And The Rest Is Just Noise

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From JONATHAN CHAIT
The New Republic

Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time

American liberals have a habit of withdrawing into cynicism and ennui at the most inopportune moments. The 2000 presidential election, and subsequent recount, was one such moment. The most die-hard reaches of the left, deeming the Democratic Party hopelessly corrupt, rallied to Ralph Nader’s fulsome populist denunciation of Al Gore’s subservience to the corporate agenda. Among more moderate quarters, an attitude of wry detachment prevailed. (“G.O.P.-lite, Democrat-lite,” sighed Frank Rich, “For the 95 percent of the country unwilling to go for Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan, that is the choice, it always has been the choice, and it will still be the choice on Nov. 7.”) Those liberals who did see something large at stake took on an almost apologetic tone, conceding the lack of any inspired positive choice and focusing instead on the dangers of Bush.

The right, meanwhile, was engulfed in passion that occasionally flared into rage. Mobs of chanting conservatives harassed Gore at his residence day after day. Another such mob intimidated Miami canvassers into abandoning a recount then seen as potentially decisive. The left met all this with a shrug.

The denouement of the health care debate has brought about a similar moment in the political culture. The opponents of the bill are full of passionate intensity. The right, of course, is subsumed in rage and paranoia. Conservatives have been joined by fiery liberals like Howard Dean and a slew of left-wing blogs, denouncing the bill as a corporate giveaway and urging its defeat. The attitude closer to the center is more resignation and disappointment. (Frank Rich again: “Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger [Woods]’s public image.”) The endorsements invariably have a defensive tone—the bill “has some imperfections but is worthy of support,” concludes a New York Times editorial.

Go to complete article here→
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The Paradise Imperative

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From WILLIAM KOTKE
CarolynBaker.net

Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many generations. In the modern view, generated from the Alternative Culture and Cultural Creatives, we have a permaculture design in a valley that has been ecologically restored and has added additional trees in different ecological niches to create a food forest of fruits and nuts. Under the forest canopy are tall bushes also of fruit and nuts. Under this, the lower berry bushes and vining plants grow. Lower, are the forbs: perennial vegetable plants that grow year after year and require no disruption of the soil community. Below this are the perennial tuber plants and also down in the soil are the edible mushrooms. This is a perpetual food design that will produce more food per acre than the industrial agricultural system, without digging, disrupting and damaging the thousands of species of the soil community, and at the same time, continually building soil fertility and preventing soil erosion.

Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise says, “ We are faced with some extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed Golden Age.

A New Chapter Unfolding in the Great Debate Over Feeding the World

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From CHUCK BENBROOK
The Organic Center

Three times before lunch on most days I encounter another dose of pro-biotech, anti-organic hogwash inspired directly or indirectly by the multiple global PR campaigns now underway in an attempt to re-position public attitudes about genetically engineered crops.  The messages are always some variation on three themes  –

• Population growth is eroding global food security and only high-yield, GE crops and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) can spare the remaining forests and wild lands from despoliation and rescue the world from famine and environmental catastrophe.
• Organic farming is backward and elitist and not productive enough to make a meaningful contribution to bridging the gap between global food supplies and food needs.
• Only conventional agriculture, and in particular the biotech-seed-pesticide industry, is committed to exploit science and technology in the effort to increase food production and promote global food security.

Left unchallenged, more and more people will come to accept these assertions as reasonably accurate reflections of reality.

During my trip to Europe earlier this month, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness of arguments encountered wherever debate flared up over the relative contributions of biotechnology and organic farming to global food security.  My sense is that both sides are well represented in the debate, dug in, and likely to hold their own for the foreseeable future.

Here in North America the general public, government agencies, scientists, farmers, and thought leaders are not engaged in this debate to the degree their counterparts in Europe are.  As a result, contemporary “discussions” of how to promote global food security are closer to diatribe than debate in the United States.

High-yield agriculture, as practiced in the industrialized nations, evolved over five decades with the benefit of, and in order to exploit the profit potential inherent in yield-enhancing inputs manufactured with relatively cheap energy.  The era of cheap energy is coming to an end. 

The Difference the Bill Makes

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From ANDREW SULLIVAN
The Daily Dish

Jon Cohn gets down to specifics:

A family making $50,000 will have to make serious sacrifices to find $10,000 [the amount you're likely to spend for an insurance policy under the new law]. But it’s better–light years better–than finding $25,000 or more [the amount you'd have to find without the new law]. It’s potentially the difference between having to give up your home, get an extra job or declare bankruptcy. Just knowing the bills that could come will be the difference between getting care you need–and skipping it, at grave risk to your health.

I keep waiting for this obvious fact to sink in. What Obama has done is force the existing system to insure 30 million more people at a modest cost, and to include a swathe of (still-insufficient) varieties and strategies of cost-control. This is huge – the biggest first year achievement of any president since Reagan. If you consider that he did this while also managing the steepest down-turn in decades, revamping America’s image in the world, preventing a banking implosion, and prosecuting two unresolved wars in the face of almost deranged opposition, it’s pretty damn impressive.

This seems clearer to me after a break from the Intertubes. Maybe others will feel the same way after the holidays.
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12 Things You Can Do To Make The World A Better Place

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World Blog→

[Repost: Nested within a longer post, Four World Changing Questions (well worth the read), is an update on this Pollard classic. -DS]

Knowing and Learning:

1. Understand What’s Happening: Before you can engage others and act purposefully and effectively you need to understand how the world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). The world is complex, and understanding and embracing complexity is a challenge to our culture’s predilection for oversimplification and dichotomy.

2. Imagine What’s Possible: Next, you need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If you can’t imagine it, you will never be able to decide how to achieve it.

3. Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things you can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so you need to learn what actions actually work. This takes a lot of time and energy, and to do it you need to stop doing some other things you are doing that are distracting you from learning these important truths.

4. Know Yourself: Then, to assess what you can do about all this, you need to know yourself, which means giving yourself the time and space to discover who you really are, what your true gifts, passions and purpose are, and therefore what you’re meant to do.

5. Build Personal Capacity: And finally, once you’ve learned all this, you need to discover and acquire the additional capacities you need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn’t entail changing yourself to be what you’re not, but just learning some new skills and abilities that will equip you to accomplish more with less effort.

The Theory of Anyway

From SHARON ASTYK
The Chatelaine’s Keys
Thanks to Dave Pollard

My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though).

This is, I think, a deeply powerful way of thinking because it is a deeply moral way of thinking – we would like to think of ourselves as moral people, but we tend to think of moral questions as the obvious ones “should I steal or pay?” “Should I hit or talk?” But the real and most essential moral questions of our lives are the questions we rarely ask of the things we do every day, “Should I eat this?” “Where should I live and how?” “What should I wear?” “How should I keep warm/cool?” We think of these questions as foregone conclusions – I should keep warm X way because that’s the kind of furnace I have, or I should eat this because that’s what’s in the grocery store. Pat’s Theory of Anyway turns this around, and points out that what we do, the way we live, must pass ethical muster first – we must always ask the question “Is this contributing to the repair of the world, or its destruction.”

So if you told me that tomorrow, peak oil had been resolved, I’d still keep gardening, hanging my laundry, cutting back and trying to find a way to make do with less.

Fat Nation

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From MARK T. MITCHELL
Front Porch Republic

Tis the season to be jolly. And the jolliest fellow of all is that rotund elf in the red suit. He’s happy. He’s spry. He binges on cookies and milk. It turns out, though, that if St. Nick put on weight at the rate of the American population, he’d have to add a few reindeer to his team and he would, if he is susceptible to human ailments, be at high risk for cancer, diabetes, and a host of other obesity related diseases.

A study released last month based on research by Dr. Kenneth E. Thorpe of Emory University suggests that if we want to control health costs it is imperative that we do something about obesity, “the fastest growing public health challenge the nation has ever faced.”

Indeed, it seems that Americans are doing pretty well if girth is any indication of success. We are heavier than ever before and packing on the pounds at a rate that is staggering. Here are a few of the findings:

• Obesity is growing faster than any previous public health issue our nation has faced. If current trends continue, 103 million American adults will be considered obese by 2018.
• The U.S. is expected to spend $344 billion on health care costs attributable to obesity in 2018 if rates continue to increase at their current levels. Obesity‐related direct expenditures are expected to account for more than 21 percent of the nation’s direct health care spending in 2018.
• If obesity levels were held at their current rates, the U.S. could save an estimated $820 per adult in health care costs by 2018 ‐ a savings of almost $200 billion dollars.

What could be causing such an increase? Well, it doesn’t take much of an imagination, but the study lays it out in case anyone is puzzled: “Obesity is attributable to inadequate activity, unhealthy eating habits, and changing food alternatives.” In other words, we Americans are spending more and more time sitting on our ample bums while eating more and more crap. It doesn’t take a researcher to figure out that this is a pretty good recipe for obesity.

The Political Ecology of Collapse, Part Two: Weishaupt’s Fallacy

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From JOHN MICHAEL GREER
Energy Bulletin
Part One→

Nostalgia’s a funny thing; you never know what’s going to fill the place of Proust’s madeleine and catapult you back to memories of some other time. A little over a year ago, I had a reminder of that while visiting the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center in Oakland County, Michigan. The path from the parking lot wandered through a lovely autumn woodland, then turned a corner and deposited me back in 1980.

In those days I was passionately interested in the appropriate technology movement, to the extent of spending the better part of three years working part time on an organic farm, learning the uses of cold frames, a solar greenhouse, compost bins, and double-dug garden beds. Every cliché you can imagine about late-70s communes was present and accounted for: wood smoke and mud, naked bodies in a creaky wood-fired sauna, goats and chickens in the pasture, and a handbuilt wind turbine that went whuppeta-whuppeta and churned out a trickle of twelve-volt current whenever the breeze picked up.

The center at Upland Hills was a good deal cleaner, and the goats and the naked bodies were nowhere to be seen, but the esthetic was much the same. Their wind turbine sounded a silky pup-pup-pup atop an honest-to-Fuller octet truss tower, and the center itself was what all of us at the Outback Farm dreamed of inhabiting someday: a big comfortable earth-bermed shelter with passive solar heating and old-fashioned round photovoltaic cells soaking up the sunlight. When we went inside, I half expected to see a circle of scruffy longhairs sitting on pillows around the latest issue of Coevolution Quarterly, excitedly discussing the latest innovations from Zomeworks and the New Alchemy Institute.

Is Wal-Mart the future of local food?

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From TOM LASKAWY
Grist

One of the most important historic developments in the food economy is embodied in this statistic: in 1900, 40 percent of every dollar spent on food went to the farmer or rancher while the rest was split between inputs and distribution. Now? 7 cents on the dollar goes to the producer and 73 cents goes just to distribution. That’s worth keeping in mind when you read things like this:

… Wal-Mart, now the nation’s largest supermarket chain as well as retailer, has gotten into the local scene, embarking on an effort to procure more of its produce from local growers.

Uh, oh.

Now, there is an intriguing (and concerning) wrinkle to all this. As the St Louis Dispatch piece linked above observes (and as Tom Philpott and I have observed many times before), one of the big obstacles to expanding local food systems is the collapse of local distribution infrastructure. There are often no wholesalers to buy and store, and no delivery infrastructure to move, produce locally. Conveniently, Wal-Mart has its own regional distribution system that rivals anything that ever existed before—why reinvent the wheel (again). So, it’s only natural for them jump in:

[T]he company is considering how its vast networking could lead to better distribution of local food to local consumers.

“If we have a truck coming to our store with a load of goods, does the truck go back to the (distribution center) empty, or is there some useful activity for it?” [Wal-Mart spokesman Bill] Wertz explained.

For Diane and Tim Rice, who farm 300 acres in Brunswick, that question found an answer.

Parsley as a vegetable

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From R.J. RUPPENTHAL
Chelsea Green

Parsley is said to be America’s favorite herb, yet it usually appears as a couple of garnish sprigs on the side of a plate. That’s it. Aside from fresh garnishes, a lot of people use the dried/dehydrated/hopefully-not-irradiated form of parsley, which is useful sometimes but basically a shadow of its former self. I never thought much about parsley until we lived near a Middle Eastern restaurant, where tabbouleh was a side dish on every menu item.

Tabbouleh is a bulgur wheat salad, but the grain is not the main ingredient: chopped, flat-leaf parsley has the starring role, supported by chopped mint, tomatoes, green onion, and perhaps cucumber and other vegetables. The dressing is heavy on the lemon juice and salt for a wonderfully sour, salty, mildly minty, and definitely parsley-ey taste. A good tabbouleh will make you believe that parsley should be classified as a vegetable, not an herb.

And why not? Parsley is a green, leafy plant in its own right. We all know it’s edible. It has a mild, fresh flavor that most people like. It is extremely nutritious, complete with vitamin A (from beta carotene), vitamin C, folic acid, and vitamin K. It is rich in antioxidant flavonoids and “chemoprotective” volatile oils that can neutralize carcinogens (source: www.whfoods.org). It is very high in minerals as well.

In fact, parsley is VERY rich in iron, calcium, and other minerals. The issue with these nutritional tables and online calculators is that most of them have a serving size for parsley that is only 1-2 tablespoons. But if you chop a whole bunch of it into a salad (coarsely chop, the same size as chopped lettuce), you could easily eat a cup of this stuff in a salad (solo or mixed with other greens). Just one cup (60g) of raw parsley delivers the following whopping portions of your RDA of the following (courtesy of www.nutritiondata.com): 101% vitamin A,  133% vitamin C, 21% iron, and 8% calcium.

Evilest Corporation Ever Gives Even More Reasons to Grow Your Own

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From SHARON ASTYK
Casaubon’s Book

The seed is starting to take shape as the site and symbol of freedom in the age of manipulation and monopoly of life. The seed is not big and powerful, but can become alive as a sign of resistance and creativity in th smallest of huts or gardens and the poorest of families. In smallness lies power. – Vandana Shiva

There’s an AP investigative report into Monsanto that suggests that the winner of the highly competetive “Evillest Corporation Ever” award has decided to raise the bar on evil further, trying to bring virtually all seed companies together under its own axis of evil.

“We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,’ said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “The upshot of that is that it’s tightening Monsanto’s control, and makes it possible for them to increase their prices long term. And we’ve seen this happening the last five years, and the end is not in sight.”At issue is how much power one company can have over seeds, the foundation of the world’s food supply. Without stiff competition, Monsanto could raise its seed prices at will, which in turn could raise the cost of everything from animal feed to wheat bread and cookies.

The price of seeds is already rising. Monsanto increased some corn seed prices last year by 25 percent, with an additional 7 percent hike planned for corn seeds in 2010. Monsanto brand soybean seeds climbed 28 percent last year and will be flat or up 6 percent in 2010, said company spokeswoman Kelli Powers.”

Even if Monsanto weren’t evil, no company should be allowed to control 90% of the seed supply for any staple foods, ever, under any circumstances.

Kill Your Kindle

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From SUSAN McWILLIAMS
Front Porch Republic

When my mother came to visit last week, she brought a copy of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union with her. Before she departed for the airport this morning, she left the book on my shelf.

And just like that, it was the end of an era.

You see, my mother has announced that she wants a Kindle.

Oh, lots of people have told me about the little advantages of those little gizmos. They are lightweight. They offer instant gratification. They have features that may make reading easier for people with certain disabilities.

For those reasons alone – usually just for the first two reasons – many of the people I know have already purchased electronic book-viewers, or will be purchasing them soon. With both Amazon(maker of the Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (maker of the Nook) making hard pushes on behalf of their respective products this holiday season — “give the gift of reading,” says Amazon’s website — people have been snatching them up. In fact, Barnes and Noble sold out of their holiday-season Nook supply in mid-November. So it’s not hard to foresee a lot of these little guys showing up, wrapped and beribboned, during the next few weeks.

For those of us who are longtime book readers, though, this is the opposite of the gift that keeps on giving. It is the gift that keeps taking away.

First — oh, sadness upon sadness! — electronic reading-devices are going to take away book-sharing, book-trading, and book-lending. You just can’t share your electronic reader like you can share a book.

Roger Ebert discusses the film ‘COLLAPSE’

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Michael Ruppert

From ROGER EBERT
Chicago Sun-Times
[Thanks to Linda Gray]

If this man is correct, then you may be reading the most important story in today’s paper.

I have no way of assuring you that the bleak version of the future outlined by Michael Ruppert in Chris Smith’s “Collapse” is accurate. I can only tell you I have a pretty good built-in B.S. detector, and its needle never bounced off zero while I watched this film. There is controversy over Ruppert, and he has many critics. But one simple fact at the center of his argument is obviously true, and it terrifies me.

That fact: We have passed the peak of global oil resources. There are only so many known oil reserves. We have used up more than half of them. Remaining reserves are growing smaller, and the demand is growing larger. It took about a century to use up the first half. That usage was much accelerated in the most recent 50 years. Now the oil demands of giant economies like India and China are exploding. They represent more than half the global population, and until recent decades had small energy consumption.

If the supply is finite, and usage is potentially doubling, you do the math. We will face a global oil crisis, not in the distant future, but within the lives of many now alive. They may well see a world without significant oil.

Oh, I grow so impatient with those who prattle about our untapped resources in Alaska, yada yada yada. There seems to be only enough oil in Alaska to power the United States for a matter of months. The world’s great oil reserves have been discovered.

Saudi Arabia sits atop the largest oil reservoir ever found. For years, the Saudis have refused to disclose any figures at all about their reserves.

Culture Wars Between Farmers

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

We are all well aware of the no-man’s land of cultural difference between farmers and non-farmers. Visualize on the one hand a high rise apartment dweller in Manhattan burning more carbon than any human ever did before in history just to maintain his luxurious lifestyle while fretting about the evils of global warming. Hold that picture while, on the other hand, visualizing the farmer out in his barn on a frigid December morning shivering and quivering while losing money on every pint of milk he produces and wishing that global warming would hurry up and get here.

But there is another cultural divide coming to the fore in our society, this one between farmer and farmer. The best current example of this phenomenon is the flare up of opposition to Michael Pollan’s books criticizing industrial grain farms and animal factories. Agribusiness has suddenly realized it can no longer just ignore the opposition. A large scale corn and soybean farmer, Blake Hurst, went online with something he called the “Omnivore’s Delusion” to blast Pollan’s “Ominivore’s Dillema.” The crap really hit the fan. Industrial farm supporters and pastoral farm supporters went at each other on the Internet like a couple of tomcats, the former labeled sneeringly as factory food producers and the latter called, even more sneeringly, “agri-intellectuals.” Fast farming vs. fake farming.

I am on Michael Pollan’s side, more or less, but I also sympathize with industrial grain farmers. I’ve been there too. The debate has become so bitter because neither side has lived in the culture of the other except for a few misfits like myself. The new farmers most critical of industrial farming are almost total strangers to the facts of life of the farmers they criticize. I bet even money that if asked what he thinks the LDP will be on corn this fall, Michael Pollan would barely know what to say…

See complete article and comments here→
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Food Safety Experts Say They Won’t Eat These 7 Foods

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From Atlanta Healthy Trends Examiner
Via Organic Consumers Assn

Want to know the foods that the “food safety experts” won’t eat? Prevention Magazine decided to ask. They posed the question, “What foods do you avoid?” to the people whose work is to uncover what’s safe to eat – or not. Here’s what they said:

1. Canned Tomatoes
Fredrick vom Saal, PhD, who studies bisphenol-A (BPA), says the linings of tin cans contain BPA, a synthetic estrogen linked to reproductive problems, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. The acidity in tomatoes causes BPA to leach into food.

2. Corn-Fed Beef
Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms says cattle evolved to eat grass, not grains. Farmers today feed cows corn and soybeans to fatten them faster. A USDA study found that grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E, omega-3s, calcium, magnesium and potassium; lower in inflammatory omega-6s; and lower in saturated fats.

3. Microwave Popcorn
Olga Naidenko, PhD, with the Environmental Working Group says chemicals, including perfluorooctanoic acid, in the lining of the bag, are part of compounds that may be linked to infertility in humans. In animal testing, the chemicals cause liver, testicular, and pancreatic cancer.

Why The Organic Label Isn’t Good Enough

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From BETH BUCZYNSKI
Care2 via Organic Consumers Assn

Environmentalists, sustainable agriculture advocate and farmers have all been stressing the same thing for years: Buy Organic. But earlier this week, a fiasco involving one of the largest organic cattle producers in the country proves that just looking for the ‘USDA Organic’ label won’t protect you from foods manufactured with questionable practices, pesticides, hormones, and other nasty stuff.

In a statement released yesterday by the Cornucopia Institute, one of the agricultural industry’s most aggressive independent watchdogs, it was revealed that Promiseland, a multimillion dollar operation with facilities in Missouri and Nebraska, including over 13,000 acres of crop land, and managing 22,000 head of beef and dairy cattle, has been accused of multiple improprieties in formal legal complaints, including not feeding organic grain to cattle, selling fraudulent organic feed and “laundering” conventional cattle as organic.

Promiseland Livestock, LLC, was suspended from organic commerce, along with its owner and key employees, for four years.  The penalty was part of an order issued by administrative law judge Peter Davenport in Washington, DC on November 25.

Full article here→
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Burn the Vineyard

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From JOHN MÉDAILLE
Front Porch Republic

I have just returned from one of the most remarkable journeys of my life, a ten day tour of Romania to promote an anthology of distributist and localist essays, Economic Freedom: The Renaissance of Deep Romania. Each day brought a new adventure, and I will be writing a great deal about all the marvelous things that happened and wonderful people that I met. But I think it most appropriate that I start this story at the end, for it was the last day that illuminated all the other days, that made sense of the whole trip and showed what it is we are fighting for, both on this journey and on The Front Porch Republic.

Along with my co-editor, Dr. Ovidiu Hurduzeu and the publisher, Alexandru Ciolan and his son Andy, we were driving from the city of Iasi, in the North of Romania, where we had gone to debate a mainstream and an Austrian economist.

Complete article here→
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Transition to a World Without Oil (video)

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From ROB HOPKINS
Transition Network

Presentation here→
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Screaming Knuckleheads – Jim Kunstler

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From JIM KUNSTLER
Author, The Long Emergency

Against a greater welter and flow of incoherence jerking the nation this way and that way en route to collapse comes “ClimateGate,” the latest excuse for screaming knuckleheads to defend what has already been lost. It is also yet another distraction from the emergency agenda that the United States faces – namely the urgent re-scaling, re-localizing, and de-globalizing of our daily activities.

What seems to be at stake for the knuckleheads is their identity, their idea of what it means to be an American, which boils down to being an organism so specially blessed and entitled that it is excused from paying attention to reality. There were no doubt plenty of counterparts among the Mayans when the weather changed and their crops failed, and certainly the Romans had their share of identity psychotics who doubted reality even when Alaric the Visigoth was hoisting off their household treasure.

Full article Climate, Oil, War and Money here→
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Why Cap ‘n Trade Is Another Crock ‘a Crap (video)

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From Story of Stuff Project

Video here→
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How to Prevent the Flu — as Easy as 1, 2, 3…

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From DR. MERCOLA
Mercola.com

Colds are a leading cause of doctor visits and missed days from work and school, and this season is no exception. Americans suffer from approximately 1 billion colds per year, or about two to four colds per year for the average adult.

But why do people start getting sick as the leaves start to fall?

Unfortunately in the US, thanks to the CDC, nearly anyone seeing their doctor for a cold will be told that they are infected with H1N1 and will be added to the already inflated CDC statistics.

However, according to the CBS News study, when you come down with chills, fever, cough, runny nose, malaise and all those other “flu-like” symptoms, the illness is likely caused by influenza at most, 17 percent of the time, and as little as 3 percent! The other 83 to 97 percent of the time it’s caused by other viruses or bacteria.

So remember that not every illness that appears to be the flu, actually IS the flu. In fact, most of the time it’s not.

Nevertheless, as temperatures drop, we begin to congregate indoors and spend less time in the sun. This means our vitamin D levels begin to drop, and we are more apt to spread viruses from one person to another.

It isn’t that these opportunistic pathogens magically appear at certain times of the year—they’re always around. It’s your ability to respond to them that changes with the seasons.

Go to full article and video here→
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Mammograms cause breast cancer, groundbreaking new research declares

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From Natural News

[This is not new news. Those of us who have been involved in natural and organic foods, and alternative health since the sixties figured this out long ago. Will the watered down health bill only enshrine our stupendously corrupt illness system? You betcha! -DS]

Ever since the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force took a look, finally, at the scientific evidence and announced new recommendations earlier this month for routine mammograms — specifically that women under 50 should avoid them and women over 50 should only get them every other year — the reactions from many women, doctors and the mainstream media have reached the point of near hysteria (http://www.naturalnews.com/027558_m…). Not getting annual mammograms, some say, means countless women will receive a virtual death sentence because their breast tumors won’t be discovered. But what is rarely discussed about mammograms is this: the tests could actually be causing many cases of breast cancer.

In fact, a new study just presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), concludes the low-dose radiation from annual mammography screening significantly increases breast cancer risk in women with a genetic or familial predisposition to breast cancer.

People of the Center vs. The Children of Moloch

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From SHARON ASTYK
Author, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil

I’ve gotten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change – attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.

Anyone who made any effort at all knows that no, they didn’t lose or hide the data – it is still out there to be gathered by anyone doing the work. Yes, they should have kept the raw data, but given that they had a tiny budget, limited storage space and were writing their own code, maybe cut them some slack – maybe some discredit is due the climate skeptics who have kept this subject so wildly underfunded? Yes, we can still find raw temperature data at both the collection sites and at the several other compilers.

Yes, the scientists said some stupid and imprudent things – but saying that they were responsible for politicizing the discussion ignores the tens of millions of dollars spent by climate skeptic lobbyists over the last decades to create dissension and attack the scientists. Is there a religious-like orthodoxy of science that has exerted pressure on poor, hapless political leaders? Sure…30+ years of not accomplishing jack-shit – wow, those mean and powerful scientists – where do they get their power? Does an attack on four guys in England undermine all climate data? Ummm…four guys. Compared to tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers.

Cultural orphan of the class struggle

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From Joe Bageant
Author, Deer Hunting With Jesus

Hi Joe,

I just found your site a few weeks ago, computer-phobe and migraine sufferer that I am, but it seems like the more I read of you, the more I understand of myself. I’m from southern Illinois, born and raised, although I lived away from here for a short time.

Now I’m back living in Williamson county, in a town where our last major factory closed two years ago, and coal mining, what’s left of it, is not much more than an irritating reminder of better times long gone. But I give the folks around here a lot of credit. They’re always looking to get beyond the disappointments of the present, find ways to attract new business, and keep the population from decreasing. We’ve held at a steady 10,000 for a good thirty years, and although it might seem laughable to some, that’s a victory in itself, considering everything we’ve lost, believe me.

As for me, I was born working class, well, underclass, truth be told. My dad had been a prosperous farmer post World War Two, but after he lost the farm, he had no other skills to fall back on. He became a house painter, working from dawn till dusk. When his health failed, he became a janitor. My mom was a nurse’s aid at a time when not only didn’t you need a certificate, you didn’t even need to show an 8th grade diploma. It was my bad fortune to be born long after the farm was gone, so all I ever heard from my parents was how wonderful everything use to be, and how shitty it is now. I was one of those quiet, bookish, pessimistic little kids, having little in common with my parents or peers. But rural poverty will have its effect, and I grew up to hold the same jobs as everybody else, working at Wal-Mart, Kroger, and at gas stations which seemed to change their names every few months. I never had what most would consider a real job. I guess because I never felt I deserved it.

And at middle age, I have to say I’ve never found a way to overcome those feelings. A few years ago, while still in my thirties, I had the quixotic idea to go to college.

From Wage Slave to Micro Entrepreneur

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From The View From Brittany

My girlfriend is setting up her own business. It is something she had always wanted to do, but her being laid off in the wake of the current economic downturn – as we have come to call what might very well be the new economic normality – kicked her into action. She is hardly the only one in this situation. All over the country there is a flurry of new business creations. In normal times, this would bode well for a country which has indeed coined the word “entrepreneur” but had forgotten it quite a long time ago. We are not in normal times however, and this unprecedented wave of entrepreneurship tells in fact of a deep economic insecurity which can only increase with the coming energy descent. It also announces the end of an economic arrangement which had shaped the western social landscape for nearly a century : the wage system.

Wage labor has become so common, so “normal” in today’s society, that we have forgotten how marginal – and despised – it was before the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies wages were what farmhands, servants and journeymen got – and for the last category it was considered temporary. All respectable working people were self employed, either owning or renting land or running small – or even not so small – businesses. Living on wages was something you did when you had no other choice, and, socially speaking, that put you a mere step above a beggar or a slave. It is particularly revealing that in Latin, the word for wages has the same root as the word for prostitute.

There were, of course exceptions, but they were not seen as such. Journeymen lived on wages but, at least theoretically, it was, for them only a temporary step

More Gang-Bang For Your Buck

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From CNNMoney.com

Faced with new credit card restrictions, lenders are touting debit card loyalty programs. But many come with fees that may not be worth it for consumers.

Could debit cards be the next cash cow for banks? If banks have their way, they will.

Americans have conducted more transactions and spent more money using debit cards than credit cards this year — the first time that’s ever happened.

Next year, consumers are expected to spend $1.64 trillion with their debit cards, nearly two-thirds more than in 2006, according to the payments industry trade publication The Nilson Report.

And there is no indication this growth is slowing down anytime soon. Not only are Americans increasingly reluctant to take on more debt, but banks are expected to become more stingy with credit cards once new federal legislation takes effect next year, which could make the debit card the preferred form of payment for many consumers.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed by large and small banks, who are currently looking for ways to wring any extra dollars out of their business at a time of severe loan losses.

“Banks, just like airlines and local governments, are looking for fee income to fill the revenue gap,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst with Bankrate.com.

What is shaping up to be an area of focus for lenders are loyalty or rewards programs for debit card users.

A concept that has long been associated with credit cards, increasing numbers of banks have looked to such programs as a way to generate more fees from consumers.

5 evil things credit card companies can (still) do

How Relocalization Worked

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From JOHN MICHAEL GREER
Via Energy Bulletin

One of the points that I’ve tried to make repeatedly in these essays is the place of history as a guide to what works. It’s a point that deserves repetition. A good many worldsaving plans now in circulation, however new the rhetoric that surrounds them, simply rehash proposals that were tried in the past and failed repeatedly; trying them yet again may thus not be the best use of our limited resources and time.

Of course there’s another side to history that’s more hopeful: something that worked well in the past can be a useful guide to what might work well in the future. I’d like to spend a little time discussing one example of this, partly because it ties into the theme of the current series of posts – the abject failure of current economic notions, and the options for replacing them with ideas that actually make sense – and partly because it addresses one of the more popular topics in the ongoing peak oil discussion, the need for economic relocalization as the age of cheap abundant energy comes to an end.

That relocalization needs to happen, and will happen, is clear. Among other things, it’s clear from history; when complex societies overshoot their resource bases and decline, one of the things that consistently happens is that centralized economic arrangements fall apart, long distance trade declines sharply, and the vast majority of what we now call consumer goods get made at home, or very close to home. Now of course that violates some of the conventional wisdom that governs economic decisions these days; centralized economic arrangements are thought to yield economies of scale that make them more profitable by definition than decentralized local arrangements.

When history conflicts with theory, though, it’s not history that’s wrong,

Obama, One Year On (Updated)

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From KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL
Editor and Publisher
The Nation

Updated below

Barack Obama was elected president at a time defined by hope and fear in equal measure. It was a remarkable moment in our country’s history–a milestone in America’s scarred racial landscape and a victory for the forces of decency, diversity and tolerance. For the first time in decades, electoral politics became a vehicle for raising expectations and spreading hope while it mobilized millions of new voters. Obama’s was a campaign built on the power and promise of change from below. At the same time, he was elected as the nation was rapidly sinking into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The night Obama was elected, relief was felt around the world. There was a widespread feeling that the United States had turned its back on eight years of destructive, swaggering unilateralism and was re-embracing the global community. In many ways, the election was a referendum on an extremist conservatism that has guided (and deformed) American politics and society since the 1980s. The spectacular failures of the Bush administration and the shifts in public opinion on the economy and the Iraq War presented a mandate for bold action and a historic opportunity for a progressive governing agenda.

A year later, it’s clear we are a long way from building a new order and reshaping the prevailing paradigm of American politics. That will take more than one election. It requires continued mobilization, strategic creativity and, yes, audacity on the part of independent thinkers, activists and organizers. The structural obstacles to change are considerable. But at least we now have the political space to push for far-reaching reforms.

Whatever one thinks of Obama’s policy on any specific issue, he is clearly a reform president committed to the improvement of people’s lives and to the renewal and reconstruction of America.

Sexual Attitudes In Agrarian Life

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From GENE LOGSDON
The Contrary Farmer

When a writer wants to sound astute, lofty words like agrarian come in handy. Nobody knows for sure what agrarian means. Makes what one says on the subject sound intelligent whether it really is or not. I use the word here to mean the whole farming and gardening way of life that wraps around the actual work of producing food. That would include, of course, sexual behavior. What follows is an excerpt from the Afterword of my recent (2007) book, The Mother of All Arts where I discuss, among other agrarian attitudes, whether people who farm and garden as a vital part of their lives look at human sexual behavior a little differently than people who don’t. Quote:

At one point in this book, I was moved to say—almost blurt out, if one can speak of writing as blurting—that all art is about sex. I made that statement in reaction to Mississippi John Hurt’s remark that all music was about human sexual relationships. [John Hurt was an early country blues singer and a real farmer whose music is now enjoying a resurgence among country music purists.]

The Final Word On Cell Phones

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From JASON PETERS
Front Porch Republic

In the early days of FPR, and then again more recently, I was impertinent enough to write disparaging remarks about cell phones, which as everyone knows are utterly pernicious. On both occasions interlocutors expressed their disapproval by espousing the publicly sanctioned predictable sentiment: that technology is neutral, that it is only our use of a given thing that renders it good or bad, right or wrong, boonful or baneful.

As any pine board knows, this is nonsense. It’s time for the correct opinion to be more widely disseminated.

Plato, if I remember aright, was worried about the perfidy a certain new technology—we would recognize it by the name “book”—would perpetrate on memory. He was vexed by what the transition from an aural to a written culture would do to our capacity to bear things in mind.

Now I like books — even Bill Kauffman’s — and I’m going to side with them. The book is a technology I’m going to defend. But I also happen to sympathize with Plato, who, I believe, was right: by writing things down we cheat the memory. I would go so far as to say that a written record resembles all technology

Suzanne Somers speaks out against the conventional cancer industry: mammograms, chemotherapy vs. alternative cures

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From Natural News

As the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Knockout: Interviews with doctors who are curing cancer,” Suzanne Somers is making waves across the cancer industry. Her powerful, inspired message of informed hope is reaching millions of readers who are learning about the many safe, effective options for treating cancer that exist outside the realm of the conventional cancer industry (chemotherapy, surgery and radiation).

