rebelpleb

Our American Dream is the Nightmare of the World

2012-01-10T16:26:00.001-06:00

The bipartisan American mantra about needing more jobs is nothing but a continuation of the ecologically and socially destructive paradigm that leads to increased monetary wealth for the already profligate, and increased enslavement for the 99% and for the rest of the world's organisms.

Photo courtesy of This American Life

While I hope to soon reiterate the many reasons why our current modus operandi of American life cannot be maintained ecologically, here I'd like to share a piece about why it is immoral and unethical socially.

A great storyteller named Mike Daisy is currently performing a one-man show, part of which is airing on This American Life (for only a short time - so listen now!) wherein he shares the horrors behind the production of all of our gadgetry. Many of us already know these horrors and are met with contempt and disdain when we attempt to acknowledge them among company; many of our friends and family seem to feel that we are so deserving of our consumerism and technology, no matter what the costs. "These modern gadgets are just things we simply cannot live without!"

Of course, Mike's story is just one piece of the puzzle and does not quite go far enough. It does not touch upon the human exploitation and harms in obtaining the resources for the products, nor the ecological harm in all steps of creating our products. Nevertheless, it reveals our racism and ethnocentrism. It is a piece of importance and worth a listen:

This American Life - Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory

From Me Culture to We Culture: There IS An Alternative

2011-10-15T22:08:00.001-05:00

Cynicism and Incoherence

I came of age in the 1980s which was, at the time, considered the epitome of pop culture, selfishness, competition, and corporate domination. The “greed is good” line from the movie “Wall Street” – meant as irony by the writer/director – became a motto for America. Indeed, the unbridled pursuit of material wealth was synonymous with “freedom.” Concurrently, in the context of the prevailing capitalistic system, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decreed to the world: There is no alternative (TINA).

Around the time I graduated from college in the early 1990s, the so-called disaffected youth had aided the election of a modern new president, viewed as almost a messiah by his flock. Sound familiar? The difference back then was that the deleterious effects of rugged individualism, blind ambition, unbridled greed, and neoliberalism had not yet permeated all of the masses. The poor, many people of color, and most indigenous people remained as marginalized by society as ever, but a critical number of the middle and upper-middle class citizens still had access to their “piece of the pie” to which they felt entitled. A faction of twenty-somethings that didn’t believe in the system of greed found themselves underemployed during this era for two main reasons: 1. A large number of available jobs had gone from union, livable-wage, skilled or professional labor positions to low-paying service-sector positions, and 2. The higher-wage jobs available were detrimental and damaging to people and the environment; these young adults did not want to partake in such a corrupt, destructive system. Those particular Generation Xers were dismissed as “slackers,” and though that label was inaccurate, it was a more useful meme for the powers that be to declare that the dissenters were lazy rather than admit that they were purposefully noncompliant with the fraudulent, unjust, unethical status quo.

However, the personal rebellion of these discontented Generation Xers were few and far between – as evidenced by the many now middle-aged members who safely reside in the sanctity of their suburban comforts - so they did not cohere into anything more than discreet individual acts, for the most part. Moreover, the stresses faced by the youth then did not necessarily amount to the kind of dire financial circumstances, grim future prospects, and desperation faced by the youth of today.

Domination and Desperation

Over the course of the past thirty years, popular culture, entertainment, narcissism, gluttony, and corporate imperialism have soared to heights unimaginable in the time of Centipede, the Cosby Show, and the Commodore 64. Until recently, the endless proliferation of these evils seemed as inevitable as the economic growth that resulted from them, and no one seemed to notice, no one seemed to care.[i] While the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and other similar events lent glimmers of hope, these twinkles were usually quickly and summarily extinguished by our own complacency and by the media blanket that kept all winds of change in the margins.

Now, the first contradiction of capitalism[ii] has at last emerged, just as predicted. (So has the second, more ominous contraction which involves the ecosystem rather than the economic system, but that vital subject will have to be left to another conversation.) In an era marked by the election of yet another phony Presidential savior, the somnambulant masses have been forced to awaken. Not only have the conditions for the already marginalized grown excruciatingly horrific, but the members of socioeconomic classes who formerly expected to have a solid, productive outlook have been offered instead a harsh present and a bleak future. And even those who once assumed their lives secure have found their assumptions trashed along with their savings. It took these dismal conditions for people to finally proclaim that enough was enough, and for some of them to rise up and speak out on their own behalves.

Opportunity

The Canadian magazine Adbusters has been chronicling the inevitable downfall of Western Civilization and calling for massive resistance for over two decades now, which is why it is not surprising that they perceived the correct place to confront the masters of the modern world. But no one could have predicted that their request just months ago to Occupy Wall Street would have come at such an opportune moment.

What is happening in New York City’s Zuccotti Park and around the country is quite similar to what occurred during the capitol occupation in Madison, Wisconsin. People who could no longer stand to be controlled and exploited finally exerted their collective force. But more importantly, they demonstrated that the system in place to which we have been required to adhere is far from the only alternative.

While the corporate media deride the “anarchy” of Occupy Wall Street, they are not completely off the mark. Few are willing to admit that, just as in the Madison capitol, what is occurring among members of the rebellion on Wall Street is anarchism at its finest: cooperation, human relations based on shared values, organic collectives of non-hierarchical groups, and democratically advanced ideas. At the height of the Madison occupation in February/March 2011, thousands of people virtually lived in the state capitol. They organized themselves into units to maintain peace, to clean, to educate, to administer first aid, to distribute food and supplies, etc. No one concerned themselves with the potential for crime – and in fact, no one was harmed, and no personal items were stolen as thousands of people amassed in an unguarded space. There existed nary a fear for person or property. The society of the occupation was one to be envied and emulated in “real” life. It appears that the experience at Occupy Wall Street is similar. I learned that they have even constructed grey water filtration systems and composting on-site. These occupations lay bare the simple truth that There Is An Alternative (TIAA). In fact, there are many options, as long as we have the creativity and the will to imagine and realize them. Of course, this discovery is precisely what the power elite fear the most, that their systems – THEY – are not necessary.

Toward a Collective Future

So, I sincerely thank you, occupiers. As I stand in awe of and in solidarity with all of you on Wall Street, in D.C., and all over the country and the world, I hope that instead of capitulating to the moneyed forces and voices who insist upon concrete demands – which will undoubtedly allow for the continuation and promulgation of their deceitful, destructive systems – the movement imagines a whole new paradigm for our collective future. It cannot be accomplished through traditional means; it will not be expressed through traditional pathways. In addition, I hope that the resisters continue to see beyond their own personal, immediate concerns and incorporate the needs of the forgotten, those who have always been suffering - the poor, the homeless, people of color, and the indigenous. The movement must never forget to include not only the currently disenfranchised who thought they could succeed under this system, but the always disenfranchised who never had a chance. In short, the movement will be worthwhile and long-lasting if it can embrace a future society in which “we” always comes before “me.” There is a better alternative. It is here now, unless we retreat back to our superficial comforts, unless we surrender to our own egos, unless we cease to envision a healthier tomorrow for us all.

[i] George Carlin

[ii] Karl Marx

When You Play the Plutocrats’ Game, They Win: On Civility and Half Measures

2011-08-10T23:54:00.002-05:00

Like many Wisconsinites, I am feeling rather dejected after the disappointing August 9^th recall elections. But unlike most of my brothers and sisters, my disappointment stems not so much from the outcome, but from the adherence to propriety and to a faith in inherently corrupt and unjust systems.

I was inspired and awed by the spontaneous and sustained uprisings in February and March and solidarity of the people of Wisconsin. Having lived numerous places throughout this country, there is no other place I would have wanted to call home at that moment. I was so proud to be among the protesters and my tendency toward negativity was suspended for a brief period. And then it ended. People went back to work (or unemployment) and though small demonstrations continued, the massive manpower and money was instead redirected toward recalling six Republican state senators and attempting to replace them with Democrats.

Though I was surprisingly impressed by the bold stand that the fourteen Democratic state senators took to protect the rights of their citizens, and though, having attended hearings in the state legislature, I have found many of these Wisconsin Democratic representatives to be supportive of the needs of the people in the state, I chose not to devote my current activism to the recall elections.

I was at the bargaining table last year when the Wisconsin state legislature and governor’s office were controlled by Democrats. Nevertheless, we state employee unions were told off the bat that any increases in any types of monetary compensation were off the table, and that our health insurance premiums would be increased. Game over. Doing anything else was too risky in “this political climate,” they said. Having worked in the U.S. House of Representatives previously, I saw firsthand the complicity and complacency of many federal Democrats, but I really had no knowledge of politics at the state level in WI. I learned quickly as, after months of negotiating, even our very crappy contracts were voted against by a couple of turncoat Democrats seeking political leverage from the incoming legion of Republicans.

In the past thirty years, state and local governments – in fact society in general - have been catering more and more to corporate interests, and consequently corporate interests have been taking over our state and our society. This has resulted in their co-opting of the only two major political parties allowed to exist in the U.S., as well as in the largest redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. In real terms, massive unemployment, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and social decay has spread across America, going largely unnoticed by anyone not experiencing it, or more likely, trying their hardest to deny it. The corporate controlled media does not report it to any substantive extent. They are too busy promoting new products, gadgets and consumer distractions.

In addition to consistent tax cuts for the rich and corporations and the expenses incurred from two-plus illegal and unnecessary imperial wars, the most recent recession in 2008 - caused by the unregulated casino known as Wall Street - has caused most of the fiscal crises in the states and throughout the nation. Yet, the Wall Street bankers committed fraud, the “brilliant” Ivy-League educated economists looked blithely away as the economic system collapsed, and the government officials who should have prosecuted the thieves let the perpetrators go scot free and proceeded to blame vital public employees for the financial woes caused by the rich. They not only allowed the criminals to go away unscathed, they fed these same criminals OUR money so that they could maintain their obscene wealth. Meanwhile, all over the nation, we, who had already lost everything, were being told we had to lose MORE so that those same rich people whom we had bailed out could “save” us through their privatization of all public goods (which, of course, does nothing but fatten their pocketbooks and starve us dead).

These unspeakable acts of reverse Robin-Hood corporate socialism took place under the watch of both Democrats and Republicans. We’d all like for it to not be so, in order for us to be able to easily place blame on one side, and go to the polls to vote in the other direction, but that vote is just a half measure. It often obtains little and changes nothing.

I do not wish to blame the Democratic officials in my state, because many of them - including Rep. Tammy Baldwin, and numerous state assemblypersons and senators whom I have had the good fortune of meeting during these recent months - have proven themselves more stalwart and progressive than most. I also recognize the insidiousness of the phony “grassroots” Tea Party, their corporate sponsors, their Republican allies, and their media propaganda machine. But laying the blame for the desperate state we find ourselves in solely at the feet of the GOP is completely disingenuous. Despite the rhetoric in the media, the real conflict is not between the Democrats and the Republicans; here and throughout the world, there is not a political war but a class war – and the rich are winning by a landslide. Given that context, trying to exact change through electoral politics is futile because the system is already rigged by the plutocrats, and because if one is not willing to deviate from their system, one is bound to lose.

Many political activists working on the recall elections have been saying that we want to elect Democrats to “stop the bleeding” and then we will hold them accountable to the people. From my vantage point, I do not see bleeding; I see fatal hemorrhaging from the carotid artery that only societal change, not politics, will be able to surgically repair.

When we play the game of the plutocrats, we allow:

A “Citizen’s United” election in which endless corporate moneys control the outcome
Continuation of the false premise that Wisconsin even had a budget “crisis”
Media framing that “the people have spoken through their votes” (regardless of the fact that this cannot be the case in a country where corporations are considered people)
Domination by “middle class” in discourse, instead of discussions about poverty, racism, and severe social injustices
Political tricks and illegal maneuvers (see: falsification of election date on absentee ballots, consistent election irregularities in Waukesha county clerk’s office, phony robo-calls by right-wing groups, voter intimidation at polls, voter disenfranchisement through cumbersome voter ID law, etc.) going uncontested or unprosecuted
“Conspiracy theory” narratives to dismiss all skepticism, despite tremendous evidence of organized wrongdoings

One of the main ways we play into their game is through prevarication and civility. What should have happened, as many chanted on March 8th – the day the state Assembly illegally voted on the anti-collective bargaining bill and 7000 people immediately flooded past the gatekeepers at the capitol doors to protest – was a general strike. If our elected officials can break a law that attempts to protect the transparency of our state legislative process by pushing through a vote without due notice, then citizens should have broken a wholly unjust law that attempts to criminalize the rights of workers to not show up for work.

I’m originally from New York. New Yorkers have a justified stereotype of being rude and abrasive (often unprovoked and for no reason). By contrast, what I have found living in Wisconsin for the past two years and in the Upper Midwest for the past four, is that civility is at a premium here. As a general rule, people like to maintain decorum and do not like to complain. That can be a very nice thing, for example, when you are new in town and everyone is welcoming and nice. But it is extremely disadvantageous when one is reticent to “act out” for fear of conflict or contention.

One of the Democrats in the recall elections said in an interview that she did not like the recent changes in Wisconsin government, because things had become so divisive and people could not compromise. Given the current state of affairs, I would say that compromise is not in order. When it comes to balancing a budget by hampering or eliminating all of the social safety nets for the poor in order to enhance incentives for corporate interests, a legislator who seeks a balanced “compromise” on these unequal terms is not a legislator that any citizen needs. Likewise, a citizen who would rather retract into her (not-so) comfortable life by casting a vote rather than by challenging an unjust political and social system is not a citizen who will be victorious for her cause. Right now, I hope that Wisconsinites can realize that when battling plutocracy, one must leave one’s civility at the door. Maybe now’s the time to take a lesson from the New Yorkers; maybe now’s the time to stop playing by their rules and to be belligerent, obstinate, and uncompromising.

Enough Equivocation: Obama and His Democratic Comrades are Right-Wing Republicans

2011-08-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

A few months ago as I walked around the buzzing and ignited capital in Madison, I came upon a vender selling T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers commemorating the ongoing sociopolitical struggle in Wisconsin. One read, “Recall Walker, Re-Elect Obama.” I loudly verbalized, “Well, HALF of that is right” and proceeded to go on a short tirade to my indulgent partner about how misled and idiotic it is to support Barack Obama for President in 2012. Some people around me seemed to glare as if I were crazy.

I have not seen anywhere, in neither the corporate nor the so-called alternative media, an analysis of the debt ceiling “crisis” that truly resembles the obvious truth. Numerous comments on alternative blogs suggest that there are citizens who have it figured out, but that which will not be spoken remains unspoken: not only is the crisis of the debt ceiling a fabrication, but Obama is also getting exactly what he wants.

Back when Barack Obama was inaugurated as President I recall watching the Daily Show, on which a former law school professor who taught both Barack and Michelle spoke about the couple. He told Jon Stewart that back when they were in law school, it seemed to him the Obamas were Republicans. I remember Jon Stewart laughing and thinking that the good professor was making a joke. I thought he was serious, and now more than ever, I still do.

What more evidence do we need that Obama supports a right-wing neoliberal agenda?

Here is but a short list of policies he’s enacted (or not enacted) off the top of my head:

Bailing out Wall Street while millions of Americans went homeless and hungry
Extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy
Enacting an ineffective new health care overhaul which puts even MORE wealth into the coffers of insurance companies but does little to nothing for the sick American (yet force them to pay for this atrocity)
Failing to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes, including torture
Increasing free trade agreements throughout the world
Continuing detention at Guantanamo Bay
Continuing “extraordinary rendition”
Continuing the unwarranted and ill-advised war in Afghanistan
Cutting and/or threatening to cut Medicare, Medicaid. and Social Security (the latter which has NO connection to the federal budget debt – it is wholly funded by our own separate cash from the FICA tax)
Promoting nuclear power as “clean” energy
Promoting highly risky offshore drilling as safe
Continuing warrantless wire-tapping of innocent citizens
Prosecuting more whistleblowers than any other president in recent history

These are neoliberal policies that support the corporate state, not the people. Obama is not, was not, and has never been a socialist. He is not a liberal. He is a corporate conservative serving the ruling class – a class not comprised of you or me or anyone who makes less than a six-figure income, let alone finds themselves in a lingering state of unemployment.

Barack Obama knows exactly what he is doing. He did not cave to the GOP. He did not make concessions to the “other side.” He enacted policies for his side: the ruling class, the rich.

Sure, you may have donated ten, twenty, even a hundred dollars to his 2008 campaign, but that is just a drop in the proverbial bucket. The bulk of his contributions came from his real constituents; the rich and the corporations that they run have donated hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to their boy Barry. These are his people, much as George W. Bush came out and simply stated explicitly: this is his “base.”

Obama could have asked to raise the debt ceiling temporarily months ago. He could have utilized the fourteenth amendment to prevent the issue of raising the debt ceiling from being willfully conflated with the budget deficit. He could have tried to raise the debt ceiling indefinitely, thus ending the whole debacle. He could have taken Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security off the table. Could have, should have, would have …. But didn’t.

Obama is not concerned with the American people who are increasingly jobless, homeless, and in deteriorating health. He is concerned with his re-election and in pleasing those who will enable his victory. By forcing this spurious “emergency” with the debt ceiling, and by agreeing to a “compromise” that takes more of America’s wealth away from those in need in order to enable the ever-increasing prosperity of the 1% ruling class (who currently have 80% of the wealth and soon to be more), he sends a clear signal that he is on their side. He is their man – if even that was really in question to begin with. He indicates that it is safe to contribute to his re-election. It is safe to allow him another four years of pilfering the poor and working class to fatten the wealthy, of enabling ecological destruction to all for the economic benefit of the few.

It is time to open our eyes and understand that in politics, men like the eminently moral and resolute Bernie Sanders are a dying breed, and that Obama was never such a man.

It is time to recognize what some realized when they searched into the depths of Obama’s superficial rhetoric in 2008 – and found nothing. Our current president is not a progressive, not a socialist, not even what used to be a Democrat when I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. He is a corporatist of the ruling class and his actions have been completely consistent with that reality. Furthermore, this debt ceiling sham and its subsequent bill are an immoral travesty that was orchestrated to end precisely as it has.

The United States of Tyranny and Injustice

2011-07-27T13:09:00.005-05:00

Portrait from Robert Shetterly
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

It's been awhile since we've written. There is so much harm occurring throughout the world on so many levels that it is difficult to decide which is the most worthy of discussion.

One of the most recent atrocities (beyond the indirect genocide occurring in Africa) is the sentencing of environmental activist Tim DeChristopher to two years in prison.

Our criminal justice system is criminal, not just. It rarely defends real people yet always manages to defend white collar corporate thieves and murderers.

Instead of writing why the sentencing of DeChristopher is a travesty, I will just let this strikingly intelligent and moral young hero speak for himself, as he did prior to his sentencing:

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court. When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.” He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate. I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye. I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time. I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

Mr. Huber has leveled a lot of character attacks at me, many of which are contrary to Mr. Manross’s report. While reading Mr Huber’s critiques of my character and my integrity, as well as his assumptions about my motivations, I was reminded that Mr Huber and I have never had a conversation.    Over the two and half years of this prosecution, he has never asked my any of the questions that he makes assumptions about in the government’s report. Apparently, Mr. Huber has never considered it his job to get to know me, and yet he is quite willing to disregard the opinions of the one person who does see that as his job.

There are alternating characterizations that Mr Huber would like you to believe about me. In one paragraph, the government claims I “played out the parts of accuser, jury, and judge as he determined the fate of the oil and gas lease auction and its intended participants that day.”   In the very next paragraph, they claim “It was not the defendant’s crimes that effected such a change.” Mr Huber would lead you to believe that I’m either a dangerous criminal who holds the oil and gas industry in the palm of my hand, or I’m just an incompetent child who didn’t affect the outcome of anything. As evidenced by the continued back and forth of contradictory arguments in the government’s memorandum, they’re not quite sure which of those extreme caricatures I am, but they are certain that I am nothing in between. Rather than the job of getting to know me, it seems Mr Huber prefers the job of fitting me into whatever extreme characterization is most politically expedient at the moment.

In nearly every paragraph, the government’s memorandum uses the words lie, lied, lying, liar. It makes me want to thank whatever clerk edited out the words “pants on fire.” Their report doesn’t mention the fact that at the auction in question, the first person who asked me what I was doing there was Agent Dan Love. And I told him very clearly that I was there to stand in the way of an illegitimate auction that threatened my future. I proceeded to answer all of his questions openly and honestly, and have done so to this day when speaking about that auction in any forum, including this courtroom. The entire basis for the false statements charge that I was convicted of was the fact that I wrote my real name and address on a form that included the words “bona fide bidder.” When I sat there on the witness stand, Mr Romney asked me if I ever had any intention of being a bona fide bidder. I responded by asking Mr Romney to clarify what “bona fide bidder” meant in this context. Mr Romney then withdrew the question and moved on to the next subject. On that right there is the entire basis for the government’s repeated attacks on my integrity. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff, your honor.

Mr Huber also makes grand assumptions about my level of respect for the rule of law. The government claims a long prison sentence is necessary to counteract the political statements I’ve made and promote a respect for the law. The only evidence provided for my lack of respect for the law is political statements that I’ve made in public forums. Again, the government doesn’t mention my actions in regard to the drastic restrictions that were put upon my defense in this courtroom. My political disagreements with the court about the proper role of a jury in the legal system are probably well known. I’ve given several public speeches and interviews about how the jury system was established and how it has evolved to it’s current state. Outside of this courtroom, I’ve made my views clear that I agree with the founding fathers that juries should be the conscience of the community and a defense against legislative tyranny. I even went so far as to organize a book study group that read about the history of jury nullification. Some of the participants in that book group later began passing out leaflets to the public about jury rights, as is their right. Mr Huber was apparently so outraged by this that he made the slanderous accusations that I tried to taint the jury. He didn’t specify the extra number of months that I should spend in prison for the heinous activity of holding a book group at the Unitarian Church and quoting Thomas Jefferson in public, but he says you should have “little tolerance for this behavior.”

But here is the important point that Mr Huber would rather ignore. Despite my strong disagreements with the court about the Constitutional basis for the limits on my defense, while I was in this courtroom I respected the authority of the court. Whether I agreed with them or not, I abided by the restrictions that you put on me and my legal team. I never attempted to “taint” the jury, as Mr Huber claimed, by sharing any of the relevant facts about the auction in question that the court had decided were off limits. I didn’t burst out and tell the jury that I successfully raised the down payment and offered it to the BLM. I didn’t let the jury know that the auction was later reversed because it was illegitimate in the first place. To this day I still think I should have had the right to do so, but disagreement with the law should not be confused with disrespect for the law.

My public statements about jury nullification were not the only political statements that Mr Huber thinks I should be punished for. As the government’s memorandum points out, I have also made public statements about the value of civil disobedience in bringing the rule of law closer to our shared sense of justice. In fact, I have openly and explicitly called for nonviolent civil disobedience against mountaintop removal coal mining in my home state of West Virginia. Mountaintop removal is itself an illegal activity, which has always been in violation of the Clean Water Act, and it is an illegal activity that kills people. A West Virginia state investigation found that Massey Energy had been cited with 62,923 violations of the law in the ten years preceding the disaster that killed 29 people last year. The investigation also revealed that Massey paid for almost none of those violations because the company provided millions of dollars worth of campaign contributions that elected most of the appeals court judges in the state. When I was growing up in West Virginia, my mother was one of many who pursued every legal avenue for making the coal industry follow the law. She commented at hearings, wrote petitions and filed lawsuits, and many have continued to do ever since, to no avail. I actually have great respect for the rule of law, because I see what happens when it doesn’t exist, as is the case with the fossil fuel industry. Those crimes committed by Massey Energy led not only to the deaths of their own workers, but to the deaths of countless local residents, such as Joshua McCormick, who died of kidney cancer at age 22 because he was unlucky enough to live downstream from a coal mine. When a corrupted government is no longer willing to uphold the rule of law, I advocate that citizens step up to that responsibility.

This is really the heart of what this case is about. The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law. Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

Mr Huber claims that the seriousness of my offense was that I “obstructed lawful government proceedings.” But the auction in question was not a lawful proceeding. I know you’ve heard another case about some of the irregularities for which the auction was overturned. But that case did not involve the BLM’s blatant violation of Secretarial Order 3226, which was a law that went into effect in 2001 and required the BLM to weigh the impacts on climate change for all its major decisions, particularly resource development. A federal judge in Montana ruled last year that the BLM was in constant violation of this law throughout the Bush administration. In all the proceedings and debates about this auction, no apologist for the government or the BLM has ever even tried to claim that the BLM followed this law. In both the December 2008 auction and the creation of the Resource Management Plan on which this auction was based, the BLM did not even attempt to follow this law.

And this law is not a trivial regulation about crossing t’s or dotting i’s to make some government accountant’s job easier. This law was put into effect to mitigate the impacts of catastrophic climate change and defend a livable future on this planet. This law was about protecting the survival of young generations. That’s kind of a big deal. It’s a very big deal to me. If the government is going to refuse to step up to that responsibility to defend a livable future, I believe that creates a moral imperative for me and other citizens. My future, and the future of everyone I care about, is being traded for short term profits. I take that very personally. Until our leaders take seriously their responsibility to pass on a healthy and just world to the next generation, I will continue this fight.

