Drug money flows through our banking systems, stock markets. The fruit of many decades of Prohibition - and the black money does get laundered --- becoming as you put it grey money. The drug criminal syndicates and government agencies that have covert understandings and dealings with them by now form a parallel world.
Your point about Turkey applies to our situation as well because drug crimes are a useful way of eliminating troublesome opponents. Scenario: radical troublemaker. gets pulled over and the police, who then "discover" a bag of cocaine hidden in their trunk. They go down for a drug conviction - who (but a very few) will believe otherwise. It is a very useful tool for tyranny and corrupt forces on many levels besides generating immense profits for the syndicates. Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 2:41 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World Hi Chris, I can't agree more. If we look at the history of prohibition, it is always either a political tools, or unfair economy, or a way for bandits to steal money. In Turkey, where almost all man were smoking tobacco, a sultan decided (some centuries ago) to make it illegal for beheading its main opponents. Easy! And the problem today, is not the black money, but the grey money. We can't indeed no more separate healthy money from the money based on lies. We are all hostage of those prohibitionist bandits. Bruno On 08 Nov 2013, at 03:57, Chris de Morsella wrote: From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 2:32 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World On 07 Nov 2013, at 03:32, Chris de Morsella wrote: The problem of any system ever devised is that eventually it will become corrupted - through one path or another corruption will become endemic and increasingly it will parasitize the system until eventually the empty husk of the hollowed out society collapses as all the illusions and Ponzi schemes become marked to market and no one is buying into it any longer. Systems are human creations and suffer from all the pitfalls and blindness characteristic of our species. A system organized around a Party or a Church will end up creating the same social structure of a corrupt class of successful crime families becoming entrenched at the vertices. >>OK. But it is always due to factual precise fact, some of them encapsulating the departure from honesty, like the closure of Plato academy in theology (and this explains a lot of our human problems today), or the prohibition in modern times, which violate the US constitution, and announces all the other violation. Sure. in the US prohibition probably did more than anything to create the culture of organized crime and to enrich the criminal syndicates to the point that now it is hard to even know how much of our economy is actually controlled by them. Dirty money pollutes markets and distorts them and drives out honest actors. In Roma there is a saying that translated more or less: "The first generation are bandits; the second generation are bankers; the third generation are politicians; and by the fourth generation a Pope." Or the Anglo saying "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime" >> I think that this is misleading, as it gives the idea that money is a problem. Money is just the best way to distibute work, and enrich everyone, ... when playing with the rules. But then big amount of moeny is an incentive for unscrupulous bandits, and if they rob the society, we are soon or later in a big mess. Then we are living earth gloablization, and the bandits use it to consoldiate their business. A large part of the middle class is hostage of that situation. Money itself is just a medium of exchange; and a marker of wealth perhaps. It is not money itself, but how criminal syndicates end up controlling how it flows and how it is used. I think it is important to look at how even a system dedicated to the principle of wiping out class has invariably spawned various nationalistic red bourgeoisies (the Radish communists - red on the outside white on the inside) Look at the princelings in the PRC; or the weird family dynasty in the PRK. or the Stalinist bourgeoisie of the former USSR. Or conversely how a system purporting to be based on the teachings of Jesus Christ resulted in the sordid history of the Papacy. It does not matter much what the superficial forms of a system are, if the end outcome is invariably the same - that is the society becomes dominated by a small entrenched elite that enjoys disproportionate benefits and is concerned only with its own self-serving interests. The US constitution was well thought, and the founders were aware if how it could be violated. In particular, some of them said explicitly that prohibition would end America. I am optimist. We just need to educate people so that they understand that prohibition is a criminal technic to steal their money, and nothing else, right at the start. We light just need to better educate people (invest in school and teaching). It will take time. In my country, the "green-youth" have proposed that the green became officially anti-prohibitionist, but the old green were just horrified, and put the proposition under the rug. But most and most young people get the point. As long as we tolerate things like prohibition, there is just no politics at all. Prohibition is a middle-term social suicide. Like institutionalized religion is a long term spiritual suicide. We will learn. Hopefully we will. The strength of the prohibition coalition is weakening in the US - the state I live in and Colorado have both legalized the production, sale and consumption of Marijuana for recreational purposes and within months marijuana is going to start being sold in state run stores in Washington. who would have thought. Prohibition introduced a huge distortion in the market and created the global drug black markets, enriching (over many generations) the various organized criminal syndicates and out of control government agencies that have gotten involved in this illicit trade. Chris Bruno -Chris From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2013 2:24 PM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: Our Demon-Haunted World On 06 Nov 2013, at 17:25, meekerdb wrote: On 11/6/2013 12:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: There is nothing wrong being rich, unless the money is stolen money, and that's the case today. There's nothing morally wrong with being rich, but it creates an ethical problem. Being much wealthier than others bestows a lot of power. If there is no effective government (like parts of Somalia) then the rich hire a personal army to protect their property. Where there is government, the police protect their property and the rich attempt to control the government through propaganda and buying influence. So long as the rich are not so rich as to live in a different 'world' than the middle class and they are relatively diverse this works OK. But the system seems to be unstable in that the rich can and do use their wealth and power to get more wealth and power - and not necessarily productively. So those who inherit wealth tend to gain even more wealth. Society needs to do something to stabilize the system and prevent the increasing concentration of wealth. I completely agree. The problem is that with money, you can produce more money in two ways, honestly or dishonestly. Once a few "fake money" (based on a lie) appears, it corrupts the whole system, and the society get pyramidal, with a higher gap between poor and rich, and eventually this crush down. We must think about a way to prevent that. Some state can play a role. But we have to get rid of the bandits first, and there is an easy way: legalize all drugs. Regulate them, and tax them proportionally by the "real" harm (that is measured by statistics no more confusing a -> b and b -> a) they do. May be that is not enough. Prohibitionists should be judged. We have to get spiritual or mature enough to understand that. The state must ensure the fairness of competition among products, their traceability, the presence of notice with the secondary effects, etc. But the state has nothing to say about what is good or not for any one. That's between you and you, with the help of your shaman if you decide so, but it is your decision, to say "yes" or "no" to this or that shaman. Stopping prohibition will not solve all problems. But continuing prohibition aggravates the situation, ... except for the super-riches and the bandits. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