Recently, Suzanne Somers spoke with NaturalNews editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, to share the inspiration for her new book Knockout. “People are just starving for some new information… for other options, for hope in [treating] cancer,” she explained.

The full interview with Suzanne Somers is available as a downloadable MP3 file from NaturalNews.com: http://naturalnews.com/Index-Podcas…

In it, Somers explains why she’s so concerned about the current course of the cancer industry:

The best current overview of peak oil, what it means, and what we should do

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From GAIL TVERBERG
The Oil Drum

I decided to write another rather basic level article because there are so many people I meet who have heard a bit about the oil situation, and it is hard to point to one single article to give an overview of some of the current issues. Regular readers will find many repeats of graphs. There are some new ones, as well, from the Denver ASPO-USA conference. Because there is so much to tell, the story gets a little long.

We live in a finite world. It is clear that at some point, we will eventually start hitting limits—we won’t be able to extract as much oil, or we won’t be able to mine as much silver or platinum, or fresh-water aquifers that have built up over millions of years will run dry.

We are reaching limits in several areas, but the one I would like to talk about here is oil production. Oil is essential, because nearly all transportation depends on oil, and because a huge number of goods use oil in their manufacture (including textiles, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, asphalt, plastics, lubricating oils, and computers). Oil is also essential for our current agricultural system–growing food and transporting it to market.

Why people are concerned about a decline in oil production

Keep reading at The Oil Drum→

See also Abiotic Oil→
~~

Debt, equity, and a third thing that might work better – Seth Godin

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From SETH GODIN

If your business needs money, it seems as though you have two choices:

• Get a loan from a bank
• Raise equity from an investor, giving up part of your company in exchange

Banks are everywhere, so the idea that they can loan us money seems obvious. And venture capitalists and the companies they fund are in the news all the time… and making a billion dollars sounds like fun.

Here’s the thing: for most businesses, most of the time, neither is a realistic option.

Banks aren’t in the business of taking risk. Which means that they make boring loans to boring companies for boring purposes. They do everything they can to be riskless. Which means you need to guarantee the loan with your house or with assets worth far more than the loan. Which means that a good idea is not a sufficiently good reason for a loan.

And equity? Well there are two problems. The first is that the number of investments that professional VCs can make is microscopically small compared to the number of businesses that want them. Go to Seth’s Blog for article→
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Why The Economic Markets Imploded – John Perkins on Democracy Now

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From AMY GOODMAN
Democracy Now

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins calls himself a former economic hit man. He has seen the signs of today’s financial meltdown before. The subprime mortgage fiasco, the collapse of the banking industry, the rising unemployment rate—these are all familiar to him.

Perkins was on the front lines of monitoring and helping create these very events that were once just confined to the third world. From ’71 to 1981, he worked for the international consulting firm Chas T. Main, where he was a self-described “economic hit man.” It was based in Boston.

He’s the author of the New York Times bestseller, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and The Secret History of the American Empire. Well, he’s out with a new book. It’s called Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why the World Financial Markets Imploded—and What We Need to Do to Remake Them.

He joins me here in the firehouse studio.

Bozos on the Couch – What is ‘Good Therapy’ in a Time of Collapse?

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From KATHY McMAHON, Psy.D.
Via Energy Bulletin

I read Sally Erickson’s post [The Culture of Pretend] and as a clinical psychologist, I gotta tell you, I found it sort of depressing. It wasn’t her criticism of psychotherapy. I understand her point about psychotherapy not healing a sick culture. James Hillman made the same point in “One Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and The World’s Getting Worse.” But golly, if we’re here anyway, shouldn’t we have some role as Peak Shrinks while the world as we know it collapses around us?

Psychotherapy wasn’t designed to heal a sick society, but proponents of psychotherapy have been calling our world a sick culture for quite a while. Harry Stacks Sullivan complained bitterly about it, when he was launching his own psychiatric practice during the Great Depression. The theory he developed talked a lot about the importance of honest, emotionally-connected relationships, and the lack of them in his time.

Therapists with a clear macro-view of the world realize that to be minimally effective, they are going to have to leave the therapy room and actually attempt to heal and repair the world, just as Sally has tried to do in her movie. But let’s talk about what relevant therapy is going to look like in the future.

I run a site, Peak Oil Blues, which is devoted to helping people face an energy-depleted future, full of climate change and a collapsing economy.

Major Hasan and The Legacy of George W Bush

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From THOM HARTMANN
Via Common Dreams

If Bill Clinton – or, presumably, Al Gore (or even Ralph Nader) – had been President in 2001, the Ft. Hood massacre almost certainly wouldn’t have happened. Because George W. Bush was president, it did. Here’s why it’s Bush’s fault:

One of the first lessons aspiring novelists and screenwriters learn is that the goodness of a hero is defined by a single quality – the evil of his opponent. From Superman’s Lex Luthor to Batman’s Joker to Indiana Jones’ Nazis to Luke Skywalker’s Darth Vader, for a hero to be perceived as larger than life, he must have a larger than life enemy.

If Frodo in “Lord of the Rings,” for example, hadn’t been forced to do battle with the supernatural powers of the Ring and its minions, his story would have merely been a boring travelogue. But with an army of supernaturally brilliant, evil, and powerful opponents, Frodo had the opportunity to display his extraordinary inner courage and resourcefulness, qualities he didn’t even realize he had until they were called forth by the peril of an awesome evil.

This is a lesson that was not lost on Karl Rove and George W. Bush. If they could recast George as the opponent of a power as great as the Ring, then the rather ordinary Dubya could become the extraordinary SuperGeorge, rising from his facileness to prevail over supernatural powers of evil.

Bill Clinton had a similar chance, but passed on it for the good of America and the world.

The Culture of Pretend: How Psychotherapy Keeps Our Communities Sick

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From Sally Erickson
Via Energy Bulletin

Early in my experience as a psychotherapy client I received the therapeutic counsel that “Secrets keep you sick.” As scared as I felt when I identified and then disclosed secrets to my therapist, I saw the healing power that came as as a result. I worked hard in therapy. I realized how much material I had kept secret, even from myself. I learned the power and value of deep insight, as I recalled forgotten events, experiences, and emotions. I committed myself to make the most out of my therapy and that counsel about not keeping secrets proved to be of great personal value. I felt real relief at finally knowing myself and then at allowing someone else to know me to the bone.

I saw some smart and helpful therapists along the way. It is not a stretch to say that psychotherapy very likely saved my life. It definitely improved my life and my regard for myself. But, like most people who have been on either or both sides of “the couch,” I didn’t expect complete healing of everything. I accepted on-going self-doubt, neuroses, bouts of insecurity, and inner triggers and over-reactions as part of being human. I’ve kind of accepted, like Jack Nicholson does in one of my favorite movies, that this is “As Good As I Gets.”

Now, after twenty-five years of being a psychotherapist and some thirty-five years since I first entered therapy as a client, I’m questioning some basic assumptions about the institution of psychotherapy. And it is because of that counsel about not keeping secrets, that I have begun this questioning.

Psychotherapy can help people to acknowledge their own history of unmet needs, hurts, and trauma, and the resulting emotions. It also can help us to acknowledge the pain of friends and family who take the risk to share themselves deeply.

Our most important task – Vandana Shiva (video)

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From VANDANA SHIVA
Via Transition Culture

The most important pressure people in the South face is the grabbing of their resources to feed a consumer machinery where the rich North doesn’t really benefit from that consumption, but it thinks it’s benefiting.

A Transition Town movement in the North, that reduces the pressure on the South, while maintaining solidarity on issues where the North can’t provide for itself — you can’t grow your coffee, you can’t grow your spices in Europe, you can’t grow your cotton — a Transition Town movement in the North needs to shrink its ecological footprint in areas where it is shrinkable, and it needs to generate more livelihood locally in production and the first candidate for this is fresh vegetables.

Fresh vegetables are the reason Third World people are losing their land. Fresh vegetables do not get exported by small peasants… giant companies take over the land, put green beans and lettuce onto flights, and ship it to the North.

So if you reduce your consumption of long distance flights for vegetables, and increase your local production ecologically, you are reducing the pressure on the South, you are making sure families don’t go hungry in the South.

That’s the kind of solidarity that helps.

Go to video at Transition Culture→

See also Sharon Astyk’s Comments→

[This is the reason the so-called "Green Revolution" is a disaster for the world. -DS]
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Avoiding Factory Farm Foods

 

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From NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN
Huntington Post Blogs

Livestock Rancher, Lawyer, and Author, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

Most people share at least the following traits: they want to be healthy; they like animals; and they value clean air and water. Yet relatively few Americans connect those concerns with their food. As more people start making the link (especially if they’ve seen graphic video footage of industrial animal operations), many decide it’s time to stop eating foods from factory farms. This is a guide for doing just that.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. Unlike the fits and starts described in Jonathan Safran Foer’s autobiographical book Eating Animals, the day I decided to quit eating meat was the last time I ever did. I remember that dinner well. It was my mother’s tuna fish casserole, and actually quite tasty. But while I chose to stop eating meat, I never adopted the view that it was morally wrong, and, consequently, didn’t become one of those vegetarians who spends her spare time plumbing the depths of meat industry literature looking for bits of information to shock my friends and family into giving up meat.

Nine years ago, I had just started working as an environmental lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he approached me about leading a national campaign to reform the livestock and poultry sector. He said that industrialized animal production had become one of the nation’s worst polluters of water and air, and he wanted to aggressively attack the problem.

Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights

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Thousands of people voted to protect nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

[After two resounding and very satisfying defeats of outside Big Money interests, is this a good next step for Mendocino County? -DS]

From Mari Margil
Yes! Magazine

Of all the candidates, bills, and proposals on ballots around the country [last week], one of the most exciting is a proposition that didn’t pass.

In Spokane, Washington, despite intense opposition from business interests, a coalition of residents succeeded in bringing an innovative “Community Bill of Rights” to the ballot. Proposition 4 would have amended the city’s Home Rule Charter (akin to a local constitution) to recognize nine basic rights, ranging from the right of the environment to exist and flourish to the rights of residents to have a locally based economy and to determine the future of their neighborhoods.

A coalition of the city’s residents drafted the amendments after finding that they didn’t have the legal authority to make decisions about their own neighborhoods; the amendments were debated and fine-tuned in town hall meetings.

Vegetarian’s Rebuttal to ‘The Carnivore’s Dilemma’

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From TreeHugger

Last week’s NY Times featured an op-ed entitled “The Carnivore’s Dilemma“–an ostensibly enlightened response to the chorus of voices promulgating a vegetarian diet as a way to significantly reduce one’s emission of greenhouse gasses (not least amongst these voices is Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”). Unlike “The Omnivore’s Delusion“–a fluff piece by the industrial agriculture lobby that defends the status quo–the author of the Times’ piece, Nicolette Hahn Niman, is no great defender of current industrial agricultural practices; she’s a rancher and advocate of “traditional”, grass-fed livestock production. Hahn Niman’s argument focuses on debunking the notion that vegetarianism is inherently the most beneficial way of eating for the environment.

While Hahn Niman has several valid points, her arguments often fall short of a sale. She frequently compares best-case scenario meat consumption and worst-case scenario vegetarianism. She states, “It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.” First off, she doesn’t say that this theoretical conscientious carnivore will be more environmentally friendly, she merely uses the more hopeful “could” and “may”. Moreover, she never deigns to compare a conscientious meat eater to a conscientious vegetarian.

The Carnivore’s Dilemma

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By NICOLETTE HAHN NIMAN
Bolinas, Calif.
New York Times Op-Ed

Is eating a hamburger the global warming equivalent of driving a Hummer? This week an article in The Times of London carried a headline that blared: “Give Up Meat to Save the Planet.” Former Vice President Al Gore, who has made climate change his signature issue, has even been assailed for omnivorous eating by animal rights activists.

It’s true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

Too Big to Fail – Too Big to Exist (video)

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From SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS
Vermont

More than a year has gone by since Congress passed the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. The Federal Reserve has committed trillions of additional dollars in virtually zero-interest loans and other assistance to large financial institutions resulting in the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world. Today, most of the huge financial institutions still standing have become even bigger — so big that the four largest banks in America (JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup) now issue one out of every two mortgages; two out of three credit cards; and hold $4 out of every $10 in bank deposits in the entire country.

If any of these financial institutions were to get into major trouble again, taxpayers would be on the hook for another massive bailout. We cannot let that happen. That is why I introduced legislation that would give the secretary of the Treasury 90 days to identify every single financial institution and insurance company in this country that is too big to fail and to break them up within one year.

If it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to exist! Break ‘em up!

Go to video→

The Oceans Are Coming

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From DMITRY ORLOV
Club Orlov

Part I: The Global Mistake

In September 2009 the latest global temperature rise projections released by the Hadley Centre, part of the British Meteorological Office indicated an average rise of 4 degrees Celsius (that’s a balmy 7.2°F) by 2055 given a business as usual scenario. Some places will be a bit more stable, but the places that particularly matter – the ice caps, the methane-rich permafrosts in northern Canada and Siberia, and the Amazon rainforest – will be melting, off-gassing, and burning, respectively. The report offers some detail on what that would feel like:

In a 4°C world, climate change, deforestation and fires spreading from degraded land into pristine forest will conspire to destroy over 83 per cent of the Amazon rainforest by 2100… in a 4°C world there will be a mix of extremely wet monsoon seasons and extremely dry ones, making it hard for farmers to plan what to grow. Worse, the fine aerosol particles released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels could put a complete stop to the monsoon rains in central southern China and northern India… the people most vulnerable to a 4°C rise are also least able to escape it. At 4°C, the poor will struggle to survive, let alone escape.

And what of that lodestone, global sea level? This happens to be a very interesting question, because ocean levels are set to rise dramatically. According to UCLA scientists, the last time carbon dioxide levels were as high as they are today was 15 million years ago. At that time, the sea level was between 20 and 36 metres higher (75 to 120 feet), there was no permanent ice cap in the arctic, and very little ice in Antarctica or Greenland. That is where we are headed. The only remaining question is, How long will it take us to get there?The authors of the Hadley Centre report predict a rise of just 1.4 metres by 2100. The IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report predicted something like half a metre by 2100 based on a combination of the fattening of the oceanic envelope caused by thermal expansion and the increased runoff from glaciers and minor ice sheets. None of this sounds particularly catastrophic just yet, but then it turns out that these predictions are not based on anything particularly relevant: the British Antarctic Survey, in 2008, made it clear that the IPCC had not included the source of nearly 100% of the world’s potential ice melt – the major ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland – simply because they had little idea of how the ice caps would behave in a heating world:

More at ClubOrlov→

See also Anthropoclastic Climate Change→
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Climate Change Deniers Are Not Skeptics – They’re Suckers

From GEORGE MONBIOT
The Guardian/UK

My fiercest opponents on global warming tend to be in their 60s and 70s. This offers a fascinating, if chilling, insight into human psychology

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

A study by the website Desmogblog shows that the number of internet pages proposing that man-made global warming is a hoax or a lie more than doubled last year. The Science Museum’s Prove it! exhibition asks online readers to endorse or reject a statement that they’ve seen the evidence and want governments to take action. As of yesterday afternoon, 1,006 people had endorsed it and 6,110 had rejected it. On Amazon.co.uk, books championing climate change denial are currently ranked at 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 in the global warming category. Never mind that they’ve been torn to shreds by scientists and reviewers, they are beating the scientific books by miles. What is going on?

It certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically over the past two years. If you don’t believe me, open any recent edition of Science or Nature or any peer-reviewed journal specialising in atmospheric or environmental science. Go on, try it. The debate about global warming that’s raging on the internet and in the rightwing press does not reflect any such debate in the scientific journals.

An American scientist I know suggests that these books and websites cater to a new literary market: people with room-temperature IQs. He didn’t say whether he meant fahrenheit or centigrade. But this can’t be the whole story. Plenty of intelligent people have also declared themselves sceptics.

More at Common Dreams via The Guardian→

See also The Global Climate Change Lobby→
~~

Derrick Jensen Calls Out Richard Dawkins et al.

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From CounterPunch

First, if the scientific materialist instrumentalist perspective is right and every other culture is wrong, the universe is a gigantic clockwork – a machine: a very predictable and therefore controllable machine. Power in this case, then, is like meaning in that there is no inherent power in the world (or out of it)—just as no power inheres in a toaster or automobile until you put it to use—and the only power that exists is that which you project onto and over others (or that others project onto and over you). Power exists only in how you use raw materials – the more raw materials you use more effectively than anyone else, the more power to you. And science is a potent tool for that. That’s the point of science.

This means, of course, that might then makes right, or rather, right, too, is like meaning and doesn’t inhere anyway—if nonhumans are not in any real sense beings and are here for us to use (and not here for their own sakes, with lives as meaningful to them as yours is to you or mine is to me) then using (or destroying) them raises no significant moral questions, any more than whether you or I do or don’t use or destroy any other tool—which means right is what you decide it is, or more accurately, it’s irrelevant, right is whatever you want it to be, which means it’s really nothing at all. But this malleable notion of right means that you can fairly easily talk yourself into feeling good about exploiting the shit out of everyone and everything else. If all of this sounds sociopathological, that’s because it is.

Western philosophy and scientific philosophy is sociopathological, it finds logic through the power of command. It makes us all insane. Richard Dawkins wrote, “Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.” Do you see the fundamental flaw in logic here? I’m guessing that if we lived in a culture that wasn’t sociopathological we would all see through this in a heartbeat. Let’s ask a simple question: How does science boost its claim to truth? Here is Dawkins’s (and the culture’s) answer: by making matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and by predicting what will happen and when. Do you see the problem yet?…

The fact that they, too, must pay this price of suffering and death as a cost of participating in the joyous web of experience and relationship that is the ongoing and eternally creative process of living, somehow seems to them an affront. To which I have a two-word response: grow up…

See complete interview here→
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Bailouts For Dummies

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World Blog

Lately I’ve been reading more about economics, in self-defence against all the corporatist-government thievery and lies going on out there.

I’m aware that most people find what is happening in our economy and financial systems unfathomable, so I thought I’d try to simplify the complex. I confess up front this is a substantial over-simplification, and I’m not a professional economist. Recent events really boil down to governments doing what they’re told to do because their self-serving advisors have made them so terrified of the consequences of not doing so, that they feel they have no alternative. It’s not so much “too big to fail” as “failure is not an option”.

Our modern economic system is founded on a false premise — that unregulated ‘free’ markets are the most efficient (free of waste) and effective (they will produce better ‘collective’ outcomes than markets that government manages or intervenes in). This has been repeatedly shown to be false, but it still governs mainstream economic, and conservative, thought. In most countries (other than the US and struggling nations) experience with the failures of the ‘free’ enterprise market system — laissez faire capitalism — has led governments to play a significant, if not dominant, role in economic regulation and decision-making. These are what are called “balanced economies”, where governments intervene to limit the excesses of self-serving private interests and to provide goods and services (like health care and education) that the majority believe should be available to all, regardless of wealth or income.

Where there is no balance, as in struggling nations where the government is weak or hopelessly corrupt, the result is a hegemony (total dominance) by a wealthy elite that effectively owns and dictates policy to politicians, regulators and judges. This near-monopoly of consolidated power is variously called corpocracy, corporatism, or fascism. Many right-wing ideologues like Mussolini believed such a hegemony was the much-sought “benign dictatorship” that would act in the collective interest more knowledgeably and efficiently than any democracy. There is a second school of right-wing libertarian ideologues, especially in the US, who believe that the ‘market’ is able to act in this fashion, and that any government intervention will necessarily worsen every situation.more→

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Simple lifestyle tweaks key in climate change fight

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From GRIST

WASHINGTON—The United States could cut greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of France’s total annual emissions by getting Americans to make simple lifestyle changes, like regularly maintaining their cars or insulating their attics, a study showed Monday.

If U.S. households took 17 easy-to-implement actions—like switching to a fuel-efficient vehicle, drying laundry on a clothesline instead of in a dryer, or turning down the thermostat—carbon emissions could be cut by 123 metric tons a year by the 10th year, the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found [PDF].

“This amounts to … 7.4 percent of total national emissions—an amount slightly larger than the total national emissions of France,” showed the study led by Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University’s department of sociology and environmental science and policy.

“It is greater than reducing to zero all emissions in the United States from the petroleum-refining, iron and steel, and aluminum industries, each of which is among the largest emitters in the industrial sector,”  the study said.

But the lifestyle changes come with a much smaller price tag and no great change to the way Americans live.

At present, U.S. direct household energy use accounts for 38 percent of the country’s carbon emissions, or 626 million metric tons of carbon—a whopping eight percent of global emissions “and larger than the emissions of any entire country except China.”

To quickly bring down those numbers, the researchers suggested greater focus on consumer behavioral changes and less on efforts to develop new technologies and put in place so-called cap and trade regimes.

The researchers grouped 17 actions Americans could take to reduce carbon emissions into five groups: weatherization, switching to more efficient equipment, maintaining equipment, adjusting appliance setting—such as the temperature on water heaters—and modifying daily personal use.

more→
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Resilience Thinking – Transition Culture

 

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From ROB HOPKINS
Transition Culture

The latest edition of Resurgence is timed to coincide with the Copenhagen talks, and looks at resilience as a key aspect of the climate change debates.  Here is the article I wrote for it.

Resilience Thinking. Why ‘resilience thinking’ is a crucial missing piece of the climate-change jigsaw and why resilience is a more useful concept than sustainability: by Rob Hopkins.

Resilience; “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks”

In July 2009, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband unveiled the government’s UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, a bold and powerful statement of intent for a low-carbon economy in the UK. It stated that by 2020 there would be a five-fold increase in wind generation, feed-in tariffs for domestic energy generation, and an unprecedented scheme to retrofit every house in the country for energy efficiency. In view of the extraordinary scale of the challenge presented by climate change, I hesitate to criticise steps in the right direction taken by government. There is, though, a key flaw in the document, which also appears in much of the wider societal thinking about climate change. This flaw is the attempt to address the issue of climate change without also addressing a second, equally important issue: that of resilience.

The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more useful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face. more→
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McKibben Versus Hedges’ Clash of Worldviews: How Do We Solve the Environmental Crisis?

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From CHRIS HEDGES and BILL McKIBBEN
Yes! Magazine and TruthDig, via Alternet and OCA

Bill McKibben believes we must reduce our carbon emissions immediately, or else face disaster. Chris Hedges says that until we defeat corporate power, we can’t address anything.

Editor’s Note: The following two articles below by Bill McKibben and Chris Hedges illustrate a key point of debate in thinking about how to solve our environmental crisis. Environmental activist and writer McKibben, in YES! Magazine on October 15, writes that we can’t let the atmosphere contain more than 350 million parts per million of carbon dioxide, or else face total environmental catastrophe, problem being that we’ve already passed this number. He’s helped organize a day of action on October 24 to push and make it happen. Chris Hedges’ response in TruthDig channels the radical thinking of Derek Jensen and argues that there is no possible way to address the release of carbon dioxide without addressing the way industrial society without addressing corporate power: “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.” A very important debate, arguably on potentially the most important issue of our lives –

350: The Most Important Number in the World

by Bill McKibben, YES! Magazine

From Mt. Everest to the Maldives, people worldwide are turning an arcane number into a movement for a stable climate. Bill McKibben asks: Will you join them?

Let’s say you occasionally despair for the future of the planet. In that case, the place you need to be this week is the website for 350.org.

Every few minutes, something new arrives at our headquarters, where young people hunched over laptops do their best to keep up with the pace. News that activists in Afghanistan-Afghanistan-have organized a rally for our big day of action on October 24. They’ll assemble on a hillside 20 kilometers from Kabul to write a huge message in the sand: “Let Us Live: 350.” more→

350 – in every corner of the globe – (Updated)

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UPDATE – Go see the photos: 350 Day of Action

Michael Moore’s Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now

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From MICHAEL MOORE
Flint, Michigan

Friends,

It’s the #1 question I’m constantly asked after people see my movie: “OK — so NOW what can I DO?!”

You want something to do? Well, you’ve come to the right place! ‘Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people’s homes are now truly worth — and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies — and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies — you name it. If a company’s primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by — and the first rule is “Do no harm.” The second rule: The question must always be asked — “Is this for the common good?” (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

Swine Flu’s Real Exposure

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From Front Porch Republic

The most haunting, awful scenes in Thucydides’s history of the Pelopponesian war are those describing the Athenian plague.

The plague emerged in the second year of the war, moving quickly from the port of Piraeus into the heart of the city. People who had been in good health, Thucydides tells us, “were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head,” then beset by sneezing and retching and violent spasms. The skin of plague victims became ulcerated, and they could not bear clothing of even the lightest sort. Nor could they sleep. They suffered from “agonies of unquenchable thirst, though it made no difference whether they drank little or much.” Most died within a week. The few patients who recovered were often “seized with an entire loss of memory,” or left blind.

The disease was so potent, Thucydides says, that the birds of prey who came to feast upon plague victims also died. Birds disappeared from the city.

There were so many plague deaths that the traditional burial and cremation rites were upended. Thucydides describes the way in which the plague turns Athens into a city of “lawless extravagance.” Citizens, fearing that their lives were not long for the world, started doing just what they pleased. They spent lavishly, pursued pleasure without honor, and generally acted without fear of god or law. They figured that no witnesses would survive to punish or judge them.

But “by far the most terrible feature in the malady,” Thucydides says:

was the dejection which ensued when anyone felt himself sickening, for the  despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to disorder, besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality. On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse; on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence.

What Thucydides helps us to see in that description, as George Kateb has written, is “the ways in which fear of death through contagion disorganizes all human relations”: more→
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How a Doctor learned about health from his farm

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From DR. ROBERT GROSS
Cooper Mountain Vineyards
Cooking Up A Story

On the surface, the practice of medicine — both the traditional and non-traditional approaches — would seem to have little in common with the growing of wine grapes. For Dr. Robert Gross, there is a strong connection between his training as a Psychiatrist, and viticulture. This episode draws upon the rich interplay between two completely separate fields, each helping to enhance better understanding with the other.

It’s hard to tell how agriculture is influenced by medicine, and how medicine is influenced by agriculture because it kind of flows back and forth

My main job is being a psychiatrist, a medical doctor in which I practice mostly psychotherapy with some medication, and I mix that with alternative medicine which includes acupuncture and homeopathy.

And then I run Cooper Mountain Vineyards. Grapes are a lot like human beings in that when they’re real young they don’t show the same maturity that an older vine, or older person, might show. And so the grapes become much more elegant, sophisticated, and balanced — as human beings usually do too — as they get older. Then, of course, at some point in life, or in the age of the vine, they start fading.

My growth as a Doctor, and as a Farmer and Winemaker, have fed each other. As an example, I know in this plot here, in the early 1980s, we were using some chemicals that were available and were used to keep the birds off these grapes. We would apply the chemical fairly close to the harvest. The birds would eat it and eventually vomit because it affected their nervous systems. We were all told that these chemicals disappear. There were 10 days [after application] that we didn’t pick.

And then Canada decided they were going to measure the amount [of that chemical] that was left in the wine… something that most of us hadn’t thought about because we had been told it was all gone. Canada eventually banned the substance because it was a neurotoxin… a neurotoxin not just for birds, but a neurotoxin for human beings too.

That knowledge came from agriculture… learning about birds and what it does, and realizing that

I Was So Wrong

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From GARRISON KEILLOR

Even people who oppose regulation and don’t mind manufacturing hamburger contaminated by E. coli deserve healthcare

OK, it was wrong of me to say last week that we should deny healthcare to Republicans except for aspirin and hand sanitizer, and thank you to the many readers who kindly took me to task. It was so wrong. And I withdraw the idea that death panels should circulate through red states searching for the obese and slow afoot, the wheezy and limpy, spray-painting orange stripes on their ankles, marking them for future harvest. That was very, very bad.

Republicans have the same right to quality healthcare as anyone else, and you can quote me on that. Even people who are crazed stark raving berserk by the thought of a president with three vowels in his last name deserve to be treated with kindness and dignity, and shot with tranquilizer darts by game wardens and wrapped in quilts and taken to refuge.

What has come along to change my mind? Fall, magnificent fall, in all its grandeur, when the maples are blazing with glory, like young romantic poets dying as they are writing their best stuff. John Keats died at 25, Shelley at 29. Stephen Crane was 28. Franz Schubert was 31, and Mozart was just a young married guy with a couple of little boys, neither of whom did much in their lives. One of them had musical talent but was crushed by the burden of his father’s fame. (Great men probably shouldn’t have children, so keep that in mind if you are young and wildly brilliant: Use a condom.)

The maple trees stand in the yards of we stolid Midwesterners and they cry out for unbridled passion and heartbreaking beauty and fabulous golden yellows and blazing reds, and they tell us to quit our jobs and fly away in pursuit of hopeless romance and a life of dance and poetry and spending your life creating masterpieces that the world will ignore, and of course we don’t listen to the bad advice of trees, we go right ahead fixing our children’s lunches and arranging little enriching experiences for them and asking them what they want to be for Halloween, and then the rain falls and the wind blows and romanticism is gone, a heap of rotting leaves on the ground. Sic transit gloria mundi, pal.

Race to the Bottom: Pilots on Food Stamps

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From MICHAEL MOORE

We’re on the descent from 20,000 feet in the air when the flight attendant leans over the elderly woman next to me and taps me on the shoulder.

“I’m listening to Lady Gaga,” I say as I remove just one of the ear buds. I know not this Lady Gaga, but her performance last week on SNL was fascinating.

“The pilots would like to see you in the cockpit when we land,” she says with a southern drawl.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No. They have something to show you.” (The last time an employee of an airline wanted to show me something it was her written reprimand for eating an in-flight meal without paying for it. “Yes,” she said, “we have to pay for our own meals on board now.”)

The plane landed and I stepped into the cockpit. “Read this,” the first officer said. He handed me a letter from the airline to him. It was headlined “LETTER OF CONCERN.” It seems this poor fellow had taken three sick days in the past year. The letter was a warning not to take another one — or else.

“Great,” I said. “Just what I want — you coming to work sick, flying me up in the air and asking to borrow the barf bag from my seatback pocket.”

He then showed me his pay stub. He took home $405 this week. My life was completely and totally in his hands for the past hour and he’s paid less than the kid who delivers my pizza.

I told the guys that I have a whole section in my new movie about how pilots are treated (using pilots as only one example of how people’s wages have been slashed and the middle class decimated). In the movie I interview a pilot for a major airline who made $17,000 last year. For four months he was eligible — and received — food stamps. Another pilot in the film has a second job as a dog walker.

We need more organic leafy greens, not less

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From MIKE ADAMS
Natural News

[Last] week, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) released a “risky foods” list aiming to reveal the top ten riskiest foods responsible for most food-borne illnesses. Number one on the list is “leafy greens.” Does this mean people should stop eating leafy greens? Of course not: The list itself is flawed from the very start.

There’s nothing inherently “risky” about leafy greens. There has never been a single food-borne illness caused by a leafy green. What causes food-borne illnesses are the bacteria that get onto the leafy greens. Putting the focus on the food item itself is not only scientifically inaccurate; it’s also misleading to consumers.

The real question is how do foods get contaminated with e.coli? And that answer involves the growing and processing of those foods. Foods that are grown near factory animal farms are far more likely to be contaminated with e.coli than those grown in more natural settings. Foods grown using methods of biodynamic gardening are far more likely to be free from e.coli than those grown as monoculture crops.

What really causes foods to be contaminated are conventional mass-agriculture farming practices, not the foods themselves. So buying leafy greens from a local organic market is completely different from buying leafy greens grown with a corporate-controlled monoculture approach.

Don’t blame the veggies!

It’s a shame to see CSPI blame the veggies for all this, especially when fresh produce is precisely what more Americans need to be eating (or drinking as raw juice smoothies) in order to prevent degenerative disease and enhance their health. By publishing this list, the CSPI perpetuates the myth that only “sterile” food is healthy. With this list, they are implying that dead foods are better for you than living foods, and yet that’s completely the wrong conclusion from all this.

Why become a seed saver?

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From About.com
Via The Oil Drum

Seed saving is as old as gardening. There was a time when gardeners considered seed from their favorites plants to be treasures well worth saving from year to year. These days, seeds and seedlings are relatively inexpensive and there are new plants to try every year. So why be a seed saver?

Aside from the politics, capitalism and biotechnology arguments that are making the news, the bottom line reason for saving seeds is because you have a plant you love and want to grow again. It could be the perfect blue campanula, the best tasting tomato or a champion pumpkin. You never know when a seed company will discontinue your favorite seed to make way for new varieties. Saving your own seed is the only guarantee.

What Seeds Can Be Saved?

Open Pollinated or heirloom, self-pollinated plants are the only varieties that will grow true from seed, meaning the seedlings will be exactly like the parents. These are the seeds worth saving.

Seeds that have been hybridized will grow into a variety of plants with some characteristics of either or both parents. Many, if not most, of the plants being sold now are hybrids. Hybridizing can create a plant with desirable traits and affords some job security for the seed company. Seed saving is not really an option with hybrids, unless you are looking to discover something new. You could however try taking cuttings.

Additionally, plants that are pollinated by insects or the wind may have cross pollinated with plants from another variety and again, will not grow true. To save seeds from these plants requires a bit of extra care, as explained below.

All that said, there are still many plants that will grow true from seed and saving and sharing these seeds has given birth to the seed savers phenomenon. Self-pollinated plants are the easiest to save and include: Beans, Chicory, Endive, Lettuce, Peas, Tomatoes. You can also save many heirloom flower seeds such as: cleome, foxgloves, hollyhock, nasturtium, sweet pea, and zinnia.

Keep reading here→

The Compassionate Life: Bringing Heaven Down to Earth

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From Joanne Stepaniak

Some people believe that a beautiful existence awaits us only after we depart this earth and that misery is simply a part of the basic human condition. Although it is true that much woe surrounds us, we are each responsible for the suffering we create within ourselves and for the distress and sorrow we bring to others. Every moment we make choices that have a positive or negative impact on us and those around us. Each of these choices is like a boomerang — the love or heartache we give away is always returned back to us.

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Because veganism espouses a reverence for life — all life — it requires practitioners to think about the impact of their actions and the good or harm their deeds will cause. Although veganism is not a theology, does not postulate religious ideology, and welcomes everyone regardless of spiritual affiliation or belief, veganism comprises the basic principle of compassion that all the world’s major religions espouse. Beyond this, however, it provides a clear and practical path for infusing compassion into every area of daily living, not just our interactions with other people.

Keep reading at author’s website→
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The Vegetarian Myth – Food, Justice and Sustainability

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From Lierre Keith

Why This Book?

This was not an easy book to write. For many of you, it won’t be an easy book to read. I know. I was a vegan for almost twenty years. I know the reasons that compelled me to embrace an extreme diet and they are honorable, ennobling even. Reasons like justice, compassion, a desperate and all-encompassing longing to set the world right. To save the planet—the last trees bearing witness to ages, the scraps of wilderness still nurturing fading species, silent in their fur and feathers. To protect the vulnerable, the voiceless. To feed the hungry. At the very least to refrain from participating in the horror of factory farming.