The government has made the claim that there were legal alternatives to standing in the way of this auction. Particularly, I could have filed a written protest against certain parcels. The government does not mention, however, that two months prior to this auction, in October 2008, a Congressional report was released that looked into those protests. The report, by the House committee on public lands, stated that it had become common practice for the BLM to take volunteers from the oil and gas industry to process those permits. The oil industry was paying people specifically to volunteer for the industry that was supposed to be regulating it, and it was to those industry staff that I would have been appealing. Moreover, this auction was just three months after the New York Times reported on a major scandal involving Department of the Interior regulators who were taking bribes of sex and drugs from the oil companies that they were supposed to be regulating. In 2008, this was the condition of the rule of law, for which Mr Huber says I lacked respect. Just as the legal avenues which people in West Virginia have been pursuing for 30 years, the legal avenues in this case were constructed precisely to protect the corporations who control the government.

The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice. Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code. I know Mr Huber disagrees with me on this. He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.” That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience. Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice. The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together.

This philosophical difference is serious enough that Mr Huber thinks I should be imprisoned to discourage the spread of this idea. Much of the government’s memorandum focuses on the political statements that I’ve made in public. But it hasn’t always been this way. When Mr Huber was arguing that my defense should be limited, he addressed my views this way: “The public square is the proper stage for the defendant’s message, not criminal proceedings in federal court.” But now that the jury is gone, Mr. Huber wants to take my message from the public square and make it a central part of these federal court proceedings. I have no problem with that. I’m just as willing to have those views on display as I’ve ever been.

The government’s memorandum states, “As opposed to preventing this particular defendant from committing further crimes, the sentence should be crafted ‘to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct’ by others.” Their concern is not the danger that I present, but the danger presented by my ideas and words that might lead others to action. Perhaps Mr Huber is right to be concerned. He represents the United States Government. His job is to protect those currently in power, and by extension, their corporate sponsors. After months of no action after the auction, the way I found out about my indictment was the day before it happened, Pat Shea got a call from an Associated Press reporter who said, “I just wanted to let you know that tomorrow Tim is going to be indicted, and this is what the charges are going to be.” That reporter had gotten that information two weeks earlier from an oil industry lobbyist. Our request for disclosure of what role that lobbyist played in the US Attorney’s office was denied, but we know that she apparently holds sway and that the government feels the need to protect the industry’s interests.

The things that I’ve been publicly saying may indeed be threatening to that power structure. There have been several references to the speech I gave after the conviction, but I’ve only ever seen half of one sentence of that speech quoted. In the government’s report, they actually had to add their own words to that one sentence to make it sound more threatening.   But the speech was about empowerment. It was about recognizing our interconnectedness rather than viewing ourselves as isolated individuals. The message of the speech was that when people stand together, they no longer have to be exploited by powerful corporations. Alienation is perhaps the most effective tool of control in America, and every reminder of our real connectedness weakens that tool.

But the sentencing guidelines don’t mention the need to protect corporations or politicians from ideas that threaten their control. The guidelines say “protect the public.” The question is whether the public is helped or harmed by my actions. The easiest way to answer that question is with the direct impacts of my action. As the oil executive stated in his testimony, the parcels I didn’t bid on averaged $12 per acre, but the ones I did bid on averaged $125. Those are the prices paid for public property to the public trust. The industry admits very openly that they were getting those parcels for an order of magnitude less than what they were worth. Not only did those oil companies drive up the prices to $125 during the bidding, they were then given an opportunity to withdraw their bids once my actions were explained. They kept the parcels, presumably because they knew they were still a good deal at $125. The oil companies knew they were getting a steal from the American people, and now they’re crying because they had to pay a little closer to what those parcels were actually worth. The government claims I should be held accountable for the steal the oil companies didn’t get. The government’s report demands $600,000 worth of financial impacts for the amount which the oil industry wasn’t able to steal from the public.

That extra revenue for the public became almost irrelevant, though, once most of those parcels were revoked by Secretary Salazar. Most of the parcels I won were later deemed inappropriate for drilling. In other words, the highest and best value to the public for those particular lands was not for oil and gas drilling. Had the auction gone off without a hitch, it would have been a loss for the public. The fact that the auction was delayed, extra attention was brought to the process, and the parcels were ultimately revoked was a good thing for the public.

More generally, the question of whether civil disobedience is good for the public is a matter of perspective. Civil disobedience is inherently an attempt at change. Those in power, whom Mr Huber represents, are those for whom the status quo is working, so they always see civil disobedience as a bad thing. The decision you are making today, your honor, is what segment of the public you are meant to protect. Mr Huber clearly has cast his lot with that segment who wishes to preserve the status quo. But the majority of the public is exploited by the status quo far more than they are benefited by it. The young are the most obvious group who is exploited and condemned to an ugly future by letting the fossil fuel industry call the shots. There is an overwhelming amount of scientific research, some of which you received as part of our proffer on the necessity defense, that reveals the catastrophic consequences which the young will have to deal with over the coming decades.

But just as real is the exploitation of the communities where fossil fuels are extracted. As a native of West Virginia, I have seen from a young age that the exploitation of fossil fuels has always gone hand in hand with the exploitation of local people. In West Virginia, we’ve been extracting coal longer than anyone else. And after 150 years of making other people rich, West Virginia is almost dead last among the states in per capita income, education rates and life expectancy. And it’s not an anomaly. The areas with the richest fossil fuel resources, whether coal in West Virginia and Kentucky, or oil in Louisiana and Mississippi, are the areas with the lowest standards of living. In part, this is a necessity of the industry. The only way to convince someone to blow up their backyard or poison their water is to make sure they are so desperate that they have no other option. But it is also the nature of the economic model. Since fossil fuels are a limited resources, whoever controls access to that resource in the beginning gets to set all the terms. They set the terms for their workers, for the local communities, and apparently even for the regulatory agencies. A renewable energy economy is a threat to that model. Since no one can control access to the sun or the wind, the wealth is more likely to flow to whoever does the work of harnessing that energy, and therefore to create a more distributed economic system, which leads to a more distributed political system. It threatens the profits of the handful of corporations for whom the current system works, but our question is which segment of the public are you tasked with protecting. I am here today because I have chosen to protect the people locked out of the system over the profits of the corporations running the system. I say this not because I want your mercy, but because I want you to join me.

After this difference of political philosophies, the rest of the sentencing debate has been based on the financial loss from my actions. The government has suggested a variety of numbers loosely associated with my actions, but as of yet has yet to establish any causality between my actions and any of those figures. The most commonly discussed figure is perhaps the most easily debunked. This is the figure of roughly $140,000, which is the amount the BLM originally spent to hold the December 2008 auction. By definition, this number is the amount of money the BLM spent before I ever got involved. The relevant question is what the BLM spent because of my actions, but apparently that question has yet to be asked. The only logic that relates the $140,000 figure to my actions is if I caused the entire auction to be null and void and the BLM had to start from scratch to redo the entire auction. But that of course is not the case. First is the prosecution’s on-again-off-again argument that I didn’t have any impact on the auction being overturned. More importantly, the BLM never did redo the auction because it was decided that many of those parcels should never have been auctioned in the first place. Rather than this arbitrary figure of $140,000, it would have been easy to ask the BLM how much money they spent or will spend on redoing the auction. But the government never asked this question, probably because they knew they wouldn’t like the answer.

The other number suggested in the government’s memorandum is the $166,000 that was the total price of the three parcels I won which were not invalidated. Strangely, the government wants me to pay for these parcels, but has never offered to actually give them to me. When I offered the BLM the money a couple weeks after the auction, they refused to take it. Aside from that history, this figure is still not a valid financial loss from my actions. When we wrote there was no loss from my actions, we actually meant that rather literally. Those three parcels were not evaporated or blasted into space because of my actions, not was the oil underneath them sucked dry by my bid card. They’re still there, and in fact the BLM has already issued public notice of their intent to re-auction those parcels in February of 2012.

The final figure suggested as a financial loss is the $600,000 that the oil company wasn’t able to steal from the public. That completely unsubstantiated number is supposedly the extra amount the BLM received because of my actions. This is when things get tricky. The government’s report takes that $600,000 positive for the BLM and adds it to that roughly $300,000 negative for the BLM, and comes up with a $900,000 negative. With math like that, it’s obvious that Mr Huber works for the federal government.

After most of those figures were disputed in the presentence report, the government claimed in their most recent objection that I should be punished according to the intended financial impact that I intended to cause. The government tries to assume my intentions and then claims, “This is consistent with the testimony that Mr. DeChristopher provided at trial, admitting that his intention was to cause financial harm to others with whom he disagreed.” Now I didn’t get to say a whole lot at the trial, so it was pretty easy to look back through the transcripts. The statement claimed by the government never happened. There was nothing even close enough to make their statement a paraphrase or artistic license. This statement in the government’s objection is a complete fiction. Mr Huber’s inability to judge my intent is revealed in this case by the degree to which he underestimates my ambition. The truth is that my intention, then as now, was to expose, embarrass and hold accountable the oil industry to the extent that it cuts into the $100 billion in annual profits that it makes through exploitation. I actually intended for my actions to play a role in the wide variety of actions that steer the country toward a clean energy economy where those $100 billion in oil profits are completely eliminated. When I read Mr Huber’s new logic, I was terrified to consider that my slightly unrealistic intention to have a $100 billion impact will fetch me several consecutive life sentences. Luckily this reasoning is as unrealistic as it is silly.

A more serious look at my intentions is found in Mr Huber’s attempt to find contradictions in my statements. Mr Huber points out that in public I acted proud of my actions and treated it like a success, while in our sentencing memorandum we claimed that my actions led to “no loss.” On the one hand I think it was a success, and yet I claim it there was no loss. Success, but no loss. Mr Huber presents these ideas as mutually contradictory and obvious proof that I was either dishonest or backing down from my convictions. But for success to be contradictory to no loss, there has to be another assumption. One has to assume that my intent was to cause a loss. But the only loss that I intended to cause was the loss of secrecy by which the government gave away public property for private profit. As I actually stated in the trial, my intent was to shine a light on a corrupt process and get the government to take a second look at how this auction was conducted. The success of that intent is not dependent on any loss. I knew that if I was completely off base, and the government took that second look and decided that nothing was wrong with that auction, the cost of my action would be another day’s salary for the auctioneer and some minor costs of re-auctioning the parcels. But if I was right about the irregularities of the auction, I knew that allowing the auction to proceed would mean the permanent loss of lands better suited for other purposes and the permanent loss of a safe climate. The intent was to prevent loss, but again that is a matter of perspective.

Mr Huber wants you to weigh the loss for the corporations that expected to get public property for pennies on the dollar, but I believe the important factor is the loss to the public which I helped prevent. Again, we come back to this philosophical difference. From any perspective, this is a case about the right of citizens to challenge the government. The US Attorney’s office makes clear that their interest is not only to punish me for doing so, but to discourage others from challenging the government, even when the government is acting inappropriately. Their memorandum states, “To be sure, a federal prison term here will deter others from entering a path of criminal behavior.” The certainty of this statement not only ignores the history of political prisoners, it ignores the severity of the present situation. Those who are inspired to follow my actions are those who understand that we are on a path toward catastrophic consequences of climate change. They know their future, and the future of their loved ones, is on the line. And they know were are running out of time to turn things around. The closer we get to that point where it’s too late, the less people have to lose by fighting back. The power of the Justice Department is based on its ability to take things away from people. The more that people feel that they have nothing to lose, the more that power begins to shrivel. The people who are committed to fighting for a livable future will not be discouraged or intimidated by anything that happens here today. And neither will I. I will continue to confront the system that threatens our future. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. I don’t mean that in any sort of disrespectful way at all, but you don’t have that authority.   You have authority over my life, but not my principles. Those are mine alone.

I’m not saying any of this to ask you for mercy, but to ask you to join me. If you side with Mr Huber and believe that your role is to discourage citizens from holding their government accountable, then you should follow his recommendations and lock me away. I certainly don’t want that. I have no desire to go to prison, and any assertion that I want to be even a temporary martyr is false. I want you to join me in standing up for the right and responsibility of citizens to challenge their government. I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience. If you share those values but think my tactics are mistaken, you have the power to redirect them. You can sentence me to a wide range of community service efforts that would point my commitment to a healthy and just world down a different path. You can have me work with troubled teens, as I spent most of my career doing. You can have me help disadvantaged communities or even just pull weeds for the BLM. You can steer that commitment if you agree with it, but you can’t kill it. This is not going away.   At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow. The choice you are making today is what side are you on.

On July 4th, Rejecting the Immoral "American Dream"

2011-07-04T10:46:00.000-05:00

Courtesy adbusters.org

The United States of America can dream only because of one of the most extensive acts of genocide in recorded human history. When Europeans landed in the region that was eventually to include the United States, there were people here. Population estimates vary, but a conservative estimate is 12 million north of the Rio Grande, perhaps 2 million in what is now Canada and the rest in what is now the continental United States. By the end of the so-called Indian Wars, the 1900 census recorded 237,000 indigenous people in the United States. That’s an extermination rate of 95 to 99 percent.[3] That is to say, the European colonists and their heirs successfully eliminated almost the entire indigenous population -- or the “merciless Indian Savages” as they are labeled in the Declaration of Independence, one of the most famous articulations of the American Dream. Almost every Indian died in the course of the European invasion to create the United States so that we may dream our dreams. Millions of people died for the crime of being inconveniently located on land desired by Europeans who believed in their right to dominate.

I have concluded that the American Dream is inconsistent with social justice and ecological sustainability. So, I’m against the American Dream. I don’t want to rescue, redefine, or renew the American Dream. I want us all to recognize the need to transcend the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the American Dream. If we could manage that, the dream would fade -- as dreams do -- when we awake and come into consciousness.

From The Anguish in the American Dream by Robert Jensen

Recap of the happenings in WI from the good folks at Real News

2011-06-20T09:55:00.000-05:00

More at The Real News

Walkerville Day Three: Protect Public Services

2011-06-06T22:35:00.003-05:00

While “public services” was the theme of the day in Walkerville, the slogan surely could have been “We will not be silenced!” At least a thousand citizens converged to march around capitol square to protest the cuts to essential public services in the upcoming biennial state budget.

At 11:30AM, a diverse group comprised of firefighters, police officers, nurses, teaching assistants, students, farmers, and numerous other community members assembled and marched up State Street to the capitol, as they had done over and over in the past several months. The bagpipers of the local fire department led the way and tractors followed in the rear as protesters made their journey around the capitol building, repeating their now familiar chants calling for equality, justice, and democracy.

Stopping briefly at M&I bank, the group demonstrated against the taxpayer bailout received by that financial institution, who then used their funds to support Governor Walker’s campaign. Shouting, “You got bailed out, we got sold out,” the protesters marked their disgust about governmental funds being funneled to private corporations rather than public services.

After several rounds about the capitol square, the firefighters led the protest group to the door of the capitol building at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Hoping to re-enter the people’s building, as they had been able to in all times past, the protest group was blocked from entry. Discovering that a side door around the corner was left ajar, a number of protesters ran to the entrance and went into the building, only to encounter capitol police officers who tried to block their passage.

The firefighters managed to gain access to the rotunda of the capitol to symbolically voice their concerns with the legislation being promulgated by the current administration. Meanwhile, others in the building did not fare as well. A couple of protesters were carried out of the building for failing to enter through the “proper” guarded door, even though at least one actually had. Two visiting documentary filmmakers from Vermont were forcibly escorted into an elevator and arrested for “disorderly conduct,” which apparently is now defined as being in the capitol with a video camera. Interestingly, there were more (erroneous) arrests today than in all of the prior months of protests, and for the first time members of the press were arrested.

As lobbyists and friends of Walker are whisked into the statehouse through a secret tunnel, the citizens who are the true owners of the capitol must be frisked and go through a metal detector to enter their own building. But this is a perfect analogy to the state budget, which hands out millions to those members of the corporate elite (who in turn, do nothing with their riches to help anyone but themselves), and slashes rights and services to all of the actual taxpaying citizens of the state.

What was clear here on Day Three in Walkerville was that fascism has become the dominant theme of the current state administration. Oppression is rampant, as not before witnessed in the previous demonstrations and rallies. Besides the continued blocking of open access to the capitol building, the Walkerville encampment itself faces severe restrictions in terms of the spaces and times allowed for the village to exist. In addition, police seem to be quick to arrest, with little to no provocation. Apparently, our new Mayor Paul Soglin is also complicit in the oppression, as sources say he reneged on his promises to the citizen protesters today, and assisted in the threats and arrests of anyone not strictly adhering to prescribed orders about when and where they could and could not be.

Nevertheless, the importance of this day should not be underestimated. Despite the attempts of the governor and state legislators to subjugate the citizenry, the citizens have proven that they will not lie down or retreat. Indeed, their struggle is about basic survival. One could immediately sense the exhilaration and excitement, the sense of purpose and strength as the crowds who had previously walked, rallied, protested, and even slept beside one another for days on end were once again united. The day marked a renewed effort in the ongoing movement against not just one anti-union bill, but the larger corporate takeover of government. It demonstrated that the ties made in recent months between numerous groups and individuals still hold strong and that the efforts to fight the anti-union bill will continue in the fight against the unjust Walker budget bill … and beyond.

Not resting on their laurels, Wisconsinites establish Walkerville

2011-06-06T15:40:00.000-05:00

After the huge wave of protests throughout February and March, the focus of activists in Wisconsin moved to the impending recall elections this summer. The winter actions erupted as a result of an anti-union bill which threatened to remove essentially all collective bargaining rights for public employees as well as hamstring unions by requiring the almost impossible tasks of annual recertification and individual opt-in dues collecting. In response, besides assembling in numbers reaching nearly one-hundred thousand, Wisconsin citizens amassed signatures on petitions to facilitate the recall of numerous state senators who had voted for Governor Walker’s duplicitous legislation.

In the past two months, though a presence of protesters has remained - with their t-shirts, buttons, signs, banners, vuvzelas – around the vicinity of the capitol building, it appeared the united front of thousands had waned. Groups still came to meet for solidarity sing-a-longs and to attend governmental committee hearings on the many new regressive, pro-corporate, anti-human bills being forwarded by the Wisconsin legislature. But with the recall elections on the horizon and with the recent small victory of the Dane County circuit court dismissing the anti-collecting bargaining law (as it had been passed so hastily as to not adhere to common legislative requirements), it appeared that Wisconsinites might be done with the fight, resting on their own laurels and those of the Democrats they hoped to elect via the recall.

Of course, the corporate media, who operate under the same anti-human system that fosters plutocracy and redistribution of wealth from the many to the few, would like nothing better than to make it appear that all is “back to normal” in the cheese state. So, perhaps few people outside of Wisconsin and even outside of Madison realize that we were serious when we said that this was not a protest but a movement. There is much yet to be accomplished.

As of 7pm on Saturday, June 4^th, a diverse group of citizens, representing unionists, non-union workers, students, teachers, immigrants, farmers, families and people with no formal affiliation (save for being a part of the empathetic class who truly seeks liberty and justice for all) laid down their tents and founded “Walkerville” around the perimeter of the Wisconsin capitol building. With a nod to the Hooverville tent cities of the Great Depression, these activists are demonstrating that we are not only opposed to the aforementioned anti-union bill, but that we are opposed to the entire regressive budget of this state, which wholly removes the rights and social safeties for the most vulnerable members of our society and shifts all of the state’s bounty to the wealthiest and most anti-social corporate oligarchs.

The police state enacted by the Walker administration has severely hampered the lawful and peaceful assembly of citizens in our own statehouse, so Walkerville exists to re-establish the constant presence and occupation by the people of the state, whose voice is being muted within the capitol.

Most importantly, Walkerville demonstrates that we in Wisconsin are not going to let up. Just as we are being attacked on all fronts as citizens, we will be fighting back on all fronts. Though the Democrats in our state legislature have stepped up to the plate and helped to support the will of the people, it is unlikely that they would have done so had their feet not been held to the fire. If we had not gathered in the capitol clearly proclaiming our will, our presence, and our solidarity, it is not clear the state Democrats would have had the impetus to help us fight. Thus we know that simply electing new officials will never be enough to ensure justice for the people from the government.
States like New York and California serve as prime examples of how the Democratic agenda is just as corporate as the Republican. Governor Andrew Cuomo, the son of a man once considered one of the strongest liberals in NY State history, is promoting many of the same brutal and unnecessary cuts to education and poverty programs. The underserved of California are faring no better under Jerry Brown. If we citizens fail to realize that we must pressure ALL politicians of all politician affiliations, and we must be prepared to fight indefinitely against the bipartisan corporate takeover of our local, state, and federal our government, we are sure to lose.

Walkerville signifies the fortitude of the Wisconsin people, and the recognition that our struggles as citizens are not soon to end. Our actions may take new forms or may morph as they are reassessed for utility, but they are far from over.

For those of us in Wisconsin who cannot camp out day and night around the capitol but still want to volunteer with the movement, there are numerous opportunities to be present for more protests and actions against the state budget, which will be negatively affecting all of us. (See Defend Wisconsin for full details.) For those in other states who will likely see similar developments, please know that we are still fighting, as you will surely have to fight too. The more we acknowledge that this struggle against the ruling class will be ongoing, that it affects us all, and that we may not ever be able to “return to normal,” the more likely we may have a fighting chance for our future.

Delusion and Denial Part 2: Ecology, Sustainability, et cetera

2011-05-15T07:04:00.004-05:00


Western chorus frog in hand

I yelled at the Lorax, “Now listen here, Dad! All you do is yap-yap and say, ‘Bad! Bad! Bad!’ Well, I have my rights, sir and I’m telling you. I intend to go on doing just what I do! And for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering on biggering and biggering and BIGGERING and BIGGERING; turning MORE Truffula trees into Thneeds which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!”

--- Theodor Geisel

It is possible that in the backwards Bizarro world, “wants” means “needs” and “growth” means “sustainability,” but here in the actual world that we occupy there exist certain immutable biochemical and physical principles, whether we want to believe in them or not. Economics, politics, and law all have fundamental principles that are wholly human constructs and wholly alterable, yet we refuse to change them and pretend instead that they are absolute. On the other hand, science has fundamental principles that cannot be altered by humans, yet in our magical thinking even the “best and brightest” of us believe that scientific principles can be modified. In thinking so, we are perilously approaching our ecological limits. The public discourse about these scientific principles, where it even occurs, continually places them in the context of economics and politics – as if they are equivalent. Though the atrocious sociopolitical and economic conditions throughout the world certainly do need to be addressed, these issues are portrayed as the primary, if not the singular problems that our global society faces. In reality, all of these issues are secondary to the issue of ecology; for without a biome, without ecosystems to sustain life, we have no society, no politics, no economics, no homo sapiens.

In the world of interdisciplinary environmental studies, academics and organizations like to believe that their purpose is to address these issues of primacy, to help find “win, win” solutions to the criminal raping and pillaging that human civilizations have committed on the earth. Yet, they commence at a starting point that ensures their inevitable failure. Even those who acknowledge the dire environmental emergency that we face on the planet consign themselves to ruin because they refuse to conform to the reality that they themselves know and have studied.

The following comprise some common erroneous premises that many environmentalists/environmental scientists agree upon, which ensure our certain doom. Predicating research and activism on any one of these illusions merely enables us to deny the inevitable:

1. We need more (energy, fuel, goods, etc.)

I once read that a group of émigrés to America from the African continent were taken to the Mall of America in Minnesota and had to be escorted out because they were so overwhelmed with grief and discomfort to witness such a spectacle. Their reaction seems reasonable and rational. I have no idea why we do not all feel this way when we enter any large scale store any day. I often go into a supermarket or department store and feel ill thinking about how many items are present in that one store; probably enough to supply the needs of the entire city – forever. I cannot find any quantitative statistics on such a thing, as no one seems to care about our gross overabundance of material items, but we must have more consumer goods than the people on the planet could ever actually consume. And yet, there are dozens or more of these stores in my city alone. And yet, we keep producing more goods (or “bads” as I like to call them). And yet, millions of people still do not have the basic necessities they need. These items of necessity certainly do exist on the planet in plentiful abundance for all people, but they are not made for people, they are made for profit.

So, industrial nations continue to produce more bads, even though we need no more, and we continue to buy more bads, even though we need no more, and we continue to utilize precious natural resources.

There are renewable and nonrenewable resources, of course. Ecologists would say that if we just utilize renewable resources, then we can continue to produce more forever. But when renewable resources are consumed faster than they can be renewed, they become non-renewables. This is how we persist. With all of the political discussion of production, consumption, economy, and jobs, we too often deny that we live on a finite planet with finite resources – and even infinite resources that we have made to be finite. These will run out, and due to our continual neglect, they will run out faster than we can probably imagine. This way of life is not sustainable.

