Permaculture Politics

The Too-Bright Future of Too-Big-To-Not-Fail Finance by Dmitri Orlov

2012-02-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Practical Post Scarcity by Open Source Ecology

2012-02-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

This trio of video treats is re-evolutionary.
Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entireeconomies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

Move to Amend - Get Corporate $$ OUT of Politics.

2012-01-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

The movement to amend the U.S. Constitution to get corporate money out of elections is picking up some serious steam.

Tens of thousands of activists across the country have already signed PFAW's petition calling for an amendment ... in November and December, thousands of Americans attended hundreds house parties nationwide -- organized by PFAW, Public Citizen, Move To Amend and other allies, and joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Jim Hightower -- to mobilize and plan for a day of action on the upcoming January 21st second anniversary of Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate spending in our elections. Organizing meetings are taking place now and our movement was just this week featured on TV on both The Dylan Ratigan Show and The Young Turks.

It's high time YOU got on board!

Please take a moment to add your name to the petition now and help restore Government By the PEOPLE!

TEN bills proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision have been introduced in the current Congress -- including one by Rep. Ted Deutch to expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons by the Constitution, prohibit corporate spending in all elections, and affirm the authority of Congress and the States to regulate corporations and to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures.

Here's just a glimpse of the growing national movement!

In Colorado, the Jamestown Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment establishing that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights and that the First Amendment does not protect unlimited political spending as free speech. And voters in Boulder City passed a ballot measure calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that would state that corporations are not people and reject the legal status of money as free speech.
In California, the city councils of Fort Bragg, Richmond, Marina, Point Arena and Aracata, Oakland and Los Angeles passed resolutions last year supporting an amendment to make sure corporations don't have the same free speech rights as people in elections.
Missoula, Montana voters approved a local ballot referendum urging Congress to propose a constitutional amendment that clearly states that corporations are not people and do not have the same rights as citizens by a three to one margin.
Residents of Monroe, Maine passed a Local Self-Governance Ordinance stating that "no corporation doing business within the Town of Monroe shall be recognized as a ‘natural person’ under the United States or Maine Constitutions or laws of the United States or Maine."

And the councils of Chapel Hill, NC, Duluth, MN, Pueblo County, CO and New York City just recently passed resolutions supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

It's time to add your name to PFAW's petition to Congress calling for constitutional amendment now and help us get from our current number of signers -- 75,000 -- to 100K!

Generations of Americans have come together to force much-needed change by amending the U.S. Constitution to expand democracy and protect fundamental rights. With the voice of the voter being increasingly drowned out by unlimited corporate spending in elections, the need has arisen again. Now, it's our generation's turn.

Please speak out now.

Thank you for standing up against corporate power run amok and for Government By the People

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet

2012-01-03T19:18:00.000-08:00

The video above discusses the Senate version of the PROTECT IP Act, but the House bill that was introduced TODAY is much much worse.

It'll give the government new powers to block Americans' access websites that corporations don't like. The bill would criminalize posting all sorts of standard web content -- music playing in the background of videos, footage of people dancing, kids playing video games, and posting video of people playing cover songs.

This legislation will stifle free speech and innovation, and even threaten popular web services like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

We need to act now to let our lawmakers know just how terrible it is. Will you fill out the form here to ask your lawmakers to oppose the legislation?

What Living On $7 An Hour Actually Means

2012-01-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

Barbara Ehrenreich is featured in this musical excerpt from The American Ruling Class, a "dramatic-documentary-musical" starring Harper's Magazine editor emeritus Lewis Lapham. In this clip, award-winning journalist Barbara Ehrenreich gets to the root of what it means to be nickel and dimed by the 1%.

Be a HERO and Help STOP SOPA Now!!

2011-12-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

I'll tell you How! This Video that Must Be SHARED!

Your Tax Dollars At War

2011-12-30T17:31:00.000-08:00

If you've been wondering why the economy sucks, here's one reason:

No way in US system to vote against banks

2011-10-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

Between Occupy Wall Street, in New York, and the other cities it's spread to, as well as the October 2011 movement that just began here in D.C, something seems to be happening in this country. Earlier at Freedom Plaza Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, tells us what this could lead to.

History is Knocking: Join the October 2011 Coalition

2011-10-01T22:36:00.001-07:00

DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER

2011-07-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Want a pesticide factory in your intestines or increase abortions? Eat GMOs or animals that eat them.

DOUBLE DIPPING DANGER from NO GMO on Vimeo.

IT'S TIME FOR A FOOD FIGHT from NO GMO on Vimeo.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-07-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

Just copied and pasted from Adbusters the following (BTW, a Google search for the phrase Occupy Wall Street received "About 4,360,000 results")
(Meanwhile, stop consuming so damn much, start producing your own food and entertainment, relocalize your economy, learn new skills, stop supporting chain stores which suck money and resources from your town, turn the frickin' lights off in rooms you aren't in, weatherize, etc., etc., etc. Act like you actually care! Change doesn't happen in a vacuum and Obama, the Dems or Repubs will not change it for us.) :

Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."
— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations.

This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and you're out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand – a presidential commission to separate money from politics – we start setting the agenda for a new America.

Waiting for the Spark

2011-04-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

(I think Ralph Nader wrote this but am not sure. It's potent whoever wrote it.)

Waiting for the Spark

What could start a popular resurgence in this country against the abuses of concentrated, avaricious corporatism? Imagine the arrogance of passing on to already cheated working people and the jobless enormous corporate losses? This is achieved through government bailouts and tax escapes.

History teaches us that the spark usually is smaller than expected and of a nature that is wholly unpredictable or even unimaginable. But if the dry tinder is all around, as many deprivations and polls reveal, the spark, no matter how small, can turn into a raging inferno.

The Boston Tea Party lit up the American Revolution. Storming the hated Bastille (prison) by impoverished Parisians launched the French Revolution. More recently, in December 1997, an Israeli military vehicle rammed a civilian van in the West Bank killing seven occupants and igniting the first Intifada.

Last December, a young fruit vendor, abused by thieving police in a small Tunisian town, immolated himself in the local square. Seen by millions on Facebook, this self-sacrifice launched the Tunisian and Egyptian overthrow of their long-time dictators. Later, in Syria, after police arrested 13 youngsters in a southern border town for anti-government graffiti the place erupted in riots and rallies that are spreading to other cities.

A few weeks ago, many progressives and quite a few pundits believed that the recurrent, ever larger February-March rallies in Madison, Wisconsin by workers, students and others against the Governors’ and the Legislature’s attack on public employee unions and social services, following earlier blatant corporate welfare enactments, would be the long-awaited spark.

The Madison eruption spread briefly to Ohio and Indiana where Republican officials were moving in the same direction, punishing workers and families while leaving the corporate and wealthy to count their mounting privileges. There, the crowds were neither as large nor as frequent. In all these states, the Republicans got most of what they wanted, albeit with a possible, future political price to be paid. The rallies have subsided, not even culminating—as some organizers hoped—in a gigantic march on Washington, D.C.

Granted, rallying a long repressed people into losing their fear and demanding, as in Cairo’s huge Tahrir Square “out with the dictator”, is a simple, anthromorphic goal. In our country, the rallies are hardly as clearcut, though use of the citizen right of recall for Republican legislators, and later Governor Walker himself, may produce an interesting accountability election. But sparks are difficult to sustain.

In authoritarian regimes, there are few options for dissent or airing one’s grievances. So when the spark does occur, the climate is fertile for an explosion of outrages.

In the United States, there are largely myths such as “anyone can sue,” or “anyone can run,” or “anyone can directly tell off the President or the Mayor,” or “anyone can blow the whistle.” These combine with a few celebrated successes by rebels or an ordinary David taking on a Goliath for a win here and there, from a corporate-government ruling class that bends a little so that it doesn’t break.

Meanwhile, the inequality, gouging, political exclusions and overall gaps between the top one percent and the rest tighten the grip of the oligarchy and its draining, violent militarized empire.

Loss of control over almost everything that matters, including their children to daily direct corporate marketing of junk food and violent programming, is rampant. Over seventy percent of those polled told Business Week that they believed corporations had “too much control over their lives”—and that was in 2000 before conditions and controls—viz, the Wall Street collapse, severe recession and taxpayer bailouts—worsened.

The American people don’t see much they can do to counter the pressures of greed and power that tracks them daily from debt to debt, from lower standards of living to outright penury, from denial of critical healthcare to the iron collar of the cruel credit score, from inscrutable, computerized bills to fine-print contracts trapping their sense of unfairness into waves of frustrations, from being put on hold by the companies until they’re told no, no, no or penalty, penalty, penalty!

How do we break the cycle of despair, exclusion, powerlessness, and endless betrayal by those given the authority to bring down the exploiters and oppressors to lawful accountability?

The Empire rips up the Constitution and takes the reserve army of the young unemployed to kill and die in aggressive wars of the White House’s choice, with Congress watching from the sidelines; its only role to funnel trillions of tax dollars into the insatiable war machine’s unauditable budgets. President Eisenhower wanted us to control the “military-industrial complex”. Instead it grew much more out of control. Eisenhower’s grave warning as expressed in his farewell address in 1961 was prescient.

The spark can come from a recurrent sequence of abuses that strike a special chord of deeply felt injustice. Or it could be a unique episode or bullying that tolls the feeling “enough already” throughout the land. Such sparks cannot be manufactured; the power to arouse and break people’s routines is spontaneous.

When that moment comes, millions of Americans whose self-respect and keen sense of wrong will remind them precisely why our Constitution begins with “We the People” and not “We the Corporations”. They will realize the necessity for a Jeffersonian revolution.

The Second American Revolution Looks Like This

2011-03-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Democracy School online

Democracy School - Part I from Mari Margil on Vimeo.

The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.

Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people's movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.

Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!

The Schools are built around carefully designed readings, clear presentations and group discussions.

* Each School reveals how it came to be that the law enables corporate managers to dictate their values, and impose their projects on communities.
* Includes an intense, comprehensive history of the judicial bestowal of constitutional rights of persons on corporations.
* Learn the secret of how People’s Movements have cut to the essence and won their struggles to be “found” in the constitution.

* The Anti-Federalists
* The Abolitionists
* The Suffragists
* The Populists
* The Labor Movement

* And learn about earlier Movements, including the Levelers and the Diggers.
* Experience the story of Pennsylvania communities, and New England Town Meetings, as well as North Western city battles – in the ongoing struggle to take the power to govern out of the Corporate Boardrooms and put it back in our communities where it belongs.
* For people of all ages, interests and occupations
* Classes consist of small groups of 10-15 people like you.

"If you take no other training this year, do the Democracy School. It is a superlative unfolding revelation of how corporations have hijacked democracy. It meticulously deconstructs the historical arc that brought us to this precipice. But most importantly, it then departs into the highly pragmatic and inspiring work now underway that is slowly turning the tide . . . This Second American Revolution may be the most important political work going on anywhere in the country or the world."

-Kenny Ausubel ‘05, Founder and Co-Executive Director, Bioneers

"Democracy School was a mind-blowing experience. During the School, I was forced to come to grips with the understanding that I really knew very little about the true structure of law that controls our activism. Democracy School is a must for everyone who seeks to be liberated from our defensive, after-the-fact reactive organizing strategies."

Featuring Thomas Linzey Esq. and Mari Margil -- WATCH PARTS II - VI HERE

Twelve Unsustainable Collapsing Systems

2011-03-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews)

If you look around what's really happening in our world today, there's an inescapable pattern that curiously emerges: Much of what's going on is simply unsustainable. It can't go on for much longer, in other words. And it must collapse due to the laws of economics or physics.

Here, I've put together a collection of twelve systems that are utterly unsustainable on our planet. Each of these twelve is scheduled for some sort of collapse or shut down in the coming years. They range from economics to medicine, population and the environment. And interestingly, the collapse of just one of these twelve would have devastating consequences across human civilization. What happens when two, three or ten of these things collapse?

This article doesn't cover the consequences of the collapse of these unsustainable things, but we'll work on covering that in future articles. Here are the twelve:

1) Debt-based banking and economic systems

There's little question that our global fractional reserve banking system is headed for a catastrophic collapse. It's a system based on debt rather than sound money principles, and the laws of economics dictate that the global multiplication of money and debt is entirely unsustainable.

This system will collapse, and when it does, it will be so large that the economic devastation will be global. Governments have actually made this worse, of course, by bailing out the dishonest investment institutions that have made the situation worse. The coming financial collapse will teach humanity some hard lessons about honest money.

When it comes to money, banking and debt, Ron Paul has always been right, after all.

2) Conventional agriculture and "rape the planet" farming

The current agricultural system that feeds the planet is simply unsustainable. It is a "rape the planet" model that clear-cuts forests to grow GMO soybeans that feed factory cattle which are turned into processed meat. Even the plant crops grown through conventional agriculture depend on chemical fertilizers from sources that are running out (fossil fuels, phosphate mines, etc.).

Furthermore, the mass application of chemical pesticides, fungicides and Monsanto's Roundup chemicals is destroying the viability of soils while polluting the world's farms, rivers, streams and oceans. This system is unsustainable. When it collapses, humanity will learn (the hard way) that only sustainable agriculture can sustain human life on our planet.

3) Mass-consumption economies based on buy-it-and-trash-it behavior

When children are raised to be good little Americans (or Canadians, or Australians, etc.), they're taught to consume more stuff. In America, it was even called "patriotic" by former President George Bush. To support your local economy, you're supposed to go out and buy stuff that you don't need, then chuck it into the trash after you use it, then go out and buy more!

Virtually the entire first-world economy is based on this idea that people need to consume more stuff, then throw it away, then consume more. That's what all the corporate advertising is for, to convince people that they are inadequate unless they buy and consume more high-priced cars, designer jeans, electronic gadgets and throwaway home cleaning supplies. This system is insane. And it cannot continue indefinitely.

4) The accelerating loss of farming soils

There's a great documentary you need to see on this calledDirt.(www.DirtTheMovie.org) It explains the value of dirt (soil) and why conventional agriculture methods are destroying the dirt upon which our civilization depends. We even wrote about the movie here: http://www.naturalnews.com/031597_D...

No dirt = no food. Get it? And the dirt is disappearing at an alarming rate, thanks to the unsustainable practices of conventional agriculture, with all its tilling, soil destruction, poisons and GMOs. I wonder what the people will plant their seeds in when all the cropland dirt is either dead or gone?

5) The mass poisoning of the oceans and aggressive over-fishing

Oceansecosystemsare collapsing. This isn't some future prediction, it's happening right now. Ocean acidification is destroying the coral reefs and mollusks all across the globe. At the same time, human civilization treats the oceans as giant planetary toilets into which all the toxic chemicals of modern civilization are flushed: Pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals, hormone-disrupting chemicals and a whole lot more.

Massive fish die-offs are becoming increasingly common (http://www.naturalnews.com/031645_d...), and fish populations are plummeting across several species. We are beginning to see the results of mankind's ongoing poisoning of the oceans.

6) Mass genetic pollution of the planet through GMOs

It will be the great, dark legacy of our modern civilization: The widespread genetic contamination of the planet through the use of GMOs.

Genetically engineered seeds are spreading their altered genetic code all across the world. The DNA of GMO crops is now detectable in soils, foods and water systems. What's the upshot of all this? It's a big unknown, of course, and that's the frightening part: No one before has ever "played God" with the planet, right out in the open, and then observed what happens after a few years (or decades). Thanks to companies like Monsanto, we are the experiment, and no one know if it might ultimately lead to something like a widespread crop failure or even the alternation of natural web-of-life interactions across multiple ecosystems.

And if genetic pollution causes problems, how do you "clean" that pollution? You can't! Genetic pollution endures. Once crops become infected with GE seeds, it's all but impossible to eliminate the DNA contamination.

7) The drugs-and-surgery conventional medical system

Big Pharma's days are numbered -- based on economics if nothing else. The monopolistic pricing, the deadly side effects and the corrupt, criminal operations of the industry make it all utterly non-sustainable.

Big Pharma and the whole chemical approach to medicine is bankrupting companies, cities, states and nations. No nation can economically survive in the long run if it keeps spending its money on Big Pharma sick care schemes. Ultimately, those nations that hope to survive will need to ditch Big Pharma and return to natural medicine and preventive nutrition.

That day is coming. Sooner that you think, probably.

8) Widespread pharmaceutical contamination of the human population and the environment

Until the day comes that Big Pharma collapses into ruin, the pharmaceutical pollution of the planet will continue. Right now, pharmaceutical factories in India (which export their pills back to the states to be sold as brand-name drugs) are dumping untold thousands ofgallonsof dangerous chemical drugs into the waterways there (http://www.naturalnews.com/025415_w...).

In the U.S. and Canada, the water near every major city is heavily contaminated with pharmaceuticals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/025933.html)

The situation is so bad that Big Pharma's chemical runoff threatens the future of life on our planet! (http://www.naturalnews.com/029314_w...)

Fortunately, this sad chapter in human history will soon come to an end.

9) Runaway human population growth

Here's the one nobody wants to talk about. But make no mistake: The human population growth we see right now is entirely unsustainable. The available of cheapfoodand fossil fuels over the last century has contributed to an unprecedented population explosion that is now nearing its end. There are only so many acres of farmland, after all, and only so many acre-feet of water to irrigate it.

Don't misinterpret this, however, of thinking that I support some sort of population reduction measures a la Bill Gates and his quote about reducing the world population by 10 - 15 percent through the use of vaccines and health care (http://www.naturalnews.com/029911_v...).

Unlike some of the truly evil world leaders, I don't believe in killing off human beings just to reduce global population. Rather, it makes more sense toteach sustainable living practicesalong with good parenting and well-considered parenthood. Strangely, most of the new children brought into the world today are not the result of stable, well-prepared parents choosing to have children, but rather the unintended consequences of casual copulation.

10) Fossil water consumption for agriculture

We just published a story on this issue, talking about how the Ogallala Aquifer is running dry, threatening the agricultural output of Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and even parts of Colorado and Texas (http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_a...).

This is a global issue, affecting India, China, North America, South America and nearly every nation that produces any significant agricultural yields. Fresh water is running out all across the world, and while additional water supplies can always be created through desalination, for example, that's a very expensive way to replenish the water, and it's almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels (see below). Even if you could build enough desalination plants to irrigate the world's croplands, the resulting food prices would still result in mass starvation by those who couldn't afford the food which might cost ten times the current price.

Imagine paying $20 for a loaf of bread and you get the idea of what's coming.

11) Fossil fuel consumption

I realize this is a highly contentious issue, with some people claiming that there's an "unlimited supply of oil" in our planet because it's replenishing itself all the time. This idea simply doesn't square with what we know: The Earth is a finite object, occupying finite space. Inside it can only be a finite amount of fossil fuels. The recharge rate of fossil fuels is on the scale of millions of years, meaning we can't simply wait around for more fuel to reappear if we use up the current reserves.

There is convincing evidence right now that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, has been lying about its output capacity for at least the last decade. It can't reach its production targets, and there is reasoned speculation that its own best-producing oil wells are approaching their end. Even if oil remains available for a few more decades, it still becomes increasingly expensive oil, meaning that everything else down the supply chain becomes more expensive, too: Food, fuel, consumer goods, etc.

