Bubblehammerblog

My friend who lives at the top of the street is a Recreational Services manager with the council, and I sometimes arrange with him the loan of pieces of equipment. Yesterday I was fancying one of the minature JCBs I'd admired earlier in the park, to help me build a frog sanctuary in my back garden. When he let me in they were having a meeting.

My friend the park keeper is also General Secretary of the Peoples and Workers Party (GB), a Pyongyang inspired microgroup. He and the other two local members were preparing for the G20 demonstration on Wednesday, tacking huge pictures of Kim Ill Sung and Kim Jong Ill onto placards, and emptying boxes of great piles of glossy leaflets in Korean. They wore crisp new matching cerise polo shirts, and had been to the barbers.

The story goes that some years ago my friend and neighbour won an open plane ticket from inside a confectionary wrapper. He chose to fly to North Korea because during the 1966 World Cup the national team had played their group matches in our city, and he'd been immensely impressed by them. They had battled courageously, and went on to lift the group Fair Play Trophy.

He was in Pyongyang for over a week, and when he got back he was telling everybody about the worker's paradise he'd discovered in North Korea: beer at 35 pence a pint, massive fishing clubs, sports and social, magnificent parks. After a few pints in the Hangman he'd become particularly enthusiastic, bringing himself to tears recalling the kindness of his friends in the Pulgunbyol District Police. Then he joined, and later became Gen. Sec. of the PWP(GB). His wife would have nothing to do with his 'thing', as she called it. As usual she was sitting in the middle of the couch, smoking cannabis and watching daytime TV.

I paid him £2.50 for a translation of a Kim Jong Ill speech on Human Rights abuses in the USA, and told him I was on my way to make my own arrangements for the G20 demo. As I closed his front door he called out, 'American journalists. Chinese border. Israeli spies'. I didn't mention of course that I was on my way to attempt to retrieve Nestor Makhno's flag.

This was the huge battle stained black flag that Makhno had galloped under when he rode with the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, fighting the Austrians, Denniken, Petlura, and later the Red Army. It had flown above the Gulyai Polya Autonimous Workers and Peasants Council.

Defeated by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Makhno managed to take the flag with him to exile in Paris. After he died the flag changed hands a few times, eventually crossing the channel in the late fifties with the British anarchist and Spanish Civil War veteran, Albert Meltzer. It was now on the top of a wardrobe in my friend's bedroom.

My friend is now semi retired, but was formerly a prominent member of a local anarchist group much influenced by the Norse tradition. The ranks of the once vigourous group have now been decimated by drink, drugs, motorbike accidents and infirmity, but a handful survive, most of them working for the council in one capacity or another.

Makhno's banner came into my friend's keeping, he says, after a 1969 conversation with Albert Meltzer in a pub near Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, where an international anarchist conference was taking place. He agrees that both he and Meltzer were two gallon drunk when he gave him the flag, but he decided to keep it because of the great honour its custody bestowed, and because of the flag's undoubted magikal properties.

Since then Makhno's flag has been raised at many of the biggest actions and demonstrations in Britain, though it saw its last outing at the Orgreave coal depot, during the miner's strike, where the flagpole gained further distinction by being rammed into a police inspector's earhole.

I was going to propose to my friend that I borrow Nestor Makhno's flag to take to the G20 demo. I'd asked him on a number of similar ocasions in the past to make use of the flag, but he'd refused outright. He suspected I might be a Trotskyist. Other political flotsam like me had tried to get their hands on the flag, he said, but he'd fucked them all off.

Before I'd touched his brass raven doorknocker he yanked open his door, saw my face and said, 'No', then he shoved the door shut. It was on a thick chain latch.

'On yer fuckin bike', he growled through the door.

'We should talk about this in a respectful manner, comrade.' I had to shout.

'Told yer, on yer way. Trotskyist cunt.'

'Do I need to remind you that that flag belongs to the entire workers movement?', I appealed.

I heard him angrily undoing the chains to get the door open, then he stuck his beard through the crack, and I saw a pair of lips appear from among the grey and orange scrub.