2. We must work with corporations

Emblematic of this idea that corporations are inevitable in our lives is the fact that at our annual Earth Day celebration, my environmental studies school invited the CEO of Stonyfield Farm to speak. Though Stonyfield Farm is an organic dairy corporation, it is still a corporation. It supplies products to Walmart, with the idea that selling organic products at Walmart promotes sustainability, since organic farming is certainly more sustainable than conventional farming and since Walmart supplies more products to more people throughout the globe. But selling more products, of course, organic or not, is not sustainable. Industrial organic agriculture is not sustainable. Flying, shipping, and trucking packages and products all over the globe is not sustainable. The corporate model of endless growth and constantly increasing rates of growth is incompatible with finite resources on a finite planet. Beyond the atrocities that corporations commit in the context of labor exploitation and increasing poverty, their basic model of business is not ecologically sustainable, no matter which way you slice it.

3. We need industry

Numerous reports have demonstrated recently that the solution to hunger throughout the world is small-scale organic agriculture. If you have ever grown a garden and/or shared your vegetables with friends and neighbors you know that unless you are visited with some agricultural calamity/disease, you almost always have more food than you can ever eat. Industrial agriculture is not necessary to supply the needs of the planet; in fact, it is only necessary to fill the coffers of industrialists. How one can possibly conclude that shipping packaged food throughout the globe and selling it to people through middlemen is the best way to provide this basic necessity of life is beyond comprehension.

Industry consumes raw materials and energy and emits harmful pollutants that last for eons in the environment. Industry simply fosters more use, more consumption of finite resources, more waste, and more profits for the rich. In an absurd and illogical manner, we actually use energy to gather and disseminate our energy supplies (coal, gas, oil, uranium). You cannot keep using energy to gain energy. Moreover, industry creates unbelievable, incomprehensible amounts of waste. Just look at the industrial wastelands of abandoned factories. Does that seem sustainable?

Have you ever seen or learned about a landfill? In a streak of creative insanity, some inane “genius” decided it would be wise to dig a large hole, bury all of our used or broken products (most of which cannot decompose, or at least, not quickly or safely) and cover them up for all eternity within our soils. Oh, and wait! These things might be somewhat toxic and might seep into our waterways, so we will line these holes with plastic (another product made from oil and also highly toxic) to prevent the waste from mixing with our clean water and our soil. Brilliant!

And these are but just a few examples of industry.

Needless to say, industry and industrial infrastructure are entirely unsustainable.

4. Science and technology will save us

Last year I went to a talk by economist and political activist Jeremy Rifkin. He explained the work he was doing in Europe, where they were dismantling large scale electrical infrastructures and replacing them with small scale, local “renewable” energy designs. Though, in theory, these designs appear to be a terrific solution to our energy problems, in reality, they are mere stop-gap measures. To deem them sustainable is to be delusional. A student remarked that even these small, local, renewable systems required not only inputs of materials - often rare-earth, extremely non-renewable materials (not to mention materials often garnered through slave labor) - but constant maintenance, which rendered them unsustainable in the long run. When asked how to deal with these quandaries of sustainability, rather than denying them, Rifkin merely remarked that it would be up to the next generation to figure out those solutions. And herein lies the magical thinking of science and technology. Though, of course, solar panels on one’s roof to power one’s home are far less harmful that nuclear power plants, they are not sustainable. Nor are wind turbines or hydroelectric plants (particularly those that require dams). To think that they are is simply ridiculous.

Likewise, in education, nearly all teaching now requires computers. Computers are in classrooms, lessons are provided through PowerPoint presentations, grades are monitored via online databases. In fact, I think every field of work in the western world also now requires computers and probably internet. We keep updating our technology and purchasing NEW! FASTER! MORE FLASHY! computers that keep our minds more idle than ever, keep us more occupied with more nonsense than ever, and keep our real interpersonal interactions more remote than ever. These computers require the input of many precious metals and rare-earth materials. They are called rare because they are rare. To assume that we can continue to produce and use computers, internet, and cell phones is to be completely deluded. But we seem to believe we will go on like this forever.

The other day a nuclear physicist spoke to my environmental toxicology class. Having no knowledge about toxicological mechanisms or biology (or none that she demonstrated), she simply declared that not only were new (still hypothetical) third and fourth generation nuclear plants safer than the old, but that they were completely safe, period. In addition, she stated that we must not only built more nuclear power plants, but that we must find ways to recycle the waste as well as remove it for “clearance.” Clearance of radioactive materials is a euphemism for creating consumer products from low-level radioactive materials. She proclaimed that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would not allow this low level radiation to be released to our environment if it were not safe for us. Her unfounded, unsupported words are the kind of industrial, corporate, ideological propaganda that is allowed to be imparted as knowledge to students. Not one thing about what this woman said was supported by scientific toxicological evidence – or common sense - and not one thing that she said established how on earth nuclear energy could possibly be safe or sustainable. What she demonstrated was nothing but illogic and ultimate human hubris. Yet most American politicians of both major parties tout nuclear as a safe and sustainable energy of the future, just as they tout offshore drilling as safe in spite of the glaringly obvious evidence to the contrary.

Finally, of late, science has played a crucial role in maintaining the status quo while examining and modeling systems. For example, conservation biology attempts to conserve natural systems and organisms while maintaining our industrial infrastructures. Science continually measures the harm stemming from alterations in ecological systems due to climate change. Science studied the pattern of movement of the oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP/Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. It studied the harm to wildlife following the disaster. It modeled the movement of radioactive material through the air emanating from the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. In short, science has tremendous capabilities to monitor our ruin. Yet science has done little or nothing to prevent our ruin. On the contrary, the need for scientific authentication of harms enables corporations to perpetuate those harms as science seeks the means of measuring and proving them. Prevention of ruin does not require science, it requires ethics and common sense actions, such as those found in the Precautionary Principle.

5. Climate change is the most important environmental problem facing the planet

Noted biologist Paul R. Ehrlich gave a speech here in Madison last year, in which he stated that climate change might not be the biggest problem facing humanity today – it might actually be toxics. For many, it was just another one of Ehrlich’s notions to dismiss, as he was the scientist who wrote of the crisis of overpopulation in 1968, but we have not suffered the effects of any such problem yet, right? While the population has not collapsed, how easily we neglect the more than two billion people on the planet without potable water and the billions who do not have adequate food supplies. Yet most will tell you that Ehrlich was far off in his dire predictions of calamitous overpopulation. That is because science favors Type II statistical errors – false negatives - rather than Type I errors – false positives. So the fact that the human race has not yet met its carrying capacity, as Paul seemingly predicted, makes his false positive an egregious error. However, science is highly tolerant of false negatives, even though these result in death and destruction daily. One of the major false negatives that we deal with every day is in the realm of toxics.

As physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva remarks:

I think one of the most tragic moments of human evolution was when, at the beginning of the scientific revolution, a bunch of men just decided that knowledge was reliable only when it was made totally unreliable. And you could define as totally objective that which had nothing to do with reality. But abstract categories became primary qualities, and primary qualities were reduced to secondary qualities about which you could not be certain. You couldn’t be certain about smelling rotten food or tasting chemicals in your food? … Can you imagine? To be reduced to that level of uncertainty that our most basic indicators of relating to the world - through our eyes, through our ears, through our nose, through our tongue, through our tactile sense – all of that knowing was … erased. And then we were put out with measuring … abstract constructions. And I believe that has been a very big reason why not only have we ended up destroying so much of the world, but it’s also a reason why we’ve ended up creating so many illusions.

Of our many illusions, one of the greatest is that toxic substances are doing little harm. The other day I heard a report from Fukushima in which a government official stated that just because the radioactive releases from the nuclear power plant were odorous, it does not mean they were harmful. This notion flies in the face of evolutionary biology. In fact, malodor is indicative of harm, and is a means of detection that organisms have adapted to protect themselves from harm! Likewise, we are constantly told that carcinogenic substances – such as radiation – are safe at certain “acceptable levels.” And based upon what is now occurring in Fukushima, those acceptable limits can be arbitrarily increased when they are reached, as the Japanese government has been doing with limits to radiation exposure.

Interestingly, despite all of the evidence of carcinogenic exposure in our environment – radiation from nuclear sources such as power plants and medical diagnostic technologies, industrial chemicals in our air, food, and water, toxic substances within our cosmetics and consumer products - we somehow have come to believe that the cancer we suffer is mainly due to inheritance. While it is certainly true that cancer is genetic – in that it nearly always involves a mutation/alteration of our DNA – to equate cancer to heredity is not only to deny what is obvious all around us, but also to deny evolutionary biology. It is clear that lethal inherited traits – such as cancer – would, according to evolution and natural selection, inevitability be discarded from the population or at the very least decrease in incidence if they were solely hereditary.

Indeed, according to biologist and science historian Nancy Langston, women who possess the so-called “breast cancer genes” BRCA1 and BRCA2, who were born before 1940 (before the boom of synthetic chemicals), have little to no increased risk of cancer. Only those women with these genes who were born after 1940 have an increased cancer risk. In their cases, an increased risk does not inevitably mean cancer – which it would if their inherited genes were the cause of the disease. Thus, the genes allow for more susceptibility to the effects of carcinogens; so the fundamental causal factor here is not the gene but the toxic substance.

Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald concurs with this assessment that cancer is not hereditary, yet he differs by hypothesizing that cancers are ultimately caused by viruses. Again, that is a nice notion to allow us to continue with our industrial pollution and toxification, but it flies in the face of evidence to the contrary. Though some cancers may be in part caused by viral infections, as in the case of human papillomavirus (HPV), and while it has been demonstrated that animals with impaired immune systems are more susceptible to carcinogenic effects, to deny the existence of carcinogens and to deny that our cancers are being caused by these substances is the ultimate form of delusion. Ever hear of mesotheliaoma? This is a rare form of cancer caused almost exclusively from exposure to asbestos. Unfortunately, most forms of cancer are neither so rare nor so clear in etiology. It is a convenient consequence of polluting the environment with so many toxic substances to which we are exposed that precise disease causation is often too complex to assess. But to deny that many, if not most, cancers are derived from our carcinogenic toxification of our environment is completely and utterly delusional.

Similarly, to deny climate change – the effects of which any of us who have lived more than thirty years (which is the temporal definition that distinguishes climate from weather) have witnessed with our own senses – is to be living in Bizarro world. It is absolutely absurd and fatalistic. But also, how convenient to pin all of our environmental troubles on climate change! And even more, how convenient to reduce all of these troubles to one basic element: carbon. What an easy way to delude people into believing that solutions are simple and that we can continue as we are, if only we reduce our carbon footprint through advanced technologies and cooperation with corporations! Meanwhile, as we develop and enhance these wonderfully low-carbon technologies (such as natural gas, nuclear and “clean” coal) we slowly die from cancer and other preventable syndromes resulting from our synthetic chemicals and pollution in our toxic environment.

6. We cannot “go back”

When I became a vegetarian almost twenty years ago, so many people asked me what I would do to substitute for the meaty things I once ate. Would I now eat veggie burgers, soy bacon, vegan steaks - the assumption being that these sorts of foods that I once ate and once wanted were also foods that I could not give up and needed? Thankfully, having grown up in an Italian family I had witnessed a plethora of healthful, gourmet, delicious meals that required no meat whatsoever, and I knew that I could have an even more abundant variety of delectable foods available to me as a vegetarian. Just because I had eaten meat did not mean I could not “go back” to a seemingly simpler diet.

But as a student in environmental studies, I have heard the continual mantra that we cannot go back. It does not seem to mean anything. In actuality, as Derrick Jenson often notes, the only sustainable technology is stone-age technology. To call anything else sustainable is delusion. The only sustainable substances are those that re-enter our natural biogeochemical cycles. Thus, anything synthetic or processed is generally unsustainable. Food that is closest to the earth (unprocessed) and lowest on the food chain is nearly always healthiest and most sustainable; materials that are manipulated mechanically rather than chemically are nearly always less toxic and most sustainable. Not only is it wrong to say “we cannot go back,” in fact, if we want to survive, we must go back.

*********

We are the only species on the planet who attempts to magically defy the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics. We are the only species on the planet who does not seem to know how to live sustainably – or who wants to delude ourselves into thinking that we do not know.

Truthfully, I used to be more cynical about people. But I do not actually believe that everyone is so delusional, that everyone is in such denial. For example, do we not realize that all of the waste we have dumped into our oceans (take for example, the oil from spills, the endless ships that have sunk, the planes that have crashed, the radioactive materials that have seeped from industry, the run-off from all of our wastes on land), our oceans that sustain a multitude of organisms, is akin for these marine species to dumping drops of crude oil, batteries, electrical equipment, etc, into our own soup or our own bathtubs? It is no way to sustain life. It is all pretty obvious. Everything about our unsustainable lifestyle and society is obvious.

I do not actually think the delusion and denial is as pervasive as it seems. It seems pervasive since the corporate media perpetuate conventional wisdom as manufactured and dictated by their corporate paymasters. People are just fearful – fearful of change, fearful of being different, fearful of dissent. Thus, a “spiral of silence” ensues.

What I have learned from the recent political protests in Wisconsin is that when enough of the more courageous people have the guts to speak out, the more fearful are apt to follow suit. So what the more courageous need to do is identify our idiocy, our excesses, our wastes, our injustices, our unsustainable practices as exactly what they are. We need to put an end to our perpetual corporate manufactured phony positivity; we need to stop labeling the truth-tellers as “Debbie Downers.” The social, economic, and health effects of climate change, the health effects of toxic industrial technologies, and our inevitable ecological collapse do not only affect those who seem pessimistic – they affect all of us.

Do I believe we can prevent the collapse? No I do not. The earth will go on, but most organisms, particularly humans, probably will not. But do I believe that we can prevent as much harm as possible to our fellow humans, as well as our other fellow organisms, whom I love, on the way down? Absolutely. I think that may be the only moral imperative that we have left. After all, evolutionary biology has also shown that altruism and cooperation are inherent traits in organisms.

We cannot pretend that our hybrid cars, our long-life mercury lightbulbs, our energy star appliances, our “clean” coal and nuclear power, or even our solar voltaics, are sustainable. Nor can we pretend that endless economic growth, population growth, industrial technology, and job creation are sustainable. Delusion and denial do us no good. What we can do is acknowledge that unless we drastically alter - even stop - our way of life as we know it immediately, we are in for a tremendously difficult and challenging future as a species. Thus, perhaps all we can do is work our hardest to minimize our deleterious impacts on our ecosystems, to fight injustice, to destroy corporations and industry, to enjoy the beauty of the earth and its biota, and to, as much as possible, help all others who need our assistance as the inevitable ecological suffering unfolds. And, we can tell the truth.

Delusion and Denial Part 1: Work, Jobs, Careerism, Charity

2011-05-01T08:56:00.000-05:00


Demotivator courtesy Despair, Inc:. http://www.despair.com/teamwork.html

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing – kill yourself.

---Bill Hicks

I am no aficionado of Superman, but I must admit, I am one of “Seinfeld.” With reference to the latter and by default, the former: Everything around me these days makes me feel like I am living in Bizarro World. Everything is exactly the opposite of what it should be. To quote fictional Jerry, “…In the backwards Bizarro World….Up is down. Down is up. He says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.” The only problem is that unlike in “Seinfeld” this Bizarro World is far from hilarious.

I find nothing much less bizarre than our notions of jobs and work. Because we westerners premise every aspect of our lives on money and the economy, we are all (but a very select elite few) wage slaves who have become totally and utterly dependent on working for an income in order to pay for our basic necessities of life. Part of the problem is that we have (purposefully) lost most of our previously held skills. Renaissance men and women and people who possess wide-ranging abilities are less valued than those who focus on a particular specialization. And of course, by specializing, we become more reliant upon the corporate-controlled structure of production to acquire our basic needs.

Yet, as we can readily know from non-western, indigenous cultures, these basic necessities are not predicated on money. In reality, human beings as a particular animal species do not need money to live. So, why do we rely on this monetary system, dominated by corporate capitalism? We can give excuses like this way of life enables technological, intellectual, and creative “progress” that could not be accomplished otherwise. That is a nice conceit. The premise is based on the false assumption that our modern way of life has led to more leisure time during which we do not have to work for basic necessities and can accomplish feats of intellectual, creative, and technological marvel. The truth is we have less leisure time than we used to, and most of it is spent observing and imbibing the spectacle of bread and circuses.

We can also pretend that we all have very valuable roles to play in our society, and that working hard in these roles is virtuous. But our jobs are no longer (if they ever were) for the benefit of us, our communities, our society; they are for the benefit of the corporate elite. We are merely their dutiful servants, and for the most part, the more success we have in our job, the more likely we are to be an unethical, immoral drone, generating widespread damage to our world.

In my youth, many children aspired to pretty altruistic professions like firefighting or teaching. They recognized, however unconsciously, the moral imperative to mix productivity with service. Yet, by the time we reached high school, pragmatism and careerism reigned supreme.

Most people do not bother with the “service” aspect of their careers. And who could blame them? From a very young age, what is presented as of principal concern is making a good living to provide for you and your family - or better yet, making lots and lots of money as fast as possible. How that is accomplished, and what harm may be done to other people, communities, or society in doing so is wholly and utterly neglected.

Of course, many people have fewer career choices than others. They have no opportunities in terms of attending college, let alone graduate/professional schools. In some cases, these marginalized peoples turn to crime because they see it as their only means of making that decent living. But in reality, the crimes of the marginalized members of society, such as the drug gangs in inner cities throughout the U.S., differ little from the crimes committed by people who work for multinational corporations in the U.S. The only subtle differences are that gangs kill far fewer people directly while corporations kill far more people indirectly, and that gang crimes are prosecutable while corporate crimes are completely legal. (David Simon beautifully, poignantly, and realistically portrays this parallel yet inequitable work structure in his magnificent series “The Wire.”) In both instances, concern about self trumps concern about community and others.

This self-concern is the primary objective given to work today. We are constantly reminded about the virtues and rewards of hard work. We work mainly to amass wealth for ourselves and our families – or, more likely nowadays, to try to maintain the basics needed to survive. However, not only is this self-concern an illusion promulgated by corporate interests to feed our egos and make us feel empowered as indentured servants, the value of work in and of itself is a fallacy. Jobs do not have inherent value; indeed many, if not most, do much more harm than good.

When I was an undergraduate at a Roman Catholic university, the Jesuit influence in our education held both academics and service in high esteem. Ironically, while the majority of undergraduates at my university were on pre-professional tracks – going into law, medicine, or business – no one thought to ponder the service of these professions. Careerism there, and on every college campus dominates. What service meant to our school was charity and volunteerism. But what good is charity when your career necessitates the need for the charity in the first place? This idea is rarely thought, much less spoken. Hard work, goal-setting, and dedication to a successful outcome is viewed as worthy of honor, even if that outcome is unethical, immoral, or of little to no qualitative value whatsoever.

To rationalize our self-absorption and selfishness, we engage in charity/volunteering. So what we are left with is one step up, two steps back for society. Charity merely signifies an excuse for injustice and demonstrates the failure of a society as a whole.

In graduate school, this careerism flourishes as well. Few conversations are had about the value and worthiness of research. What are more often discussed are the criteria necessary to gain prominent positions in the future. Time spent conducting studies of quality geared toward the betterment of our society or of our environment is secondary to time spent just getting a study – any study – done. Quantity of research and publication is far more important than quality, and success is measured in terms of how much is accomplished, not how valuable those accomplishments are.

In Hollywood, for actors and film/television crews, being booked on a job is seen as a success. Nearly everyone in these fields takes whatever jobs they land, as these jobs are scarce and competition is fierce. Until you have “made a name for yourself” or made certain connections, it is all the same to land work on a creatively innovative movie or an offensive reality show, a cerebral satirical program or a broad mindless comedy, a politically and culturally educational film or a porn flick. (The latter is sometimes the sole criterion for turning down a job.). Not too much is different in other fields, either.

While people fortunate enough to have college educations frown upon working at places like McDonalds because of the lack of prestige, non-living wage, repetitive mindless work, and lack of benefits, few mention problems with McDonalds’ direct connection to the proliferation of agribusiness and destruction of family farms, of factory farming and torture of livestock animals, or of environmentally destructive farming practices and commodification/monopolization of seeds.

The fact that corporate business models are revered as the lone models to emulate in each and every career field now only aggravates the problem with work. For example, when I (not proudly) worked for a short time at a large bookstore chain, I was paid barely over minimum wage and had no benefits. The company attempted to spew propaganda about being a work “family,” but did not even attempt to pay a livable salary. When their quarterly profits turned out to be less than anticipated, they fired a third to half the workforce and had the rest of us fill in - i.e., take on more responsibilities – for no more pay. Mind you, profits were garnered handily by the corporation, but the yield was not high enough.

Contrast that job with the time I spent working for a local sandwich shop. This business had limited hours, not because it wouldn’t have profited from being open longer, but because the owners preferred time spent at home with family to time spent making more money. They did not advertise and relied only on word of mouth, so that they could keep their business at a manageable scale to enable their modest but comfortable lifestyle. Despite the popularity of their business, they did not want unlimited growth and unlimited wealth for its own sake. They paid me almost twice the minimum wage to be a cashier, order assembler, and delivery person because they valued me as worker and did not feel the need to pocket the extra cash they could have taken for themselves. They even respected my vegetarianism and allowed me to stay clear of the meat in their sandwiches! Indeed, theirs was a vastly successful and useful business following an anti-corporate model, which exemplified how you can make a very good living, treat your workers well, and remain successful on your own terms rather than society’s.

But that sandwich business remains a huge anomaly. And though I could probably find small ethical quandaries in that job as well, they were minimal compared to most other jobs that currently exist.

The Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians, commonly translated as “do no harm,” rarely enters into the careerist picture for any workers – not even for doctors. There is a reason that we experience a decrease in deaths when hospitals temporarily shut down, and why environmental conditions tend to improve when the economy is bad. Our work – even in those professions that purport to be of service - is often harmful (at the very least) in the way it is currently conceived and conducted according to corporate principles.

The fact remains that we seldom question the corporate model of efficiency in work, in which the most amount for the least cost and/or least amount of time is the only value. Nor do we question the qualitative, ethical, or moral value of the work we do. Occasionally, people quit or refuse to participate when direct effects of harm are obvious in their job, but more often than not, our jobs produce tremendous amounts of indirect harm for which we remain complacent and complicit.

So, while unions currently remain one of the few means of protecting us workers from completely being enslaved, they are but an interim piece in the sustainability of working in general.

We need to rethink all the jobs we do, and look toward creating alternate paradigms of “making a living.” We should stop rationalizing our jobs with excuses that we are “just earning a living,” and “just paying the bills”; we should make the ethical and moral implications of our work of paramount importance. Furthermore, we need to reinvigorate local connections, renew sharing and bartering, and relearn basic skills to help us become less reliant on corporations to provide the necessities we need in life. We need vibrant local communities to help one another outside of the corporate structure, rather than compete for the scraps that corporations throw our way as if we are vermin.

And while we vigorously fight the austerity measures being forwarded by our governments - which do nothing more than redistribute wealth from the people with the least to the people with the most – we should reconsider voluntary austerity in our own personal lives.

My partner’s beloved uncle, may he rest in peace, was an icon to emulate in this regard. Not only was he a vibrant member of the community at large, giving and sharing with his neighbors, he was a college professor who voluntarily worked part-time to enable the hiring of another worthy employee. His austerity allowed for another’s prosperity.

Through a qualitative reassessment of our work values and our jobs, in addition to a reinvigoration of local communities and camaraderie, and a re-education in basic life skills, we may help allow for the prosperity of both people and the planet. Through the rationalization of careerism, corporate efficiency, and self-concern in work, we foster individualization in our society and ensure its inevitable collapse.

(Still to come … Delusion and Denial Part 2: Ecology)

The Media on Education – Grade: F

2011-03-27T08:15:00.002-05:00

We Do Not Have an Education Crisis in this Country. We Have a Societal Crisis

Regardless of the dearth of media coverage, the protests and rallies here in Madison, Wisconsin continue. There are people inside and outside the capitol every single day, rain, snow, or shine. One particular group that is represented each afternoon is teachers. Yet, amid the constant media chatter about public education and teaching, and the absurd vilification of teachers, the one voice that is rarely if ever represented in the news is that of an actual classroom teacher.

Among the many segments of society profoundly affected by Wisconsin’s and other states’ recent and impending regressive legislation is public education. But despite what either of the two dominant political parties claim about their interest in and respect for education, the entire American public education system has been under attack for decades. All of the political rhetoric about leaving no child left behind and racing to the top amounts to nothing but ignorant and useless policymaking, which purposefully masks the threats to our public educational systems and disgracefully blames the only people who actually know what is going on in the nation’s classrooms.

It is not simply the conservative arch-rivals of public education who get it all wrong. Nicholas Kristoff and those behind the recent documentary travesty “Waiting for Superman” also reveal their elite status and their cluelessness when speaking about teachers and education. The only voices in the ongoing discussion about education in America are those with tenuous ties, if any, to the actual institution.

Teachers are a special segment of society. Most enter their profession out an altruistic calling to help, out of a concern for children, and because of their kind and caring natures. In addition, as one local teacher I spoke to recently stated, teachers are rule-followers. With the few iconoclastic exceptions, most teachers want to please; they do not want to publicly complain or rock the boat. Thus, it is difficult to get teachers to speak out about the horrific conditions under which they work and to demand the things they truly need in the classroom.

I am currently a university teaching assistant, which is quite different than a classroom teacher. Nevertheless, I previously taught in a public school, a private school, and a charter school. Moreover, my experience as a middle-class student who was able to attend both public and private schools opened my eyes to the great disparity in educational opportunities in America early in my life.