The era of cheap fossil fuels is coming to an end. Although fossil fuels will no doubt be around for several decades more, the cheap stuff is long gone, it seems. The citizens of Earth will soon need to find an alternate way to power their cities, cars and businesses in the 21st century.

Oh, and by the way, solar probably isn't the answer, as solar panels depend on rare earth metals that are entirely dependent on Chinese mining operations (http://www.naturalnews.com/028160_r...). Wind energy also hasn't panned out as it should have. And the governments of the world continue to suppress free energy technologies such as Cold Fusion, which has now been proven to work by even the U.S. Navy (http://www.naturalnews.com/025925_c...).

12) The widespread destruction of animal habitat

Here's one that drives some people nuts. What? We can't keep clear-cutting the rainforests to plant genetically engineered soybeans?

Not if you want the planet to survive, actually. There's a delicate web of life on our planet upon which human life ultimately depends. The more animal habitat we destroy, the more it ultimately comes back to haunt us.

Now, I'm not in favor of the insane green police and the UN's freedom-stealing efforts to pigeon-hole human beings into centrally-controlled behavior boxes. The key here is finding ways for people to live in balance with nature while still maintaining their freedoms.

And that depends on education. We need to continue to teach people how to make sound decisions about where they buy their wood furniture (to avoid the slashing of old-growth forests). We need to teach people who eat meat to buy truly free-range, grass-fed meat rather than factory-farmed meats that depend on soybean mega-farms. And of course, we also need to make people aware of the benefits of getting more plant-based foods into their diets where possible, because when properly prepared, plant foods provide a lot of nutrients with a smaller ecological footprint than most meats.

I'm not against those who eat meat, by the way. I just think that people need to consider where their food comes from no matter what they're eating, and then take steps to reduce the ecological footprint of the food they're choosing to consume. The best answer to this is to buy local food. In fact, I would argue that eating some beef steaks from a local farmer is more ecologically sound than juicing up organic fruits and vegetables grown and imported from Chile (unless you live in Chile, of course).

That's an arguable point, of course, and opinions differ sharply on this, but I believe that we really need to focus on eating local foods just as much as we do onwhat we're eating. Personally, I don't eat cows, but even for the plants I consume, I'm working hard right now on growing more of my own so that I'm acting with integrity -- "walking the talk" so to speak -- to be aligned with what I'm advocating for others.

While we're at it, one of the best ways to reduce the destruction of animal habitat is to grow your own food by turning your yard into a garden. Reduce your demand for store-bought food and you unquestionably reduce your ecological footprint on the planet.

And reconsider how much seafood you eat. Most seafood is extremely damaging to ocean ecosystems. I don't have space to discuss it all right here, but we'll cover it more on NaturalNews in the near future.

Life is on the line

So those are 12 of the biggest things that are entirely unsustainable on our planet right now. Human life depends on most of them. It makes you wonder: How will humans survive when these systems and resources upon which we depend have run out or collapsed?

That is a question we'd all better be asking ourselves right now. Because the age of cheap fuel, cheap money, cheap water and cheap food is fast ending. The future of life on our planet will require something far more evolved than the infantile, selfish and self-destructive mindset that humanity has so far demonstrated.

Debt-based money systems don't cut it. Burning up all the fossil fuels is only a fool's abundance. Medicating the humans and animals with toxic, synthetic pharmaceuticals is a form of medical insanity. These things will all come to an end.

The question is: Who will survive the end of these things and be around to help shape the next society which must operate with far greater humility and wisdom?

Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/031669_life_on_earth_unsustainable_agriculture.html#ixzz1GdM2ZOWl

Plutocracy - A No-Love Story

2011-03-07T16:59:00.000-08:00

America Is NOT Broke...the Madison speech
by Michael Moore

Delivered in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday, March 5th, 2011. Video available here.

America is not broke. Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have as much loot, stock and property as the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

I have nothing more than a high school degree. But back when I was in school, every student had to take one semester of economics in order to graduate. And here's what I learned: Money doesn't grow on trees. It grows when we make things. It grows when we have good jobs with good wages that we use to buy the things we need and thus create more jobs. It grows when we provide an outstanding educational system that then grows a new generation of inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, scientists and thinkers who come up with the next great idea for the planet. And that new idea creates new jobs and that creates revenue for the state. But if those who have the most money don't pay their fair share of taxes, the state can't function. The schools can't produce the best and the brightest who will go on to create those jobs. If the wealthy get to keep most of their money, we have seen what they will do with it: recklessly gamble it on crazy Wall Street schemes and crash our economy. The crash they created cost us millions of jobs. That too caused a reduction in tax revenue. Everyone ended up suffering because of what the rich did.

The nation is not broke, my friends. Wisconsin is not broke. Saying that the country is broke is repeating a Big Lie. It's one of the three biggest lies of the decade: 1) America is broke, 2) Iraq has WMD, and 3) The Packers can't win the Super Bowl without Brett Favre.

The truth is, there's lots of money to go around. LOTS. It's just that those in charge have diverted that wealth into a deep well that sits on their well-guarded estates. They know they have committed crimes to make this happen and they know that someday you may want to see some of that money that used to be yours. So they have bought and paid for hundreds of politicians across the country to do their bidding for them. But just in case that doesn't work, they've got their gated communities, and the luxury jet is always fully fueled, the engines running, waiting for that day they hope never comes. To help prevent that day when the people demand their country back, the wealthy have done two very smart things:

1. They control the message. By owning most of the media they have expertly convinced many Americans of few means to buy their version of the American Dream and to vote for their politicians. Their version of the Dream says that you, too, might be rich some day -- this is America, where anything can happen if you just apply yourself! They have conveniently provided you with believable examples to show you how a poor boy can become a rich man, how the child of a single mother in Hawaii can become president, how a guy with a high school education can become a successful filmmaker. They will play these stories for you over and over again all day long so that the last thing you will want to do is upset the apple cart -- because you -- yes, you, too! -- might be rich/president/an Oscar-winner some day! The message is clear: keep you head down, your nose to the grindstone, don't rock the boat and be sure to vote for the party that protects the rich man that you might be some day.

2. They have created a poison pill that they know you will never want to take. It is their version of mutually assured destruction. And when they threatened to release this weapon of mass economic annihilation in September of 2008, we blinked. As the economy and the stock market went into a tailspin, and the banks were caught conducting a worldwide Ponzi scheme, Wall Street issued this threat: Either hand over trillions of dollars from the American taxpayers or we will crash this economy straight into the ground. Fork it over or it's Goodbye savings accounts. Goodbye pensions. Goodbye United States Treasury. Goodbye jobs and homes and future. It was friggin' awesome and it scared the shit out of everyone. "Here! Take our money! We don't care. We'll even print more for you! Just take it! But, please, leave our lives alone, PLEASE!"

The executives in the board rooms and hedge funds could not contain their laughter, their glee, and within three months they were writing each other huge bonus checks and marveling at how perfectly they had played a nation full of suckers. Millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt (see #1).

Until now. On Wisconsin! Never has a Michigander been more happy to share a big, great lake with you! You have aroused the sleeping giant known as the working people of the United States of America. Right now the earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. Your message has inspired people in all 50 states and that message is: WE HAVE HAD IT! We reject anyone who tells us America is broke and broken. It's just the opposite! We are rich with talent and ideas and hard work and, yes, love. Love and compassion toward those who have, through no fault of their own, ended up as the least among us. But they still crave what we all crave: Our country back! Our democracy back! Our good name back! The United States of America. NOT the Corporate States of America. The United States of America!

So how do we make this happen? Well, we do it with a little bit of Egypt here, a little bit of Madison there. And let us pause for a moment and remember that it was a poor man with a fruit stand in Tunisia who gave his life so that the world might focus its attention on how a government run by billionaires for billionaires is an affront to freedom and morality and humanity.

Thank you, Wisconsin. You have made people realize this was our last best chance to grab the final thread of what was left of who we are as Americans. For three weeks you have stood in the cold, slept on the floor, skipped out of town to Illinois -- whatever it took, you have done it, and one thing is for certain: Madison is only the beginning. The smug rich have overplayed their hand. They couldn't have just been content with the money they raided from the treasury. They couldn't be satiated by simply removing millions of jobs and shipping them overseas to exploit the poor elsewhere. No, they had to have more -- something more than all the riches in the world. They had to have our soul. They had to strip us of our dignity. They had to shut us up and shut us down so that we could not even sit at a table with them and bargain about simple things like classroom size or bulletproof vests for everyone on the police force or letting a pilot just get a few extra hours sleep so he or she can do their job -- their $19,000 a year job. That's how much some rookie pilots on commuter airlines make, maybe even the rookie pilot who flew me here to Madison today. He told me he's stopped hoping for a pay increase. All he's asking for now is enough down time so that he doesn't have to sleep in his car between shifts at O'Hare airport. That's how despicably low we have sunk! The wealthy couldn't be content with just paying this man $19,000 a year. They had to take away his sleep. They had to demean him and dehumanize him and rub his face in it. After all, he's just another slob, isn't he?

And that, my friends, is Corporate America's fatal mistake. But trying to destroy us they have given birth to a movement -- a movement that is becoming a massive, nonviolent revolt across the country. We all knew there had to be a breaking point some day, and that point is upon us. Many people in the media don't understand this. They say they were caught off guard about Egypt, never saw it coming. Now they act surprised and flummoxed about why so many hundreds of thousands have come to Madison over the last three weeks during brutal winter weather. "Why are they all standing out there in the cold?" I mean, there was that election in November and that was supposed to be that!

"There's something happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you ...?"

America ain't broke! The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers. And we aim to fix that compass and steer the ship ourselves from now on. Never forget, as long as that Constitution of ours still stands, it's one person, one vote, and it's the thing the rich hate most about America -- because even though they seem to hold all the money and all the cards, they begrudgingly know this one unshakeable basic fact: There are more of us than there are of them!

Madison, do not retreat. We are with you. We will win together.

CAFO's Can Kill You - No Joke.

2011-02-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

Flies and cockroaches carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria from factory farms, study finds

BY Tom Philpott

25 FEB 2011 3:24 PM

A fly's paradise: Near a giant hog factory in North Carolina, downed pigs fester while sprayers spread untreated manure onto fields.Photo: Steve WingWhat sort of antibiotic-resistant pathogens are growing on factory farms, along with all the cheap pork chops and chicken wings? And what level of threat do they pose to our health?

Well, we know that in total, factory-farm animals consume a jaw-dropping four times as many antibiotics as do people in the United States, thanks to diligent reporting by Maryn McKenna andRalph Loglisci and work by Rep. Louise Slaughter(D-N.Y.).

And we know that a kind of antibiotic-resistant staph infection called MRSA now kills more people than AIDS -- and infects people who never set foot in a hospital, which is the site where MRSA is thought to have originated. We also know, due to the stellar work of Iowa State University researcher Tara Smith, that pigs in confined animal feedlot operations, and the workers who tend them, routinely carry MRSA strains (her paper can be found here).

We also know that, by the FDA's own reckoning, meat on grocery store shelves is routinely infected by pathogens resistant to multiple antibiotics (again, McKenna's work brought the FDA's perhaps intentionally obscure report to light).

And now we know of yet another means by which antibiotic-resistant nasties can make their way from meat factories into the broader community: through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the titanic amounts of manure produced on factory farms. For a paper published last month in the journal Microbiology, researchers from North Carolina State and Kansas State universities took one for the team -- i.e., the public. They did something few of us would want to do: rounded up common flies and roaches hanging around factory hog farms, and tested them to see what kinds of bacteria they were harboring.

Their finding? More than 90 percent of the insects sampled carried forms of the bacteria Enterococci that are resistant to at least one common antibiotic, and often more than one.

Read the rest here.

Boycott Land O'Lakes - GMO Pushers

2011-02-25T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hay Now — It’s Boycott Time: Land O’Lakes, This Means You!

By Citizens for Safe Food and Feed

Farm Wars

By now you’ve heard how President Obama and his Monsanto Administration have plowed through approvals of three more genetically engineered products, including GE alfalfa. Well, here’s something else you should know:

To produce its Round-Up Ready Alfalfa seeds, Monsanto partnered with a company called Forage Genetics International, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Land O’Lakes dairy co-op. That’s right, Land O’Lakes stands to make a fortune from polluting our food supply with untested and unlabeled GMOs.

To protest, you could sign one of the many petitions going around that will likely just be ignored. But there’s another way to show your disapproval of genetically engineered Round-Up Ready Alfalfa: Boycott all Land O’Lakes products — its butter, cheese, eggs, speads, margarine, seasonings, creams, cocoa and cappuccino mixes, sour cream and milk. All of them.

You have the power to economically punish Land O’Lakes — the owner of Forage Genetics, Monsanto’s partner in crime — for its role in polluting the food chain with untested and unlabeled GMOs, increasing the use of toxic glyphosate herbicide, and potentially destroying the organic beef and dairy feed market by loudly refusing to support Land O’Lakes with your dollars.

Tell all your friends to go to all the supermarkets in their area and let the check-out clerks know that they’re boycotting Land O’Lakes products until they are out of the GMO business, loud enough for other shoppers to hear. And next, stop by the store manager’s desk and tell him about the boycott.

Send Land O’Lakes and other companies a clear message: HAY you — We’re FED UP with GMOs in our food supply!

And to make sure Land O’Lakes knows why its sales are down, contact its president and CEO Chris Policinski and let him know you won’t be buying Land O’Lakes products anymore because you don’t want genetically engineered food or animal feed:

Chris Policinski
President and CEO
Land O’Lakes
4001 Lexington Avenue
Arden Hills, MN 55126-2998
651/481-2222

Spread the word…

Taking Root in Detroit

2011-02-09T19:36:00.000-08:00

Be part of the solution. Join us in Detroit:

ReNew, ReVision, Redesign Detroit - A Permaculture Design Course
April 27 - March 8th, 2011Larry Santoyo and Keith D. Johnson, Instructors

An Invitation to Mutually Assured Succession

The concept for the ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit - Permaculture Design Course is inspired by Detroit's efforts to re-imagine itself after decades of slow, steady decline. In Detroit, real green shoots arise in once-empty lots as individuals and organizations create community and market gardens as ways to beautify, create green spaces, provide fresh, nutritious food to city residents, create or recreate community, and pursue self-reliance as entrepreneurs in the food system. While some pursue food justice via gardens, others pursue racial and economic justice. Some do all three, many of them via a garden, or urban farm.

On some streets a rooster may crow, a goat bleat or a duck quack. Pheasants, raccoons, opossums and deer can be seen in various places. But this is not chaos and ruin, it is edge meeting edge, which is where magic happens. This is nature saying, "Join me. I haven't forgotten you." This is opportunity to design a regenerative, sustainable city. But the city is more than fallow fields and squawking chickens.

Old meets new as the Motor City becomes a city with a growing reputation for attracting entrepreneurs, artists and wanderers looking for niches, and filling them. Some are wary of the new, some embrace them. Tension like the surface tension of a bubble stretches until boundaries burst and edges blend creating magic and conflict. Techno whizzes bring the whiz-bang of new frontiers while social media rides a wave of enthusiasm for ethereal connectedness. Grace Lee Boggs sings a song of resistance to powers tangible and hidden while schools descend into chaos and overcrowding, and a new style of education seeks to rise from the ruins of industrialization.

Into the political crisis following the fall of Kwame Kilpatrick rises Mayor Dave Bing, bringing a new game, far from the basketball court, one where the stakes are very much higher. Assembling a cadre of corporations, experts and advisors, the Mayor and his select group set about the designing a future for Detroit. A Detroit from a corporate, growth-oriented view in which the citizens are engaged in meetings without dialogue and are asked to respond to pre-selected questions out of context and without any data, information or expression of what assumptions they are expected to consider. The claim is transparency, but little is known and less stated openly. The city is told people will be incentivized to move to renewed, walkable neighborhoods, but there is no money to make it happen - and they will be left behind with reduced or absent city services, but may do as they please in these left-behind "green" spaces.

An equal and opposite reaction is the response to every action. Not from the top, but from the bottom. Not behind closed, corporate and governmental doors, but in city squares, school auditoriums and neighborhood meeting places. Not in the name of growth, power and profit, but people, sustainability and community. Perhaps the people populating DetroitWorks can create a Perfect Possible Future, but sound principles of ecological engineering suggest this is ulikely. How can sustainability arise from a profit motive? How does a community grow when torn from its roots and transplanted without them? How can a city be the sum of only some of its parts?

An equal and opposite reaction, this is a call and an invitation to all to engage in a discussion and a deseign process where all are equally empowered and the process is open and interactive. We hope this process can lead to an alternative to the current DetroitWorks process, or help create a realignment and redesign of the DetroitWorks process, that has as its primary concerns community and sustainability.

The ReNew, ReVision, ReDesign Detroit PDC will fulfill all content requirements of a PDC, however, it is, possibly, unique in its goal to apply permaculture principles to produce a workable design for a major city as the course Design Project. Detroit's difficult past, it's vibrant entrepreneurial spirit, under-utilized workforce, abundant water, vacant land, and it's industrial past all combine to make Detroit the perfect candidate to be the first large, post-industrial, post-carbon urban area.

Bank Bailouts Explained

2011-01-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

The story of the bank bailouts, and what we've gotten so far in return.
by Omid Malekan

Campus Food Lawns....

2011-01-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Treehugger (and Rachel Cernansky) for this story:

With Support from Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan, Campus Food Co-op Project Set to Launch Nationwide

by Rachel Cernansky, Boulder, Colorado on 01.18.11

FOOD & HEALTH

Image: cofed.org
Thursday marks a big day for the future of food on college campuses around the country. Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, and Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel are part of the launch committee that will help the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFed, empower students to establish co-ops stocked with ethically-sourced and sustainable food on college campuses nationwide.

CoFed grew out of a campaign that successfully blocked the first fast food chain restaurant from opening on the University of California's Berkeley campus. The Berkeley student food co-op opened instead on November 15th and in 2010 alone, six teams on the west coast began working on doing the same at their own schools, from Santa Barbara to Seattle.
Complete with experts ready to help students with everything from retail and dealing with legal issues and incorporation, CoFed "will train a new generation of leaders with experience creating good, clean, fair food businesses and a new generation of eaters who believe in the power of community," said Josh Viertel.
Bill McKibben, 350.org founder, made this enlightened statement: "Colleges around the country are figuring out that they educate their students three times a day about either good food or bad - about a world where local matters, or where food is just a plate full of calories to get you through class. CoFed has the potential to be a crucial part of that process."
More on sustainable food and colleges
Organic Food Can Feed the World, Maine College Students
New Study Finds College Cafeteria Trays Can Increase Both Dish Use and Food Waste
Campus Kitchens Project: Helping Schools Eliminate Food Waste and Combat Hunger

Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk

2011-01-17T20:27:00.000-08:00

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

The American Dre.....er, Nightmare. Time to Wake Up, eh?

