February 15, 2007 at 08:17:37
The Bush " SCARE THE PEOPLE INTO SUBMISSION" ApproachCan Work Two Ways
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
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In 1968, According to a Stanley Hilton, who was Senator Dole's chief attorney for 20 years the phrase "SCARE THE PUBLIC INTO SUBMISSION" came of age for them in 1968. That year, the present leaders of our nation, including Wolfowitz, Feith, Tenet and Bush plus Hilton attended Ohio University. We were Nazis, Hilton states, and we talked always of controlling the world. According to Hilton, he wrote his thesis on "How Easy it Would Be to frighten voters into complete submission: all we need, he pointed out, is to arrange a Pearl Harbor.
It is time we, the peace organizations, reversed the Bush Crime Rings "scare" technique and pushed it down their throats. Obviously, if It worked for them, it can work for us. This is our opportunity. All the signs suggest that the public is awakening, a lot of them embarrassed and angry at having bought a pack of lies, prime candidates for a membership drive, and for the needed hands, feet, and minds and voices to reverse this flow of fear. We have at least a hundred organizations, well organized, rapidly expanding. Combined, that adds up to People Power.
We need to understand that we are facing Nazis who kicked off their plan to control the World in 1968 and who have proved willing and able to lie, cheat, destroy and murder and torture.
But we have leaders such as Veterans for Peace from Viet Nam. We and they can stop war again.
We, with eyes and ears, that span both periods, have watched it happen. We need, all of us, to study and understand how, who, and what worked-and why. Can we work smoothly in combined groups as the corporations. Can we operate as 4 groups, as the corporations have. What they have done we can do.
From the start, you'll see not one enemy, but two: linked! And the real stench emerges from the corporations. The other enemy, Bush and friends, the friends by nature and nurture high-stye criminals, climbed aboard as tools. So now you have the Nazi's and the corporations. Step back 30 years and you'll find hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corporations: Each really a slight-of-hand out of focus image? a trick. Each is individual with its own management: add the Nazis, who, regarding chores, are neither fussy, nor concerned as to what they put their hands to and it exudes power.
But no one owns the corporate system. It's available and free. Now we are down to "how."
The corporations did the legal dirt. As a first step, with help from legal friendlies, thus, with no one watching the henhouse, they did the parent-child thing -how threatening could parents and kids look?- while combining into what authorities count, now, after-the-fact, as four bloated, all-powerful "Trust's" ready and willing to "nurture" themselves. At that point they recruited Bush and his pack of rats. They proved ideal for the job.
But, remember, they are Nazi, and panting to get on with controlling the planet, the job they launched in 1968. To do it, they both weakened and ignored the Anti-Trust Laws. However, that means they are, now, as weak for us as for them. That leaves the next probable step as consolidating our helter-skelter, duplicating groups into a powerful four and following it up with an injection of fear.
If you want to plant the fear of the devil in the Oval Office, I suggest that we inhale a load of vigor and aim at providing citizens with a system that proves every vote is counted once. Study IRV. Isn't it standard in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand? And, recently, hasn't it become so in a number of our cities and states. It allows a poor man, one of the PEOPLE, to run for office, makes cheating difficult and voting easy. Never doubt how badly that can frighten the crooks. They can't survive an honest voting system.
That leaves, to do, re-organizing our groups.
Can we squeeze our masses into The Fighting Four, fighting to stop this ugly War. It is time to take back control our Nation.
It's time to scare the Crime Ring in the Oval Office out of office and into where-ever they can't stain our hands and hearts with still more blood and murder, theft, rape, torture and rampage without our interference.
A program like this, copying the corporation's success, could be a route to democracy and with it justice and peace? Or if you prefer, peace and justice. The two are inoperable Siamese twins. You can't have one without the other. If we choose to combine bodies and brains, we can create an atmosphere of fear and dump it onto the Nazi would-be world dictators illegally occupying the Oval Office. United, we can make the Bush Crime Ring very uneasy.
The corporate world calls their combination of many into a few, a "trust." They boiled down thousands of theirs into four; and, with their consolidated power they are teetering on the edge of ruling the world! With our maze of Peace Groups consolidated to four, each handling an issue, we have an opportunity to replace the Bush program of terror and destruction with one involved in a search for peace. We have the tools. Where do we start? I suggest putting our voting system into a food chopper and chopping out a system that's honest and fair.