First of all, American public schools have not deteriorated because of bad teachers. Though what constitutes a “good” teacher can be highly subjective, I think I can safely say that most teachers are good teachers. The vast majority are competent professionals who do their jobs well. There exist some teachers who have a more difficult time with conveying information to their students, and an extremely small minority who do not put in the time they perhaps should. But most teachers are not “bad” – particularly if you consider what they are up against.

I have not met one critic of teachers who could handle teaching in a modern classroom for a full day, or even for 30 seconds - forget a career. The concentration and multi-tasking necessary for teaching has been compared to that of being an air-traffic controller. Teachers are not only responsible for imparting information. They must also serve as role models, counselors, psychiatrists, disciplinarians, and parents to their students. In fact, I have even witnessed a teacher become a guardian of a student who would have otherwise been homeless. Some teachers who may seem to be “slacking” are probably just attempting to remain sane by allowing themselves a split second of personal time and space. The amount of work that teachers have is incomparable to almost any job that I have seen - and it never ends.

Teachers begin their days well before dawn. They usually arrive at work an hour or more before classes start, and often stay long after classes end, either to engage in extra-curricular activities with their students, to work in their classrooms, or to devote extra time to their students. When they go home after their already 8-10-hour day, they normally have a bare minimum of two hours of preparation and grading for the next day. In addition, teachers usually have professional development meetings, grade-level or course-specific meetings, and other professional trainings or duties such as parent-teacher conferences and open-houses weekly or bi-weekly. Their weekdays and weekends are consumed with teaching, preparation, and assessment. Most non-teachers, even those highly respectful of the profession, cannot even conceive of the amount of time it takes to be a teacher. It is not a job for the faint of heart or for those who do not wish to work hard.

Second, contrary to popular opinion, raising teachers’ salaries will not bring better teachers to the profession. Teachers do not enter education because they care about career momentum or financial compensation. Teachers become teachers because they care about education and because they care about children. No one would tolerate the stressful working conditions and unending criticism that teachers endure if they were not at least somewhat selfless and altruistic. Increasing the base salaries of teachers might attract different people to the profession, but those people would be far from “better.” The kind of people attracted to higher salaries are careerists, people who compete to receive the most accolades, people who care more about their own egos and their own prestige - about materialism, public successes, and external validation - than about substantive, meaningful work. Ivy League graduates and straight-A students are not necessarily better people and would not necessarily make better teachers. Indeed, the reasons for their high grades and prestigious diplomas have less to do with superior intelligence than they do with fortuitous pedigrees.

To be sure, teachers deserve higher salaries – on the order of 1000% raises – but if you asked teachers what they wish for, higher salaries would be the last thing they would mention. They would tell you that they want:

• smaller class sizes, so that they can give more individual attention to their students and have fewer papers to grade, so that they can devote enough time to give students thorough feedback and assistance to help them learn
• more preparation time, so that they can devise creative and interesting lessons to enable students to learn and be engaged
• more autonomy, so that they can help students think critically instead of forcing the students to engage in rote memorization for standardized tests
• more support from school staff, so they can teach rather than having to do much administrative and bureaucratic work that is not connected to educating their students
• more social supports for students so they can devote their time to learning more effectively
• more time for their students to engage in art, music, and physical education
• and did I mention smaller class sizes?

Everything on this wish list relates directly to better education. While we spend money on new technologies and gadgets for classrooms, new books and learning programs which enrich the pocketbooks of corporations, we do nothing to enrich classrooms in the ways that teachers and students need most.

One quarter of our children live in poverty. We have a crisis of unemployment, joblessness, hunger, and homelessness that worsens by the day and deeply affects all of our school-age children. In addition, we have a cultural crisis in which superficiality and the spectacle of entertainment are revered beyond any moral and civic responsibilities to each other and to our communities. We have a crisis of technophilia, in which we are addicted to television, computers, iPads, iPhones, smartphones, etc., and lack important engagements in interpersonal conversation and true emotional attachment. And we have a crisis of society, in which the corporation has taken over all aspects of our lives, including our educational systems. Our schools have been reconstructed to train mind-numbed automaton serfs for the benefit of their corporate overseers.

Furthermore, while teachers are held to higher standards than probably any other profession, and critics of teachers have zero tolerance for anything but impossibly perfect outcomes, the children they teach are either ignored or held to no standards or personal responsibility for their own learning.

Many poor students have obligations and burdens beyond their control which impede their abilities to devote themselves to their educations. To address the educational needs of these children, their social and economic needs must be dealt with first, and this larger, societal issue cannot be adequately addressed by teachers, though many try to do so.

But there is also another fact that most teachers will never speak of publicly – students are not all perfect angels, not by a long shot. Though I hate to rely on TV as a model, the show “Supernanny” depicts how poorly some children are parented and how spoiled and entitled so many children are now more than ever. These same children who throw endless temper tantrums, speak back to adults, and obtain everything they want in every way they want it are the children that teachers are supposed to manage and educate every day. Rather than support the authority of the teacher when problems arise, parents of these children back up their offspring and complain to administrators about teachers, rather than confront the control their own children exert over them.

Clearly then, merit pay based on student achievement - another of the commonly mentioned and ill-conceived notions of politicians and pundits of all persuasions - is ridiculously biased and absurd. Classes are composed of so many different types of students with so many different backgrounds and different advantages or impediments to their educational success that have nothing to do with their teachers.

Charter schools are not the answer, either. Though some charter schools (such as the one in which I taught) are run by caring professionals who truly wish to help their students, many are run by business school graduates and are simply created for profit alone. By taking some of the best-performing students from public schools and leaving the poorer-performing students, as well as taking funds from public school which are never to be returned (even if a student leaves the charter school) charter schools were devised by politicians as a calculated means of slowly destroying public education. Study after study has demonstrated that charter schools perform on average exactly the same as public schools, even with their vastly increased flexibility in terms of curriculum and practices. Some charter schools perform better, but just as many perform worse than regular public schools, thus they are not in any way the panacea their corporate champions claim them to be. One thing that charter schools are most able to do is to take away the union-won rights of teachers. So, charter schools are free to exploit teachers as they see fit – and they often do.

Private schools, on the other hand, actually do hold the key to educational success.* They graduate the most successful students who attend the most celebrated universities. But their teachers are generally not paid more than public school teachers, which proves false the idea that increased teacher compensation will increase student success. Here is what most private schools have:

1. Class sizes with no more than 12-15 students
2. Teachers who teach only 4-5 classes per day rather than 5-6
3. Teachers who, because of #1 and #2, are able to offer individual help to their students
4. Teachers who, because of #1 and #2, are able to assign more rigorous coursework and spend more time on offering thorough and precise feedback on student work
5. Teachers who are able to be creatively flexible in their curriculum and autonomous in their course structure, instead of having to adhere to bureaucratic standards devised by people with little or no educational experience
6. Students who, because they are generally rich, have no worries for their personal health and safety or concerns with meeting their basic needs
7. Students who, because they are generally rich, have no other pressing responsibilities or obligations and can thus dedicate all of their time and their full attention to their studies
8. Students who, because they are rich, know that they will be able to attend college and can thus concentrate on working toward that goal

But what needs to be clear is that the argument over good and bad teachers or good and bad schools is a straw-man that masks the real problem with the American educational system. We need to rethink education, true, but not in any of the ways that our politicians and media suggest. We need to make students, teachers and education a priority by making the quality of life for all citizens a priority. The only way this will be accomplished is through focusing on what is really wrong with education: the immoral inequalities and injustices rampant in American society. Until our media portrays these realities accurately and until we attend to the actual deficiencies within our systems, public education will never improve.

*N.B. The argument being made here is not that private schools are the solution; it is that schools with students who have no other vital needs and teachers who have greater flexibility, smaller class sizes, and fewer burdens themselves are the ones that succeed. If only public schools (and our society as whole) could be so lucky to have that kind of ideal situation ...

In Solidarity: Remembering War and Exposing Color Lines

2011-03-20T11:48:00.000-05:00

The fifth weekend of the Madison, Wisconsin protests against the budget “repair” bill, and now also the state budget bill, saw a smaller turnout than the 150,000 plus ralliers from last week. Even so, a sizable number in the thousands if not tens of thousands congregated once again at the capitol. As usual, few if any major media outlets are painting a complete picture of this, over month-long, grassroots movement. While the media has mainly spoken of the loss of collective bargaining rights for workers in Governor Walker’s recent bills, the regressive legislation takes away so many more provisions, especially those for the poor, women, and people of color. Moreover, while the mainstream media has maintained the fallacious right-wing narrative of large state deficits needing to be paid by the poor and working class, the people in Wisconsin and beyond have been duly awakened to the true causes of the federal and state fiscal “crises”: corporate welfare, the ultra-rich not paying their fair share of taxes, and billions of dollars spent on unnecessary and illegal wars. These stark media omissions became apparent Saturday as important and interrelated contingents, who have been wholly unrepresented, comprised the focus of the March 19th rallies.

Marking the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the Iraq Veterans Against the War sponsored the first march and rally of the day. At this point, we seem to forget how some of us called foul when we were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was an imminent threat to the United States. We seem to forget that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and others in the administration lied about the reasons for the war. We seem to forget the illegality of the offensive strike against a nation that did not threaten the U.S. We also seem to forget the millions of people around the world who protested against the war, the trillions of dollars spent on the war, the thousands of U.S. soldiers needlessly slain, and the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens killed. Finally, we forget the veterans who have returned to find themselves physically, psychologically, and socially impaired by their ordeal in Iraq. Contrary to the lip service of the war hawks, veterans have been disgracefully neglected by their government, unable at times to receive decent medical care or suitable, stable employment, and often becoming homeless. Now, with the cuts in the federal and state governmental spending on social services, these same people who went to fight a war that has done nothing but enrich corporate war profiteers, are losing the rights and privileges that should have been awarded to them for their service. And the corporate media fails to notice.

Though teachers, nurses and other public sector employees have been the subject of most news reports, the emergence of farm laborers at last week’s rally demonstrated how far-reaching the effects of Walker’s new budget bills would be on other sectors of society. As usual, the dominant false rhetoric about the budget in the mainstream media only pertained to white and middle class workers. Yet no sector will be more affected than the working poor. And the largest segment of the poor tends to be people of color. This disregarded group held the second march and rally of the day, under the moniker “Cultural Resistance: Exposing the Color Lines.” The loss of wages, Medicaid, Badger Care (the state health program) and numerous other essential social services will particularly affect people of color. More specifically, the new budget contains provisions to repeal food stamp benefits to legal immigrants, to eliminate in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrant students, and to “increase flexibility” to the UW-Madison, meaning greatly increased and unaffordable tuition rates.

Interestingly, the two rallies were intricately connected, as the poor people of color tend to be overrepresented in the military, due to both recruitment targeted at their population and their lack of viable alternatives in terms of employment. When the war broke out, I was an inner-city school teacher in East Los Angeles and I witnessed the tragic events unfold. Relatives and friends of my largely (99%) non-white middle school students were disproportionately represented and killed in Iraq. I also witnessed the vulnerability of impoverished students who had every bit as much talent and capability as their white peers in Beverly Hills, but far, far fewer opportunities. When all of your basic needs are met (and then some), your ability to succeed in school is exponentially increased. However, when you struggle to meet your basic needs, as is the case for too many people of color, your familial and social problems are greatly exacerbated, and your ability to succeed in school is hampered by all of your more pressing responsibilities Thus, students who could otherwise be college-bound are enticed by recruiters to see the military as an immediate solution to these exigencies.

As my current graduate school and TAA colleague, Kaja Rebane, proclaimed in a speech at the rally on Saturday, we should thank Governor Scott Walker. His brazen actions have unveiled the truth behind his lies, and as a result, we have become united. We have connected the dots and placed these myriad issues in their proper global context. We have recognized not only the enormity of the war that has been waged on the bottom 98% of the population by the upper class, but the fact that we all actually have much in common. Now, we should work within our various circles to include one other, help one other, and use our strength in numbers to finally fight back – on behalf of all workers, veterans, immigrants, and taxpaying Americans of all colors.

George Carlin was Awake - Are You?

2011-03-19T16:18:00.003-05:00

George Carlin knew what many of us have for years: The American Dream is a myth and the country has been under corporate control for decades. I recall seeing this routine and thinking how doomed we all are, as everyone is asleep.

In the past month, people have awakened. But it is not enough to finally be awake. Now, we have to all be active - not just active but pro-active, vigilant, and unrelenting.

Now is not the time to return to slumber. Now is the time to fight.

Let's prove Carlin wrong in his belief that no one is awake and no one will fight. (RIP George)

Madison, Wisconsin Protest: Saturday, March 12, 2011

2011-03-13T20:04:00.012-05:00

Though the media seems indifferent to the protests, low-balling the 150,000 person turnout and reporting it in the margins of the news with headlines taken directly from corporate talking points (see earlier NPR post for one example), the largest rally yet occurred here in Madison on Saturday.

The event featured a collection of people, including farmers, who showed up with

their tractors, to protest, among other things, the fact that Badgercare, the health care program that most of them rely on, will be severely cut under this administration.

People of all stripes attended with signs and costumes and banners too numerous to catalog, but I was able to document at least a sample of what was out there.

The Fab 14 were in attendance, the returning state senators who had been in Illinois to give the people time to illuminate some of the nightmare that Walker and his puppetmasters have wrought for the state (more on that from "Wisconsin Death Trip" in COUNTERPUNCH). Earlier in the day on the opposite side of the capitol, democratic assembly members spoke, including Peter Barca, the one who read out the law that the republican senators were breaking as they brazenly voted on the bill last Wednesday. The republican assembly passed it Thursday, and Walker signed it into law Friday. Lawsuits are pending on several counts. Firstly, that the republican senators used an illegal procedure to pass the bill. Secondly, that the logic used for dividing the bill in the first place, separating the stripping of union bargaining from

what was considered "fiscal," thereby not requiring a quorum, which is what the democrats denied the senate by exiting the state, was in fact false, since stripping unions of bargaining has fiscal implications. Plus, Walker still insists that the purpose of stripping unions of rights is to balance the budget. You can't call it nonfiscal and claim that it has fiscal implications. Therefore, all this might go away in the courts.

above: union cab (cooperatively owned taxi company) procession up State St

One of the most important messages in Saturday's protest was to elect a Wisconsin supreme court judge on April 5th, Joanne Kloppenburg, to replace a hideous conservative, which would throw the balance away from a 5-4 conservative majority.

All-in-all, the protest was packed, passionate, and peaceful. Fixed News insists that Union Thugs were imported for the protests, and of course this is nonsense. Here are their thugs:

My greatest pleasure was marching with Kristine and her union from the library mall on campus, up State Street, and around the capitol. Empowering is the word for it, shouting "Union Power!" and "How do we fix the deficit? TAX, TAX, TAX THE RICH!" You could see the excitement spread to others as we marched past.

And no, half the people were not tea baggers. Every person was anti-Walker. Every one. If your news is telling you otherwise, you are watching propaganda.

At 7 pm, we went to the Barrymore to hear a very fiery Dennis Kucinich, Jim Hightower ("I'm as pleased to be here as a flee at a dog show"), union organizer Bill Franks, Laura Flanders of Grittv.org, our fed rep Tammy Baldwin, and others. What a crowd. I'll attempt to embed the Kucinich speech below. Definitely worth your time:

Solidarity!

Carl & Kristine

Dear corrections@npr.org:

2011-03-12T08:46:00.000-06:00

Again this morning, Saturday, March 12, 2011, on my NPR station here in Madison, Wisconsin, you said the same line at the end of your brief report: "Walker said he needs the bill to balance the budget in Wisconsin."

This is wrong.

Walker, his Republicans puppets, and their corporate masters are clearly and directly stripping unions of rights. This is not a budget issue. Please report this simple truth rather than the lie, the corporate talking points, you are constantly repeating.

Please consider these things:

1) Even the Republicans have tacitly admitted that the bill Walker signed has been removed from the fiscal realm in order for it to be passed, since only fiscal issues require the quorum they could not obtain with the 14 democrats out-of-state. They did this by removing fiscal portions of the "budget repair bill." This alone reveals your repeated line to be inaccurate. Only the union stripping and other "nonfiscal" provisions of the bill remain. Please confirm this simple fact rather than parrot out-of-date Republican talking points.

2) Why do you have to use (an old and now irrelevant) falsehood from the governor? Is it because he is an authority figure? Is it because it is easy? Your laziness on this repetition hurts what the people of Wisconsin are trying to do. Every time you repeat it, millions of people get the wrong message, one that makes them more complacent. We want America to wake up, rise up and fight corporate tyranny. How can that happen if you are spreading this soporific lie?

3) If you need an authority figure for a quotation (which is a questionable practice in any event) why not quote a democratic state senator here like Miller, Larsen, or Erpenbach? Why not quote a union leader? Any of them will tell you the truth, that what was signed into law was union busting, plain and simple, and that it was done illegally. This should be your ending statement to your hourly brief report. Why isn't it? Has your corporate funding made the truth too inconvenient for you to support?

I am going to start a campaign against you on this issue until you start to report this story correctly. I am going to spread this letter to as many people and Internet sites as I can, urging them to use your email address to correct your false reports.

The fight in Wisconsin is far from over, and your reporting has been disgraceful. It is hindering our just cause. Please report the people's news, not news tailored by corporate talking points.

Carl Mumm
Madison, WI

Tyranny in America; Dateline: Wisconsin

2011-03-10T22:42:00.003-06:00

(photo courtesy: AP)

Since these peaceful protests against the “budget repair” bill in Wisconsin began on February 14 of this year, and as crowds amplified day after day, everyone here recognized one truth about how our story would be told to the nation and the world: “Fox News will lie about this.” - A slogan later to be found on many protest signs. But the truth is NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Time would also lie about this. Their lies began when they allowed our dictatorial governor to speak complete fallacies without questioning, investigating, or critically examining any of his claims, such as:

This bill is about a budget crisis.

Now the lies have been exposed for all they are worth.

Here is what happened the evening of March 9, 2011 in Wisconsin from someone who was there.

At 5:15pm I readied to tackle all of the work I had piled up before me, as my civic responsibilities of late have undermined my academic ones. I quickly checked my email, only to find a flurry of messages labeled “Urgent!” (I probably would have received word via text/ cell if I had one.) They implored me to rush to the capitol building in Madison. The republicans in the state senate had found a way to extract the collective bargaining provision out of the “budget repair” bill and vote on it as a separate entity, since they can vote on non-fiscal matters without a quorum of senators, and the 14 democrat senators needed to produce a quorum were still in Illinois. The republicans had rather surreptitiously convened a hearing (as has been par for the course since the entire bill was announced) and were set to vote on it at any moment.

But the bill was about a budget crisis, right?

I immediately fled to the capitol, as did thousands and thousands of other concerned taxpaying citizens. Upon arrival, we found ourselves waiting outside in a single-file line as we attempted to enter the building, which was supposed to be completely open to the public. Entrance was permitted through only one door. Once we passed through, we were met by numerous police officials who searched our bags and sent us through metal detectors. In addition, a large sign alerted us to the dozens and dozens of items that were no longer permitted in the building. After over three weeks of completely peaceful, non-violent protesting with nary an arrest – despite what erroneous rumors you may have heard – we could no longer simply enter our statehouse. We faced draconian rules and regulations and we were herded like mere cattle.

Nevertheless, many of us made it in, and despite their having to search us and treat us as criminals, the police kindly assisted us in finding the senate chambers where the vote on the bill was being held. Hundreds and hundreds of loud and angry, yet still extremely peaceful citizens continued their familiar chants from the past twenty-three days:
“Whose house? Our house!”
“Recall Walker!”
“Tell me what democracy looks like.” “This is what democracy looks like.”
And finally, to those cowardly, duplicitous republican senators: “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

By shortly after 6pm, the bill which effectively strips all employee unions in WI – minus the police and firefighters – of collective bargaining rights was passed by the state senate. The senators fled quickly. The citizens remained.

But this bill was about a budget crisis, right?

Initially, there were hundreds if not a couple of thousand of citizens in the capitol building, as the outside doors were being strictly monitored. People of all ages and all walks of life – from infants to seniors, from preppy, to hippy, to working-class, to hipster, to “regular” folk – remained in the capitol feeling resentment and disappointment about their government, but feeling solidarity and kinship with their fellow citizens. People assembled back in the center rotunda, as we had all done so many weeks back, and began collectively chanting and letting out the frustration of the moment. Then cheers erupted as scores of more people flooded into the rotunda. The police had opened all of the doors to the building, against the orders of the governor, apparently. Within minutes, from my vantage point on the second floor, I could smell the scent of pizza wafting up through the rotunda. Soon thereafter, boxes of fruit and snacks came in, bottles of water were passed around, and sandwich stations were created. At some point during this flurry of activity, a first aid headquarters was organized, and volunteers began to don those familiar fluorescent Marshall vests to help maintain the peace. In addition, blankets, sleeping bags, and bedding started to arrive. The energy and conviviality in the air was electric. All of the items banned under the tyrannical Walker regime were allowed back into the building. It was Day 1 all over again. Thousands upon thousands of people were occupying the capitol building in response to an imminent loss of their rights as workers and citizens. (The revamped bill will have to pass the assembly on Friday, which it will easily do.)

But this bill was about a budget crisis, right?

To the world, it might seem the people have lost. To us, we have only just begun.

The right-wing shock doctrine that promoted American imperialism around the world has come home. It is in our state of Wisconsin, and it is in yours too. We are not defeated here; we are reinvigorated. Our small battle is now a national war against these emerging tyrannical states and against the corporate plutocracy that has stolen our money, our lives and our futures. This is our story today, but it will be yours tomorrow. It is a national call to arms for the working people – for all the citizenry.

This bill is not about a budget crisis. It was never about a budget crisis.

This cannot stand.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Wisconsin:

2011-03-09T21:30:00.007-06:00

The corporate Republican representatives in our state capitol, masquerading as your state senators, have met in the dark and have stolen your rights to collectively bargain for wages and benefits.

On Tuesday, in a feint worthy of a master fencer, Wisconsin Corporate Governor Scott Walker released emails that appeared to show his stubborn stance on his budget despair bill to be weakening. Then on Wednesday evening, the Republican state senate Koch brother marionettes formed a committee to split the bill so that they could pass the union-busting measures without a quorum.

As Democratic senate minority leader Miller stated, “In 30 minutes, 18 state senators undid 50 years of civil rights in Wisconsin. Their disrespect for the people of Wisconsin and their rights is an outrage that will never be forgotten.”

Even if you are not in a union, even if you are not currently employed, this decision will affect you, your family, all Wisconsinites, and eventually all Americans unless we take our rights back. If you ever wish to improve your standing in the workplace, if you want to earn enough to survive in the future, it is vital that you understand what unions do: they make it possible for us to band together to stand against the tide of corporate tyranny in a country that has been usurped by corporate power.

As I read on a sign wielded by an iron worker on the capitol square: “Together we bargain. Alone we beg.” They love it when we have to beg. The corporate agenda is to divide us so they can lower our wages, strip our health care benefits, and remove pensions entirely.

But it won’t stop there. They want to raze public education so they can privatize it. In Michigan, legislation is nearly passed in which municipal governments might have a good chance of being run not by democratically-elected governments, but by corporations. Naomi Klein on Wednesday’s Democracy Now! spoke about how this could occur:

“They have created, if this passes [in Michigan], the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. . . . It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.”

The moneyed interests of this country have spoken through their Republican sock puppets of the Wisconsin senate. Wisconsin must become the third world for their benefit, even though they caused all the budget shortfalls of every state in the union, and even though the corporations and the banks that caused the 2008 crisis and the recession that followed have more capital now than ever before. They already gorged themselves on the bailout. Now they want more of what you do not have.

We must rise up to face them head-on, and we must do it immediately. There can be no division. The corporate machine that we all contribute to through our modern lifestyles and our daily jobs must stop dead for as long it takes. We must hurt them, slam into them with our great numbers. We must swarm the capitol and recall all the Koch-addicted Republican finger puppets that took part in passing this disastrous bill.

It is time for a general strike. Buy only essentials. Do not work.

Make. Them. Pay.

--CSM

This is what Democracy is all about - The "Fab Fourteen"

2011-03-07T09:14:00.000-06:00

Fourteen brave Wisconsin Democratic state senators have been in Illinois for three weeks, doing exactly the job that their constituents have asked of them: fighting for the will of their people and staying strong in their resolve to help see that the democratic process is upheld.

There can be no better example of fulfilling one's duties as public servants.

Thank you Fab 14!

(Video courtesy Shahin Izadi)

"We have had it!": Michael Moore Speaks Truth to Power, Madison, WI 3/5/2011

2011-03-06T11:27:00.001-06:00

Anyone who questions the sincerity and authenticity of this man needs to adjust his/her moral compass.