'Aye, comrade, but not to the butchers of Kronstadt.'

Then he slammed the door shut again, rattling the raven's beak against the wood. I'm planning a final cunning attempt to get my hands on Makhno's banner before the G20 demo. My friend is a notorious old goat, and I'm arranging for a local sex worker to visit him posing as an admirer of Emma Goldman. If this ruse works, prepare to be awed by the flag at the G20.

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This piece by Michael Hudson is short and to the point enough to reproduce entirely.

The free market at work, financial style.

March 27, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- Newspaper reports seem surprised at how high banks are bidding for the junk mortgages that Treasury Secretary Geithner is now bidding for, having mobilized the FDIC and Fed to transfer yet more public funds to the banks. Bank stocks are soaring – thereby bidding up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as if the “financial industry” really were part of the industrial economy.

Why are the very worst offenders – Bank of America (now owner of the Countrywide crooks) and Citibank the largest buyers? As the worst abusers and packagers of CDOs, shouldn’t they be in the best position to see how worthless their junk mortgages are?

That turns out to be the key! Obviously, the government has failed to protect itself – deliberately, intentionally failed to do so – in order to let the banks pull off the following scam.

Suppose a bank is sitting on a $10 million package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that was put together by, say, Countrywide out of junk mortgages. Given the high proportion of fraud (and a recent Fitch study found that every package it examined was rife with financial fraud), this package may be worth at most only $2 million as defaults loom on Alt-A “liars’ loan” mortgages and subprime mortgages where the mortgage brokers also have lied in filling out the forms for hapless borrowers or witting operators taking out mortgages at far more than properties were worth and pocketing the excess.

The bank now offers $3 million to buy back this mortgage. What the hell, the more they bid, the more they get from the government. So why not bid $5 million. (In practice, friendly banks may bid for each other’s junk CDOs.) The government – that is, the hapless FDIC – puts up 85 per cent of $5 million to buy this – namely, $4,250,000. The bank only needs to put up 15 per cent – namely, $750,000.

Here’s the rip-off as I see it. For an outlay of $750,000, the bank rids its books of a mortgage worth $2 million, for which it receives $4,250,000. It gets twice as much as the junk is worth.

The more the banks holding junk mortgages pay for this toxic waste, the more the government will pay as part of its 85 per cent. So the strategy is to overpay, overpay, and overpay. Paying 15 per cent is a small price to pay for getting the government to put in 85 per cent to take the most toxic waste off your books.


Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist. A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached at mh@michael-hudson.com

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I can't work up any enthusiasm for the invitation to get indignant over Sir Fred Goodwin's modest £16 million payoff. Over the last couple of decades I've noticed few complaints about undeserving people with vast pallet loads of money. As I recall it we've celebrated the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and not bothered much about where all the cash came from. Relaxed about people getting filthy rich. A cultural aristocracy has emerged, broadly called celebrities, that includes people rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The numbers are as difficult to grasp as the billions and trillions being bandied about in the current banking panic.

Take David Beckham, undoubtably a graceful footballer and a nice lad with a hansome jib. He has a fortune worth well over £200 million, and palaces on two continents. Then there's Elton John, unfairly called by some an irascible wee fat old puff, though in my view a fine lyricist and spectacular performer, who's amassed more than twice as much, and has double the palaces. Damien Hirst, performance artist, construction manager, and canny bilker of billionaires, was telling us recently that the proceeds from his recent car boot sale had made him a dollar billionaire. Damien has outdone Saddam in palaces.

And what does it say when Bono, bandy legged anthem botherer and stuff strutter on the global stage, owns a big chunk of Forbes Magazine, publisher of the eponymous Global Rich List, and vulgarly known as the millionaire's bible. Someone tried to tell me it sells for $200 a pop. Bono has fine reception rooms in each of his estates in Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Pago Pago, to which the world's movers and shakers await invitations.

When things were going well, Broon would've put old Fred Goodwin's £16 million earner down to that dull old mule 'hard work'. For Broon marches under the banner of 'hard work'.

