Jul 31 2007
King Hemp: Part 2: Battle Lines: Natural, Or Synthetic…Life, Or Death?
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By Rand Clifford
7/31/07
Hemp is about life, renewal and future, power to The People…most everything America’s embedded fascist regime is not about. Government of, by and for corporations (CorpoGov) has us hogtied.
Corporate profits rule the priorities in a globalizing plutocracy (CorpoWorld) where the bottom line is…power to the bottom line. Corporate grip just keeps increasing, squeezing the life out of the biosphere—CorpoWorld truly is making a killing!
CorpoWorld lives by fossil energy, death and decay sucked and scoured from Earth’s burial grounds. Fossil fuels have already so poisoned the biosphere that canned tuna, healthy old protein standby, needs health warnings on the label. Banks of many rivers and lakes are sprinkled with signs reading: DO NOT EAT THE FISH! Common at others are diagrams detailing parts of fish where mercury, PCBs, dioxins, furans, lead and arsenic collect; anatomical maps posted to warn of where CorpoWorld’s toxic fingerprints are concentrating…. Mercury is the premier toxin, pervasive and potent, now piling up around the top of virtually every ocean food chain. The primary mercury dispensers are coal-fired power plants—China is building new ones as fast as they can, expecting to continue bringing another new plant on-line every few days…. And so it goes in the world of hidden costs keeping cheap imports “cheap”. So goes the biocidal foundation of “cheapness”. Nothing synthetic is cheap when all the real costs are accounted for.
Ironically, the most imminent threat to the biosphere has been set in motion by one of fossil fuel’s few “non-toxic” components. We keep pumping carbon dioxide sequestered from ancient atmospheres into our own atmosphere, where it retards infrared radiation from escaping into space—a life-supporting phenomenon in natural moderation, life-threatening in excess. Moderation, a weaker virtue of mankind, has been obliterated by CorpoWorld’s fundamental creed: More!
And of course, “Better”—remember DuPont’s slogan: “Better Things for Better Living…Through Chemistry”? Formerly DuPont Munitions, the world’s leading manufacturer of gunpowder and dynamite, DuPont Chemical wanted to change their image from “the powder people” to “peace-time manufacturer”. Launched in 1935, the slogan persisted until the 1980s, when “through chemistry” was dropped. Word had gotten out that many of the chemicals for better living were accumulating in the biosphere with deadly effects, such as dioxin from pulp mills. Then in 1999, DuPont’s slogan became, “The Miracles of Science”. Over the years, DuPont has gone from a company dealing explosive death and destruction…to one dealing slower death and destruction, accent on the insidious. In a different way, DuPont’s major role in robbing The People of hemp was no less insidious.
Back to the 1930s; DuPont held the patents for making plastics and synthetic fibers from petroleum, and patents for that environmentally-infamous sulfuric acid process for making paper from wood pulp. New machinery to unleash industrial hemp’s cornucopia of superior natural products suddenly made The King a serious threat to profits of the petroleum and timber industries—real Titans in terms of economic and political dominance. William Randolph Hearst had seen the looming threat of a modernized hemp industry deflating his paper-making empire, and had already conjured cannabis hemp into “marijuana”, a Mexican slang term (or the Americanized, confusing and even slightly spookier? “marihuana”). Rattling his newspaper chains, Hearst had for years terrorized Americans with horrors of the “evil weed from Mexico”…truly a Greatest Hit in the art of propaganda (a certain “Stairway to Heaven” for the weed with roots in Hell!) Most people were familiar with the benefits of hemp, and cannabis, and were totally blindsided when DuPont and Hearst and their henchmen diddled Congress into strangling America’s hemp industry in 1937 with the illegal Marijuana Tax Act. Tax laws are for raising revenue, not for molding behavior. But….
1937…a year of remarkable infamy—in its annual report to stockholders, the DuPont company gloated over “radical changes” regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of “sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization”. Whoa!…quite a malignancy here—the voice of CorpoWorld proclaiming that after massive farm foreclosures of the depression, farmers were inhibiting America’s industrial progress. They should move to industrial cities so farmland could be consolidated into huge agribusinesses controlled by corporations—along with all other means of industrial production. Farming should be primarily for food…. These biocidal design were taken further when DuPont’s president, Lammont DuPont, proclaimed: “Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products. The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products.” You got it, Lammont, a world of synthetics…mother lode patents, petroleum alchemy, pollution, extinction, poverty and disease, deforestation, global warming; fascism, globalization, perpetual wars for dwindling resources; corporate centralization of all means of production—even global food supply. Concentration of money, of power, of control—power to the corporations, slavery to The People. Conversion of largely rural, agricultural America into an urban, industrial nation. Landfills brimming with immortal waste leaching death into our living systems, forever…. Amen.