To lay the fear of the devil on these bums, we next announce loudly and clearly that we intend to replace the present voting system with IRV. For readers not informed, under an IRV voting system any citizen, so choosing, can get on the ballet for any public office through citizen endorsements: and as I have mentioned, IRV is gaining adherents here. With IRV, we are voting for issues, rather than fortunes, IRV erases the nightmare of cheating. Imagine how badly that can frighten these crooks who have set up housekeeping in the Oval Office. One item they can't survive is an honest vote.
With one issue selected and three to go, let's try these.
IMPEACH NOW. Support New Mexico. Bug Congress. Drag, mangle, whatever works. With Washington State 's raising our hand to do both Bush and Cheney, do we need 4 more states to move on?
KILL CORPORATIONS: "Logo: DON'T BOTHER TO CONTROL THEM. DELETE THEM." Partnerships work fine: One major difference between corporations and partnerships is that the later have to accept responsibility. Isn't it time to bring that back?
And could we agree on a big support job for The DEPARTMENT OF PEACE? For Kucinich. George Washington wanted one, which means it's hardly plunked down ontop of us off the wall. Now it's Congressman Dennis Kucinich's thing, and anything Dennis suggests we need to support with body and soul, including his announcement that he means to run for President. Perhaps his new job as Chair of the Committee having Oversight on all Domestic Policy is the sign of fighting Democrats in Congress.
If we hit hard with four issues, simultaneously, we can smash these criminals. We won't have to win. We just have to push major issues hard enough so they smell them cooking.
With consolidated people-power, we have a chance of to turn this scare project around, shove it down their throats, and throw the rotten batch out.
We just have to remember that, the corporations did it, which means we can.
SHALL WE DANCE? And during a waltz I suggest we thank Hilton, if we can find him for stepping out of the crowd at 911, and announcing, "This is murder. I will have nothing to do with it. I will take care of the survivors." THAT TOOK COURAGE."
Of course, that go him into plenty of trouble. First someone made confetti the briefs he prepared for his follow-through of his promise to take care of the survivors, then he kept pulling bugging apparatus out of corners of his office and finally he found Alex Jones studio and gave us the bit of history and a story of true courage.
And remember "scare" can work two ways.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Shame on You
February 27, 2007 at 08:46:00
SHAME ON YOU
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
All these criminals who have seated themselves in the Oval Office, by devious and criminal actions, against the will of the people, all must be impeached, all must be incarcerated where they can do no more harm. And it must be done now. In the interest of justice to the injured we must also take back the wealth these criminals have stolen from us and from the world, for only with it can we hope to save the globe and repair its ability to host life. These are hardened criminals of the worst type. People who torture the helpless and the innocent are filth.
As a journalist, it was my job, and the duty of all journalists, to inform the people, to tell them the truth, all of the truth, and nothing but the truth. Shame to those who did and still do otherwise.
Each and all of us who took the creed and the way of the pen and plow, rather than that of the sword, we all know that only fully informed citizens who are reaching toward a democratic government can hope to achieve such governance of, by and for the people with the information we glean and deliver. We are responsible for the damage done.
Shame on the media that have, become as corrupt as the corporations to whom they toady, that have become a tool to corporate evil and corporate greed and by this shameful exhibition have criminalized the profession meant to rank as the highest and most honorable and that should exist as a tool of justice.
Shame on the media that have shamed all of us. We the world's writers, know that we are in a large proportion responsible for this world at war against the innocent, for the millions of horribly injured who will never walk again, see again or breath without pain again, for the thirsty and the hungry-shame on you.
SHAME ON YOU
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
All these criminals who have seated themselves in the Oval Office, by devious and criminal actions, against the will of the people, all must be impeached, all must be incarcerated where they can do no more harm. And it must be done now. In the interest of justice to the injured we must also take back the wealth these criminals have stolen from us and from the world, for only with it can we hope to save the globe and repair its ability to host life. These are hardened criminals of the worst type. People who torture the helpless and the innocent are filth.
As a journalist, it was my job, and the duty of all journalists, to inform the people, to tell them the truth, all of the truth, and nothing but the truth. Shame to those who did and still do otherwise.
Each and all of us who took the creed and the way of the pen and plow, rather than that of the sword, we all know that only fully informed citizens who are reaching toward a democratic government can hope to achieve such governance of, by and for the people with the information we glean and deliver. We are responsible for the damage done.
Shame on the media that have, become as corrupt as the corporations to whom they toady, that have become a tool to corporate evil and corporate greed and by this shameful exhibition have criminalized the profession meant to rank as the highest and most honorable and that should exist as a tool of justice.