Notes from the Renewed Labor Movement

2011-03-05T11:22:00.005-06:00

My grandfather, Pio, was born in 1909 in New York City, the son of poor Italian immigrants who had recently arrived in America seeking prosperity. He began working at a very young age to help support his family. At thirteen, Pio lost his father and as the eldest son with six siblings, took responsibility as the family wage earner. On one occasion, he was out making deliveries during a blizzard. The streets were empty in the lower east side of Manhattan and a police officer came up to Pio, thinking he was a delinquent up to no good. My grandfather explained that he needed to work so that his family could eat; the officer escorted him through the rest of his route.

Life never came easy for Pio, but he nonetheless became a hardworking, diligent husband and father who raised three capable and successful children. He worked numerous jobs throughout his adult life, and after having some major setbacks, including the devastating loss of his first daughter when she was just nine-years-old and the theft of an electrical contracting business by an unscrupulous partner, Pio became a union-backed electrician who worked on projects for the city of New York.

Pio was able to send both of his remaining children to private colleges. In his later years, Pio and his wife retired to a comfortable condominium in Connecticut. All of this time he constantly showered his four grandchildren with an abundance of gifts (not the least of which was his unconditional love and adoration). How was a man with no high school diploma able to so successfully provide for his nuclear family and even their offspring? He had a union.

What was granted to my grandfather – the simple ability to raise a healthy and productive American family – is far too rare today. Families with two incomes cannot even afford to send their children to state universities, let alone private ones. Moreover, pensions and retirement savings either no longer exist or are threatened with being revoked.

By the 1950s and 1960s, both public and private sector employees enjoyed relatively healthy incomes with considerable access to necessary benefits such as family health insurance and pensions. These comforts came as a result of union victories over the horrendous exploitation and abuse of workers that had occurred so prevalently for decades and decades prior. In subsequent years, beginning around the time I was born in the 1970s, private sector unions were diminishing and the public perception of unions began to decline. Or so we thought. Recent polls reveal that the public still overwhelmingly supports unions in spite of the well-orchestrated campaign to vilify them.

The media took the reins in promulgating the narrative that unions crumbled due to rampant corruption and the laziness and/or ineptitude of the union workforce. Though these situations existed to a minor extent, unions were in fact systematically dismantled by moneyed corporate interests whose wealth enabled them to lobby government as well as dole out millions in public relations messages to control the rhetoric about unions. We continue to see these same baseless rhetorical tactics right now with the attacks on teachers and public employees throughout the United States.

Concurrently, as private sector unions lost power over the past three to four decades, all employee benefits were cut, the middle class deteriorated, the gap between rich and poor expanded, and the richest 1-2% of citizens amassed record wealth while paying their lowest tax rates in history. Furthermore, corporations began to dominate all aspects of American life. They paid (or avoided paying) minimal taxes, and gained greater and greater rights as citizens, culminating in the Citizens United verdict of last year. This profoundly irresponsible and unethical Supreme Court decision allowed corporations to not only control our media and commerce, but to establish complete control of our governments. The influx of corporate money into elections ushered in the many tea party and ultra-conservative officials in local, state, and federal governments. These candidates won narrow victories that would never have been accomplished without enormous sums of private funds. These crony politicians do not represent real people, nor do they reflect the people’s choice. They are tools of the corporate elite.

Now, because of the profound corporate influence on our democracy, state and federal officials are adopting the same regressive legislation that the governor here in Wisconsin is attempting to put forward. It constitutes the decimation of the entire social infrastructure – which already stood on shaky ground – to be replaced by a sociopathic corporate model via the ideological cronies that the corporate backers spent millions to get elected.

However, the same pathological greed inherent in corporate capitalism, which served to enable the consolidation of wealth and power by the corporate elite, may ultimately prove to be its doom. As I said in my testimony to the Wisconsin legislative Joint Finance Committee less than two weeks ago: When people lose all rights, they also lose all fear. There will be nothing left to lose. People around the world are no longer tolerating their lack of freedom under dictatorial regimes. And indeed, we here in Wisconsin have reached our critical breaking point.

No single one of us could ever have resisted alone. The struggle in Wisconsin immediately united working people as we remembered a few simple truths: We are much more alike than we are different. We all deserve a decent existence. We all have been robbed by the rich and powerful. And the mainstream media’s conventional wisdom and false paradigms represent corporate interests, not ours. In order for this large group of organized, committed individuals to come together in Wisconsin, we relied on the same tools that our grandparents used: our unions. Without unions, the convergence of common citizens and taxpayers seeking representation and dignity may have never occurred. With unions, there is a fighting chance to battle injustice. We may not have the money or the power, but there is great strength in numbers, which is exactly why the minority elite wish to see unions permanently destroyed.

My grandfather was a proud American patriot, a devout Catholic, a tireless laborer, and a staunch unionist whose American dream was fulfilled. He would never have imagined that his granddaughter and her peers would again be fighting for rights that his generation had already secured. He would be appalled to see how his nation, which had afforded him so many opportunities, has methodically removed those same opportunities for his grandchildren. He would be livid about the attacks on public sector employees, yet he would also know that through his precious union, a means of resistance was possible.

Some may call Saturday, March 5, Day 20 of sustained resistance to the so-called “budget repair bill” in Wisconsin. Or they may identify it as a continuing protest against the oligarchic administration of Gov. Scott Walker. But we might as well stop counting the days because this will not soon be over. And we may as well stop calling it a protest. This is a movement.

We are here for the long haul to protect our rights to collective bargaining. We are here to preserve our rights to a just standard of living. We are here to honor our fellow Wisconsinites and all Americans. And in addition, I am here to honor my beloved grandfather.

Locked Out - Day 18 Madison, WI

2011-03-03T15:36:00.001-06:00

The public has been illegally locked out of he capitol building since Monday morning. Peaceful protesters left early Monday, thinking they would re-enter the capitol after going to work, fulfilling obligations and responsibilities, and resting. They returned to find that unlawful, arbitrary policies had been imposed by the Department of Administration, under Gov. Walker's direction, to keep people out of the building. Regardless, dozens are adhering to the archaic policies and maintaining a small vigil in the rotunda, while hundreds, if not thousands return daily to continue the marches and rallies outside the capitol, opposing the cruel and unnecessary austerity measures proposed by this governor.

Here's a look at the recent conditions:

Wisconsin State Capitol Budget Repair Bill Protest March 1st from Michael Kienitz on Vimeo.

(Video courtesy Michael Kienitz)

A view from inside the capitol - Madison 2.27.11

2011-02-28T20:37:00.002-06:00

As some of us, unfortunately, break from the capitol grounds to teach, take mid-terms exams, and otherwise fulfill our unrelenting obligations, others remain firm in the WI statehouse.

Even as the fledgling governor tries to disperse the wholly peaceful, non-violent, democratic protesters in an attempt to buoy his image and minimize their impact to the media when he announces his new and ever more draconian budget, this determined bunch holds ground.

(by TAA member Shahin Izadi, with sound by Jason Nolen)

Stay strong, brothers and sisters! We'll back back with you soon!

www.defendwisconsin.org

"We Are Wisconsin"

2011-02-27T18:48:00.000-06:00

Fantastic video by Finn Ryan and David Nevala

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

Day 13 – On the Ground in Madison: “As Long as It Takes”

2011-02-27T12:33:00.001-06:00

Despite temperatures in the mid-teens and a steady snowfall, throngs of taxpaying citizens of Wisconsin assembled at the Madison capitol for the thirteenth consecutive day of the sustained protest of Governor Scott Walker’s budget “repair” bill. Saturday was not only the coldest, but the largest protest yet, with numbers reaching beyond the 70,000 in attendance last weekend. In addition, thousands more rallied inside the capitol building. Walker likely anticipated citizens would withdraw by now and opt for the warmth and comfort of our homes, but we all remain resolute. The loss of momentum that the governor expects does not appear to be imminent.

Though crowds at the capitol have waxed and waned over the past six days, the determination of all the members of the “Kill the Bill” contingent has remained steady. Because we public sector workers, who are most directly affected by the bill, are committed professionals, and because the public depends upon us daily, many have added “protest” and “rally” to our already long to-do lists. Our previously overwhelmed schedules have been adjusted to include not only fulfilling our responsibilities as teachers, nurses, service workers, etc., but shifting back and forth between our jobs and the Wisconsin capitol. We continue to stand in solidarity with both public and private sector unions, and with the many non-union people who walk beside us. It is a stressful, exhausting and exhilarating endeavor. We are fatigued, sick, and more overworked than ever, but our morale remains high and our resolve will not falter.

Besides the steadfast dedication of the alliance of Wisconsin protesters, what has made these past two weeks in Madison most inspiring is witnessing how the narrative has shifted from reactive to proactive, from local concerns to global awareness. As a student of environmental studies, the aphorism “Think Globally, Act Locally” is familiar to me, but it has taken on a profound and important meaning here in Madison. Previously, Governor Walker dictated (as he appears inclined to do) the points of discussion. The media largely followed suit, as did Walker’s detractors, who concentrated on countering accusations about lazy, greedy public employees who were unwilling to sacrifice, and answering Walker’s erroneous charges tit-for-tat. Walker controlled the conversation by speaking to specific details about budget shortfalls and collective sacrifices. He advanced the false dichotomy, perpetuated by most Republicans and Democrats alike (see Obama’s recent 2012 budget bill) which claims that the only possible means of balancing a budget are either to slash spending on public employees and public services or to lay off the workforce. Certainly, creative alternative policies exist to address excess government spending and to generate revenue without inflicting undue harm to the middle and lower classes. What most people here now recognize is that our fight is less about Wisconsin fiscal issues than it is about the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few, both in our state, in our country, and around the world.

During the first week of our uprising and at the first large Saturday rally, discussions mainly focused on the rights of workers to collectively bargain and on the unfair, dictatorial character of Governor Walker and his bill. In the past week, the discourse has evolved substantially, placing the effort in Wisconsin into a broader context. Signs at this Saturday’s protests reflected the shift in awareness and the deeper comprehension of the profundity of the battle here in Madison. A sign from National Nurses United declared:

“Blame Wall Street - No Concessions.”

Inside and outside the rotunda, placards stated:

“Capitalism is the problem, not the public employees”

“Hands off workers! Make the banks pay!”

“Banks got bailed out! We got sold out!”

Most remarkably, perhaps, on an enormous banner cascading into the capitol rotunda was written the solution to the financial hardships facing every state and the nation as a whole:

“Tax the Rich.”

Most people here in Wisconsin now recognize that our fight is not about our personal stories, however heartbreaking and devastating they may be. The massive redistribution of wealth to the top echelons that occurred primarily in my lifetime marks the heart of this Wisconsin controversy. There is a reason that money, well-wishes, messages of support, and even people have flooded into this state over the past two weeks: this fight is about democracy and justice.

This particular bill not only takes aim at collective bargaining rights, it strips away provisions from state Medicaid programs, and allows for the no-bid sale of state-owned power plants. The plutocratic nature of this bill and the upcoming biennial budget bill is evident. An even more marked deterioration of worker rights, health care provisions, education, and social services is impending. Some of the people who have been sleeping overnight in the capitol have been able to remain there because they are already among the ranks of the unemployed. They recognize the social destructiveness of the administration’s agenda. Instead of bitterly complaining that public employees have it too good and should suffer as they have suffered, as laid out in the script set down by Walker and his corporate masters, these citizens maintain their solidarity. For this is a conflict between the haves – who continually acquire more and more – and the have-nots – who are asked to relinquish more and more. It is a fight against oligarchy. In a country where millionaires and billionaires could pay off state debts with their own personal checkbooks, there is no need to quibble over pennies from citizens who barely get by month-to-month. The demonization of hardworking, dedicated, essential employees as indolent, greedy sloths, and the acceptance, even reverence, of overcompensated, entitled, wealthy individuals - for whom rewards and hand-outs are a way of life - is exposing itself as a disgraceful, absurd fallacy.

One need not be a philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, economist, or an “expert” of any kind to understand the realities of the present global societal predicament. Though millions around the world constantly struggle with far worse conditions than most in Wisconsin, the line has been drawn here, now. The budget repair bill in the hands of the state senate does not need a systematic analysis of particular aspects and elements. Its relationship to the larger global class war has been exposed. The true battle here has been revealed as a distinctly moral one, so it is incumbent upon us to continue fighting to the end.

Those of us here, even as we periodically leave to teach our classes or to provide other necessary services to our fellow citizens, will not waver. On Friday, my union was evacuated from the capitol office that it had occupied for over ten days. As of this writing, the state Department of Administration has threatened to remove all people from the capitol building by 4pm Sunday. It is unclear yet whether people will go voluntarily or if they will need to be escorted off the premises. In any event, though Scott Walker hopes to construct the appearance of diminishing enthusiasm by the protesters and counts on media fatigue to propagate his own construction of reality, what is clear is that we will remain. You may not see us as often in the paper, you may not hear our voices on your television, but do not be fooled: we are here. We have the moral authority and the moral imperative. As one protest sign succinctly put it: “As long as it takes.”

(For more information, please visit: http://www.defendwisconsin.org)

The Real Story Behind the Battle in Wisconsin

2011-02-20T01:13:00.005-06:00

As someone who has been involved in the protests in Madison for the past six days, I find the news media coverage of the momentous events in this town to in no way portray the reality of what is going on here. In their attempts to constantly be balanced, the news media seem to have lost all ability to be accurate.

The mass protests by unions and their allies that have occurred in Madison, WI, resulted after an abrupt announcement by Governor Walker late last Friday, Feb. 11, that he was introducing and fast-tracking a so-called “Budget Repair” bill, which would not only deeply cut benefits to public workers, but effectively strip unions of all of their collective bargaining rights. The response to the Governor’s move was rapid and in no way orchestrated or long-planned – there was absolutely no possible time for that. By late Monday, Feb 14, the WI state legislature announced a hearing of the bill in the Joint Finance Committee which was open for public testimony. It was then that unions and affected public sector workers began to try to organize to fight the bill.

Interestingly, members of the public, including myself, arrived early Tuesday morning to have our positions heard in the committee hearing on the bill. When the public testimony began, numerous media outlets were present to cover the proceedings. The media portrayed the hearing as a chance for “both sides” to have their voices heard, as if this were an even dispute between two viewpoints with equally numbered constituents. That was not the case. The clerk’s office documented testimony against the bill versus for the bill to be roughly 20 to 1, at least. Moreover, I know first hand that many of the bill supporters who spoke before and after I did had not been waiting in line with the rest of us. Where did they come from? They seemed to be placed into the queue somehow, conveniently, very early in the day when the media was present. As the proceeding wore on, few if any supporters of the bill were present at all.

These six days of protests have been completely non-violent and peaceful. There have been rumblings that protesters have “trashed” the capitol. That is completely false. Members of unions, particularly the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) and the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants’ Association (MGAA), have been regularly organizing volunteer crews to clean up trash and litter.

As crowds swelled from approximately 13,000 on Tuesday, to around 70,000 (some estimate 100,000) on Saturday, the media finally began to take notice. But curiously, most media outlets only began to show up when the Tea Party announced its plans for a counter-rally on Saturday. Contrary to sources, these Saturday rallies did not consist of a meeting of disputing views in virtually equal numbers, nor were they a “clash.” The Walker supporters numbered roughly 700-1000 at most, while the anti-bill, pro-union activists outnumbered them nearly 100 to 1. Furthermore, there was no violence and no confrontation between opposing sides. (But interestingly, it was the first day that the capitol police posted signs on the capitol building stating “No Firearms Allowed.”) The Tea Party contingent barely made a blip with their paltry turnout.

Less than one-quarter of the pro-union activists

Entire Tea Party contingent

Sign that only emerged, after five days of entirely peaceful protests, when the Tea Party arrived

As far as the actual issue at hand, most media outlets merely mimicked the talking points repeated ad infinitum by Governor Scott Walker, and did no investigating into the veracity of his claims, nor any critical questioning about the situation in Wisconsin. Here are some facts:

1. The state of Wisconsin is not facing a financial crisis. Though specific numbers have been continually disputed and some even claim that the state faces a surplus at the end of the 2009-2011 budget, what is clear is that Wisconsin’s financial woes are moderate at most, and do not constitute a dire situation. The $3.6 billion shortfall that Walker keeps repeating is based on the State Budget Office Analysis which calculated the 2011-2013 biennial figures based on agency requests. These requests always exceed actual monies allocated. The 2011-2013 actual budget has not even come out yet. Walker is misrepresenting these details. Moreover, Governor Walker was unconcerned about budget matters when he offered over $140 million in tax incentives to out-of-state multinational corporations, but now he is suddenly unable to afford to take care of his in-state workforce. The “crisis” is manufactured.

2. The government employee unions bargained for and ratified contracts late last year that provided numerous concessions, including but not limited to freezes in compensation for two years and increased health insurance premiums. Unions are not opposed to “sacrifices”; in fact, they had ALREADY agreed to them.

3. The erosion of collective bargaining rights has nothing at all to do with the contrived “Budget Repair.” Stripping unions of their freedom to negotiate will do nothing to help alleviate deficits.

4. The workers in the private sector have not been voluntarily sacrificing for the public good; pay cuts and loss of benefits have been thrust upon them without any say on their part, precisely because they do not have unions to support them.

5. The rhetoric spewed by the right, such as “I lost my pension, so should you” is akin to saying “My legs were cut off, now yours should be, too.” Unionists would prefer that our legs not be cut off – and we would like to see all non-union workers walking again too. Our battle is for the rights of ALL workers, and our victories are YOUR victories. This is trickle-up economics – and it actually works.

6. Union workers are not lazy slackers; indeed they do some of the most difficult jobs imaginable, such as being home-health care workers, factory laborers, and teachers.

7. The gap between rich and poor started to increase in the 1970s and has reached its widest margin today. Coincidentally, during that same time period, massive tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthy have been mounting.

8. The people who have not sacrificed are the wealthy and corporations. They have the ability to repair these purported budget deficits, yet those who can barely make a decent living are instead called upon to lose what little they have. All the while, Wall Street flourishes and the rich continue to accumulate more and more of the financial wealth of the nation.

9. The struggle in Wisconsin is not about my union or any other union; it is class warfare, plain and simple. It is a battle for decent human rights and against the systematic, concerted and well-orchestrated effort to remove all the rights of workers in this country. Anyone and everyone who makes less that a six-figure income – i.e. the poor and middle class - should be outraged by this immoral and unjust bill and united in our effort to protect our right to a decent living.

Why is it that those who have never had to worry about money, never had to sacrifice, and never had to fight for anything in their lives continually get more and more while working folks get less and less? And why, inexplicably, do other working folks support this race to the bottom?

The corporatization of America has already occurred; now we are well into the third-worldification of America.

We Wisconsin workers are fighting for you and fighting for this country. We must win.

Another Video of the Public Hearing on the WI "Budget Repair" Bill

2011-02-15T23:02:00.003-06:00

Speech to the Wisconsin State Joint Finance Committee Hearing

2011-02-15T21:28:00.000-06:00

On the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill

2/15/2011

I am a graduate teaching assistant with the TAA at UW Madison. As we’ve heard already, this bill has very little to do with repairing the state budget and everything to do with rescinding workers’ rights. The right to collective bargaining is in no way connected to balancing a budget. Taking away workers’ abilities to bargain for their contracts is completely undemocratic and dictatorial. Moreover, even if this bill had anything at all to do with repairing a budget, taking what small scraps are still held by those who have the least (and have the least to do with the deficit) while extending benefits to those who have the most—as the governor recently did by passing tax cuts to big businesses—is an unwise and misguided path toward destruction for the state. President George H. W. Bush called it “voodoo economics” and over the past two decades, he has consistently been proven correct. At no time in American history has the gap between rich and poor been so wide and the unfounded rhetoric against workers and unions been so vitriolic.

There was a time in America when people like my grandfathers—with barely a high school diploma—could raise families, send them to college, protect them with access to health care, and then also comfortably retire on either a public or private sector income. That was because workers enjoyed protections provided by unions, which afforded them a decent life. Those protections have already been systematically destroyed in the private sector, as CEOs have amassed record wealth while employees have suffered record losses. Now, public sector workers’ rights are at risk as well. This constitutes a race to the bottom. It is an unethical and immoral way to run a business or a government. It is also an enormous political miscalculation. As people lose all rights, they also lose all fear. There will be nothing more left to lose. And as we’ve seen in recent weeks, people around the world are no longer tolerating their lack of freedom under dictatorial regimes. With this bill, Wisconsin will not be “open for business”; it will be closed, indefinitely, for repair.

Thank god!

2010-08-18T22:22:00.001-05:00


Courtesy of Despair, Inc.

What a world!

Isn't it great that we can choose to live our lives in any way we want and it does not have any effects on other people or other species?

Isn't it fantastic that we are in no way responsible for harm to others unless we intend it and/or actually directly touch them?

Aren't you glad that some of us are predestined to live in reprehensible extravagance while others are meant to spend their short time on earth in utter abject misery?

Isn't it great that there is really nothing we can do about it, because some really important, smart, hard-working people just deserve fifty million times more resources than they need (and they have a guy in the sky to prove to you it's true!)? The people who don't have so much? They are all just lazy louses, who happen to be a little darker in hue (probably terrorists). Someone up there does not like them very much.

Isn't is wonderful that we can mechanically alter other species now, as well as pack them into tiny little spaces and fatten them up so fast so we can get them to our dinner tables in record time? Yum, yum! I feel healthier than ever!

And aren't you psyched that we (or our slaves ... but we don't call them that anymore! This is 2010!) can extract every single element on the planet to engineer into machinery that ever-increases our expediency and our ADD and our planetary temperature? Not to mention that we can just consume and expend and discard at our leisure - no ill effects on ecosystem or human health whatsoever! Waste just disappears, ecosystems do not matter, and everything else is determined by our genes, don't you know?!?

Phew. I am so glad that I can just go on with my life. I deserve it! Thank god!

And Thank god global warming is a hoax!!

Lies Our Corportations (i.e., Governments) Tell Us

2010-08-14T11:21:00.001-05:00

The toxic dispersants used by BP to cover-up their criminal catastrophe in the Gulf are banned in Great Britain. As if crude oil is not toxic enough, the dispersants "Corexit 9500" and "Corexit 9527" are know to cause tremendous harm in all vertebrates - including humans.

Crime of the Century

Crime of the Century Part II

The Gulf Oil disaster is not over; it will continue for eons. Placating the positivist masses and protecting oil corporations does not change the facts. It does not save the thousands of sea turtles, dolphins, whales, birds, fish, and HUMANS who will suffer from lingering illnesses and syndromes, resulting in premature and preventable deaths in the near future.

The Pharmaceutical Medical Industrial Complex

2010-08-14T11:10:00.002-05:00

An American Hero: Howard Zinn 1922-2010

2010-01-27T20:21:00.003-06:00

RIP, Dr. Zinn.

You are one of our greatest idols.
Losing you is a dear loss for humanity...

Democracy Now
Common Dreams
Boston Globe

Gone Too Soon

2009-11-08T10:13:00.006-06:00

My friend would have turned 42 yesterday. Instead, she passed away before her 39th birthday. It was not inevitable.

I am supposed to turn this situation into something positive.

I am supposed to be happy for the joy she brought to so many people's lives, to believe she is looking down upon all of us and smiling, to know she is in a better place and at peace.

What I know is that her life was taken too soon.

Not because of some inherited genetic deficiency, but because of cultural negligence and complacency.

I am befuddled at a society that refuses to ackowledge and address the obvious causes of such an epidemic while so many of our friends and family members perish.

(Though here, I speak of cancer ... you can substitute what you will, and it will still likely fit... )

We are the architects of our own doom.

Will we ever learn?

How many others will be lost prematurely?

The Racists Are At It Again

2009-09-12T22:05:00.001-05:00

Tens of thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands of people -"a cross section” of America, said NBC - protested against their best interests and for the interests of the multi-trillion dollar “health” insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries today.

Besides the fact that this event speaks to the profound infiltration of the inaccurate and fallacious mainstream corporate media messages into the highly impressionable psyche of Americans, it speaks to the fact that many (perhaps most?) white Americans are simply racist.

People are and have been losing their homes, going bankrupt, and dying because of inadequate health insurance and rejected claims for service for which they paid for decades, while industry insiders (including insurance employees, pharmaceutical employees, and even doctors) have raked in the dough.

We just rid ourselves of a President and Vice-President who lied about erroneous links between Al Qaeda and Iraq, who lied about torture, who committed war crimes against the Geneva conventions, who put us trillions of dollars in debt to launch and maintain two needless wars, yet during their reign, they were not even called to account for their multitude of criminal behaviors.

Now … now that the man occupying the White House is BLACK, people are out in the streets because they are afraid of the government spending money on medical care for all Americans?

Of course, Medicare-for-all, i.e., a single-payer government sponsored medical care system would save the government and all of us BILLIONS of dollars in wasteful bureaucratic spending. This system is actually the most fiscally conservative of all medical care options. And neither the Republicans nor the Democrats (save for the progressive caucus and a select few others) have the intellect, the compassion, the sense, nor the gonads to support such a simple, sensible, humanitarian plan.

The absurdity and insanity of it all is too sad to even laugh at.

But what we see at this inane D.C. protest today - and by the way, the President that you all so hate was not even in D.C. today, you brilliant wunderkinds – is not about medical care. It is not about government spending.

Where were you when the Bush administration lost - yes LOST - 9 Billion dollars that was airlifted to Baghdad and just went “missing”?????????