Speaking of which, last week I saw former funnyman and management consultant, John Cleese, with a $24 million real estate portfolio, publicly moaning that he'd have to 'work dammned hard' for two months every year to pay for his ex-wife's palace refurbishment.

We could afford to enjoy the spectacle of the millionaire lifestyle because debonaire spivs of Goodwins kidney, with Broon's encouragement, had been able amass huge amounts of surplus wealth to pay for it. Gazing into the celebrity bubble allowed us a glimpse of what increasing prosperity and free markets might bring us. If we worked hard.

Now someone is going to have to pay for all the treasure that's been shovelled into oblivion to keep the markets going. A shaken Ant and Dec, pictured today on the cover of the Mirror, have already sacrificed £6 million from their £30 wad. There are signs of hope though. Secondrate 80s one-hit popsters, Spandau Ballet, have reformed and will tour again. One of the band reported, 'We've had a few rehearsals now, and we sound like a million dollars.'

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Here's a fine piece of reporting from the American News Project, about the daily round of junketing on Capitol Hill.

And here's an Alternet article by the filmakers who tried to crash the parties.

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Here's piece of history for readers who like the 'degrees of Kevin Bacon' type diversions.

Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929), the celebrated visionary reformer, socialist, poet, and what we would now call gay rights activist, lived for most of his life in my home city in the North of England. (Wikipedia has it that he lived in a 'gay community' here, which would be spendid, but it's not true. His remote cottage is pictured above.) There are council buildings bearing his name, and a statue in one of our parks. While his pose on the plinth may not exactly resemble a teapot, it seems camper the more you look at it.

During the brief period three decades ago when the red flag fluttered over our Town Hall, a revival of interest in Carpenter was encouraged by the city council, which celebrated his contributions to socialism, trades unionism, and the emancipation women, while neglecting his pioneering and immensely brave gay rights activism. I doubt that many in people this city familiar with Carpenter would be aware that he was a shirt-lifter.

He lived as an openly gay man at a time when to do so could bring upon you the fate of Wilde or Parnell. Carpenter got away with it because of his innate discretion, his personal magnetism, and the great respect he commanded among educated workers, and progressive circles in Victorian and Edwardian England and abroad. He was very well connected, much admired, and something of a guru.

In the 1890s he published, at his own expense, a widely circulated pamphlet on homosexuality, Homogenic Love. A quote from it gives a flavour of Carpenter,

I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.

When the sage was in his eighties, he was paid homage in my home town by a wealthy young American admirer, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was at the time collecting material for a work on homosexuality among the Fenian Brotherhood. Carpenter was of course a massive fan of Walt Whitman, as was his visitor. Carpenter had visited Whitman in 1877, and he mentioned to Chester Alan Arthur III that while there he had enjoyed some sack action with the great American poet and visionary. The octagenerian Carpenter then gave the much impressed Chester Alan Arthur III the best blowjob of his life, which he recalled forty years later to the poet Allen Ginsburg.

At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.

Now the links emerge. Chester Alan Arthur III in later life became the sometime lover and sugar daddy of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, seminal novel of the Beat Generation. So there's only two degrees of separation between Carpenter and the Beats.

There's more. Neal Cassady was also the driver of the Merry Pranksters schoolbus, (destination: 'Furthur'), which toured the US in the 60s distrubuting free LSD, and inciting what came to be called 'happenings'. A little history would be interesting here.

By the end of the 1960s the ranks of LSD enthusiasts had become divided into two camps. Both shared the notion that LSD might change the world for the better, but they were divided about how to do it. The positions could be identified with the names of Timothy Leary and Ken Keysey. Broadly speaking, the Leary strategy was to proceed by turing on and creating an enlightened elite of the best and brightest, whose influence would permeate society. Keysey and the Merry Pranksters wanted to give acid to an many people as possible, and see what happened.

On this side of the Atlantic at least the divisions were clearly discernable, Leary followers were Hippies, while the Keysey tribe called themselves Freaks. Freaks took The Fugs version of Leary's 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' seriously, were full-time unemployed drug fiends, lived in chaotic affinity groups, and favoured the overthrow and non-replacement of the State. Hippies were much more media friendly.

