the moment), isn't this a fundamentally different mechanism from either a) government fiat or b) unsafe capitalism? Is it better? More ethical? Less?

Regarding the treasury plan, I'm deliberately ignoring the implications on the revenue end that could end up as disincentives; we're stuck between a terrific debt burden and China explicitly warning us not to inflate it away, so I don't take it lightly, but I'm more concerned about the way this specific mechanism could work.

A final caveat here. I used the term artifical earlier, which implies that capital markets are "natural" and government-influenced markets are not. I dispute this, totally, but I leave it here for clarity.