Toucans – Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica

Back when I was a bona-fide environmental activist — a phase/career that lasted close to 14 years (if I had to be honest counting) I wrote a book, called Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater Country (WSU Press, 1998). In it, I documented a series of stories through my various adventures in the social and political landscape, which turned out to be far more interesting than the physical landscape I had spent so much time defending.

Why? The trees were beautiful — the wild rivers clean, and it’s hard to explain the deep awe I had, and still maintain for these wild places. But there was simply no cognitive dissonance in the fact that these places, functionally remnants of a bygone era, should be saved. All the truly economically conflicted places had, at least in the Clearwater Country in Idaho, had been logged. The timber industry was literally running on fumes. And the end was near, at least in that era, of large-scale resource extraction. What WAS left was gorgeous, striking and more than a little anachronistic. But the remaining stands of old-growth might build a couple thousand or so houses, or actually cedar shakes for roofs of houses. Or vineyard bracing. Saving this last, best place was simply a no-brainer.

But the forces persisted. There was no aesthetic swaying, no changing of minds. It was obvious to me that the timber industry was going to keep going until its own, bitter end.

It was then that I turned my attention away from just looking at trees, and working to understand the convergence of forces that allowed the destruction of rare, simplistic beauty. And in the process, often done meditating (or doing whatever it was that I did huffing through the mountains) I came up with the notion of The Perfect Racket.

What is a Perfect Racket? It is when you create a psycho-socio-economic machine that manages to cut across class lines, to achieve an end in spite of overwhelming demographic and other boundary conditions. And what had been set up in the heart of the Clearwater Valley in Idaho was exactly that.

What did that look like? There was a mill in Kooskia specializing in cedar. The mill owner was quite rich, and had sons who had left the area. The profits from the mill funded his sons’ passion — high end NASCAR racing, and there were articles about their success in the local paper. Further down, the blue collar people who worked in the mill were receiving their cut, as well as the ones that sawed down the trees, and drove the logging trucks. The bottom of the socioeconomic ladder was dominated by locals as brush monkeys — people who assisted with the various high-line logging jobs and would pile the logging slash for burning at the end of the season.

And the middle class? It was there as well — the US Forest Service. And then the surrounding small communities had some version of medical clinics, or small hospitals, which then were also fed by traffic by local farmers. Government spending in these communities was enormous. Logging and milling often only made up 5-10% of the workforce, as mills had been increasingly more automated even while I was fighting my own personal jihad. But I also noticed that lots of driveways had a Caterpillar D-8 parked there. Turns out a D-8 is about the right size for punching in roads into the backcountry, and the US Forest Service heavily subsidized road construction with both dollars per mile, as well as the timber cleared from the P-line, the route through the forest, where the road was supposed to be built.

Everyone was cut in. It was The Perfect Racket.

Buttressing the Perfect Racket were also myths, and lots of them. The hardworking logger. Trees as a renewable resource. Thriving local communities. On and on. The problem with living in any remote community, though, was that the culture varied in levels of violence pretty dramatically. Some were reasonable. Others were not. All had elevated levels of child abuse and poverty, because that’s what happens when you build a town in the middle of what we, in the PNW, call BFE (Butt-Fuck Egypt.) Don’t ask me the etymology. I don’t know.

When the trees had mostly been felled, and enviros like myself appeared to be winning the battle to protect these last wild places, the stories kept propagating. Loggers could “sustainably” log and build furniture. Or mobile homes. Or program computers (literally). Whatever. It was all insane, and it was all a myth. The real structure of the economy had been built on enormous government subsidy, and once the metrics involved with that were altered (miles of road into wild places being key) there was no simple replacement. Normal people cannot conceive of the scale of the Clearwater anyway. It’s huge by contemporary standards for Lower 48 wild places. So inevitably, people create smaller abstractions that they can place inside their Overton Window. To say we, the environmental activists, were cast as bad guys, well, yes. But most enviros never got out to the woods either. I was the freak, hiking, paddling and driving all over the vast landscape, and all hidden by those damn trees I was attempting to save.

It’s June 11 today, and it’s been a crazy six months of Trump’s presidency. Donald Trump came in with a mission, and a new cast of characters. Having gotten his ass handed to him during his first Presidency, he brought the appropriate guns to a gun fight – an entirely different set of Cabinet members and advisors, some of whom are true rebels. Donald Trump is far more of a cipher than people give him credit for. For his supporters, he’s MAGA. For his detractors, he’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and the Anti-Christ. What he is doing, however, is intruding across the board on an ensemble of Perfect Rackets. Or rather — the money to fund them.

I happen to think that the Perfect Rackets we’re seeing are more corrupt and convoluted than the ones I fought. They’re staffed with people from Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from the prior administration, all holding up some version of what I’ve named a Narcissistic Shield — some innocent thing hostage, with the threat that if the money goes away, the bunny rabbit gets it. Most of the appropriated money for these NGOs goes into the hands of an increasingly incompetent administrative caste, that’s woven together with corporate interests, in ways that are wildly indeterminate on who’s getting what. The amount of money flowing into these organizations from sources like USAID, to fix things like clean energy appliances, or homelessness, is staggering. But there’s some visual evidence that the money is flowing — namely in communities around Washington, D.C. Or even my hometown of Pullman. Look at the 4000 sq.ft. McMansions. That money came from somewhere.

Most of these people employed in their current niche as bureaucratic activists are just as unemployable in the private sector as the loggers were in writing code. When they lose their sinecure, it’s not obvious what any of them will do. So they’re willing to fight for whatever their piece of the racket is with savage lies, attacking the morality of anyone that says society might be better off without them. And as their numbers of followers and children have grown, it also creates incentives for them to spool up the various rate functions in their problems. No one working on homelessness actually wants to SOLVE it. What the hell would they do? There’s a lot of money in NOT solving homelessness.

In LA, especially when these systems come into contact with divergent interests, like the Mexican drug cartels, more and more convoluted connections are formed. Then, the primary vector of spread becomes actually social intelligence. The cartels master bringing in illegal immigrants from East Africa, or India. But that’s not the end of it. Do you know how to set up a transnational human cargo smuggling operation through Ecuador? I don’t. Yet these people meet aligned interests in L.A., funded by the state government, like CHIRLA. Bureaucratic and economic alignment ensues. And those people need a place to stay — bring in the real estate managers. Once coupled with D.C. politicians, Mike Benz calls this “The Blob”. The more money brought in, the higher up in the system this goes. Elections must be paid for, or bought off. Key pieces, like the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying corporate money spent is equivalent to speech. All of the sudden, we are bombarded with nitwits who never wrote an op-ed, nor had a political opinion of any nuance, screaming about “free speech” and “constitutional” rights.

It’s the Perfect Racket. And take it from someone who’s spent a lifetime fighting them, they don’t just go down because you expose them.