Shame on the media that have shamed all of us. We the world's writers, know that we are in a large proportion responsible for this world at war against the innocent, for the millions of horribly injured who will never walk again, see again or breath without pain again, for the thirsty and the hungry-shame on you.
I Have a Dream
March 17, 2007 at 01:53:57
I HAVE A DREAM
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
Through misuse of their taxes, you commit 40 million of the people for whom you are responsible to poverty. They lack the most basic means to house, clothe, feed, themselves. Through your use of our taxes to enrich your oil billionaire friends you commit murder, genocide, torture and rape. I accuse you of endangering the U. S. and the entire World.
Through said lies you have ordered our children to invade and destroy a tiny, helpless nation and to destroy it for power and for their oil, leaving our children's schools closed for lack of funds and increasing thousands of children for whom you are responsible illiterate.
By abandoning our commitment to the UN and to the rest of the world you have made yourself an international criminal. Your ultimate crime is sucking dry the earth's ability to host life. By ignoring, indeed by facilitating, global warming you seek to endanger the World. That is an international crime.
As citizens and human beings it is clearly our duty to put you where you can do no more harm and for our survival, for the survival of the earth, it must be done now. I call upon you, citizens of the world.
Perhaps, after all, we have a fitting purpose for your torture dungeons? They will be your legacy! Do I understand correctly, you take credit for 24 of these replacements for Abu Graib, all built to torture those who would "Take your name in vain?
I HAVE A DREAM. I dream of setting free the innocent you and your criminal friends have have had hidden within these replacements for Abu Graib: thus we can make room for you and yours.
I HAVE A DREAM. I see the name to which you will answer there: "King George the Third." Which of these prisons you have built for your subjects who dare to criticize you would you chose to call your permanent home? What sentence would be fitting? I have a dream that, first, We the People will sentence you to repay the trillion dollar debt with which you seek to enslave our children.
All. Arise? Wake up!
Dr. Emily Horswill
I HAVE A DREAM
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
Through misuse of their taxes, you commit 40 million of the people for whom you are responsible to poverty. They lack the most basic means to house, clothe, feed, themselves. Through your use of our taxes to enrich your oil billionaire friends you commit murder, genocide, torture and rape. I accuse you of endangering the U. S. and the entire World.
Through said lies you have ordered our children to invade and destroy a tiny, helpless nation and to destroy it for power and for their oil, leaving our children's schools closed for lack of funds and increasing thousands of children for whom you are responsible illiterate.
By abandoning our commitment to the UN and to the rest of the world you have made yourself an international criminal. Your ultimate crime is sucking dry the earth's ability to host life. By ignoring, indeed by facilitating, global warming you seek to endanger the World. That is an international crime.
As citizens and human beings it is clearly our duty to put you where you can do no more harm and for our survival, for the survival of the earth, it must be done now. I call upon you, citizens of the world.
Perhaps, after all, we have a fitting purpose for your torture dungeons? They will be your legacy! Do I understand correctly, you take credit for 24 of these replacements for Abu Graib, all built to torture those who would "Take your name in vain?
I HAVE A DREAM. I dream of setting free the innocent you and your criminal friends have have had hidden within these replacements for Abu Graib: thus we can make room for you and yours.
I HAVE A DREAM. I see the name to which you will answer there: "King George the Third." Which of these prisons you have built for your subjects who dare to criticize you would you chose to call your permanent home? What sentence would be fitting? I have a dream that, first, We the People will sentence you to repay the trillion dollar debt with which you seek to enslave our children.
All. Arise? Wake up!
Dr. Emily Horswill
The Miracle Paper Plant
September 29, 2006 at 23:09:29
THE MIRACLE PAPER PLANT
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
While I do not argue with Don Lindroff's article "Bush's Solution to Global Warming", I think it useful to remind readers that alternatives to destruction do exist, that Nature is very forgiving, but that we need to get work at implementation. The information in THE MIRACLE PLANT may not be new,but I believe it needs to be repeated until it becomes embedded.
1,802 words THE MIRACLE PAPER PLANT
by Emily J. Horswill
Dropped into a hemp field today, an American farmer wouldn't recognize the paper plant even though it will grow in every state in the Union.
He would be in a thicket, each plant growing to a height of 10 to 20 feet-like a young tree, except the stem is sappy, and he would be looking at the only known renewable that can meet the world's energy needs and, simultaneously, cleanse the atmosphere.