Such is CorpoWorld’s bleak picture for living beings dependent upon a healthy biosphere—bleakest for those whose ultimate champion has been the same for over 6,000 years. Cannabis Hemp, The King. Consider globalization—unfettered corporations preying upon cheap labor, cashing in the biosphere’s life-support systems, spreading poverty and environmental disaster in the grossest pageant of greed in history, all powered by enormous consumption of fossil energy and armed with any necessary coercion, including war. Hemp is the ultimate antidote for the biocidal plague of globalization.
Whereas globalization is powered by the toxic waste of ancient life, hemp is powered by the sun. Hemp is the premier solar energy machine, something we sure would like to invent if nature hadn’t beat us to it (if hemp could be patented!) Few plants grow faster, are easier to grow, are better for the soil, and none are more useful. Land that has produced hemp exclusively for twenty years is in no way degraded. And no plant even comes close to turning sunlight, carbon dioxide, nutrients and water into so many products. No other plant can actually empower entire regional economies, the antithesis of globalization. Farmers could return to the status they deserve, growing the world’s most valuable 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 the wealth stays where it belongs—with the people that produce it. This could all be happening across America right now, if not for CorpGov.
Nothing is more environmentally-friendly than hemp. Any region with a hemp economy would remain a healthy place with clean air and wells, and waters with edible fish…any region not already smudged with the fingerprints of CorpoWorld. Plus, one of the few realistic ways we might mitigate global warming is to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Current CorpoWorld strategies are kind of like raiding the bar on the Titanic; lots of talk about reducing emissions, talks to make us feel better, temporarily, but such damage has been done. Rising temperatures have already sent many systems into positive feedback, as in Siberia, where melting permafrost is releasing greenhouse gases including methane in quantities that dwarf global releases of carbon from fossil fuels. Oceans are peaking out in their ability to absorb carbon. Forests, the planet’s lungs, are huge absorbers of carbon. But actual forests are getting rare fast, soon to disappear if we don’t shut down globalization. And proposed reductions in emissions translate directly into CorpoWorld profit reductions…let’s not hold our breath on that. Anyway, just this month, China actually passed the U.S. in carbon emissions to become the world’s leader. China doesn’t even want to talk about reductions in carbon emissions.
Vast fields of hemp could replace lung capacity lost to deforestation—the possibilities are limited only by our vision. Hemp gulps carbon dioxide like no other sink, and though biomass hemp fuels and other utilizations would return carbon to the atmosphere, it would be carbon taken from our atmosphere, not carbon from atmospheres of millions of years ago as is stored in fossil fuels.
Hemp will never be donated to The People, only seized. Anything that spreads wealth from the top, down through The People, will never be imposed from the top, only forced from below. So the question is not how good hemp is—one of hemp’s problems is that it sounds too good to be true. Well it is true, and until married to modern American technology we’ll never know the genuine potential of hemp. As is in more ways every day, our biggest problem is CorpoGov. Will We The People find the wisdom, coordination and motivation to take back what CorpoGov stole from us through lies and manipulation seventy years ago…lies and manipulation still robust today?
In Part 3: Getting hemp back, what are our chances?
Rand Clifford is a novelist and essayist living in Spokane, Washington, with his wife Mary Ann, and their Chesapeake Bay retriever, Mink. His novels CASTLING and TIMING are published by StarChief Press: http://www.starchiefpress.com
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Greetings:
Being a Canuck, I have several friends in the prairies getting into hemp growing and I worked on Joe Strobels last tobacco crop. He was Canada’s first hemp farmer in a long time. I was going through the DEA’s ‘Microgram’ newsletter today and wow! What a bunch of ignorant morons.
I found an article or two (pre-public access…but thats another story) on ‘hemp’ (they always put it ”..whatever those little half quote marks are called around ‘hemp’). It seems they (the DEA) are the main front against hemp…it seems that if you take 10 million tonnes of industrial hemp, then turned it into hash…some wise and nefarious street dealer could buy wholesale and make about 3 grams fo hash…wow, eh? Anyhow cheers…good to see my favourite plant being lauded as always.