This display is all about racism, plain and simple.

These people are too selfish, stupid, and racist to be given any consideration whatsoever.

The fact that these protesters are given any credence at all demonstrates how selfish, stupid, and racist the rest of America is too.

(photo courtesy indybay.org)

Exposing American Racism

2009-09-07T19:30:00.001-05:00

As Bill Maher so accurately noted, the Democrats have moved to the right and the Right has moved into a mental hospital. As it stands, Democrats now simply affirm all of the ideologies that Republicans used to. Need proof? Look into history. Look into the policies and bills that have passed through Congress and the White House over the past couple of decades. Hell, Richard Nixon passed more progressive legislation than almost any federal Democratic official in the past twenty years. Barack Obama’s administration has continued nearly in lock-step with the previous George W. Bush administration, with few exceptions.

So, then, these facts beg the question: Why do Republicans disapprove of Obama, considering that he is promulgating their own agenda?

Their answers are that he is a:
Socialist
Communist
Liberal
Progressive
Terrorist
Fascist
Illegal Alien
Racist

The fact that these characterizations are contradictory notwithstanding, they are also completely inaccurate.

What then is going on here?

Simple.

Obama does not represent progressives; he and nearly all Democrats do not represent liberal ideals any longer.

Obama does not represent change in terms of political and social principles; he is a corporatist like all of those before him.

Yet, he is change: he is a change of skin color.

What we have here is a national case of word substitution.

When people complain that Obama is a “socialist” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “communist” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “liberal” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “progressive” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “terrorist” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “fascist” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is an “illegal alien” they mean he is “black.”

When people complain that Obama is a “racist” they mean he is “black.”

Let’s call a spade a spade.

The only rational explanation to the hatred and dissatisfaction of Barack Obama and his policies by the Right is that they are racists.

They are racists.

Why are we listening to racists?

They are racists.

They should have no voice.

P.S. The recent forced resignation of Van Jones from his post as “green jobs czar” demonstrates the power of the racists. While war criminals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney roam the streets freely and continue in their lives of extreme privilege and immorality, Van Jones’ only fault is the so demonized trait of “living while black.” Oh, and perhaps his other fault is attempting to help the environment and help those other young people who also carry the trait of “living while black."

(photo courtesy of the National Organization for Women)

Torture and Capitalism

2009-08-25T11:37:00.012-05:00

With all the revelations about U.S. government-sanctioned torture, of how Cheney claims torture brought important information to light, and of how those claims are refuted by actual facts, it is easy for us to fall into some common traps.

For one, Cheney’s claims might lead us to believe that there is merit in talking about whether or not torture is useful. This canard plays into the fiction spun by the torturers. We can argue and prove that torture does not produce good intelligence, but what if it did? Would that excuse it? The entire subject is moot since torture has but one purpose: to force prisoners to say what torturers want them to say. It does not extend beyond that and never has throughout history.

In the Medieval period, the Church or the secular state could confiscate land of all who were hanged/burned/drowned after confession under torture. This was quite profitable for the powerful. To increase profits, they not only obtained a confession of guilt for witchcraft or heresy, but a list of “accomplices.” Names of friends and family extracted under the duress of torture gave the torturers an excuse to torture more people before absconding with their property in an ever-widening circle. This went on until the public would no longer tolerate it in that area, and the inquisition would move to the next town. The torturers of that time no more believed their own cover story than Cheney et al. believes our torture of prisoners made us safer after 9/11. Torturers didn’t believe in witches and heretics; that was simply their lie so they could extract capital from their victims, mining the resources of the populace.

Little has changed. Torture is one means to a capitalistic end. It creates a fiction that spreads to the masses to allow the powerful to exploit the people. Today, to get common folk to accept war and torture and to continue to extract money from taxpayers for corporate welfare, many techniques are utilized, including: nationalism, corporate funded PR, false stories put out by corporate-owned media, and claims based on “science” co-opted and paid for by industry. Falling for any of these traps allows the powerful to escape responsibility for their deceptions and crimes as they reap tremendous profits from the people around the world.

Where does that leave us in our present discussion of U.S. torture policy? We might dig directly into the onion rather than be diverted by its outer layers. When torture is used, we should discern what fabrications the torturers wanted their victims to confess to and why, rather than get mired in pointless corollaries.

By their own admission (and membership), the Cheney regime endeavored to strengthen the “Project for a New American Century” agenda. This is a global corporate agenda; pointing out their corporate ties confirms this. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton; Halliburton gained noncompetitive contracts in Iraq. Bush has ties to big oil; our troops invaded, then guarded oil fields while ignoring the plight of the people and their culture as Baghdad was looted, and on an on.

With torture, any story can gain credence if someone is forced to confess to its validity, since anyone will say anything under torture. In short, it is a way to gain a competitive edge in the capitalistic market place. Want an excuse to go into Iraq to secure oil for your friends and family? Get someone to confess to a lie (weapons of mass destruction, say) that supports your military position so you can invade an oil-rich nation. You can make someone say “I am a fish!” if you like; it doesn’t matter how outrageous the story. They would even confess to being sexual partners with Satan and confirm that their family performed similar perverted acts under the light of the moon. It’s a powerful tool, but it is never used to actually extract unknown information. It is meant to create fictions written by torturers for a purpose.

So given that any torture policy throughout history is simply a means to create false evidence for economic gain, what should we be talking about? Should we say that we are a good people who do not torture? That would be replacing one fiction with another.

America

, like any power, has always tortured, killed, and abused people for its own ends. Vigorously waving a flag won’t change that. Should we say that it is ineffective for gathering information? That concedes that torture should be used under some circumstances, which is fallacious.

Given that the “Bush” regime had an agenda to enhance corporate power around the globe, the real concern should be: What lies were put into existence and for what specific purpose? To do so strips the onion to its core, exposing the agenda of the torturers. Only by doing this can we decide what steps to take regarding criminal prosecution and future actions to remove torture from our national toolbox.

However, this discussion is off the table, and it will remain so. A few scapegoats might be thrown into the fire as they were with the Abu Ghraib affair. Obama, being a good right of center corporate Democrat, has unequivocally stated that he wishes to “look forward, not back” so all this torture nonsense can be swept under the rug. Eric Holder will investigate torture, but only cases in which the torturers tortured outside the letter of the torture policy. To do any more, to penetrate the onion, would be to condemn Obama’s corporate paymasters and our whole way of life.

For we are capitalists and consumers, cheering on behemoths like big oil, big pharma, big agriculture, and of course our huge military machine, which consumes at least half of our federal budget every year once you add up all its conveniently separated parts. Our global military domination that Americans support is our brutal arm sweeping aside everything non-corporate in the world. Regurgitated fictions about keeping our children safe, a war on terror, liberating the bombed-out masses in “Iraq/Af/Pak," and, yes, fictions obtained through torture, pave the way.

Progressives Owe Ralph Nader an Enormous Apology

2009-07-02T11:26:00.002-05:00

Much of the American public used Barack Obama as their mirror throughout the 2008 election cycle. They wanted an end to war, equality for minorities, universal “socialist” health care, tougher environmental regulations, corporate accountability. They looked at Obama and saw what they wanted, even though he never professed to espouse these values and never committed to any promises in these veins. Just like Bill Clinton in 1992, the disgruntled masses projected their hopes, fears, and aspirations onto the candidate for change, and he happily obliged by appealing to their needs with all rhetoric and little substance. Here was a bright, intelligent, attractive, somewhat self-deprecating and enormously charming man from a difficult background who no-doubt faced tremendous challenges on his path to power. Here was a man who could understand all of us who did not fit into that infamous “base” of George W. Bush’s. Here was the antithesis to the last eight years. How could we possibly elect the first-ever American President of color, following what some call the worst administration in the history of the United States, and not have the sweeping reform and reconstruction we so needed? How, indeed. We certainly enjoy our reflections, don’t we?

Certainly, it’s too soon to tell what the full Obama presidency might bring, but the little glimmers of hope – such as the organic White House garden – pale in comparison to the outrageous missteps - continued war in Afghanistan, refusal to prosecute torturers, further unjustified arrests and detainments, no significant climate change, energy, or toxic substance regulations, no support for single-payer health care, and approval of additional mountaintop removal for coal. The list of problems is endless.

It’s time America learns the audacity of truth, rather than the denial and phoniness of hope. We need to stop feeding ourselves the self-help “nothing but positivity” soup (along with our genetically modified non-food products) and nurture ourselves with the broth of reality. There is no shame in a cynical truth. Those progressives who faced being ironically called racists for not supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 election were and still are decried for their “negativity” and “pessimism” in not blindly believing the hype. There’s no question that it is wonderful for America to have a President of African-American decent. There’s no question that Barack Obama is better than anything the Republicans could offer. But is that all we expect? Why do we not want the best for ourselves?

We have had a better choice for the past three elections and yet time and time again, few have had the boldness to be bulls rather than sheep and vote for the man who has selflessly served us all for his entire career and professed the truth in all of its unpleasantness. We can still hope that Obama will get better. Indeed, we should make him get better and not accept his expedient excuses. But in the meantime, we need to offer our most humble apology to the man who prophetically predicted this outcome and who always had nothing but our best interests at heart – the hero, Ralph Nader.

"Stand up 2 Cancer?" Try, "Bow Down to Industry"

2008-09-07T12:16:00.018-05:00

Ten weeks ago, I had colon resection surgery for a malignant polyp. At 36 years old, I had cancer. I have been a vegetarian for nearly 15 years, have not eaten red meat in nearly 20 years, and have been physically fit my entire life - I was even a college athlete. I possessed exactly zero risk factors (as defined by the ever knowledgeable medical industry) for such a malady. In fact, I had numerous “anti-” risk factors that should have placed me at negative odds of acquiring cancer at all. My reality belies these erroneous beliefs about health and cancer. A great number of our common health problems and syndromes (I refuse to term them diseases, because “disease” connotes known specific causes) can be attributed to our atrociously unhealthy lifestyles and western diets that lack nutrition. Cancer is not one of them. The notion that good nutrition, fitness, health and well-being prevent cancer is fallacious. And the unwavering hope that we will find a cure to this epidemic is just as flawed.

Cancer stems from carcinogens. Carcinogens are agents that promote mutations in DNA, which promulgate the uncontrolled growth and division of useless cells that may interfere with the normal cellular, organ, and system functions in the body. This is about all we truly know about cancer. Yes, much research has been conducted for decades about the life cycle and progression of this illness, but most results are nothing more than theoretical and dubious. Recently there has been a lot of discussion and endorsement of supposed “cancer genes", which are said to be inherited. Much of what has been stated as fact flies in the face of everything that scientists believe about evolutionary biology. According to evolutionary theories, undesirable traits (such as cancer) would in time decrease in the gene pool because of natural selection and normal mutations. Yet cancer continues to increase at an alarming rate. Last I heard, in 2004 in America, one in every two men will develop cancer in their lifetimes, while one in every three women will develop cancer. This is not because we are living longer and thus have more time to develop the illness. Discounting infant mortality rates and those who perished young from infectious disease, Americans are not living longer than those hundreds of years ago who made it through infancy and infection. Cancer is striking Americans at younger and younger ages. When my grandparents were my age, they knew no peers who suffered from cancer and barely knew anyone who had cancer. When my parents were my age, they knew no peers who had cancer and a couple of older-aged people who had the illness. I have personally known at least a dozen peers with cancer, and have known at least a three who have perished, including a close friend. So why are so many of us young, strong, healthy individuals contracting cancer? Because of carcinogens.

Some carcinogens exist in nature, but most result from industrial technology. The vast majority of synthetic chemicals, which do not exist in nature, were introduced to the world as recently as the late 1940s. Many if not all of these are carcinogenic, either in their original form or as by-products. In the decades following their inception, cancer rates in the general population have exploded. Cancers were once most exclusively linked to workers’ exposure to carcinogens in their jobs. These chemicals have now spread through our air, water supply, and through our use of consumer goods. In addition, cancer-causing radiation from technologies – such as television, nuclear power, microwave ovens, and cellular phones – is present now when it was nonexistent in the recent past. It is assumed that these levels of radiation are safe. Yet even if the levels are safe in isolation, there is absolutely no research that exists to qualify their cumulative safety effects. Most notably, radiation exposure is highest through medical care itself. According to the proceedings of the 2001 international joint conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the European Commission, The Pan American Health Organization, and the World Health Organization, medical procedures - X-rays, CT Scans, radiation therapy – are the most significant source of human-made radiation exposure to the public by far. Clearly, cancer is a result of industrial pollution of the biosphere and of industrial technology, not of unlucky inheritance. It is quite convenient that we are being blamed for the misfortune of our own cancer via heredity while none of the carcinogen-producing industries is indicted at all.

As for cancer therapy, little has changed since Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer near the time of my birth. Three main remedies exist – surgery, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy. The latter two cause cancer themselves. Moreover, many of the major diagnostic tools for detecting cancer, such as mammography, CT scans, and fluoroscopy expose patients to extremely high levels of radiation. Their safety is increasingly coming into question as evidenced by articles in major media outlets such as CBS, ABC, MSNBC, US News and World Report, and Time magazine, based on peer-reviewed scientific research. The futile quest for an elusive singular cure to a complex but preventable set of illnesses is a waste of time and money. This search has been conducted for at least half a century now, to little or no avail. But does that mean we just have to live with cancer? Solutions exist. Prevention exists. However, prevention does not mean early detection. Prevention means elimination of carcinogens.

Two years ago, I underwent a barium enema to attempt to discover the source of some digestive trouble. Barium enemas do not necessarily detect cancer, but they do discover growths of any size. They also consist of a series of x-rays of the colon – in my case over a dozen. At the time, I joked to my partner, “If I don’t have cancer now, I will after all of this.” I did not have cancer then. The x-rays showed no signs of any growths large or small. Now, two years after that enormous radiation exposure, I am no longer laughing. That same month, an acquaintance of mine from my childhood died from metastatic cancer at the age of 31; also, a close friend of mine died of (originally) ovarian cancer at the age of 38. My friend’s cancer story began with benign cysts. Two years later, cancer was detected. Her therapy consisted of aggressive treatment – including pinpointed radiation to an area of her body where she later developed bone tumors from which she died. Her doctors were surprised at the way in which her cancer had jumped to her bones. It was so rare, indeed, that they wrote journal articles about her case. They never thought to question their own radioactive therapy.

We need to be open to changing our lives. We ought to adopt policies that favor human and environmental health over economic health (i.e. growth) – the Precautionary Principle, for example. We must gain the wisdom to value natural living things such as ourselves, otherwise the artificial economy upon which we choose to base our entire existence is liable to outlive us all.

The term cancer “survivor” offends me. It disrespects my fit and healthy friend who did not survive. It discounts the millions of those who have not survived. I live now, but for how long? How much longer will my body tolerate all of its exposure to carcinogenic agents? Unfortunately, as a biotic organism, I must continue to breathe (polluted) air and drink (polluted) water as a necessity to survive. My impeccable diet and healthy lifestyle – and those of so many others – do not immunize us from toxic poisoning. We will surely not even come close to suffering from diabetes or heart disease, but until carcinogens are eliminated, we will always be at risk for cancer.

I am not a cancer survivor. I am a cancer victim. I am a victim of industry. After 36 years with not a single medical event, my body has now undergone manipulation and mutilation as the result of cancer surgery. I have an eight-inch scar on my abdomen. My formerly robust abdominal muscles are trying to be of use again. My intestines are attempting to discover their new function as a result of being in a new location in my gastrointestinal tract – sometimes unsuccessfully. I am annoyed with everyone clinging to false hope and not dealing with reality. I am disgusted with telethons such as “Stand up 2 Cancer” that feed money into the same medical industry that irradiates us, but does not touch upon the causes of this preventable epidemic. We cannot tolerate this toxic, carcinogenic world that we have created to satisfy our needs for useless and wasteful consumer technologies – our bodies cannot tolerate it. If we do not stop allowing “acceptable levels” of carcinogenic agents, if we do not stop choosing economic growth over public health, if we do not stop feeding our insatiable hunger for unnecessary products and production of “goods’ (I prefer to call them “bads”), if we do not stop enduring incredible harm from industry, if we do not stop depending on experts alone rather than relying on common sense grounded in well-informed education, and if we do not stop seeking a single, reductionist scientific solution to a complex problem that is too cumulative and aggregate in nature for science to deal with, then we are doomed.

The Tribute That Should Have Been (RIP my wonderful Nanny)

2008-08-23T13:44:00.004-05:00

I wanted to say a few words about my grandmother - Nanny, as we grandchildren called her - because she was one of my favorite people on the planet. Being with Nanny and speaking with her always brought me great joy, just as it brought her joy to be with her grandchildren. Though it never felt like it at the time, our conversations were always a learning experience. From her I learned not only how to cook, but how to give, how to sacrifice, how to be strong, how to deal with life’s difficulties, and most of all, how to give and receive unconditional love.

From a young age, I delighted in visiting my grandparents. Those weekly visits to their Yonkers home, and then to their home in Bethel, enabled me to learn to cook from the master. I’ll never forget all the years of “caving” the cavatelli macaroni and leaving pounds of it to dry on the dining room table. We could never get to eating it soon enough. Every time I came over to my Nanny’s home, she had the most delectable leftovers in her fridge and was ready to serve up any one of them as I walked through the door. It is impossible to recount all of the wonderful meals she made for us all. It was funny, because my grandfather (my Poppop) would always volunteer her services, saying, “Anything you want, Nanny will make it for you.” And of course, Nanny would happily oblige. Thankfully, I can still carry on making some of the traditional food she made, perhaps not as perfectly as she did, but I don’t know that there is anyone left who will ever be able to duplicate her stupendous manicotti.

In addition to being an outstanding chef, Nanny was such a generous woman. She never failed to sacrifice for those she loved, first in her roles as sister and daughter then wife, mother, and grandmother. Like most women of her time, she surrendered much of herself to those around her. I noticed this most after my Poppop passed away. I used to drive up from my home in D.C. about once a month to visit and try to help Nanny with what she might need – which was always nothing because she never asked for anything. Often I would offer to take her for a drive or ask her what she wanted to do, and she constantly replied, “Whatever you want to do.” I don’t think Nanny knew how to express her own desires. I think she was always busy helping everyone else. Though I wish Nanny had indulged herself on occasion, I think her demonstration of self-sacrifice is an example we could use more of in this all-too self-centered world.

Most of you know that Nanny was a woman of few words. However, her silence shouldn’t be mistaken for meekness. Her quiet demeanor belied her strength and fortitude. She had big hands – which I inherited from her and which I was once told signify an ability to handle things well. And that she did. She was “green” before her time as she never drove a car and always walked everywhere she needed to go. There was no such thing as a gym for Nanny. She used to walk miles to the center of town from her home in Bethel, hiking up a long steep hill at the end of the journey – and this occurred when she was in her seventies and eighties. During those same years, she used to cook her famous Italian omelet in her heavy cast iron-pan, flipping the entire pan over with one arm, and telling ME not to help her because it was too heavy. In her nineties, I had the pleasure of watching her take an exercise class in her retirement home. Not only was she the most nimble, she was one of the oldest participants and one of the few who never needed a walker of wheelchair to travel. And boy could she still cut a rug!

Nanny had an inner-strength, too. She dealt with more tragedies than anyone should have experienced in one lifetime, but she handled them with grace and courage. I don’t know how many people are aware of how she reacted when my grandfather died. From downstairs in their home, she heard him drop to the floor. She called 911 and raced upstairs to give him CPR – which she had never been trained to do. She was 81 years old at the time. She never complained, always telling me on the phone that she “had no aches or pains” and she was “doing great.” I even spoke to her the morning that she passed. She was in the emergency room awaiting surgery, clearly in pain, yet she assured me that she was OK and she felt fine.

Even as Nanny reached her nineties and could not necessarily recall what she had eaten at her last meal, she had a keen awareness of people and things around her. She was always observing and absorbing. I’d sit with her when I visited, sometime silently, and watch her look around. I could see the wheels in her mind turning and I’d asked her what she was thinking about. She’d just give me a sly smile and I’d have to pry out what she had been analyzing. At other times, I’d call her when I’d had a bad day. When she asked how I was doing, I’d put on my best happy voice so as not to bother her and say, “I’m doing ok,” to which she’d reply, “Just OK?” She could tell. Another funny observation she made was when I’d tell her that I wish I could be there with her, and that I think about her often. She’d reply, “Well, you’re not my granddaughter for nothin’!”

After nearly 96 years, Nanny knew that life came with its good and bad. She was not one to see the glass as half full, but not one to see the glass as half empty, either. She just saw the glass for what it was. Recently I’d been feeling sad that I did not see Nanny as often as I’d like and I kept telling her on the phone how much I wished I were there with her. She always responded, “Well, we just have to make the best of it.” That philosophy allowed her to carry on for so long. I think it was a realistic, healthy one that we all would do well to follow so that maybe we could have such a long and loving life as my wonderful grandmother.

Oh, and by the way, Nanny often said to me that she thought she’d “hit the jackpot,” meaning that she’d live to be 100 years old. Well, she didn’t quite hit that jackpot, but we all hit the jackpot in having her in our lives.

And now, to celebrate her, here is her favorite song, which she had taken to singing beautifully to us all in the latter years of her life …

I’ll be loving you always
With a love that’s true always.
When the things you’ve planned
Need a helping hand,
I will understand always.

Always.

Days may not be fair always,
That’s when I’ll be there always.
Not for just an hour,
Not for just a day,
Not for just a year,
But always.

© Irving Berlin

Look Away

2008-07-19T12:01:00.003-05:00

My life partner and I sometimes take out DVDs from our local library here in Grand Forks, North Dakota. These disks are in appalling condition, full of scratches, gouges, congealed gunk, and a wide sampling of malodorous particles. It is true that these materials get used a lot, but certainly no more than the rentals from local video stores, which rarely suffer from the same kind of calamities. As we try to repair the carnage visited upon these disks so they will play in my computer, we try to visualize what people must be doing to ruin the materials. We envision Frisbee-type tossing that degenerates into even less advised drunken household stunts; we even imagine folks using the disks as mini plates from which fork-worthy victuals are carelessly tined.

Why all the respect for rentals and not for the library loans? The first thing that pops to mind is that we might be held accountable for rentals but that library stuff is free. Pushing it slightly further brings us to this: we respect what we have to pay for. Paying for things is our sacred duty, and we take this very seriously. Forget that libraries are funded with our taxes. That concept contains a distance that separates us from the expense.

Creating distance is vital to us and always has been to those sitting atop any hierarchy of destruction. It is the same distance that separates the killing of people far away from a job we may have in, say, a munitions factory or on Wall Street that trades shares for that factory or in some unrelated job that has a pension fund containing shares from the company that thrives off the profits of the munitions factory. We may be half a world away, occupied all day with what seem like mundane, peaceful activities, but our involvement in state murder in Iraq or Afghanistan or Viet Nam or East Timor or any other place we try to control through violence is linked to what we do every day, and to our very way of life.

This separation is so important that we use denial and anger to maintain it when we are faced with the truth about the way we live. A biased media, owned by the global corporations that benefit from the destruction of the planet and its inhabitants, aid us in this endeavor to distance ourselves from our complicity. As a result, and since we are surrounded by people in the same situation as ourselves, we feel pretty good about our claims that we are not complicit in the many atrocities that are committed around the world by “We the People.” We might even re-label such actions as “spreading democracy” or “insuring freedom” or even “self-defense.”

This distancing and denial is so powerful and automatic that as soon as this article jumped from a vapid discussion of something safe, like damaged library materials, and skidded into territory that might cast an aspersion towards the reader, I probably lost the majority of my audience. We look away if we aren’t complimented or made to feel good. If you did not stop reading, you might have experienced at least an urge to do so, most likely an unconscious one. It might have even manifested itself with a physical distancing of your body from these words, or an actual removal of attention to some distraction, a phone call or an email, perhaps. Don’t feel bad if this is so. We are programmed to do this by our corporate masters.

Sound crazy? Am I a conspiracy theorist or an ecology nut? Now that I have been labeled as such, should I not now be dismissed and forgotten, along with my ideas?

One of the TV series my life partner and I have been watching is “The X-Files.” We both have noticed that whenever Mulder presents evidence concerning a mutant or a UFO or whatever paranormal thing he investigates, that he is immediately rebuffed and labeled as crazy or as a conspiracy theorist or whatever other pigeon hole that allows him to be comfortably dismissed. Of course, this is because the notions Mulder describes in those shows lie outside the accepted confines of the assumptions of the culture, so he is thought to be crazy, even if he has very convincing scientific data like in the case of that liver-eating guy, the mutant Tooms. No one would listen to his evidence, compelling or not. It isn’t because they disagreed with his facts. It isn’t because they had a better explanation. Mulder wasn’t heeded because the listeners are part of the paradigm, and they will not shift from their position because then where would they be? They would be living in a world they could not understand. They would be lost.

One doesn’t have to talk about mutants or UFOs to get dismissed as a kook in our culture. Simple truths about the way the world works suffices. The distance from our own place in the world is there because without it we would be lost. Who would we be? What would we do with ourselves if we knew that we are participating in a system that commits violence against others of our own species to keep the our paradigm of economic growth in place, that chokes non-human species into oblivion, that destroys the very state of the planet that allows us to survive?