I was an early admirer of Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, and soon took up freakery. There was an abrupt change of syle, I cut my hair short, abandoning bright flowing finery, bangles beads and bells, in favour of a look that suggested I might be on my way to work - both as a cunning camoflage and to distance myself from hippies. Because my local circle of freaks included people who had blown their crusts long before taking LSD, or were just plain weird, the ranks were predominantly working class. Some even managed a few days tripping in the steelworks, or down the pit.

The purpose of this digression is to show the global threads running through this city that link Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Kerouac, Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, and a small but significant working class heresy that flourished here some forty years ago. A chain over a century long. Edward Carpenter was the best known and most popular hippie of his time.


I've taken much from Colm Tóibín's excellent review of Sheia Rowbotham's 2006 biography of Carpenter in the London Review of Books. Read it HERE.

See also The Edward Carpenter Archive HERE.

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We all relish being apalled now and then. My own taste involves ocasionally exposing my raw nerves to the rantings of selected rightwing nut-the-bricks, and other irritants. If you look to your right you'll see that I include in my Blogwatch the loathsome Atlas Shrugs, placed there so readers can share in my perversions.

In the privacy of my own livingroom I'll shut the curtains and tune in Top Gear for the mildly offensive, punch-him-in-the-face, Jeremy Clarkson - intensifying the frisson by reminding myself that I'm watching the most popular windbag in the country, who my compatriots would vote in as Prime Minister if they had the chance.

For stronger meat I'll turn to Youtube, rubbing my sweaty palms together in anticipation of watching clips of the noxious little squit Bono, leader of the Greatest Rock Band on the Planet. I might even play an illegally downloaded track from his shite new album as accompaniment. (Fellow self-sickeners with a Bono habit can get a decent fix here)

Americans who 'enjoy' such unnatural pleasures are much better served, they have the wildly popular Rush Limbaugh,(catchphrase:'He can talk faster than he can think'). British perverts accustomed to the likes of Sir Jeremy, St Bono, Lord Geldof, Sir Alan Sugar and the like require a health warning. I tell you man, hearing Limbaugh, it's like your dealer forgot to step on your wrap.

Here's a taster. This is some of Limbaugh's plan to save the economy.

1. Every man and woman between 18 and 60 who signs up for unemployment benefits is automatically registered for the military draft...

2. A U.S.-led coalition of the at-least-semi-docile will invade selected oil-producing countries, including Venezuela and Iran... all the other English-speaking provinces whom we subsidize (England, Canada, Australia) – will share in the (sp)oil(s).

3. Disband the United Nations. Liberals, their allies in underdeveloped countries and various Euro-smarties have for decades accused the United States of trying to be the world’s policeman. Unfortunately they were wrong and the world has suffered for it...

4. Deport all undesirables. Not just the wetbacks, anyone who fails a basic English test. If they can’t learn the common tongue that unites our great nation, they need to leave...Our beefed-up military will protect our southern border with orders to shoot to kill. No more amnesty. No more sending people back in busses. You cross illegally, you die. End of story...

5. Legalize all drugs. In times of crisis, necessity trumps morality... By legalizing and taxing marijuana, heroin, methedrine, cocaine, etc. we can turn the dreadful losses of ineffectual enforcement into mega-profits...