2011-01-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

The AMERICAN DREAM is a 30 minute animated film that shows you how you've been scammed by the most basic elements of our government system. All of us Americans strive for the American Dream, and this film shows you why your dream is getting farther and farther away. Do you know how your money is created? Or how banking works? Why did housing prices skyrocket and then plunge? Do you really know what the Federal Reserve System is and how it affects you every single day? THE AMERICAN DREAM takes an entertaining but hard hitting look at how the problems we have today are nothing new, and why leaders throughout our history have warned us and fought against the current type of financial system we have in America today. You will be challenged to investigate some very entrenched and powerful institutions in this nation, and hopefully encouraged to help get our nation back on track.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE MAKERS OF THIS FILM AND BUY A QUALITY DVD!
http://www.theamericandreamfilm.com/

Waste = Food

2010-12-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

An inspiring documentary on the Cradle to Cradle design concept of the chemist Michael Braungart and the architect William McDonough. Winner of the Silver Dragon at the Beijing International Science Film Festival 2006. OUTLINE: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in nations like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill.
But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), production and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution.
• Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource.
• Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment.
Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braungart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption.

Chomsky at Woods Hole, Ma.

2010-12-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

Here's three videos that I found on Vimeo
Noam Chomsky (MIT Emeritus Institute Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics) answers ZMI student questions at Woods Hole part 1

Noam Chomsky answers ZMI student questions from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.
Noam Chomsky ZMI student questions part 2

Noam Chomsky ZMI student questions p2 from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.
Genesis to End Times and Everything Between

Chomsky v2: Genesis to End Times and Everything Between from Permaculture Cooperative on Vimeo.

Lieberman's War on the Press and the First Amendment

2010-12-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

Constitutional law and national security scholars testified on the constitutionality of prosecuting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. [The Espionage Act was passed by Congress in 1917 after the United States entered the First World War. It prescribed a $10,000 fine and 20 years' imprisonment for interfering with the recruiting of troops or the disclosure of information dealing with national defense. Additional penalties were included for the refusal to perform military duty. Over the next few months around 900 went to prison under the Espionage Act.] Among the topics addressed were the nature of journalism, the extent of constitutional protections of the press in protecting the divulgence of classified information, and the amount of information that is categorized as classified. Below we have Ralph Nader and Geoffrey Stone, two of a number speakers addressing the House Judiciary Committee. You can watch all of these videos here.

In response to the actions of Julian Assange and his organization, U.S. Senators Joe Lieberman, John Ensign, and Scott Brown "introduced a bill to amend the Espionage Act in order to facilitate the prosecution of folks like Wikileaks." Critics have noted that "leaking [classified] information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers," and that "Lieberman's proposed solution to WikiLeaks could have implications for journalists reporting on some of the more unsavory practices of the intelligence community."Legal analyst Benjamin Wittes has called the proposed legislation "the worst of both worlds," saying:

It leaves intact the current World War I-era Espionage Act provision, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), a law [with] many problems . . . and then takes a currently well-drawn law and expands its scope to the point that it covers a lot more than the most reckless of media excesses. A lot of good journalism would be a crime under this provision; after all, knowingly and willfully publishing material 'concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government' is no small part of what a good newspaper does.

We are fighting for the life of the First Amendment. Thanks to all those who have joined the fight.

Nobody Wastes Like America

2010-12-12T18:50:00.000-08:00

Iraq war spending vs. spending on renewable energy. The same amount of money could have been invested to supply 2/3 of of current energy consumption

The Elephant in the Room

2010-12-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

See more at http://www.caglecartoons.com/

Military Geoengineering Since 1990 - The Smoking Gun?

2010-12-11T21:01:00.000-08:00

(above, man-made clouds above western Europe)

I've been following this story (and watching the effects) since 1997. I discovered this video at a conservative website (which I would normally not visit but was curious to see what they were discussing) and was surprised to discover (though many conservatives [and lefties] would shudder to think so) that "left" and "right" actually share a fair bit of common ground (gasp!). The trick, of course, is to find and focus on those areas of shared interests and concerns rather than the differences. We simply cannot afford to be divided as we face the enormous challenges of climate weirding, economic upheaval and peak oil.

Rosalind Peterson of California Skywatch was a certified U.S.D.A. Farm Service Agency Crop Loss Adjustor working in more than ten counties throughout California. She now spearheads a watchdog group that monitors uncontrolled experimental weather modification programs, atmospheric heating and testing programs, and ocean and atmospheric experimental geoengineering programs Peterson is at the forefront of the chemtrail research field and how the unexplained patterns that scar our skies are “causing detrimental human health effects and environmental degradation.”

After studying water quality samples for the state of California stretching back some 30 years, Rosalind Peterson found that starting from 1990, water sources were all registering unusual spikes in certain chemicals at precisely the same time, namely arsenic, barium, aluminum, calcium, manganese, magnesium, lead and iron. By measuring the spikes in these chemicals in the water supply with similar spikes in these chemicals in air quality samples, Peterson was able to conclude that the cause was airborne and that it had to be coming from the atmosphere. Peterson notes that mixing aluminum and barium creates clouds and that NASA experiments based around this concept were coinciding with the spikes in such chemicals measured in water and air quality samples.

This is an enlightening, detailed and documented explanation of how chemtrailing is being conducted, who is responsible for it and what the consequences are for our health and the environment.

This last video shows lab results of testing for aluminum and barium in northern California. The tests show as much as 61 times the amount of aluminum. Also very high barium and strontium.
"Aluminum greater than 400 ppm is a problem for most growing plants. The primary target for aluminum is the root cap. Therefore, it has a major impact on root growth and efficiency." (BTW, Monsanto is developing aluminum-resistant GMO crops. http://farmwars.info/?p=2927 , )
This may be the New World Order's "solution" to overpopulation.

Reaping Whirlwinds: Peak Oil and Climate Change in the New Political Climate - By Sharon Astyk :: ASPO-USA: Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas

2010-12-11T16:01:00.000-08:00

Political prognostication is a dangerous game, but one of the certainties of the latest election was that the US will not be enacting any significant federal climate legislation. One could be forgiven for wondering what the election has to do with anything. In the two years previously during which the Democrats controlled Presidency, House and Senate, the US had failed also to enact any climate legislation, but we have moved from the faintest possible hope to none at all.
If inaction is certain on climate change, it may be that all is not entirely hopeless if we reframe the terms to addressing our carbon problem.
Peak-oil activism could accomplish many of the goals of climate activists. Unlike climate change, peak oil doesn’t carry the ideological associations with the left that climate change does. Could peak oil provide a framing narrative for political action to address both climate change and peak oil? Certainly, a great deal would have to happen in order to accomplish this. But peak oil is a sufficiently powerful and pressing issue that its profile could be raised, particularly if current climate activists were willing to change their focus from the means of achieving consensus on climate change to the end of achieving emissions reductions.
Read the rest: Reaping Whirlwinds: Peak Oil and Climate Change in the New Political Climate - By Sharon Astyk :: ASPO-USA: Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas

Sharon Astyk: Can We Fill The [Food] Gap?

2010-12-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

Since Vimeo did not allow me to embed this video here please take a look at it, with its accompanying slides, here:
http://aspo.tv/2010-peak-oil-conference/sharon-astyk-can-we-fill-the-gap/

MN Dept of Agriculture Steals People's Milk

2010-12-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

The USDA says that we are not entitled to choose our own food. If we do so we, or our farmers, can be prosecuted. This is an outrage. We all need to document and expose these aggressive acts. At a time when we need millions more small farmers the corporate ag folks are criminalizing it.

Some sources for more info:
http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/factoryfarms/
http://www.factoryfarmmap.org/
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/factoryfarming/
http://www.animalwelfareapproved.org/
http://www.wspa-international.org/wspaswork/factoryfarming/default.aspx
http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/farm-animal-cruelty/
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/factory-farming-101.html
Read these books and educate yourself before soul-less non-persons take it all away.

Couldn't have said it better...than Calvin & Hobbes

2010-12-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

Calvin and Hobbes

America: The Silence of a Nation

2010-12-04T19:54:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from a speech by: Chris Hedges.

The author spoke at the Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society on January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and USA complicity in Israel's murderous destruction and genocide of the innocent men, women and children of GAZA and the West Bank.

Bernie Exposes Parasite Capitalism

2010-12-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Bernie Sanders: Today as the Middle Class Collapses

It should come as no surprise that the consolidation of wealth is occuring among the more affulent members of our society. Bernie Sanders comments on this, in the video below, in an address to the Senate regarding an extension of the Bush Tax cuts. While figures and statistics could be derived to support either side of this argument, let's analyze some information that's fairly commonplace knowledge.
It is easier to gain wealth, when wealth is already present in your life. Conversly, if you come from a less fortunate socio-economic background, it is rather difficult to aquire wealth. While there are anomalies in the system, it is difficult to aquire wealth without dragging yourself up out of the grave dug through student loans and credit cards. So then, why would we ever attempt to lessen the budget deficit by cutting social programs, such as education, a fundimental building block of society that benefits all classes, as opposed to reinstituting previously held taxes on the wealthest few percent?
By Brett Mullins at http://www.seismologik.com

Recall Toxic Lawmakers to Prevent Toxic Food

2010-12-02T14:46:00.000-08:00

US Recall News
Interview with Joel Salatin
November 26, 2009
http://www.usrecallnews.com/2009/11/interview-with-joel-salatin.html

Food recalls seem out of control these days. We’re not just seeing a few sporadic cases of food poisoning here and there anymore. I regularly publish recall alerts for hundreds of thousands of pounds of beef and poultry. Here’s a recent one for half-a-million pounds of beef possibly contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg if you factor in the pages upon pages of salmonella recalls.
It’s enough to make you scared of eating anything. In fact, it is enough to make us call our legislators and demand action! The problem is – we don’t ask ourselves, or our legislators, if we’re taking the “right” action. What we end up with are misguided attempts at regulation and laws written by academia and corporate agriculture, such as NAIS. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask ourselves if we’re treating the symptom or the problem. One man who has done just that is Joel Salatin. I have been granted the honor of asking Mr. Salatin a few questions about our nation’s food supply – especially in regard to food safety – and without further digression I’d like to share his responses with you.

Q.
Do you think there are more cases of food-borne illnesses per-capita these days, or are we just hearing about more of them due to the media and better reporting by government agencies?
A.
    I believe we’re having far more per capita. While it’s true we’ve always had food issues, from botulism poisoning to undulant fever, the historic figures are very, very low. If you add obesity and Type II diabetes into the mix – in a way, they are pathogenically caused as well because the food is not real food; it’s pseudo food. Amazingly, we’ve become a culture that considers Twinkies, Cocoa Puffs, and Mountain Dew safe, but raw milk and compost-grown tomatoes unsafe. The fact that we have an entirely new lexicon of salmonella, listeria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, campylobacter, E. coli, etc. speaks to the new generation and penetration of the current food borne pathogen situation. Furthermore, it’s hard to empirically measure secondary results of tainted food, like the things that occur when people eat genetically modified organisms, irradiated foods, or pasteurized milk. Some of these things take a while to develop into problems, just like infertile frogs, three-legged salamanders, and crippled eagles did not happen immediately when DDT was developed. The long lag between cause and effect is hard to measure, and very hard to quantify in today’s fast-paced data and news system.

Q.
Do you see a legitimate, defensible role for state and federal government agencies to play in protecting American consumers from food-borne illnesses? If so, what would that be?
A.
    No. This side of eternity, a perfect system does not exist. To assume that government agents are more trustworthy than business, or journalists, or farmers, is inherently ridiculous. Unscrupulous people exist in all vocations. That is why we have third-party independent accreditation that works fairly well in many areas, from certified General Motors mechanics to schools to Triple A to Underwriters Laboratories. Every time the government gets involved with these things, rather than being voluntary, they move into the realm of force, and that completely changes the dynamics. When the Sheriff shows up with an arrest warrant and a gun, that’s a very different dynamic than Triple A sending me a letter telling me they will drop my two star hotel status because their inspection found wrinkled sheets in Room 129. And that extra force allows the independent certification status to assume inordinate power, which ultimately attracts more unseemly characters to its model – both the regulators and the regulated. It all boils down to trust. Indeed, on my end I see incredible abuses from regulators, especially toward small operators. When people say we just need to create more honesty in the government program, they are speaking from incredible naïveté, in my opinion. We have more dirty food, more centralized mega-processing facilities, and less nutrition now than we did in 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt railed against the packing industry exposed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Both Sinclair, and to a great extent Roosevelt, wanted much bigger government and far more intrusion into the marketplace. Within six months after The Jungle hit America’s shelves, meat sales dropped nearly 50 percent. Rather than waiting for this marketplace spanking to have its effect, Roosevelt and the industry created the Food Safety and Inspection Service. That organization and the incredible power it wields have systematically banished the embedded butcher, baker, and candlestick maker from America’s villages. We’ve had three overhauls of the system: 1947, 1967, and 2000 – and each time, within 18 months, the US lost half of its smaller abattoirs. People must realize that giving that power to the government is inherently flawed because it will inevitably attract abuses that more gentle, voluntary, privately-operated systems do not.

Q.
Is there another country in the world that has a safer, more equitable food production system that allows for corporate agribusiness to thrive without putting small farmers out of business and without endangering consumers? If so, what can we learn from them?
A.
    My sense is that most developing countries have far more food freedom. Whether it’s safer or not, I don’t know. But it’s certainly no worse. The point is that you can’t define safety necessarily. I consider pastured livestock and poultry safe; the poultry industry considers me a bioterrorist because the Red-winged Blackbirds commiserate with my chickens and will transport their diseases to the since-based, environmentally- controlled Tyson chicken houses, endangering the entire planet’s food system. We’re seeing studies coming out of land grant colleges now saying that meat laced with antibiotic residues due to subtherapeutic antibiotic feeding in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations is safer for consumers than meat carrying no drug residues. The fact is that those of us promoting a heritage-based food system are under assault by the industrial-governmental fraternity just as surely as Native Americans were nearly annihilated by government policy in earlier times. Largely for the same reasons. They threatened the American way of life (read Wall Street there) or they jeopardized decent western contrivances like Roberts Rules of Order and cobblestone streets. Read what the founders of our country said about the Naive American – “just barbarians”. By whose standard? And read what the government-industrial food complex says about heritage food – it endangers the world food supply because it’s not science-based; it plays to ignorant and duplicitous consumers; it’s a waste of land because we can’t afford these low production numbers, etc.

    Historically, respecting an indigenous view while allowing techno-innovation has not been possible. The technology conquers and subjugates the heritage-based. The European Union is attacking heritage-based Polish sausage and Swiss artisanal cheese with a passion. My friends in China tell me that a thriving local food system exists there that would put America to shame. And people not far removed from the land know the difference between the good local stuff and the junk. They export the junk and eat the good stuff themselves. Oh that Americas would have such discernment.

Q.
What would a “sane” Food Bill look like to you? Or would there even be one?
A.
    We wouldn’t even have a Food Bill if I were in charge. The first response to that is: “But then the big corporations would just take over and it would be worse than today. After all, the free market is why we’re in the mess we’re in.” On the contrary, the U.S. has not had anything resembling a free market for well over a century. You could argue that ever since that big-governmenter Abraham Lincoln created the US Department of Agriculture, we’ve had inappropriate government agents meddling in the food system. The fact is that the terrible food things that have been developed have come at the financing, either directly or through research, of the government. Why does Monsanto get to park their recruitment bus on the campus of Virginia Tech for several days each year – for free? I personally have had numerous professors from Virginia Tech visit our farm and express great interest in researching some of our environmentally-friendly practices, but lament that they can only get seed funding from multi-national corporations so they can’t do this kind of research. Again, the framers of the Constitution very carefully spelled out the duties of the government, and they were extremely minimal. The reason was that as soon as an area of the culture comes under the authority of the government, that area quickly develops cronyism, a big business agenda, and lack of respect for dissenters, which is now what the local food movement represents. I would call it a freedom of food choice movement.

    In my book Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal, I quote at length from the written testimony of government food police who make no secret that they believe consumers cannot be trusted to make their food decisions. If choosing how to feed my internal three-trillion member bacterial community that is responsible for my health and energy doesn’t represent the most basic Malthusian desire for personal autonomy, I don’t know what does. The Constitution guarantees the Right of Contract, and yet the food police routinely waltz between the farmer and consumer, waving thousands of pages of regulations, and bringing along agents carrying big badges and sidearms to interfere with the right of contract. If we truly allowed unfettered right of contract, the entrepreneurial explosion of creative heritage-based food offered to the local marketplace would topple America’s industrial food complex.
    The only reason America’s food is as industrial and non-local as it is, is because government force encourages such a system. Absent that meddling, thousands and thousands of local food entrepreneurs would spin circles around the subsidized, corporate-welfared food system.

Q.
Why don’t small farmers band together to lobby Washington? Could the combined power of thousands of small farmers compete with the centralized power of a few corporate interests?
A.
    Lobbying takes time. Lots of time. And numbers. And money. I’ve been trying all my life to encourage this, but like everyone else, I don’t have the time, money, or numbers to get it done. And too many small farmers still believe the government is a sugar daddy. So more than half the potential supporters are lobbying to get subsidies for small farmers instead of big farmers. Why don’t we forget about subsidies? Period. But we’ve raised a generation acculturated to believe government candy is free, and justified. And then certified organics also split up the small farmer group. That probably more than anything splintered what could have been a significant block. Now much of the time and energy that could be devoted to just creating market freedom are being siphoned off in suits and protests against industrial organics. We just still have way too many people who trust the government and think business is inherently evil.

Q.
Are house bills H.R. 875 (NAIS) and H.R. 759 (FDA Globalization Act) still a threat to small farmers and sustenance farmers or are people overreacting?
A.
    First, let me be clear that the industrial food agenda, along with its complicit government fraternity, is evil. These folks lie, steal, cheat, kill, whatever. It’s an evil agenda, with evil planners, evil strategists, and evil execution. Certainly some sincere-minded and honest folks are caught up in it, but it behooves us to appreciate the evil ambition of these people. When Monsanto purposely used geriatric rats in their GMO feeding trials for the FDA, or cleverly falsified data to receive rBGH approval and infected and afflicted hundreds of thousands of dairy cows with mastitis, and then used crooked judges to agree that placing rBGH-free on milk labels on artisanal milk actually harmed consumers – that bespeaks an evil, deceptive company and agenda. And the rest of their cohorts are just like them. So nobody should think that these outfits have a benign, population-friendly agenda. And nobody should underestimate their connivances to advance their agenda.

    That said, here’s my rule for legislation: if Monsanto is for it, I’m against it. If Monsanto is against it, I’m for it. Ditto large meat packers, the USDA, etc. A person is known by the company he keeps. These outfits aren’t Jesus spending time with sinners to bring them to repentance. They are Devils trying to dupe and destroy ecological, economic, and social wholesomeness. This test for legislation can save you lots of time and consternation trying to figure out all the details. I don’t have enough to time to read it all or understand the legalese. I listen to people I trust and assume the enemy hasn’t suddenly converted.

    Thanks for asking these questions, and I hope my answers aren’t too rambling, but in today’s world, you can’t take these positions without some fleshing out and context.