These political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it.

Keep reading at author’s website→
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The New Renaissance: Finally a How-To!

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From IshThink
Thanks to Dave Pollard

When you hear the idea of “The New Renaissance”, what do you think of? What are you imagining? When I think about what Daniel Quinn’s vision of humanity is, I am often stuck with the concept of what I don’t want to be. I think of a tribe of capitalists holding together their capitalist ways on that sliver of land known as Manhattan. I spend time imagining space for other ways of life, but I am somewhat stumped to think of what it might be other than what I’ve already got to work with.

It seems likely that the future will always be ahead of us, just quite out of reach. I think what most readers of Daniel Quinn hope is that there is first: a future to imagine, and second: to be the cultural ‘winners’, that is, to be in the position to write the history books in their favor.

There are plenty of philosophies and writings that share the urgency of writers like Quinn who see a system beyond repair. In the same fashion, they all have in common a single conclusion; that the course of history must be changed by individuals engaging in collective action. All critiques of civilization recognize that the power of today’s rapidly devolving society is fueled by the alienation of individualism, consumerism, and other ‘me-first’ ideologies.

Octogenarian Charlie Koiner Leads the Way in City Farming

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Charlie Koiner, Farmer

From Real People Eat Local
Silver Spring, Maryland
Thanks to Organic Consumers Assn

Only one block from a typical urban strip in downtown Silver Spring, MD, that includes an old parking garage, a beauty parlor and an Ethiopian restaurant, Charlie Koiner, who’ll be 88 in November, still has a farm. It’s hard to believe, but turning east onto Easley Street off Fenton, in the course of one block, you shift from urban grime to fertile rural splendor, from the cramped seat of your hot car to a comfy lawn chair under a mature shade tree, from the usual “rodent issue” to a farm cat named Hank.

Keep reading at Real People Eat Local→

See also Charlie’s Farm video→
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Depressed? The Drug Industry Hopes You Are

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From WILL WINTER
Acres USA

You may have seen in the papers recently that antidepressants are now the number 1 prescription drug in the United States, and the demand keeps skyrocketing each year. Over 30 million of us are now being numbed by drugs.

No wonder! Between the low-fat craze (the brain is 60 percent fat), the flood of omega 6 fat and trans fats, and vitamin D deficiency (approaching 100 percent of the population where we live), it’s going to happen! Mineral depletion is also known to be a major contributor to emotional imbalance. Then it’s excitotoxins (MSG and worse), heavy metals and other contaminants.

Combine that with all your children with ADHD, your job gone, your house spiraling down in value by the minute, crime in the nighborhood, the war and all else, it’s pretty inevitable. Doctors tend to prescribe these drugs like candy, and even people who are suffering from sadness or dislocation have a bottle of pills thrown at them as the M.D. hollers, “Next!” Once you are on the numbing drugs, it gets harder and harder to feel normal. Rampant and provocative TV ads for drugs remind you how easy it is to just pop a pill. It’s a black hole for many people who will never free themselves from being drugged.

Personally, if I ever feel the need to take prescription anti-depressants, I’m just going to start drinking city water and get all my antibiotics, hormones and brain chemicals in one glass!
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The Deep Surface: A Note on Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry

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From Jason Peters
Front Porch Republic

In the introduction to Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey denied any interest in “true underlying reality, having never met any.” “I am pleased enough with surfaces,” he said; “in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance.”

The catalog of surfaces Abbey gave by way of example couldn’t have been Abbeyer: “the grasp of a child’s hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl’s thigh, the sunlight on rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind—what else is there? What else to we need?”

Later in the book Abbey would say there is a way of being wrong that is also a way of being right, which is to say he provided the necessary hermeneutic for understanding all that deliberate hogwash about surfaces. Abbey was plenty interested in “underlying reality”; it’s just that he knew full well that you don’t get any underlying reality without first acquainting yourself intimately with the surface. The silk of a girl’s thigh is the beginning of knowledge, not its end.

Abbey certainly wanted to know the sweet aroma of a juniper fire, but he also wanted to know the “peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape.”

Keep reading at Front Porch Republic→
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Flu Shots and Alzheimer’s Disease

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From royalrife.com
Thanks to Linda Gray

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world’s leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals): If an individual has had 5 consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer’s Disease is 10 times higher than if he/she had one, 2 or no shots. Dr. Fudenberg said it was so and that it was due to mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot. The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction.

Flu shots contain 25 micrograms of mercury. One microgram is considered toxic.

About Hugh Fudenberg, MD

Hugh Fudenberg, MD, is Founder and Director of Research, Neuro lmmuno Therapeutic Research Foundation. Information from Dr. Hugh Fudenberg came from transcribed notes of Dr. Fudenberg’s speech at the NVIC International Vaccine Conference, Arlington, VA September, 1997. Quoted with permission.

Mercury Contributes To Alzheimer’s Disease!

Scientists have shown that trace amounts of mercury can cause the type of damage to nerves that is characteristic of the damage found in Alzheimer’s disease. Keep reading at royalrife.com→
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A Cure For Cancer? Eating A Plant-Based Diet

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From Kathy Freston
Huffington Post
Excerpts

Through a variety of experimental study designs, epidemiological evidence, along with observation of real life conditions which had rational biological explanation, Dr. Campbell has made a direct and powerful correlation between cancer (and other diseases and illnesses) and animal protein…

…the nutrients from animal based foods, especially the protein, promote the development of the cancer whereas the nutrients from plant-based foods, especially the antioxidants, reverse the promotion stage. This is a very promising observation because cancer proceeds forward or backward as a function of the balance of promoting and anti-promoting factors found in the diet, thus consuming anti-promoting plant-based foods tend to keep the cancer from going forward, perhaps even reversing the promotion. The difference between individuals is almost entirely related to their diet and lifestyle practices.

Most estimates suggest that not more than 2-3 percent of cancers are due entirely to genes; almost all the rest is due to diet and lifestyle factors. Consuming plant based foods offers the best hope of avoiding cancer, perhaps even reversing cancer once it is diagnosed…

Our work showed that casein is the most relevant cancer promoter ever discovered…

The biochemical systems which underlie the adverse effects of casein are also common to other animal-based proteins. Also, the amino acid composition of casein, which is the characteristic primarily responsible for its property, is similar to most other animal-based proteins. They all have what we call high ‘biological value’, in comparison, for example, with plant-based proteins, which is why animal protein promotes cancer growth and plant protein doesn’t.

KF: Are you saying that if one changes their diet from animal based protein to plant-based protein that the disease process of cancer can be halted and reversed?

TCC: Yes, this is what our experimental research shows. I also have become aware of many anecdotal claims by people who have said that their switch to a plant-based diet stopped even reversed (cured?) their disease. One study on melanoma has been published in the peer-reviewed literature that shows convincing evidence that cancer progression is substantially halted with this diet…

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/a-cure-for-cancer-eating_b_298282.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/a-cure-for-cancer-eating_b_298282.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/a-cure-for-cancer-eating_b_298282.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/a-cure-for-cancer-eating_b_298282.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/a-cure-for-cancer-eating_b_298282.html

Read more at: 

Keep reading at Huffington Post→

Love a local business? Buy a share

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From CNN Money

Sometimes it takes a village to fund a company.

John Halko was halfway through renovating an expanded space for Comfort, his mostly organic eatery in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., when the credit crisis hit. His source of funding — a home-equity line — ran out, so he applied for a loan at a local bank. He was turned down.

Halko wasn’t ready to throw in the dish towel. His solution? The modern equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising. Instead of soliciting neighbors to lift timbers, he asked them to open their wallets. For every $500 they purchased in “Comfort Dollars,” his patrons received a $600 credit toward meals at the restaurant. As the community rallied around Comfort, Halko says, “it gave us hope.” He raised $25,000 in six months, and the new, larger space – now called Comfort Lounge — opened for business in May.

Plenty of entrepreneurs are turning to their communities for support in these tricky times. As the recession wreaks havoc on America’s economy, finding the money to launch, expand or even just sustain a small business is often a struggle. In the second quarter of 2009, venture capital funds raised the smallest amount since the third quarter of 2003, according to the National Venture Capital Association in Arlington, Va. Banks continue to pull credit lines and credit cards from many small businesses. Even proprietors who are willing to extract capital from their homes — often their biggest personal asset – can’t always do so, because the declining housing market has left so many homeowners underwater.

But entrepreneurs are resourceful, and as the economic crisis forces them to seek new sources of capital, a growing number appear to be finding money in their own backyards. After all, local customers have a personal incentive to invest in their favorite businesses. And while no one is officially tracking the trend, anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is growing.

Keep reading at here→

New Big Ag Push To Fight World Hunger Is Missing What Organic Ag Is Already Doing

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From Timothy LaSalle
Rodale Institute

The compelling humanitarian goals expressed today at the corporately sponsored Global Harvest Initiative symposium were laudable, as were some of the hunger-relief projects cited. Missing, however, was an honest assessment of the limits of dead-end chemical agriculture to play a leading role in actually feeding people.

Also absent from the high-powered forum was a prominent role for what organic agriculture is already doing to meet the most important goals on the food-hunger-nutrition side of the problem.

The event, despite all the good people presenting and all the calls for curbing the environmental harm of chemical ag, amounted to glitzy green packaging for the same unnecessary gift of chemical dependence for the world’s farmers. GHI is sponsored by ADM, DuPont, John Deere and Monsanto. (Yes, the same Monsanto which has promised to double its profits by 2012 with continuing introductions of “high impact technology” seeds.)

In his opening remarks, GHI executive director William Lesher placed the focus firmly on the need for more food, highlighting a projected “productivity gap” that will require a doubling of current world food output by 2050. This thinking follows the outlines of a white paper by GHI in April: “Accelerating Productivity Growth: The 21st Century Global Agriculture Challenge: A White Paper on Agricultural Policy.” Yet more food alone won’t help starving people until the global agricultural system radically shifts its focus to address the barriers of poverty (the inability to buy food) and distribution (getting food people want to where they are).

By framing global food security in terms of “not enough food,” the Global Harvest Initiative seems stuck on doing the same old thing harder and faster. It backers still push expensive seeds and continued dependence on climate-damaging inputs. Organic and near-organic techniques offer robust, biodiverse, productive and regenerative systems that can out-produce chemical approaches in drier and wetter seasons.

Keep reading at Huffington Post→

Cap and Trade is about Privatizing the Atmosphere, not Climate Change – Vandana Shiva

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From VANDANA SHIVA
The New Statesman

The science of climate change is now clear, but the politics is very muddy. Historically, the major polluters were the rich, industrialised countries, so it made sense that they should pay the highest price. The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in December 1997, set binding targets for these countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 per cent on average against 1990 levels by 2012. But by 2007, America’s greenhouse-gas levels were 16 per cent higher than 1990 levels. The American Clean Energy and Security Act, which was passed in June, commits the US to reduce emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020, yet this is just 4 per cent below 1990 levels.

The Kyoto Protocol also allows industrialised countries to trade their allocation of carbon emissions, and to invest in carbon mitigation projects in developing countries in exchange for Certified Emission Reduction Units, which they can use to meet reduction targets. But emissions trading, or offsetting, is not in fact a mechanism to reduce emissions. As the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank, has pointed out, the emissions offset in the American act would allow “business as usual” growth in US emissions until 2030, “leading one to wonder: where’s the ‘cap’ in ‘cap and trade’?”.

Such schemes are more about privatizing the atmosphere than about preventing climate change; the emissions rights established by the Kyoto Protocol are several times higher than the levels needed to prevent a 2°C rise in global temperatures. Allocations for the UK, for example, added up to 736 million tonnes of carbon dioxide over three years, meaning no reduction commitments. And emissions rights generate super profits for polluters.

The Emissions Trading Scheme granted allowances of 10 per cent more than 2005 emission levels. This translated to 150 million tonnes of surplus carbon credits, which at 2005 prices translates into profits of more than $1bn.

Keep reading at The New Statesman→
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Why are so many celebrities dying after chemotherapy?

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From Natural News

The cancer industry, by any honest assessment, is a sham. Pure quackery.

Patrick Swayze’s death came as a shock to many people. But not to his own cancer doctor: They know that the five-year survival rates of people being treated with chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer are virtually zero. And Swayze was only the latest in a long list of celebrities dying after being treated with chemotherapy and other toxic forms of western medicine:

Farrah Fawcett died following chemotherapy used to treat anal cancer and liver cancer.

Famed newscaster Peter Jennings died from chemotherapy treatments for lung cancer.

Former White House press secretary Tony Snow died after receiving chemotherapy for colon cancer.

Celebrities still battling cancer
Desperate Housewives actress Kathry Joosten is currently battling lung cancer. It’s not clear whether she has undergone chemotherapy yet, or plans to, but she did have cancer surgery in 2001 which obviously didn’t “cure” the cancer because it has now returned.

Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs looks deathly ill after undergoing not only chemotherapy but also a complicated cancer surgery that removed a part of his pancreas and digestive tract.

Sheryl Crow is battling breast cancer, but she famously decided to support her immune system with natural medicine by turning to a Traditional Chinese Medicine wellness center called Tao of Wellness (http://www.taoofwellness.com). No doubt her outcome will be vastly improved by this integrative approach. Unfortunately, her hubby Lance Armstrong is more into the conventional drugs-and-chemo approach, and most people probably don’t realize the two things that saved Armstrong’s life were intense exercise and regular exposure to sunshine during his cycling training (creating vitamin D, a powerful anti-cancer nutrient). (And wearing those little yellow Livestrong bracelets only tags you as being completely brainwashed about cancer and the cancer industry.)

Keep reading at Natural News→

See also: Suzanne Somers: Patrick Swayze Was Poisoned By Chemotherapy→

…and 10 Swine Flu Lies Told By The Mainstream Media→
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American Perestroika Needed

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From James Howard Kunstler
Author of The Long Emergency
Excepted from blog posted here

[...] The Russian word roughly translates to “restructuring.” They flubbed it in 1989 because their system was too ossified and too far gone — though history and circumstance eventually did it for them.  A similar outcome is possible here, too, in which things just have to completely fall apart before emergent reorganization occurs.  But you can be sure that if we allow this to happen, an awful lot of things will get smashed along the way, including lives, careers, families, property, and cherished institutions…

American perestroika really boils down to this: we have to rescale the activities of daily life to a level consistent with the mandates of the future, especially the ones having to do with available energy and capital.  We have to dismantle things that have no future and rebuild things that will allow daily life to function.

We have to say goodbye to big box shopping and rebuild Main Street.  More people will be needed to work in farming and fewer in tourism, public relations, gambling, and party planning.  We have to make some basic useful products in this country again.  We have to systematically decommission suburbia and reactivate our small towns and small cities. We have to prepare for the contraction of our large cities.

We have to let the sun set on Happy Motoring and rebuild our trains, transit systems, harbors, and inland waterways. We have to reorganize schooling at a much more modest level.  We have to close down most of the overseas military bases we’re operating and conclude our wars in Asia. Mostly, we have to recover a national sense of common purpose and common decency.

There is obviously a lot of work to do in the list above, which could translate into paychecks and careers — but not if we direct all our resources into propping up the failing structures of yesterday.

The most dangerous illusion, of course, is a belief that we can return to a hyped up turbo debt “consumer” economy — and perhaps the most disappointing thing about Barack Obama, is his incessant cheerleading for a  “recovery” to what is already lost and unrecoverable. The man who ran for office on “change” doesn’t really have the stomach for it. But, of course, events are in the driver’s seat now, not personalities, even charming ones.  I’d venture to say that if Mr. Obama thinks he’s seen a crisis, and gotten through it, then he ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  We are for sure not returning to the kind of credit orgy that made the last twenty years such a nauseating spectacle — of which, by the way, the misfeasances and wretched excesses of Wall Street were just one manifestation…

There are too many truly good and intelligent people in this country, to leave our fate to the Palins and the Glen Becks.  But the good people had better man up and start telling the truth with some conviction that the truth matters.
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A Saunter With Thoreau, Walker Errant

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From Jason Peters
Rock Island, IL

One of Thoreau’s most frequently quoted phrases—“in Wildness is the preservation of the World”—comes from an essay not frequently anthologized. First published in the Atlantic Monthly shortly after Thoreau died in 1862, “Walking” has been a darling of conservationists by dint of this favored quotation, and, true enough, the line enjoys a place of privilege in the essay. Thoreau leads into it with a specific pointing: “what I have been preparing to say is that …” and then he give us the banner phrase.

But the quotation is by no means the most felicitous quip in the essay and certainly not its salient theme. Thoreau had lectured on walking in the 1850s, and the title he ultimately assigned to the essay that emerged from those lectures was not “Wildness.” The title—for good reason—was “Walking,” and it can come as no surprise to anyone with Thoreau coursing through his veins that the discipline of walking turns out to be yet another thing that separates Walden’s sage from the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation.

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” Thoreau said, “unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

That other people’s “busy lifestyles” might preclude their sauntering this much each day is no cause for being uncharitable toward them; indeed, Thoreau whispers their praises: “When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having committed suicide long ago.”

Nor is it any cause for grumbling that all that walking might bring the same old landscapes too frequently into view: “Give me the old familiar walk,” Thoreau wrote in a journal entry from 1858, “post-office and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.”

This ever new self: such was a favorite motif and image for Thoreau, who in Walden warned us of enterprises that require new clothes and not a new wearer of the clothes. We are called to a “higher life than we fell asleep from,” he said, and “the man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life,” for “moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.”

Keep reading at Front Porch Republic→
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Chemicals In Our Diet Produce Fat People

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From Natural News

Most people don`t think about how chemicals in their diets affect their weight or weight loss efforts. But the man-made chemicals you consume on a regular basis can play a big role in whether you’re fat or not – even if those chemicals don`t contain a single calorie.

To understand this, you’ll need to know that your liver is your primary detoxification organ. Your liver is also your primary fat-burning organ. Therefore, the more unnatural chemicals you consume on a regular basis, the more time and energy your liver needs to spend detoxifying you. But, the more your liver is consumed with the role of detoxification, the less time and energy it will have for burning fat. It`s really that simple.

For example, we all clearly agree that pesticides are poisons; their primary purpose is to kill living organisms. We know that most non-organic foods are laced with pesticides, and we understand that pesticides don`t magically become non-poisonous inside our bodies. Our bodies see pesticides as poisons too.

How does your body treat a poison? It attempts to detoxify it. This means your body attempts to render the poison harmless, and then removes it from your body, generally through your colon. Your colon is your primary organ used to eliminate toxins from the body, and your liver is the organ most often responsible for rendering poisons harmless.

But what happens when people eat unnatural chemicals in most meals?

Our livers become overwhelmed with the need to detoxify all of those chemicals and poisons, and the poisons start to back up in our blood. The fact that this is happening in just about everyone has been confirmed by several looks inside the average person`s blood.

Your liver will also store toxins and poisons for you that is was unable to render harmless. It does this to keep those poisons out of your bloodstream and from circulating in your body.

But now your liver, in addition to being overwhelmed detoxifying all of the chemicals you’re consuming each day, is also losing its functionality and has become a storage facility for poisons it couldn’t render harmless. Some estimates are that three fourths of the average person’s liver is used to store toxins that the liver was unable to render harmless.

No wonder so many people think losing weight is challenging… Their primary fat burning organ is overwhelmed with another task, and it’s become only half functional.

What is the answer? There are a couple of them. The first is to stop consuming chemicals in your diet on a regular basis.

Keep reading at Natural News→

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession

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From the Daily Mail UK
Thanks to Linda Gray

The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination – and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year

The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. They are more of a dark, soupy green. They also carry a suspicious smell. Not that this is of any concern to the lone Indian face that has just peeped anxiously down at me from the rusting deck of a towering container ship; he is more disturbed by the fact that I may be a pirate, which, right now, on top of everything else, is the last thing he needs.

His appearance, in a peaked cap and uniform, seems rather odd; an officer without a crew. But there is something slightly odder about the vast distance between my jolly boat and his lofty position, which I can’t immediately put my finger on.

Then I have it – his 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. The low waves don’t even bother the lowest mark on its Plimsoll line. It’s the same with all the ships parked here, and there are a lot of them. Close to 500. An armada of freighters with no cargo, no crew, and without a destination between them.

My ramshackle wooden fishing boat has floated perilously close to this giant sheet of steel. But the face is clearly more scared of me than I am of him. He shoos me away and scurries back into the vastness of his ship. His footsteps leave an echo behind them.

Navigating a precarious course around the hull of this Panama-registered hulk, I reach its bow and notice something else extraordinary. It is tied side by side to a container ship of almost the same size. The mighty sister ship sits empty, high in the water again, with apparently only the sailor and a few lengths of rope for company.

Nearby, as we meander in searing midday heat and dripping humidity between the hulls of the silent armada, a young European officer peers at us from the bridge of an oil tanker owned by the world’s biggest container shipping line, Maersk. We circle and ask to go on board, but are waved away by two Indian crewmen who appear to be the only other people on the ship.

‘They are telling us to go away,’ the boat driver explains. ‘No one is supposed to be here. They are very frightened of pirates.’

Nearby, as we meander in searing midday heat and dripping humidity between the hulls of the silent armada, a young European officer peers at us from the bridge of an oil tanker owned by the world’s biggest container shipping line, Maersk. We circle and ask to go on board, but are waved away by two Indian crewmen who appear to be the only other people on the ship.

Keep reading at the Daily Mail UK→
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The Great Swine Flu Cover-up

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From Americas Program

The first outbreaks of the H1N1 virus, or “swine flu,” took place in a small town in the state of Veracruz. Carroll Farms, the massive industrial farm animal production facilities co-owned by Smithfield Foods and AHMSA of Mexico is located near La Gloria, in the municipality of Perote. A local boy, Edgar Hernandez, gained the dubious distinction of becoming the first confirmed case. After weeks of denying any connection between the farm and the illness, the state governor finally called for an independent investigation into possible linkages. That investigation has not been made public or even carried out so far as is known.

The governor’s announcement followed a long line of denials regarding the role of the hog farm—or hog farms in general—in the outbreak of the A/H1N1 virus in Mexico. Unusual respiratory diseases began showing up in communities surrounding the industrial feedlot in early March, with some indications dating back to January. Local health authorities attributed the outbreak to the open-pit lagoons of manure and biological wastes surrounding the farms.

On April 5, authorities declared a health cordon in the area but failed to carry out tests to determine an exact diagnosis of the strange illness showing up in local residents. They discovered that 60% of the community’s 3,000 people reported an undiagnosed respiratory disease. Meanwhile, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) determined on April 17 that two patient samples from San Diego were a new H1N1 virus. On April 21 the CDC issued a dispatch to its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report to warn of the discovery. The San Diego cases were then linked to the suspicious cases popping up in Mexico and the alert went out of a possible pandemic.

Emergency measures in Mexico were not declared until April 23. On April 25, the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. On April 27, with the epidemic already rapidly spreading throughout the country and the press and public pressuring for accurate information, the Mexican government announced that little Edgar Hernandez was the first confirmed case of a new swine flu transmitted to and through humans.

On June 11, the WHO declared the virus a pandemic. The latest WHO report shows 162,380 confirmed cases worldwide and 1,154 deaths as of July 31. The Americas where the virus originated is the hardest-hit with 1,008 deaths, concentrated in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina.

Defending the Factory Farm

Experts have long warned that “industrial farm animal production” (IFAP) leads to potentially serious human health impacts. A tragically prophetic study done by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production of 2008 concludes, Keep reading at Americas Program→

Journalism Is Killing America

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From emptywheel

Five years ago, the traditional media helped Bush pitch a war that got 4,337 service men and women killed in Iraq (to say nothing of the thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed).

Now, traditional media journalism is back to killing Americans, in this case by deliberately misrepresenting public views on health care reform. EJ Dionne describes how at least one network refused to cover civil, informative town halls.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television.

Big Food vs. Big Insurance

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From MICHAEL POLLAN
New York Times

TO listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
Go to article at NYT→
Thanks to Janie Sheppard and Evan Johnson
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People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That

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From MICHAEL POLLAN
The Nation and Alternet

This article is adapted from Michael Pollan’s introduction to Bringing It to the Table, a collection of Wendell Berry’s writings out this fall from Counterpoint.

Wendell Berry’s now-famous formulation, “eating is an agricultural act” — is perhaps his signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today.

A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the paper’s agriculture reporter, said that “after being largely ignored for years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have found a receptive ear in the White House.”

Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform the way Americans grow food and feed themselves — the “food movement,” as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food — local and organic and pastured — are thriving, farmers’ markets are popping up like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms tallied in the Department of Agriculture’s census has gone up rather than down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to “sustainability” and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors.

Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there have been more words than deeds — but some of those words are astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a reporter for Time that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil”… Complete article at AlterNet→
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Side With the Living – Derrick Jensen

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From Derrick Jensen
Orion Magazine

A note to those who would demonize nature

The other night I saw a commercial for a PBS program that breathlessly described how orcas “dominate” the oceans. And the nature program I had the misfortune to see before that talked of different species of bears “conquering” each other’s territories. The program repeatedly emphasized the powerful bite of one particular type of bear—making sure we got the point by always playing scary music when these bears were depicted—and only late in the program did viewers learn that these bears were exclusively scavengers, with powerful jaws not so they could “conquer” and “dominate,” but so they could break the bones of those already dead. This projection onto the natural world of this culture’s urge to dominate is so ubiquitous as to be at this point almost invisible to us, like air. And obviously, how we perceive the natural world affects how we behave toward it: if we perceive it as full of domination, we are more likely to attempt to dominate it.

Not infrequently, people will use the mass extinctions of the past to rationalize their efforts to dominate (read: destroy) the world at hand. For example, I recently read an essay by the influential scientific philosopher Sam Harris titled “Mother Nature Is Not Our Friend.” It begins, “Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature. . . . I now believe that this romantic view of Nature is a stultifying and dangerous mythology. Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is.” Never mind that only one of the major mass extinctions was probably caused by an asteroid. But the real point is that the moral I derive from mass extinctions is precisely the opposite of the moral Harris projects onto them.

Go to complete article here→

Giant Hoax By Monsanto Continues – Genetically Modified Seeds Do Not Produce Higher Yields

From Union of Concerned Scientists

[As many of us have been saying for years, the only thing Monsanto has accomplished by genetically modifying seeds to withstand their poisons, is to increase the sales of those poisons, blanketing the earth and our bodies with their nasty, cancer-causing chemicals for profit. Their blatant bullshit about increasing higher yields is a con-job to force farmers to buy their seeds every year. Their executives and "scientists" should be pilloried in public humiliation in their own town's public squares and tried for crimes against humanity. Mendocino County was first to ban their plants from our county. We will feed the world with small, local, organic farms. Thanks to Janie for link. -DS]

Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops (Union of Concerned Scientists)

For years the biotechnology industry has trumpeted that it will feed the world, promising that its genetically engineered crops will produce higher yields. That promise has proven to be empty, according to Failure to Yield, a report by UCS expert Doug Gurian-Sherman released in March 2009.

Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields. Failure to Yield is the first report to closely evaluate the overall effect genetic engineering has had on crop yields in relation to other agricultural technologies. It reviewed two dozen academic studies of corn and soybeans, the two primary genetically engineered food and feed crops grown in the United States.

How American Health Care Killed My Father

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From David Goldhill

[A devastating indictment of our current medical system. My own father also died needlessly within a couple of days of hospitalization for a cracked hip. -DS]

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

Amost two years ago, my father was killed by a hospital-borne infection in the intensive-care unit of a well-regarded nonprofit hospital in New York City. Dad had just turned 83, and he had a variety of the ailments common to men of his age. But he was still working on the day he walked into the hospital with pneumonia. Within 36 hours, he had developed sepsis. Over the next five weeks in the ICU, a wave of secondary infections, also acquired in the hospital, overwhelmed his defenses. My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success…

Go to complete article here→
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Pfizer Launches ‘Zoloft For Everything’ Ad Campaign

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From your American Medical Industry

September 4, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

NEW YORK–Seeking to broaden the customer base of the popular drug, Pfizer announced the launch of a $40 million “Zoloft For Everything” advertising campaign Monday.

“Zoloft is most commonly prescribed for the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders, but it would be ridiculous to limit such a multi-functional drug to these few uses,” Pfizer spokesman Jon Pugh said. “We feel doctors need to stop asking their patients if anything is wrong and start asking if anything could be more right.”

Continued Pugh: “How many millions of people out there are suffering under the strain of a deadline at work or pre-date jitters, but don’t realize there’s a drug that could provide relief? Zoloft isn’t just for severe anxiety or depression. Got the Monday blues? Kids driving you nuts? Let Zoloft help. Zoloft.”

Zoloft (sertraline hydrochloride) was originally introduced as a means of treating depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In January of this year, however, Pfizer won FDA approval for use of Zoloft to treat premenstrual dysphoric disorder, as well as social-anxiety disorder, or “social phobia.”

Last week, the FDA okayed Zoloft for treatment of “the entire range of unpleasant or otherwise negative social, physical, and mental feelings that an individual may experience in the course of a human life.”

“At first, Zoloft was only used to treat depression,” Pugh said. “But what is depression, really? Who died and gave doctors the authority to dictate who is and isn’t depressed? One man’s hangnail could be another man’s darkest depths of despair. Isn’t medication a tool to help people lead better, happier lives? Access to drugs should not be restricted to those the medical community officially deems ’sick.’”

Pfizer president James Vernon said the “Zoloft For Everything” campaign will employ print and TV ads to inform potential users about the “literally thousands” of new applications for Zoloft. Among the conditions the drug can be used to treat: anxiety associated with summer swimsuit season, insecurity over sexual potency and performance, feelings of shame over taking an antidepressant, and a sense of hollowness stemming from losing an online auction.

In today’s fast-paced world, Vernon said, people don’t have time to deal with mood changes.

“Zoloft has always helped clinically depressed people modulate serotonin levels and other chemical imbalances that make life unlivable for them,” Vernon said. “But now, Zoloft can also help anyone who needs their emotions leveled off. Do you find yourself feeling excited or sad? No one should have to suffer through those harrowing peaks and valleys.”

Anita White of Yuma, AZ, sought out Zoloft after seeing one of the new commercials.

Go to article at The Onion→
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Santa Rosa: Big Box Project Killed For Good Reasons

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From The Press Democrat
Excerpts – Full article here

September 3, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The Santa Rosa City Council voted late Tuesday to stop Lowe’s from building a big-box home improvement store on Santa Rosa Avenue, heeding the concerns of local business leaders who warned the chain store would hurt the community…

Councilmembers also worried that Lowe’s success would come at the expense of local businesses and their employees…

In a community where environmentalists and the business community often have battled over who will sit on the City Council, Tuesday was a rare occasion where the two sides came together to oppose what they saw as a common opponent.

The business leaders opposing Lowe’s included Exchange Bank President William Schrader, Skyhawk Village Market owner Mike Runyon, Clover Stornetta President Marcus Benedetti, Friedman’s Home Improvement President Bill Friedman and La Tortilla Factory co-owner Carlos Tamayo.

Their presence sent a message, as Oliver’s Market General Manager Tom Scott put it, that “we local retailers need to stick together against the big guys.” And they warned that the community would be less well off if Lowe’s were allowed to build here.

“I love the city of Santa Rosa’s campaign of ‘buy local, shop local, eat local,’ said Jody Lau, whose family owns G&G Supermarkets. “Remember that? By allowing this box store to go through, this is not supporting local.”

Tuesday’s hearing was the culmination of a battle over the 11.8-acre plan proposed about a half-mile south of Costco. The dispute has included mass mailings warning residents that the nation’s second-largest home improvement retailer would hurt existing businesses and take away jobs.

Opposition has come not only from some local business people but also from environmental, labor, housing advocacy and social justice groups. They claim the project would harm Friedman’s and other stores, take away jobs, increase traffic congestion and generate tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

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Neighborhood Stores: An Overlooked Strategy for Fighting Global Warming

From Stacy Mitchell
New Rules Project

Recently that began to change: first a restaurant opened and then a tea shop. And then, in what many of my neighbors greeted as nothing short of a gift from heaven, a small fresh food market opened. Stop by at 6 in the evening and you’ll find a row of bicycles out front and the store’s narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options.

This little store is one of hundreds of new neighborhood businesses that have opened in the last few years in what might be both the beginnings of a revival of small retail and one of the more important strategies we have for countering global warming.

Go to article at New Rules Project→
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Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks

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From THOM HARTMANN
Author Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture.

September 2, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the US. Highly paid employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available.”

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, “What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?”

It’s an interesting question. If there is a “free market” of labor for CEOs, then you’d think there would be a lot of competition for the jobs. And a lot of people competing for the positions would drive down the pay. All UnitedHealth’s stockholders would have to do to avoid paying more than $1 billion to McGuire is find somebody to do the same CEO job for half a billion. And all they’d have to do to save even more is find somebody to do the job for a mere $100 million. Or maybe even somebody who’d work the necessary sixty-hour weeks for only $1 million.

So why is executive pay so high?

I’ve examined this with both my psychotherapist hat on and my amateur economist hat on, and only one rational answer presents itself: CEOs in America make as much money as they do because there really is a shortage of people with their skill set. And it’s such a serious shortage that some companies have to pay as much as $1 million a day to have somebody successfully do the job.

But what part of being a CEO could be so difficult — so impossible for mere mortals — that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it?

In my humble opinion, it’s the sociopath part.

CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world’s largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.

Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths — people who don’t have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there’s probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there’s an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.

Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.

President Obama: Healthcare; you promised. – Anne Lamott

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From ANNE LAMOTT
Marin County

September 1, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

I am afraid there has been a misunderstanding since that election in 2008, during which 66,882,230 Americans cast their votes for you. Perhaps one of your trusted advisors has given you bum information. Maybe they told you that we voted for you — walked, marched, prayed, fund-raised and knocked on doors for you — because we hoped you would try to reunite the country. Of the total votes cast that long-ago November day, I’m guessing that about 1,575 people wanted you to try to reconcile the toxic bipartisanship that culminated in those Sarah Palin rallies.

The other 66,880,655 of us wanted universal healthcare.

You inherited a country that was in the most desperate shape since the Civil War, or the Depression, and we voted for you to heal the catastrophic wounds Bush inflicted on our country and our world. You said that you were up to that challenge.

We did not vote for you to see if you could get Chuck Grassley or Michael Enzi to date you. The spectacle of you wooing them fills us with horror and even disgust. We recoil as from hot flame at each mention of your new friends. Believe me, I know exactly how painful this can be, how reminiscent of 7th-grade yearning to be popular, because I went through it myself this summer. I did not lower my bar quite as low as you have, but I was sitting on the couch one afternoon, thinking that this adorable guy and I were totally on the same sheet of music — he had given me absolutely every indication that we were — and were moving into the kissing stage. Out of nowhere, I thought to ask him if he liked me in the same way I liked him.