The plant's ability to fertilize the soil and produce a crop after an earlier one such as corn or wheat is harvested was the characteristic for which my grandfather most cherished hemp on his Wisconsin farm. Until two hundred years ago, this fall hemp crop paid the taxes-with enough hemp seed left to keep the family in breakfast cereal.
But important as hemp's ability to rejuvenate soil is, the fact that grandfather's hemp crop matured in the fall, Wisconsin's shortest growing season, and after he had harvested his corn crop, and that a field can produce three hemp crops a year in temperate zones, more in the tropics, is of equal importance in today's needy world.5
Until the Twentieth Century, hemp provided eighty per cent of human needs. It made the toughest canvas, the finest linen, excellent rope, and protein rich food. Eighty-five per cent of the world's marketable goods has been supplied by hemp-seventy-five to ninety per cent of its paper.5,13
Today, especially to the college crowd, hemp is marijuana. Marijuanne, one of the many hemp plents, can produce a mild drug. I abhor the use of any addictive substance (I hate having my mind scrambled), still with the world teetering between survival and the inability to host life it seems unimportant. But it is this trait that set hemp up as our indusrial scapegoat.
Long before that, hemp earned its royal reputation producing paper. According to USDA Bulletin No. 404 published in 1916, it takes 4 acres of forest to produce the quantity of paper produced by one acre of hemp.1
Yet 40 per cent of our forests are harvested for paper! America grinds up over a million trees a week for paper pulp.12
Forests are our siamese twins. A growing forest provides us four cubic feet of oxygen per minute per tree.8
The world ought to be demanding standing forests and hemp paper. Where is the United Nations?
Also paper made from wood disintegrates in fifty years costing libraries millions, while paper made from hemp is virtually indestructible. What entrepreneur would consider marketing an inferior product that takes sixty years instead of one-third of a year to grow and requires four times the land?
Ever since a handful of tribespeople exchanged wandering with their herds for tilling the fertile soils on the Nile and the Mesopotamian plateau, hemp has been the "pot of gold" in a variety of forms. In the Crown Colonies it was the old classic, "hemp, the export crop." 7,11,5
Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Chesapeake Colonies, among others, passed laws making it illegal NOT to grow hemp.11
But hemp had to be hand stripped - "decorted" - a tedious job. Colonial women processed it in the duck pond, a system that produced a welcome by-product, fat, tasty duck,9 but did little to satisfy even the domestic appetite for hemp much less load ships for overseas. Worn- out rope and rags made excellent paper: "rag paper." But the nation continued to import hemp.
George Washington touted hemp as "our farmers' future." 11,5,1 Jefferson 1,11 , the good farmer, considered it unthinkable to depend on cotton: it had a "nasty habit of stripping the soil of fertility." Thomas Jefferson also predicted that "The ladies will not give up stronger, finer, wrinkle-free hemp goods: and, indeed, in 1812 United States went to war with England over access to Russian hemp. Otherwise, Jefferson's prediction proved inaccurate. The cotton gin rendered cotton cheap, and by 1900, cotton, the land gobbler, was "King."
In 1901 Henry Ford was absorbed in his horseless carriage when he heard an item of news: America's timber industries were gearing up to supply the world's ballooning paper needs from wood pulp. "We are already cutting our forests three times as fast as they can grow," Ford protested in alarm. "We must meet our needs with recyclable biomass, not fossil fuel."
Ford had been involved in the search for an alternative to petroleum to roll his contraption. Now he focused on energy for the nation. Shortly, his laboratories re-discovered hemp. "At least four times richer in renewal than any other source," Ford scientists reiterated. "Hemp planted on six per cent of our land will provide all of America's energy year after year."
When fires raged through the West devastating billions of acres of timber, Ford reacted succinctly: "If we were using hemp, we'd harvest another crop in a couple months."
The federal government assessed the charred forests and assigned a botanist and a paper chemist to study alternative sources for paper. In 1916 their report, USDA Bulletin #404, conluded that "hemp paper pulp is both more economical AND more ecological than wood pulp."1 Ford, whose mind focused on solutions, urged immediate attention on building a hemp decorting machine.
No doubt, plans for it were instituted, but a war intervened: at last, in the 1930s excited farmers gathered on village street corners discussing their new hemp harvester.
