On this day in 1879, the Mexican agrarian reformer and revolutionary Emiliano Zapata was born. He was a huge figure in the Mexican Revolution. But I must admit: I find the Mexican Revolution baffling. It is so complex with different factions and constant changes in alliances. But I’m not so much interested in Zapata as a revolutionary. I’m interested in him as a reformer and I think in a different time and place, that’s all he would have been. His participation in the Mexican Revolution was from beginning to end about reforming the system and freeing the peasant community.

During his whole life up to the Mexican Revolution, Mexico was an autocracy with what was effectively a feudal system. I find this more and more in my reading of history. Feudal system are an equilibrium that societies very often fall into. We know that feudalism in England turned into capitalism. But as we see in our own country, capitalism has a tendency to creep back into feudalism. It is very simple: money and power are positive feedbacks. The more money the rich have, the more they can manipulate the political system to their advantages. And this is exactly what happened in Mexico. According to Wikipedia, “These officials [of autocrat Porfirio Diaz] became enforcers of ‘land reforms’ that drove the haciendas into the hands of progressively fewer and wealthier landowners.” Sound familiar? (For the record, Diaz was nominally the democratically elected president.)

By the age of 30, Zapata was elected council president of his home town of Anenecuilco. He worked peacefully to get the hacendados (large land owners; think: oligarchs) to return land to peasants. He was somewhat successful. But most had no intention of giving land back and, in fact, continued to steal land. The state government was not at all interested in doing anything. So eventually, he used the local militia to simply take over disputed land. Now, a common conservative complaint about this kind of thing is that it is wrong to take someone’s property by force. But this is the ultimate conservative trick, claiming that however things are at a given time is how they should be. This land was stolen by the hacendados, generally from peasants who were still alive and wanted it back. And the state government understood what modern conservatives understand: if they just do nothing, then the rich win.

In 1910, Francisco Madero became a viable threat to Diaz. So Diaz had Madero arrested. Zapata aligned with him and this was pretty much the start of the Mexican Revolution. Madero did become president in 1911 and stayed in power until 1913 when Victoriano Huerta (with the help of Diaz supporters and the United States government) staged a coup d’etat. He was subsequently assassinated. Zapata spent much of the next several years at war with Huerta’s forces. If you look at photographs of the players in all of this, you can see why the United States would align with Diaz and Huerta: they were white. The more you know of American history, the more you see how large racism looms over it.

Once in power, Madero did what most powerful people do: he abandoned his ideals and the people’s interest. One of the first things he did was to appoint a governor of Zapata’s home state of Morelos who, like governors Diaz had appointed, supported the interests of hacendados. Zapata was very unhappy. In response, he wrote the Plan de Ayala. Much of it involved the revolution itself. But the main thing is that it called for land to be taken away from the hacendados and given back to local townships and individuals. Talk about local control! Libertarians always tell me that’s what they want, but I have a feeling that they would be totally against this.

Zapata’s assassination in 1919 pretty much ended the Mexican Revolution. Many of his reforms were eventually enacted, although never on the scale that he had wanted. And Zapata stands today as a hero whereas everyone sees Diaz and especially Huerta as villains. So there’s that.

Happy birthday Emiliano Zapata!

Afterword

Warren Zevon’s second album has a song called “Veracruz” about the US troops leaving Veracruz after having occupied it for much of 1914. I’ve always liked it. Now I see it as kind of a pro-Huerta song, with the characters being wealthy land owners. I mean, why is the American troop withdrawal from Veracruz the death of the city? I know that Zapata practiced modern warfare, but still: who didn’t? Regardless, it is a nice song and it is responsible for my first introduction to the Mexican Revolution:

Happy Hiroshima Day! On this day 69 years ago, we dropped a bomb on one of the few remaining cities in Japan. If we had been on the losing side of World War II, there would have been war crimes trials and a number of Americans would have been put to death. The truth of the matter is that at the end of the war, the Japanese army was doing pretty well. We had spent the war focused on destroying the Japanese civilian population. That is, of course, what modern war is—going back at least to Sherman’s March to the Sea. The idea is that the civilian population provides supplies to the army and is thus an appropriate target. So much for Just War theory. Anyway, I think today and Saturday (the day we bombed Nagasaki) should be national holidays so we could spend the day begging forgiveness.

The drug smuggler George Jung is 72 today. Jung is an interesting guy—clever but clueless. He was a recreational cannabis user in his native Massachusetts and like many others, he did some dealing on the side. But he thought big and so before long he was transporting large amounts of the drug from California to New England. We he maxed that out, he started flying drugs out of Mexico in stolen planes. But as usual, he was caught when one of the people in his large network was caught and rolled over on him.

