Article: Hemp, The Great Green Hope

The idea of a "jobless recovery" is ludicrous, the term itself an oxymoron. Parasitic Wall Street casino killing off the middle class is also killing off America. Globalization is shoving us back toward feudalism. Dark-ages redux. Privatization is poisonous...and the way things are going, how long do you think it will be until some corporation privatizes the atmosphere, and we have to pay to breathe? Hemp is a powerful antidote to globalization and privatization. No other plant can actually empower entire regional economies...the antithesis of globalization. Farmers could regain the status they deserve, growing the world's most useful crop and selling it to local markets that sell it to local processors that sell their products to locally-owned businesses that sell to local citizens that work in the hemp industry--all with the aid of public banking. All the wealth stays where it belongs--with the people that create it. This could all be happening across America right now, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work creating wealth. But...the same movers and shakers standing most in the way of America returning to hemp slither in the same den as other parasitic snakes that ripped off the whole world with complex toxic debt bombs rated as AAA investment-grade securities while at the same time profiting on bets that the toxins would foul the entire global economy--THEN when their toxic bombs burst, slithered to Congress dripping crocodile tears and begging for (and getting) $23.7 trillion! (1) of taxpayer blood via threats of global financial meltdown, and threats of martial law in America. The whole sordid nightmare represents the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history. Troubled Asset Relief Program...doesn't paying federal taxes make you proud to be American?

So much for the "shining city upon the hill". Too bad we commoners lack the spirit to fight for hemp and get back some shine....

Of course democrats and republicans are simply two sides of the same corporate-toady coin, despite apparent differences especially regarding the common good. In 2005, republican representative from Texas Ron Paul was chief sponsor of the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2005". The bill would have allowed farmers to grow industrial hemp--non-drug varieties of cannabis, differentiating between cannabis strains and setting limits on the amount of psychoactive THC allowed. Now, for the environment, the economy, the common good--for everything that deserves a future, that sounded too good to be true.

The bill died in committee.

Ron Paul tried again in 2007, 2009, and on May 12, introduced the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011". This time Ron Paul has twenty-two co-sponsors--and that's where differences appear in the way democrats and republicans regard the common good; twenty of the co-sponsors are democrat, two of them republican. It's the most co-sponsors Ron Paul has attracted so far. Sounds like hope? At this rate, perhaps in a few more decades such bills might even make it out of committee.

Chances even seem good for a democratic senator to introduce for the first time a companion bill in the Senate. But odds are overwhelming that the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011" will die in the usual place: The Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

You might wonder why in hell an agricultural bill is going first to a committee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. Well...sorry folks, this is America, and the bill is actually an entrenched-profits issue, common good against the ruling elite. We should all know by now what function hope has in America, but collective amnesia is epidemic. So....

Never mind.

And the ultimate clincher that scarabs might never be able to obliterate with their mighty balls, stark revealment of marijuana interdiction being an attack on hemp...it's getting closer. Hemp was prohibited by prohibiting marijuana...but it is conceivable--even almost certain that eventually, marijuana will be legalized, but not hemp. The purported reason for banning hemp will disappear, but not the ban on hemp. Such is how power works in America. And amnesia.

The environmental benefits, the economic benefits, the major surge of job creation, the luxury of superior natural products--forget them and the countless other benefits to the common good of America; the impact to entrenched profits would be too great for the elite to ever allow hemp to be grown in America again. As long as the status quo is maintained, hemp will never have a chance.

We obviously need drastic changes to the status quo, but us commoners have a profound problem called apathy. Relentless perception management of mainstream corporate media (CorpoMedia) feeds the apathy, and amnesia. How are mainstream Americans ever supposed to learn the truth? How is the fact that we outnumber our primary oppressors nearly a million to one ever supposed to be seen clearly, and focused on as a platform for doing something...anything to correct problems such as hemp prohibition, and American imperialism being so vastly more important than us common Americans?

Hope is an elusive thing, unpredictable--just like us...we hope?

(1) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM

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