But United States Goliath, Hearst Tember Industries would lose billions: nor had they been asleep. They, too, had a new invention. Or rather Hearst's friend and co-worker, Dupont did - a sulphate solution which would reduce wood to pulp with unheard of efficiency. It would also reduce bones, hide and hair to pulp, pit marble, pock iron, and burn holes in stomachs, animal and human, while hemp, turns to pulp in water - to bleach paper, threw in hydrogen proxide which quickly breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen with a double dose of the latter. Released into the atmosphere it becomes ozone. Sulphuric acid clings stubbornly to its compoumd form. 10,5,11 With this "improvement" a Dupont attorney hastened to a friend in Congress: via a committee chaired by a nephew of the Chief of the USDA, who had close connections with the Dupont Family. He soon had their witch's potion cleared for use. Now the Hearst conglomerate had only to dispose of the competition.
They discovered that marijuana was a product of one of the hemp plants, and "hemp" became "marijauna " and marijuana a great danger "to our children." Inevitably, their closed door machinations reached the Oval Office aand the ears of the President.
One wonders whether FDR's first impulse was to laugh or scream. Here was a scheme to dispose of a plant the profits from which he surely had been hailing as a godsend, to help pay for his programs designed to yank the nation out of The Great Depression. The purpose must have been transparent - a zany scheme that would make the plant the criminal rather than its misuse - tantamount to declaring it a crime to grow corn, barley, wheat, rye, potatoes and rice, because they can be used to produce whisky, vodka and wine!
FDR lost no time in lining up his support group of opponents, among them, Fiorelli LaGuardia, the fieisty little Mayor of New York with a reputation as a mean fighter; Ralph Laziers, of the National Oil Seed Institute: Doctur James Woodward, of the A.M.A; and a prosecutor for the Bureau of Narcotics. Hearst pulled out their trump card, the power of press: and they set into motion the world's most shameful era of "Yellow" Journalism.
A key scene in Hearst tabloids was the image of Huge, Black, Negroes, insane with marijuana, raping white women: while these tablois whipped citizens to a frenzy, the farners exhibited little serious interest in this marijuana squabble.5
Hemp has an enormous family with members that have little in common. For instance, in drug potential, they range from the psychologically addictive hashish, to the paper plant, with a THC drug factor too low to mention, and some benign weeds, such as nettles.14,1,6
The farm attitude is best depicted by the following exchange between my grandfather and his neighbor:
"Heard you had the Feds crawling around your back forty during the night, Bob."
"Yup. Penned the dog in the barn. Figured they might get a pair of handcuffs on that patch of nettles!"
The farmers were producing paper, not marijuana.
Rational people that they were, they were confident that whatever legalese the attorneys bleated, it would leave space to exempt the paper plant. What country would emdanger a billion dollar export crop? Theirs was not a lone opinion.
Popular Mechanics 3 published an article eulogizing the new crop four months after the passage of The Marijuana Act.
Shortly Henry Ford unveiled a biomass cracking system producing electricity, heating oil, kerosene, a protein stock food, and an auto powered by hemp fuel. But, with the pasage of The Marijuana Act, the timber industry disposed of their competitor. Horever, The Roosevelt Administration made one more comment.
In 1942, FDR ignored the law and distributed 400,000 pounds of hemp seed to farmers for the war effort. Further seed for the plant "so dangerous to our children" would be grown by 4H Clubs! 14,5 No one challenged him. The war would be temporary: the timber industry was already at work devastating our fish runs and poisoning tthe planet.
That has taken only 50 years-but Henry Ford's statement in his later days, that when we run out of forests we'll still have the paper plant, is both comforting and true.
The grumblings of the timber companies, that their production suffers because they have run into a solid wall of environmentalists, is not true: what they have run into is The Pacific Ocean-which sooner or later they will be forced to concede. When they do, they too, will be interested in the paper plant and possibly of use in our drive toward sustainability. We will need strict guidelines and a new enforcement squad: The Forest Service and The Bureau of Land Management have proved incompetent.
On a public radio talk show a couple weeks ago, one of our leading lights from The Forest Service, backed into a corner, admitted that The Department of Forestry sells our public timber at a loss, his justification being that "our mandate is to provide wood products." It seems that we need a new enforcement squad, new guidelines and a new mandate.
But the paper plant can allow us to rebuild our forests.
And perhaps we have all learned that the best use for these trees is standing up. well rooted, poufing out oxygen.13,8,5
END
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Acres, USA, (the national journal of eco-farmers); May'92, p.22, "The Advantages of Bringing Back Hemp" & "A Hemp Report" March '93, by John Clark: "Eco Update," by Eric Skidmore, Chugiac, AK. Apr. '93.
