Josh Harkinson

Reporter

Born in Texas and based in San Francisco, Josh covers the economy, corporations, and a wide range of political issues in California and the West.

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I Have A Scheme

—By Josh Harkinson

| Thu Feb. 3, 2011 5:03 AM PST

If you think that race relations in your urban hipster enclave have much improved since the 1950s, you probably haven't seen Clybourne Park, a hilarious, devastatingly spot-on play by Bruce Norris that has been making audiences squirm in New York, London, and Washington, DC. At moments during Clybourne Park's West Coast premiere in San Francisco last week, some people laughed and others scowled, as one would expect from a play that mercilessly shreds Obama-era pretensions to social enlightenment.

Expertly directed by Jonathan Moscone at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, Clybourne Park juxtaposes two scenes in the same Chicago townhouse across the span of a half century. In the first, a war-scarred white family is selling the house, which looks like the set to a cheery postwar sitcom, to an African-American couple over the objections of the all-white neighborhood's Rotarian booster (theater buffs will notice this as a re-imagining of "A Raisin in the Sun," a famous 1959 play about race). The second act shows the same house bare and mouldering as two white bobos (Steve and Lindsey), who want to replace it with a modernist tower, square off against black neighbors (Kevin and Lena), who view themselves as defenders of the neighborhood.

That's when things really get interesting. The PC blather deployed by both sides—the acknowledgements of past injustices, the oblique claims to victimization, the emphatic repetitions of "I hear you"—thinly veils the same jurassic territoriality of the '50s. A rhetorical arms race has complicated and in some ways deepened the old divisions, with matters of "taste" substituting for race and class in an an ostensibly post-racial world.

Even the well-educated, well-off, obviously liberal San Francisco theater audience had trouble navigating these shoals at times. There were jokes about deaf people, gay people, black men, and white women that may or may not have been funny. (Why are white women like tampons? "They're both stuck up cunts!"). There was the moment when several people in the audience cheered as Steve tried to find common cause with Kevin by condemning the War in Iraq, only to learn that Kevin's minivan was plastered with three "support our troops" magnets, one for each of his relatives fighting overseas (statistically, African-Americans are overrepresented in the armed forces). But in other ways Kevin is a classic latte liberal.

Clybourne Park ends by suggesting that neither side in the gentrification wars really pays enough heed to the true nature of the history that it enshrines. I hear you, Bruce Norris. I totally hear you.

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As Go Egypt and Tunisia, So Goes America?

—By Josh Harkinson

| Wed Feb. 2, 2011 12:56 PM PST

One cause of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is popular outrage over the monopolization of wealth by a small cadre of elites. The grievances of the Middle East's dispossessed probably seem justified to most Americans, who view the the region as a relic of feudalism and stomping ground for despots. But what about America itself? As has been widely noted over the past few days, income inequality in the United States is actually much worse than in Egypt, Tunisia, or Pakistan. Could the US government feel the push of inequality's domino effect?

The too-simple answer is that the US is immunized to unrest by its comparative prosperity. Over at Economix, Catherine Rampell presents a fascinating graph that illustrates how America's poor are, as a group, about as wealthy as India's richest. Yet those arguments neglect some of the major disadvantages of being modestly middle class in a wealthy country: A much higher cost of living and a perceived need to keep up with the Joneses, which fueled the explosion of subprime home loans that caused the recession.

"Global unemployment remains at record highs, with widening income inequality adding to social strains," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the chief of the IMF, said this week during a speech in Singapore, citing turmoil in North Africa as a prelude to what may happen elsewhere. "We could see rising social and political instability within nations—even war."

He wasn't just talking about banana republics. While India and China have mostly bounced back from the recession, the recovery in the United States has been more uneven, with corporate profits skyrocketing despite entrenched joblessness. "The recovery that is underway is not the recovery we wanted. It is a recovery beset by tensions and strains—which could even sow the seeds of the next crisis,"Strauss-Kahn said. A recent paper (pdf) by two IMF economists warned of "disastrous consequences" if developed economies continue to neglect their eroding middle classes.

While certainly no solution to inequality, the tea party, with its seething anti-establishment resentments, is clearly a product of it. Time will tell whether its quixotic brand of populism gives way to a fiercer kind of class warfare.

Which Dangerous Toxins Are in Your Pot?

Your weed might be gnarlier than you think. So what's an eco-conscious stoner to do?

—By Josh Harkinson

| Mon Jan. 31, 2011 3:30 AM PST

In 2004, California organic farm inspector Chris Van Hook submitted an unusual request to the US Department of Agriculture: He wanted permission to certify a medical marijuana farm as organic. He’d already inspected three pot farms, he says, before word came back that weed couldn't be organic because it wasn’t a federally recognized crop.