He said, in so many words, no.

And Mr. President, that is what the Republicans are saying to you: They are just not that into you, sir.

This may have thrown you for such a loop that you have forgotten why you were elected — which was to lead your people back to the promises of our founding parents. Many of us no longer recognized our country after eight years of Bush and Cheney, and you gave us your word that you would help restore the great headway we had made on matters of race, equality and plain old social justice.

People, get ready, you said; there’s a train a ‘coming. And we did get ready. We hit the streets. We roared, whispered, cried, whooped and went door to door, convinced that even if Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had not specifically dreamed of you, his dream of justice and equality and pride might come into being through your vision, your greatness, through the hope that your words gave us, through the change you promised.

Keep reading at LA Times→
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Lyme/autism group blasts Genetically Modified foods as dangerous

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From Jeffrey Smith
Huffington Post – excerpts

September 1, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

[Certified organic foods are free of GM poison. -DS]

Stop eating dangerous genetically modified (GM) foods! That’s the upshot of the Lyme Induced Autism (LIA) Foundation’s position paper released today.

The patient advocacy group is not willing to wait around until research studies prove that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) cause or worsen the many diseases that are on the rise since gene-spliced foods were introduced in 1996. Like the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) earlier this year, the LIA Foundation says there is more than enough evidence of harm in GM animal feeding studies for them to “urge doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets” and for “individuals, especially those with autism, Lyme disease, and associated conditions, to avoid” GM foods…

The five main GM foods are soy, corn, cotton, canola, and sugar beets. Their derivatives are found in more than 70 percent of the foods in the supermarket. The primary reason the plants are engineered is to allow them to drink poison. They’re inserted with bacterial genes that allow them to survive otherwise deadly doses of poisonous herbicide. Biotech companies sell the seed and herbicide as a package deal. Roundup Ready crops survive sprays of Roundup. Liberty Link crops survive Liberty. US farmers use hundreds of millions of pounds more herbicide because of these herbicide-tolerant crops, and the higher toxic residues end up inside of us. The LIA position paper acknowledges that “Individuals with infections that compromise immunity… and/or high toxin loads may also be especially susceptible to adverse effects from pesticides.”

…The beneficial bacteria living inside our digestive tract is used for digestion and immunity. Excessive herbicide residues on herbicide-tolerant GM crops may kill beneficial gut flora. More importantly, the only published human feeding experiment revealed that the genetic material inserted into GM soy transfers into bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function. This means that long after we stop eating GM foods, we may still have dangerous GM proteins continuously produced inside us. Read it and weep. Go to complete article here→
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The Fallacy of Climate Activism

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From Adam D. Sacks
Grist Magazine – Excerpts

August 31, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

…the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions, as we have currently framed it, is over.

It is absolutely over and we have lost.

We have to say so…

If we climate activists don’t tell the truth as well as we know it—which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words—the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless “focus groups,” contrary to the endless speculation on “correct framing,” the only way to tell the truth is to tell it.  All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be…

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably.  Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn’t good and we’d better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic.  We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen’s elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely. We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don’t poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part.  We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it. The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look.

How do we survive in a world that will probably turn—is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike—into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods,

The Economics of Organic Food

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From Avery Yale Kamila
Portland Press Herald (Maine)
Via Organic Consumers Association

August 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Only rich people can afford to eat locally grown, organic food. Have you heard that one before? I have, and it’s sure to come up during the “Can Maine Feed Itself?” keynote discussion taking place at next month’s Maine Fare festival in the midcoast.

The panel brings together a number of movers and shakers from Maine’s food scene for a conversation centered on how the state can become more self-reliant when stocking our grocery stores and filling our dinner plates.According to well-known organic Maine farmer and author Eliot Coleman, who farms year-round in unheated greenhouses and will participate in the panel, the No. 1 barrier preventing more Mainers from eating food grown and raised locally is the competition from cheap eats trucked in from California.

A whole book could be written (and has been) about the reasons factory farms and agribusinesses can produce food that costs so little. However, the simple answer, as Coleman pointed out, includes physical scale, illegal immigrant laborers, polluting farm practices and government subsidies.

At the same time, the idea that only the well-off can eat fresh, locally grown eats ignores the obvious and inexpensive solution of growing your own garden. You can’t get any more local than food grown steps from your kitchen. And with seeds that sell for pennies apiece and with compost an essentially free fertilizer that anyone can make from table scraps and dried leaves, it becomes clear that price alone is not the true issue.

I’d argue that the real barrier is psychological. Part of this can be traced to the American obsession with animal protein.

Meat, dairy and eggs are all expensive ways to include protein in our diets, and these ubiquitous staples of our national cuisine can be produced cheaply (think a dozen eggs for $1.69 at the grocery stores versus $4.50 at the farmers’ markets)

We’ve Been Going “Back To The Land” For A Long Time

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

August 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Here are some quotes you expect to see regularly in the media these days.

“Today, from press and pulpit, from publicists and legislators, comes the cry, ‘Back To the Land’! The problem of the “small farm” is becoming a very interesting one. The cry is ‘Back To the Land’ but the drift is away from the land.”

“The question of the big farm versus the small farm is very hotly debated… Good farming must perish with the breaking up of large farms, contends one side. Not so, replies the other side.”

“Two classes of people enthusiastically advocate the ‘Back To The Land’ movement… editors of our city papers and the high-cost-of-living sufferers… The metropolitan editors usually say: ‘Be independent. Be good citizens. And by quitting the city for the farm, you will become both.”

But those quotes appeared in print in 1921. Almost a century ago. The writer was James Boyle, his book, Agricultural Economics. At that time, the first big wave of gigantic farming in the United States, called bonanza farming, was breaking up on the shoals of economic reality. Some of those farms were over 10,000 acres in size, powered by cheap hired help and hundreds of teams of horses. There was a great hue and cry both for and against them. If the reader replaces the word ‘bonanza’ with ‘big’,  many of Boyle’s quotes read exactly like quotes today.

“Mr. Budge says there are several bonanza farms in North Dakota and mentions one of above seven thousand acres. He adds that he would like to see them all out of the way. They take up so much space that it hurts the school districts. The owners ship in supplies from the East. They ship their men in and out too.” Keep reading at OrganicToBe→
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A Low Impact Woodland Home

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From Simon Dale
Wales

August 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

You are looking at pictures of a house I built for our family in Wales. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

Keep reading here→
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Our House Frog Liked Beethoven

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

August 21, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Living close to nature, I learned long ago there were mysteries as yet unexplained by science or even by the art of farming. Or maybe I just don’t read the right books. Anyway one of those things that science calls a phenomenon occurred again this morning. We have witnessed this occurrence so many times that it can’t be happenstance. When the hummingbirds run out of sugar water in their feeder right outside our kitchen, one of them flies up to the window and gently bumps it. Doesn’t run into it as if by accident, but hovers right at the pane and deliberately bumps it. The hummer seems to be saying: “The feeder is empty, you dolts. Get with it.” And they never bump the window unless the feeder is empty. They know. How do they know?

But a stranger mystery occurred last winter when a frog got into our house. It happened this way. We have a Christmas cactus that as far as we can figure is at least a hundred years old. My grandmother owned it and cussed it. Then one of my aunts owned it and cussed it. Somehow we inherited it. And cuss it. The pot it grows in is almost as big as a bushel basket and that’s why we cuss. Plant plus pot equals at least eighty pounds. All of us being inveterate farmers and gardeners, none of us have had the steel courage to get rid of it. We have tried starving it to death to no avail. It will not die. We time its movements into the house as winter approaches and back out as summer arrives when our son and son-in-law are visiting. Now they cuss it too.

Anyway, the frog evidently burrowed into the the Christmas cactus pot one summer and was still in it when we brought the plant inside. We never did see it— it being a tiny, tan creature that takes up very little space— but its song came loud and clear from the depths of cacti leaves and roots.

Keep reading at our food and farm blog OrganicToBe→
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Local Currency Directory U.S.

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From E. F. Schumacher Society

August 21, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North Californa

CALIFORNIA

Humboldt Exchange
Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap
P.O. Box 858
Eureka, CA 95502
info@humboldtexchange.org
http://www.humboldtexchange.org
First issue: January 2003
Currency: “Humboldt Community Currency” is a paper local currency in Eureka. Individual participants agree to accept half payment for their goods and services in a local currency made just for Humboldt. Many local businesses also accept Community Currency.
Participation: 67 businesses.
Information updated March 26, 2009

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MASSACHUSETTS

BerkShares
BerkShares, Inc.
Asa Hardcastle, President of board
Susan Witt, Administrator
P.O. Box 125
Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-1737
info@berkshares.org
http://www.berkshares.org
First issue: September 29, 2006
Currency: BerkShares are a paper currency printed in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 and are traded in the southern Berkshire region of Massachusetts. They are distributed by local banks and are backed by federal dollars. They are purchased at $0.95 per BerkShare from the bank, spent at a value of $1 per BerkShare with participating individuals or businesses, and traded back for federal currency at $0.95 per BerkShare, providing a financial incentive for both individuals to get and spend them in the first place and for someone who has recieved BerkShares in a transaction to spend them again rather than return them for federal currency.

Keep reading at the E. F. Schumacher Society→
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A Realistic Plan and Time Line for Your Survival Homestead

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From The Oil Drum

August 17, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

[For all you remaining Back-To-The-Landers here in Mendo, it may be interesting to compare what you did back in the sixties and seventies to what you might do now. I am not a survivalist, nor do I think the survivalist family going it alone makes any sense. If things do go bad, it will be collaboration and cooperation, in the city and in the country,  at the homestead and in the town house, that will get us through. -DS]

This plan assumes that you will be starting with raw land with no improvements. The advantage is that you can tailor things specifically to your needs while allowing time for your skills to develop. Yes, you could buy an old farm. However, I believe that old farms will ultimately cost you more and require significantly more time to rehabilitate than starting from scratch. Further, trying to fix up old stuff is more difficult than new construction. Things are rotted, out of square, foundations and roofs are shot or lack insulation.

The plan also assumes that all property is owned by a single family and that the work will be done by that family (a husband and wife or partner). I know a lot of people believe that a sharing/commune-type structure is the way to go. However, a community timeframe will be little different from that of a family and my experience is that most communities eventually fail.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons since moving to the country over 30 years ago. I should add that I also lived in a rural area until I was 12. However, I sure as hell don’t know everything and some of my suggestions are guesstimates. For example, I grew up around my neighbor’s draft horses but I’m not a teamster. There are thousands of others out there who live far more self-sufficiently (self-reliantly) than my wife and I. But, I’ve also had the opportunity to observe the successes and failures of other people. Keep reading at The Oil Drum→

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Denmark: A Modern Beacon – Thom Hartmann

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From Thom Hartmann

August 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Excerpted from Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture

Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative possibilities. ~Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959)

If it’s happening in Danish politics (or, for that matter, Scandinavian or European politics), Peter Mogensen knows about it. An economist by training, he’s the chief political editor of Denmark’s second largest national newspaper, Politiken, and for four years (1997-2000) he was the right-hand man (“head of office” and “political advisor”) to Denmark’s then prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. A handsome man of young middle years, he also plays in a “Bruce Springsteen look-alike” rock band, and cuts a wide swath through Danish popular society.

So it was particularly interesting to see this normally unflappable man with a slightly confused look on his face.

We were in the studios of Danish Radio (their equivalent of BBC or NPR) in downtown Copenhagen, where I was broadcasting the week of June 23-27, 2008, and I’d just asked Mogensen how many Danes experience financial distress, lose their homes, or even declare bankruptcy because of a major illness in the family.

“Why, of course …” he blinked a few times, “none.”

I explained how every year in the United States millions of families lose their jobs and their homes,

Creating a Resilient, Natural Economy

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From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World Blog

August 11, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

My friend Dale and I have been conversing about my recent post concerning why so many entrepreneurs want to be sole proprietors, when, historically, committed partnerships (of people with a shared purpose and complementary skills) tend to be far more resilient, sustainable, and joyful. I’d been writing about our modern aversion to accepting responsibility for other people, and Dale suggested it was this fear of responsibility, more than any of the ten fears of entrepreneurship* I write about in my book, Finding the Sweet Spot, that keeps so many of us in the thrall of wage slavery. Dale wrote:

What keeps people from starting startups is the fear of having so much responsibility. And this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear…This really fits with my own experience.  I had plenty of opportunity to expand my business creating software products and sharing software development expertise. The thing that always held me back was knowing the responsibility that I had for everyone else.  I was also nagged by the thought that this great burden that I was taking on would not be respected, or worse, would be taken advantage of.

I was chatting about this this afternoon with Tree (a very successful sole proprietor, doing work as an independent professional facilitator), who has challenged me before on whether “the work we’re meant to do” really should preferably be in partnership with others. I had lamented that most of the people who had written to me to tell me that thanks to my book they had found their sweet spot (the work they’re mean to do), also told me that this work involves writing or personal coaching or some other individual enterprise.

Keep reading here→
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What it takes…

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From LYNN MILLER
Small Farmer’s Journal
(Farming with Draft Animals)

August 11, 2009, Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

[This is the Editorial in the Spring 2009 issue, from Lynn Miller, Editor and Publisher. For those of us whose grandparents and great grandparents were farmers, and because of distorted US farm policies, find ourselves totally removed from farm life — that would be millions and millions of us — this essay brings us back in touch with the care, beauty, and poetry of true farm life... in these times that try men's and women's souls. Amidst the insanity and greed, there are traditions still being lived and written about. Read this and weep for what has been lost. And if there be hope, this is where hope lies. If small farm tradition and sensibility becomes lost, all is lost. -DS]

Some will remember how it was that Dad never explained, just expected you to know. “No, not that way. To the left, to the left! Haven’t you been paying attention?”

Instruction was a ludicrous concept. Water in the nose, fire on the skin, ridicule in the gut, dizzy with pain, nauseous with anxiety, dull with confusion: these were the ways to learn. Those days, for some they may still be today, if you didn’t allow yourself to be pulled along you were left behind. And behind was nowhere, no flow, no connection, no justification, no ladders, no doors, no coupon, no pay, no stay, no return.

“Why would I waste myself explaining to a kid or a greenhorn how the thing is done? It’s an invitation to questions, the answers to which invite more questions. The work doesn’t get done that way. And the kid doesn’t learn that way.

SPIN Farming

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From spinfarming.com

August 10, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

SPIN stands for S-mall P-lot IN-tensive

SPIN-Farming is a non-technical, easy-to-learn and inexpensive-to-implement vegetable farming system that makes it possible to earn significant income from land bases under an acre in size. Whether you are new to farming, or want to farm in a new way, SPIN can work for you because:

• Its precise revenue targeting formulas and organic-based techniques make it possible to gross $50,000+ from a half- acre.
• You don’t need to own land. You can affordably rent or barter a small piece of land adequate in size for SPIN-Farming production.
• It works in either the city, country or small town.
• It fits into any lifestyle or life cycle.

SPIN is being practiced by first generation farmers because it removes the two big barriers to entry – land and capital – as well as by established farmers who want to diversify or downsize, as well as by part-time hobby farmers.

SPIN-Farming’s learning guides detail the concepts and practices of sub-acre farming and offer specific models of operation you can use to create your own independent farm business. Each guide builds on the next so that your understanding grows along with your ability to put SPIN into practice. You can work through the learning series at your own pace. And the authors are available by email to answer your questions every step of the way!

SPIN Frequently Asked Questions

Here are answers to questions we’ve been asked the most since we began pioneering sub-acre farming in 2001. Some are posed by aspiring farmers short on cash or land or both. Some come from concerned citizens looking to make their communities more farm-friendly. Others are asked by reporters who know a good story when they see one. Still others are asked by policymakers who are realizing that sustainability is more than just a buzz word. If what’s on your mind is not covered here, contact us, and we’ll either answer your question or make you even more curious.

Top 10 Reasons To Grow Your Own Organic Food

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From Foodmatters

August 10, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

1. GET THE NUTRITION YOU NEED & ENJOY TASTIER FOOD!
Many studies have shown that organically grown food has more minerals and nutrients that we need than food grown with synthetic pesticides. There’s a good reason why many chefs use organic foods in their recipes—they taste better. Organic farming starts with the nourishment of the soil, which eventually leads to the nourishment of the plant and, ultimately our bodies.

2. SAVE MONEY
Growing your own food can help cut the cost of the grocery bill. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars and month at the grocery store on foods that don’t really nourish you, spend time in the garden, outside, exercising, learning to grow your own food.

3. PROTECT FUTURE GENERATIONS
The average child receives four times more exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. Food choices you make now will impact your child’s future health.

4. PREVENT SOIL EROSION
The Soil Conservation Service estimates more than 3 billion tons of topsoil are eroded from the United States’ croplands each year. That means soil erodes seven times faster than it’s built up naturally. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. However, in conventional farming, the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, American farms are suffering from the worst soil erosion in history.

5. PROTECT WATER QUALITY
Water makes up two-thirds of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates pesticides – some cancer causing – contaminate the groundwater in 38 states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more than half the country’s population.

What to say at town-hall protests

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From David Sirota
Columnist

August 7, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town-hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.

The group’s core gripe is summarized in a letter I received that denounces a proposed surtax on the wealthy and corporations to pay for universal health care: “Until recently, my family was in the top 3 percent of wage earners,” the affluent businessperson fumed in response to my July column. “We are in the group that pays close to 60 percent of this nation’s taxes. … Think for a second how you would feel if you built a business and contributed more than your share to this country only to be treated like a pariah.”

This sob story about the persecuted rich fuels today’s “Tea Parties” – and I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it in your community.

I’m also fairly certain that when many of you run into the Me-First, Forget-Everyone-Else Crowd, you don’t feel like confronting the faux outrage. But if you do muster the impulse to engage, here’s a guide to navigating the conversation:

What they will scream: We can’t raise business taxes, because American businesses pay excessively high taxes!

What you should say: The General Accountability Office reports that most U.S. corporations pay zero federal income tax.

Health Care: “Since we got nothin, how about we just go in there and kill their stupid democracy”

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From Daily Kos

August 6, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Fight the Screamers: Show Up

So we know that the screamers and right-wing performance artists are part of a larger astroturf effort. They don’t represent a significant segment of the actual voting population in the country. But you know what, that doesn’t make a damned bit of difference if they’re the only ones showing up.

Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes made that point in the video clip DarkSyde posted earlier:

MADDOW: Chris, one of the great regrets of Democrats that I have heard over the past decade is that they weren’t called by their party to go fight in Florida the way that Republicans called their people to go fight in Florida. Looking back on Florida nine years down the road, now that we know what happened there, can you imagine how things might have worked out if Democrats had done the same thing that Republicans did?

HAYES: Yes.

MADDOW: I mean, is it conceivable that they might have asked Democrats to go there?

HAYES: Well, I mean, to consider the counterfactual, it’s undeniable the Democrats got out-hustled and they got out-organized. And I want to say, at a certain level, right, what the right is doing right now is corporate sponsored and it’s astro-turf but it’s organizing. They’re coordinating.

There is a set of very powerful interests that are spending literally millions of dollars a day to defeat this agenda and they’re coordinating it. And the answer in a free Democratic republic like our own is to meet organizing with more organizing,

Bank Bailouts: There’s a Real Chance There’s Going to Be an Uprising

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From Terrence McNally
The Huffington Post

August 5, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Q and A with Michael Lewis (Part 2): I recently interviewed Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis. After talking about his new book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, we discussed the financial meltdown and the bailout. This is Part 2 of some excerpts. You can hear the full podcast at terrencemcnally.net.

In Part 1, we talked about how the rules of the game were “totally screwed up” – for individual traders, firms, and ratings agencies. In Part 2, we look at some implications for American society at large.

TM: In 1970 only about 5% of men graduating from Harvard went into finance. By 1990, 15%, and by the class of 2007, 20% of the men and 10% of the women planned to go into investment banking.

ML: And half of the other ones applied, they just didn’t get jobs. This is a radical misallocation of human talent. You can say it’s faith in the free markets, but it’s caused by the huge growth of a culture of financial manipulation.

TM: For years people have been saying that the U.S. was shifting from a manufacturing to a service economy. I suspect people thought of services as fast food, IT, health care, maybe lawyers. I don’t think many really saw the huge role played by the financial sector.

ML: That’s right. And let me draw an analogy. With the sub-prime mortgage racket generating lots of fees, the people within each big Wall Street firm who create that business acquire enormous power. So when the business gets decreasingly sane, when the loans get shakier and shakier, and the leverage gets bigger and bigger, they’re the ones who say we’ve got to keep doing this. Even though people not directly implicated in the business might have said, “No, it’s time to stop.”

Keep reading at Huffington Post→
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Report: Rising Sea Levels, Temperature Inevitable In California, State Must Prepare

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From Huffington Post

August 4, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Even if the world is successful in cutting carbon emissions in the future, California needs to start preparing for rising sea levels, hotter weather and other effects of climate change, a new state report recommends.

It encourages local communities to rethink future development in low-lying coastal areas, reinforce levees that protect flood-prone areas and conserve already strapped water supplies…

The report was compiled after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger directed agencies in November to devise a state climate strategy. It comes three years after the Republican governor signed California’s landmark global warming law requiring the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

Most countries have focused on cutting greenhouse gases in the future, but researchers say those efforts will take decades to have an effect while the planet continues to warm. States have only recently begun to look at what steps they must take to minimize the damage expected from sea level rise, storm surges, droughts and water shortages because of the climate changes.

Over the last century in California, the sea level has risen by 7 inches, average temperatures have increased, spring snowmelt occurs earlier in the year, and there are hotter days and fewer cold nights.

The report warns that rising temperatures over the next few decades will lead to more heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods.

“We have to deal with those unavoidable impacts,” said Suzanne Moser, a research associate at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz. “We can’t pretend they are not going to happen and we have to prepare for that.”

Keep reading Report→

See also: It’s Official: This July Was State’s Coldest Since 1924→
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365 Books Worth Reading: #1 Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

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From Sharon Astyk
Casaubon’s Book

July 30, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

I’ve got a lot of books I’d love to review at length, but somehow there’s always something more urgent to do.  So I’ve decided that I’m going to try and post regular (I doubt it will be every day…no, I’m sure it won’t be every day) short book reviews of a paragraph or so until I’ve done 365 of them.  I know it’ll probably take me a lot longer than a year, but at least it is a way to get conversations going about my favorite books without having to take a month to write about them.

I’m not promising that every single one will be on a relevant topic to the main themes of this blog – in fact, again, I promise they won’t be.  Everyone needs good escapist or imaginative literature sometimes, or simply to learn everything they can about something interesting, even if it has no direct application.  Besides, it is very rare that I find I read something truly great and never use it again – it always shows up somewhere in my thinking.

Ok, the honor of being the very first book worth reading goes to Saul Alinsky’s superb book Rules for Radicals→ – I picked it up at my school library when I was 14,

From farms to Northern California hospitals: Healthier food for healthier patients

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Chef Deane Bussiere shows off the yellow squash that he and staff are growing in the quarter acre garden at the hospital on Thursday, July 16, 2009. Dominican Hospital, in Santa Cruz, is using organic, sustainably sourced foods and has a garden where it grows organic vegetables and herbs. Chef Deane Bussiere, oversees the kitchen and garden.

From San Jose Mercury News

July 29, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Nothing spells patient satisfaction like free-range roast chicken after triple bypass surgery.

Throw some organic potatoes mashed with hormone-free milk and locally grown arugula salad onto the tray and hospital food may soon escape the culinary sneers it usually shares with TV dinners and airline meals.

Such bedside menus may not be far off for Northern California hospitals that are harnessing their buying power to demand changes in how food is grown and distributed. They’re part of a growing alliance of doctors and food advocates who say organic, fresh food is healthier, and local, sustainable food practices reduce pollution and contamination, which will ultimately lead to fewer health problems.

“What people eat is one of the most important determinants of their health,” said Dr. Preston Maring, an obstetrician at Kaiser Permanente who started the movement to put farmers markets outside the hospitals.

Keep reading at San Jose Mercury News→
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A Blog is a Little First Amendment Machine

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From Jay Rosen
The Huffington Post

July 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

When in the eighteenth century the press first appeared on the political stage the people on the other end of it were known as the public. Public opinion and the political press arose together. But in the age of the mass media the public got transformed into an audience.

This happened because the mass media were one way, one-to-many, and “read only.” When journalism emerged as a profession it reflected these properties of its underlying platform. But now we have the Web, which is two-way (rather than one) many-to-many (rather than one-to-many) and “read-write” rather than “read only.”

As it moves toward the Web, journalism will have to adjust to these conditions, but a professionalized press is having trouble with the shift because it still thinks of the people on the other end as an audience–an image very deeply ingrained in professional practice.

I’m going to tell you some stories that I think illustrate the disruptive effects that blogging has had, and the democratic potential it represents. But let me say at the outset that, though a blogger myself, I am not a triumphalist about blogging. I do not think that the age of fully democratic media is suddenly upon us because we have this new form. There is a long way to go if we are to make good on its potential.

Now to my five stories, which are I offer more as parables, even though they are, of course, true to the facts.

Keep reading→

The End of the Beginning of the Collapse

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From DailyKos
by mwmwm

July 28, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

The present is not what the past was; the near future is by no means what the recent present was. We have reached a tremendously complex, tremendously traumatic point in human history… I think there’s plenty of evidence that that entire community is based on a failed model: a failed economic model, a failed environmental model, a failed energy model, a failed sustainable-lifestyle model.

This morning, I started my day with a coffee cup and DailyKos, intrigued by the internicene conflict between the estimable bonddad (who has informed me countless times), and bobswern (who has also informed me countless times), each of whom posted diaries disagreeing with each other (Bonddad, bobswern) about whether we are seeing “the bottom” of the recession, and whether a gloomy or merely less-gloomy future awaits us).

Their analysis was fascinating; less fascinating was the implicit and explicit sniping between adherents (and authors) to the different philosophies and assumptions of the others.

But in both analyses, there was something seriously lacking.

Both presume that “the economy” is something human-created, and independent of world-scale limits. Both presume that the realities of the current mess (and implicitly, the likelihoods of the next five years) have a relationship to the past’s realities, either by their use of graphs, or their use of employment rates.

Apocalypse Then: Earth Abides – Book Review

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Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Reviewed by Marian Powell

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures.

The quote above sounds like it was written today. Yet, it’s not from a doomsday article in a current magazine. That quote is from a novel published in 1949.

Can a novel over a half a century old speak to current concerns? The answer is yes. Earth Abides is probably more relevant now than when it was written. In 1949, a story about a new disease that wipes out the human race would have been one more science fiction story. Now, with AIDS progressing around the world and a dozen other newly discovered diseases such as Ebola lurking, ready to erupt, the idea is no longer just science fiction but a current concern. Another comment from the opening chapter is that just because something has never happened does not mean it cannot happen. In other words, just because the human race has never been wiped out by a plague, doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen tomorrow.

This may sound like the novel is a polemic or a tract. It is not. It is a good, solid end-of-the-world yarn.

Ish, a young graduate student, spends several weeks in the mountains of California, doing research for his thesis. He has deliberately cut all communication with the outside world, not even listening to the radio. He wants to focus on his work and he is a man who enjoys being alone.

The scene when he drives out of the mountains to return to San Francisco is still creepily effective. Nothing is wrong except no other car is moving on the highway and the radio picks up nothing but static.

Evil Syndicated

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From James Howard Kunstler
Author of The Long Emergency

July 27, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday’s loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves – the Nasdaq in particular – in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called “churning,” in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society – i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation – it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end – shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early – is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation – that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Since this racket was made public, there has been chatter all over the Web about how angry the American public is about Wall Street in general, and increasingly about Goldman Sachs in particular. Keep reading→

New, Much Better Alternatives to Dinosaur Monster Malls – Bright Green Retail

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From Worldchanging.com

July 22, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino, North California

Right now, many of us in the developed world shop by driving to large chain stores — this is especially true in North America, but has become common elsewhere too.

The problem is, this way of shopping adds an enormous ecological burden to all the goods we buy: not only do we burn gas getting to the store and back, but the building and operation of that store and its parking lot have a huge impact; the supply chain that keeps huge stores stocked with masses of various kinds of goods adds more impacts; while the packaging and sales presentation of the goods we buy tops it all off with more energy and materials waste. From the lighting to the loading docks, the freezer cases to the shopping carts, conventional retail is unsustainable.

Retail today has other costs as well. Big chain stores are not generally known for their excellent labor practices, meaning that part of the savings we get by shopping in them comes from the mistreatment of the people who serve us while we’re there. The kinds of volumes that it takes to stock big box chain stores means that these stores will only buy things in huge orders, often from the lowest-cost big provider, which often means supporting sweat shop work conditions, factory farmed food or toxic knock-off products. Furthermore, because the backstories of the objects they sell is often so atrocious, big chain stores are often at the forefront of fighting transparency and labeling laws…

Not all chains are as bad as this, of course, [b]ut there are real limits to how much the model of big box, auto-dependent chain stores can be improved…

[Instead... Webfronts; Flexible Spaces; Micro-commerce; Backstories and Display Transparency; Delivery; Drop Shops and Reverse Supply Chains]… Keep reading at Worldchanging→

The Great Tax Con Job – Thom Hartmann

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From Thom Hartmann

July 24, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.

A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.

As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kos blog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.

Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?

The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there. Even though William Kristol’s publication is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers!), his association with the Standard was enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants, and a column with The New York Times. The Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to stardom.

A Seminal Moment?

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From David Kurtz
TPM Blog

Just to mention something that is obvious, but hopefully not overlooked, i.e., if this country cannot pass a bill which insures that every citizen has access to medical care, which every developed country has managed to do (and got done many many years ago), there is something very fundamentally and structurally wrong with this country.

Such an event, in my mind, would confirm that we live with a completely corrupt and dysfunctional form of government. Forty nine states, each with bicameral legislative bodies, some of which have distinguished themselves recently with unabashed levels of incompetency and cluelessness. Then, graft a federal government over that, which is also bicameral, the non-representative portion of it being filled with officials who are certifiable morons and/or who are bought and sold like whores by wealthy contributors.

Talk about a Waterloo.

This is a defining moment in our history. Do we fulfill our supposed status as a “shining city on a hill” or continue our long slow decline into a second rate oligarchy?

I am not one prone to hyperbole.

I believe this to the depths of my soul.
Thanks to Janie Sheppard
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What about The Transition Initiative?

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From Orion Magazine

July 22, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Changing the scale of change

A while ago, I heard an American scientist address an audience in Oxford, England, about his work on the climate crisis. He was precise, unemotional, rigorous, and impersonal: all strengths of a scientist.

The next day, talking informally to a small group, he pulled out of his wallet a much-loved photo of his thirteen-year-old son. He spoke as carefully as he had before, but this time his voice was sad, worried, and fatherly. His son, he said, had become so frightened about climate change that he was debilitated, depressed, and disturbed. Some might have suggested therapy, Prozac, or baseball for the child. But in this group one voice said gently, “What about the Transition Initiative?”

If the Transition Initiative were a person, you’d say he or she was charismatic, wise, practical, positive, resourceful, and very, very popular. Starting with the town of Totnes in Devon, England, in September 2006, the movement has spread like wildfire across the U.K. (delightfully wriggling its way into The Archers, Britain’s longest-running and most popular radio soap opera), and on to the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The core purpose of the Transition Initiative is to address, at the community level, the twin issues of climate change and peak oil—the declining availability of “ancient sunlight,” as fossil fuels have been called. The initiative is set up to enable towns or neighborhoods to plan for, and move toward, a post-oil and low-carbon future: what Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Initiative, has termed “the great transition of our time, away from fossil fuels.” Part of the genius of the movement rests in its acute and kind psychology…

Keep reading at Orion Magazine→

See also Ukiah’s Transition Timeline→
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Why I will never buy a Kindle

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From tristero
Via Hullabaloo

July 20, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

This is why I will never, ever buy a Kindle:

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

Unacceptable, and on so many levels, I don’t know where to start.

Actually, I do. I’m buying, as I have for a long time now, only from a local bookstore, and I’m buying only real books…
~

Comments…

I own a Sony ebook reader. I use it to read freely available content online. Only occasionally (when going on a vacation etc) do I actually purchase any reading content from sony. On those rare occasions I feel ripped off because I have no physical ownership of an actual book. I can buy the same book in a store and then re-sell it, lend it to anyone etc. etc. The finances behind buying ebooks is just all off. I’m also the person that owns an Ipod and love it…but I still buy my music via an actual CD that I can download on my computer and own…ie: can re-sell, lend etc.

Until ebook readers all work on the same format….offer ownership in the form of re-sell value etc. I think there will always be those hardcore book owners like myself. Come see my shelves….its far far more exciting than me handing you an electronic device and saying “you really should see my library!” What a downer that truly is….
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…those are great points. I agree with you – as Sony Reader owner, myself. I use it when I’m traveling, especially on free e-books that can be downloaded because of expired copyrights or other freebies given away on the web.

I will never, never give up my books and will keep adding to them until the day I die, I suspect. E-books are kinda cool but they are not really books and they never will be.
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The Agrarian Standard – Wendell Berry

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From Wendell Berry
Orion Magazine

July 16, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

The Unsettling of America was published twenty-five years ago; it is still in print and is still being read. As its author, I am tempted to be glad of this, and yet, if I believe what I said in that book, and I still do, then I should be anything but glad. The book would have had a far happier fate if it could have been disproved or made obsolete years ago.

It remains true because the conditions it describes and opposes, the abuses of farmland and farming people, have persisted and become worse over the last twenty-five years. In 2002 we have less than half the number of farmers in the United States that we had in 1977. Our farm communities are far worse off now than they were then. Our soil erosion rates continue to be unsustainably high. We continue to pollute our soils and streams with agricultural poisons. We continue to lose farmland to urban development of the most wasteful sort. The large agribusiness corporations that were mainly national in 1977 are now global, and are replacing the world’s agricultural diversity, which was useful primarily to farmers and local consumers, with bioengineered and patented monocultures that are merely profitable to corporations. The purpose of this now global economy, as Vandana Shiva has rightly said, is to replace “food democracy” with a worldwide “food dictatorship.”

To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years.

Keep reading at Orion→

Death of the Category Killers

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By Stacy Mitchell
New Rules Project

July 15, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

Borders Books is on “death watch,” according to one industry observer. Virgin shut down its last U.S. record store this month. Office Depot and Staples are struggling. Circuit City is gone. Best Buy has launched a desperate ad campaign.

The specialty chains that grew so aggressively in the 1990s and early 2000s — the so-called “category killers” that bankrupted thousands of independent businesses — are now themselves rapidly losing ground to a handful of giant mass merchandisers, namely Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target, and Costco.

While the decline of independent businesses has leveled off and many are finding ways to survive and even thrive by building local business alliances and emphasizing their community roots, the rest of the retail sector is undergoing dramatic consolidation as a small number of massive companies become ever more dominant. This is an ominous trend for manufacturers and consumers, and it exposes serious flaws in U.S. antitrust policy.

