Ya, I'm waiting for the weevils to say, "fuck this Salvinia shit, this (insert cash crop here) is AWESOME!"

I like Bill Nye. But this whole argument treats 'Africa' (as only one example of a region of the underdeveloped and exploited world) as the nebulous hell-region where bad things happen. He cites examples of these bad things, but then, in a characteristically bourgeois fashion, he focuses on the consumptive problems (not enough aid, not enough to eat, no enough medicine, etc). And who is responsible for this? The first-world, capitalist zones of power (the US, Europe, 'civilization', etc).

Why don't we actually look at the production-side of things. Why can't Africa produce its own resources? It once was able to, very efficiently and without problems. That is, until imperialism happened. We are taking about a continent that was broken up into artificial nations, where agriculture was transformed into cash crops, where millions were shipped off as slave labor. We are talking about a continent that has tried for hundreds of years to fight for liberation for itself, only to have these imperialist countries keep their stranglehold on its neck.

(go wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%ADlcar_Cabral
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sankara

My point here is that the whole discussion of more or less foreign aid presupposes an Africa that cannot feed itself. The solution is not to continue a dependent relationship. The solution is a sustainable and liberated Africa, who has economic control over her resources, and political freedom for her own people. the solution is self-determination, not should the US try to feed more of the kids? (whose starvation is rooted in the US's wealth. )

/end rant

^ What Mr. Chomsky neglected to mention here was scale & production cost vs payoff.

Yes anyone can grow their own strawberries but how many could you ever hope to produce in the average back garden/greenhouse? Probably not enough to let you eat Strawberries everyday I'd bet, and you certainly would'nt pull much of a profit selling them to people at a domestic scale (the key issue here).

Pot however....... even a modest indoor backroom grow can easily net between 30-90oz when dried (alot!). And this can easily be repeated up to 3-4 times a year.

Tobbacco by comparison yields very little for the space and time taken. There's a reason basically no-one home grows tobbaco, you need a huge farm and large scale processing to produce a profitable quantity. Hence it being the preserve of big business and thus legal (plutocrats sure know how to lobby!).


For what its worth though, I do think the Hemp fiber thing was probably the bigger factor in legislation, but what Chomsky is alluding to here is also pretty valid I think.
Pot is a massive cash crop that is seemingly always in demand and relatively easy for a consumer to produce in their own garden/backroom.

There would be a profit in industrial production (always going to be plenty lazy people), but combined with the hemp industry and the effect it tends to have on people (makes you think!) I can totally see why the establishment fears it so much.
It'd be slow, but legal Pot would start eroding the very foundations of the elites power as it's much more profitable for the lower and middle class of society than the Plutocrats at the top and the scale is huge.

A more equal distribution of wealth/economic power is bad for Plutocracy!

>> ^Payback:

$200,000 a day? I think they have a "cash crop" in back they aren't showing us...


$200,000 per acre! Must be in a year. No mention of $200,000 per day.

$200,000 a day? I think they have a "cash crop" in back they aren't showing us...

Less facts, more of a time line. same ole shit though. I also had to laugh at #1 cash crop... theres our problem! people arent planting enough god damn food!

I'm for legalizing it, but I want its users and cigarette users banned from healthcare.

I am all for ending all subsidy of energy, oil, coal or otherwise! I would LOVE to see technology finally take government out of energy production. I would love for every house in America to be its own power generator. Could you imagine stopping off at someones house to "fill'er up"! That would be so cool to me! We still might want to keep "the grid" around, but it would fulfill a totally different function. I am hopeful that a combination of solar power + hydrogen fuel cells will give us this ability. Solar seems like such a cash crop of energy, and fuel cells give you the mobility aspect. Time will tell if this comes to be, but it seems pretty promising now with solar cells reaching 50% effectiveness!

I know of studies that talk about feedback loops for weather, and while intellectually intriguing ( I love all things dealing with Apocalypse!), it seems to be without any real historical evidence. Most mass extinction due to weather change that we have any real evidence of are due to catastrophic events such as massive volcanic activity or comets and meteors. While I don't doubt that human CO2 levels could do something that equates to those, I question if we produce the amounts necessary at this point in time. I have tried with little success to find ice and CO2 levels of the Mesozoic era. However, I have read somethings to the contrary of the capacity of the ocean to stabilize the temperature better than ice. Liquid water has a very high specific heat, by increasing the volume of water, you could have an even more effective heat dissipation system than that of reflective ice. I lack any real education into which one is more true. Interestingly enough, CO2 levels were most likely 10% higher than today during the Cretaceous period. There might be slightly more elasticity in the climate than most people have come to understand.

I disagree that the government needs to "create a market for something". If it is one thing governments are very poor at doing is creating markets for things. People do this better and faster than government think tanks. I do however support new understandings in pollution in how it interacts with property rights. If you clog my air with filth, there has to be some legal ramification to that. It is due time to assess how property is defined in terms of air, water, and the like, I welcome that conversation.

(edited: Spelling, dear god man spelling)

I was going to comment, but I saw that there are already too many comments.

Shit, I just commented. Fuck my life.

