Until recent years, cannabis prohibitionists have been able to intimidate most reform-minded politicians by simply threatening to brand them as “soft on drugs.” But finally, thanks to determined activists and broad support from the general public, politicians are starting to use common sense when it comes to cannabis.

Already, 32 states have legalized medical marijuana in some form or another. And in last November’s election, Alaska and Oregon joined Colorado and Washington in full legalization of recreational uses of marijuana.

Even Congress is beginning to climb aboard the cannabis common sense bandwagon. Tucked in the 2014 Farm Bill was an amendment allowing universities, colleges, and state agriculture departments to grow research plots of industrial hemp – a species of cannabis that is a cousin to marijuana, but produces no high. From West Virginia to Hawaii, 10 states already have laws on their books to allow for this – so our country is finally “advancing” back to the 1790s, when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson considered hemp America’s most beneficial crop. Oh, progress!

Also, Congress included a provision in its December federal spending bill to stop the DEA and Department of Justice from going after states that legalize medical marijuana. They can no longer raid licensed marijuana outlets that service patients who use marijuana to treat everything from the side effects of cancer treatments to epileptic seizures. Marijuana farmers are now safe to cultivate the plant, and the patients themselves are now safe from prosecution for possessing it.

Marijuana Policy Project and Vote Hemp are two organizations that are working with the public and our lawmakers to change the laws and regulations surrounding cannabis. Connect with them at www.mpp.org and www.VoteHemp.com.

“Congress quietly ends federal government’s ban on medical marijuana,” www.latimes.com, December 16, 2014.

“Hemp Research & Pilot Programs Authorized in Sec. 7606 of The Farm Bill,” www.votehemp.com, 2014.

Corporate coup d’etat

Look out America – here comes the Trans Pacific Partnership! Dubbed “a corporate coup d’etat” by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, it’s a grandiose grab for power masked as a trade deal, allowing an unprecedented level of global corporate rule over Americans. Let’s take a quick look at what we’ll be getting into.

The trade hoax. Of the document’s 29 chapters, only five address tariffs and other actual trade matters. The other 24 consist of various ways to “free” corporations from any accountability and from any responsibility to the world community’s common good.

Bye-bye “Buy American.” TPP dictates that all corporations based in any member nation must be given equal access to the public dollars that any government spends on equipment, food, highway projects, etc. Thus, our own national, state, and local governments would no longer be free to give preference to suppliers of our choice. “Buy American” and “Buy Local” programs could be challenged by private corporations.

Wall Street rides again! If anyone doubts this the pact is a corporate boondoggle dressed in trade clothes, let them read its shameful financial provisions. “Too big to fail” laws, ensuring that the costs of a bank’s collapse would be borne by investors, not taxpayers? Under TPP, giant global banks could scamper into private tribunals to grab billions of our tax dollars if they have to comply with such laws. Also, our nation’s financial regulations would have to be “harmonized” to comply with TPP’s extreme deregulation, re-creating the anything-goes Wall Street ethic that crashed the world economy in 2008. A Robin Hood Tax on volatile, super high-speed speculators? Nope. TPP specifically lets global banks challenge and kill these laws.

To help stop this anti-democratic nasty, go to www.exposethetpp.org.

Keeping our COOL

When I was a tyke, momma warned me not to eat anything unless I knew where it came from. That’s so sensible that even Congress acted on it in 2002, passing a straightforward law called COOL (Country Of Origin Labeling). COOL requires meat marketers to tell us whether the meat they sell is a product of the USA, China, or Whereintheworldistan.

This useful information empowers us consumers – which is why global agribusiness giants hate it and are trying to get a secretive, autocratic, plutocratic, private court in Switzerland to kill it.

This can’t be, you say? But it is. Unbeknownst to most Americans, when the US joined the World Trade Organization in 1999, we surrendered a big chunk of our sovereignty to this corporate court.

Here’s what’s happening: (1) American consumers have a basic right to know where their meat comes from, but (2) that right has been pitted against American corn flakes and ketchup in a “trade war” that (3) is being forced upon us by a handful of corporations that produce, slaughter, butcher, and package meat outside of our country, but, (4) are allowed under trade agreements to challenge a US law that had been duly enacted for the people inside our country, so (5) America was sued in an obscure, autocratic, private organization created by and for corporate interests and headquartered in Switzerland. Then, (6) that corporate “court” did indeed rule that the “profit right” of foreign meat packers is superior to our people’s basic right of self-determination.

This is Jim Hightower saying... Holy Tom Paine, this is corporate tyranny! But it’s about to get worse, for President Obama and Congress intend to hang another bad trade deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, around our necks this Spring. For more information on how to stop this atrocity, check out: www.exposethetpp.org.