Books as Loss Leaders

“For much of 2008, the industry focused its attention on the viability of the struggling Borders, but Barnes & Noble faces many of the very same issues,” wrote Peter Olson, the former CEO of Random House, earlier this year in Publishers Weekly. Olson predicts that the two chains will continue to lose ground, struggle to finance their inventories, and be forced to close outlets.

Big-box mass merchandisers, like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, have taken over 30 percent of the book market. These chains are now selling as many books as Barnes & Noble and Borders.

‘Localwashing’ Corporations Move to Co-opt Consumers Desire to Buy ‘Local’ & Sustainable Products & Services

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By Stacy Mitchell
New Rules Project

With Americans’ new focus on buying products made close to home, corporations are moving quickly to co-opt the term “local.” But if everything is local, is anything local?

[This is why we use the terms "locally-owned" and "independent", and why we need a local currency that circulates only in locally-owned, independent businesses. -DS]

July 15, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

HSBC calls itself “the world’s local bank,” which belies the intent of the “local” movement, a campaign to urge consumers to buy locally produced goods and support independent businesses in their hometowns.

HSBC, one of the biggest banks on the planet, has taken to calling itself “the world’s local bank.” Winn-Dixie, a 500-outlet supermarket chain, recently launched a new ad campaign under the tagline, “Local flavor since 1956.” The International Council of Shopping Centers, a global consortium of mall owners and developers, is pouring millions of dollars into television ads urging people to “Shop Local” — at their nearest mall. Even Walmart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say “Local.”

This new variation on corporate greenwashing — localwashing — is, like the buy-local movement itself, most advanced in the context of food. Hellmann’s, the mayonnaise brand owned by the processed-food giant Unilever, is test-driving a new “Eat Real, Eat Local” initiative in Canada. The ad campaign seems aimed partly at enhancing the brand by simply associating Hellmann’s with local food.

Book Reviews: The Delights of Rural Life

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By Jane Ciabattari
TruthDig

June 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

As Alice Waters hovers in the wings as a muse for the Obama era, inspiring the White House garden and healthy school lunches, the fantasy of a pastoral life far from derivatives and emissions and other excreta of our times abounds. Right on track are these two memoirs—journalist Jonah Raskin’s “Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California,” an account of organic farming in Sonoma County, and novelist Brad Kessler’s “Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, a Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese,” a chronicle of learning to raise goats and make cheese on a farm in Vermont.

Each provides vicarious and delicious adventures for those of us more likely to buy locally at farm stands or plant a garden patch than respond to the call of the land at full bore.

In the process of writing these memoirs, both Raskin and Kessler made drastic shifts in daily routine, and followed an imperative to digest a universe of new information, much of it nonverbal. Paramount for each was a personal quest—for healthier living, for connection to the land, for simplicity—or, possibly, simply for peace and quiet.

Raskin, author of “The Radical Jack London” and “American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the Making of the Beat Generation,” sketches Northern California’s organic farming lineage quickly, beginning with Jack and Charmian London, who settled in Sonoma’s legendary Valley of the Moon in 1906 and grew much of their own food. He includes Warren Weber of Marin County’s Star Route Farm, and makes it clear that Sonoma County’s farms have supplied Alice Waters’ restaurant kitchen for decades and impressed Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement…

Keep reading at TruthDig→
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Prince Charles: Just 96 months to save the world

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By Robert Verkaik
The Independent

July 13, 2009 Ukiah Valley, Mendocino County, North California

The price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high, he tells industrialists

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned in a grandstand speech which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.

And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.

The Prince, who has spoken passionately about the environment before, said that if the world failed to heed his warnings then we all faced the “nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon”.

Charles’s speech was described as his first attempt to present a coherent philosophy in which he placed the threat to the environment in the context of a failing economic system.

The Prince, who is advised by the leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, said that even the economist Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, had been aware of the short-comings of unfettered materialism.

Keep reading at The Independent→
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Some Choice Words for the ‘Select Few’

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by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Common Dreams

July 11, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don’t go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House “town meetings.” They’re just for show. What really happens — the serious business of Washington — happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally — and usually only because someone high up stumbles — do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

Case in point: Katharine Weymouth, the publisher of The Washington Post — one of the most powerful people in DC — invited top officials from the White House, the Cabinet and Congress to her home for an intimate, off-the-record dinner to discuss health care reform with some of her reporters and editors covering the story.

But CEO’s and lobbyists from the health care industry were invited, too, provided they forked over $25,000 a head — or up to a quarter of a million if they want to sponsor a whole series of these cozy get-togethers. And what is the inducement offered? Nothing less, the invitation read, than “an exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will get it done.”

The invitation reminds the CEO’s and lobbyists that they will be buying access to “those powerful few in business and policy making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues…

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.” The invitation promises this private, intimate and off-the-record dinner is an extension “of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard.”

Let that sink in. In this case, the “stakeholders” in health care reform do not include the rabble… Keep reading at Common Dreams→

Dollars with Good Sense: DIY Cash

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From Yes! Magazine→
by Judith Schwartz

July 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Local currencies value time, build community, and keep business moving even when credit dries up.

Total dependence on one currency is like total dependence on one crop, or, for that matter, a single energy source: there’s always the risk that crop failure or a cutoff in supply will topple the whole system. This is the scenario we’re seeing now—credit has dried up and unemployment is soaring. In small pockets throughout the world, in rural areas and inner cities, and spots as far-flung as Bavaria and Thailand to Massachusetts and Michigan, people are responding by launching their own currencies. Such monetary renegades are not simply thumbing their noses at the dollar (or the yen, or the euro, or the baht…) They are making a carefully considered choice to promote the well-being of their communities.

“From the beginning we had two objectives—to promote the region and promote local charities,” says Christian Gelleri. In 2003, Gelleri and a group of his students at a Waldorf School developed the Chiemgauer currency in the Lake Chiemsee region of Bavaria, Germany. Since then, some 3 million Chiemgauer notes (equivalent in value to the euro) have been placed in circulation. The currency, accepted by 600 businesses in the region, typically is spent and spent again 18 times a year, three times more than the Euro. This means that the currency is encouraging trade and cooperation in the region, which keeps the shops and restaurants

Busted: 9 Economy Myths

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From Yes! Magazine→

July 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Reinflate the old economy? Get Real!

NEW ECONOMY, NEW WAYS TO DO MONEY

	The measure of a healthy economy is a growing GDP.
		A healthy economy meets real needs within ecological limits.
	All you need is money.
		You can’t eat money. What we need is healthy families, communities, and ecosystems.
	Booms and busts are inevitable in a modern economy.
		The boom/bust cycle is a result of letting banks create money.

People Power Pushed the New Deal

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by Sarah Anderson
Yes Magazine

July 9, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Roosevelt didn’t come up with all those progressive programs on his own.

During the Great Depression, my grandfather ran a butter creamery in rural Minnesota. Growing up, I heard how a group of farmers stormed in one day and threatened to burn the place down if he didn’t stop production. I had no idea who those farmers were or why they had done that—it was just a colorful story.

Now I know that they were with the Farmers’ Holiday Association, a protest movement that flourished in the Midwest in 1932 and 1933. They were best known for organizing “penny auctions,” where hundreds of farmers would show up at a foreclosure sale, intimidate potential bidders, buy the farm themselves for a pittance, and return it to the original owner (see photo above where farmers crowd around the auctioneer at a foreclosure sale in Nebraska.)

The action in my grandfather’s creamery was part of a withholding strike. By choking off delivery and processing of food, the Farmers’ Holiday Association aimed to boost pressure for legislation to ensure that farmers would make a reasonable profit for their goods. Prices were so low that farmers were dumping milk and burning corn for fuel or leaving it in the field.

Book Review of Telex From Cuba

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From New York Times
Author is daughter of locals Peter and Pinky Kushner
Now Available in Paperback

July 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

In the early 1950s, a doll called Scribbles shook up the toy industry. Her face had no features of its own but could be sketched on with a special marker, washed clean and drawn on again. Creepy as this may sound, she’s a handy metaphor for creating a self in an uncertain environment like the one in Rachel Kushner’s multilayered and absorbing first novel, “Telex From Cuba.” Here a little American girl plays with her Scribbles the way Madame Defarge knits, while the international drifters around her settle in to bury pasts that include murder, adultery and neurotic meltdown. Meanwhile, Cuba itself is being remade; President Prio is replaced by the Americans’ favorite, Batista, and the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills of Oriente Province.

For the last half-century, Cuba has been America’s cultural Other, a nearby example of what capitalists dread most (Communism! revolution! beards!). But before that, it was America’s outpost. Most of Kushner’s story takes place in the sweltering canebrakes and comfortable homes

Take Action! Boycott the Shameless Seven – Organic Outlaws Labeling Factory Farm Milk as ‘USDA Organic’

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From Organic Consumers Association

July 7, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

While USDA bureaucrats drag their feet on closing key loopholes in national organic organic standards, retailers, wholesalers and major “organic” brands are continuing to sell milk and dairy products labeled as “USDA Organic, even though most or all of their milk is coming from factory farm feedlots where the animals have been brought in from conventional farms and are kept in intensive confinement, with little or no access to pasture.

The Organic Consumers Association is expanding its boycott of Horizon and Aurora organic dairy products to include five national “private label” organic milk brands supplied by Aurora, as well as two leading organic soy products, Silk and White Wave, owned by Horizon’s parent company, Dean Foods. Its time to turn up the heat on the “Shameless Seven.

While thousands of organic consumers and a number of natural food stores and cooperatives have joined the boycott, major national large grocery retailers have ignored the boycott.

Aurora Organic supplies milk for several private label organic milk brands,

There’s No Such Thing as Local vs. Organic Food

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By Timothy J. LaSalle
Rodale Institute
Via Organic Consumers Association

July 6, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Let’s clear up one issue: There is no such thing as local vs. organic. When it comes to consumer choice, we should be buying local and organic, though for mostly different reasons.

Why We Should Buy Local
Local is really important as a deep investment into your local economy and developing a relationship with the person who produces your food. Not only do local businesses generate more local income, jobs, and tax receipts, but they also tend to utilize advertizing, banks, and services in the local community. In fact, a dollar spent at a local business turns over seven times in that community; while the same dollar spent at a box store or chain only turns over 2.5 times.

Buying locally builds a healthy community on many levels. (For case studies on the economic, social, and environmental impacts of buying local visit the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). Not only can you support the economic health of your community and offer security to your hardworking neighbors, but you can eliminate the uncertainties of agribusiness by talking to your farmer and seeing first-hand how your food is produced.

It is also helpful in being able to purchase food that is often fresher. What’s more is buying local can create local food security, which may become more and more important in the near future. We at Rodale Institute couldn’t be more enthusiastic about local.

Considering the Carbon Footprint of Food
In this conversation, food carbon footprint often arises. However, the most carbon intensive portion of food production and consumption, outside of driving to the store and putting the food in your refrigerator, is the farming methods. The amount of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere varies widely with regard to the manner in which the food is grown. Because the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and other conventional farming inputs are reliant upon vast amounts of fossil fuel, the food you eat (local or not) can account for huge levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) releases. According to a recent New York Times article about Tropicana orange juice, fertilizers alone contribute to nearly 60% of the CO2 emitted in production. Conventional chemical-based agriculture is a net emitter of CO2 and by some estimates contributes between 9 – 20% of our total greenhouse gases in the U.S.

On the other hand, non-chemical organic farming will pull carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere and hold it in the soil for decades. As a matter of fact, research at Rodale Institute that has now been replicated at several land grant universities, shows that over 3.5 tons of CO2 can be sequestered on well-managed organic soils using compost and no chemical inputs. Synthetic fertilizers and many pesticides used in conventional farming inhibit the biological factors that build soil carbon, which adds to the long-term destruction of soils.

Why We Should Buy Organic
If we converted all tillable acres globally to organic practices, we could sequester up to 40% of all the world’s carbon emissions. This is the single largest strategy for mitigating carbon dioxide. There is nothing more significant to help us in our crisis with climate. In the U.S. alone,

Goldman Sachs owns our government and we’re the suckers

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From Rolling Stone Magazine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

[...] What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet…

Goldman’s role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren’t in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed…

Fast-forward to today. It’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs…

How Wal-Mart Screws Its Employees and Why They Need The Employee Free Choice Act

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From In These Times

July 4, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Since liberal Democrats and their labor supporters introduced the Employee Free Choice Act into Congress earlier this year, opposition to the legislation has reached a fever pitch.

The main line of attack from corporations and business trade associations zeroes in on EFCA’s “card check” provision, which would give union advocates the option of avoiding a contentious and often employer-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election. The provision would allow a majority of workers in any given workplace to enroll in a union via a simple card-signing.

A typical corporate response to the bill–which remains in committee in both the House and the Senate–came from Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company. The proposed labor law would “effectively eliminate freedom of choice and the right to a secret-ballot election,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Moore said in March, a few days after the bill was introduced. “We believe every associate or employee should have the right to make a private and informed decision regarding union representation.”

So Wal-Mart champions worker freedom. To get a sense of that company’s Orwellian definition of the concept it is useful to revisit the scene of a union organizing effort at Wal-Mart’s Kingman, Ariz. discount store. One might well look at dozens of other failed organizing attempts at Wal-Mart, but this campaign in the late summer of 2000 was exceptionally well-documented. The account that follows is based not only on NLRB reports and opinions, but on an authoritative Human Rights Watch report and internal company documents that were put in the public domain after litigation before the labor board and the federal courts.

Summers are hot in Arizona, and the young men who work in Wal-Mart’s Tire and Lube Express (TLE) department get their hands dirty, have few prospects for promotion and are well aware that similar blue collar jobs in garages and car dealerships pay a lot more. Such was the case in Kingman where an otherwise humane manager, under corporate pressure to keep labor and maintenance costs down, refused to spend the $200 needed to repair an air-cooling system essential in the 110 degree heat. So the TLE workers got in touch with the United Food and Commercial Workers, which on August 28, 2000, filed a petition with the nearby Phoenix office of the NLRB to represent as many as 18 automotive service technicians.

The reaction from Wal-Mart managers, both at the Kingman store and at corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., was virtually instantaneous. Within 24 hours a Bentonville-based “labor team” had flown into Kingman, where they joined a growing cadre of district and regional managers from Arizona and Nevada. In all more than 20 outside executives flooded the store. Wal-Mart replaced the Tire and Lube department manager with a high-level personnel executive, untutored in changing oil or tires but well-versed in the corporation’s union avoidance program. Loss prevention–the company’s shoplifting police–got busy as well, training a new set of cameras on work areas in the tire and lube shop. “I had so many bosses around me, I couldn’t believe it,” rememberes Larry Adams, a union supporter who worked in the TLE at that time. “They weren’t there to help me. They were there to bug me. It was very intimidating.”

Book Review: Future Scenarios — How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change — David Holmgren

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By Mark Archambault
Special Guest Contributor to The Localizer
Via Energy Bulletin

David Holmgren, one of the originators of the permaculture concept, has recently written what I believe is one of the best books on the societal implications of peak oil and climate change to be published over the last several years. His book “Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change” (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008), is a concise, well-written exploration of a range of possible futures facing humanity given certain assumptions about the interplay between the key variables of peak oil and climate change over the next few decades.

One of the most thought provoking and I believe useful observations he makes in the book is the distinction between energy descent and collapse, which I will relate shortly after exploring his main scenarios.

The author considers energy–and more importantly whether future energy supplies will likely increase, remain stable, or decrease–to be the most important variable in assessing potential futures. In the book, he first considers four meta-level energy-driven scenarios for the long-term future, these being ‘techno-explosion’, ‘techno-stability’, ‘energy descent’ and ‘collapse’.

‘Techno-explosion’ can be thought of as the science fiction future of continual growth made possible by energy breakthroughs such as nuclear fusion and free energy from the vacuum of space. Humanity is able to transcend the limits to growth on a finite planet through continual technological innovation and space colonization. The amount of energy available to mankind increases steadily over time, with no end in sight to available energy and the economic and population growth this makes possible. Though this scenario may have looked like the potential future when Arthur C. Clarke wrote the classic “2001, A Space Odyssey”, most policy makers now seem willing to concede that the odds of it coming to pass are vanishing more rapidly than the dwindling oil reserves of Mexico’s Canterell field.

In ‘Techno-stability’ he envisions “a seamless conversion from material growth based on depleting fossil energy to a steady-state in consumption of resources and population, if not economic activity.” This seems to be the scenario envisioned by politicians and corporations promoting the conversion to a ‘green economy’, yet who do not realize or acknowledge that no combination of renewable energy resources will enable industrial society to run as it has been running on fossil fuels, as repeatedly emphasized by James H. Kunstler.

In Techno-stability the amount of energy available to humanity may fall a bit during the transition, but will stabilize thereafter allowing for a newer, greener business as usual economy. Later in the book, however, he acknowledges the “small problem of reforming the monetary system away from dependence on perpetual growth without inducing financial collapse”. Or, as Michael Ruppert puts it, “until you change the way money works, you change nothing”.

Holmgren echoes the opinion of such researchers as Robert Hirsh in stating that a smooth transition away from an economy based on fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy is unlikely this late in the game without severe economic and geo-political crises. Hirsh, in a recent study prepared for the US Department of Energy, found that industrial societies will require at least a decade

What Employment Opportunities Arise from Embracing Transition?

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From Transition Culture→

July 1, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

As part of the Totnes EDAP, we are creating this table (below), by way of illustrating the wealth of new employment possibilities that could be created in a community that seriously embraces the potential of Transition. There will of course be hundreds of things we have neglected to include. In the light of the continued ’sharp contraction’ of the UK economy, we are arguing that the only way the area can revive its fortunes will be via. the Transition approach…

Employment Opportunities for a Post-Peak Oil Totnes and District
Employment Sector	Industry Type	Opportunities for Economic Development
Food Production/Land Use	Organic Farming	Farm workers, research and innovation, value adding and processing, retail, Community Supported Agriculture initiatives
	Textile Production	Farming, processing, manufacturing
	Organic Food Production	Training, freshwater aquaculture, organic gourmet mushroom production for food and medicines, intensive market gardening
	Forestry	Timber for construction and a variety of uses, sawdust for mushroom cultivation, charcoal, wood gasification, coppice products, saps, tannin, bark mulch, education, training, food crops, fibre
	Urban Agriculture	Co-ordination, land access provision, edible landscaping consultancy, online tools for linking growers and consumers, large potential for commercial production, plant nurseries and propagation
	Gleaning	Apple harvesting and pressing, hedgerow drinks and other products, education
	Agroforestry systems	Design consultancy, planting and ongoing management, selling of wide range of produce, long term enhanced timber value, courses, publications, research
	Schools	Edible landscaping, teaching, Education for Sustainable Development, food growing training, apprenticeships, bespoke Transition training programmes
Manufacturing and Processing	Recycling	Salvaging building materials, processing and reclaiming materials (bricks, timber etc), making insulation from waste paper, glass bottles into insulation
	Sustainable Industry	Renewable energy technologies manufacturing and installing, technology systems,
	Repair	Extending the life of machinery, building for durability
	Fabric	Processing of locally produced fabric, hemp, flax etc, making a range of clothing for retail, and repairs
	Scavenging	Materials reuse, refurbishing, resale to low-income families
Services	Healthcare	Holistic healthcare, research into effective herbal medicines, local herb growing and processing, training for doctors, apothecaries, nutritional advice
	Energy	Home insulation advice, energy monitoring, energy efficient devices, investment co-ordinators, sale of energy to grid or decentralised energy systems, producing wood chip/pellets for boilers, Energy Resilience Analyses for businesses
	Compost Management	Collecting, Managing, Training, Distribution, Education, potential links to urban food production
	Information Technology	Creation of effective software systems for energy management, carbon footprinting and much more
	Hospice services / bereavement	Hospice services, supporting families who keep relatives at home, green burials
	Financial Investment	Credit Unions, local currencies, mechanisms whereby people can invest with confidence into their community, Green Bonds, crowd funding
Government	Councils	Opportunity to organise efforts throughout region, and parishes
	Researchers	Opportunity to gather information from the many projects and enterprises underway.
Education and Design	Educators	Wide range of opportunities for supporting ‘The Great Reskilling’, developing Distance Learning programmes, training for professionals
	Sustainable Designers	Landscape architects specialising in edible landscaping, zero carbon buildings
	The Arts	Art projects documenting the Transition, installations, exhibitions, public art workshops, local recording studios, storytelling
	Transition Consulting	Working with businesses on energy audits, resilience plans, a range of future-proofing strategies
Personal / Group Support	Counselling	Personal ‘Transition Counselling’, group support, community processes
	Citizens Advice	Debt advice, housing advice, financial management skills, debt scheduling
	Outplacement/Redundancy Support	Support, retraining, ongoing support and training
Media	Print media	Local newspapers, small print run books on different aspects of the Transition
	Internet	Online retailing systems for local markets
	Film media	Online TV channels documenting inspiring examples of Transition in Action
Construction	Reskilling	Retraining builders to use local materials and green building techniques, improving awareness around energy efficiency in building, setting up local construction companies
	Materials	Creating local natural building materials, clay plasters, timber, lime, straw, hemp etc. Growing, processing, distribution, retail etc. Locally made wallpaper.
	Architects	Specialists in passiv haus building, local materials, retrofit advice
Transportation	Low energy vehicle fleets	Marketing, maintaining, renting, chauffeuring
	Bicycles	Selling, servicing, maintenance training, rental
	Rickshaws	Importing, servicing, taxi service, weddings etc.
	Biodiesel	Sourcing, processing, selling, training and advice
	Biomethane/Electric vehicles	Fleet management, sales, leasing, car clubs

This chart is based on and expanded from Chen, Y., Deines, M., Fleischmann,H., Reed, S. & Swick, I. (2007) Transforming Urban Environments for a Post-Peak Oil Future: a vision plan for the city of San Buenaventura. City of San Buenaventura.
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See also Transition Ukiah→
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12 Things You Can Do To Make The World A Better Place – Dave Pollard

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From Dave Pollard
How To Save The World Blog→

July 1, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

[Nested within a longer post, Four World Changing Questions (well worth the read), is an update on this Pollard classic. -DS]

Knowing and Learning:

1. Understand What’s Happening: Before you can engage others and act purposefully and effectively you need to understand how the world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). The world is complex, and understanding and embracing complexity is a challenge to our culture’s predilection for oversimplification and dichotomy.

2. Imagine What’s Possible: Next, you need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If you can’t imagine it, you will never be able to decide how to achieve it.

3. Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things you can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so you need to learn what actions actually work. This takes a lot of time and energy, and to do it you need to stop doing some other things you are doing that are distracting you from learning these important truths.

4. Know Yourself: Then, to assess what you can do about all this, you need to know yourself, which means giving yourself the time and space to discover who you really are, what your true gifts, passions and purpose are, and therefore what you’re meant to do.

5. Build Personal Capacity: And finally, once you’ve learned all this, you need to discover and acquire the additional capacities you need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn’t entail changing yourself to be what you’re not, but just learning some new skills and abilities that will equip you to accomplish more with less effort.

Most of us never have the opportunity to do any of this, so we end up doing ill-informed, half-hearted, non-time-consuming, and largely ineffective things. We complain, we sign a few petitions, we feel guilty, but none of that gets us anywhere. We say we’re doing our best given the other commitments on our time, resources and energies, but are we? Until we have done these five knowing and learning steps, we can’t possibly know.

Teaching and Sharing:

6. Converse and Tell Stories: Once we have learned these things, we can start to engage others. Conversation, discussion, talking, explaining, showing — these aren’t ‘doing’ actions, but they are essential. Until we engage others in meaningful dialogue, our efforts are atomized, fragmented, isolated.

No Growth is the Smartest Growth

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From Kirkpatrick Sale

Let’s Get Rid of the Economy of Growth

June 27, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California,

It’s getting worse and worse, and the wizards don’t have a clue. They don’t even know the economy is broken—and can’t be fixed. That’s why they keep doing more of the same with the same old solutions and same old people.

Nothing could be more obvious, and I think most sentient people in the land know this in their hearts. And nothing could be more obvious than the need to overhaul that economy entirely—which is indeed the opportunity we have now.

I don’t mean we have to scrap the capitalist system entirely, but we do have to reign it in. We have to fit it in to the limits of the real world. We have to understand that economics is a subsystem of the overall ecosystem. We have to realize that continuing to base it on the concepts of growth and consumption—and encouraging, “stimulating,” more of that—will lead to the collapse not only of the global economy but probably the industrial civilization it serves.

Isn’t it obvious that the Keynesian idea of growth at all costs, particularly growth fostered by large governments that can print money, has failed? Isn’t it clear that we can’t keep on throwing money at this failed economy and that something quite different is needed? The U.S. economy has been devoted exclusively to the idea of perpetual growth since the end of World War II, and it has allowed any number of evils—environmental destruction, greenhouse gases, pollution, resource depletion, military expansion, government inefficiency and corruption, corporate political domination, unregulated financial institutions, immense inequality, a perpetual underclass, the decay of public education, and that’s just for starters—in its pursuit. Isn’t it obvious that it doesn’t work and that the current Great Recession is the proof of that?…

The alternative? Nothing complicated: a non-growth economy. A human-scale economy. A steady-state economy.

Read whole post Let’s Get Rid of the Economy of Growth→

See also the moralities of scale at Orion→

…and this wonderful website on Thomas Jefferson→
All via Energy Bulletin
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Financial Shock and Awe

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From Bill Ayers

June 27, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

The mother of all bail-outs is upon us– approaching a trillion dollars in federal funds, that is, in tax-payer’s money, to get the big gamblers and hustlers and sharpies off the hook– and it’s way beyond global. Let’s call it galactic or stratospheric. It is awesome, and the questions just keep on coming:

When the big guys were raking in super-profits, we were not invited to the table to share the wealth, so why are we now told we must share the pain?

Isn’t this socialism for the rich?

If “government is the problem” and the genius of the “free market” the solution to everything from health care and education to national defense and public safety, why are the marketeers in line with their hands out?

We were told repeatedly by the powerful that there wasn’t enough money for decent health care for all, wonderful schools for poor kids, and support for a life of dignity and purpose for the elderly, so how did a trillion dollars suddenly materialize?

Further if full and generous funding for education and health care would turn ordinary, hard-working citizens into lazy, dissolute louts– that’s what they said– then what can we hope for the moral well-being of the financial wizards?

Is the government of the people, by the people, for the people, or has it finally become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Finance, Big Oil, and Big Pharma?

We were reminded that our patriotic duty required that we support a war-of-choice costing $500,000 per minute, but who profits, and who suffers in war?

I’m just asking…
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The Post-Oil Novel

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From Seattle Peak Oil Awareness

June 24, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

The post-oil novel: a celebration!
by Frank Kaminski

Novels that deal with the collapse of our oil-based civilization undoubtedly belong under the heading of speculative fiction—and some even qualify as outright science fiction. But even so, there’s an inescapable irony to their being categorized as such. This is because, by and large, speculative fiction is an optimistic genre. It celebrates technological progress and often tacitly assumes a near-endless supply of both energy and human ingenuity.

Peak oil, in contrast, casts a ruthlessly critical eye on technological progress, human ingenuity, and alternative energy sources. Indeed, it considers the entire technological age to be nothing more than a charade, enabled by the reckless over-consumption of nonrenewable energy resources.

Given how alien the assumptions of peak oil are to some of the most cherished ideals of speculative fiction, it is perhaps unsurprising that only four novels published thus far (at least, by major mass market publishers) have endeavored to tackle the subject head on. Similarly unsurprising is the fact that, out of this small handful of books, only one was written by an author previously known for writing speculative fiction—the German writer Andreas Eschbach, whose post-oil thriller Ausgebrannt (2007) wound up hitting the German bestseller list.

The other three books—the late John Seymour’s Retrieved from the Future (1996), Alex Scarrow’s Last Light (2007), and James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand (2008)—are all the work of first-time speculative fiction writers inadvertently turning the genre on its head.

Go to full essay→

See also his essay of three more post-oil novels→
Thanks to Energy Bulletin
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What’s On My Food? New Tool…

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From Pesticide Action Network

June 23, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Pesticides
…on our food, even after washing;
…in our bodies, for years;
…& in our environment, traveling many miles on wind, water and dust.

What’s On My Food? is a searchable database designed to make the public problem of pesticide exposure visible and more understandable.

How does this tool work? We link pesticide food residue data with the toxicology for each chemical, making this information easily searchable for the first time.

Use the tool, share it with others: we built it to help move the public conversation about pesticides into an arena where you don’t have to be an expert to participate.

At Pesticide Action Network (PAN), we believe that pesticides are a public health problem requiring public engagement to solve. We want you to have the information you need to take action on pesticides. What’s On My Food? builds on PAN’s 27-year tradition of making pesticide science accessible.

Go to What’s On My Food?→

See also Organic To Be→

…and Fatal Harvest – Industrial Agriculture Series→

…and More evidence links pesticides to Parkinsons→

…and Organic Consumers Association – Action Center→
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Santa Cruz Group Gears Up for Life After Cheap Oil

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From The Santa Cruz News
Excerpts

June 23, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

…Voudreau, a member of Transition Santa Cruz’s steering committee, said that drastic change is coming whether we want it or not, that there is no point in discussing whether or not we should be driving, and soon, in fact, the luxury to make such choices will not even exist.

“We’re here,” she said, “to talk about peak oil.”

But Transition Santa Cruz and its several hundred members firmly believe that, although dramatic change may be in the works, we can prepare for it if we reorganize the way we live. The organization was born last summer as just one localized faction of the worldwide Transition movement, which first began in 2007 in Totnes, England. It was there that one Rob Hopkins recognized that the modern world will not be able to continue on its current trajectory when fast, easy access to oil peaks and begins to dwindle—or when global warming and economic meltdown, the other two drivers of the Transition movement, become inescapable realities.

But in an ideal Transition town, society would be ready for such changes. With limited gas-powered transport or oil-based products, a Transition community’s people would live within cycling distance of one another in a township built upon complete self-sufficiency, with extremely localized infrastructure for agriculture, clothes making, metalworking and other basics of life that humanity largely abandoned to the factories in the late 1800s, when oil power turned life into a sort of leisurely vacation from reality…

He’s Barack Obama. He’s come to save the day!

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Go to JibJab→
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Transition Ukiah 6/18/09

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From Sharon Astyk
Author/Blogger

June 18, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

…The mere idea that America could flourish by becoming the best shoppers on the planet and not much more is bizarre, and yet it has held a grip on us for decades.  Our job is to consume, while China and other states produce for us.  The reality is that an economy based on devouring what other people produce, mine, build and make is ummm…due for a refit.

My suggestion is that we refit it voluntarily, and rapidly.  It is time and well past time to begin making things in the United States again.  And by making things I do not mean “asphalt paving and cars” – the private car is doomed, and none of us are made much richer by acres of highway, which only increase our dependency on foreign oil and its toxic cognates.

By making things, I mean things we actually need. I’m sure you can think of some – socks and shoes and tools and trains; beer and books and beans and bikes; hoes and hats, fiddles and fishing poles.  And on a small scale, keeping fossil fuels to a minimum, near where you live and I do.   Because the other choice is this – we become China’s supplier of things they want that we have – food, mostly, since we’re the biggest exporter in the world, and they can’t feed themselves.  And we do it on China’s terms, at China’s prices, with all that that implies.  There’s a kind of horrible justice there, since we’ve been doing that through globalization to countless poor nations – but there are better things than ironic justice.

Point me to one single piece of evidence that suggests the US will be fine if other nations stop buying our debt, please.  Point me to our plan – one that doesn’t involve rapid growth or actual fairies.  Otherwise, better get started making something useful.

Read whole post Whither America without China?→

See also Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation (Dmitre Orlov)→

…and The Vindication of The Population Bomb (Paul and Anne Erlich)→
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WeCommune: Tech Support for Community

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From Worldchanging

June 18, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Post-ownership living may be closer than we think. We see the evidence all around us, in the form of innovations from community kitchens to emerging mobility solutions. So, if people are recognizing the practical potential in social solutions, why aren’t even more models for collaboration, sharing and product-service systems thriving? According to architect Stephanie Smith, spurring the movement may be a simple matter of providing the tech support.

This week Smith, who heads WeCommune, plans to launch the first software platform designed specifically for, well, communing (if you visit, you may get a splash page while they transition). The platform’s services will allow groups of three or more people to self-organize a “commune” defined by a shared interest or shared zip code, and will provide tools for communicating, organizing and managing projects, and sharing resources.

What is commune-support software?

WeCommune is a networking platform, outfitted with commune-specific project management applications that make it much different from a social networking tool. The software enables common and practical actions – for example, a group of members can organize a buying club, set up a rideshare system, or barter goods and services. And like everything on the web, WeCommune gives users the option to extend their reach: by networking to other communes, groups can make certain assets like bartering and goods-sharing pools more robust.

WeCommune offers the basic platform free to anyone who wants to use it, and even the more complex services are available for a monthly subscription under $2. Smith hopes that by making it affordable she’ll enable communes of all sorts – from those who are already sharing, like condo associations and college dorms, to neighborhoods and interest groups.

“We couldn’t find anything out there like this,” says Smith. “We feel like if we hit a home run, we’re going to be the ultimate community application.”

Read whole post here→
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BookTV on the Internet

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From BookTV

June 17, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

You no longer need a TV to watch BookTV.

BookTV.org has been redesigned for viewers. Visit their new site and discover the following new features…

• More user-friendly and intuitive
• Easier to search for and watch videos through “search” function and video player on the front page
• Provides users with an option to bookmark and share BookTV.org pages on popular social media websites (click the orange plus sign under the search bar)
• Streams Book TV programming LIVE

The new BookTV.org has easy-to-navigate sections where you can watch video, view and print the schedule, learn about book festivals, and find news about books and the publishing world. Additionally, in order to accommodate the growing number of online video viewers, the “search” function–which links directly to the Book TV archives–is readily visible at the top of the home page. Stop by and check it out.

Go to BookTV.org→

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Why Fiction Matters

From Dave Pollard

Fiction enables us to imagine possibilities. The power of such imagination and realization is transformative. As I’ve said before, if we can’t imagine (what is really going on, that we can’t see directly), we can do anything (including tolerate factory farms, the abuse of spouses and children, atrocities in prisons and foreign wars, etc.) Once we can imagine, through powerful writing, what is really happening, we cannot sit by and let it happen. We are propelled to change our thinking and then our behaviour. And we can also become aware of things we might love, things we might be good at, things that are needed that we care about, and hence discover what we are meant to do in our lives, that, without such stories, we might never have realized.

…a good story is one that draws our attention to something important we hadn’t noticed. Much as the job of the media, according to Bill Maher, is to make what’s important interesting, the job of the story-teller is to draw our attention to things we wouldn’t normally consider or look at — sometimes even things we shudder to think about… Read whole post→

A Homegrown Revolution (video)

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From Path to Freedom

June 17, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Founded by Jules Dervaes (Dur-VAYS) in 2001, Path to Freedom is a grassroots, family operated, viable urban homesteading project established to promote a simpler and more fulfilling lifestyle and reduce one family’s “footprint” on the earth’s dwindling resources.