Okay, so yeah, he didn't say anything about decriminalizing it, but it was awkward to hear a room full of adults laugh like children when they were talking about it.

I don't think that even a huge cash crop like weed would possibly help the economy.

1. We owe trillions, and that's not going to be fixed by one plant.
2. If it's legal, people will grow it and smoke it at home, and it won't be sold very well in the marketplace. After all, if you could grow tobacco easily in your closet, how big would Big Tobacco be?

3. What were we talking about? I forgot, man.

>> ^KnivesOut:
Interesting take on the illegality, that it was for racist reasons. I haven't that before.


Southern white-supremacist senators, congressmen and law enforcement pushed for criminalization to drive out the Mexican population by taking away their biggest cash crops, and tossing the perps in jail.

The propoganda from Harry Anslinger in the 20s and 30s pushed ideas that "negros" high on marijuana were impervious to .32 caliber bullets. Also, they attacked the jazz scene in New Orleans warning that whites and blacks were dancing in "teahouses" together to their crazy jungle music, and these scary black reefer smokers were coming to get your wife next!


“When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff… he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies..All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy.”

>> ^Spoon_Gouge:
When did marijuana become California's #1 cash crop?


Interesting question. I was able to find articles stating this as early as 1997, but I couldn't find the year that it actually surpassed vegetables as the #1 cash crop in California.

When did marijuana become California's #1 cash crop?

I don't really have any negative feelings about you either way, I met alot of troops like you in Kuwait already, they were all pissed they weren't fighting a conventional military force under a very vague mission statement of bringing Freedom and Democracy. Its hard to do anything when you have no definitive objective or exit strategy. Surprisingly to me a lot of them fell in love with the place and went native, but that happened in Vietnam and other conflicts as well.

The drug problem in Afghanistan is economical, when the Taliban took over they banned the drug trade with their usual heavy hand tactics, when chaos began the drug trade began all again. Culturally alot of people cultivated it for medicinal use, which explains my own rather liberal views towards drugs. But now mostly its a cash crop, for most its a means of survival though there are farms that are solely created to feed back funds into the Taliban movement and other warring factions. The old "its okay to grow this because it only destroys the infidel" ignoring the large drug abuse levels in the local population, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and many other nations through which it makes its way.

In terms of imposing culture I think alot of US military and political planners, coming from the top down Bush belief that "democracy will simply flourish given the chance" implemented alot of very silly political and economical ideas. I remember reading about the imposition of democratic elections in Iraq in rural tribal areas, the US civies where then shocked to find that everyone voted by tribal alliances and background. It's again a failure to read the human terrain of the battlefield in the same way we had occur in Vietnam.

This aspect is covered very well in several chapters of Dexter Filkins The Forever War - http://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Dexter-Filkins/dp/0307266397
Showing the disparity of understanding between coalition forces and the local population, I recommend it as unlike many books it stays politically neutral with no preaching on either side but rather an account of a journalist who went through Afghanistan and Iraq during the opening stages of the war.

In reply to this comment by smooman:
As per our last "discussion" you probably dont like me much but I think i just found some common ground =)

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:

Given the last 8 years, I believe the Western world needs to engage the Arab world in dialog but it must respect the cultural background of the region and not just think that it can westernize ideas through brute force and seemingly endless criticism of it's religion.

I, for one, absolutely HATE the idea of westernizing Arab and Persian nations (namely Iraq and Trashgan....I mean Afghanistan). One of the platoons in my unit, while we were in Afghanistan, went out on a mission with the objective of demolishing a cannabis field. I was livid when I found out. These are a people who have been a nation far, far longer than we (the USA) and here we are telling them, forcing them even, to be like us while completely disregarding centuries of culture and history. Fuck that!

>> ^jwray:
legalization would save taxpayers billions, and the preponderance of the evidence shows that it is not as harmful as alcohol and tobacco.


And put the people that survive on that tax money out of work. That's the only drawback. Draconian pot laws keep jails full and law enforcement busy, at that employs many people.

The alcohol and tobacco industries have billions of dollars to spend preventing the legalization of pot. Not to mention the oil, timber and cotton industries wanting to keep industrial hemp outlawed as well.

There's very little money to be made if you legalize weed as a drug. We're talking about a plant that requires little effort to grow and process to make a usable substance. If it were legal the majority of pot heads would just grow their own at home, only thing stopping most of them from doing it now is the risk of getting caught and being sentenced to a mandatory 20 years.

The hemp industry though would be a boon to the economy. Hemp oil could replace foreign oil. Hemp fiber could produce quality paper and textiles. And on the environmental side, hemp plants absorb a lot of carbon from the atmosphere. There was a time when hemp was the US's largest cash crop, there's no reason why it shouldn't be again. And after learning about the corn industry, it'd probably wouldn't hurt to replace much of the corn crops with hemp fields.

> I find it had to believe that it is America's #1 cash crop.

Im not sure what wheat or corn sells for per pound, but weed comes in at about $3200-$4000. Im guessing that would get you a shit load of corn.

I find it had to believe that it is America's #1 cash crop.