    Happy Thanksgiving.
    Best regards,
    Joel Salatin
    Polyface Farm

Sacred Demise - Interview w/ Carolyn Baker

2010-12-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

From Peak Moment Television
Quoting Janaia Donaldson, interviewer...
"Carolyn Baker is the author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, and principal of Speaking Truth to Power website. I first read one of her essays three or four years ago in Michael Ruppert’s From The Wilderness site, and was impressed by her attention to our psychological and emotional experience as collapse touches our lives (and that was before the mortgage meltdown and 2008 financial crash!).
In our conversation, Carolyn shared a concise, well-thought-out summary of her perspectives. As a historian with ten years of college-level teaching, she has a sharp eye for current events that are leading indicators of the collapse we’re feeling and seeing, but which is mostly absent from mainstream corporate-owned media.
But, as she pointed out, the recognition of these times is coming into the mainstream. Commentators are using words like “collapse” and “unprecedented.” Even the New York governor recently stated that “we’ve crossed the Rubicon” and “we’re dealing with something much bigger than a recession.”
I think of Carolyn as a premier collapse-watcher. Her daily email digest is an ongoing chronicle with links to multiple changing collapse indicators — economic, political, financial, homelessness, greed, corruption, spin, inequality. They’re examples of what she calls the Old Story that is no longer working, a story based in separation from nature and each other, a story in which the vision of endless economic growth is now hitting the wall.
If this were all her digest included, it could be pretty dark and depressing as a steady diet. But she also includes links to those preparing for the collapse — like the Transition movement, local food producers, permaculturists, communities creating alternate currencies and more.
Such people are living out aspects of the New Story, a culture based on reconnection to nature, including a reclaiming of our indigenous selves. We may not live to see that new culture in its fullness, but many people are finding it meaningful to plant seeds for it.
She provides her perspective on why the demise is sacred, starting with a definition of sacred as “set apart, part of something greater.” This big picture can help counterbalance watching institutions crumble all around us. We are in a process unlike any that humans have experienced. Part of something greater.
But Carolyn is not just a historian. She’s also a psychologist. The heart of Sacred Demise is psychological and emotional preparation. She asserts, with support from Carl Jung and Victor Frankl, that having meaning is essential for humans. In the book she provides reflective exercises to enable our seeing how we’ve responded to prior losses, initiations, and challenges in our lives, and how to carry that learning into what lies ahead. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book are the well-chosen, soul-touching poems sprinkled throughout.
Like Psyche sorting all the seeds, Carolyn shines as a discerning sifter of information, sharing the essential and life-giving seeds with her readers.
Check out her website Speaking Truth to Power, where you’ll find plenty of essays, her books, daily email digest subscription (my primary information source for what’s going on in the world), transition counseling services, and online courses for navigating the collapse. I think you’ll find a seed or two worth pursuing there."

Taking Back Our Lives from the Wall Street Mafia

2010-11-25T09:01:00.000-08:00

“Get rid of Wall Street!” says David C. Korten, author of Agenda for a New Economy and The Great Turning. Wall Street is about phantom wealth — real wealth is about happy, healthy families, local living economies in balance with Earth’s resources, and caring, resilient communities that provide life’s basics, like food, shelter, and education. To do that, we must change the rules to reduce the power of corporations, the politicians in their pocket, and a destructive money system. (www.davidkorten.org). (From Peak Moment TV)

Prosecute Bush (et. al.) for Murder

2010-11-16T04:33:00.000-08:00

Famed Charles Manson prosecutor and three time #1 New York Times bestselling author Vincent Bugliosi stars in this most powerful, explosive, and thought-provoking documentary. In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

More Homework for Progressives

2010-11-16T04:19:00.000-08:00

... it speaks words to my feelings about the hypocrisy of our government, and the books presents a compelling and full spectrum of information that should tug at the conscience of the true Christians in this country - conservative, liberal, or other. It serves as a reminder that "Republican" and "Christian" aren't necessarily the same thing, and that proclaimed "Christian" policies certainly don't reflect the message of a prophet who gave to the poor and pardoned the sinful. In fact, as Dr. Meyers points out, Jesus saved his white-hot anger for the sins of religious hypocrisy.

Alterman, journalist and proud liberal, readies his readership for the coming day when the word liberal is given a wash and rinse after being slimed by conservatives. Arguing that liberals are so downtrodden they may have forgotten who they are, Alterman provides a refresher course, explaining what liberals believe and why liberal policies are reviled, even though most people approve of their basic ideas as long as they aren’t identified as liberal. His insightful examination of so-called liberal problems (secularism, abortion, dovish foreign policy) leads into an extensive and sharp rebuttal of all the crimes attributed to liberals. In ironically entitled chapters—“Why Do Liberals Hate Patriotism?” “Why Do Liberals Blame America First?”—Alterman fights back with facts and wit. He busts myths in “Why Do Liberals Deny America Was Founded as a Christian Nation?” but he owns up to the fact that liberals do like to tax and spend (conservatives do, too, just on different things). Readers of Alterman’s What Liberal Media? (2003) will find some familiar points here, but this rock-’em, sock-’em defense effectively proves that not all liberals are wimps.

Homework for Progressives

2010-11-16T04:09:00.000-08:00

The religious right is gaining enormous power in the United States, thanks to a well-organized, media-savvy movement with powerful friends in high places. Yet many Americans — both observant and secular — are alarmed by this trend, especially by the religious right's attempts to erase the boundary between church and state and re-make the U.S. into a Christian nation. But most Americans lack the tools for arguing with the religious right, especially when fundamentalist conservatives claim their tradition started with the Framers of The Constitution. Fighting Words is a a tool-kit for arguing, especially for those of us who haven't read the founding documents of this nation since grade school. Robin Morgan has assembled a lively, accessible, eye-opening primer and reference tool, a "verbal karate" guide, revealing what the Framers and many other leading Americans really believed — in their own words — rescuing the Founders from images of dusty, pompous old men in powdered wigs, and resurrecting them as the revolutionaries they truly were: a hodgepodge of freethinkers, Deists, agnostics, Christians, atheists, and Freemasons — and they were radicals as well.

As a Harvard Divinity School graduate, his investigation of the Christian Right agenda is even more alarming given its lucidity. Citing the psychology and sociology of fascism and cults, including the work of German historian Fritz Stern, Hedges draws striking parallels between 20th-century totalitarian movements and the highly organized, well-funded "dominionist movement," an influential theocratic sect within the country's huge evangelical population. Rooted in a radical Calvinism, and wrapping its apocalyptic, vehemently militant, sexist and homophobic vision in patriotic and religious rhetoric, dominionism seeks absolute power in a Christian state. Hedges's reportage profiles both former members and true believers, evoking the particular characteristics of this American variant of fascism. His argument against what he sees as a democratic society's suicidal tolerance for intolerant movements has its own paradoxes. But this urgent book forcefully illuminates what many across the political spectrum will recognize as a serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society.

"Chris Hedges may be the most credible figure yet to detect real-life fascism in the Red America of megachurches, gay-marriage bans and Left Behind books. American Fascists is at its most daring when it enunciates...the perversities that are obvious to those of us not beholden to political exigencies." -- New York Observer

"Throughout, Hedges documents, and reflects on, what he feels is the bigotry, the homophobia, the fanaticism -- and the deeply un-Christian ideology -- that pose clear and present danger in our previous and fragile republic." -- O, the Oprah magazine

"This is a powerful book that looks inside some of the darkest movements on American soil." -- Time Out New York

More Books to Wake You Up

2010-11-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

Books to Wake You Up

2010-11-16T03:53:00.000-08:00

AlterNet editor Joshua Holland demolishes the Right's biggest and most outrageous myths about the economy
Taxes kill growth. Labor unions hurt their members. Government regulation destroys jobs. These are just a few of the biggest lies in the web of misinformation spun by conservatives and the Chamber of Commerce. Holland's book dissects each malicious fiction to show how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy—wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxes, wrong on trade.

Takes down old and new conservative myths about the economy, including healthcare, stimulus, progressive taxes, Wall Street regulation, and more
Filled with recent quotes from conservative politicians and pundits, from the misleading to the laughable to the totally outrageous
Tackles specific aspects of the Republicans' economic agenda, including their 2010 alternatives to Obama's budget
Deftly written and rigorously documented by Alternet senior writer/editor Joshua Holland

With the economy set to be the driving issue before and after the 2010 midterm elections, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy sets the record straight on every part of the conservatives' economic agenda.

From the Back Cover

"Who knew that the daily gusher of corporate myths and right-wing lies could be boiled down to just fifteen big ones? Holland and Team AlterNet toss up all fifteen for us and knock 'em out of the park, while also teaching us how to detect any new twists they might throw out at us. What a handy book!"
—Jim Hightower, author of Swim against the Current "A valuable antidote to the brazen lies, calculated deceptions, and vacuous sound bites of those who want to use our government for their own gain rather than to benefit us all."
—David Cay Johnston, author of Free Lunch
"Most of the basic facts that people need to know about the economy are straightforward, as this book demonstrates. It is only the bad guys who make things complicated."
—Dean Baker, author of False Profits
"Joshua Holland's brilliant, data-rich, accessible, and in-your-face book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy, should be required reading for every American livid about floating a political-financial system that benefits powerful institutionsand megalomaniac leaders."
—Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage
By nearly every conceivable standard, the American economy has gotten steadily worse from the time Reagan took office to the present. The anti-government, pro-corporate agenda has damaged our nation for too long, and yet, turn on Fox News and you'll find them still hawking the same foolish theories, baseless accusations, and bald-faced lies. The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy dissects each malicious fiction to reveal how the Right is just plain wrong on the economy — wrong on jobs, wrong on the deficit, wrong on taxes, wrong on trade. However, Holland goes beyond the most recent Republican talking points to explain the issues with the depth and nuance that you'll need to see through the nonsense rhetoric you're going to hear about the nation's economy for some time to come.

Idiocracy Begins at Home

2010-11-16T03:41:00.000-08:00

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
The dramatic story behind the most audacious power grab in American history

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class—made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding—has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers. The crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they’ve hijacked America’s political and economic life.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi here unravels the whole fiendish story, digging beyond the headlines to get into the deeper roots and wider implications of the rise of the grifters. He traces the movement’s origins to the cult of Ayn Rand and her most influential—and possibly weirdest—acolyte, Alan Greenspan, and offers fresh reporting on the backroom deals that decided the winners and losers in the government bailouts. He uncovers the hidden commodities bubble that transferred billions of dollars to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world, and he shows how finance dominates politics, from the story of investment bankers auctioning off America’s infrastructure to an inside account of the high-stakes battle for health-care reform—a battle the true reformers lost. Finally, he tells the story of Goldman Sachs, the “vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”

Taibbi has combined deep sources, trailblazing reportage, and provocative analysis to create the most lucid, emotionally galvanizing, and scathingly funny account yet written of the ongoing political and financial crisis in America. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the labyrinthine inner workings of politics and finance in this country, and the profound consequences for us all.

A Century of Challenges

2010-11-14T20:14:00.000-08:00

Just attended the 2010 International Conference on Sustainability in Grand Rapids where we heard Nicole Foss address some VERY serious issues. The video below is a small snip from a much longer video available at her blog.
To order the interactive video presentation (only $12.50!! ) of her lecture "A Century of Challenges" , PLEASE CLICK HERE

Nicole Foss is senior editor for The Automatic Earth (where she writes as Stoneleigh) and former editor of The Oil Drum - Canada. Foss recently completed a speaking tour of North America and Europe where she described the interaction of peak oil and debt deflation. Foss also presents at the ASPO-USA conference and the European Biodiversity Conference in Brussels.

You can also listen to an MP3 of her talk here.

Quantitative Easing Explained

2010-11-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

Your Farmer Behind Bars?

2010-11-13T04:21:00.000-08:00

What S510 Could Do

By Stanley A. Fishman, Author of Tender Grassfed Meat
There are many reasons to oppose S510, the so-called “Food Safety” bill that will come up in the Senate after the election.
It will do nothing to improve actual food safety, relying almost totally on burdensome paperwork.
It will drive small farmers out of business, because they do not have the resources to comply with the crushing burden of meaningless paperwork that will be required.
The paperwork will have to be done to the satisfaction of regulatory agencies that are heavily influenced by the large agricultural companies, who will be able to use the government to destroy their smaller competition. This has happened before, when the adoption of paperwork-heavy HAACP standards led to the closing of most of the small meat processing plants in the nation. Of course, their business was taken by the giants, and most American meat is packed at huge plants owned by a handful of large companies. And there are more meat contamination outbreaks than ever before.
It will give the FDA the power to control every aspect of how crops are grown. The FDA favors genetically modified crops, pesticides, chemical disinfectants and preservatives, and radiating produce. The FDA would have the power to force these industrial methods on every farmer in America.
But perhaps the worst thing S510 would do is create criminal penalties that could result in 10 years in federal prison, and huge fines. People could go to prison for farming, and for selling food, or possibly even receiving food.
But surely the government of the United States of America, a country that prizes liberty, freedom, and justice, would not send people to prison for a technical violation that hurts no one?
Yes it would, and yes it has. Three people were sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison for importing frozen lobster tails that were wrapped in plastic, not cardboard.

Prison for Packaging

There is a federal law called the Lacey Act. The Lacey Act prohibits the importation of seafood in violation of foreign laws, and imposes criminal penalties for its violation.
A small group of businesspeople had been importing lobster tails from Honduras for ten years, without problems. Every shipment was passed by the FDA and Customs. In 1999 they were arrested and charged with violation of the Lacey Act. According to the government, they had violated Honduran law by packaging the frozen lobster tails in plastic, rather than cardboard. They were also accused of violating other provisions that turned out to pertain to turtles, not lobsters. These lobsters were not an endangered species.
The government sought heavy prison terms. This case was such an outrage that some of the finest lawyers and organizations in the nation came to the defense of these businesspeople, and gave them the best representation possible. The Attorney General of Honduras sent a letter to the court, stating that the resolution in question was void and had never been in effect. His letter was backed by a decision of the Honduran Supreme Court.
Since no Honduran law had been broken, since nobody could possibly be harmed by packing frozen lobster tails in plastic rather than cardboard, surely our government would drop the case?
They did not.

What about the trial judge, surely he would dismiss the case?
He did not.
Three defendants were sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison each, and fined heavily. Their business was destroyed. They were separated from their families. They lost their liberty.
They appealed their convictions. Surely the Court of Appeals would overturn this unjust conviction, and set them free?
They did not.
The three defendants appealed their conviction to the United States Supreme Court. Surely the highest court in our land, the court that is charged with enforcing the constitution, would overturn the Court of Appeals, and do justice?
They did not.
The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the case.

Prison for Selling Any Food the Government Considers “Adulterated”?

This “lobster tail” case has established that our Federal government will enforce a bad law. This case has also shown that the courts will not stop the government from doing so. A bad law is a threat to the freedom of everyone.
It is expected that S510 will include, as an amendment, Senate Bill 3767. The amended version of S3767 states in part that:
“Any person who knowingly violates subsection (a),(b), (c),(k), or (v) of section 301 with respect to any food and with conscious or reckless disregard of a risk of death or serious bodily injury shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both”.
The included subsections of section 301 prohibit the introduction of adulterated or misbranded food into interstate commerce, misbranding or adulterating food in interstate commerce, and receiving misbranded or adulterated substances into interstate commerce, among other things.
This means that anyone who sells, produces, or possibly even receives “adulterated” or “misbranded” food with “conscious or reckless disregard of a risk of death or serious bodily injury” could go to jail for ten years.
“Adulterated” has been defined as including any food or that is “unsafe.”
“Misbranded” has been defined as including any food that is marketed or labeled in a way that is “deceptive.”
The statute is very broad. It uses the phrase “a risk of death or serious injury.” This statute does not require a “substantial risk” for prison terms to apply.
It only requires “a risk.” Any risk.
This could mean any risk, even a one in a million risk. Even one in ten million. Even one in a billion.
All the government would have to do is show ANY possibility of death or serious bodily injury.
It is impossible to eat ANYTHING without at least having some tiny chance of death or serious injury, due to choking, allergic reaction, etc.
There is a real danger that all the government would have to do to imprison someone for 10 years is to show that they sold, raised, or even received food that the government considers “adulterated” or “misbranded,” and that they knew the government considered the food to be “adulterated” or “misbranded.”
While I hope the courts would not interpret the law that broadly, and they should not, the lobster tail case shows that we cannot rely on the courts to protect us from a bad law.

The End of Raw Milk?

How does this relate to raw milk? “Adulterated,” according to the FDA would include any substance that the FDA considers “unsafe.” The FDA considers raw milk and cream to be “unsafe.”
The FDA, on its website, warns that the consumption of raw milk can cause “serious illness.” In fact, the FDA‘s page on raw milk warns of a risk of death, as well as serious harm to health. The FDA considers ALL raw milk to be unsafe.
The FDA sent a letter to Morningland Dairy stating that their recalled raw cheese products were an “acute, life threatening danger to health.” This statement was included in the FDA letter, despite the fact that nobody has ever gotten sick from a Morningland Dairy product. The only basis for the danger cited in the letter were tests of cheese that was seized in the infamous Rawsome raid, in California. The cheese was placed in unrefrigerated coolers when seized, in the sweltering heat of a Los Angeles summer. It is unknown if the cheese was even refrigerated before being tested, seven weeks later. The tests were done by the California Department of Agriculture, SEVEN WEEKS after the cheese was seized. No samples were sent to the dairy for independent testing, as required by FDA regulations. But the FDA had no problem in relying on these tests as the basis for their letter, and for their persecution of Morningland Dairy.
These actions show what the FDA will do when they see a chance to attack any raw milk product.
The FDA has also stopped the renowned Estrella Family Creamery in Washington from selling their award winning raw cheese, claiming that the cheese is “adulterated.” Nobody has ever gotten sick from the cheese of the Estrella Family Creamery either, but that does not seem to matter to the FDA.
The persecution of the Morningland Dairy and the Estrella Family Creamery, and others, shows that the FDA will go after small raw dairy producers, even when no one has been harmed.
In addition to the “adulterated” issue, anyone who sells and markets raw milk and says almost anything about the product is in danger of being accused of selling a “misbranded” product, if the FDA considers even a single statement to be “deceptive.”
If S510 passes, would the FDA try to jail farmers who produce raw milk or cheese? I certainly hope not, but I do not want the FDA to have the power to do so.
Given the broad and vague language of the statute, any food or supplement that the government decides is “adulterated” or “misbranded” could trigger criminal penalties, if the government decides that the food or supplement carries a risk of death or serious bodily injury.
S510 must be defeated. If any part of it passes, it must be amended to remove criminal penalties and to exclude small farmers and producers.
This article is not intended to be legal advice. The proposed laws have not yet been passed, and hopefully they won’t be.
Stan Fishman is the author of Tender Grassfed Meat. His book describes in detail how to cook grassfed beef, grassfed bison, and grassfed lamb. The book follows the nutritional principles of Dr. Weston A. Price, and uses only the best natural ingredients. The book can be purchased through Amazon.com. Follow Stanley’s blog at Tendergrassfedmeat.com.

Action you can Take

If you would like to preserve America’s small farms, there is something you can do. See the Action Alert on Food Safety Modernization Act released by the Weston A. Price Foundation.
In regards to the dangers S510 poses to raw milk farmers, see also, FDA’s Ace in the Hole by Pete Kennedy of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
Send this post to your US Senators office, directly to the legislative aid that works on agricultural or consumer protection issues. And, please share it with your friends using the share buttons, below.