Appalling enough for yer? You can get some more of Rush's Economy Plan here

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After doing some casual Mass Observation, such as nebbing on conversations in pubs, on buses and trams, or sidling up behind people in queques, it seems to me that we're experiencing a period similar to the Phoney War at the end of the 1930s. We're told that the economy is in the process of plunging over the edge of a cliff, and that catastrophic climate change is now inevitable, yet it seems no one really believes any of it. You could get the impression that the middle classes are for the most part quietly confident that eating organic, recycling their newspapers, buying a bike or taking the odd bus, and growing a few vegetables is the way forward. The rest, the majority still in work and with adequate incomes, hope that by ignoring such inconvenient concerns they'll eventually go away. After all, as the government says, once the stimulus packages kick in, we'll begin to see an upturn by about the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, it's only March and our next door neighbours, the French, have been out on the streets in their millions twice this year. This baffles and bemuses the British when they see the 10 second clips on the nightly news, and the media make no attempt to explain what's happening. But you hear, repeated like a mantra, that demonstrating is useless - look at the Iraq war demo they say. Of course, I knew that at the time, as I trudged through London wearing an awkward smirk under a Hizbullah banner, beside a bunch of joyful Lebanese teenagers. It had all been decided already. If ever there was a chance for us to stop being so English, brick in some shop windows and torch some cars, that was it. And we missed it. Thousands of human lives were at stake, fer fucks sake.

The long consumer boom has dulled out wits. We don't really know how to believe in very much at all anymore. On both sides of the Atlantic the blather is all about undeserved bonuses for fat cats, the bastards at HBOS, and in the US the greedy fuckers at AIG. As Michael Hudson has pointed out, the bonus shock horror has served the financial elite nicely, deflecting attention from the governments as they shovel unimaginable sums down a fiery bottomless pit, in the hope of maintaining a system that keeps half the world's population in abject poverty while it trashes the planet. The biggest transfer of wealth in history.

And don't you think it's a bit rich, as it were, that all of a sudden we've begun to express a little distaste at undeserved wealth, when as a culture we've created a religion based around the worship of money, celebrity and prestige?

I'm a Baby Boomer, and some of my generation briefly entertained vastly audacious and unfounded hopes. My friends and I were among the halfwits who believed that LSD plus revolutionary marxism might change the world. Bliss it was to be alive in that dawn, and heaven itself to be young. I mention this to point out that the 'pre revolutionary situation', as I would have grandly called it at the time, could not have happened without a generalised mood of crisis. These things don't happen very often. Could this sense of phoney war presage another wave of outrageous audacity - just when such a thing has, finally, become absolutely vital for survival?

As a would-be revolutionary and disaffected troublemaker, I've become case hardened by defeat. I watched as the wave that rose in the 1960s - from After Bathing at Baxters to Volunteers -(you'll know what I mean), gurgled down the tubes. I've watched as the British working class had its arse kicked by little men in suits. One defeat after another. You'd think such hopeful fools would've cleaned their act up long ago. Wait and see though, eh.

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At the website of John Mearsheimer, who, along with Stephen Walt, wrote the controversial The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, I noted that he was preparing a new work on the subject of lying in international politics. I look forward to reading it.

This brought to mind a recent TV interview I watched with Jacob Zuma, likely to be the next president of South Africa. The interviewer asked Zuma about the increasing levels of violence in South African society. Murder, robbery, rape and bloody mayhem are rife in that country. Johannesburg has more murders than any capital in the world. Zuma brushed the question aside with a swish of the hand. It was not so, he said, South Africa was no more violent nor crime ridden than anywhere else. He explained that the cause of this mistaken impression was the unique openess of the South African media, which was more diligent in its reporting of crime than the media of other countries. South Africa was daily becoming less violent and more law abiding. Wait and see, he blithely informed the interviewer, by 2010 South Africa will have a crime rate of zero.

Hearing this sort of barefaced baloney from politicians is hardly uncommon, we even expect it of them. In another recent interview I saw Shimon Peres angrily thump the arm of his chair and declare, 'Israel has never attacked anyone. Never!'

The purpose of this kind of lie, and the most commonly deployed, is to curtail discussion. South Africa is experiencing unprecedented levels of violence and crime because it is a grotesquely unequal society, and the ANC has failed miserably to do anything about it. Bigshots like Zuma have no immediate plans other than to line their own pockets. Israel has not decided who to attack next, Lebanon or Iran.

Other types of fanny serve other purposes. Gordon Brown's cringe inducing panegyric delivered before the US Congress might lead you believe him entirely ignorant of American history, other than the fairy tale version dreamed up by Hollywood. Sadly, this is true. The last Labour leader to have read a book not bought on a rail station platform was Michael Foot, who was doomed for that very reason. Blair, who was appointed a Middle East envoy as malicious joke, once cheerfully admitted he had never heard of Mohammad Mossadegh.