So Van Hook founded Clean Green, a certification program for medical marijuana farmers that's nearly identical to the USDA's organics program—except that it can't legally use the term "organic." Since launching in 2004, Clean Green has certified 80 medical marijuana growers who last year produced 8,000 pounds of cannabis valued at as much as $33 million. It's the only inspection service aimed at pot smokers who want their ganja to be farmed as safely and ethically as their organic salad greens.

In practice, medical marijuana is typically greener than pot from your curbside drug dealer, which is often sourced through Mexican cartels or illegal grows in national forests. But the distinction pretty much stops there. Grown under the radar of state and federal agricultural authorities, even "medical" cannabis can be covered in toxic mold, raised in rooms filled with shedding pit bulls, or coated in commercial-grade synthetic fertilizers and insecticides such as phosphate and Diazinon, which can be especially toxic if improperly applied. "Under our program a huge advantage is the patient can be assured that their cannabis is being grown in a legally compliant manner," says Van Hook. Well, at least "legally compliant" enough for any eco-conscious stoner.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I accompanied Van Hook, a balding, soft-spoken, 54-year-old, on an inspection of an indoor cannabis growing operation in a house deep in a Northern California redwood forest. He'd asked that I not reveal the name and location of the grower, a fit, clean-cut young father whose day job involves corporate leadership training. It had been about a year since Van Hook had certified his grow-op; just as USDA organic standards require, it was now up for its annual re-inspection.

"I just want to do something I believe in," explained the grower, who I'll call Jack, as we stood outside his modest bungalow, "and do it as ethically and environmentally consciously as possible."

[Read the full article]

Obama: Drug Legalization "Worth a Serious Debate"

—By Josh Harkinson

| Fri Jan. 28, 2011 5:20 AM PST

Legalizing recreational drugs in the United States "is an entirely legitimate topic for debate," President Barack Obama said yesterday during an online chat session moderated by YouTube. He was responding to a retired deputy sheriff whose question criticizing the War on Drugs had been voted the most popular during the web video site's "Your Interview With the President" competition.

While Obama quickly added that he's "not in favor of legalization," his comments went further than those of any past past president in questioning the wisdom of a drug policy based on arrests and incarceration. It was also a significant break from Obama's own rhetoric. During an online address in 2009, he'd dismissed outright a popular question about whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy, chuckling as he said, "No, I don't think that's a good strategy."

Obama's statement will probably to score points with people who favor pot legalization—according to some polls, nearly half of all Americans. In early 2009, he earned kudos from potheads when the Justice Department announced that it would stop raiding medical marijuana dispensaries that complied with state laws. In recent months, however, the IRS has intensified audits of California pot dispensaries, where marijuana is a $14-billion business with ties to venture capitalists and Wall Street (as I document in a recent feature, Weedmart).

Here's Obama yesterday, in his own words:

Will the IRS Extinguish Medical Marijuana?

—By Josh Harkinson

| Mon Jan. 24, 2011 5:20 AM PST

In February, 2009, the US Department of Justice announced that it would no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries that abided by state laws, sparking a boom in quasi-legal cannabis investments that I detail today in "Joint Ventures" (my feature from the January/February print magazine that's now online). Even so, the fast-growing grey-market in ganja could be about to get pruned. The Internal Revenue Service is reportedly auditing some of California's largest and most reputable medical pot dispensaries, examining their compliance with an obscure section of tax law aimed at drug dealers. Dispensary owners say that the provision, if strictly applied, could effectively snuff out the nation's burgeoning medical marijuana industry.

Enacted in 1982, the year that President Ronald Reagan declared a "War on Drugs," section 280E of the federal tax code explicitly bans any tax deductions related to "trafficking in controlled substances." Though 280E predated the legalization of medical marijuana in California and other states, it has remained "like a dagger held at the throat of every medical cannabis organization," says Steve D'Angelo, the founder of Oakland's Harborside Health Center, which recently underwent an audit by the IRS that targeted its compliance with the provision. "If 280E is applied literally and strictly, it has the potential to close down Harborside and every other medical cannabis dispensary."

According to Americans for Safe Access, a nonprofit group that advocates on behalf of medical marijuana users and growers, the IRS has recently launched audits of several other large dispensaries in California based on 280E. (The IRS did not return a phone call last week). "I think it's a new front [in the War on Drugs]," says Caren Woodson, the ASA's director of government affairs. "We're nervous that this is going to have a big effect."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]