10 Million Americans May Not Have Heat This Winter

2010-11-13T04:10:00.000-08:00

Will You Be Able To Heat Your Home This Winter? Millions Of American Families Will Not
by Michael Snyder - Economic Collapse

Will you have a warm house to come home to this winter? If so, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate. With the United States experiencing the highest levels of long-term unemployment that it has seen since the Great Depression, millions of Americans families are simply out of money. All across America this winter, families are going to be forced to make some heart breaking decisions. For many, the choice will come down to either heating their home or putting food on the table. According to the National Energy Assistance Directors' Association, more than 10 million U.S. households will not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter without assistance, which would be a new all-time record. So, if you are in a position to easily heat your home this winter, be very, very thankful. The number of American families that cannot even afford the basics of life is growing by the day.
As I have written about previously, millions of formerly middle class families have been absolutely ripped apart by this economy. There simply is not nearly enough jobs for everyone, and those who have been left on the outside looking in are becoming increasingly desperate.
Of course there is federal help available, but it doesn't go nearly far enough for those who are truly in need. For example, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) assists low income households in paying their home heating bills. However, the truth is that usually only a small fraction of heating costs are covered. Nationally, the average benefit represents only about 8% of the average winter heating bill.
Last winter, a record number of U.S. households applied for home heating assistance. In fact, in 17 states application requests were up more than 20% from the year before. Due to rapidly spreading poverty, the number of Americans filing for heating assistance is expected to increase even more this winter.
If you cannot heat your home, it is a really, really big deal. In 2009, a 93-year-old man in Bay City, Michigan actually froze to death inside his own home.
These days, many American families are finding that their budgets are stretched beyond the breaking point. Most Americans take it for granted that they will be able to heat their homes, but for the poor, being able to have enough heat is a great blessing. Today, the poorest 20 percent of Americans spend more than 50 percent of their after-tax income on food and energy....

So can't the U.S. federal government just pay for everyone to have heat?
No, they cannot.
The truth is that as millions upon millions of Americans jump on to the "safety net" it is rapidly approaching the breaking point. For example, 42 million Americans are now enrolled in the food stamp program. That is a whole lot of hungry mouths to try to feed every month.
Not that feeding hungry people should not be a priority. It is just that the U.S. government continues to spend way, way more money than it is bringing in and is basically bankrupt at this point.
So what about the states? Can't they step in and help?
No, the truth is that most U.S. states are absolute basket cases financially. A recent article that I wrote about the state of California illustrates this point very well.
Unfortunately, most Americans families are just going to have to scrape by the best that they can.
It is hard to even describe the horrible pain that many Americans are experiencing because of this economy. The following story from the Unemployed-Friends website is from a woman named Leetah who is desperately hoping that her family will be able to get through this upcoming winter....
The place I live in right now has no jobs and no places to live. My fiance, Lloyd, and I have been looking for anything but he lost his job from McDonald's and the factories (the only jobs to make a living off of) consider him an insurance liability. I can't get hired to a factory because of I was fired from our major factory for attendance (I had to miss 3 days of work because I was sick). So we are moving to the Edmond/OKC region where we are hoping to find a job and a place with running water and heating. We've spent the last few years without heat and running water and so having a place with water and heat would be heaven.
Winter is coming up fast and I am so afraid. Last winter we almost died from the cold and now the thought of cold makes my throat close up and my heart pound. But it isn't just ourselves we are looking out for, we have our dog too. Our wonderful APBT Maggie who is 2-years-old and has been with us since she was 5-months-old. She's our baby girl and we can't lose her. We almost lost her to the cold too and it scared me so much. We are going to be living in our car soon with our dog.
I am hoping to be able to keep our food stamps in the new city so we can still eat. I have already applied for ten+ jobs and nothing yet but I am keeping my hopes up. Hopefully it will get easier to find a job once we get there. Then we just have to save up and then we can afford an apartment. Now finding an apartment with my awesome dog is another story.

Please say a prayer for those who are hurting this winter. This economy has pushed millions of Americans to the absolute edge of despair. Another participant on the Unemployed-Friends forum named Sanskay sounds like the hard reality of her situation has sucked almost all of the life out of her....
I met the love of my life when I was 19, and we moved in together. He had an excellent job and savings (he was several years older than me), and we decided together that I would stay home. When I was 26, he started feeling sick to his stomach a lot. By the time he was diagnosed with colon cancer (at 33!), it had already spread to his liver. We lost everything to medical bills, treatments, and medications. We fought so hard to prolong his life, and we drained his (our) savings accounts to try to cure him. Well, it did not work. He died in agony.
So then I was 26 and a widow and penniless, and I had not worked since college. I moved back in with my parents and decided to go back to school. Everyone told me that the health care fields were all in demand, so I studied to become an ultrasound tech. I excelled in my classes. It took me two years to do all of my prerequisites before I entered the program. By then, the recession had hit, but everyone at the school told me that I would have no problem landing a job as long as I was willing to move. This ended up being all lies. By that point, they knew that they were having trouble placing grads from 2007 and 2008, but that was never mentioned to me. This was a community college with a good reputation, and not some for-profit school, and I believed them.
I graduated last year (2009) and have been looking for employment as an ultrasound tech for over a year now. I have applied to over 400 jobs. I have gained three in-person interviews and seven phone interviews. None of them have amounted to anything. I am still unemployed. There are many per-diem (they'll call you when they need you, and you have no guaranteed hours) jobs listed, but I cannot move unless I have a full-time job.
It's awful because they are still funneling people into the program and telling them that as long as they're willing to move out of state, they will have no trouble finding full-time work. They're just concerned with keeping the seats full and they don't care if their new graduates are unable to find work. I feel betrayed.
So now I'm 30 years old and still living in my parents' basement, as I have been for years now. I feel like such a loser. My parents paid for my community college degree and my registry exams, which are all worthless now. It's been so long that I have scanned anyone that I don't remember what to do for some of the exams any longer, not to mention what the pathologies look like.
I haven't applied to a job in a month. The official unemployment rate in my county is 15.6%, but the "unofficial" unemployment rate (REAL unemployment rate!) is easily double that. There is no work here, and I have no money to move, and no salable skills even if I had the money to move.
I miss my husband terribly. Suicide has definitely crossed my mind many times, but it would literally kill my mother if I did anything rash (she has a heart condition and can't allow herself to become over-excited or her heart starts beating out of rhythm, which could cause a heart attack). It seems most days that the best years of my life are far behind me and that I have nothing to look forward to anymore.
Hopefully as you read these kinds of stories you feel your heart move. The truth is that it could be any of us that are next.
In this economy, no jobs is secure. In this economy, no business is secure. There is no guarantee that the income that you are enjoying today is going to be there tomorrow.
The U.S. economic system is slowly dying. There are many that are cheering this downfall, but the cold, hard truth is that tens of millions of us are going to experience horrible economic pain as the economy unravels.
It is not going to be a fun time. So count your blessings while you still have them.

News from Automatic Earth - Nicole Foss

2010-11-13T04:07:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama’s Debt Commission Is An Exercise In Futility – The U.S. Government Will Never Have A Balanced Budget Ever Again
by Michael Snyder - Economic Collapse

In a surprise move, the co-chairs of Barack Obama's national debt commission released their preliminary proposals to the media on Wednesday. The proposals are actually quite modest - they recommend that nothing be implemented until 2012 because of the weak economy, and their plan would not balance the federal budget until 2037 - but almost as soon as it was released Democrats and Republicans both started screaming bloody murder about how they would not support it.

The truth is that virtually none of our politicians are willing to make the hard choices that would be necessary to get the national debt under control. Today, the U.S. national debt is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars and it is growing at an exponential rate. It is the single largest debt in the history of the world, and it has increased in size for 53 years in a row.

It would be very difficult to understate the true horror of the debt that the U.S. federal government has accumulated. So what is the solution? As you will see below, there isn't one. In fact, it will be an absolute miracle if our leaders are able to even slow down the rate at which the debt is growing in the years ahead.
The deficit reduction plan put forward by Erskine Bowles, a former White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and Alan Simpson, a former Republican Senator from Wyoming does not even have support from the rest of Barack Obama's national debt commission. There is no way that either most Democrats or most Republicans in Congress will ever accept it. But at least the Bowles-Simpson plan is making headlines around the world and has brought the national debt back to the center of the political debate in this country.
In some ways, the Bowles-Simpson plan is a complete and total fantasy. For example, it assumes that the U.S. economy is going to fully recover and will experience solid growth for many years to come. That simply is not going to happen. The prosperity of the last couple of decades has been fueled by the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and there is no way that is going to continue. At some point the U.S. economy is going to fall apart like a house of cards.
But even if the U.S. economy could magically meet the projections contained in the Bowles-Simpson plan, it still contains a whole host of "poison pills" which make it completely and totally unacceptable to both political parties....
The plan calls for deep cuts to U.S. military spending. The Republicans will never go for that.
The plan reduces Social Security benefits to most retirees in future decades. The Democrats will never go for that.
The plan raises the Social Security payroll tax cap to $190,000. The Republicans will never go for that.
The plan envisions a very slow rise in the retirement age from 67 to 68 by 2050 and finally to 69 by 2075. The Democrats will never go for that.
The plan includes a "less generous" annual cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security benefits. Considering the fact that Social Security benefits are already not going to see an increase this upcoming year, this proposal is likely to upset a large number of seniors.
The plan calls for the federal tax on gasoline to approximately double by 2015. The Republicans would never go for that, and if that was ever implemented it would have a very serious negative impact on the economy.
The plan would eliminate the deductibility of mortgage interest payments. Millions upon millions of homeowners would be absolutely furious.
The plan would tax health benefits provided by employers. That would make millions of people very angry.
The plan also calls for huge cuts in farm subsidies. There are a lot less farmers than there used to be, but that would still be extremely unpopular.

But the truth is that hard choices need to be made. The national debt is spinning wildly out of control. The U.S. government is essentially bankrupt.
Unfortunately, the majority of the federal budget is made up of entitlement programs. Entitlement programs are not subject to budget freezes or budget cuts - unless Congress changes the underlying laws. But any change to major entitlement programs would potentially upset millions of voters.
Not that there are not other areas that could be cut. Today, the average federal worker earns far more than the average private sector worker. In fact, wages for federal workers have been escalating at a frightening pace. In 2005, 7420 federal employees were making $150,000 or more per year. Today, 82,034 federal employees are making $150,000 or more per year. That is more than a tenfold increase in just five years.
But any major cuts to federal spending are going to really upset a lot of voters, and our politicians really, really like to get re-elected. The kinds of cuts that are really needed will never get through the Democrats in Congress and the Republicans in Congress and signed into law by Barack Obama. There are just way too many things that both major political parties consider to be "untouchable".
Meanwhile, the U.S. government debt continues to explode. The debt is already so big, interest on that debt is scheduled to escalate so dramatically, and we have made so many unsustainable promises regarding Social Security and Medicare that it is basically impossible to balance the federal budget at this point. If serious attempts were actually made to balance the budget in 2011, it would likely create a financial panic, and suddenly sucking over a trillion dollars in federal spending out of the system would crash the economy.
The following are 15 facts that reveal just how obscene the U.S. national debt has become, and why it is now basically impossible to balance the budget of the U.S. government at this point....
#1 On average, the U.S. government accumulates about 4 billion dollars more debt each day.
#2 In just the last 30 years the U.S. government has accumulated 12 trillion dollars more debt.
#3 According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
#4 The U.S. government has to borrow 41 cents of every dollar that it currently spends.
#5 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.
#6 The Congressional Budget Office projects that the health care bill recently passed by Congress will add an additional trillion dollars to our debt over the next ten years.
#7 Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama's 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf. Any attempt to reduce those payments will make a lot of people very angry.
#8 According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2010 the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes. That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.
#9 Back in 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 16 workers. Today, each retiree's Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
#10 According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single penny is spent on anything else.
#11 Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare falls somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of GDP each year. By 2080, they are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.
#12 The present value of projected scheduled benefits exceeds earmarked revenues for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare by about 46 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.
#13 After analyzing Congressional Budget Office data, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff concluded that the U.S. government is facing a "fiscal gap" of $202 trillion dollars.
#14 At our current pace, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that U.S. government public debt will hit 716 percent of GDP by the year 2080.
#15 Sometimes we forget just how big a trillion dollars is. If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. The U.S. national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars last year, it will increase by more than a trillion dollars this year and it is being projected to increase by more than a trillion dollars the following year.
We are literally drowning in debt. We have been living beyond our means for decades, and most Americans do not understand that eventually that is really, really going to start catching up with us.
Already, the United States is fading as an economic power. According to the Conference Board, China will surpass the United States and will become the biggest economy in the world by the year 2012.
That is just two years away.
So how did we get into such a mess? Well, it all goes back to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The Federal Reserve was created to enslave the United States government in an endlessly growing spiral of debt from which it would never be able to escape.
That is exactly what has happened. Our money is actually debt-based. That is why they are called "Federal Reserve notes". When the Federal Reserve creates more money for the U.S. government to borrow, it does not also create money for the interest to be paid on that debt. Eventually the U.S. government is forced to borrow even more money just to keep up with the game.
Today, if you gathered up all of the physical currency from every bank, every business and every individual in the United States, you would not even put much of a dent in the national debt. That is how bad things have gotten.
A lot of people got elected to Congress by promising to balance the federal budget and by promising to start reducing the U.S. national debt. But those ships have sailed. The U.S. government will always have a national debt under the Federal Reserve system, and things have gotten so bad financially for our government that it is now virtually impossible to even balance the budget for a single year.
In the 90s, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress briefly balanced the federal budget by "borrowing" massive amounts of money from the Social Security surplus. Using GAAP accounting, the budget was not even close to balanced at that point, but many point to that time as a moment when the U.S. government was at least somewhat fiscally responsible.
Well, the Social Security surplus is gone forever. Now we have a Social Security deficit which is only going to explode in size in future years.
In addition, the financial condition of the U.S. government has deteriorated enormously over the past 10 years, and things only look worse the further you look into the future.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is falling to pieces all around us. We are experiencing our longest bout of serious long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, 42 million Americans are on food stamps and the United States is being deindustrialized at a pace that is mind blowing.
As America continues to get poorer, the U.S. government is going to really struggle to raise revenue. But interest payments and financial obligations are projected to escalate wildly. At this point it is really hard to envision a scenario that does not lead to the eventual financial collapse of the U.S. government.

Progressives Rules for Raising Hell

2010-11-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

10 Rules of Populist Power -- The Progressive's Guide to Raising Hell

This excerpt from Jamie Court's new book offers ten simple rules that can help an awakened public see and seize the outside opportunities for creating change.

November 6, 2010 |

The following is an excerpt from Jamie Court's new book, The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For (Chelsea Green, 2010).
Turning the tables on a powerful opponent revolves around a few core principles. By understanding what works and what hasn’t for change makers, an informed public can better stake its claim to change. In fact, there are ten simple rules that can help an awakened public see and seize the outside opportunities for creating changes that the vast majority of Americans believe in.
Rule 1: Forcing Opponents to Make Mistakes Is the Goal of Effective Advocacy for Change; Promoting Issues Is Not Enough

