Browsing PBH By Articles

Calculating Human Misery

The Article: Recessions and Human Misery by Paul and Howard Sherman in the Monthly Review.

The Text: The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) decides the peak and trough dates of the business cycle. Most economists, including the government economists, accept their dates as the bible of research.

Their dates do accomplish what they set out to do: they reflect the highest and lowest levels of business activity. This was the definition set by the founder of the NBER and it is very useful for many purposes. Certainly, there is a major gain if all economists use the same dates.

Nevertheless, it is useful to ask a different question and use different dates for some purposes. Suppose we do not want to know the peaks and troughs of business activity, but instead we ask: How much human misery is caused by the cycle? There are many ways to answer that question, but the easiest is just to examine the duration of recessions in terms of human misery.

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The Obama Dilemma

It is time again for the quadrennial absurdity of the American presidential race. In reality, it began as far back as last summer as the slew of utterly risible “candidates” for the Republican nomination entered the fray. While the establishment media has myopically focused on the long slog of a horse race that is the primaries, it is often difficult to discover that there are other things going on in the world. The average broadcast on Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN ineluctably devotes the majority of its airtime to discussing the inequities and megalomania of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum’s sweater vests, or Mitt Romney’s automaton personality; often ignoring Ron Paul, the only principled, yet deeply flawed candidate. Now this coverage of the seemingly meaningless rigmarole of the Republican primary and the subsequent similar coverage of the presidential race may make Chuck Todd’s heart palpitate, it does a massive disservice to everyone else. We will be told over and over again, from the editorial pages of the New York Times to the primetime cable new shows, that this election is about the future of the country and presents two stark contrasts for the economic trajectory of America. Most informed Americans realize that our politics are a sham, in a sense they are outside of politics. What progressives and leftists must ask themselves this election is can we vote for President Obama in good conscience?

It is difficult to adequately decipher the causes of the manifest failure of the Obama administration to implement progressive initiatives. Are these failures endogenous to President Obama? In other words, is he really the milquetoast, bipartisan-craving centrist (even center-right) politician that we have seen over the past three years? Or has the obduracy of the Republicans in Congress and the pathetic, spineless Democrats presented an insurmountable stumbling block to the advancement of his agenda?

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I’ll Meet You At The Corner Of Obscurity Street!

Finally, a place where the two of them belong: the middle of nowhere.

A Weed Tell-All: One 65-Year Sentence Later

The Article: America’s Biggest Marijuana Ring:Black Tuna Tells All by Tony Dokoupil in the Daily Beast.

The Text: It was late 1977 when the DC-3 lowered its landing gear onto a jungle airstrip, one of dozens on the Caribbean side of Colombia. The plane was to be loaded with two tons of marijuana, and then immediately turn back for Florida. But Colombian soldiers stormed the clearing, pulling an unlikely gringo from the cockpit. “Self,” thought Robert Platshorn, a 34-year-old American, as he closed his eyes on machine guns and green berets, “how in the hell did you end up here?”

It remains the preoccupying question of his life. Platshorn bribed his way out of Colombia, he says, but in May 1979, he was indicted as the mastermind of the biggest marijuana ring ever uncovered, a paramilitary squad responsible for the DC-3 job and much more—a million pounds of Santa Marta Gold between 1976 and 1977. The 105-page indictment had “more intrigue than ten James Bond novels,” as the Chicago Tribune put it: 13 codefendants, $300 million in earnings, a dozen yachts, a fleet of aircraft from a Cessna to a Lear jet, all of it coordinated from the penthouse of Miami Beach’s largest hotel, the Fontainbleau.

Platshorn was the first marijuana dealer to be prosecuted under the so-called Kingpin Statute, a 1970 law that targets elaborate large-scale drug syndicates. He was sentenced to 64 years in prison, making him “America’s longest serving marijuana prisoner,” according to High Times. This is a man “with no social conscience,” the head of Miami’s FBI office told a reporter at the time.

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The Great Inequality In America

The Article: The Great Inequality by Michael D. Yates in The Monthly Review.

The Text: In the early 1980s, I began telling my students that growing inequality of income and wealth would become the dominant political issue of the future. I did not think that the future meant thirty years, but better late than never. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) uprising has put inequality squarely on the political agenda, with the brilliant slogan, “We are the 99%.” While the “99%” includes many rich persons, the focus on the “1%” at the top of the economic pyramid serves to shine a light on those who rule both the economy and the politics of the United States. The 1 percent is a diverse group, but among them, especially at the top, are the men and (a few) women who own controlling interests in our largest businesses, including the financial corporations whose actions precipitated the Great Recession, which officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, and has since morphed into what looks like a long period of slow growth best termed stagnation. They are also the people whose campaign contributions and prominent positions in Congress, as advisors to the president, and on the Supreme Court have placed the government firmly on the side of the rich.

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