2. Hydrogen Proxide: The Medical Miracle, by William Campbell Douglas, M. D. pub.,Second Opinion, '92.
3. Popular Mechanics, v,69:239 -9; Feb.'38, "Hemp, the New Billion-Dollar Crop," and a followup December, '41.
4. Popular Science :v.128:14,May '36; "Uncle Sam Fights New Drug Menace," W. Wolf.
5. Hemp & The Marijuana Conspiracy: the Emperor Wore no Clothes; Jack Herer;pub.Van Nuys, '90. (Recommended reading per "Acres, USA).
6. The Care of the Earth: the History of Husbandry, Russell Lord;pub. Nelson, New York, '62.
7. Farming in Prehistory: from Hunter/gather to Food Producer, by Barbara Bender, St. Martin's Press, '75.
8. The End of Nature: by Bill McKibbin; Random House, '89.
9. Oxford English Dectionary.
10. Encyclopidia Americana, '92; "Sulphuric acid & paper."
11. " " Britannica (Micropaidia); v.9:126 1A, v.21:3731A, v.16:81 lA,.12: V 10 1B
12. Seattle Times, Oct.21, '90:.p.23
13. The Orange County Register, (The second largest Newspaper in California), Oct. 30, '88-A History.
14. My own notes on the FDR/hemp affair of the 1930s.
15. The Daily of the University of Washington: "Hemp Products Apart from Drugs Develop Hihg Following., by Albert B. Butler, Oct.25,'93.
16. From The Henry Ford Museum: "The Public Image of Henry Ford":
by David L. Lewis;pub.Waybe University, '76
17, HEMP THE PLANT THAT CAN SAVE MOTHER EARTH: www,ratical.org/renewables/hemp.html
18. Solutions to RainForest Destrucion:www.rainforestinfo.org.au/background/solutions.html
THE MIRACLE PAPER PLANT
by emily horswill
http://www.opednews.com
Tell A Friend
While I do not argue with Don Lindroff's article "Bush's Solution to Global Warming", I think it useful to remind readers that alternatives to destruction do exist, that Nature is very forgiving, but that we need to get work at implementation. The information in THE MIRACLE PLANT may not be new,but I believe it needs to be repeated until it becomes embedded.
1,802 words THE MIRACLE PAPER PLANT
by Emily J. Horswill
Dropped into a hemp field today, an American farmer wouldn't recognize the paper plant even though it will grow in every state in the Union.
He would be in a thicket, each plant growing to a height of 10 to 20 feet-like a young tree, except the stem is sappy, and he would be looking at the only known renewable that can meet the world's energy needs and, simultaneously, cleanse the atmosphere.
The plant's ability to fertilize the soil and produce a crop after an earlier one such as corn or wheat is harvested was the characteristic for which my grandfather most cherished hemp on his Wisconsin farm. Until two hundred years ago, this fall hemp crop paid the taxes-with enough hemp seed left to keep the family in breakfast cereal.
But important as hemp's ability to rejuvenate soil is, the fact that grandfather's hemp crop matured in the fall, Wisconsin's shortest growing season, and after he had harvested his corn crop, and that a field can produce three hemp crops a year in temperate zones, more in the tropics, is of equal importance in today's needy world.5
Until the Twentieth Century, hemp provided eighty per cent of human needs. It made the toughest canvas, the finest linen, excellent rope, and protein rich food. Eighty-five per cent of the world's marketable goods has been supplied by hemp-seventy-five to ninety per cent of its paper.5,13
Today, especially to the college crowd, hemp is marijuana. Marijuanne, one of the many hemp plents, can produce a mild drug. I abhor the use of any addictive substance (I hate having my mind scrambled), still with the world teetering between survival and the inability to host life it seems unimportant. But it is this trait that set hemp up as our indusrial scapegoat.
Long before that, hemp earned its royal reputation producing paper. According to USDA Bulletin No. 404 published in 1916, it takes 4 acres of forest to produce the quantity of paper produced by one acre of hemp.1
Yet 40 per cent of our forests are harvested for paper! America grinds up over a million trees a week for paper pulp.12
Forests are our siamese twins. A growing forest provides us four cubic feet of oxygen per minute per tree.8
The world ought to be demanding standing forests and hemp paper. Where is the United Nations?
Also paper made from wood disintegrates in fifty years costing libraries millions, while paper made from hemp is virtually indestructible. What entrepreneur would consider marketing an inferior product that takes sixty years instead of one-third of a year to grow and requires four times the land?