He reportedly told the judge that it made no sense to send a man to prison “for crossing an imaginary line with a bunch of plants.” This is what I mean by him being clueless. He’s right, of course. It does make no sense. But if there is one thing my own clueless mind has learned over the last fifty years, it is that there is nothing the power elite care about as much as imaginary lines and imaginary crimes. Our modern drug and immigration laws are just the modern equivalent of ancient religious laws. Jung’s crime was not drug transportation; it was apostasy.

But his time in prison wasn’t wasted. Jung gained a contact, Carlos Lehder. (Interestingly, back 2008, Lehder’s lawyers had to file a habeas corpus petition because the federal prison system had “lost” him.) Lehder introduced Jung to the Medellin Cartel, for whom Jung transported cocaine. But by the late 1970s, he was back to being a freelancer. And in 1994, he was arrested for possession of almost a ton of cocaine and sentenced to 60 years in jail.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Remember Ethan Couch, the 16-year-old who got no jail time at all after killing four pedestrians because he had the made up disease “affluenza”? Jung got 60 years for crossing an imaginary line with a plant product that people were eager to buy. Of course, it is important to remember that Couch was part of the power elite and those he killed were just little people. Jung, although rich, was still an outsider. But this is why I have written many times before that in our society, doing drugs is worse than murder.

Anyway, I wouldn’t even be writing about Jung today, except that on 2 June 2014, he was released from prison after serving 20 years. He is currently living in a halfway house in California. He has been working with writers to novelize his life. He has long been something of a celebrity, especially after Johnny Depp played him in the film Blow. So I’m sure that unlike most people caught up in our criminal “justice” system, he will be fine. I wish him well.

Happy birthday George Jung!

Today is J K Rowling’s 49th birthday and clearly the world is a better place because of it. I’ve tried to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and I have to say that I didn’t make it very far into it. Not really my kind of thing. It is, after all, written for grammar school children. What I find amazing is that a lot of adults like it. There is no accounting for taste. But I like the fact Rowling seems to be a decent person and even tried to publish a novel without getting massive sales based upon her name. So that’s all very nice. But since I don’t know much about her and don’t particularly want to know anything about her given I have a nice feeling about her and I don’t want to spoil it, I am not going to write about her for today’s birthday post.

Instead, I’m going to provide you with a slightly edited version of last year’s birthday post about probably the most pernicious academic of the twentieth century. That’s right, rather than write about the nice British lady, I am going to write about a nasty American man who symbolizes most of what is wrong with our shared country. A man who not only did great harm here, but also exported his pernicious ideology to other countries where countless were harmed, many dying many years before they would have. All of this happened because of ideas pushed by an ideological zealot.

On this day in 1912, the undoubtedly great economist Milton Friedman was born. The truth is, though, that being a good economist doesn’t mean you know anything about economics in the real world. The the Chicago School that he was so important in building shows that to this day. The people who have followed him tend to get lost in their models and mistake them for reality. I’ve seen it happen in my own field. And I think by the end, you could say the same thing about Friedman.

He was far more influential as a popularizer of libertarianism. That was especially true of the very disingenuous book he wrote with his wife, Free to Choose and then the PBS series Free to Choose. (It is amazing how much conservative propaganda the “liberal” PBS has pumped out over the years.) In this capacity, he pushed the thinking on the right to such an extent that now they would consider him a socialist who wants to steal everyone’s money via the Federal Reserve and its money printing. Of course, I figure if he were still alive, he’d be as crazy as they are. As he got older, his arguments became less grounded in economics and more like the thinking of a religious fanatic.

The other thing about him is that the 2008 economic crisis showed that he was wrong about his greatest claim to fame. He supposedly showed that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression; he claimed that if the Fed had just increased the money supply, all would have been well. That is exactly what the Fed has done since 2008 and you can see that it simply isn’t enough. The only reason we aren’t in the same place as we were in the 1930s is because of automatic fiscal stimulus in the form of Social Security and Unemployment—the very kinds of policies that Friedman was against.

I have long wondered what Friedman would have said if he had lived to see the crisis of 2008. It is certainly the case that most of the people who followed in his footsteps came up with clever ways to justify themselves. I feel fairly certain that Friedman would have used his own remarkable mind to justify his old thinking rather than to adjust it. As it was, he was an adviser to Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Every time Friedman’s free market ideas failed to pan out, Friedman’s excuse was always, “It’s that the economy isn’t free enough!” This is, by the way, a common trick of libertarians and communists and, for that matter, any utopian thinker. There can never be the perfect system (whatever the ideologue might see it as), so there is never a way to disprove their theories. So if Friedman had still been alive in 2008, he probably would have been part of the chorus claiming that there was a crash because the deregulation didn’t go far enough.

The thing is that even though Milton Friedman was totally wrong about the main things he is now remembered for and even though he caused so much pain and suffering all over the world, he had a great life. And even in death, he is deified by modern conservatives, especially the libertarians. He considered himself an agnostic, which means that in his reality, there’s at least a reasonable chance that he is burning in hell. So there’s that.

Now that you’re dead, happy birthday Milton Friedman!