Since the mid 1980s, all five members of the Dervaes family have steadily worked at transforming their ordinary city lot in Pasadena, California, into an organic permaculture garden supplying them with food all year round. They also run a successful business, Dervaes Gardens, providing salad greens to local restaurants. This helps them fund their purchases of solar panels, energy efficient appliances, and biodiesel processor to further decrease their homestead’s reliance on the earth’s non-renewable resources.

What is unique and makes PathtoFreedom.com different from other sustainable living sites on the Internet? The Dervaes family isn’t just writing about the latest eco-practices or products that should be incorporated into their lives. Instead, they are sharing with you the changes and steps to sustainability they already have implemented in their lifestyle.

Furthermore, you, the readers, can “visit” the family daily at their journal and witness their first-hand accounts of struggles and joys, defeats and successes, as they journey along the path to self-sufficiency to accomplish more.

It is the family’s hope and desire to live by example as they strive to become earth stewards on a journey towards a sustainable world.

“This project evolved from our commitment and conviction to live a simple, self-sufficient and holistic lifestyle,” says Jules Dervaes, founder, “It is an entire life’s journey and we have many more miles to go–the journey is by no means over! We are proving that we can attain our goal if we advance in stages whatever the circumstances. Our hope is that by documenting our personal experiences we can offer encouragement to those who are on the same journey towards a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle whether they are in the city or country.”

Backyard chickens on the rise

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From The LA Times

June 16, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Urban poultry farmers get a taste of rural life — and a constant supply of eggs — with their own coops. But not every city will run with the idea.Reporting from Madison, Wis. — Jen Lynch and her family live in the heart of the city but roll out of bed to the sound of clucking chickens.

Their day starts with cleaning coops, scooping out feed and hunting for eggs for morning omelets. Eight families in a three-block radius and an estimated 150 families citywide do the same.

“It’s our slice of rural life, minus the barns,” said Jen Lynch, 35, as Flicka the chicken pecked at her backyard lawn.

As the recession drags on, city dwellers and suburbanites alike are transforming their backyards into poultry farms. Victory gardens, proponents say, are not enough. Chickens are the next step.

“People are turning to things that remind them of simpler times,” said Ron Kean, a poultry specialist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If you’re smart, you can save money doing this.”

Growing interest in backyard chickens has fans rallying for change in dozens of cities, although the movement leaves some people squawking.

“I moved to the city for a reason,” said Evan Feinberg, 41, a technology consultant in Madison who said he grew up on a Midwest farm. “I never wanted to see another chicken, unless it’s wrapped in plastic.”

Still, the idea of urban chickens is picking up steam. In Traverse City, Mich., officials are weighing the issue. In Iowa City, Iowa, chicken lovers have collected 600 signatures urging local officials to permit backyard chickens.

Poultry fans in Madison persuaded the city’s common council to reverse a ban on backyard hens about five years ago. The ordinance — similar to regulations in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and Baltimore — allows up to four chickens per property. The animals are to be raised for eggs, and must be housed in a coop that is far separated from neighboring homes. (Roosters are typically banned in cities because of crowing.)…

Go to full article: Backyard chickens on the rise – Los Angeles Times→
Thanks to Linda Gray
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Home

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Free, on-line film. One and a-half hours of earth’s beauty, devastation and hope…
Narrated by Glenn Close. HOME→
Thanks to Dave Pollard.
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Forest Gardening for Mendocino?

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Video Below

From Schumacher College, UK

June 11, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Regenerating landscapes, rediscovering abundance

SCHUMACHER COLLEGE near Totnes in South Devon has been a pioneering college of holistic education for over twenty years. Students leave the college nourished by the high quality of the educational experience, which includes helping to prepare and cook the food for staff and participants.

Over the past two years Schumacher has further deepened this aspect of the learning process by actively engaging with the land and rediscovering true abundance in its woodland ecosystems.

Inspired and informed by its neighbours at the Agroforestry Research Trust, Schumacher College has been regenerating its grounds using a dynamic “layering” design known as forest gardening. Tree crops, shrub crops and perennial herbaceous plants grown in harmony with each other produce an abundance of seasonal foodstuffs whilst contributing to the health and integrity of the land.

Designed with diversity in mind, these “foodscapes” seek to embody the natural principles of a healthy temperate woodland: this is the pattern of least effort and maximum diversity. Growing food in tune with this woodland tendency requires less effort, less machinery, and less fossil fuel — and the result is an almost unbelievable abundance.

Schumacher staff and participants have now planted over 100 fruit and nut trees to form the canopy layer of the woodland gardens. Peaches and apricots are grown as espaliers against sunny south-facing walls. Apple, pear and plum trees dot the landscape as do less common crops such as Cornelian cherries, hardy kiwifruits and Ugni berries. Sweet chestnut, walnut, hazel and bladdernut

Smaller West Coast towns and cities get aggressive on energy efficiency

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By Roger Valdez
Worldchanging

June 10, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Ambitious programs to build sustainable communities.

I have written about energy efficiency programs in Cascadia’s three largest cities and how each of these communities is working to combine federal, state and local dollars to incentivize energy efficiencies.

What about some of the region’s smaller cities? Small cities have as much to gain – and to lose – as the big urban centers.

When I was last in Oregon I was surprised to hear that Lincoln City was endeavoring to become carbon neutral. One of the last times I was in Lincoln City was to see George Jones at the Chinook Winds Casino. It seemed the last place in the world that would be making carbon neutrality a goal. But Lincoln city has a lot at stake.

At just 11 feet above sea level, Lincoln City is well within the danger zone for rising sea levels caused by global warming. So, they’re getting proactive. The City will combine a mix of energy savings along with purchase of renewable energy and carbon credits to achieve neutrality. There is some ongoing debate about whether these methods truly lead to neutrality. But it’s hard to argue with Lincoln City’s dedication to efficiencies and sustainability — and even the Casino has taken measures to shed 900 tons of emissions annually. Because of this focus, Lincoln City became an EPA Green Power Community in 2007.

And speaking of Green Power Communities, Bellingham, Washington, was not only selected for the program but became the Washington’s first green power community. The EPA’s program focuses on voluntary community-wide efforts to create energy efficiencies and reduce the environmental impacts of energy consumption including greenhouse gas emissions.

This fall, Bellingham will initiate the Energy Efficiency Community Challenge aimed at substantially reducing Bellingham and Whatcom County’s consumption of electricity through an incentive program designed to motivate retrofits of existing residential and commercial buildings.

Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance to Build a New Economy

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by David Korten

Yes Magazine→

June 8, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Whether it was divine providence or just good luck, we should give thanks that financial collapse hit us before the worst of global warming and peak oil. As challenging as the economic meltdown may be, it buys time to build a new economy that serves life rather than money. It lays bare the fact that the existing financial system has brought our way of life and the natural systems on which we depend to the brink of collapse. This wake-up call is inspiring unprecedented numbers of people to take action to bring forth the culture and institutions of a new economy that can serve us and sustain our living planet for generations into the future.

The world of financial stability, environmental sustainability, economic justice, and peace that most psychologically healthy people want is possible if we replace a defective operating system that values only money, seeks to monetize every relationship, and pits each person in a competition with every other for dominance.

From Economic Power to Basket Case

Not long ago, the news was filled with stories of how Wall Street’s money masters had discovered the secrets of creating limitless wealth through exotic financial maneuvers that eliminated both risk and the burden of producing anything of real value. In an audacious social engineering experiment, corporate interests drove a public policy shift that made finance the leading sector of the U.S. economy and the concentration of private wealth the leading economic priority.

Corporate interests drove a policy agenda that rolled back taxes on high incomes, gave tax preference to income from financial speculation over income from productive work, cut back social safety nets, drove down wages, privatized public assets, outsourced jobs and manufacturing capacity, and allowed public infrastructure to deteriorate. They envisioned a world in which the United States would dominate the global economy by specializing in the creation of money and the marketing and consumption of goods produced by others.

President Obama: Take Back The Power To Create Money From The Private Banking Industry

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by Ellen Brown
The Web of Debt Blog→

June 9, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

The Constitution states, “Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” This power has been abdicated to private bankers. Today, 99.99% of our money is created by private banks when they make loans. This includes the Federal Reserve, a private banking corporation, which orders Federal Reserve Notes to be printed, and then lends them to the U.S. government. Only coins are actually created by the government itself. Coins compose only about 1-10,000th of the M3 money supply, and Federal Reserve Notes compose about 3% of it. All of the rest is created by banks as loans, something they do by simply writing numbers into accounts.

Congress could take back the power to create the national money supply by:
(a) Nationalizing the Federal Reserve.

(b) Reviving the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a government-owned lending facility used by Roosevelt to fund the New Deal. Rather than merely recycling borrowed money as Roosevelt did, however, the RFC could actually create credit on its books, in the same way that banks do it today, by fanning its capital base into many times that sum in loans. Assuming $300 billion is left of the TARP money approved by Congress last fall, this money could be deposited into the RFC and leveraged into $3 trillion in loans. That’s based on a 10% reserve requirement. If the money were counted as capital, at an 8% capital requirement it could be leveraged into 12.5 times the original sum. That would be enough to fund not only President Obama’s stimulus package but many other programs that are desperately short of funding now.

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See also Money As Debt – How It Works (video)→

10 Ways to Limit Health Risk from Cell Phones

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From The Daily Green

June 3, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

French schools have banned cell phones because of concern over electromagnetic radiation. Here’s what you can do to protect yourself and your children.

1. Do not allow children to use a cell phone except for emergencies. The developing organs of a fetus or child are the most likely to be sensitive to any possible effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields.
2. While communicating using your cell phone, try to keep the cell phone away from the body as much as possible. The amplitude of the electromagnetic field is one fourth the strength at a distance of two inches and fifty times lower at three feet.Whenever possible, use the speaker-phone mode or a wireless Bluetooth headset, which has less than 1/100th of the electromagnetic emission of a normal cell phone. Use of a headset attachment may also reduce exposure.
3. Avoid using your cell phone in public places, like a bus, where you can passively expose others to your phone’s electromagnetic fields.
4. Avoid carrying your cell phone on your body at all times. Do not keep it near your body at night such as under the pillow or on a bedside table, particularly if pregnant. You can also put it on “flight” or “off-line” mode, which stops electromagnetic emissions.
5. If you must carry your cell phone on you, it is preferable that you orient the keypad toward your body and the back is positioned toward the outside of your body. Depending on the thickness of the phone this may provide a minimal reduction of exposure.
6. Keep your conversations short. Only use your cell phone to establish contact or for conversations lasting a few minutes as the biological effects are directly related to the duration of exposure. For longer conversations, use a land line with a corded phone, not a cordless phone, which uses electromagnetic

Reinventing the Informal Economy

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From Sharon Astyk

June 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

…Now the informal economy isn’t perfect. Unless you join the criminal parts of it, or are a natural scrounger, you probably won’t get rich off of it.

But the truth is that the informal economy is more resilient (being vastly larger) than the formal economy – markets, as we all know, long preceeded “the market.” That is, human beings always have economies – they are simply not always formal.

In most cases, people live partly in one, partly in the other – the formal economy is needed for the paying taxes and debts, for some projects, while the informal economy meets other needs. The more cash money you have, the less you may rely on the personal ties and subsistence labor of the informal economy, but also, the more unstable, complex and vulnerable the formal economy is (and these are the defining characteristics of modern finance), the more the informal economy is necessary – family ties take over for retirement accounts, barter when neither of you has any cash, subsistence labor replaces money labor for some people, so that you need to earn less.

Transition Towns Sweeping The World

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From The Guardian UK
May 31, 2009

June 2, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

Within three years it has gone from an idea to having 170 towns, villages and cities signed up as transition communities, working in 30 countries, and thousands more all over the world using the transition model. It is viral, catching on faster than its founder, Rob Hopkins, can track.

Its message is that peak oil and climate change demand dramatic changes in the way people live, and, given that no one has the answer, communities themselves must start working out how that change might come about.

It offers no answers, no solutions, only some tips in a handbook for how to get started. Transition lays the challenge squarely at the door of everyone. This is too big and difficult for government alone to tackle, too overwhelming and depressing for individuals to face alone.

Transition is rooted in a new politics of place: geography matters again as people look to the community immediately around them to devise the solutions for sustainability and resilience.

Community-Based Entrepreneurs – Dave Pollard

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From Dave Pollard
How To Save The World

Six steps to sustainable, community-based Natural Enterprise, from my book Finding the Sweet Spot

I’m in Denver for the weekend at the annual conference of BALLE, the international network of community-based sustainable businesses. The reason I’m here is more about looking for ideas than personal networking. One of the mandates I’ve taken on in my current work is to make our association (the Chartered Accountants of Canada, equivalent to CPAs in the US) champions of entrepreneurship and of new, sustainable enterprise formation.

The reason we’re championing entrepreneurs is that no one else will. It’s an interesting paradox that the North American economy is driven by entrepreneurs (virtually all new net employment in the last decade has been in the entrepreneurial sector), not by big corporations, but all the money and attention flows to the big corporations. Entrepreneurs don’t get bailouts, massive incentives to locate in your community, or big unpublicized government subsidies. Universities say they teach entrepreneurship but what they do is the minimum (‘intrapreneurship’) lip service to get big corporations to fund ‘chairs in entrepreneurship’ that let them hire and retain professors. Economic Development Offices of governments at various levels are designed to attract businesses (i.e. property and business tax revenues) so their work for entrepreneurs is mostly low-budget, low-value work like providing names of lawyers and accountants and telling you how to get business licenses, incorporate and file taxes.

Accountants and lawyers (especially the smaller ones) will take on entrepreneurs as clients, but generally are unenthusiastic and not terribly helpful for businesses at the critical start-up stage. Bankers (with the notable exception of credit unions) generally avoid entrepreneurial businesses, and lenders of last resort are usually vultures who create more problems for entrepreneurs than they solve. BALLE founder Michael Shuman has written about these challenges in his book The Small-Mart Revolution.

What’s worse, in some progressive circles, the very word ‘entrepreneur’ is suspect — it’s almost as if profit and enterprise are considered necessarily exploitative.

Keep reading here→.
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Rev. Billy Exhorts!

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From Rev. Billy
Activist and Founder of The Church of Life After Shopping
In yes! magazine

“Now so many of us have lost our jobs, our savings—we are starting new businesses out of our garages. Out of our personal computers. We discover that our hobbies can make money. We teach in the home.

“Trading, bartering, thrifting… we are doing what we can. We are making things. The old shuttered storefronts can be re-opened …

“This is the basic healing that we need now across our country … We are getting to know each other again. This is the stuff of our new economy. It will grow and we won’t let it go this time.”
~

Rev. Billy on YouTube→

See also Recession Turns Malls Into Ghost Towns→

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Greenpeace: Polluters to get massive giveaways in climate and energy bill

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From Greenpeace

Washington, D.C., United States — Greenpeace is calling for renewed leadership from President Obama and Congress following the release of the drastically weakened Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill today. The American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) was already in need of improvement when first released as a discussion draft in March, and has become severely worse as members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee actively worked to weaken the bill on behalf of fossil fuels industries and other corporate polluters.

Following the release of the legislation, Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford issued the following statement:

“Despite the best efforts of Chairman Waxman, this bill has been seriously undermined by the lobbying of industries more concerned with profits than the plight of our planet. While science clearly tells us that only dramatic action can prevent global warming and its catastrophic impacts, this bill has fallen prey to political infighting and industry pressure. We cannot support this bill in its current state. We call on President Obama and leaders in Congress to get back to work and produce a bill, based on science, which presents a clear road map for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, transforms our economy with clean, renewable energy technology, generates new green jobs and shows real leadership internationally.”

Ol’ Mister Doom and Gloom

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From Jim Kunstler
Author, The Long Emergency

There are plenty of things you can state about the economy past and future with some confidence right now:
– Cheap energy is over and our wishes for alt.energy are currently inconsistent with reality, meaning we have to live differently.
– We have to downscale and re-localize our major economic activities: food production, commerce and manufacturing, banking, schooling, etc.
– We can’t hope to have a stable money system unless we allow a workout of unpayable debt to proceed.
– Even if we can do this, universal easy credit is a thing of the past. From now on, we have to save for the things we want and run our businesses and households on accounts receivable.
– Major demographic shifts are inevitable as it becomes necessary to let go of suburbia and reactivate our derelict towns and smaller cities (and allow our giant metroplexes to contract).
– We have to face the truth that our major social contracts cannot be met, namely the continuation of social security as we know it and probably all pension arrangements. We’ll probably have to change household arrangements to make up for these losses.

Spiritual Shopping

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From Bohemian.com

Going local and the Pearl of Great Price

Shopping is a religious experience in the United States. In fact, it may be the biggest drink-the-Kool-Aid church of them all. Sadly, it ignores the parable attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, the one about the Pearl of Great Price, which is something inside you that you cannot buy at a mall. But let’s not get preachy. We all have to go to the store now and then.

Commercial enterprise is a helpful thing; it just happens I am someone who despises corporate greediness and also hates to shop in multi-acre stores offering styrofoam-packed stuff made with exploited labor in China and bearing environmental footprints bigger than San Bernardino and New Jersey combined. Give me instead a farmers market and a few little mom-and-pop places where there seems to be some real personality and environmental thinking expressed. This is why I am so happy to know that like-minded people across the country are organizing commerce groups that strengthen communities and weaken bad-boy corporations—they are intentionally going local.

In Sonoma County, the hub of this movement is a nonprofit group unambiguously called the Sonoma County Go Local Cooperative. It works as an empowering organization for county residents and for businesses that are at least 51 percent locally owned. This means that bullies can’t join. For example, you will not find among the membership any of the following, recently blacklisted by Green America: Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Monsanto, General Motors, Dominion, Citigroup, Shell Petroleum or McDonald’s.

Instead, Go Local has a membership that includes the likes of Redwood Hill Farm, the Post Carbon Institute, Zazu Restaurant and Farm, Village Art Supply and a host of other reasonably sized, mostly locally owned enterprises, most of which have some claim to sustainability. What jumped off the list for me was the Sonoma County Meat Buying Club, a cooperative within a cooperative that will no doubt get a huge boost in membership if this swine flu epidemic is in fact linked to the unsanitary conditions of hog farms that supply meat to chain stores. But this is what going local is all about—knowing where your food comes from and getting services from people who live in your community and want to keep it a nice place…

Presently, about 800 million people in 85 countries are served by cooperatives, nongovernment groups presently focusing on recovering from economic crisis around the globe. The localization movement is not only good for business; it’s good for community spirit. And maybe it’s good for the soul as well. Because when you go local and shop responsibly, you also care for your own community, and you chip away at the corporate superpowers whose unsustainable business practices result in making life so miserable for so many people. Sure, you get stuff, but you also get a better glimpse of the Pearl of Great Price, which is really not for sale.

See complete article here.
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Growing Power in an Urban Food Desert

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From Yes! Magazine

At the northern outskirts of Milwaukee, in a neighborhood of boxy post-WWII homes near the sprawling Park Lawn housing project, stand 14 greenhouses arrayed on two acres of land. This is Growing Power, the only land within the Milwaukee city limits zoned as farmland…

…Since 1993, Allen has focused on developing Growing Power’s urban agriculture project, which grows vegetables and fruit in its greenhouses, raises goats, ducks, bees, turkeys, and—in an aquaponics system designed by Allen—tilapia and Great Lakes Perch—altogether, 159 varieties of food.

Growing Power also has a 40-acre rural farm in Merton, 45 minutes outside Milwaukee, with five acres devoted to intensive vegetable growing and the balance used for sustainably grown hays, grasses, and legumes which provide food for the urban farm’s livestock.

Allen has taken the knowledge he gained growing up on the farm and supplemented it with the latest in sustainable techniques and his own experimentation.

Growing Power composts more than 6 million pounds of food waste a year, including the farm’s own waste, material from local food distributors, spent grain from a local brewery, and the grounds from a local coffee shop. Allen counts as part of his livestock the red wiggler worms that turn that waste into “Milwaukee Black Gold” worm castings.

Allen seems to take a particular delight in thrusting his steam-shovel-sized hands into a rich mixture of soil and worms in Growing Power’s greenhouses. “You can’t grow anything without good soil,” he preaches to a group touring the project.

Allen designed an aquaponics system, built for just $3,000, a fraction of the $50,000 cost of a commercially-built system. In addition to tilapia, a common fish in aquaculture, Allen also grows yellow perch, a fish once a staple of the Milwaukee diet. Pollution and overfishing killed the Lake Michigan perch fishery; Growing Power will soon make this local favorite available again. The fish are raised in 10,000-gallon tanks where 10,000 fingerlings grow to market size in as little as nine months.

10 Important Business Trends

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From Dave Pollard
Author, Finding The Sweet Spot
How To Save The World blog

May 12, 2009 Ukiah, Mendocino County, North California

A shift from ‘free trade’ to ‘fair trade’: Free trade is a euphemism for unregulated trade, and it’s been a colossal failure for everybody except multinational corporations and a few third-world workers. Its cost has been the collapse of the middle class in many affluent nations, horrific working conditions in many struggling nations, and massive environmental destruction everywhere. As WTO talks dissolve in disarray and we begin to see NAFTA for the social and environmental disaster it truly is, we will start to see trade regulated to ensure protection of working-class jobs and local environments. This will be a huge boon to local and green employment and businesses opportunities, that will far outweigh the additional cost of imported junk.

A shift back to basics and real value: There’s nothing like a recession or three to make you refocus on what’s really important in your life. There are already signs that people are valuing their time more than they have for decades, and that may mean that workers will seek careers that allow them time to do what’s more important than their jobs. Fewer hours and less overtime means they’ll have less disposable income, and that means they’ll do more things themselves that they used to ‘outsource’ — less eating out, more do-it-yourself home and car repairs, purchase of clothes and other durables that are well-made and timeless, more self-made entertainment and recreation (good for your health and creativity!), less willingness to commute, less tolerance of low-quality goods and services, preference for locally-made and hand-crafted products, more saving and less spending in general. That means companies that are depending on a rebound of frenzied consumer spending after each recession will not fare well, and those that help customers to be self-sufficient, to connect with each other, and to learn, those which have a reputation for quality and attentiveness, and which get most of their business by word of mouth, will flourish.

Complete article here→
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See also Should we all be part-time Garden Farmers?
Hat Tip Dave Pollard

The latest health care corporation’s hoax (Dennis Kucinich video)→
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Here’s Why We Need the Employee Free Choice Act (Obama, Kennedy, Sanders videos)

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César Chávez (1927 – 1993)

From Around the web

It’s time to restore the freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.

• America’s Working Families Are Struggling
• Corporations and CEOs Have All the Power
• Workers in Unions Can Bargain for a Better Life
• But the System Is Broken
• The Employee Free Choice Act Will Help Build an Economy That Works for Everyone

From Wikipedia

The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) (H.R. 1409, S. 560) is pending legislation in the United States. Its text states that it would “amend the National Labor Relations Act to establish an easier system to enable employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to provide for mandatory injunctions for unfair labor practices during organizing efforts, and for other purposes.”^[1] The latest version was introduced into both chambers of the U.S. Congress on 10 March 2009.^[2]

In order for a workplace to organize under current U.S. labor law, the card check process begins when an employee requests blank cards from an existing union, and requests signatures on the cards from his or her colleagues.^[3] Once 30% of the work force in a particular workplace bargaining unit has signed the cards, the employer may decide to hold a secret ballot election on the question of unionization.^[3] In practice, the results of the card check usually are not presented to the employer until 50 or 60% of bargaining-unit employees have signed the cards.^[3] If the employer decides to demand an election, and the majority of votes in the election favor the union, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will certify it as the exclusive representative of the employees of that particular bargaining unit for the purpose of collective bargaining.

If enacted, the EFCA would change the currently existing procedure to require the NLRB to certify the union as the bargaining representative without directing an election if a majority of employees signed cards.^[1] The EFCA would take away employers’ present right to decide whether to use only the card-check process or to hold a secret-ballot election among employees in a particular bargaining unit, and instead give the right to the employees to choose a secret-ballot election in cases where less than a majority of employees has chosen to unionize through card-check.^[3][4] The proposed legislation would still require a secret-ballot election when at least 30% of employees petition for an election.^[3][5]

The proposed legislation would also establish stricter penalties for employers who violate provisions of the NLRA when workers seek to form a union, and set in place new mediation and arbitration procedures for disputes.
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Barter, Baby, Barter

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From Susan Astyk

…I’m particularly fond of barter because while it is often not possible to pay the property taxes that way, barter can cover an awful lot of other territory.  It is astonishing what barter can bring about – and while I like barter networks and other programs, and can see their advantages, I am particularly passionate about barter that takes place in human relationships – because I think it kills two birds with one stone, not only does it save money on the particular exchange, but it helps us give up our general dependency on money in place of community.

I see all the uses of internet barter networks, which give you credit you can use with people for what you need, even if the person who has the other thing doesn’t need your resource.  And yet, direct barter – the oldest form of human exchange, in which my eggs and your honey meet one another, has something special going for it.

And that is the reality of human exchange – in monetary exchange, and I think by necessity to an extent in barter networks, things have  a fixed valuation.  This is convenient, of course, but it also changes the nature of the relationship.  When your eggs equal on “barter buck” or “credit hour” you are shopping for the best possible bang for your buck.

But when you and your neighbor who have a relationship are figuring out how many eggs a week are worth a cord of firewood, something more is at stake besides the precise exchange – you have entered into a relationship that can’t be commodified fully, one in which you have to talk to each other, have to interact.  And this is always just the beginning – someone who eats eggs will probably keep wanting them.  Someone who heats with wood may want more firewood.  The relationship will be based on two things – your perceived equity (ie, it was fair) and your pleasure in the relationship – this is also true with some kinds of shopping, and is why people like going to farmer’s markets and hate Walmart (in part).

But the thing about barter that I find true is that it brings out the best in us for the most part – because it is never possible to full equate eggs with logs, because they are fundamentally not the same, in barter, you are never fully sure that the price paid is a fair one – you can’t be.  And what I see in barter relationships is a turning around of economic exchanges – because we want fairness even in ourselves mostly, because few of us like to beholden, or to look cheap, we find ourselves feeling as though the relationship is never fully even – at its best, both barter participants always feel that they got the better of the deal, that they paid too little, and thus, “owe” a little on next time.  Instead of *getting* the best bang for your buck, barter becomes about *giving* the best bang for your time…

Full article here→

See also our own Mendo Time Bank (now organizing)→
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Oil Has Peaked Says The Wall Street Journal

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[As always, very late to the truth. -DS]

Peak Oil: Global Oil Production’s Peaked, Analyst Says
By Keith Johnson

Dust off those survivalist manuals and brush up on your dystopias: Peak oil is back.

Global production of petroleum peaked in the first quarter of last year, says analysts Raymond James, which “represents a paradigm shift of historic proportions. Unfortunately, mankind better get ready to live in a peak oil world because we believe the ‘peak’ is now behind us.”

Raymond James’s notes that non-OPEC oil production apparently peaked in the first quarter of 2007, and given precipitous falls in oil output from Russia to Mexico, there’s not much hope for a recovery. OPEC production—and thus global output—peaked a little later, in the first quarter of 2008, Raymond James says.

The contention rests on a simple argument: OPEC oil production actually fell even as oil prices were above $100 a barrel, a sign of the “tyranny of geology” that limits the easy production of ever-more crude.

“Those declines had to have come for involuntary reasons such as the inherent geological limits of oil fields … We believe that the oil market has already crossed over to the downward sloping side of Hubbert’s Peak,” the analysts write.

If true—and the analysts note that true historical peaks are only visible in the distant rear-view mirror—then expect oil prices to jump back toward triple digits. All the more so if demand recovers—oil has clung to the $50 a mark even as demand cratered everywhere.

Now, there are signs of some green shoots out there. The Chinese economy seems to be responding to the government’s almost $600 billion stimulus plan. The CLSA China Manufacturing Index showed a big jump in April and the first expansion since last July.

Crude oil futures are up about 1% to $53.70 today.

See article here.
Thanks to Linda Gray
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Eating ethically during hard times

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From Salon

…At honest moments, though, I suspected my reluctance to seek out organic rutabagas was more lazy than practical. So last year, when global food prices began to soar, I devised an experiment: My husband and I would eat conscientiously for a month, not just on our regular grocery allotment but on the government-defined, food-stamp minimum: $248 for two people in our hometown of New Haven, Conn.

We would choose the SOLE-est products available — that is, the sustainable, organic, local or ethical alternative. We would start from a bare pantry, shop only at places that took food stamps and could be reached on foot, and use only basic appliances. The test would mean some painful changes; gone was my husband’s customary breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios and our favorite dinner of pepperoni pizza. But it would answer that nagging question: When shopping for food, did I have to choose between my budget and my beliefs?

Challenges began on my first grocery trip, where staples required some massive outlays of cash. It was anxiety-inducing to shell out $4 a jar for organic spices, even after I pared down my shelf to salt, pepper, oregano, basil, curry, cumin, chili and cinnamon. (I also bought some garlic, soy sauce and red wine vinegar, though these were non-local organic; I justified the carbon footprint — not to mention the price — with the thought that cheap eaters need to fill up on flavor.) It was frightening to spend $7 on a small bottle of organic olive oil in hopes it would last all month. The costliest decision was meat; I didn’t want to impose a completely vegetarian diet on my carnivorous husband or on-and-off-carnivorous self, but the frozen slabs of grass-fed steak at the farmers’ market seemed tough to manage. Instead, I bought a small free-range chicken for about $9 and a scant pound of local ground beef for about $6, knowing that this, along with some sustainable canned fish, was our allotment of animal flesh for four weeks. Even less expensive purchases demanded worry and adjustments; the price difference between organic fruits and vegetables, for example, prompted me to switch apples for carrots in my packed lunch.

The real work began when I lugged my haul home. The chicken had to go far: After roasting my scrawny-looking bird in the most basic way — a smear of oil across the skin, a sprinkle of salt and pepper — I sliced, hacked and pulled every piece of meat I could find off the bones and then simmered the carcass in a pot for basic stock. (I saved the fat for cooking.) Along with the meat, this broth was divided into meal-size portions and stored in my freezer for soups, sandwiches and dinners to come.

For complete article go to Can we afford to eat ethically at Salon→
Hat tip Dave Pollard
Image credit: Globally Green Living

See also Organic Prices – Are They Prohibitive? at Organic To Be→
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The media laps up fake controversy over climate change – George Monbiot

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by George Monbiot

Proof of paid-for climate denial at the Global Climate Coalition comes as no surprise, but it is no less depressing for that

There are three kinds of climate change denier. There are those who simply don’t want to accept the evidence, because it is too much to bear, or because it threatens aspects of their lives that they don’t want to change. These are by far the most numerous, and account for most of those whose comments will follow this post.

I have some sympathy for their position. Denial is most people’s first response to something they don’t want to hear, whether it is a diagnosis of terminal illness or the threat presented by the rise of the Axis Powers. The moral, intellectual and practical challenge of climate change is unprecedented. The urge to duck it almost irresistible.

Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism…

Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or who subscribes to Science or Nature knows that they cannot possibly believe this, or are able to believe it only by tying their minds into such elaborate knots that they have succeeded in deceiving themselves.

..Last week the New York Times revealed that the Global Climate Coalition, the industry-funded body that led the campaign to persuade people that manmade climate wasn’t happening, knew all along that it was…

Go to The media laps up fake controvery at The Guardian→
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Homeopathy successfully treated Flu Epidemic of 1918

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(NaturalNews) Homeopathy was successful in treating the flu epidemic of 1918 and can provide answers to questions about the 2009 Swine Flu. Homeopathy can provide quick and inexpensive relief for symptoms of the flu. A system of medicine based on the principles of “like cures like,” homeopathy uses plant, mineral and animal sources for the natural flu remedies. Homeopathy is based on ideas from ideas dating back to Egyptian medicine. The term “homeopathy” was coined by the medical doctor and medical reformer, Samuel Hahnemann in the 1800s. Homeopathic remedies have been used to treat flu symptoms for two centuries.

Was homeopathy successful in treating the flu epidemic of 1918?
Yes.
While the mortality rate of people treated with traditional medicine and drugs was 30 percent, those treated by homeopathic physicians had mortality rate of 1.05 percent. Of the fifteen hundred cases reported at the Homeopathic Medical Society of the District of Columbia there were only fifteen deaths. Recoveries in the National Homeopathic Hospital were 100%. In Ohio, of 1,000 cases of influenza, Dr. T. A. McCann, MD, Dayton, Ohio reported NO DEATHS.

What homeopathic remedies were used to successfully treat the Spanish flu in 1918?
Gelsemium and Bryonia
According the Dr. Frank Wieland, MD, in Chicago, “(With) 8,000 workers we had only one death. Gelsemium was practically the only remedy used. We used no aspirin and no vaccines.”

Homeopathy was 98% successful in treating the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918?
Yes.
Ohio reported that 24,000 cases of flu treated allopathically had a mortality rate of 28.2% while 26,000 cases of flu treated homeopathically had a mortality rate of 1.05%. In Connecticut, 6,602 cases were reported, with 55 deaths, less than 1%. Dr. Roberts, a physician on a troop ship during WWI, had 81 cases of flu on the way over to Europe. He reported, “All recovered and were landed. Every man received homeopathic treatment.

Keep reading Homeopathy successsful at Natural News→

Hat tip Organic Consumers Association
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Big buck climate change deniers copied the cigarette cancer liars

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Industry Ignored Its Own Scientists on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Keep reading Industry Ignored Its Own Scientists at NYT→

See also Deniers are just one off of the truth→
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Send U.S. Senator Sanders your Credit Card horror stories

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From Bernie Sanders

The outrage…is building. Doesn’t anyone get it?

People in Vermont and throughout the country are outraged by skyrocketing credit card interest rates. At a time when the taxpayers in this country are bailing out Wall Street financial institutions, these very same banks are charging them 20, 25, 30 percent interest rates on their credit cards.

President Obama recently met with top executives of the nation’s largest credit card companies and threw his support behind credit card reform legislation. Senator Bernie Sanders agrees, but he would do more. He proposed a bill to cap interest rates at 15 percent, similar to credit unions.

A Vermonter writes, “I am appalled at the hikes in credit card rates! Everywhere in our small town in Vermont, everyone is talking about the latest surge in interest rates. People who are never late in payments have seen their rates climb overnight. The outrage, which I am sure doesn’t surprise you, is building. Doesn’t anyone get it?”

SOUND OFF! Click here to send Bernie an e-mail about credit card companies that he could read on the Senate floor.

WATCH : To watch the senator read e-mails on credit card rates, click here.

READ MORE : To read some of the e-mails, click here.