Ever since a handful of tribespeople exchanged wandering with their herds for tilling the fertile soils on the Nile and the Mesopotamian plateau, hemp has been the "pot of gold" in a variety of forms. In the Crown Colonies it was the old classic, "hemp, the export crop." 7,11,5
Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Chesapeake Colonies, among others, passed laws making it illegal NOT to grow hemp.11
But hemp had to be hand stripped - "decorted" - a tedious job. Colonial women processed it in the duck pond, a system that produced a welcome by-product, fat, tasty duck,9 but did little to satisfy even the domestic appetite for hemp much less load ships for overseas. Worn- out rope and rags made excellent paper: "rag paper." But the nation continued to import hemp.
George Washington touted hemp as "our farmers' future." 11,5,1 Jefferson 1,11 , the good farmer, considered it unthinkable to depend on cotton: it had a "nasty habit of stripping the soil of fertility." Thomas Jefferson also predicted that "The ladies will not give up stronger, finer, wrinkle-free hemp goods: and, indeed, in 1812 United States went to war with England over access to Russian hemp. Otherwise, Jefferson's prediction proved inaccurate. The cotton gin rendered cotton cheap, and by 1900, cotton, the land gobbler, was "King."
In 1901 Henry Ford was absorbed in his horseless carriage when he heard an item of news: America's timber industries were gearing up to supply the world's ballooning paper needs from wood pulp. "We are already cutting our forests three times as fast as they can grow," Ford protested in alarm. "We must meet our needs with recyclable biomass, not fossil fuel."
Ford had been involved in the search for an alternative to petroleum to roll his contraption. Now he focused on energy for the nation. Shortly, his laboratories re-discovered hemp. "At least four times richer in renewal than any other source," Ford scientists reiterated. "Hemp planted on six per cent of our land will provide all of America's energy year after year."
When fires raged through the West devastating billions of acres of timber, Ford reacted succinctly: "If we were using hemp, we'd harvest another crop in a couple months."
The federal government assessed the charred forests and assigned a botanist and a paper chemist to study alternative sources for paper. In 1916 their report, USDA Bulletin #404, conluded that "hemp paper pulp is both more economical AND more ecological than wood pulp."1 Ford, whose mind focused on solutions, urged immediate attention on building a hemp decorting machine.
No doubt, plans for it were instituted, but a war intervened: at last, in the 1930s excited farmers gathered on village street corners discussing their new hemp harvester.
But United States Goliath, Hearst Tember Industries would lose billions: nor had they been asleep. They, too, had a new invention. Or rather Hearst's friend and co-worker, Dupont did - a sulphate solution which would reduce wood to pulp with unheard of efficiency. It would also reduce bones, hide and hair to pulp, pit marble, pock iron, and burn holes in stomachs, animal and human, while hemp, turns to pulp in water - to bleach paper, threw in hydrogen proxide which quickly breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen with a double dose of the latter. Released into the atmosphere it becomes ozone. Sulphuric acid clings stubbornly to its compoumd form. 10,5,11 With this "improvement" a Dupont attorney hastened to a friend in Congress: via a committee chaired by a nephew of the Chief of the USDA, who had close connections with the Dupont Family. He soon had their witch's potion cleared for use. Now the Hearst conglomerate had only to dispose of the competition.
They discovered that marijuana was a product of one of the hemp plants, and "hemp" became "marijauna " and marijuana a great danger "to our children." Inevitably, their closed door machinations reached the Oval Office aand the ears of the President.
One wonders whether FDR's first impulse was to laugh or scream. Here was a scheme to dispose of a plant the profits from which he surely had been hailing as a godsend, to help pay for his programs designed to yank the nation out of The Great Depression. The purpose must have been transparent - a zany scheme that would make the plant the criminal rather than its misuse - tantamount to declaring it a crime to grow corn, barley, wheat, rye, potatoes and rice, because they can be used to produce whisky, vodka and wine!
FDR lost no time in lining up his support group of opponents, among them, Fiorelli LaGuardia, the fieisty little Mayor of New York with a reputation as a mean fighter; Ralph Laziers, of the National Oil Seed Institute: Doctur James Woodward, of the A.M.A; and a prosecutor for the Bureau of Narcotics. Hearst pulled out their trump card, the power of press: and they set into motion the world's most shameful era of "Yellow" Journalism.