"When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind,as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe;he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."~Thomas Paine"The Age of Reason" 1793

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Years ago I had a mate, a mid level cannabis dealer, who used to amuse himself writing letters to local and national newspapers describing in ludicrous detail the deleterious effects of dope smoking - grotesque enlargements of the genitals, pathological consumption of jelly babies, monsterous bearded growths on buttock cheeks. One or two letters were published by gullible editors and it was a good laugh. But my friend claimed his letters had a serious purpose. He was opposed to the idea of decriminalisation on economic grounds, since the illegality of cannabis was the only factor that allowed him to make a meagre profit from what was basically a common or garden weed.

My dealer friend had no real grounds for concern, because there is no realistic prospect of progressive legislation on drugs. Nor is there any hope for a rational objective debate on the issue taking place in the mainstream. In the words of the memorable speech by the Baltimore police major in the excellent The Wire, there has never been, nor ever will be, a 'paper bag for drugs'.

There are simply too many players for whom prohibition is both convenient and highly profitable. The global recreational drugs industry is vast, ranking just behind the motor industry in economic terms. The US and Europe spend more on cocaine than they do on education and overseas aid combined.

As better informed legislators are aware, it's clear that no amount of prohibitionist legislation can make any significant impact on demand for recreational drugs. The UN declaration of creating a 'drug free world' is obviously absurd. If the further repressive measures that some politicians are itching to get on the statue books were effective, then Iran, with some of the harshest punishments for drugs use on the planet, might be the model. But that country has the largest population of drug users in the world. The abject failure of prohibitive legislation has prompted some self-appointed drugs experts to pin their hopes on research to come up with vaccines to immunise the next generations against the effects of selected drugs, but that prospect thankfully remains science fiction.

The main beneficiary of prohibition is organised crime. Prohibition magically transforms easy to cultivate weeds and kitchen sink chemical processes into hugely profitable commodities. No other commodities come close to offering the profit margins available to cocaine and heroin traders. Once the basic agricultural product has been processed, using cheap easily available chemicals, the value of the product doubles every time it moves down the chain to the consumer. Factor in adulteration at the wholesale stage and margins go through the roof. A lot of people make a lot of money, is there any wonder that some are prepared to kill to protect and promoted this trade?

States also benefit from the prohibition status quo in less obvious ways. There's the basic principle that the state has the right to legislate on the chemical composition of the brains of its citizens, including the notion that there is an officially sanctioned range of states of consciousness, ('working, asleep, drunk', as Timothy Leary put it), outside of which lies only subversion. This is why the 1960s counterculture caused such alarm among the American elites.

Prohibition is also useful to the police, providing them with easy access to search warrants, and enabling them to keep a high profile among whole swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens. Traditionally, drugs squads have enjoyed low status in the police force because, at street level, busting users is easy danger free work.

State intelligence services have been known to use the huge profits of the  drugs trade to fund 'off the books' covert operations. The well documented links between some state intelligence services and organised crime, inevitable given the nature of their operations, have made this possible. Elements of the CIA and the Pakistani ISI for example have a long history of involvement in the South American and Asian drugs business, as documented by various ex CIA agents, and academics such as Professor Peter Dale Scott. The Kosovo Liberation Army, which has morphed into the Kosovo civilian administration, was largely funded by heroin, a blind eye having been turned by the various intelligence agencies involved in the region. Kosovo remains a major transit point for the trade.

The medical establishment played a key part in the early years of prohibitive legislation, lobbying against the availability of opium, an effective remedy for a whole range of ailments, and much cheaper at the time than visiting a physician. Prohibition provided doctors with a much enhanced fee paying patient base. The medical profession continues to provide the state with research that justifies continued prohibition. People continue to ignore medical advice, which annoys many doctors intensely.

This is the merest sketch of the range of forces and interests lined up against those who hope for any meaningful change in the drugs laws, absurd and futile as they are. So there's no forseeable paper bag.

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