If you are still reading this, you might be wondering exactly what our complicity is. That is simple. We see ourselves as consumers. Instead of realizing that consuming wreaks havoc upon the world, we prefer to believe that this is a good thing to do. We are told this by people who insist that everything boils down to money—not life. Ours is a toxic relationship of codependence with global corporations that control our government and, hence, its military, global corporations that exploit workers here and especially overseas to externalize costs, global corporations that rely upon the inability of reductionist science to prove environmental harms, thereby allowing them to continue to pollute and tear up the world, unregulated. As a result, our economic juggernaut crashes onward, aimed at life’s total destruction. Meanwhile, we are told that low prices and an obsession with fancy gadgetry is all there is to life. Since we prefer not to see ourselves at the apex of this pyramid of mindless destruction, since we prefer to distance ourselves from the costs we impose upon other life and the planet, we continue operating within the paradigm, looking up occasionally from our texting or our pointless phone calls to shake our heads at the tragedy of it all as the world burns down around us.

Our New Paradigm

2008-05-15T07:59:00.006-05:00

In the May 12, 2008,

paper The Guardian, David Adam reported that “carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high…[and] climate change could begin to slide out of control.” He went on to write that scientific models assumed half of our future CO2 emissions would be reabsorbed by forests and oceans, but that these assumptions “may be too optimistic.” Of course, CO2 isn’t the only crisis in our world, but let’s set the shortcomings of scientific reductionism aside for the moment.

The fact that CO2 emissions are increasing is no surprise. Look locally. Is there a decrease of driving in your town or city? Besides the handful of folks that are walking or biking, not even high gas prices diminish driving. Couple that with the abundance of vehicles that get eight to twelve miles per gallon, and it might appear to the casual observer that there is no climate crisis or even a fuel shortage.

Do we need to drive every time we go out? Are we really too busy to walk? Is that trip to the big box store down the road necessary? Or are we too self-absorbed to recognize the way commercial interests have taught us to live? There is an irrational notion inculcated in “civilized” cultures that assumes economics and especially gadgetry (that we must buy) solves all problems. In truth, gadgetry causes harms. Our most sophisticated gadgets by far are implements of war. Are we just “boys (and girls) with toys” caring only for instant gratification?

If we are merely selfish, pursuing instant gratification, we are utterly lost. However, if we care about saving the planet and all the species that dwell upon it (including our own children), we must change the way we live. Markets will not solve our problems; they created them in the first place with deregulation, pollution, worker exploitation, manipulation of our minds through advertising, and unchecked greed.

As individuals, we must first and foremost reduce our ravenous and unnecessary consumption, reuse things rather than stuff them into landfills, and as a last resort, recycle the things we must discard. We need to stop or at least reduce driving in favor of our more “primitive” means of ambulation. Besides, it’s good for us.

Will these steps solve all the problems we’ve created? Well, no, not with economics being the sole paradigm of all decisions and actions in our “advanced” culture, but at least we could mitigate our own contributions to problems that are “slid[ing] out of control.” That way, instead of feeling that any talk of climate change is a personal attack due to our complicity in the system, we can eliminate our anger, denial, and our cynical business-as-usual attitude, and become examples of a new paradigm. We might as well learn to live more simply so we can teach our children how to do it. They need to be ready for when they have no choice in the matter. And let’s face it—that’s tomorrow.

(the) GROWTH

2006-05-29T13:41:00.000-05:00

Let’s start off traditionally with this tiny iceberg tip of a discussion on growth with a selection from a definition (The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition):

growth

3. An increase, as in size, number, value, or strength; extension or expansion.

To our civilization, growth in this sense of the word is something to strive for. Certainly, in terms of our stock portfolios, growth is always looked upon as a fine thing. Our money must grow. Our worth must grow. Our status must grow. Our possessions must grow. Our economy must grow. These are absolute musts in our society. No one wants the economy to stagnate. Share holders of a corporation expect capital growth, and CEOs are hired to make this happen. It is their legal responsibility to do so.

Is it right, though, to expect growth to be something that should last forever? Currently, no corporation in the world would ever be content with zero growth. Negative growth would be a cause for great concern. Perhaps, though, we ought to ask the unspeakable question: Should we allow growth to go unchecked? Any growth?

We certainly have something to say about the growth of animal populations, and we apply “conservation” efforts to keep numbers down when this kind of growth reaches, in our view, an unsustainable level.

Should we not apply that to economic growth, as well?

When we wish to curb animal populations, deer, for example, because they are “too plentiful” or when we allow grizzlies to be hunted again because they are no longer “endangered” in our view, we are applying a cost-benefit analysis to these issues. We are claiming that the burgeoning deer population will affect the environment, at least in our view, in such a way that their population, their growth, must be checked. This is what we call “balance.”

Since we consider balance only when other species or other peoples are concerned, and rarely if ever apply this sort of analysis to our own economic system (and if someone does try to apply it, they are labeled as crackpots and dismissed) it is necessary to spell out the frightfully simple parallels.

When our money grows in, say, a stock fund from Fidelity, we are benefiting directly from the growth of that company. In order for a company to grow, it must increase its revenue. In order to do that, it must use up more of the natural world than it did before it grew. If this kind of growth continues, as our civilization believes it should, all resources will eventually be used up, since all resources are finite.

With me so far?

Before anyone tries to argue that some companies don’t use up more of the natural world to grow, please find evidence of any company that is able to do this. Something must have been stolen or used from somewhere to increase profitability. More oil might have been used to create more plastic or pesticide or to move goods further. Raw materials from somewhere had to be obtained by taking something from land somewhere that was, before, used for something else (such as deer or grizzly habitat, for example). Maybe profits increased by reducing costs of production through cheaper labor. This could be accomplished through slavery of children (and this is especially true of the chocolate industry—so your sweet tooth is most likely assuaged by child slavery) or by forcing indigenous people to work for three cents per hour in a factory in Indian or China or Honduras that was built upon land that was, before, used by them to plant crops. Once the factory or damn or multinational water installation is built, no crops can be grown, so the people there become poor and have to work for slave wages to survive. Any economic growth requires the taking of something from somewhere else. This is just fact. Sorry about that.

Ah, but isn’t all this growth natural? Animals do it. Plants do it. We all must grow. Growth is the stuff of life.

Let’s take a look at that straw man in order to refute it. Let’s liken all this economic growth to the growth our bodies go through as children. Our parents lovingly drew pencil lines on the wood (now PVC) of the door frame in their kitchens every few months to gauge the growth of their offspring. They encouraged their children to eat more and more because they are “growing boys/girls.”

Here’s where it breaks down: this fond memory of growth ended when we matured. I suppose there may still be a few mothers and fathers out there who still measure the growth of their forty year old children, but they would be, of course, insane, and even insane people might stop such irrational behavior once they see that their “little” boy or girl hasn’t grown in the last twenty-two years. In nature, growth ceases upon maturity.

So the obvious question is: when will our civilization mature enough to stop demanding growth of its economy? When the planet is completely depleted of what we so arrogantly call “resources”? What exactly is it we want our economies to grow into, anyway? I am imagining right now a boy growing right through his maturity, getting bigger and bigger, till he can’t fit in his home anymore, till his head reaches up hundreds of feet, eating tons of grain or beef or whatever per day so he can continue growing incessantly, till the very air around his face is too thin to breathe, so he lies down to survive, eating and eating more and more, like the world serpent, eventually nibbling at his own feet as his huge body encircles the planet.

Or perhaps you believe we will all be saved by technology. Unfortunately, that child-like hope dies rather quickly if one spends any time at all pondering what technology has done for us so far. Even ignoring that, the absurdity of this notion becomes laughable as soon as one puts it into actual examples: one day, we will make huge machines that suck all the pollution out of the sky; one day, we will figure out how to transmute seawater into oil through a process that requires no energy to operate it; one day, a man will come who can change water into wine (wait a minute, that one might not be original).

Rather than assuming economic growth is good, I offer another definition of “growth” that seems more appropriate, from the same dictionary:

5. Pathology. An abnormal mass of tissue, such as a tumor, growing in or on a living organism.

That organism is the planet, by the way, and our way of life is the growth. I feel that I must explain everything, is all, because we are so stubbornly resistant (expressed through denial and through lashing out at the messenger) to any suggestion of changing how we live.

So what am I saying? Stop economic growth!? But wouldn’t that lead to a downfall of our civilization? Wouldn’t all life as we know it cease!?

Well, yes, strictly. As we know it.

But another way to look at it is this: would you rather be part of the growth, or part of the organism?

Kelli Smiling

2006-04-17T21:30:00.000-05:00

(photo courtesy Garrett Oie)

Two months ago my friend Kelli Auletta died of cancer. She was 38. She was a caring, effusive, warm, and welcoming woman who befriended nearly everyone she met. She had hundreds, even thousands of friends and acquaintances, yet she made you feel like you were the only one. She liked to live life to the fullest and fortunately, she had the ability and opportunity to do so. For the fifteen years I knew her, she was always present with care and support for me through all circumstances. I can only hope she felt the same from me.

She fought her condition to the end and left with the same stubbornness, tenacity, and sense of humor with which she lived. Many referred to her as “The Social Director.” As she brought endless numbers of people together in life, so she did in her death. She will be terribly missed, having gone far too soon.

Though the circumstances surrounding the loss of someone so young to a “disease” so epidemic are rife for comment, I find no comfort or security in trying to look for understanding or reason where there is none. For now I just want to say I love you, miss you and will think of you often, my friend.

Ciao, bella!

EPA Creates Face Shooting Standard

2006-02-17T13:36:00.000-06:00

Washington D.C. - Spurred by a recent string of cases in which famous or powerful Americans in the upper 0.001% socioeconomic bracket have fired projectiles into the faces of other Americans (famous, powerful, or otherwise), the Environmental Protection Agency has been urged to set safety guidelines for similar future cases so Americans will know precisely how much being-shot-in-the-face is actually safe.

Among the details in the 746 page Countenance Impact Study (CIS) are levels of safe shot size at particular distances given the gauge of the shotgun in question, number of grains of powder per shell, and wind speed at the time of the occurrence. Surprisingly, most buckshot is still considered safe for the being-shot-in-the-face guidelines, as long as the formulas listed even out across all factors.

“Being shot in the face doesn’t have to be unsafe,” says EPA special studies expert Dr. Ralph Remmington. “Even twelve or ten gauge shot guns can have safe distances or powder combinations for being-shot-in-the-face occurrences. The last thing we want is for the public to feel at all threatened by these recent cases. Our very lengthy, detailed, and mathematically and scientifically sound data erases most if not all of the harms that were formerly assumed to accompany being-shot-in-the-face events.”

When asked about the high percentage of deaths among those affected by being-shot-in-the-face cases, Remmington remarked “Given our recent mathematical data, and the data we have been able to assemble through extrapolation from other cases when the very wealthy have shot into the faces of the populace, we have concluded that the deaths of those involved were not necessarily related to the being-shot-in-the-face case in question.”

Asked to remark further on this phenomenon, Remmington said “Other factors could have related to the demise of those shot-in-the-face individuals. For example, some have been shown to have severe heart ailments whose recurrence coincided, at random, with the being-shot-in-the-face event. In even more cases, we believe, the individuals in questions are likely to have suffered from a genetic being-shot-in-the-face condition that lies well outside the bounds of accountability by the shooter.” The EPA’s CIS elaborates on this point, using evidence from some of the nation’s foremost geneticists, stating that Americans have a nearly 100% genetic predisposition to harms resulting from being-shot-in-the-face cases. This alarming finding is no cause for concern, however, according to Remmington.

“Scientists and other people wearing white coats are working around the clock on applications for the now-mapped human genome. The multitude of research based on these findings, done primarily by the nations largest and most important corporations, include all manner of data linking any number of toxins, hazards, syndromes, and even being-shot-in-the-face cases to the internal workings of each of us, ridding our need to blame external sources for society’s problems in the future. It’s only a matter of time before we discover the being-shot-in-the-face gene.”

“It all lies within us,” Remmington concludes. “We must take responsibility for our own genes. Even if it requires us to be shot in the face by rich people without filing a frivolous lawsuit.”

Top Ten Cultural Lies

2006-02-15T05:00:00.000-06:00

10. Growth is good.
9. Globalization helps the poor.
8. Corporations and governments care about people.
7. Scientific progress is beneficial to living things.
6. A degree or diploma confers expertise or wisdom.
5. Money = wealth.
4. There are enough resources to endlessly supply our overconsumptive and wasteful lifestyles.
3. Consumption by the rich does not deprive the poor.
2. Cancer, heart disease, obesity, endocrine syndromes and neurological disorders (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Multiple Scleroisis, Autism, et al.) are genetically inherited.
1. There is a level at which toxins are OK for living things.

Dr Will and The Globalization World Tour - Stop #1

2006-02-07T00:46:00.000-06:00

Having liberated most of the developed world with his in-your-face, get-with-the-program therapy, Dr. Will decided to embark upon a quest to offer his unique brand of services to the rest of the globe. He figured that if the North could use his support, the poorer, more desperate South might respond to his aid even more. Dr. Will convinced himself that he was destined to reach all of those in need, considering how well-intended, well-received and well-off he had become in the past few years.

First stop: Honduras.

The setting for Dr. Will’s reception in this country was a newly constructed outdoor amphitheatre build from native old growth trees from the Amazon just for his visit. Nearly 3000 people turned out for this makeshift, self-help retreat, but the focus of today’s treatment was an 18 year old girl, Rosa, jailed for the past five years and recently released. Rosa’s mother was concerned about her past acts of delinquency and rebellion against the state, and worried about Rosa’s prospects for the future. Hopeful that Dr. Will might set her back upon the right track, Rosa too looked for answers from this guru and sat on a stool on the stage next to her mother and the good doctor, much like on Dr. Will’s widely popular television show.

“Now Rosa, let’s start with explaining to these people,” Will points to the audience, “just how it came about that you got yourself into jail.”

“Well, I was working at the Sean John factory in the maquiladora trying to help my mom pay for my little brother’s school. With my salary of 31 cents an hour, we had enough to afford rice and beans for breakfast and dinner, and still send Jorge to school, but we couldn’t afford water. Since the takeover of the water supply, water cost $12 a week, and that was nearly ¾ of my salary.”

Rosa continued, “I worked 15 hours a day, so by the time I got home at night, it was too late and too dangerous for me to venture down to the river on the other side of town to gather some buckets for our family’s needs. Besides, Juanita was telling me that everyone in town was getting sick from the river water, anyway. It flowed downstream of the Chiquita farm, and the planes come and spray that place nearly every week. Juanita’s brother was born without eyes, and they say it’s from the spray.”

“Rosa, it sounds like Juanita is a fairly negative young woman. You might want to try to get people like that out of your life.” Dr. Will advised.

“Juanita’s my bestest amiga!”

“We can talk about Juanita later, Rosa. Please continue with your story.”

“OK. So anyway, I put our buckets on the roof to collect rainwater so we could drink and clean. Two days later, they came and arrested me.”

“So they put you in jail for collecting the rainwater?” asked Dr. Will, to reiterate the point.

“Yes.”

“And who, by rights of state, owned that rainwater?”

“I don’t know. Bechtel or Vivendi or Coca-Cola or some other --.”

“So you admit that you were being a typical rebellious teen, stealing water that wasn’t your own, breaking the law and expecting to get away with it?”

“What? No ….”

“Rosa, girl! You just can’t do that! You just can’t decide what laws you will and will not obey. Don’t you understand that? With rule-breaking, there are consequences. You do understand this, don’t you?”

The crowd applauds.

“Well, yeah…”

“You don’t want to land in jail again, right?”

“No. But—”

“And you want to really be of help to your family now, right?”

“Yeah. But—”

“So let me tell you what I am gonna do for you, Rosa. I’m gonna set you up with Maria here. She’s a local water counselor here in Honduras. She’s an expert in the field of water preservation and did her PhD studies on water deprivation. She’s able to go for five days at a time with no water whatsoever! Would you be willing to accept Maria’s help?”

“I guess…”

Crowd applauds and cheers again.

“And I’m going to give you a free autographed copy of my new book, Will You Just Behave: Who Made You Think You Know What’s Best for You?”

The crowd whoops with approval. Another woman saved. Another country liberated.

Preying

2006-01-30T22:49:00.000-06:00

One of the few creatures we have found in New Zealand is the eel and his cousin, the lamprey. Over the course of my stay here, I’ve run into a practice unique to New Zealand that links the lamprey to human health. People who practice this sort of science, called Preying, use the lamprey to balance nutrients within human blood.

There are a number of blood tests that can be done to determine the optimal levels of all the amino acids and other nutrients needed for good human health (if anyone doubts that I need the Preying procedure, I’d be happy to provide the conclusive evidence born out in these tests). These are not simple blood tests that look for particular flags like in normal blood screening. Rather, these tests reduce the blood into its components. It isn’t at all difficult to determine what these components should be for a healthy person. From there, Preying strives to regulate blood, to remove excess nutrients and leave nutrients that are correctly balanced. In this way, the chemical balance of the blood can be regulated and maintained.

Who even knew that much of what ails us is due to a chemical imbalance of the blood!

Twice per week now, I am visiting the offices of my local Preyer. She has all the certificates and papers needed, so I trust her with my health completely. All I have to do is pay a low fee per visit, NZ$55, and she lays me down, takes her scientific blood tests that determine how healthy I am, and then she attaches one or more of these lampreys to various parts of my body, depending on the areas that produce or concentrate particular nutrients.

It isn’t always comfortable, like last week when she attached a particularly vicious-looking meter-long lamprey to my scrotum, but I think it’s well worth the pain, the cost, and the total abandonment of reason and common sense to provide me with the peace of mind that my health is being taken care of by someone else - anyone but me.

Toward Solutions

2006-01-30T02:14:00.000-06:00

Though most people are vaguely aware of the numerous ills that plague the global landscape – poverty, social unrest, disease, metal illness, ecological devastation, climate change – they often complain:

“I’m so tired of hearing about all of the problems. What can I do about them?”

I believe we cannot fully comprehend the severity and enormity of what troubles us without opening up our eyes and minds to grasp the full extent of our predicament. Each and every problem is wholly connected to the other, and to solve them, we need individual and collective systemic change, in behavior and paradigm. I also do not think people will be willing to sacrifice their superficial contentment and comfort without the full knowledge of why it so critical to do so. This blog is devoted to elucidating global truths about our lives and the life of the earth, however painful and negative those truths may seem to be. Writing about them will take volumes and fully comprehending them will take years of reading, learning, understanding, critical thinking, soul searching and surrender.

In any case, for those who want to cut to the chase, here’s a list of things each one of us can personally do to help ourselves, our health, those less powerful or economically wealthy, and the earth:

Reduce consumption, thereby reducing waste. When you must buy:
Buy products that are necessary and useful, and eliminate those that are of no value.

Buy as many of your products as possible from local producers/manufacturers. If you must buy imports, make sure they are fair trade.

Do not patronize large corporations. That includes buying products from them, or listening to/reading their biased/polarized media.

Buy only organic food as directly from the farm as possible.

Save energy whenever and wherever you can. This might include canceling long trips by air, using your car far less, using more energy efficient lighting or none at all, eliminating superfluous gadgets and turning off the TV.

Do not eat any processed foods. Check your labels. If there are ingredients that don’t look or sound like food, don’t ingest them.

Do not buy or use products made with synthetic chemicals.

Eat as close to a vegetarian diet as you possibly can and exercise regularly, if that only means taking a walk a few times a week. This will help ….

Prevent illness and eliminate your reliance on pharmaceuticals. Talk to your physician and learn about your own illness. You may not need medicine to help yourself heal. In most cases, your body is constructed to do that on its own.

Eliminate your ties to jobs that destroy people or the environment.

Get to know the other lives that share your community, not simply the human ones.

Read.

Remember, when all is said and done, you cannot eat or drink money.

This is only a partial list of first steps in helping to heal our lives and our planet. It is not easy to follow them all the time, but the more of us that do, the more society and businesses around us will change to reflect our wishes to have healthier and happier lives. And to protect the lives of the future.

To read more about why these changes are imperative, you may want to reference any one of the following:
Diet for a Dead Planet, Christopher D. Cook

Not on the Label, Felicity Lawrence

Globalization: Take it Personally, Anita Roddick

The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken

The Corporation, Joel Bakan

How We Can Save the Planet, Mayer Hillman

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartman

Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins

Monocultures of the Mind, Vandana Shiva

Welcome to the Machine, Derrick Jensen

Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky

The People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn

Civil Obedience

2006-01-25T03:36:00.000-06:00

Civil disobedience in not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.

Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience ...

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty.

Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty theives, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.

-- Howard Zinn
(Sometimes when you are at a loss for words, you ought to just defer to the master.)

Big Foot

2006-01-23T01:45:00.000-06:00

I feel I have a moral obligation to leave as little of a footprint on this earth as possible. Though I still use far too many energy sources for far too many gadgets, I have made a concerted effort to cut back over the past dozen years or more, and continually strive to do better. My personal commitment is far from perfect and far from over. This is the only way I can live with myself. I am not a fascist, socialist, communist, or idealist. I am a realist. Life on earth is struggling to survive (for billions of related reasons that can only be covered in many subsequent writings), and since it is quite likely that it’s lifespan may be shortening at a more alarming rate than any of us had imagined, the least I can do is help to extend it’s life expectancy.

To that end, I have only been in a motor vehicle once in the past month and a half. I have been spending all of my time on foot.

Walking is a fine way to get around when you can. Zero-emission, environmentally friendly. Free; no money spent on gasoline/petrol. Side benefits include free workout (saving money on gym memberships), and free psychotherapy (via long thoughts and communing with nature).

I did as much of this as I could when living in D.C. and LA. too, but because of the fewer number of and smaller cars here, New Zealand tends to be a more hospitable pedestrian environment. And being a pedestrian, I tend to be more hospitable to the environment.

The Conscientious Orc

2006-01-14T15:48:00.000-06:00

I’ve been reading about people like Ray Anderson, the carpet manufacturer who is trying to “climb Mt. Sustainability” by making carpets that reuse 100% of their materials, are tracked and reclaimed by the company at the end of the product’s life, are made with solar power rather than being plugged into the grid. The architect William McDonough specializes in making eco-friendly factories for businesses like The Gap and Ford so that the output from those factories produces fewer or no toxins (really?) in the design. He even creates scenarios where river water used by factories is pumped out at the “waste” end with even cleaner water than the river had originally.

Let’s put this in perspective, first of all. These guys are freaks. Regular businesses laugh and point at these guys. Immediate profits are everything to just about every company in the world, and this is even a legal mandate for a corporation, who (yes who, corporations are legal people, remember) cares nothing for you or me or any other creature on the planet.

But beyond the fringe nature of these guys, I can’t help but feel disturbed by what they are doing, because their idea is that we can still turn a profit and run a sustainable enterprise. In fact, as you might well imagine, without this pitch, neither The Gap nor Ford would ever agree to build eco-friendly factories at all, unless it were an isolated publicity stunt to enhance their corporate image (and I’m not convinced, yet, that this isn’t the case).

Can we really maintain a paradigm of economic growth and still be doing no harm in any sense? We need to think beyond being green, here. What about poverty? Should we still be able to horde 4000 pair of shoes in our closets like those idiot women in Sex in the City just because the soles are no longer made of PVC, and just because the factory didn’t pollute the water? Is it OK to remain rabid consumers, which is essential to the growth paradigm, when most of the world suffers as a result of our glut?

It’s just not enough.

An analogy with those evil Orcs from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings amuses me, and sort of makes it easier for me to understand why it feels wrong to be both green and profitable.

So there’s this medium-sized Orc, by the name of Grisly, who is a member of Sauron’s (the Dark Lord’s) army. He and his fellow marauders are currently dismembering Hobbits (you know, like cute little Frodo and Sam) in the Shire, stealing their moderate wealth, then torching the Hobbit’s tiny hovels before moving on to the next village.

One night, around the fire, Grisly confides to his friends that he believes it is wrong to dismember the Hobbits in so painful a way. His buddies point and laugh, slap him around a bit, but eventually they listen to what he has to say. They tell him he can go ahead and use a quick cut to the throat if he wishes, but that he shouldn’t deprive the rest of the band of the joy they receive from torture.

The next evening in the next Hobbit village, Grisly acts on his conscious, and he reduces the suffering of the poor Hobbits by slashing their throats quickly and efficiently. He even is able to sneak up on some of them and kill them before they know what is happening. It is his hope that this practice will spread to his fellow pillagers, but until such a time, he will just have to be content with his new, clean methods of extermination.

After a couple of weeks of this practice, however, a new thought nags at Grisly: Why are we pillaging at all? Yes, we need to ransack and murder for the Dark Lord, but is this the right thing to be doing? Are there not other pursuits besides filling Sauron’s coffers through murder that ought to be considered as primary occupations for one’s life?

“Nah,” says Grisly to himself. “It’s all I know how to do.”

To Shtup or be a Schmuck

2006-01-12T01:22:00.000-06:00

Look, I was no fan of Bill Clinton, but does it not seem absurd that he was impeached for having extra-marital sex while George W. Bush continually commits crimes against his own citizens and the rest of humanity and still rides high, no questions asked? African-Americans all throughout America know that the “justice” system is nothing of the sort, but how can anyone believe in the law after this charade?