Any major change in public policy requires a shift in the balance of power. A big opponent with a self-interest in the status quo stands in the way of the popularly sought reform, or that reform would have happened already. When the powerful opponents of change make egregious mistakes, they vastly amplify the value and force of our campaigns by proving the point we cannot demonstrate on our own: our opponents’ values are out of touch with the public’s.
Every campaign for real change must (1) define an opponent; (2) be waged to trip up the opponent; and (3) be ready to create change from the opponent’s mistakes.
Consider how Congress finally banned so-called drive-through deliveries when HMOs tried to save some money by discharging newborns and their mothers from the hospital as early as eight hours after birth. The practice caught Congress’s eye only after a Kaiser HMO bureaucrat got a little too cute in a memo written to staff at the HMO’s flagship Sunset Boulevard hospital in Los Angeles. A whistleblower gave me the memo, titled “Positive Thoughts Regarding the Eight Hour Discharge.” Among the “reasons” given for hospital staff to explain the hasty departure to new moms were “hospital food is not tasty” and “better bonding with siblings at home.” Our exposure of the memo to the media became big news and was soon the subject of congressional hearings. Not only were the HMOs slighting motherhood, but data showed that newborns discharged early were twice as likely to end up in the emergency room with problems that proved to be expensive.
HMO executives were confronted with their penny-wise, pound-foolish policy. The rare glimpse into the cynical attitude of an HMO administration, coupled with exposures about mothers thrown out of the hospital before they learned to breast-feed, drove a Newt Gingrich–controlled Congress to require that newborns and their mothers not be discharged from the hospital any sooner than forty-eight hours without their consent. Congress rarely acts quickly, but when it does it’s because there is little doubt what the public wants and that those who oppose the public’s interest, like HMOs, cannot be trusted because they are so out of step. Only our opponents’ mistakes can demonstrate so clearly why things need to change.
When opponents of new financial privacy protections claimed our privacy was not at risk, I proved the point in a novel way. I bought the Social Security numbers of Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other cabinet officials on the Internet for $26. When California legislation to protect financial privacy stalled in the statehouse, I decided to up the ante. I easily and legally bought the Social Security numbers of all the state legislators who opposed the legislation or refused to vote on it. Then I put up their partial Social Security numbers on the Internet along with the partial Social Security number of Governor Gray Davis. The politicians went ballistic. They called on the California Highway Patrol and attorney general to investigate and prosecute me. Their hot reaction to a risk to their personal privacy proved my point. It allowed me to turn the media spotlight they created onto their own failure to be concerned about the privacy of the public at large. The legislators drew attention to their own hypocrisy. Later that year, the California financial privacy protection legislation was revived, passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Davis.
True change almost always involves a public opinion war with those who control the status quo. This is where President Obama fell down on the job as a health reform change maker. He buckled early on to the drug companies, health insurers, and other medical complex lobbyists, as well as stalwarts in his party, rather than putting them to the test of whether their values were in sync with the public’s. He didn’t think he could fight the barrage of advertising the lobbies could afford to shape public opinion, and in doing that he put too little faith in the public and his own ability to use his opponents’ own weight against them. Obama largely refused to put the opponents of real change in the Capitol and on K Street on the spot so that their mistakes would betray their interest in the status quo. Ironically, his success in finally enacting federal health insurance reforms was a result of one health insurance company’s big mistake. When health reform looked like it was in the mortuary, Anthem Blue Cross raised premiums by 39 percent in California. President Obama had the good sense to seize on the public outrage and make the company a poster child for reform. The president effectively used his media pulpit to vector the public anger into a final, successful push for enactment of a new law, even though it had no teeth to stop premium increases like Anthem Blue Cross’s. Obama’s early capitulations to the medical insurance establishment had created a patient protection act that protected the medical industries’ greatest interests and put new financial burdens on most Americans.
Public success often hinges on the quality of opponents’ mistakes and the ability of change makers to exploit them. When opponents make mistakes that show they are out of touch, they amplify our case and weaken their own. Mistakes are the turning points of most populist battles, because mistakes provide the leverage and ammunition to finish the fight.
Rule 2: To Make Big Changes, Target the Little Things and a Few People
We have only so much energy, time, and capital to spend creating the changes we want. Often the impulse to get involved can be overwhelmed by how difficult it seems to change anything or anyone, particularly powerful institutions, industries, or officials. So it should be a comfort to know this trade secret of change makers: big changes are created by a small number of people who do little things right.
Think Paul Revere. In his bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell shows how Revere had the right connections to knock on the right revolutionary leaders’ doors, those who knew him, with his “sticky” message: “The British are coming!” Stickiness means that a message has an impact and is memorable. Another messenger who rode out in the opposite direction failed in the same charge because he wasn’t as well connected as Revere, or apparently as persuasive. The Tipping Point, a must-read for effective advocates, sums up a growing body of research that shows how big changes on social issues come down to a few decisions and a few key decision makers. Whether you’re trying to stem the tide of teen smoking, reduce your local crime rates, or sway opinion on any other issue, you need to influence the few to affect the many. Focus on identifying the smallest number of people who have the right connections and who can act with the greatest impact.
The small resources of my consumer group have necessitated that we find the right pressure points—the little things and right people—that will have a big impact. For proof that little things matter, consider the case of what happened after my colleagues and I took Arnold Schwarzenegger’s red carpet away.
After his election as governor during the 2003 California recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger got an even bigger ego. The Republican governor embraced a thoroughly reactionary agenda. Although he had run for office as the anti-politician in a progressive state, Schwarzenegger called students, teachers, firefighters, and even the disabled “special interest groups” in an attempt to cut their budgets and pensions. But Schwarzenegger claimed that the label did not apply to big corporations that funded his campaign committee with tens of millions of dollars.
Shades of the same arrogance had surfaced during the recall, which is why my colleagues and I created “ArnoldWatch.org” to publicly track the hidden hand of special interests in the Schwarzenegger administration. We knew the California public would not look fondly upon being been lied to.
Ultimately Governor Schwarzenegger was forced to apologize for his tactics. Chapter 6 offers the blow-by-blow of that campaign, but a key turning point hinged on doing a small thing right. Early on, a small group of us began in-your-face protests, starting at the governor’s house on Super Bowl Sunday, and shadowing him across the state. Ultimately the protests grew to ten thousand strong. We knew that for a celebrity, used to basking in the public’s spotlight, facing angry fans would be debilitating. The psychological turning point in the campaign came midway, during a premier for the Danny DeVito film Be Cool in Sacramento. DeVito was Schwarzenegger’s acting partner in the movie Twins and a close friend.
We knew that if we could keep Schwarzenegger from walking the red carpet into that premier it would be symbolically devastating. The mighty California Nurses Association, great progressive allies, rented the Greek restaurant next door to the theatre, a block from the Capitol. Hundreds of nurses occupied the restaurant and its adjoining space on the red carpet with anti-Arnold signs and critical props. Schwarzenegger had to enter the theatre from the back exit. The symbolism said we would turn Arnold’s celebrity around on him and that he couldn’t show his face in California if he continued on his course. The governor suffered a near-knockout blow at the ballot box eight months later, when all five of the regressive ballot measures he opened fire with post-election were defeated. Schwarzenegger apologized the day after, reversed course, and regained some of his celebrity.
In a populist fight, targeting the right person can change the entire campaign. That’s how Consumer Watchdog ended one insurance company CEO’s two-decade war against voter-backed insurance regulation and won an end to insurers’ redlining of poor and urban neighborhoods.
George Joseph is one of the four hundred richest men in the United States. He made his wealth from his Los Angeles–based company, Mercury Insurance. No one has more hatred for the insurance-regulating Proposition 103, nor has anyone done more to undo it. Joseph’s company gave millions in campaign contributions to statehouse politicians to undermine the law. When Democrats bucked him, Joseph gave an even bigger, six-figure contribution to the opposite party. That sent a chilly message to both parties’ leaders.
By the time Joseph turned eighty-four in 2006, California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi had at long last finalized rules to end auto insurance rates based on motorists’ zip codes. It was the last unfulfilled promise of the 1988 insurance reform initiative.
Mercury did a lot of business in urban areas, and George Joseph apparently didn’t want to be told that he had to charge people based on how they drive, not where they live. So good drivers in the inner city were being required by the state to buy auto insurance, but insurers would not sell them a policy at an affordable price. In the poorest areas, the cheapest, most basic auto policies cost thousands of dollars a year because insurers didn’t want to sell insurance there. So when the end to zip-code-based insurance was at hand, as final regulations were about to be implemented to make this change real, Joseph gave some top political consultants a big check and a green light to file a ballot measure overturning this long-awaited provision of Prop 103. After almost two decades of resistance, Joseph decided on all-out war.
Our response? We proposed a ballot measure of our own that would strictly curb Mercury’s profits. We started a boycott of Mercury Insurance. But the key to turning George Joseph around was an Internet video we made about him for the “Boycott Mercury” Web site. Robert Greenwald, a friend and the progressive movie director behind Iraq for Sale, Outfoxed, and Wal-Mart Movie, sent a film crew to shadow the octogenarian from his luxurious Hancock Park home to his office. The camera crew confronted Joseph about the initiative in his office garage. They asked why Mercury would want to charge African Americans who lived in low-income communities and poorer zip codes more money. An angry letter from civil rights leaders also appeared on his desk. Within about a week, Mercury had withdrawn the initiative. But not before calling my colleague and Prop 103 author Harvey Rosenfield.
Joseph told Harvey his wife had asked him why there had been a video camera at his home. When he explained, she said she also thought it was wrong for his company to charge customers based on their zip code. A few months later, Joseph resigned as Mercury’s CEO, though he retained his position as chairman of the board. New rules charging people based on how they drive, not where they live, finally took effect in 2008. California is the only state in the nation that forces insurers to base premiums on motorists’ driving record, how far they drive, and how many years of experience they have, and not on where they live.
Only a few people were involved; only a small number of actions were needed. Less yielded more—something that is often not the case with staging a mass demonstration or other Herculean labor of protest. For example, for almost a year a group of doctors called “Physicians Who Care” worked to organize massive protests against HMO medicine on “Rescue Healthcare Day.” The lead doctor bothered me nearly daily, and I kept warning him that the key to rescuing health care was what would happen the day after the protest. Nonetheless he continued to believe the outburst of physician energy would change everything. Of course, things didn’t change on their own the day after the protests. The doctor and his group quickly disappeared. I didn’t hear from him again for almost seven years. Just before the 2008 election he e-mailed to ask how he could raise questions about Senator McCain’s failure to disclose his health records. I pointed him to Robert Greenwald, who had already created a video on the topic and a petition signed by thousands of doctors calling for a release of those records. Greenwald started out with only a few doctors but ultimately grew the effort to include thousands, a popular online video, and a front-page New York Times story that turned McCain’s health into a campaign issue.
The question progressives must ask themselves is which small things and few people to target to turn things around.
Applying this to a national scale leads to some interesting options. Obama may not be the leader of the progressive movement, but it doesn’t mean the movement cannot make him move. And if you were going to target a few people for the greatest change, you probably wouldn’t have to look far. Progressives could demand a shake-up at the White House to oust Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The jobs of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers should also be on the chopping block. The strategy of these three men is largely responsible for the setbacks for progressives in health care, financial regulation, and climate change legislation.
Rule 3: Simple Moral Sentiments Can Change the World When Public Opinion Propels Them
The public’s power to create change against the wishes of powerful interest groups springs from simply phrased, widely shared moral sentiments. A short, simple articulation of the moral viewpoint driving a campaign sums up exactly what we are fighting for or against. The right sentence can rouse public opinion and spread the spirit of change like wildfire.
Here are some of the morals-based phrases that I have put to work:

• Newborns and their mothers should not be kicked out of the hospital eight hours after birth.

• Doctors, not HMO bureaucrats, should make medical decisions.

• Motorists should not be forced to choose between paying for auto insurance and buying food for their family.

• Oil companies should not be able to make more profit by making less gasoline.

• Our private financial information should not be bought and sold like pork bellies to the highest bidder.

• Insurance premiums should be based on how we drive, not where we live.

I have run successful campaigns around each of these irrefutable moral sentiments precisely because big industries and their allies in government tried to refute them. Campaigns for change rely on a social, ethical, or populist belief so powerful that our smartest opponents will not openly take issue with it for fear of losing their standing with the public. Most opponents do argue, though, and that is often their big mistake.
The sentiment of any issue-based campaign should (1) articulate a popular moral principle; (2) be simple and human; (3) put our opponents on the spot and force their tactical decision to support it or oppose it. Clever opponents will claim we are mistaken and that they don’t really disagree with the populist sentiment and don’t violate it. Then we must gather evidence to expose them to win our campaign, which creates opportunities for those with that information to come forward. Smart campaigners will have the evidence in their pocket first, ready to release once their opponent claims to support the sentiment.
The Kaiser bureaucrats who gave new meaning to the term “maternity leave” showed disregard for social mores about how to treat mothers and reaped their own shame. I spent years, with the help of whistleblowers, proving that HMO bureaucrats did indeed make medical decisions. HMOs tried to argue back with reasons why doctors should be paid bonuses to deny care to patients. They tried to defend their use of accounting manuals to dictate hospital stays and their bureaucrats in far-off states overriding a treating doctor’s decisions. They found out quickly that offending the public’s sensibilities is quicksand for those who want to maintain the status quo.
Campaigns for change, ironically, are often about preserving traditional values like fairness, justice, and privacy. They are about getting back something that has been lost. That is a powerful message that doesn’t frighten the public: it involves returning lost values through new plans, not embarking on a dangerous new course. People fear change, even as they desire it. Popular change almost always is built on the bedrock of existing values that are threatened.
The greatest tactical objective of change makers is to expose our opponents’ opposition to social mores, ethical customs, and the rule of law. Then we seize the moment to reassert these mores through new laws, stronger codes of conduct, or new decisions. The public should recognize these telltale signs and lend their opinion.
When you hear a moral sentiment worth fighting for, go for it. If you are trying to build a campaign, craft a statement that defines it. Moral sentiments have the power to create change when fueled by the last credible source of information in a culture of disintegrating trust: word of mouth. And Americans now have the best conductor of “word of mouth” in human history, the Internet.
Candidates already know how to win elections based on clearly expressed moral sentiments. Here are some of the ones that brought Obama to the White House:

• Health care should be accessible and affordable so that medical bills bankrupt no one.

• Americans must end dependence on the petroleum economy and stop gasoline prices from destroying our economy.

• Lobbyists and special interest groups shouldn’t control Washington, D.C.

Republican senator Scott Brown, who foiled many of Obama’s ambitions on the president’s one-year anniversary in office, was remembered for this sentiment during the campaign: “This isn’t Ted Kennedy’s seat. It’s the people’s seat.”
During campaigns, candidates have opponents to hold them accountable for such sentiments, but, after elections, too many interest groups are afraid to hold officials to their campaign pledges for fear of losing access. There’s no more fertile ground for outsiders who seek to hold elected officials accountable to a platform of change than the field of the candidates’ own words on the campaign trail. This was the tactic, for example, that finally forced Arnold Schwarzenegger to redefine special interests to include corporations that were giving him money. Even allies have to be reminded of the sentiments they espouse in order to keep them to reasonable timelines for taking action. One moral sentiment Americans agree with is politicians shouldn’t forget their promises after taking office.
Rule 4: Forget Sun Tzu: The Bigger the Fight, the Better the Odds; Fight Even If You Cannot Win Today, and Someday You’ll Win without a Fight
Politics may be the art of the possible, but often “realism” or, as Hillary Clinton put it, “reality-based politics” undermines the possibility of genuine political change based on an outside game. By “outside game,” I mean the notion that forces outside the Washington Beltway can move the insiders, based on the power of public opinion. Politicians tend not to believe or put much hope in the outside game unless the public’s sentiment is a clear and present danger for them. Rousing public opinion begins with a strategy to invite conflict.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is the classic strategy manual for politics, business, and military conflict. The Chinese general argues that if your forces are unequal to your opponent’s, you should avoid conflict. That may be true for classical warfare, but in the game of populist change, be it a fight with a government agency or a Fortune 500 company, the odds are always unequal. Engaging a fight with a more powerful opponent on an issue that may not seem winnable at the moment is essential because confrontation creates opportunities for your opponent to make mistakes and creates a public record of the battle. Look for the big fight if you want the big payoff, even if you lose some battles.
When our consumer group first took on the HMOs’ cost-cutting practices, many of our allies said they were too strong and we would alienate a potential force for universal health care by trying to bring them under control. But we changed their worst abuses by exposing and confronting them.
When he went to the California ballot with insurance reform Prop 103 in 1988, Harvey Rosenfield had to deal with angering allies who claimed he could never beat the property-insurance industry’s money. Consumer groups and trial lawyers wanted to avert a ballot war and cut a deal with insurance companies, who ultimately put their own anti-consumer agenda on the ballot to confuse voters. Harvey wouldn’t back down, even though he had raised no significant money to spend on a campaign. Insurers spent over $60 million against Harvey’s landmark ballot measure and on making the case for their own, and that turned out to be their downfall. The companies so saturated the airwaves with television advertisements against Prop 103 that the public realized insurers were against the measure. That convinced 51 percent of voters to support the ballot measure, because it was the real-deal insurance reform. You have to love populist jujitsu.
When matched against a much more powerful opponent, the more our opponent attacks, the stronger we become. So provoke the more powerful opponent to attack. The more a powerful opponent engages and acknowledges us, the more power our arguments gain in the court of public opinion. When the more powerful opponent lends us his spotlight, he places us on the same stage and credentials our point of view. The powerful attack only when threatened. The more we attack, the more they react, and the stronger we become.
Rule 5: Creating the Record Creates the Seeds of Change
Building a record of one’s battles and one’s opponents’ errors is critical to the power of the less-resourced advocate. Letters, demands, exchanges, and exposés that confront opponents—and force them to respond publicly—create a record that can later be used against your target. In the court of public opinion, creating a public record and forcing a decision maker to respond is the equivalent of the legal discovery process in the court of law. You are trying to uncover a discrepancy and take advantage of a mistake, now or later.
A campaign that can and will create a record is a triple threat to a powerful opponent.