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Will Obama Reboot Capitalism Anew? – Thom Hartmann

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By Thom Hartmann
April 23, 2009

Over six million people are now out of work, and unemployment figures released today show that now-record number is continuing to climb. Meanwhile, still-profitable American corporations manufacture goods for American consumption using Chinese labor and pay virtually no income tax by keeping their profits offshore.

A hundred years ago, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt tried to reign in some of the most toxic behaviors of capitalists that he found incompatible with modern democracy by pushing through congress a law that banned the practice of corporations giving money to politicians. He slowed down the robber barons a bit, but three consecutive Republican presidents in the 1920s led us straight into the Republican Great Depression.

Franklin Roosevelt, his distant cousin, rebooted capitalism in the 1930s, ushering in an era of regulated capitalism – embraced by Republicans like Eisenhower and Democrats like JFK – that brought us the largest, strongest, and most stable middle class ever seen. We also became the world’s economic superpower, as the world’s largest importer of raw materials, exporter of finished goods, and banker to the world. We imported iron ore and exported televisions and cars and washing machines. The rest of the world was in debt to us. A worker with a high school diploma could find a job that paid enough to raise a family and have a safe and comfortable retirement.

The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s was the third “rebooting” of capitalism in the 20th Century, and continues to this day. Scorning the “regulated” part of “regulated capitalism,” economic Reaganites from the Gipper himself to GHW Bush to Bill Clinton to GW Bush flipped our economy upside down. Today, after just thirty years of “free trade” and “right to work” and other oxymoronic nostrums applied as policy, we’ve become the world’s largest importer of finished goods and the world’s largest debtor. We now export minerals to Asia, and import back from them televisions, cars, and washing machines.

So now the big question: Will Obama reboot capitalism anew? Will he move us into a new realm of capitalism, back toward regulated capitalism, or continue the slide toward a poverty-ridden Dickensian economy that Reagan started?

At the moment, nobody knows.

Reagan began the war on working people when he busted PATCO in the first year of his administration, and then began the process – largely uninterrupted right up to a few months ago – of dismantling the protections organized labor had enjoyed since the New Deal. When Bill Clinton totally abandoned the national industrial policy that Alexander Hamilton had put into place in 1791 with NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, we made the shift from a “Made in the USA” to a “Do you want fries with that?” economy. And the near-total deregulation of the commodities (including energy) and financial sectors begun in the last years of the Clinton administration and put on steroids by Republicans during the GW Bush administration led to a shift from a “Do you want fries with that?” economy to a “How much would you like to borrow from us?” economy.

Fresh Food Revolution

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From Mark Hertsgaard
The Nation

When Michelle Obama began planting an organic garden on the South Lawn of the White House recently, there was no doubt she was sending a message, but the message was more subversive and far-reaching than most American media coverage recognized. On March 20, joined by a class of local fifth graders, the first lady lifted the first shovels of dirt onto a 1,100-square-foot plot that will feature fifty-five kinds of vegetables, including spinach, peppers, arugula, kale, collards and tomatoes (but no beets–the president reportedly does not like beets). Various herbs and berries will also be grown in the garden , which is fully visible to the thousands of tourists and other pedestrians that pass by the White House daily. (There will also be two boxes of bees for pollination.)

Michelle Obama’s stated message was simple and was clearly aimed at her fellow Americans: fresh food tastes better and is better for you, so kids and grown-ups alike should eat lots more of it. “A real, delicious heirloom tomato is one of the sweetest things you’ll ever eat,” she told the 10-year-olds, adding that freshly picked vegetables were what prompted her daughters to try new kinds of foods. What made Obama’s message so subversive was something she left unsaid: the food most Americans eat nowadays is not fresh, tasty or healthy. The superiority of fresh ingredients may be obvious to Italians, but it is a truth most Americans long ago forgot, if they ever knew it in the first place. Over the past fifty years, the United States has been transformed into a fast food nation, in author Eric Schlosser’s phrase. What the typical American eats is not so much food as it is highly processed food derivatives that have traveled thousands of miles since leaving the farm, losing along the way most of the flavor and nutritional value they once possessed. To disguise such losses, food manufacturers overload products with fats, salts and sweeteners, especially corn syrup–additives that, along with the massive portions typically served in the United States, help explain why nearly one in three Americans is obese.

Now, by publicly championing fresh local food, Michelle Obama clearly hopes to entice Americans away from their junk food past to a healthier, more delicious future. And that is what makes her message so far-reaching. Change America’s eating habits and you can change the world.

Shifting to a greener diet would be good not only for the health of America’s children and families but the health of the planet. The American diet, and the food production and distribution system that supports it, is one of the main drivers of global warming and a host of related hazards, from deforestation to air, soil and water pollution. Most people know by now that our civilization must fundamentally change the way it produces and consumes energy if we are to stop global warming. Far fewer people realize that it is equally important to change the way we produce and consume food.

Keep reading Fresh Food Revolution at The Nation→
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Farmers Market Tips

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By Jeff Cox
OrganicToBe.org

The first farmers’ markets are opening up in the warmer parts of the country, and soon they’ll be opening everywhere. You can find the markets nearest you by visiting www.localharvest.org.

But when you do go to a farmers’ market, some questions arise.

The seller may say he or she is organic, but how do you know for sure? Many small farmers and truck patch operators may very well be organic but don’t want to go through the paperwork and expense of getting organic certification. Some unscrupulous sellers may tell customers what the customers want to hear and claim their produce is organic when it isn’t.

First, ask the seller is he’s certified organic. Here in California, the certifying agency is CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers) and the seller may have a CCOF sign displayed. That’s your guarantee that the food is raised organically. There are certifying agencies across America. If there’s no certification but the seller claims his produce is organic, here are some questions you can ask to make sure the food is organic.

Ask how he controls cabbage worms. Any organic grower will know right away that Bacillus thuringiensis, called Bt, is the sure-fire organic control for those little green worms that chew on the leaves of cole crops (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, rutabagas, kohlrabi, bok choy, and many other vegetables). If he says that he doesn’t have a problem with cabbage worms, be skeptical. White cabbage moths, the adult form of the green caterpillars, are ubiquitous.

Ask how he controls corn earworms. Most organic growers will tell you that the worms don’t eat much, and to just break off the tip of the ear where the worm has set up shop. There are some organic controls like twist-tying the tip and putting a drop or two of mineral oil on the tip, but they are impractical for anyone growing a farm-sized amount of corn. A few earworms, by the way, are a good guarantee that the corn is indeed organic, and the farmer may tell you that.

In Praise of Peasants

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César Chávez

by Jim Goodman
Common Ground

“Our lives are dependent on the sacrifice of the Campesinos”- César Chávez

On April 17, 1996 1,500 members of Brazil’s MST, the Landless Peasants Movement, having been evicted from their farms two years earlier, marched to the state capitol in Para to demand a return of their land so they could again feed their families. Instead of meeting with government officials they were surrounded by police, who, using machine guns, killed 19 and seriously wounded 69.

Farmers, peasants, the indigenous and the landless are entitled to land only until the government or the corporate interests find a better use for it.

La Via Campesina, the international movement of the small farmer celebrates April 17 as the International day of Peasant’s Struggles. The struggle against the evictions, oppression and marginalization of the farmer. The commemoration of the struggles of César Chávez, the United Farm Workers and the indigenous peoples of the world.

Those who farm in the US distance themselves from the term peasant, thinking it connotes a tenant, sharecropper, a small farmer or mere farm worker. I am a small farmer, a peasant and proud of it. Remember, roughly half of the worlds population are farmers who work the land and tend livestock. While I am a minority in the US, worldwide, I am part of the majority.

The vast majority of the worlds small farmers and farm workers continue to struggle against trans-national agribusiness corporations (TNC’s) that control the worlds food supply, they struggle against oppressive government policies that wish to convert local farming to industrialized agriculture.

The peasant farmer struggles for the right to grow what they wish, for access to water, land and credit and for the rights of women farmers who grow most of the world’s food. They struggle for protection from subsidized foreign imports and to protect their crops from contamination by Genetically Engineered seed. They struggle to eliminate food from international trade agreements, because food is different, food is a human right, not a commodity.

Reverend Billy’s Bailout

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One Street Preacher Makes the Case for Propping Up Community Banks

By David Weidner
Wall Street Journal

Would Jesus take a bailout?

Confronted with the once-in-a-century opportunity to remake the financial system, the reformers in Washington have a choice: Succumb to the temptation of serving financial supermarkets or lift up community banks and street-level economies.

Enter Reverend Billy Talen, the New York-based street preacher, performer and activist who — along with his flock, the Church of Life After Shopping — believes government has a moral obligation to support communities before big banks.

“I’ve been trying to drive people out of their institutions,” Reverend Billy says. “Their institutions aren’t working.”

It’s hard to imagine Timothy Geithner taking advice from an iconoclast dressed in a white suit, clerical collar and Elvis-inspired hair, but the Reverend Billy may be on to something.

In place of a system where big banks and corporations enter neighborhoods only to profit from them, Reverend Billy wants to empower small banks and credit unions that hold a stake in the communities they serve by offering incentives and making it harder for big finance to undercut local business.

It’s hard to argue against the system he envisions.

Think for a moment about what community finance could mean for the nation: Neighborhood banks would lend to local businesses. Profits [and revenue and paychecks -DS] could stay in the community.

Simply knowing who your customers are and living near them could bring common sense — the most basic and sound form of risk management — back to banking.

A dark, dark day for America. We demand that the rule of law be applied. (Update 2)

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by Glenn Greenwald

…Needless to say, I vehemently disagree with anyone — including Obama — who believes that prosecutions are unwarranted.  These memos describe grotesque war crimes — legalized by classic banality-of-evil criminals and ordered by pure criminals — that must be prosecuted if the rule of law is to have any meaning.  But the decision of whether to prosecute is not Obama’s to make; ultimately, it is Holder’s and/or a Special Prosectuor’s.  More importantly, Obama can only do so much by himself.  The Obama administration should, on its own, initiate criminal proceedings, but the citizenry also has responsibilities here.  These acts were carried out by our Government, and if we are really as repulsed by them as we claim, then the burden is on us to demand that something be done.

More than 250,000 Americans attended protests yesterday (ostensibly) over taxes and budget issues.  If these torture revelations are met with nothing but apathy, then it will certainly be reasonable to blame Holder and Obama if they fail to act, but the responsibility will also lie with a citizenry that responded with indifference.

Finally, it should be emphasized — yet again — that it was not our Congress, nor our media, nor our courts that compelled disclosure of these memos.  Instead, it was the ACLU’s tenacious efforts over several years which single-handedly pried these memos from the clutched hands of the government. Along with a couple of other civil liberties organizations, the ACLU (with which I consult) has expended extraordinary efforts to ensure at least minimal amounts of openness and transparency in this country, something that was necessary given the profound failures of these other institutions to do so.

Read Glenn Greenwald at Salon→

Update 2: Demand accountability and tell Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the detainee abuse at ACLU website→

and this absolutely shameful opinion piece in the WSJ→
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The Real Boston Tea Party was an Anti-Corporate Revolt

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By Thom Hartmann

CNBC Correspondent Rick Santelli called for a “Chicago Tea Party” on Feb 19th in protesting President Obama’s plan to help homeowners in trouble. Santelli’s call was answered by the right-wing group FreedomWorks, which funds campaigns promoting big business interests, and is the opposite of what the real Boston Tea Party was.

FreedomWorks was funded in 2004 by Dick Armey (former Republican House Majority leader & lobbyist); consolidated Citizens for a Sound Economy, funded by the Koch family; and Empower America, a lobbying firm, that had fought against healthcare and minimum-wage efforts while hailing deregulation.

Anti-tax “tea party” organizers are delivering one million tea bags to a Washington, D.C., park Wednesday morning – to promote protests across the country by people they say are fed up with high taxes and excess spending.

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.

They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.

Keep reading more about Real Boston Tea Party at Common Ground→

‘Too big to fail’ is too big — period – Jim Hightower

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by Jim Hightower

The “too big” claim forms the rationale for the diversion of regular people’s money into rich people’s pockets.

As skiers and backcountry hikers know, a whiteout is a blizzard that’s so intense that those caught in it can’t even see the blizzard.

That’s how I think of the Wall Street bailout now swirling around us. So many trillions of our tax dollars are being blown at the financial giants that we’re blinded by the density of it, unable to see where we are or know what direction we’re headed.

However, one way to get your bearings in this bailout blizzard is to focus on the central point that both the bailors (Washington) and the bailees (Wall Street) keep pounding as an irrefutable truth that everyone simply has to accept — namely, the institutions being rescued are too big to fail.

Even sheep know to flee when coyotes howl in unison — and we commoners need to confront the absurdity of this “too big” claim, which forms the rationale for the entire diversion of regular people’s money into rich people’s pockets.

Wachovia, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG — omigosh, cried the Powers That Be, these behemoths are linked to every other behemoth, so if we don’t stuff them with tax dollars … well, we have no choice, because they’re just too big for the government to let fail.

Point No. 1: They have failed. They are kaput. It costs more to buy a snickerdoodle than to buy a share of Citigroup stock. AIG is 80 percent owned by you and me, the taxpayers. These once-haughty outfits are insolvent — wards of the state.

Point No. 2: If they’re too big, why should we sustain them? Let’s be clear about something the establishment doesn’t want you and me to understand — these giants did not get so big and interconnected because of natural market forces and free-enterprise efficiencies. They amassed power the old-fashioned way: They got the government to give it to them. In the past 20 years or so, they lobbied furiously to get Washington to rig the rules so they could latterly bloat … and float out of control.

Keep reading To big to fail is too big at AlterNet→
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See also Corn, Soy Yields Gain Little From Genetic Engineering: Study at Common Dreams→

and Germany Bans Genetic Engineered Corn as Dangerous to Environment→
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The Great Organic Potato Race (With Johnny Carson Potato Chip Video)

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From Gene Logsdon

[What happened when a band of merry seminarians full of modern science, took on a traditional old farmer in a contest to decide whether potatoes grown organically would yield better than those grown chemically. An excerpt from the novel, The Lords of Folly, by Gene Logsdon.]

In a rural area where even a car passing on a country road was a Social Event, the Great Potato Race had taken on the trappings of festival: a cross between a county fair and a prayer meeting. Various interested parties began to descend upon Oblate Gabe’s and farmer Hasse’s two potato patches. Horticulturists and agronomists led discussions in the use of sulfur in potato culture and on the increasing immunity of potato bugs to insecticides. Young farmers argued about whether the oblates’ close plantings producing a greater number of smaller potatoes would out-yield Hasse’s wider plantings producing fewer but larger potatoes. Old farmers wondered if it made any difference whether big or small potatoes were used for seed. Harriet Snod’s Garden Club discussed whether Pisces, Scorpio or Capricorn was the better sign to plant under… Oblate Blaze arranged a special ceremony that involved the Prior walking up and down the rows of the Josephian’s potatoes sprinkling holy water, being careful not to do so in his usual ample manner, lest some of the precious liquid fall accidentally on Hasse’s potatoes too…

In case holy water was not enough, Gabe turned to irrigation during a summer dry spell. He showed farmers and agronomists how he could easily irrigate his potatoes by damming up the laterals of his drainage system so that the ever-flowing spring water from the swamps filled the ditches to the desired level, allowing the water to run out into the potato patch.

Keep reading The Great Organic Potato Race (with Johnny Carson video) at OrganicToBe.org→

Why I Am a Socialist – Chris Hedges

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From TruthDig

[In honor of much-loved local citizen Ken Anderson, an avowed socialist who gave of himself to our community, here is one of my (and most likely his) favorite journalists, Chris Hedges. -DS]

The corporate forces that are looting the Treasury and have plunged us into a depression will not be contained by the two main political parties. The Democratic and Republican parties have become little more than squalid clubs of privilege and wealth, whores to money and corporate interests, hostage to a massive arms industry, and so adept at deception and self-delusion they no longer know truth from lies. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism — one that will insist on massive government relief and work programs, the nationalization of electricity and gas companies, a universal, not-for-profit government health care program, the outlawing of hedge funds, a radical reduction of our bloated military budget and an end to imperial wars — or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite and shackled and chained by our surveillance state.

The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. But this does not mean our corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell wrote, “that is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” Force and fraud are all they have left. They will use both.

Keep reading Why I Am a Socialist at TruthDig→

Manure More Precious Than Gold

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From Gene Logsdon

I half-jokingly suggested about a year ago that animal manure— used livestock, horse, and chicken bedding— was going to be the hottest commodity on the Chicago Board of Trade. There are indications now that such a seemingly absurd prediction might not be so absurd after all. Last year the prices of some farm fertilizers shot up to over a thousand dollars a ton. Ammonium polyphosphate is still nearly that high. Deposits of potash in Canada, a main source of our potassium fertilizers, are declining. Natural gas, from which commercial nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured, is rising in cost as other uses compete for it. Long term, there are reasons to believe that the era of abundant manufactured fertilizers is passing.

There is nothing funny about that prediction. Nor should organic farmers feel vindicated. If we run out of commercial fertilizers, there would be no way we could avoid a precipitous decline in crop yields while farmers switched to all-organic methods. It has taken us a couple hundred years to reduce the organic matter content in our soils to the low levels of today and experts say it might take at least half that long to build them back up again. Getting enough manure and other organic wastes to make up for a shortage of commercial fertilizer would be an enormous challenge requiring changes not only in agricultural attitudes but cultural attitudes as well.

Keep reading Manure More Precious Than Gold at OrganicToGo.org→

Thoughts on Bill O’Reilly and Squeaky the Chicago Mouse – Roger Ebert

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To: Bill O’Reilly
From: Roger Ebert

Dear Bill: Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your “Hall of Shame.” To be in an O’Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper. It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him. My grade-school teacher, wise Sister Nathan, would have called in your parents and recommended counseling with Father Hogben.

Yes, the Sun-Times is liberal, having recently endorsed our first Democrat for President since LBJ. We were founded by Marshall Field one week before Pearl Harbor to provide a liberal voice in Chicago to counter the Tribune, which opposed an American war against Hitler. I’m sure you would have sided with the Trib at the time.

Keep reading Thoughts on Bill O’Reilly at Chicago Sun-Times→

Organic Money

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By Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Recently I was invited to a most unusual gathering. The event was not officially called a “Conference On Advanced Economic Trends” but if it had been held at a university, it would surely have been given a high-sounding name like that. Instead it was held on a working farm and was called “Our Garlic Festival.”

The farm is Jandy’s, after its owners, Andy Reinhart and Jan Dawson. They  make their living growing and selling vegetables from less than two acres of their little farm, mostly at the farmer’s market in nearby Bellefountaine, Ohio.  Locally Jan and Andy are revered organic garden farmers. One look at their crops will tell anyone who knows anything about organic gardening just how remarkably skilled they are at their craft. Sometimes a head of their bibb lettuce barely fits into a bushel basket. They don’t need to have organic certification. Their customers know that if Jan and Andy say its organic, rest assured that it is organic. They don’t sell commodities; they sell the fruit of their dedicated way of life, drops of their sweat and blood. Every year they hold an open house for friends, neighbors, customers and other market farmers looking for new ideas.

This year, with a record garlic crop on their hands, they decided to sell their produce at the open house too. They also invited a local deli owner, Nick Carter, to sell his homemade pesto and bread and a local beekeeper, Skidmore Apiaries, to sell their honey products. A local musician, Bob Lucas performed. I sold my books. Surrounded by shade trees and gardens, about 200 people, a surprising number for such a rural setting, stood around in little knots talking spiritedly about subjects that all came under the heading of Home Economics: local food; natural medicine; home-based alternative energy; home birthing; home schooling, even, get this, home churching.

It dawned on me that what I was witnessing was a near perfect example of a local economy in action…

Keep reading Organic Money at OrganicToBe.org→

The End of Small Farms? What you should know about HR 875, HR 759, NAIS and Monsanto

Are we rich enough?

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From The Guardian
Thanks to Pinky Kushner

We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens’ incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we’d trust each other more.

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don’t soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet’s resources.

Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years’ standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.

Keep reading The Way We Are Now in The Guardian→
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Local Currencies: Communities Printing Own Money To Keep Cash Flowing

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By Marisol Bello, USA TODAY

A small but growing number of cash-strapped communities are printing their own money.

Borrowing from a Depression-era idea, they are aiming to help consumers make ends meet and support struggling local businesses.

The systems generally work like this: Businesses and individuals form a network to print currency. Shoppers buy it at a discount — say, 95 cents for $1 value — and spend the full value at stores that accept the currency.

Workers with dwindling wages are paying for groceries, yoga classes and fuel with Detroit Cheers, Ithaca Hours in New York, Plenty in North Carolina or BerkShares in Massachusetts.

Ed Collom, a University of Southern Maine sociologist who has studied local currencies, says they encourage people to buy locally. Merchants, hurting because customers have cut back on spending, benefit as consumers spend the local cash.

“We wanted to make new options available,” says Jackie Smith of South Bend, Ind., who is working to launch a local currency. “It reinforces the message that having more control of the economy in local hands can help you cushion yourself from the blows of the marketplace.”

About a dozen communities have local currencies, says Susan Witt, founder of BerkShares in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. She expects more to do it.

Keep reading Local Currencies at USA Today→

See also Mendo Moola→
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The Ones Who Got It Right – Ralph Nader

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By Ralph Nader

Why is it that well regarded people working the fields of corporate power and performance who repeatedly predicted the Wall Street bubble and its bursting receive so little media and attention?

Instead, the public is still being exposed to the comments and writings of people like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, James Glassman (of Dow 36,000 notoriety) while others like Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Gary Gensler are newly-appointed at high levels in the Obama Administration. These men were variously architects, rationalizers and implementers of the massive de-regulation and non-regulation that unleashed the epic forces of greed, speculation and ruination of millions of livelihoods and trillions of dollars other peoples’ money worldwide.

Here are some of the people who got it right—early and often:

1. William Greider—author and columnist with The Nation magazine—wrote books (including Secrets of the Temple, 1988) and articles warning about the Federal Reserve and the anti-democratic consequences of rampant corporate globalization.

2. Robert Kuttner whose books (e.g. Everything for Sale, 1999) and articles predicted what will happen to workers and pensions when the regulatory state is tossed aside by the corporatists operating inside and outside of government.

3. Jim Hightower whose books (If the Gods Has Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates, 2000) and the monthly mass circulation Hightower Lowdown newsletter pointed out again and again the abuses of the “greedhounds” and vastly overpaid corporate bosses that have run consumers of health care, credit, cars and banks into the ground.

Keep reading The Ones… at Nader.org→
Thanks to Janie Sheppard
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The Locavore’s Dilemma

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From Slate Magazine

What to do with the kale, turnips, and parsley that overwhelm your CSA bin.

My husband and I were looking for new ways to use the vegetables from our CSA—a program, short for “community supported agriculture,” in which you pay in advance for a weekly box of fresh produce delivered from a local organic farm. We’ve been members of this particular CSA for about three years, and for the most part, we love it. In August, we receive endless tomatoes. In June, we’re invited to a farm event called “strawberry day.” Every time we resubscribe, they send us a lavender sachet. But each year, toward the end of winter, I run into the Turnip Problem.

Ordinarily, I would never eat turnips. I managed to go 30 years without buying one. But now every winter I’m faced with a two-month supply, not to mention the kale, collards, and flat-leaf Italian parsley that sit in my refrigerator, slowly wilting, filling me with guilt every time I reach past them for the milk. After three years of practice, I’ve figured out simple ways to deal with most of these problem vegetables: I braise the turnips in butter and white wine; I sauté the kale and collards with olive oil and sea salt; I wait until the parsley shrivels and then throw it out. The abundance of roughage is overwhelming.

It’s a problem that affects anyone who tries to eat seasonally or consume a wider variety of vegetables, as an increasing number of Michael Pollan-ated Americans are trying to do. But it becomes especially acute when you’re faced with a new delivery each week, whether you’re ready for it or not. One friend confessed “utter panic” at the sight of tomatillos. When I asked another what he did with his mustard greens, he responded, straight-faced, “I take them home, put them in my refrigerator, and wait until they rot.” Cabbage, kohlrabi, collards, bok choy—everyone, it seems, has their problem vegetables. And, like me, many feel guilty about it. When our farm’s CSA manager, an enthusiastic woman who has been known to use the words tasty and rutabaga in the same sentence, revealed that her problem vegetable was the radish, she immediately asked for forgiveness: “I know I should embrace it more and am getting better.”

Keep reading The Locavore’s Dilemma at Slate Magazine→

See also 8 Ways to Join the Local Food Movement at Yes Magazine→

…and Vandana Shiva and the sacredness of seed at The Organic and Non-GMO Report→
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Parenting for a Peaceful World

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Emotion, emotional intelligence and our emotional health

Emotion is an essential aspect of interpersonal communication. The capacity to feel is what makes us human, and what connects us to one another. Emotional intelligence is what helps us to achieve our potential, and to fulfil our hearts’ ambitions. So, the more we develop and refine our emotional intelligence the more we can enjoy fulfilling relationships, realize our deepest longings, manage life’s conflicts with grace, and create fair, peaceful and sustainable societies.

Many of the experiences we have in childhood leave a lasting emotional impression, even if we don’t consciously recall them. Childhood therefore has a profound influence on how we relate to each other as adults.

The good news is there is a lot we can do to develop our emotional intelligence as adults. Counselling or psychotherapy can do much to help us develop our emotional health. Conflicts and difficulties can be turned into opportunities for learning, healing and growth.

Nurturing our emotional health can transform our relationships, and in fact, it can change the world.

Since our childhood experiences so strongly influence our emotional health, the way we raise our children is of profound consequence.

The Quiet Coup

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The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Keep reading The Quiet Coup at The Atlantic Magazine→

Once the five problem banks have been put into isolation by the FDIC and the Treasury, the Administration must introduce legislation to immediately repeal the Larry Summers bank deregulation including restore Glass-Steagall and repeal the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 that allowed the present criminal abuse of the banking trust. Then serious financial reform can begin to be discussed, starting with steps to ‘federalize’ the Federal Reserve and take the power of money out of the hands of private bankers such as JP Morgan Chase, Citibank or Goldman Sachs.

See also Geithner’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ at Global Research→
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Trust Your Guts

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[We do not have a democracy if our economics is not democratically controlled. The Federal Reserve runs our economy and it is not answerable to our elected representatives, only to the private bankers. Here's a solution. -DS]

by William Greider

A reassuring new story line is emanating from our leaders. I heard Representative Barney Frank, chair of the House Banking Committee, explain it. Then I read the same line in a Washington Post news story. That tells me people in high places are selling it. Dynamic capitalism, they explain, invents ways to create greater wealth, but sometimes it goes a little too far. Then government has to step in to correct things. This need typically occurs every generation or so, all in a day’s work. The Obama administration is proposing “sweeping” new regulatory laws so that capitalism can continue its good works.

The story makes disturbing current events sound practically normal. But what are the storytellers leaving out? They aren’t saying that this financial catastrophe was not merely an inevitable development of history but a man-made disaster. Greedheads on Wall Street did their part, but so did Washington. The reason we need new rules is that a generation of Democrats and Republicans systematically repealed or gutted the old ones–the regulatory controls enacted eighty years ago to remedy the last breakdown of capitalism (better known as the Great Depression).

The White House executed a nifty two-step this week to re-educate the public and deflect anger. On Tuesday Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner relaunched the massive bailout of banking and finance. Knowing how unpopular this is with the people at large, Geithner followed on Thursday with his “sweeping” plans to re-regulate the bankers and financiers. Whenever official plans are called “sweeping,” it indicates that they really, really mean it this time.

Most Americans are not financial experts. It’s very difficult, nearly impossible, for normal mortals to sort through the dense policy talk and conflicting opinions to figure out if the rhetoric of reform is real. Confusion is widespread in the land. Most Americans want to believe this president is leading us out of the swamp, but how can they know? I say, trust your gut feelings. They are as reliable as the learned experts.

Keep reading Trust Your Guts at Common Ground via The Nation→
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A Call for an Equitable and Sustainable Economy

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Dear fellow business leaders and social entrepreneurs,
To review and sign this letter, please click on this link and sign by Tuesday, March 31st.

To: White House Offices: The Office of Public Liaison/Dept. of Energy, Environment and Natural Resources; The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement; and The Council on Environmental Quality
From: American Sustainable Business Council
Subject: A Call for an Equitable and Sustainable Economy
Date: March 31, 2009

This document was written by business executives and social entrepreneurs who are working to create a more equitable and sustainable economy. The undersigned individuals are the chief executives of mission-driven businesses, social enterprises, and sustainable business networks representing hundreds of thousands of employees, members and leaders, and hundreds of billions in economic activity.

We have been very pleased with the leadership and transparency of the Obama Administration to revitalize the U.S. economy. Our council and partners are working to build on this momentum with new thinking on a critical but often overlooked segment of the economy: mission-driven enterprises.

We believe it is time to create the foundation and framework for a transition to a new, 21st century American economy grounded in principles of sustainability and equity. We need to move beyond the politics and business of the past to create the innovative solutions—enterprises, collaborations, and ideas—necessary for accelerating such a transformation.

While our recommendations come from a variety of sources, this community is unified in the conviction that the current economic, social and environmental crises we are facing are rooted in inequitable and unsustainable practices and structures that must be transformed if there is to be a renewal of hope and prosperity. As Einstein famously stated, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

An overarching strategy behind our recommendations is for government to empower the engines of our economy—businesses and social enterprises—to be the agents of recovery and revitalization. By removing obstacles, creating incentives, providing support, and partnering, government can help create an enabling environment in which restorative, equitable and sustainable economic models can thrive. These recommendations will unleash the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation across all sectors and disciplines to confront and solve the economic, social and environmental problems we are now facing.

In this document, we share high level perspectives and recommendations in major policy categories and offer examples of changes we consider to be effective and feasible in the current political climate. As a companion to this proposal, this council will be working in collaboration with others to launch an ongoing, comprehensive multi-stakeholder initiative to aggregate, synthesize and prioritize the most effective policy recommendations that promote equitable and sustainable economic reform.

You’re not here to become an entertainer…

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From Karl Paulnack, welcoming address to freshman students at Boston Conservatory of Music [thanks to Dave Pollard, who thanks Beth P for the link -DS]

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at 2:00 AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8:00 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.
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Give Obama more time…

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Give Obama more time. Then give him hell.

The president has had only two months -  harsh judgments are premature

From Andrew Sullivan

The former New York City mayor Ed Koch was renowned for strolling about Manhattan when he was in office, grabbing strangers by the lapel and asking, “How am I doing?” This is not exactly Barack Obama’s style – he shimmers around, with a dry but beguiling smile that seems to say, “Don’t touch me” – but others are doing it for him. In an age of 24-hour news channels, millions of blogs and columnists vying to stay above the bloggerrhoeic tide, there is a real urge to make a clear and instant judgment.

I’m not going to do it, because, two months after a president has taken office in the middle of a global financial and economic crisis, as he grapples with two unending wars and a battered constitution, the whole idea of a definitive judgment is loopy. It’s also likely to be wrong. If you had judged the last Bush administration at this point, you would have said it was much better than expected. If you’d judged Bill Clinton in March 1993, you’d have said he was the most incompetent, clueless, chaotic manager the White House had survived. Now look at history’s judgment.

However, there’s a case for feeling that Obama is floundering. He has yet to solve the banking crisis, his Treasury is horrifyingly understaffed and he somehow allowed a bunch of incompetents and thieves at AIG to walk off with massive bonuses under his nose. His stimulus package was too controlled by the Democrats in Congress and is too spread out into 2010 to have a big impact now, when it’s most needed. He is trying to take on too many things at once – from climate change and healthcare reform to engaging Iran and reforming Pakistan. The aura of his campaign has waned as the poetry of insurgency has segued into the deadly and often ungrammatical prose of government. He seemingly still can’t speak without a teleprompter.

Keep reading Give Obama more time at TimesOnline→
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This is going to piss you off…

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From Dave Smith

“Short selling hedge funds lit the spark that led to the global economic meltdown. Now they want to help craft the laws Congress will pass to fix our broken regulatory system. That’s insane.”

Go to: Hedge funds and the Global Economic Meltdown (Video)→

Hat tip The Automatic Earth
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From Michael Moore

Friends,

I am in the middle of shooting my next movie and I am looking for a few brave people who work on Wall Street or in the financial industry to come forward and share with me what they know. Based on those who have already contacted me, I believe there are a number of you who know “the real deal” about the abuses that have been happening. You have information that the American people need to hear. I am humbly asking you for a moment of courage, to be a hero and help me expose the biggest swindle in American history.

Keep reading Will you help me with my next film?→
~~

Local Food from the South Lawn of the White House (Updated)

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[It doesn't get much better than this! -DS]

By Marian Burros

New York Times

Published: March 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of the South Lawn on Friday to plant a vegetable garden, the first at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets — the president does not like them — but arugula will make the cut.

While the organic garden will provide food for the first family’s meals and formal dinners, its most important role, Mrs. Obama said, will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity and diabetes have become a national concern.

“My hope,” the first lady said in an interview in her East Wing office, “is that through children, they will begin to educate their families and that will, in turn, begin to educate our communities.”

Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot, in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It is just below the Obama girls’ swing set.)

Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs. Virtually the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said with a laugh. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, will probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”

Whether there would be a White House garden had become more than a matter of landscaping. The question had taken on political and environmental symbolism, with the Obamas lobbied for months by advocates who believe that growing more food locally, and organically, can lead to more healthful eating and reduce reliance on huge industrial farms that use more oil for transportation and chemicals for fertilizer.

Then, too, promoting healthful eating has become an important part of Mrs. Obama’s own agenda.

Keep reading  Obamas To Plant Vegetable Garden at White House at NYT→

Update

First lady breaks ground on Kitchen Garden→

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Digging their way out of recession

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From The Economist

IN 1943 Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged a return to the “victory gardens” that had become popular during the first world war, when the country faced food shortages. Mrs Roosevelt planted a garden at the White House; some 20m Americans followed her lead, and by the end of the war grew 40% of the nation’s vegetables.

Now a grassroots movement wants Barack Obama to plant another White House victory garden. The new secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, announced recently that his department would create “The People’s Garden” out of a paved area outside their building. And he won’t stop there. Mr Vilsack wants there to be a community garden at each of the department’s offices around the world.

Margaret Lloyd, a researcher on victory gardens at the University of California at Davis, finds many reasons for this new national trend. The recession is one; but people are also worried about food safety, want to eat more healthily, and are bothered about climate change. This may be a way to make a difference.

If Washington needs further inspiration it might examine the movement in Bill Clinton’s former stamping-ground. Although Arkansas is an agricultural state, urban gardening has not always been popular. But now victory gardens are springing up in backyards, school grounds and even on front lawns in posh neighbourhoods. Many gardeners are focusing on “heirloom” plants—rare varieties from earlier times that do not appeal to agribusiness.