Ciao fer Now
lancifer
Where is part 3 of KING HEMP !
Maybe we would be better off if we just blew out our liver or kidneys or just shit ourselves with alli® oops.
Missing biofuel in graphics atop…
There are thousands of acres of agricultural land in the central US that have been in families for generations who refuse to stop the lifestyle; many now subsist by growing the dreaded tobacco. Their fence-rows are literally lined with hemp plants still reseeding from the past, as are many bean, corn and hay fields in this vicinity. Roadsides flutter all summer with it. Now these farmers are urged to grow grow beautiful corn to burn for ethanol and to stay solvent, they must. It is disgusting. Yet if you bring up “hemp” to many of these people, their minds are closed…..they have bought the government line.
How can one plant do all of this and more so much better than the poisonous corporate substitutes?
How can such a useful, safe, economical, and environmentally friendly plant be so demonized?
Shame on the dumb Americans for allowing the exploitation to continue in so many ways.
A special nod to the know it all police a$$holes.
During the first Gulf war invasion I read an article in the city paper about a book that detailed a lot of hidden history about hemp. This was in 1990. The book was of course
“The emperor wears no clothes.” The one statement that stood out was the author’s claim that if the government allowed farmers to grow hemp (on 6% of available good farmland) we would not have to import a drop of oil from overseas in order to meet our energy demands. I figured that within 15 years we’d be totally independent of foreign oil-and all our oil would grow from hempen plants here in the USA. As it turns out-I underestimated how stupid and ignorant the American people are. I’ve told this to many folks-usually a blank stare or some irrelevant comment is my reward. I’ve stopped tossing pearls to swine-its a waste of time. Face it-the American people are too stupid to do what is best for them. They are a bunch of ignorant,simple minded cattle that need to be told what to do by a conniving elite class of megalomaniacs. The average American is a dupe and a sucker. How else to explain GWB-2 terms at that? The CIA? The federal reserve? The Clintons and Bushes? Dick Cheyney? The DEA?
Unfortunately for me and the few other reasonably intelligent others, we get dumped on because the majority of American citizenry is so backward intellectually that they are easily manipulated and conned by the myriad of lies and treachery concocted by the ruling elites. Just like a heard of dumb sheep they allow themselves to be abused and disposed of with barely a whimper. Sheeple is the best adjective to describe the prevaling mindset in the USA. Home of the brave is just a meaningless empty slogan from where I sit.
If that wasn’t true then hemp would have been legalized long ago under threat of severe consequences to anyone preventing it. What do you call someone too scared or stupid to recognize and demand what is best for himself-because of what conventional wisdom dictates?
Help! I’m surrounded by idiots!
Awwwww - come on guys. Why shouldn’t a crop that would bring wealth to our country be put down.
Are you not ALL FOR - giving polititions that bought up great areas of land in Up State New York and other States so that they could cash in on NOT GROWING CORN - OR WHEAT OR WHATEVER … and getting a government check every year for ONLY BUYING THE LAND AND NEVER GROWING A FREAKIN’ THING … doesn’t that make much more sense than growin A SINGLE THING???
Business prospective = you would then have to buy a tractor or several … duhhhhh
You would have to hire help = duhhhhhhh
You would have to develope a marketing plan = duhhhhhhh
You would have to find those who would buy your product = duhhhhh; and/or etc.
So - to actually grow something that is needed and necessary for our survival … sounds pretty stupid, eh?
These poloticians and blood suckers OF OUR TAX DOLLARS NOT TO GROW A FREAKIN’ THING AND GET PAID FOR SITTIN’ ON THEIR ARSES … is this not a GLORIFIED WELFARE?????
The very same WELFARE that our politicians are SUCKING UP EVERY YEAR BY NOT PLANTING CORN … (THAT THEY NEVER INTENDED TO GROW … CAUSE THEY KNEW THE BILL AND LAW WAS TO BE PASSED … A LITTLE INSIDER TRADING, EH??? DON’T TELL THAT LADY … UMMM - WHAT’S HER NAME… ???) -
BY NOT PLANTING WHEAT (THAT THEY NEVER INTENDED TO GROW … CAUSE THEY KNEW THE BILL AND LAW WAS TO BE PASSED … A LITTLE INSIDER TRADING, EH??? DON’T TELL THAT LADY … UMMM - WHAT’S HER NAME… ???) - and/or etc.