1. We can lose the battle and still negatively affect our opponent’s standing in the court of public opinion.

2. We can lose the battle yet create the conditions by which we can win the war.

3. We can win the battle by forcing our opponent to make a big mistake.

Building a record builds our power and leverage because an opponent who knows of our ability to build the record and willingness to wait for the right moment to use it will have to take us seriously.
Consider the most famous example of a well-fought loss that led to victory. The debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as they vied to become the U.S. senator from Illinois are among the most famous in American history. Lincoln lost the election, but the record he established in those debates won him the platform to ascend to the presidency a few years later.
Or consider a more recent case from my consumer group’s files, one that shows the value of building a public record on an opponent.
As recently as 2005, then Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee was a presumed front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination to succeed President Bush. Today he’s not even in the Senate. Here’s the story.
When Frist controlled the U.S. Senate in 2003 and 2004 as majority leader, he made a big mistake. At the time there was little chance that he or the Senate Ethics Committee would respond favorably to my consumer group’s written concerns about his conflicts of interest with his family’s business. But we created a record that years later undermined Frist’s power and helped to end his political career.
Frist, a doctor whose family controlled one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, was then backing a Senate bill to limit legal accountability for doctors and hospitals when they commit medical malpractice. We publicly demanded that Frist sell at least $25 million of stock he held in the Frist family company, HCA. HCA was one of America’s largest hospital companies and owner of HCI, the nation’s fifth biggest medical malpractice insurer. No one had ever heard of this issue before we put it on the map for the media and opinion leaders, but afterward it was closely tracked.
“HCI, HCA and your entire family stand to profit directly from the passage of malpractice caps legislation,” we wrote to Frist. Of course, Frist did not divest his stock, nor recuse himself from the medical malpractice vote. We got some press at the time, but, more importantly, the record we created came back to haunt Senator Frist two years later.
When Frist finally sold the stock in September 2005, he did it just before the stock price tumbled, suggesting his family had given him an insider tip. A lot of eyes were watching by then. Frist was subpoenaed by the Justice Department and the SEC in an insider trading investigation of his well-timed sale. The investigation was made public two days after we sent another letter calling for an inquiry to the SEC and U.S. attorney. The record we had created years before, when it looked like we could not win the fight, was significant in the demise of Frist’s political career.
The scandal put an end to Frist’s presidential ambitions. His medical malpractice legislation, stained by the insider-trading allegation, never passed. The record, not the outcome of the initial battle, mattered most in the end.
Doing the right thing at the right time usually produces the right result in the end. The tension between progressives, who want their officials to stand on principle, and politicians, who want accomplishments before the next election, is constant and inevitable. It’s our job to urge the politicians to put what’s right over what’s convenient.
Rule 6: Keep It Human, Put People First
Never underestimate the power of one person’s story to change the world; indeed such stories may be the only thing that ever has. The sincere experiences of individuals who have suffered injustice are the best weapons against injustice. Winning campaigns are about the triumph of fundamental human truth, so real people with genuine stories are the best messengers of populist campaigns.
The language of the status quo is often statistical, actuarial, and data-based. This is not to say proponents of change don’t have science and statistics on their side. It’s just that opponents of change often base their objections on the hard, cold numbers that only accountants can muster and manipulate to show how they will bust budgets, bankrupt businesses, and break up families. My favorite example is tobacco companies’ argument against the Czech government’s smoking cessation plan. The industry’s actuarial study found that the country’s health care costs would skyrocket since people would live longer.
While it’s tempting to mix it up with scientists when you know you’re right, change-making campaigns typically mobilize the public and affect politics by sticking to the human case. Consider the medical patients’ wars in Washington, D.C., the classic arena where critical public policy battles with significant human consequences are too often fought over statistics and computer models. Powerful opponents use selective data to defuse change. So in the mid-1990s I pioneered a method to make sure Washington politicians looked patients in the eye before they took away their legal rights.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were engaged in a debate over whether victims of medical negligence should have limits on their rights to go to court and recover damages for malfeasance. Of course, the medical-insurance industry instigated that discussion. So we began our first “casualty of the day” campaign. In the pre-Internet world, fax machines were the cutting edge of communication. Every day for five months, every congressional representative, every senator, and key members of the press received a fax with a picture and tragic story of a casualty of medical malpractice who needed his or her rights preserved. I knew the campaign was successful when the medical-insurance lobby’s public relations machine answered back with its own “medical miracle of the moment,” highlighting life-saving medical advances. As I commented at the time, the industry’s reaction was like Ford putting out a press release about every Pinto gas tank that didn’t explode.
The power of the campaign was in its cumulative impact. Every day, another story. Legislative staff and the media paid attention. The drumbeat built. We defended against the assault on injured patients’ legal remedies.
A few years later, the time came to go on the offensive for the legal rights of HMO patients. We warmed up the fax machine again. The HMOs spent millions on television advertising to stop us. Here’s how CNN’s Brooks Jackson described the “HMO casualty of the day” campaign at the time: “The industry has its advertising too, but far more effective is this shoestring consumer group. A fax a day to keep the HMOs at bay.” The patients-first tactic fueled landmark HMO patients’-rights reforms throughout the nation.
More recently, I saw the “people-first” principle work when one woman with a compelling story was able to fell a whole industry. It’s the case of “Dana vs. Goliath.”
With health insurance costs skyrocketing in 2006, insurers hatched a plan to remove themselves from the patients’-rights laws that were passed in forty-four states in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The industry explained that the insurance companies wanted to “reduce their costs of compliance” so insurance would be cheaper. It sounded simple enough to President Bush and Congress, who were about to enact the plan. Attorneys general, governors, and state insurance commissioners complained, but it looked like the industry had the votes.
Then Dana Christensen came to Capitol Hill with my Consumer Watchdog colleagues Carmen Balber and Jerry Flanagan.
Christensen had been working with my consumer group to warn against the very type of “junk health insurance” policy that we feared would become the norm if state regulation were bypassed. She and her husband, Doug, had been technically insured, yet Dana was left with $450,000 in unpaid medical bills when her husband died of bone cancer.
The fine print in her insurance policy had no limit on “out-of-pocket cost.” So she had to pay most of the costs of his chemotherapy and cancer care. On his deathbed, Doug asked Dana to divorce him so she would not have to be liable for the medical bills. She refused. In the end, only because of a lawsuit under state law, which prevented fraudulent representations, was Dana able to recoup the cost of those bills from the insurer.
Dana flew into Washington on Monday, on the heels of a PBS NOW news story about her case that aired the previous Friday. She held a press conference with Senators Edward Kennedy and Richard Durbin, then lobbied other senators. The power of her story stopped the legislation dead in its tracks.
“What’s the point of paying for health insurance and then, when you need it, discovering the benefits you thought were promised and paid for just aren’t there?” Dana asked. “That’s what happened to my husband Doug and me.”
Human truth is very hard for a human being, even the most hardened Washington politician, to turn away from.
Rule 7: Make It Personal for Decision Makers
Confrontation creates change in human beings. It forces them to evaluate their positions because it warns of the consequences if they do not. If you want recalcitrant decision makers to change their ways, confront them personally and publicly about their actions. Don’t just tell them why they are wrong; show them how their position reflects on their personal character.
Publicly confront them in a way that forces them to examine their person, not merely their positions. Then they must take inventory of what you have described and stand by it or change it. Successful decision makers typically change to conform with deep-seated social mores and ethical customs. Sometimes they even become your allies. Less-successful opponents compound their mistakes and dig themselves in deeper, which can give us more leverage over them. Making it personal means not name-calling or making spurious allegations, but forcing a confrontation with an opponent on the battlefield of values.
When he was in the California Legislature, Gray Davis, who later lost a recall election as governor in 2003, sponsored legislation to put the faces of missing children on milk cartons. When my consumer group wanted to force Davis, as governor, to sign a strong HMO patient protection law in 1998, Harvey Rosenfield came up with the idea of putting the governor’s face on faux milk cartons. “Missing: California Governor. Last Seen at Fundraiser with HMO Executives.” We printed up thousands of the cartons and delivered them to hotel rooms in the San Francisco Hilton the night before Davis was scheduled to give a big breakfast speech. The flyer had all the details about how Davis met behind closed doors with HMO executives, raised big campaign contributions from them, and said he would not sign the tough patient protection law we wanted.
Davis received a chilly reception at the breakfast speech. He was upset by our tactics, especially a letter about the issue that we had Ralph Nader send to him, and went into a San Francisco Chronicle editorial meeting with a chip on his shoulder and angry that, as the governor, he was being taken to task. At that editorial board meeting he was asked about the patients’ rights legislation and made his big mistake. He said of the legislature, “Their job is to implement my vision.” When those words appeared in the newspaper, he was forced to retreat. The legislature put a very tough piece of legislation on his desk and he signed it. After the HMO patients’ bill of rights signing ceremony, Davis stopped me as I was walking in a crosswalk. He leaned out of the backseat of his Lincoln town car and said, “Jamie, you have to give me high marks for this one. I want to see it on the front page.” Never underestimate politicians’ regard for their self-image.
Making it personal obviously often comes with a personal cost. The governor was very angry with us for a long time. We heard from donors that Governor Davis had personally called them and asked that they not contribute to our group. I knew one of the organizers of that Gray Davis breakfast very well. He wouldn’t talk to me for years. I have no doubt, though, that had we not personalized the issues, Davis would have carried through on his threat to veto the stronger patient protections.
Rule 8: Seize the Moment—Don’t Pick Your Time, Have the Goods and Let Your Time Pick You
Timing is the fulcrum of populist power. We cannot always choose it but we have to be ready for it to choose us. Create the record, plan for the right moments, and windows of opportunity should open to our advantage. These rare openings are awakenings in a public consciousness about an issue that can trump the human tendency to fear transitions and change itself. Moments of opportunity, events that focus public opinion like a beam, must be seized or they are lost. If it seems like the right time to jump into a campaign, don’t wait.
For example, the collapse of Enron following the burst of the dot-com stock bubble left people wondering what had happened not only to their nest eggs, but also to corporate governance rules. Our consumer group knew it provided a moment to act.
In the 1980s, an industrial accident led to a new California law requiring that managers tell regulators about workplace hazards or go to jail. We wanted the same individual accountability for corporate executives on financial matters. Our first stab at reform was California legislation requiring that executives report financial fraud to government authorities or face jail time. We also wanted to create new protections for whistleblowers and a 1-800 hotline for them to report problems. Big business targeted the bill for defeat, calling it “tattletale” legislation and claiming the disloyal should not have new rights.
In the end, the legislature and the governor bowed to popular opinion and granted whistleblowers their protections. They wouldn’t, however, make individual corporate executives personally liable for their financial statements. It took the U.S. Congress to do that a little later, seizing on the idea under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Corporate executives today must personally sign their financial statements and are personally accountable for the veracity. There is not a single provision of Sarbanes-Oxley that CEOs complain about more, which makes us happy and shareholders a little more secure.
Or consider the case of our “Rx Express.” The 2004 presidential election provided a moment of clarity for many Americans about the high cost of prescription drugs. The issue infected the presidential debate between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. So our consumer group chartered two private trains—dubbed the Rx Express—to take seniors to Canada to buy cheaper drugs, right in the middle of the presidential debates. My colleague Jerry Flanagan wanted to show how Americans pay about 60 percent more for prescription drugs than the people of other nations. The next president would then have to lower prescription drug costs.
One train went up the West Coast, another up the East Coast, picking up seniors along the way while we held whistle-stop press conferences in their communities. A train began in Florida and stopped for passengers and press conferences all the way to Toronto. The other train did the same from San Diego to Vancouver. In Canada, the Rx Express riders saved an average of 60 percent off the prescription drug prices they paid in the United States for a total annual savings of $2,000 each. And the journeys made a big impression, in the media and with the presidential candidates.
The Rx Express train trips generated more than three hundred television appearances, with a Nielsen audience of sixty-five million, sixty newspaper articles, and one hundred radio interviews. The provision of prescription drug benefits to seniors became a central issue in the election and ultimately translated to an expansion of Medicare, albeit a faulty one that will be corrected at the right moment.
We had one amazing windfall of luck during the trip, when the Bush administration tried to intimidate our seniors. Government officials boarded the eastern-seaboard train at its last stop before the Canadian border looking for drugs. On the night of a presidential debate no less. Of course, that mistake only gave Jerry and his crew of seniors another round of media stories. The only error we made was not asking then state senator Barack Obama to come along. Had we, he may not have been able to retreat in 2009 from his campaign pledge to reduce the nation’s prescription drug bill through bulk purchasing.
Rule 9: Exploit a Powerful Opponent’s Fear of Falling to Achieve Victory without Combat
Our powerful opponents, if they’re smart, will always be more afraid of us than we are of them. We have far less to lose. I had that revelation early in my career as a public advocate. At the time, I worked as an advocate for the homeless and was vacationing with my wife on the Yucatán Peninsula near the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. As I ascended the great pyramid, the congressional welfare reform fight was on my mind—in particular how to fight on behalf of people most others in America didn’t care about. At the homeless shelter where I worked, there were several children. Their mothers did not have child care, so they couldn’t hold jobs and keep a roof over their children’s heads. But Congress wanted to take away their aid without providing them the child care they needed to go to work.
I remember how the climb up the narrow steps was hard and the view of the surrounding jungle was magnificent. But what really stuck with me was the feeling of standing at the top, on the broad plateau looking out on the dense forests of the Yucatán. My knees went weak. There was plenty of space to stand, yet as I looked toward the edge, I could not help fearing that I would fall, as improbable as I knew it was. It occurred to me then that this is how those at the top of any pyramid of power must feel—fearful of the fall, worried about their knees being cut out from under them, ever conscious of the ineluctable force of gravity pulling them down. It spurred me on to more aggressive tactics to get elected officials to pay attention to the families in our shelter.
I have taken that lesson with me. Exploiting our opponents’ fear of their own missteps, of falling from their perch, is the quickest way to win. Show them how bad they look early on in order to have them change course or preempt an attack. It’s a lesson some colleagues and I recently put into practice against the leaders of Yahoo and Intel to stop an assault on class action lawsuits in California.
In 2007, Intel was a household brand with tremendous popular approval. That’s probably why the company was called on to chair a corporate consortium in California bent on eliminating consumer class action lawsuits. The consortium chose Intel—rather than one of its drug companies, tobacco makers, or insurers—to occupy the top spot as it filed a ballot measure to put up so many legal hurdles that ripped-off consumers would never have been able to file class action cases holding the responsible corporation accountable. Before signatures were even collected to place the initiative on the ballot, though, a group of us trying to stop the effort caught a huge break.
I heard on National Public Radio that Intel was in the middle of a flap over an insensitive advertisement that many considered racist. The print ad, which had been published overseas, featured a white manager standing over six African-American sprinters kneeling before him. The ad proclaimed, “Maximize Your Power.” Intel withdrew the advertisement and apologized. Still, I knew immediately that Intel had made the fatal mistake that could be used to force withdrawal of the initiative. Its brand was now vulnerable. A major purpose behind class action lawsuits is to protect the civil rights of Americans, and Intel had shown a callous disregard on matters of ethnic sensitivity.
During the next two weeks, my consumer group launched an Internet campaign that asked, “Is Intel racist inside?” We called on the company to withdraw both the advertisement and the initiative. After our e-activists sent thirty thousand faxes online to the board of directors and kicked up a lot of bad press, Intel and its corporate consortium announced that the initiative would not go forward. In an internal e-mail to the consortium’s board of directors, a proponent blamed the retreat on the fact that the initiative campaign would be more “high profile” than initially anticipated.
“Fear of the fall” was directed not only at Intel, but at one of its key board members, Susan Decker. Decker had just taken the reins at Yahoo, right after CEO Terry Semel resigned for a major misstep. We knew Decker was particularly vulnerable to criticism as a new CEO. So a member of our group, Chris Lehane, who had been a lawyer and spokesperson in the Clinton White House, and Will Robinson of the New Media Firm created and produced a cable television ad that ran in Silicon Valley targeting Decker and providing her office phone number.
The ad opened with the Yahoo logo flashing on a white background while the announcer declared, “Yahoo is a leading global brand.” Then a photo of Decker swept in next to the Yahoo logo and the announcer continued, “And as president, Susan Decker helps set Yahoo’s vision.” The Intel logo swooped in, too, and the announcer added, “But she’s also on the board on Intel.” At that point, an image of the controversial Intel advertisement slowly crept onto the screen. “And Intel had been using advertising that has been called offensive, even racist,” said the announcer. Eventually, the image cut to a ballot box, and word discrimination with a big “no” circle over it. “Now,” continued the announcer, “Intel is supporting a ballot measure that makes it tougher to fight discrimination, and harder to stop big corporations, HMOs, and oil companies from hurting consumers.” At the ad’s close, the Enron logo flew in and pushed out the word discrimination, then “HMO” pushed out “Enron” and then finally an oil derrick pushed out “HMO” and the image changed back to Susan, with her phone number plastered below. The voice-over concluded, “So call Susan, and tell her maybe it’s time to start bringing Yahoo’s vision to Intel.”
The same week the advertisement aired, Intel decided to withdraw its ballot measure. Fear cuts both ways, of course. The public’s fear of change is often the target of our opponents’ campaigns to defeat reform. Special interest campaigns to stop popularly sought-after changes operate from a standard playbook that feeds upon the public’s well-conditioned fears and seeks to distract from the public benefits of a reform. Seeing through the standard ploys, though, may make it easier to resist them. The following table shows six of the most common “fear points” that opponents of change use in both their political attacks to counter reform and the claims they frequently make. You may recognize how the GOP and the medical-insurance complex effectively used these arguments in the court of public opinion to fear-monger about the Democrats’ health care reform plan during 2010. The Tea Party’s playbook is little different, as it’s been constructed by many longtime GOP operatives, like Dick Armey, looking for a more populist chorus.
Appeals to the public’s fear that destroy reform efforts are typically strategic arson: a fire of fear sparked on the dry brush of parched populist ground. For example, the drug companies and insurers could ignite Americans’ fear of the bureaucrats in President Clinton’s health care plan because the Clintons failed to keep the populist soil fertile by engaging public opinion. Instead, the Clintons engaged in back-door negotiations with so-called stakeholders. President Obama fared far better with his health reform effort during the summer of 2009,when it contained a public health insurance option to compete with the private health insurance market, supported consistently by the vast majority of Americans in poll after poll. Obama lost ground to the fear factors only when he abandoned the public option and his progressive base. That’s when support for his plan fell under the 50 percent mark. The best prevention against public fear destroying a populist campaign for change is to constantly nourish public opinion and stay true to your message and values.
Rule 10: Don’t Worry about Your Seat at the Table; Find the Rock to Throw through the Window
The big coalition, the most famous names, or the politically diverse negotiating partners do not signal that the changes being espoused reflect a consensus about the public’s opinion—or even have a chance of success. In fact, when insiders are all on the same page, it’s very likely that their proposal won’t shake things up at all. Shaking endangers their interests.
Copyright Chelsea Green 2010 -- All Rights Reserved

Jamie Court’s new book, The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For, was just released by Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Court, an acclaimed consumer advocate, is president of Consumer Watchdog.

2010-11-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

Restore Democracy - Power Back to the People

2010-11-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

(See the blog at http://celdf.org/blog)
The Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools are a key piece of our community organizing. Named for a boy in Pennsylvania who died after exposure to sewage sludge, the Democracy Schools are one to three-day intensive seminars that examine how communities across the U.S. are beginning to assert local control to protect the rights of their residents, their communities, and nature.
We often begin our work with a phone call from a community member. A resident will contact us because his or her community is facing a proposal for an unwanted project – perhaps a factory farm, a quarry, or mining operations. From there, we will often visit with community members, conduct an evening presentation, or meet with elected officials and hold a Democracy School.

The Legal Defense Fund has nearly 200 Democracy Schools, graduating nearly 3,000 participants. Participants include many first-time activists, concerned citizens, and local elected officials.

There are lots of materials about Democracy School here on our website as well as a schedule of Schools. You can also register for a School from our website. We hope you will join us at an upcoming Democracy School.

The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is a non-profit, public interest law firm providing free and affordable legal services to communities facing threats to their local environment, local agriculture, the local economy, and quality of life. Our mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature.

Established in 1995, the Legal Defense Fund has now become the principal advisor to community groups and municipal governments struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stopping those harms by asserting local, democratic control directly over corporations.

Through grassroots organizing, public education and outreach, legal assistance, and drafting of ordinances, we have now assisted over 110 municipalities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, and Virginia to draft and adopt new laws with over 350,000 people living under these governing frameworks. These laws address activities such as corporate water withdrawals, longwall coal mining, factory farming, the land application of sewage sludge, and uranium mining.

Tombstone Blues

2010-11-03T05:06:00.000-07:00

The Tombstone Blues

By James Howard Kunstler for ClusterFuck Nation

On Tuesday, when the Republican Party and its Tea Party chump-proxies re-conquer the sin-drenched bizarro universe of the US congress, they'll have to re-assume ownership of the stickiest web of frauds and swindles ever run in human history - and chances are the victory will blow up in their supernaturally suntanned, Botox-smoothed faces.

But don't cry for John Boehner, Barack Obama.

The President and his Democrats may have inherited this clusterfuck from the feckless George Bush but they flubbed every chance to mitigate any part of it, ranging from their failure to restore the rule of law in banking (by prosecuting the executives of major banks who oversaw the systematic swindle), to mis-directing our dwindling resources toward ends (such as "shovel-ready" new super-highways) that won't promote a credible future for this society, to misleading the public in the fantasy that alt-energy will offset the disruptions of peak oil (and allow us to keep running suburbia, the US Military, and WalMart by other means).

It's really too late for both parties. They're unreformable. They've squandered their legitimacy just as the US enters the fat heart of the long emergency. Neither of them have a plan, or even a single idea that isn't a dodge or a grift. Both parties tout a "recovery" that is just a cover story for accounting chicanery and statistical lies aimed at concealing the criminally-engineered national bankruptcy that they presided over in split shifts. Both parties are overwhelmingly made up of bagmen for the companies that looted America.

Alas, the damage is now so pervasive in money matters that the federal government could be toast as a viable enterprise, even if a new party or two spontaneously rose up out of the ruins of a plundered democracy. Anyway, one of them will not be the Tea Party, with its incoherent agenda and moron cadres who seek to put Jesus back in the US constitution, where he never was in the first place - though they don't know that.

Nor is there any party on the left or even in the center with a clue or a moral compass. Its just one of those tragic moments in history - like 1850s America, when a strange vacuum of thought occupied the heart of political life, and the scene was cluttered up with mere place-holders like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. (Can you state a single idea or position, these political ciphers advanced?)

Where we stand now is on the cusp of another giant step into the abyss, since the latest storm of Foreclosure-Gate suggests pretty strongly that mega-tons of mortgage-backed securities are assured of blowing up, as well as the sundry derivatives of these things (CDOs, CDOs-squared, plus the massive fetid matter infesting the alternative cosmos of credit default swaps). If you follow the media-of-record like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, you would have to conclude that there is no extant plausible notion among financial leaders as to how the fiasco of botched mortgage-and-title documentation can be resolved. After three weeks of emerging events around this debacle, the consensus among the power brokers is to pretend that there's no problem, that the issue of missing, forged, post-dated, trashed, or non-existent paper related to claims on property can just be put aside, brushed under the rug, glossed over, ignored.

Let me tell you something: this problem is not going away. At the very least it is going to paralyze the real estate industry for as far ahead as anyone can see. For another thing, it could force the disclosure of what the banks are holding in their vaults in the way of worthless paper and expose their insolvency. For still another thing, it could lead to rafts of lawsuits that would additionally shove the banks toward collapse, demolish the claims that underlie our currency, call into question the meaning of property ownership per se that is the basis of Anglo-American law, and tie up the court system until kingdom come. In any case, every pension fund, state government, and insurance operation would be crippled. I could go on but you get the picture.... This might all sound extreme, but I repeat: nobody with any authority in this land has proposed a plausible way out.

By the way, I haven't even touched on the totally insane but now accepted practices of the Federal Reserve attempting to stage manage the velocity of money by so-called quantitative easing - a.k.a. the US writing checks to itself - because even that nonsense assumes that everything else remains more or less stable.

This is what the two major parties can look forward to as we swing around into the Yuletide season and then into 2011. The proud winners of seats in congress and the senate might as well put on clown suits and little pointed hats on Wednesday morning and drive around the Washington monument in toy cars. There will be a desperate need for a new politics in this country, for people unafraid to tell the truth and act in the genuine public interest. If we can't generate it from the saner quarters of this country where people think thoughts that comport with reality, I'm afraid we could see some generals step into the picture.

I write literally over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, en route from Australia where I spent the past week - not on vacation. It's a reminder that there are a lot of other players in the wide world - not all of them nations on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The End of Liberty...or....