Keep reading Digging… at The Economist→

A recent survey conducted by the National Gardening Association confirms that vegetable gardening in the United States is on the rise… Go to Recession spurs millions of new gardeners→

The petrocollapse and the economic crisis have a bright side; they will be the catalyst for the rebirth of the local small farm. These will be the kinds of farms that we need: diverse, educational , and organic… Go to Small Farm Renaissance→

The idea of investing in new home construction and high-end restaurant businesses would send most entrepreneurs running these days, but developers in a small community in rural Georgia say they’re still growing… Go to Contemporary commune bucks housing crash→

Hat tip Energy Bulletin
Image: Victory Garden Poster, WWII, Wikipedia Commons

Growth?

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From The Automatic Earth→

There is a point where, when you need to grow faster and faster just to meet your payments and other needs, you can’t grow enough anymore. That’s not just the problem for banks and carmakers, it’s the underlying issue for our entire economic system. A constant growth rate will never be sufficient down the line, you need your growth rate itself to grow. Our society depends on exponential growth. And that process stops somewhere. It’s the same as the reason why your body stops growing around age 20. If you would grow to be 10 feet tall, your bones would break under your own weight.

There are limits inherent in any and all systems, and ignoring laws of physics doesn’t mean they go away. When Glass-Steagall was repealed, and when Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Phil Gramm and Robert Rubin managed to stop regulation of securities, Wall Street banks in effect obtained permission to grow as in the physical world only malignant tumors do and can. And we all know from observing that physical world that these tumors, if left untreated, will grow until they kill their host. America is the host to General Motors and Citigroup, to Chrysler and Bank of America. Instead of seeking treatment, the country seeks to deny the harmful and lethal effects, or even the very existence, of the cancerous growths in its body politic. And economic.

If we stick to this metaphor, it’s not that hard to see where it goes. At some point, you, or we if you will, need to make a choice. You either choose to lose your life, as when you don’t seek treatment, or you choose to risk losing your hair and feeling real sick for a time, as when you go in for radiation and chemo-therapy. Our societies as a whole are stuck in denial mode so far. Looking at the Obama, Geithner, Gordon Brown et al responses, all I see is an attitude that says: we don’t need treatment, we can beat this by ourselves, on our own.

And while miracles may have happened at times while humans have roamed this earth, it’s an insane and irresponsible gamble to take when you are a President or Prime Minister or Treasury Secretary and you hold the welfare and potentially the very lives of millions of people in your hands. That’s simply inexcusable. Still, looking at what happens to our economies and the actions, worth trillions of dollars, that are being taken, all I see is continued denial. It’s impossible to let GM and Citi go, we can’t live without them, that’s the prevailing drive.

Well, they’re going no matter how fiercely you try to deny it, like so many organs being amputated from your disease-riddled body. Toxic assets cause diseases. It’s up to us to decide whether they will finish us off as nations and societies. So far, we have made all the wrong decisions. We couldn’t have been more wrong if we had tried. It’s time to get a true diagnosis, and stop listening to faith based quacks and tea-leaf healers, to rid ourselves of Geithner and Rubin and Summers and Bernanke. Unless we have a death wish. Do we? Do you? It’s time to face that question for real…
~

see also Dmitry Orlov’s Social Collapse Best Practices→
Hat tip Janie Sheppard

and Bill Maher’s Ode To Government (video)→

and Dave Pollard’s Why Insurance Makes No Sense In A Natural Society→
~~

Shelf Life

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From NY Times
Excerpts

I felt so fortunate to attend a special presentation the other night: William Stout, owner of the eponymous architecture and design bookstore in San Francisco, had been invited to talk about his favorite books at Linden Street, a casual salon of sorts that aims to foster the design community in the city…

Stout is a collector in the best sense of the word. Though he joked that he began acquiring books when he realized he’d never have a 401k, it is probably more accurate to say that Stout is in complete thrall of the smell of ink, the feel of paper, the intellectual and physical heft of the literary object, the near-indiscernible sound of the turning of pages…

Scanning the bookshelves of others is a favorite pastime, and sitting here canvassing my own makes me fully understand why Stout recently left his San Francisco house to move into a warehouse: he wanted to be surrounded by not just some but all of his books, to feel among the living. As one who has lugged an ever-increasing number of boxes of books from apartment to apartment, city to city, unable to part with nary a one, I feel the same way…

Keep reading Shelf Life at The New York Times→

Banking on Credit Unions

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By Ralph Nader

While the reckless giant banks are shattering like an over-heated glacier day by day, the nation’s credit unions are a relative island of calm largely apart from the vortex of casino capitalism.

Eighty five million Americans belong to credit unions which are not-for-profit cooperatives owned by their members who are depositors and borrowers. Your neighborhood or workplace credit union did not invest in these notorious speculative derivatives nor did they offer people “teaser rates” to sign on for a home mortgage they could not afford.

Ninety one percent of the 8,000 credit unions are reporting greater overall growth in mortgage lending than any other kinds of consumer loans they are extending. They are federally insured by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) for up to $250,000 per account, such as the FDIC does for depositors in commercial banks.

They are well-capitalized because of regulation and because they do not have an incentive to go for high-risk, highly leveraged speculation to increase stock values and the value of the bosses’ stock options as do the commercial banks.

Credit Unions have no shareholders nor stock nor stock options; they are responsible to their owner-members who are their customers.

There are even some special low-income credit unions-thought not nearly enough-to stimulate economic activities in these communities and to provide “banking” services in areas where poor people can’t afford or are not provided services by commercial banks.

According to Mike Schenk, an economist with the Credit Union National Association, there is another reason why credit unions avoided the mortgage debacle that is consuming the big banks.

Credit Unions, he says, are “portfolio lenders. That means they hold in their portfolios most of the loans they originate instead of selling them to investors….so they care about the financial performance of those loans.”

Keep reading Banking on Credit Unions at Common Dreams→
Hat tip to Janie Sheppard and Dan Hamburg

See also Mendo-Lake Credit Union→
~~

California’s Deadbeat Republicans

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From Crooks and Liars→

[The 2/3rds rule is simply dictatorship by the minority. -DS]

The Republicans in the California legislature are trying to close down the entire state. As everyone across America watches with awe how f*&ked up these idiot Republican politicians are acting, finally we hear someone step up to the plate and get at the root of the problem.

Lt. Gov Garamendi: I’ve been listening to what you had to say about Republicans in the Senate and Congress, we have an infection here and it’s a Republican infection that’s really spreading across this nation. Just what do they propose to do? Shut everything down? They did that with Newt Gingrich. They seem to want to do that in California and we’re saying no way, no how. We’re gonna build, we’re going to go with Obama.

He linked these deadbeat Republicans to the Newt Gingrich led Congress that got embarrassed by shutting down the federal government.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger gets a free pass from the California and national media time and time again. He was Enron’s chosen boy to oust Gray Davis and he’s almost single handedly led us down a path to ruin. The CA media needs to start looking in the mirror on this one.

And as the Garamendi explained, California has this super majority requirement on any vote that entails raising taxes in place that stalls all legislation.

We do have a two thirds vote….And then when you have Republicans that have taken a no new tax pledge and seem to just want to throw this state and really the nation into chaos and further decline in the economy, then we have the gridlock that we see. We need to change our constitution.

We need to hold these Republicans accountable…

It’s a joke. California residents need to start taking action. We can’t just sit around and watch these morons sleeping in their chairs because of obstructionist Republicans.

As Julia points out:

The 2/3rds rule is the reason why we can’t pass a budget. We are one of three states that requires a 2/3rds vote. If we don’t change that rule we will be right back here in 2010.

Cox and Moldanado are the ones to call. Here is our Moldanado action: http://couragecampaign.org/action/229/save-california-tell-senator-abel-maldonado-to-vote-yes-on-the-budget

They’ve received over a thousand calls. We can do better than that. Flood their lines.

UPDATE:

Sign the pledge to repeal the 2/3rds rule to pass a budget

Garamendi’s plan of a 55% vote is way off base too.
..
d-day has an excellent post up about California’s situation.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is irrelevant and a failure. State Democrats are spineless jellyfish. The death-cult Republican Party is a collection of flat-earthers bent on destruction. All well and good. Yet all of these discrete groups are enabled by a political system that does violent disservice to the people of the state and the concept of democracy. We must have a return to majority rule as soon as possible. For the sake of accountability…read on

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A new way of life is waiting…

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by Jim Kunstler
author of The Long Emergency

The reality we can’t face is that one way of life is over and a new one is waiting to be born. It’s been waiting, really, since the early 1970s, when God whacked the USA upside its head to announce that we’d outgrown our once-stupendous domestic supply of oil. I remember those fervid months following the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 (I covered the story as a young newspaper reporter.) The basic message was this: from now on we’ll be running this show on other people’s oil so we better start doing things differently. Back then, the not-yet-lost-in-a-fog-of-greed Baby Boom generation rolled up its tie-dyed sleeves and got to work doing a lot of forward-looking things: micro hydro-electric, passive solar houses, rural homesteading, the next generation of public transit (BART, the D.C. Metro), the first wave of urban gentrification….

Then, in 1979, the Ayatollah tossed out the Shah of Iran, we got another dose of oil problems, and a year later, President Jimmy Carter’s clear-eyed view of the oil situation as “the moral equivalent of war” got overturned in favor of Ronald Reagan’s dreadful Hollywood nostalgia projector. As usual in times of severe social stress, the public got delusional. Mr. Reagan was very lucky. During his tenure, two of the last great non-OPEC oil discoveries came into full production — Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and the North Sea — and took the leverage away from the Islamic oil nations who had been making us miserable with their threats, embargos, price-jackings, and hostage-takings.

Americans drew the false conclusion that Ronald Reagan was an economic genius (a similar thing happened in Great Britain with Margaret Thatcherism). The price of oil went down steeply while they were in office. Britain could kick back and enjoy it’s last remaining industry, banking, on a majestic cushion of energy resources. The USA resumed its major post-war industry: suburban sprawl building. Reaganism got elevated to the status of a religion, though it was little more than a twisted version of Eisenhower-on-steroids. Under Reagan, WalMart embarked on its campaign to destroy every main street economy in the nation. The Baby Boomers came back from the land, clipped their pony tails, discovered venture capital, real estate investment trusts, securitization of “consumer” debt, and the Hamptons. Greed was good. (No, really….)…

Now we’ve arrived at the moment of wreckage. Meanwhile, Barack Obama sailed into the White House on a tide of “hope” for “change.” The change was unspecified, by both Mr. Obama and the general public (and the news media that audits its thinking). What is dogging many of us who supported Mr. Obama is the delayed entrance of much-vaunted change. At this moment of “stimulus” and TARP-II, it seems to have been about a desperate attempt to preserve the hypertrophic debt economy of “miracle” mortgages, blue-light-special shopping on credit cards, and endless happy motoring at all costs. And by “all costs” I mean literally bankrupting our society at every level to keep on living as if it were still 1999. This naturally alarms those of us who perceive a need for more drastic reprogramming in American life…

Keep reading President’s Day→
~
See also A Commodity Called Misery by Joe Bageant→
Hat tip Dave Pollard

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Prepare for the best

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From Philadelphia Citypaper

As usual, the future will be different. Philadelphia’s responses to global warming and market cooling, high fuel and food prices, health unsurance, mortgages, student debt and war will decide whether our future here becomes vastly better or vastly worse. Whether we’re the Next Great City or Next Great Medieval Village. Imagine Philadelphia with one-tenth the oil and natural gas.

But to hell with tragedy. Let’s quit dreading news. Take the Rocky road. There are Philadelphia solutions for every Philadelphia problem.

Imagine instead that, 20 years from now, Philadelphia’s green economy enables everyone to work a few hours creatively daily, then relax with family and friends to enjoy top-quality local, healthy food. To enjoy clean low-cost warm housing, clean and safe transport, high-quality handcrafted clothes and household goods. To enjoy creating and playing together, growing up and growing old in supportive neighborhoods where everyone is valuable. And to do this while replenishing rather than depleting the planet. Pretty wild, right?

Entirely realistic. Not a pipe dream. And more practical than cynical. The tools, skills and wealth exist.

Mayor Michael Nutter foresees we’ll become the “Greenest City in the United States.” So it’s common-sensible to ask, “What are the tools of such a future?” “What jobs will be created?” “Who has the money?” “Where are the leaders?” “How will Philadelphia look?” “What can we learn from other cities?”…

As President Barack Obama says, “Change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up.” Philadelphia’s chronic miseries suggest that primary dependence on legislators, regulators, police, prisons, bankers and industry won’t save us. They’re essential partners, but the people who will best help us are us. As stocks and dollars decay, most new jobs will be created by neither Wall Street nor government. We and our friends and neighbors will start community enterprises; co-operatives for food, fuel, housing and health; build and install simple green technologies to dramatically cut household costs. Then we can have fun…

Some of the proposals sketched here can be easily ridiculed, because they disturb comfortable work habits, ancient traditions and sacred hierarchies. Yet they open more doors than are closing. They help us get ready for the green economy, and get there first. Big changes are coming so we might as well enjoy the ride. You have good ideas, too — bring ‘em on…

Keep reading Prepare for the Best→
Hat tip Energy Bulletin

See also Mendo Time Bank→

and Mendo’s Garden Project→

and Mendocino County’s Farmers Markets→

and Willit’s Economic Localization→

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Top 10 Reasons To Support Universal Single-Payer Health Care

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1. Everybody In, Nobody Out. Universal means access to health care for everyone, period.
2. Portability. If you are unemployed, or lose or change jobs, your health coverage stays with you.
3. Uniform Benefits. No Cadillac plans for the wealthy and Pinto plans for everyone else, with high deductibles, limited services, caps on payments for care, and no protection in the event of a catastrophe. One level of comprehensive care for everyone, regardless of the size of your wallet.
4. Prevention. By removing financial roadblocks, a universal health system encourages preventive care that lowers an individual’s ultimate cost and pain and suffering when problems are neglected and societal cost in the over-utilization of emergency rooms or the spread of communicable diseases.
5. Choice. Most private insurance restricts your choice of providers and hospitals. Under the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, patients have a choice, and the provider is assured a fair payment.
6. No Interference with Care. Caregivers and patients regain their autonomy to decide what’s best for a patient’s health, not what’s dictated by the billing department. No denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions or cancellation of policies for “unreported” minor health problems.
7. Reducing Waste. One third of every private health insurance dollar goes for paperwork and profits, compared to about 3% under Medicare, the federal government’s universal system for senior citizen healthcare.
8. Cost Savings. A guaranteed health care system can produce the cost savings needed to cover everyone, largely by using existing resources without the waste. Taiwan, shifting from a U.S. private health care model, adopted a similar system in 1995, boosting health coverage from 57% to 97% with little increase in overall health care spending.
9. Common Sense Budgeting. The public system sets fair reimbursements applied equally to all providers, private and public, while assuring that appropriate health care is delivered, and uses its
   clout to negotiate volume discounts for prescription drugs and medical equipment.
10. Public Oversight. The public sets the policies and administers the system, not high priced CEOs meeting in private and making decisions based on their company’s stock performance needs.

Call Congress, and the President
Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121
(ask for your representative’s office)

If your member is a current co-sponsor, thank your rep. and ask him or her to stand firm for HR 676 and actively seek additional co-sponsors.

If your member was a co-sponsor in the last Congress, ask him or her to sign on immediately as a co-sponsor in this Congress.

If your member has yet to co-sponsor HR 676, ask him or her to please become a co-sponsor, select one or two talking points here.

Urge your member to accept testimony from panelists to explore the serious flaws in the Massachusetts health plan and examine why it cannot serve as a national model for providing universal and comprehensive care.

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How Popular Anger Grew, 1929 and 2009

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The “Best Men” Fall
How Popular Anger Grew, 1929 and 2009
By Steve Fraser

Obtuse hardly does justice to the social stupidity of our late, unlamented financial overlords. John Thain of Merrill Lynch and Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, along with an astonishing number of their fraternity brothers, continue to behave like so many intoxicated toreadors waving their capes at an enraged bull, oblivious even when gored.

Their greed and self-indulgence in the face of an economic cataclysm for which they bear heavy responsibility is, unsurprisingly, inciting anger and contempt, as daily news headlines indicate. It is undermining the last shreds of their once exalted social status — and, in that regard, they are evidently fated to relive the experience of their predecessors, those Wall Street “lords of creation” who came crashing to Earth during the last Great Depression.

Ever since the bail-out state went into hyper-drive, popular anger has been simmering. In fact, even before the meltdown gained real traction, a sign at a mass protest outside the New York Stock Exchange advised those inside: “Jump, You Fuckers.”

You can already buy “I Hate Investment Banking” T-shirts on line. All the Caesar-sized salaries and the Caligula-like madness as the economy crashes and burns, all the bonuses, dividends, princely consulting fees for learning how to milk the Treasury, not to speak of those new corporate jets, as well as the government funds poured down the black hole of mega-mergers, moneys that might otherwise have spared citizens from foreclosure — all of this is making ordinary Americans apoplectic.

Nothing, however, may be more galling than the rationale regularly offered for so much of this self-indulgence. Asked about why he had given out $4 billion in bonuses to his Merrill Lynch staff in a quarter in which the company had lost a staggering $15 billion dollars, ex-CEO John Thain typically responded: “If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise. Those best people can get jobs other places, they will leave.”

Apparently it never occurs to those who utter such perverse statements about rewarding the “best people,” or “the best men,” that we’d all have been better off, and saved some serious money, if they had hired the worst men. After all, based on the recent record, who could possibly have done more damage than the “best” Merrill Lynch, Wachovia, Wamu, Citigroup, A.I.G., Bank of America, and so many other top financial crews had to offer?

Keep reading How Popular Anger Grew at TomDispatch.com→

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Transition Network’s ‘Who We Are and What We Do’ Document Available

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From the document..

Peak oil and climate change have  rapidly moved up in people’s  awareness in recent years, but  often, particularly in relation to  peak oil, solutions tend to be thin on the ground. Since its initial emergence in Kinsale in 2005, the Transition idea1has spread virally across the UK and increasingly further afield, serving as a catalyst for community–led responses to these twin challenges. As the Transition network has grown, questions have been raised regarding how this emerging movement might structure itself, which this document is the first formal attempt at answering. We have already been seeing a structure emerging organically over the last two years and what we propose in this document is based on a deepening and a supporting of this emergent model, on the principle that self- organisation, innovation and action are to be encouraged and supported where they arise, supported by a distinct set of principles and clear guidelines.

This document has arisen from a process of extensive consultation across the Transition network, including face-to-face meetings, the use of on-line tools and fora. It will remain work in progress and be reviewed on an ongoing basis.

PDF available for download here→

[Hey Cliff! We need GULP now more than ever! -DS]

Start Me Up – Rolling Stones→

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Dear President Obama…

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By Jason Bradford
Willits

Dear President Obama…

…How You Could Give Me Hope

I know heaps of ridiculously high expectations are being placed upon you, but allow me to give you five simple, inexpensive and immediate ways that you could provide hope.

1. Convert White House lawns to food gardens. In addition to an assortment of vegetables (imagine fresh arugula whenever you are at home), go ahead and include hens, a beehive, and perhaps a dairy cow (I think you have the space). I am a farmer so I know that getting your nails dirty would be a great compliment to a basketball workout and is fantastic for mental relaxation and acuity. A walk through the garden would likely help during tense negotiations, whether foreign or domestic. But most importantly, this move would give people the message that some degree of self-reliance is good for them and their country.

2. Bring House Rep. Roscoe Bartlett over to your office for a special presentation of his energy talk, make sure your cabinet is there, and present him with an appropriate Presidential Medal of some sort. He’s a Republican so this would be a great bipartisan move. He is also a bona fide scientist who can speak with authority on the “source” side of the equation with respect to fossil fuels.

3. Invite James Hansen and his wife to stay in the Lincoln bedroom. Keep him around long enough to personally be assured that you understand his positions and reasoning. He believes substantive changes in energy policy need to happen within your first term or the planet is toast. Unfortunately, I think he’s right.

4. Place Herman Daly as a key economic advisor. So far your economic team looks to me like the same folks who created the mess. I have absolutely no confidence in them. Much of the banking system is a black hole that is insolvent and unredeemable. By contrast, the hundreds of billions (soon to be trillions?) of dollars wasted in shoring up banks could help pay down our ecological debts if allocated wisely. Maybe you are going to tell these guys to do a pirouette and reform themselves and their ilk?

5. Develop a “Securing the Basics” plan. With the economy tanking, the risk of civil unrest, both here and abroad, is real. Because we are mostly a society of urban and suburban consumers, households in the U.S. must pay for basic goods. The extreme income inequity in the U.S. is an additional vulnerability. Lack of self-reliance means that if oil imports are cut off suddenly or commerce falters due to a cascade of credit failures, the very necessities of life such as food, water, and shelter may be lost to tens of millions of citizens. If the population knew that a credible plan existed to mitigate for such a catastrophe, ensuring fair and timely distribution of goods, it would reduce the likelihood that panic would set in. Over the long-term, a society that is not so import-dependent, especially for food and energy, should be a policy goal.

Read the whole letter at The Oil Drum→

Hat tip to Meca

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The Media’s role in the financial crisis

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[This article is about why journalism is so important. Locally, the UDJ can never do an effective job until it is independent and locally owned, and also independent internally from its advertisers... as professional, feisty journalism used to be. -DS]

by Dan Gilmor
TPM Cafe
Excerpts
Full article here→

Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices — and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building — made a bad situation worse…

It’s not as if this is the first time a big issue has had too little discussion while there was still time to fix the problem. Journalism has repeatedly failed to warn the public about huge, visible risks. The media’s complicity in the Iraq War-mongering and 1990s stock bubble were the most infamous recent examples until the financial bust came along, but the willful blindness to reality was uncannily similar…

And even when the reporting was solid, which was rare enough, news organizations didn’t follow up in appropriate ways. If we can foresee a catastrophe, it’s not enough to mention it once or twice and then move on.

That common practice suggests an opportunity. When we can predict an inevitable calamity if we continue along the current path, we owe it to the public to do everything we can to encourage a change in that destructive behavior.

In practice, this means activism. It means relentless campaigning to point out what’s going wrong, and demanding corrective action from those who can do something about it.

So in Florida, Arizona and California, among other epicenters of the housing bubble, newspapers might have told their readers — including governmental officials — the difficult truth. They could have explained, again and again, that the housing bubble would inevitably lead, at least locally, to personal financial disaster for many in their regions, not to mention fiscal woes for local and state governments. How many should have done this, given the media’s at least partial reliance on advertising from those who profited from the bubbles? Any that cared to do their jobs…

Californians are especially practiced at pretending not to see what’s visible in front of them. The state’s fiscal crisis is far worse than most, in large part because the governor and state legislature — with media winks and nods — generated a torrent of new red ink, via borrowing, to cover new spending and earlier debts. The piper is now demanding his payment, and his price threatens to be ruinous. (Will this be our national fate in a few years?)…

Once upon a time, news people went on campaigns when they saw the need. Sometimes this led to yellow journalism, as when newspaper owners used their publications to stir up the populace in dangerous ways. At other times, however, old-fashioned press campaigns led to change for the better; back when editorial pages had more influence in communities, a few courageous newspaper editors in the South campaigned for school integration, and made an enormous difference.

Journalistic activism — precisely what we need despite most journalists’ disdain for the idea — won’t save newspapers that are suffering from a perfect storm of dwindling leadership and advertising losses. But as Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles recently wrote, journalists should “accept the responsibility to demand action” based on what they learn when they do their jobs right.

The media’s collective irresponsibility has ill-served its audience. If journalists want to keep the audience they have, never mind building credibility for the future, they need to become the right kind of activists. More than ever, we need what they do, when they do it well.

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[The right of freely examining public characters and measures, and a free communication of the people thereon has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right. -James Madison, 1798]

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Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years – Hartmann

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by Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams

This weekend, House Republican leader John Boehner played out the role of Jude Wanniski on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Odds are you’ve never heard of Jude, but without him Reagan never would have become a “successful” president, Republicans never would have taken control of the House or Senate, Bill Clinton never would have been impeached, and neither George Bush would have been president.

When Barry Goldwater went down to ignominious defeat in 1964, most Republicans felt doomed (among them the then-28-year-old Wanniski). Goldwater himself, although uncomfortable with the rising religious right within his own party and the calls for more intrusion in people’s bedrooms, was a diehard fan of Herbert Hoover’s economic worldview.

In Hoover’s world (and virtually all the Republicans since reconstruction with the exception of Teddy Roosevelt), market fundamentalism was a virtual religion. Economists from Ludwig von Mises to Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman had preached that government could only make a mess of things economic, and the world of finance should be left to the Big Boys – the Masters of the Universe, as they sometimes called themselves – who ruled Wall Street and international finance.

Hoover enthusiastically followed the advice of his Treasury Secretary, multimillionaire Andrew Mellon, who said in 1931: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down… enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

Thus, the Republican mantra was: “Lower taxes, reduce the size of government, and balance the budget.”

The only problem with this ideology from the Hooverite perspective was that the Democrats always seemed like the bestowers of gifts, while the Republicans were seen by the American people as the stingy Scrooges, bent on making the lives of working people harder all the while making richer the very richest. This, Republican strategists since 1930 knew, was no way to win elections.

Which was why the most successful Republican of the 20th century up to that time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been quite happy with a top income tax rate on millionaires of 91 percent. As he wrote to his brother Edgar Eisenhower in a personal letter on November 8, 1954:

“[T]o attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government.

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt [you possibly know his background], a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Continue reading Two Santa Clauses→

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Bad Faith Economics – Krugman

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By Paul Krugman
NYT

As the debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan’s opponents aren’t arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don’t want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don’t want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.

Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services — and called it a plan to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives.”

But the obvious cheap shots don’t pose as much danger to the Obama administration’s efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don’t know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.

Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.

It’s true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn’t, because we’re in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero.

That’s why we’re talking about large-scale fiscal stimulus: it’s what’s left in the policy arsenal now that the Fed has shot its bolt. Anyone who cites old arguments against fiscal stimulus without mentioning that either doesn’t know much about the subject — and therefore has no business weighing in on the debate — or is being deliberately obtuse.

These are only some of the fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments out there. Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick.

But here’s the thing: Most Americans aren’t listening. The most encouraging thing I’ve heard lately is Mr. Obama’s reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: “I won.” Indeed he did — and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost.

[Action: Fill the internet with emails, and the phone system with calls to our representatives. Don't let utterly failed policies or roadblocks screw America over again... -DS]

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Printing our own money?

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By George Monbiot 1/20/09
Excerpts

In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out – as the government did yesterday – that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of “an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange”. The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.

But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer’s doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which has the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately issued currency that becomes less valuable the longer you hold on to it.

Go to If the state can’t save us, we need a licence to print our own money in The Guardian→

Also see Mendo Time Bank→

and Mendo Moola→

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Letter To Obama – Krugman

From Dave Smith
Ukiah
(Excerpt)

Universal health care, then, should be your biggest priority after rescuing the economy. Providing coverage for all Americans can be for your administration what Social Security was for the New Deal. But the New Deal achieved something else: It made America a middle-class society. Under FDR, America went through what labor historians call the Great Compression, a dramatic rise in wages for ordinary workers that greatly reduced income inequality. Before the Great Compression, America was a society of rich and poor; afterward it was a society in which most people, rightly, considered themselves middle class. It may be hard to match that achievement today, but you can, at least, move the country in the right direction.

What caused the Great Compression? That’s a complicated story, but one important factor was the rise of organized labor: Union membership tripled between 1935 and 1945. Unions not only negotiated better wages for their own members, they also enhanced the bargaining power of workers throughout the economy. At the time, conservatives warned that wage gains would have disastrous economic effects — that the rise of unions would cripple employment and economic growth. But in fact, the Great Compression was followed by the great postwar boom, which doubled American living standards over the course of a generation.

Unfortunately, the Great Compression was reversed starting in the 1970s, as American workers once again lost much of their bargaining power. This loss was partly due to changes in the world economy, as major U.S. manufacturing corporations started facing more international competition. But it also had a lot to do with politics, as first the Reagan administration, then the Bush administration, did all they could to undermine the ability of workers to organize.

You can make a start on reversing that process. Clearly, you won’t be able to oversee a tripling of union membership anytime soon. But you can do a lot to enhance workers’ rights. One is to start laying the groundwork to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it much harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to join a union. I know it probably won’t happen in your first year, but if and when it does, the legislation will enable America to take a huge step toward recapturing the middle-class society we’ve lost.

Go to Krugman’s Letter To Obama in Rolling Stone→

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The Real New Deal

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Via Energy Bulletin

Post Carbon Institute today announced the release of “The Real New Deal: Energy Scarcity and the Path to Energy, Economic, and Environmental Recovery,” a proposal to the incoming Obama Administration.

The plan calls for responding to the current economic crisis with a massive policy and investment shift towards a fossil fuel-independent economy. Noting the urgency to address global fossil fuel depletion and climate change, the “Real New Deal” calls for a series of bold measures to electrify the transportation system, rebuild the electricity grid, relocalize the food system, and retrofit the nation’s building stock for both energy efficiency and energy production.

The plan’s lead author is Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg, author of “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies” and an internationally recognized expert on fossil fuel depletion. Heinberg said, “While there are many ‘new deal’ plans being offered to President-elect Obama, our plan recognizes that declining fossil fuel supplies and rising greenhouse gas emissions put us at tremendous and immediate risk. Building more roads and bridges as a stimulus for jobs is the wrong tactic. We must re-engineer our country now to deal with the end of cheap energy and to stop catastrophic climate change.”

Bill McKibben, author of “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future,” remarked, “”The world is up against real limits, limits that will define our future. We’re running out of oil and we’re running out of atmosphere, and those two alone will change the planet. Let’s get ahead of the curve for once.”

Here’s the deal: Energy Scarcity and the Path to Energy, Economic, and Environmental Recovery→

Here’s Mendocino County’s energy deal: Green Transition Papers→

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The Greenhorn’s Guide for Beginning Farmers

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via Energy Bulletin

This is a guidebook for beginning farmers. It is written to help you plan your professional trajectory into the field of sustainable agriculture. In this 30-page guide, we cover some of the major areas of institutional support for young farmers, some likely venues of learning and useful references. You should come away with a sense of how to approach the many hurdles with style, persistance, and improvisational zip.

Greenhorn’s Guidebook for Beginning Farmers→

Mendocino Organics CSA Blog→

Draft Proposal for a Mendocino Community Based Farming Network (Live Power Community Farm)→

A Fifty-Year Farm Bill by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, NYT→

Fifty Million Farmers, Richard Heinberg at Energy Bulletin→

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Watching the growth of WalMart across America

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Via Energy Bulletin

Watch it grow in front of your eyes→

[I don't know... reminds me of films I've seen from high altitude bombers... DS]

It matches up well with the Climate Time Machine→

Also see Big Box Swindle – The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Business→

…and Major Flaws Uncovered in Study Claiming WalMart has Not Harmed Small Business→

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Artists reimagine poster art of the Great Depression

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See and download all 5 posters: Poster Children at ReadyMade.com→

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10 Reasons to be Hopeful for 2009, and 3 Reasons to be Terrified

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From Yes Magazine
by Sarah van Gelder

We’re entering a new year at a time unlike any other in recent memory. Here are 10 reasons I’m filled with hope as I look ahead at 2009—and three reasons I’m terrified.

1. Young people are stepping up. They know that they formed the backbone of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and that their work infused the country with the “Yes, we can” spirit. Now that these young people know what success feels like, many will be in it for the long haul.
2. Election protection is working. Grassroots vigilance, successful lawsuits, and media exposure are making voter suppression efforts less successful. More remains to be done, but the trends are in the right direction. (One terrifying note, though, is the death in a December 19 plane crash of GOP IT expert Michael Connell, who many believe was poised to reveal secrets related to vote stealing.)
3. There is now overwhelming support for universal health care. This grassroots commitment coupled with Obama’s leadership could make this the year when we finally overcome the roadblocks big insurance and drug corporations have placed in the way of progress. A majority of Americans favor a tax-supported single-payer system like Canada’s. The Obama plan, while it’s not single-payer, is nonetheless a good plan—as long as it retains the option for all Americans to join a public health insurance plan.

Continue reading 10 Reasons to be Hopeful for 2009 at Yes Magazine→

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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

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From The Automatic Earth

And may you find the strength and wisdom to lower your expectations when it comes to money and material possessions. A lot of dreams will be shattered in 2009, a lot of things once taken for granted will disappear and never return. My biggest fear looking forward is probably that many of us will not be able to adapt to the vision of a future with less of almost everything. The reactions of younger generations to the realization that the vast majority among them will not be able to do as well as their parents could be rough and violent. Millions upon millions in the western world who are today reasonably well-off, and expect to retire with a nice pension, will find when the time comes that that dream is gone too.

[Predictions are based on the past. The future is up to how the we respond to the challenges that present themselves, not the worst case scenarios. Hope, our family and friends, and our local community intelligence are all we've really got. Are we up for the job? -DS]

See also Local Money In Britain→

Continue reading The Automatic Earth→

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Oppose Tom Vilsack’s Confirmation as Secretary of Agriculture

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From Organic Consumers Union via John McCowen

Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture.

While Vilsack has promoted respectable policies with respect to restraining livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning. Equally troubling is Vilsack’s support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production, which has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join our call to action and block Vilsack’s confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture. Please help us reach our goal of 100,000 petition signatures against Vilsack’ nomination. Sign today!

Go to Sign Petition→

See also A food agenda for Obama – change we can eat→

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The wisdom of uncertainty

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This from Kurt Cobb
via Energy Bulletin

More than 50 years ago author and interpreter of Zen to the English-speaking world Alan Watts wrote a book entitled “The Wisdom of Insecurity.” He made the case that feelings of certainty and security were just that, feelings. Our true and perpetual state as humans is that of uncertainty and insecurity. The world never stops changing and never stops unsettling our settled notions, at least if we pay careful attention to it.

And so, what’s really necessary to feel certainty in one’s life is to be oblivious to what is actually happening. For Watts a good life and a happy life, taken with all its sufferings, is one lived while paying attention. Recent events are forcing more of us to pay careful attention. But to pay attention is to feel more insecure and more uncertain. Still, instead of something to be avoided, insecurity is something to be embraced. It forces us to become more resourceful, to encounter the world as it is and to gain a measure of prudence that can serve us well when we are tempted to believe the optimistic hype of investment advisors, economists, politicians, or experts of any kind.

Continue reading post on his blogsite→

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Circulating through the blogosphere…

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Click on post title above to enlarge

Like Iraq, it’s the leadership at fault, not the foot soldiers…

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It all starts at the local level…

From the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia via the Energy Bulletin

Creating locally self-sufficient economies and renewing democracy: a friendly vision.

Go to: The Flaw of Western Economies→

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New report on peak oil…

Thanks to the Energy Bulletin:

Britain’s leading green commentator, George Monbiot, tackles the International Energy Authority’s chief economist, who reveals for the first time a startling and worrying prediction for the date of peak oil…

Go to 12 minute interview→

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