Let us get real here guys - THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE BILL THEY SCREWED UP ON … A SINGLE WORD THAT WOULD ALLOW US TO GROW FOR OUR INCREASE … A PHRASE THAT WOULD CAUSE A 2 KILO PACKAGE TO BE STUCK UP THEIR ARSES FOR TRYING TO INTERFERE … THERE IS SOMETHING IN THERE - THE LAW … THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING AND NOBODY HAS FOUND IT YET CAUSE THEY WERE TOO BUSY LICKING THEIR SACKS FROM BEING KICKED …
LET US GET OUR HEADS OUT OUR ARSES AND FIND IT.
Then they will sit around for 78 FREAKIN’ YEARS … licking their sacks wondering how the world they missed ONE SINGLE FREAKIN’ WORD … OR A SINGLE PHRASE THAT COLLAPSED THEIR WHOLE UNIVERSE IN UPON THEM.
IT IS THERE … help me search it out … find it and let us all benefit and the planet as well.
I WANT A PAIR OF FREAKIN’ SANDLES I MADE FROM MY OWN PLANTS AND DID NOT HAVE TO PAY A STINKIN’ DIME TO CREATE … AND MY UNDERWEAR AS WELL … AND MY PANTS … AND MY SHIRT AND MY FREAKIN’ HAT - DON’T TOUCH MY SUSPENDERS … YOU MAKE YOUR OWN …
Seriously - there is a word … a stinking word or phrase … several words or several phrases … these power DRUNK BASS TERDS … COULD NOT THINK STRAIGHT with the whole power system on their side ….
OUR LOVING CREATOR - guaranteed … has left a loophole that none have ever seen before … it is there - I guarantee it. It is there - these slugs cannot close all the doors … when they close a door it infringes on the air from another - and it cannot stand even constitutionally…. read it close fellers- and you will see it soon … may be too late - but soon …
They plan to bomb Iran here shortly and several other nations with nuclear weapons - might not even have another growing season for us … but= in the meantime - search and find the word or words - the phrases or phrases that grind away the gold of the constitution …
One is in the LIMITING OR DOING AWAY WITH CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENTS … or IN HOW WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO BUSINESS … get the cops to sit down and smoke a pound of this hemp and see if we don’t need to send in paramedics …while a couple heads simply smoke one doobie to show the effects they seek …
THEN INVITE A HEAD TO SMOKE A WHOLE POUND OR TWO OF HEMP FOR FREE … and FILM their REACTIONS … see if it would be a slow down for DEA or any other guy wanting to stop a head from puffin on the majic dragon …
Just a couple ideas guys - I got a million of them and read the laws like none else could … seriously - but; then again,
who cares, eh?
I been fighting an entire City …and it won’t even hit the papers … cause the judge has been billed as a co-conspiritor for over a billion bucks and his little court too … who wants to know the facts …
Peace;
Aintmyfault
I do not have all day and I read slowly. It was a new and useful insite but you could have said it all in one tenth the space.
Hello Dear Community,
I have read the entire piece and I have to say its well written and has many layers of truth backed up by facts. I too have spent half my life in researching sustainable practices within agriculture as well as renewable energies.
Im not here to release more information or back up any of the facts listed within this piece.
Im here with a plan of action. Since Im Canadian and even though the Canadian Gov’ is corrupt to the core as well at least the people here in Canada still stand up for what they believe in and some are relentless in their pursuit and in being so diligent and hard working we here in Canada have won the right to grow “hemp” their is a license to get and various applications to fill out- Blah Blah..
I have a 100+ acre farm in Southern Ontario. I also have facilities to harvest hemp (giant barns 30000+ sqaure feet)
We have been researching two areas of processing- 1st Crushing hemp seeds for essential oils. Two- grinding hemp stalks and its woody material so it can be fermented into alcohol (Ethanol) for fuel.
There are many other areas we could also get into.
I have a pretty good team as well but would want more involved we kinda want to turn the farm into a place where others can come to learn and get a hands on understanding of hemp the processing of hemp as well as other sustainable practices. Since everyone on my team (4 of us) is a vegetarian or a converting vegetarian we dont raise any animals on the farm for slaughter. Therefore we would like to extend our olive branch to Americans- We are looking for a couple more interested people who could help make this happen you would also share equally with the profits and be asked to do your part to raise awareness in your home country USA.
We are not far from the border.
We also want to turn parts of our sister farm into a sustainable education center where adobe buildings www.calearth.org homes will be constructed where youth and others could come and stay and learn the art of sustainability
Anyone interested please emailqA