A key scene in Hearst tabloids was the image of Huge, Black, Negroes, insane with marijuana, raping white women: while these tablois whipped citizens to a frenzy, the farners exhibited little serious interest in this marijuana squabble.5
Hemp has an enormous family with members that have little in common. For instance, in drug potential, they range from the psychologically addictive hashish, to the paper plant, with a THC drug factor too low to mention, and some benign weeds, such as nettles.14,1,6
The farm attitude is best depicted by the following exchange between my grandfather and his neighbor:
"Heard you had the Feds crawling around your back forty during the night, Bob."
"Yup. Penned the dog in the barn. Figured they might get a pair of handcuffs on that patch of nettles!"
The farmers were producing paper, not marijuana.
Rational people that they were, they were confident that whatever legalese the attorneys bleated, it would leave space to exempt the paper plant. What country would emdanger a billion dollar export crop? Theirs was not a lone opinion.
Popular Mechanics 3 published an article eulogizing the new crop four months after the passage of The Marijuana Act.
Shortly Henry Ford unveiled a biomass cracking system producing electricity, heating oil, kerosene, a protein stock food, and an auto powered by hemp fuel. But, with the pasage of The Marijuana Act, the timber industry disposed of their competitor. Horever, The Roosevelt Administration made one more comment.
In 1942, FDR ignored the law and distributed 400,000 pounds of hemp seed to farmers for the war effort. Further seed for the plant "so dangerous to our children" would be grown by 4H Clubs! 14,5 No one challenged him. The war would be temporary: the timber industry was already at work devastating our fish runs and poisoning tthe planet.
That has taken only 50 years-but Henry Ford's statement in his later days, that when we run out of forests we'll still have the paper plant, is both comforting and true.
The grumblings of the timber companies, that their production suffers because they have run into a solid wall of environmentalists, is not true: what they have run into is The Pacific Ocean-which sooner or later they will be forced to concede. When they do, they too, will be interested in the paper plant and possibly of use in our drive toward sustainability. We will need strict guidelines and a new enforcement squad: The Forest Service and The Bureau of Land Management have proved incompetent.
On a public radio talk show a couple weeks ago, one of our leading lights from The Forest Service, backed into a corner, admitted that The Department of Forestry sells our public timber at a loss, his justification being that "our mandate is to provide wood products." It seems that we need a new enforcement squad, new guidelines and a new mandate.
But the paper plant can allow us to rebuild our forests.
And perhaps we have all learned that the best use for these trees is standing up. well rooted, poufing out oxygen.13,8,5
END
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Acres, USA, (the national journal of eco-farmers); May'92, p.22, "The Advantages of Bringing Back Hemp" & "A Hemp Report" March '93, by John Clark: "Eco Update," by Eric Skidmore, Chugiac, AK. Apr. '93.
2. Hydrogen Proxide: The Medical Miracle, by William Campbell Douglas, M. D. pub.,Second Opinion, '92.
3. Popular Mechanics, v,69:239 -9; Feb.'38, "Hemp, the New Billion-Dollar Crop," and a followup December, '41.
4. Popular Science :v.128:14,May '36; "Uncle Sam Fights New Drug Menace," W. Wolf.
5. Hemp & The Marijuana Conspiracy: the Emperor Wore no Clothes; Jack Herer;pub.Van Nuys, '90. (Recommended reading per "Acres, USA).
6. The Care of the Earth: the History of Husbandry, Russell Lord;pub. Nelson, New York, '62.
7. Farming in Prehistory: from Hunter/gather to Food Producer, by Barbara Bender, St. Martin's Press, '75.
8. The End of Nature: by Bill McKibbin; Random House, '89.
9. Oxford English Dectionary.
10. Encyclopidia Americana, '92; "Sulphuric acid & paper."
11. " " Britannica (Micropaidia); v.9:126 1A, v.21:3731A, v.16:81 lA,.12: V 10 1B
12. Seattle Times, Oct.21, '90:.p.23
13. The Orange County Register, (The second largest Newspaper in California), Oct. 30, '88-A History.
14. My own notes on the FDR/hemp affair of the 1930s.
15. The Daily of the University of Washington: "Hemp Products Apart from Drugs Develop Hihg Following., by Albert B. Butler, Oct.25,'93.
16. From The Henry Ford Museum: "The Public Image of Henry Ford":
by David L. Lewis;pub.Waybe University, '76
17, HEMP THE PLANT THAT CAN SAVE MOTHER EARTH: www,ratical.org/renewables/hemp.html
18. Solutions to RainForest Destrucion:www.rainforestinfo.org.au/background/solutions.html
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