2010-10-31T08:46:00.000-07:00

The National Inflation Association is an organization that is dedicated to preparing Americans for hyperinflation and helping Americans not only survive, but prosper in the upcoming hyperinflationary crisis.

With a $13.6 trillion national debt, $6.3 trillion in Fannie/Freddie debt and $61.3 trillion in unfunded obligations for programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the U.S. government has total obligations of over $81.2 trillion or 5.57 times our GDP of $14.59 trillion. It is our belief that the United States for all intents and purposes is bankrupt and Americans need to take steps immediately to protect themselves from the potential loss of the purchasing power of their U.S. Dollars.

NIA believes the largest financial crisis in history is ahead of us as a direct result of the U.S. government unwilling to accept a much needed recession. We are now at a point where our national debt is impossible to pay off. Due to rising interest payments on our national debt, it is unlikely the U.S. will be able to balance its budget ever again. Foreigners will eventually stop lending the U.S. money and the Federal Reserve will most likely have to print the money to fund our deficit spending out of thin air.

Our goal is to help as many Americans as possible become aware of the disaster we are rapidly approaching. In our opinion, the wealth of most Americans could get wiped out during the next decade, but it will be an opportunity for a small percentage of Americans to become wealthy by investing into companies that historically have prospered in an inflationary environment, such as Gold and Silver miners and Agriculture producers.

Franken Kicks Supreme Butts

2010-07-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

Helping to kick off the 2010 ACS National Convention, Sen. Al Franken criticized Republican efforts to scuttle the Obama administration's nominations to the federal courts and numerous administration positions.
"Tonight, we celebrate the rise of a new generation of progressive legal scholars and jurists," Franken said. "Look to your left. Look to your right. Odds are, at least one of the three of you will someday be filibustered by Senate Republicans. Speaking of which, I'd like to give a special shout-out to all the filibustered nominees we have here with us tonight. The Republican obstruction that is standing between you and the work you've agreed to do for your country is unacceptable. And we will continue to fight it."

How's That Recessioney, Oily Thing Working Out For Ya?

2010-07-01T09:45:00.000-07:00

For OpEdNews: David Michael Green - Writer

Let's be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times.

Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.

Such candidates ran on issues like the death penalty, immigration, bogus wars, gay marriage and abortion. But what they really were about as legislators was exporting jobs to where workers are dirt cheap and politically neutered, crashing organized labor, shifting the tax burden onto the mass public, deregulating industry to allow unhindered profit-taking on the upside and socialized public responsibility for risk on the downside, and locking in a Supreme Court majority that would never blanch at even the most outrageous rulings enhancing corporate power in American society.

If the product of this slow and silent coup wasn't so bloody and so ruinous to so many lives, you'd really have to hand it to these guys for their political acumen and patience. It took a while, and it required the building of a broad and robust infrastructure, spanning from mainstream media to talk radio and TV to think-tanks to Congress, the presidency and the judiciary, to the GOP and now to the Democratic Party as well, but they have pretty much completely succeeded in grabbing all the levers of power in our society. They dominate its discourse entirely, and they have been almost completely successful to date in securing all the elements of their legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential agenda, at least to this point (how far they ultimately intend to go isn't clear the US as Honduras, perhaps? but it's unlikely to be pretty). Perhaps the only major exception to that rule was their 2005 failure to privatize the vast pool of public money sitting in the Social Security coffers, which they lust over lasciviously, like teenage boys inhaling online porn by the bucketful.

The product of these efforts has been precisely what one would expect. Corporations and economic elites have grown fantastically more wealthy than they already were thirty years ago. Their tax liabilities are now negligible and sometimes less than zero. Massive national debt, the product in part of those tax gifts to the rich, plus huge bills for interest on that debt (this alone is one of the largest items in the federal budget each year), is now owned by the mass public, who got nickels and dimes worth of tax cuts, in exchange for which they will now have to literally work years of their lives to pay down the taxes the rich escaped. Working people across the country get less and pay more for everything today. College is becoming increasingly out of the financial reach of average Americans. The minimum wage, which actually often isn't the minimum, is far from a sustainable salary for one person, let alone a family. As of 2004, the richest one percent of Americans possessed sixty percent of all wealth in the country, while the bottom forty percent accounted for a whopping two-tenths of a percent. Between 1979 and 2004, after-tax income for the top one percent of Americans rose by 176 percent, while for those in the bottom 20 percent that figure rose only six percent. And those figures are for six years ago, during what by current standards was flush times for working people. Now jobs are disappearing, with the inevitable effect of driving wages down further, not to mention all the obvious effects on prosperity, security, health, mental health and sheer longevity.

Meanwhile, just the approach to regulation alone has produced three monstrous attacks on American society as a direct result. First the recession-starting-to-become-a-depression and all its devastation, then the recent mining disaster, and now BP's WMD attack on the Gulf Coast states. What all of these have in common is a government regulatory apparatus that over time transitioned from a public service mission into deference to those supposed to be regulated, and then from deference for the corporate sphere into constituting a straight-out satellite office of the corporations themselves, literally having business supposed "regulatees' fill out their own monitoring forms in pencil, to be inked in later by the planted shills in government. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been wiped out by these actions and the public is paying for its own thrashing through bail-out funds. I'm sorry, but in what sense is this not treason?

Okay, so far so bad. Nothing particularly Alice-In-Wonderlandy or especially novel about rampant greed, is there? But what's really bizarre to the point of being becoming a fully hallucinogenic experience that really should come under the supervision of the Controlled Substances Act is the effect that this has had on politics. Could there ever be a moment when right-wing "economics' have been so thoroughly and manifestly repudiated? Could there ever be more overt examples of corporate greed gone nuclear? Could the repercussions of these policy decisions ever more clearly have wrecked the lives of economically insecure ordinary Americans?

No, no and no. All this is as obvious and predictable as sunrise. And yet... Here we find ourselves in this remarkable and remarkably absurd position where the folks who not only created this monster, who not only have worked assiduously to prevent any solutions to the destruction they've wrought, and who now also promise even more of the same these very folks are poised to win resounding electoral victories in November. And the folks who will be voting for them will once again become victims of their predations. And the folks in Congress and the White House they'll be voting against supposed socialist-fascists (whatever strange Janus-faced zoological beast that would look like if it actually existed) are in fact just about the most pro-plutocrat government imaginable. But they're going to get stomped by voters for being socialists.

How on earth did this happen?

Well, to start with, it happened because it was intended to happen. As described above, this is the product of a broad, concerted and patient effort by the radical right to capture and control American government, and it has worked remarkably well, especially when one considers the sheer amount of deceit required to pull it off. It's like trying to sell a cocktail of Dirt Drink mixed with Sawdust Soda to a man dying of thirst. But it can be done, and we know that because the process is now all but complete. When even John McCain refers to Congress "the best government that money can buy" you know you're really hurting, pal. As for that Trotskyite socialist in the White House, well he's staffed his economic team directly out of Goldman Sachs' boardroom, he bails out mega-banks one hundred cents on the dollar without even requiring that they loan money, he wrote a health care bill that forces thirty or forty million Americans to buy a product from bloated thieving insurance companies whether they want it or not, and he has dramatically increased spending on an already astonishingly distended military, while remaining essentially silent about (meager but essential) unemployment benefits right now in the process of terminating for millions of Americans. Yeah, baby that socialist. "Workers of the world unite" is definitely what they rap about at White House cabinet meetings. Geithner, Summers, Gates all those revolutionary syndicalists can't talk it up enough. Then they sing "The Internationale".

Clearly, the political branches of the US government have been fully captured by monied elites. Perhaps scariest of all, however, is the newly emboldened ultra-radical majority on the Supreme Court (that description is not reckless hyperbole used for effect look at what they've done in cases like Bush v. Gore, Ledbetter and Citizens United, and watch what they do in the coming years it will be astonishing in its scope, radicalism and hypocrisy). After decades of histrionic lies about supposed objections to judicial activism (what they really hated was the impudent offense of an elite court handing down liberal decisions and siding with mere mortals in American society, period), they have now kicked out the jambs to expand the practical definition of the "activism' term beyond all recognition. Lori Blatt, former attorney in the Solicitor General's Office, put it best: "They are fearless. This is a business court. Now it's the era of the corporation and the interests of business." No case underscored this tendency better than Citizens United, of course, where the regressive majority was so blatantly activist that they literally told the stunned litigants to go home, come back in a month and reargue the case around a far, far bigger question than was at stake for the parties involved, and then sweepingly cast aside long existing law in order to blow blitzkrieg-size breaches in the barriers that had previously controlled corporate influence of elections. The only case that can rival this one for utterly transparent activism seeking a regressive outcome is Bush v. Gore, in which the right-wing bloc simultaneously violated three of their own cardinal tenets judicial restraint, states' rights, and hostility to civil rights principles in order to require vote counting be stopped (say what?!) and to crown the mentally deficient dauphin as king. It could hardly be clearer that the Roberts Court ominously completes the troika of the right-wing governmental coup.

But there are other reasons we're in this state, as well. Think about Barack Obama and the Democrats for a second, and then try applying Ms. Blatt's phrase, "They are fearless", to those folks. Now pick yourself up the floor. Change the underwear you just soiled from laughing so hard. Wring out the hanky you just soaked from sobbing so relentlessly. Part of why we're in this mess is that Democrats wouldn't know what guts looked like if they were all board-certified gastrointestinal surgeons. But, of course, to complain that "the people's party" lacks sufficient courage of their convictions assumes that they have any. The good news is that they do, as a matter of fact. The bad news, however, is that those convictions can be reduced neatly down to two: serving themselves and serving the nice folks who donate money to get them elected. It's a bit of a problem when the gang who are meant to protect us from the crimes of the GOP are nearly indistinguishable from Cheney's thugs, apart from stylistically. Democrats are happy to give you a little kiss on the cheek before they screw you. Republicans prefer to just get on with the assault.

Then there's the media in this country which is, of course, beyond hopeless. Watching Rachel Maddow the other month throwing a few medium-speed hardballs at Rand Paul only served to remind me just how rare it is for any of these pathetic hacks to actually do their job, as opposed to doing the cash-driven bidding of those in power, especially tough-guy Republicans who must get plenty of laughs out of how easy it is to bully the Washington press whores er, sorry, I mean press corps. There's nothing quite so self-made as the disasters of Election 2000 and the Iraq invasion of 2003, and the absence of any sort of serious media scepticism in those cases simply illustrates how utterly worthless the press truly are. Except, of course, as excellent public relations specialists for plutocrats. These days it seems like the only outlet doing anything approaching serious journalism is Rolling Stone. As to what it says about American society and journalism that you have to wade through cover photos of Lady Gaga's full-on unclad posterior to find out the lies our government is telling us, well, I'll leave that to you.

But clearly the neutering of the obedient profit-motivated media has worked spectacularly. One of the key fronts in this class warfare conducted by the wealthy in America has been with respect to framing. For three decades now, all we've heard is how government is a screw-up and how heroically efficient are the captains of industry in the private sector. The way regressives trash our own government in a democracy would certainly have seemed traitorous in another day. Just imagine if you said the same things about the military, which seems to miraculously escape the right's attention as the biggest and most famously wasteful government bureaucracy of all. Moreover, looking back over Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, not just a small bit of the curtain has been pulled back from the notion of the military's supposed infallibility. It's been two-thirds of a century since the United States won a big war against a serious adversary, and even then the Russians did the heavy lifting, at least in Europe. Somehow we never hear much about big, incompetent government in that context, though.

But, hey, forgive my little flight into logical analysis there. We really cannot have that in these times. For a minute there, I forgot to forget. It won't happen again, Mr. O'Brien, I assure you. From now on, up is down, black is white, war is peace, government is bad and corporations are purveyors of Happy Meals (happy, that is, unless you happen to be a cow, like having small businesses around, have a problem with obesity, don't want your planet to catch fire, or object to the creation of massive great lakes full of animal waste). Yep, big business is good! That's why we need to apologize to BP for our government "shaking them down" and forcing them to be slightly-barely-kinda-nominally-sorta responsible for their ecological and economic epic disaster in the Gulf. Get it?

But the other sad truth is that, at the bottom of this roll call of nefarious predators under every Cheney and Obama and Brian Williams and Lloyd Blankfein doing (his green) god's work, is a great big stinking pile of yahoos better known as "Us". We'll vote Republican this fall because we utterly lack the intellectual curiosity to investigate other options. We'll vote Republican because we're greedy and lazy and willing to step on anyone's throat to get our little slice of prosperity back. We'll vote Republican as if we weren't only two years ago just absolutely counting down every second until the previous government packed up and left town. You know, the er, uh, Republicans.

But I have just one question for my fellow Americans before they step into that voting booth. The truth is that what ails us now is exactly what y'all have been voting for over the last three decades. The truth is that if you vote Republican in November it will all only get worse. The truth is that you're living the regressive dream just now, right as we speak.

We've let corporations run wild. We've decimated the government whose function it was to regulate them in the public's interest. We've shifted a very large pile of your money into the hands of the richest one percent of us, and given you and your kids loads of government debt to pay off in exchange. We've shipped your job off to China or India. We've completely immunized all branches of your government from any form of influence other than from rapacious plutocrats.

So my question is, fellow Americans, now that we've all had a nice heaping helping of what regressive politics means for us real people down here below the stratosphere, "How's that recessioney, oily thing working out for ya?"

Eh?

Behind the Corporate Curtain

2010-07-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Thom Hartmann's latest book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" and How You Can Fight Back, 2nd Edition, wherein I have learned some startling things about the reasons that "our" government "of, by, and for the people" has become, instead, of, by, and for the corporations.

Wonder why your liberties are shrinking, your vote not counting? You better read this. Think "big government" is the total cause of your affliction and misfortune? You're part right...and part wrong. The main reason it's gotten SO big and controlling is that corporations have basically taken it over. The recent Supreme Court decision, which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits, is just the latest in a long string of judgments that have steadily eroded people rights and created huge inequalities.

The first Tea Party revolt was, as some seem to have forgotten, against transnational corporate domination of the early American economy by the East India Company. Modern Tea Partiers owe it to themselves to understand this fundamental truth and to rechampion the same cause that birthed the American Revolution and our nation.

Chapter 6 provided a surprising list of 19th-century laws, common to most states at the time, regulating corporations. If American citizens (not "consumers" by the way; that's the corporate name for us) still had the powers once provided by these kinds of limits, we would be enjoying a cleaner world, more freedom, and much greater happiness. Here's that list:

- Corporations were required to have a clear purpose, to be fulfilled but not exceeded.
- Corporations' licenses to business were revocable by the state legislature if they exceeded or did not fulfill their chartered purpose(s).
- The state legislature could revoke a corporation's charter if it misbehaved.
- The act of incorporation did not relieve corporate management or stockholders/owners of responsibility or liability for corporate acts.
- As a matter of course, corporation officers, directors, or agents couldn't break the law and avoid punishment by claiming they were "just doing their job" when committing crimes but instead could be held criminally liable for violating the law.
- State (not Federal) courts heard cases where corporations or their agents were accused of breaking the law or harming the public.
- Directors of the corporation were required to come from among the stockholders.
- Corporations had to have their headquarters and meetings in the state where their principal place of business was located.
Corporation charters were granted for a specific period of time, such as twenty or thirty years (instead of being granted "in perpetuity", as is now the practice.
Corporations were prohibited from owning stock in other corporations, to prevent them from extending their power inappropriately.
Corporations' real estate holdings were limited to what was necessary to carry out their specific purposes.
- Corporations were prohibited from making any political contributions, direct or indirect.
- Corporations were prohibited from making charitable or civic donations outside of their specific purposes.
- State legislatures could set the rates that some monopoly corporations could charge for their products or services.
- All corporation records and documents were open to the legislature or the state attorney general.

Now imagine the country if these laws were still in place. You'll begin to understand why Thom chose the following titles for some chapters in his book...
     Unequal Uses for the Bill of Rights
     Unequal Regulation
     Unequal Protection from Risk
     Unequal Taxes
     Unequal Responsibility for Crime
     Unequal Privacy
   Unequal Citizenship and Access to the Commons
     Unequal Wealth
     Unequal Trade
   Unequal Media
     Unequal Influence

Here's a few reviewer's comments:

"If you wonder why the corporate world constantly lurches from malaise to oppression to governmental corruption and back, Unequal Protection reveals the untold story. Beneath the success and rise of American enterprise is an untold history that is antithetical to every value Americans hold dear. This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies."
--Paul Hawken, author, Natural Capitalism

"This extraordinary book combines meticulous historical and legal research with a clear and compelling writing style to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt the incompatibility of corporate personhood with democracy, the market economy, and the well-being of society. Complete with a practical program for essential reform to restore the rights of real persons - including model legislation - it is essential reading and an invaluable reference work for every citizen who cares about democracy, justice, and the human future. Hartmann combines a remarkable piece of historical rersearch with a brilliant literary style to tell the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel. I intended to take a first quick glance and then couldn't put it down."
--David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World

"Unequal Protection should be in the hands of every thinking American. If we do not awaken soon, democracy will be replaced by a new 'Third Reich' of corporate tyranny. To be aware of the danger is the responsibility of each of us. No one has told us the truth better than Thom Hartmann. Read it!"
--Gerry Spence, author of Give Me Liberty

"Unequal Protection is a blueprint for revitalizing the spirit of American democracy. Sometimes you have to understand the bad news in order to appreciate the good news. Thom Hartmann connects the dots in a way that is a tremendous gift for our generation of Americans."
--Marianne Williamson, author, Healing the Soul of America

(see more cartoons by this artist at http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Cartoons.html)

"Essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of democracy, both here and abroad. With devastating precision and well-reasoned passion, Thom Hartmann shows the reader precisely how the corporate entity gained such a perilously dominant role in the life of a nation whose founders meant for its politics to respond to the concerns of people and communities, not return-seeking corporations."
--Jeff Gates, president, Shared Capitalism Institute, author, Democracy At Risk

"We thought it was only in science fiction that things created by humans could actually take over what is inherently our human heritage. But Thom Hartmann shows how we've already let that happen on a frightening scale - not in Frankenstein's monsters or Kubrick's creeping computer Hal - but in the corporations that present their friendly 'faces' to us as if we have nothing to fear from this ultimate usurpation of our rights as real humans."
--Ed Ayres, Senior Editor at Worldwatch and author, God's Last Offer

"For years, Thom Hartmann has been asking the important questions and inspiring people to act on their solutions. Now he tackles one of the hardest - how democracy in America and worldwide has been eroded by unaccountable corporate power. He looks at the structures that encourage destructive behavior and offers alternatives. Fascinating history told engagingly. We need books like this to find a way forward."
--Paul Loeb, author, Soul of a Citizen

"Hartmann goes where no person has gone before - towards uncovering the true history of how corporations and the wealthy people behind them transformed our law and culture to usurp democracy. This book is an inspiration to all groups and communities and explains why we must rethink our engagement in single issue struggles and move towards the assertion of direct, democratic control over corporations."
--Thomas Linzey, Esq., Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

Read this book...please.
(You can enjoy all of M. Wuerker's latest excellent political cartoons at Politico.com)

Cousteau Calls Gulf Disaster "...a nightmare"

2010-05-27T22:16:00.000-07:00