I was appalled as I listened to the misogynist words of Samuel A. Alito at his Senate confirmation hearings. But beyond that, he was questioned as to whether he believed that the President was above the law. At which time it occurred to me, does it really matter what anyone believes with regard to this issue? Clearly, the President IS above the law, since he just committed a national crime against Americans’civil liberties. In addition, he has engaged in an illegal war which is violating UN international law and has committed war crimes both directly and indirectly with methods of interrogation and torture utilized at Guantanamo Bay and around the world. This man should be in jail (along with scores of other corporate and political criminals).

Years ago, when I lived in Washington D.C., I was called for jury duty. I was selected for a group that would be whittled down to what they hoped would comprise the actual jury. The judge asked us some general questions as a group, and told us to raise our hands if our response to any of the questions was negative. One question was, “If I told you that X was the law, would any of you have a problem following that?” I raised my hand. After lunch break, anyone who had raised their hand was individually questioned by the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney. The judge asked me again, “If I told you the law was A-B-C, then you might still see it as D-E-F?” I said that if “D-E-F” were just, then yes, I’d rather have true justice than superficial law. To which the judge looked at the lawyers, and said, “Gentlemen, I think we call that anarchy.” I smiled. Exactly.

When it’s Time to Change then it’s Time to Change

2006-01-08T02:37:00.000-06:00

As a teenager, just getting my footing in regards to socio-political issues, I considered myself a liberal Republican. My knowledge of history and current events was clouded by family tradition, education, and media. Not by an education or media with a dichotomous political bent, mind you. That dichotomy is immaterial compared to the singular world view that actually exists. My knowledge, as everyone’s in the western world, was biased toward a particular way of life: a way of life that is destroying the planet and all of its inhabitants, a way of life that is physically, psychologically, and emotionally fatal, a way of life that is usurping the globe.

I didn't have a single epiphany and suddenly discover I was a Democrat. I had a lifelong learning curve (still in progress) that has led me to understand that the only solution to our problems exists far outside the simple, contented duopoly we have created.

Our model for living is not sustainable for us as individuals and certainly not for future generations. In the words of Bill McDonough and Ray Anderson, it is

intergenerational tyranny, the worst form of remote tyranny, a kind of taxation without representation across the generations, levied by us on those yet unborn

Evidence to this truth exists in abundance. Though it may be negative or depressing, we ought to remove our rose-colored glasses, put away our superficial, insular self-help books, and use the dismal truth to heed the call to action. The reason that the Oprahs and Dr. Phils and gurus of the world, despite their tremendous wealth, power, and influence, have not effected positive lasting change on the planet is because they promote action within the comfortable confines of our current cultural paradigm. A little giving here and a little help there, while still separating the personal from the political and still maintaining a corporate-industrial lifestyle, will not save future generations from definite chaos.

The purpose of this blog is to exchange understandings of truths not always promoted by a corporate-controlled society with a certain financial agenda. We don’t have all of the answers, but we are constantly searching and uncovering more and more questions.

There are two things of note that I encountered this weekend:

In a cafe here in New Zealand, I happened upon a program that originated in the United States, BookCrossing.com. One’s read books are left in any public space, tagged and cataloged via this website, for other people to read and spread along again. Sort of like a global library. Sure, it takes away revenue from the author who might otherwise sell another book. But let’s face it; authors rarely make the money on their publications. The corporate publishing conglomerate reaps nearly all the profits while (under most circumstances) plundering and polluting the earth in the process of production. A free, anonymous exchange of published ideas and information seems a noble notion.

My neighbor/landlord loaned me a book that encompasses a variety of topics, with great research and resources, proclaiming, with more eloquence and consideration than what I write here, the oneness of all of our problems and solutions. I’ve only just begun reading the book, but would like to begin sharing it now, nonetheless:

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann.

It's time to change.

(Note: For now, computers and the Internet {i.e., this blog} enable a fast, free exchange of ideas and information, but that must change too. There should be a time when this technology is obsolete, not because it is replaced with a new model, but because despite some of the positive things it does, it is wreaking mental, social, and environmental havoc on the planet, especially on the poor.)

Bizarro Robin Hood

2006-01-05T01:14:00.000-06:00

The wealthy and the government are at it again, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. As if they don't already do that every year with a thing known as income taxes.

I won't go into the fact that every single human in every industrialized nation, including you and I, owes all that we have to the detriment of others around the world. Yes, we are all guilty by virtue of our collusion with the system (and all of its components) in which we choose to live. But I will have to go into that further at another time with more proof, since it takes mounds of evidence for us all to face clear and common sense facts. We are not absolved because we donate to charity.

Ours is a world where the rich are quenched by the sweat of the poor, confined to slave labor, jail, or death.

Maybe we should start reading to our kids from the Book of Bizarro Fairy Tales, beginning with a story of Bizarro Robin Hood. Perhaps that might prepare them for the real world.

What Impudence!

2006-01-04T15:16:00.000-06:00

Can you believe the audacity of this guy?

Quick! Someone alert Homeland Security!

Energy Free Energy

2006-01-02T03:13:00.000-06:00

For those of you in the Midwest and Northern part of America, it is already promising to be a frigid winter. With the rising costs of energy this year due to natural disasters (and, of course, gouging) you might be looking for ways to save. I don't blame you. And your government is certainly not going to help you. If not for Venezuela, the low-income populations in many major cities would probably be falling in droves due to frostbite. Here's one thing we do:

We have a wee washing machine in our wee cottage but not a dryer. Considering that we need to do a wash about every other day, and considering that it has been rainy here for the past week, it has been pretty crowded while the clothes dry on a rack in the house. However, the other day the sun came back out, and we rushed to do all of our laundry. Hanging clothes out on the line is really common here, but the practice seems to be fading in America. We hung stuff out in the morning sun, and our clothes were nearly dry in about 15 minutes. It's amazing! What a tremendous energy source! Why in the hell are we not universally harnessing this free, clean, seemingly endless supply of energy? Enron? GE? Con Ed? Unocal? BP? ExxonMobil? What say you? “Shh. No $$$$S.” (Oh, I forgot.)

Another Externality, better known as Daughter, Sister, Wife, and Friend

2005-12-29T17:46:00.000-06:00

On Christmas night a 31 year old woman died of cancer. I knew her. I hadn’t seen her in at least 15 years, but she was my neighbor growing up. I was a couple of years older than her and didn’t attend the same school, but we saw each other often in our condominium complex and played together sometimes, as did all the kids growing up in our little community microcosm. I remember her even as a child being a bright, intelligent girl and talented actor. By all accounts, she remained much the same as an adult. She should still be here, finishing off at least another half a century on the planet. Instead, she has become another corporate externality.

How does a woman who only spent three decades on earth become ravaged with terminal cancer? Just a stroke of bad luck, a curse from the heavens, faulty inherited genes? Those seem the only explanations we even venture to suggest, if we even seek explanations at all. Aren’t they simple, easy, convenient? And TOTAL B.S.!

In the past few years, cancer has touched upon my life a number of times. My father was diagnosed and treated, my dear friend has been battling it for far too long, another former neighbor recently underwent surgery and her first round of chemotherapy. CS lost his uncle to cancer at the age of 57. This “disease” is an epidemic! These people do not represent cases of inheritance or misfortune; they are victims of toxic, carcinogenic living conditions that we chose to ignore and expect, and of corporate irresponsibility and neglect. We should be holding those responsible accountable for what they have done to our lives and our planet, and trying to reverse and eliminate their effects. Instead, we seek panaceas and buy silastic bracelets. We need a change of paradigm in the case of cancer.

Since the industrial revolution and the introduction of synthetic chemicals in the early 1900’s, cancer rates simply SOARED. Though some naturally occurring chemicals are known carcinogens, synthetic chemicals bombarded our bodies with mutagenic agents that our cells did not recognize. Pesticides, herbicides, cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, detergents, cleansing agents, plastics. Most of the products that we use without question every day contain at least minimal traces of carcinogens. The particulates in our air from industry and especially automobiles do immeasurable damage as they pass through our cell membranes into our nuclei, where they are able to affect our DNA. Our water is replete with fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture as well as from manufacturing. Carcinogens like perchlorate (from the offense industry) and chromium 6, not to mention mercury have seeped into nearly every waterway in the country. There even exists great evidence that microwave ovens and cell phones promote tumor growth. Due to our constant exposure over the past 5 or 6 decades, we carry many of these chemicals, in absurdly dangerous levels, right in our bloodstreams. Couple all that with the fact that our diets have diminished amounts of nutrients due to our reliance on overly processed food products and beverages, and we have little chance to combat the assault. Our own immune system cannot function in its normal capacity to rid our bodies of cancer cells before they grow into a tumor and metastasize. Every second of our lives we receive an onslaught from all directions of known cancer causing agents, so we will likely have an extremely difficult time linking cause and effect to just one of these many chemicals we encounter daily in our particular environment.

Despite all of this evidence, some scientists still insist, and the rest of us gladly believe, that cancer is hereditary. First of all, even if cancer can be linked to supposed faulty genes, it is highly probable that these genes were originally intact, then became yet another byproduct of mutagenic agents in the environment. In addition, the supposed “cancer genes” that have been discovered only occur in a minimal percentage of people who contract the cancer. Of the women who have breast cancer, 95% of them DO NOT have the supposed breast cancer genes. This being the case, it seems absurd to focus on that connection at all. The reason for the great attention to genes and heredity is to enable multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies to capitalize on genetic counseling and gene therapy (a dubious venture). And by spotlighting cancer medicine rather than cancer prevention, corporations evade blame and exponentially win. They do not face any consequences for providing the lethal environments that promote human cancers, and they profit from the expensive, often highly painful therapies (ALL of which are cancer-causing themselves)!

Certainly, anyone who has unfortunately contracted cancer needs help and hope to fight it. However, our best bet on battling cancer may be in elimination rather than addition. In lieu of barraging our bodies with treatments that WEAKEN our immune system and potentially cause cancer themselves, we should focus on STRENGHTENING our immune system. Eliminating all superfluous non-nutritious foods and as many products with synthetic chemicals as possible is a good start for both cancer prevention and reversal. In fact, elimination of all food via a water fast can be a great therapy in which your body utilizes its own resources to expel toxins.

That a life is cut short at the age of 31 is horrendous beyond comprehension. That many corporations actually benefit (over and over again) by the deaths of those we love is unfathomable! We need to address cancer as the avoidable, preventable, environmentally induced syndrome that it is. We need to hold companies responsible for their products. We must stop letting a person we know become another corporate externality when those that loved her will miss her forever as a daughter, sister, wife, and friend.

This is a POSITIVE Post

2005-12-28T17:21:00.000-06:00

No need to cover the begonias in Hell. We’re still curmudgeons, so we’ll likely find things to complain about, but yes, something non-awful happened to us, even rather anti-discouraging.

As we’ve observed before, there are plenty of things down here that have been disappointing. Nature is all owned, whether it is for grazing, tree farms, or just to cordon off animals and slap a price tag on them. We had imagined a lot of virgin territory ripe with native bush, but those corners are far rarer than we had hoped. The teacher shortage is mythical, it seems, so CS still has no employment, though brands have been thrust to flame. The Kate Sheppard precedent hasn’t kept women from being oppressed by knuckleheads. We even witnessed domestic abuse as we were strolling through a wee neighborhood in Kaikoura. (A woman staggered past us with a bloody face and she said “I just got kicked out of me home. No worries.” Later the police showed up.)

HOWEVER, yes, one thing that has proved to be very true, indeed, is that we have encountered such friendly, laid-back, helpful, even ETHICAL people. This is a definite improvement over life in the U.S. Friends and family back home, upon hearing this, seem a little defensive, saying that people in _____ (their city) are nice like that, too, and that Los Angeles was just a ghastly, dreadful place, and that we are simply reacting to THAT hellhole. OK, well, the L.A. part is quite true. It certainly is a parody of a cesspool, a paragon of misbehavior, no argument. But still, we’ve never seen any people cut through bureaucracy and make us feel welcome like the people here. Sure, nice people exist in the States, but would a stranger in a money-making situation in the U.S. give up that opportunity just to be a good person? Watch it. Your nose will grow if you say yes to that.

We’ve been processing all kinds of paperwork down here in Kiwiland. In an effort to send off CS’s Teacher Registration, so he can legally obtain employment (this is separate from credential verification and any immigration processes) he had to put together nineteen documents and have them all certified before sending them off to the head office in Wellington.

K gathered information on notaries, all of them law offices, and CS called them. Most were on holiday till 4 January, 2006, but one office was open with their notary on hand. The receptionist (a woman, of course, just like in every other country—that’s the sound of Kate Sheppard sighing in her grave) connected CS directly with the notary, Mr. Nolan. He said that the notary service costs forty-five dollars per page, but that he is used to processing just a page or two for people. He offered to do the lot for a hundred bucks. This is about what it would cost in the States. Things, generally, aren’t cheaper here than in the States (except salaries), and some things, like furniture, are maw-gapingly expensive. (We saw a cheaply made office chair yesterday for $800 dollars. I’m still grappling with that one.)

So we made the appointment with Mr. Nolan for 2:30 that same day (you heard right) and we collated and copied documents at the library, then walked downtown. Mr. Nolan said his office was a block and half from the cathedral in the center of Christchurch—a beautiful structure, but you have to pay to step foot inside—and that it was on the Avon River, which snakes elegantly through town. Since the address indicated that it exists on the ninth floor of a building, we proceeded to the only possible candidate.

Once there, we were sent right in. Mr. Nolan, looked at the instruction that the Teacher’s Council had given me (they wanted every page to say a particular thing—a tedious lot, the Teacher’s Council) and then Mr. Nolan said:

“Well, it says here you can use a notary, but that you can also use a solicitor. I can do that for free.”

I sort of panicked then. Kind of like what a person does when an alien with twelve tentacles, seven eyes, and seventeen testicles appears in front of him and asks to be led to Bill Gates. All I thought to say was “Why would you want to do something like that?” I’m not sure if that was a rude comment, or just kind of silly, but I simply couldn’t fathom any lawyer anywhere saying to me, in his own office on a work day, that they would do something, anything, for free.

“Well,” he replied, “the holiday spirit and all that, you know?” He just smiled then and looked through my papers, saw that they were in order, then popped out to process them. He came back five minutes later with that correct wording printed on the back of each page of the copies, then he signed each page in front of us. He handed me the packet, shook my hand, and sent me on my way. All of it free of charge. Not a bloody cent, mate!

I’m still not elated about this. I’m too busy being bewildered for that. Our neighbor and landlady, Jodie, had us over for some fresh juice and a couple of hands of cards last night (we rather enjoy her and her boyfriend, Barry) and when I told her this story, she said “Well, some lawyers will give you the first service for free so you come back.” Then Barry quipped “So then, next time, you can go to the next law office and get their free service,” as a rebuttal, I think.

I still don’t know what the explanation is for why the solicitor did that work for free, but it is a pattern here in NZ. You folks in the States may live in a beautiful, albeit polluted, place with frogs and bats and an abundance of wild bunnies (we miss wildlife SO MUCH) but I challenge any American to find a lawyer that will work for free, or an immigration officer that will resurrect your paperwork from the dead, or a landlady that will allow you to pay your rent a week late as you scramble to get money wired, and then have you over for potluck and cards. No, it’s a pattern. It’s different here.

Other stuff still bugs us, though.

Merry Christmas!!

2005-12-23T21:03:00.000-06:00

Here’s to you and yours on this day of gluttony and excess! May the bows and packaging of blatant consumerism be reflected in our landfills for generations to come as we blindly celebrate in a tradition created for us by all the corporate entities that make America and all other “first” nations the plunderers that we are! May our laughter and cheer drown out all the cries of suffering around the world induced by our outrageously affluent lifestyles! Let the “third” world feel the digging of our heels into their backs as we buy cheap goods made possible by such practices as child labor, slave labor, and sweatshops around the world set up by the likes of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, JC Penney, The Gap, and many other of our favorite stores! Rejoice! For Jesus Christ would have wanted it that way! For certainly he was being ironic when he said such things as “The meek shall inherit the Earth” and “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than it is for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven!”

And here’s to a wonderful new year, one rife with the drudgery of the workplace that we chain ourselves to, despising every instant, just so we can gain enough purchasing power to buy the latest gizmo we are convinced we need, adding yet another created want to the heap, creating more waste, demanding more of our time, and consuming all our energies so we are totally unable to enter or maintain enduring relationships with our loved ones! Way to go, America! Your lifestyle stands out as a shining standard that all nations on Earth wish to emulate, ensuring the mutual and utter devastation of the planet due to air pollution, ground pollution, water pollution, destruction of natural resources, and the obliteration of all living systems on the planet! Keep up that denial and self-absorbed attitude! You will need that, since the worst is yet to come! God bless America!

Tree Hugging

2005-12-23T00:59:00.000-06:00

Ah, Christmas. The time of year when we decapitate a member of one of five kingdoms of life on earth to put it in our house though it belongs outside. (Unfortunately, I have been guilty of such slaughter in the past.) Such good common sense we have. And such a respect for nature/God/_____ (take your pick or insert your own). Well, New Zealanders follow this common practice too, and they may have an even easier time doing so.

Guess what is one of the most common farms found in New Zealand? It is not one that raises livestock or grows crops. It is a tree farm.

From the moment we began driving around the country, we discovered patches of mountain with evenly spread trees of identical species at identical heights of growth. Then we discovered clearcut patches of these same mountains. Then we saw these words: Tree Farm.

Apparently, New Zealand sets aside acres upon acres of land to farm pine trees. These are not trees for use at Christmas, but trees grown for the ever increasing WANT of new timber. The land utilized is old pasture that is extremely fertile, so it grows these trees at a rate nearly double that in the U.S. or Canada. And guess whose timber companies have set up shop here?

Though the prospect of growing trees to farm is a slightly more sustainable notion than clearcutting the old growth forests that millions of species make their habitat and call home, there are still vital ecological health concerns. There is the major problem of erosion, which among other things, ends in polluting lakes and rivers with the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides used in the soil. More ills include blight due to overpopulation with a single species, ecosystem disruption and dissolution, and just plain exploitation of natural resources. Not to mention a clearcut mountain is a sore sight to see. I think we humans often forget that when something looks all wrong and feels all wrong that is usually because it is all wrong. We do have instincts, though we rarely use them.

Strike Out

2005-12-22T01:14:00.000-06:00

I’m still sore about all of the “news” spewing from the mouths of the rich and powerful about the NY transit strike. For a multimillionaire financier to call low wage workers “selfish” or “thugish” is horrendous. Wonder how he made his bucks.

It is a well known fact that the disparity between rich and poor is ever increasing in America. The wealthiest people in America have more and more control, more and more money, and pay fewer and fewer taxes. Mayor Bloomberg has some nerve complaining about people who want a decent living for themselves and their family. People are biting themselves in the arse by not supporting strikers. Some people on the street are complaining that the transit workers should just “take what they can get” because they have it better than a lot of others. That’s not the point. No one should be relegated to take only the minimum of their worth. That’s precisely why everyone is struggling so much except the wealthiest 10 ro 20% of the country.

The argument that the transit strikers are being selfish and flippant in their decision to go forward with the strike just does not ring true. The Los Angeles Unified School District has given its teachers a 3% pay increase in the last three years. This does not even come close to reflecting inflation rates in Los Angeles, one of the cities in America with the highest cost of living. LAUSD has also been threatening to chip away at health and other benefits now enjoyed by its staff. Over and over again this particular school district violates teachers’ rights and the teachers’ union makes more and more concessions, yet the teachers refuse to strike. When the topic is brought up, teachers always worry about the practicality of not having their income, etc. This despite the fact that teachers pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a year to pay for basic necessities for their classrooms not provided by the schools.

Strikes are NOT entered into lightly. Most people DO NOT want to strike, and fear for their financial safety and security when doing so. Strikers are brave people who are fighting for not only their own rights but the rights of fellow workers in all segments of society. Calling them selfish is a spurious comment.

If I didn’t make it clear before, this strike, as all strikes, is going to set precedents for all workers in America. Strikes are SUPPOSED to inconvenience people. They are SUPPOSED to make things difficult. That is how people realize the importance of the strikers and their work. The more that the less powerful concede to those in power (such as choosing Kerry as the lesser of two evil politicians rather than choosing a non-partisan selfless hero who’d actually help people), the fewer rights and privileges we are all going to have. Some democracy.

Strike Three

2005-12-21T03:51:00.000-06:00

Since arriving in New Zealand nearly two months ago, I have witnessed two service worker strikes, and soon to be a third. In the first, KFC workers were demanding fair and equal wages for all employees. Apparently, in New Zealand, there exists a practice of paying teenagers less than their adult counterparts for the same union job. I guess the employer takes it upon himself to determine who needs more money and why, and finds a way to curb even more spending that way by reducing already low wages for those he sees as the need-nots. I suppose that is better than in America, where most fast food employees are neither in unions nor teenagers making extra spending cash, but underprivileged people looking for simple livelihood. Or even overqualified, more privileged people who have run out of alternatives to make a living other than in the service sector. There is no way to do this working at McDonald’s or Starbucks. Regardless, just as with the worst transgressor, Wal-Mart, union upstarts are being squelched before any seeds can even be planted in America. Here in New Zealand, unions are more powerful and people seem to be allowed to fight for their right to work their asses off at an unglamorous, inglorious, unwanted job and at least be out of poverty. Thus followed the world’s first Starbuck’s strike in Auckland in November.

There also exists an ethical consciousness among workers in New Zealand. Far from the “it’s just business” attitude that leads neighbors to constantly screw each other in America, New Zealanders seem to give a damn. Here, we are on the eve of a strike of national workers at a bank called Wetspac. Their complaint? Pressure to lend money to people who already have huge debts. Tellers say that their pay is reduced if they do not meet targets to sell credit, so they are forced to try to convince customers to borrow as much as possible. The workers call it an ethical dilemma. Regardless of whether or not these workers are simply utilizing the fact of this commission-based practice as an excuse to receive fair wages, when are ethics ever brought up in American business discourse? I don’t even think union workers in America could come up with the “ethical dilemma” excuse if they wanted to, because those kinds of dilemmas rarely cross the mind of the average American worker (or employer). (Those brave corporate whistleblowers notwithstanding.) I look forward to following this story.

In the meantime, I hear news of the transit strike in New York. Far from the “liberal media” showing bias toward the unheralded working class, or worrying about the increasing loss of health care and retirement packages by most working Americans, the slant in the news from the AP is that the workers are inconveniencing the transit riders and Christmas tourists. And the transit union is being fined a million dollars a day for standing up for their rights to be treated as productive members of society (and more necessary members than most of the people doing all of the complaining and earning all of the money)? So, now it is illegal for workers to strike? And America is not fast becoming a fascist regime? This totalitarian style of U.S. capitalist control, which is clearly seeping into public organizations, since corporations own the government, is not unlike Soviet style communism. That worked well for the people, huh? Frankly, it’s appalling to see. I think of my grandfather who worked for years as a union electrician in New York City. He loved his union and he loved the opportunities he was afforded in America. Sorry Poppop, those days are no more.

Health Authority

2005-12-19T19:31:00.000-06:00

As part of my application for residency in New Zealand, I am required to have a physician examine my pee (among other things), have a chest X-ray to ensure that I contract cancer within my lifetime due to unnecessary exposure to X-rays, and have a battery of blood tests, all of which cost many hundreds of dollars. (Hooray! The economy is growing! The economy is growing!)

I hate doing these tests for many reasons, the most important of which is this: health authorities tell us nothing about our health except for the things they look for.

Sounds stupid, I know. When I think about that statement, though, so many things strike me about

• How we place our trust in authorities of all kinds rather than in our own, presumably good, judgment
• How arbitrary the criteria is for determining our health
• How the sway of popular paradigms in our culture affects that criteria
• The anti-critical thinking that makes up our medical establishment
• And of course the corporate influences of medicine.

As for the first of these things, so many times my points have been rebutted with “Well, how do you know? You’re not a ______ (fill in blank with authority of your choosing).” In our present culture, logic, research, and experience are meaningless unless a particular title or certificate or degree or secret tattoo is affixed to us by an external agency. We have handed over all knowledge to authority, and therefore we have handed over all knowledge to those who grant authority, for authorities can be controlled. The powers that be, and these are corporate powers, make no mistake, control how plaudits of whatever variety are distributed because they control what hoops are jumped through in order to gain a particular credential, such as M.D.

Our judgment may be fine, by the way. We’re just so used to being fed answers by “experts” that we no longer exercise our own judgment unless it has to do with comparison shopping, which is a process that requires us to choose between a narrow variety of predetermined choices.

The criteria for determining my well-being in this exam ignored the most important aspects of my health. They asked me if I have ever smoked or if I drank alcohol, since these are huge issues in mainstream culture, but they didn’t ask one thing about my diet or even about my exercise regimen. I am a vegetarian. I don’t own a car, so I walk everywhere, many miles more per week than the average person. But what was used to determine my physical condition? Blood pressure, which was high for me since I have been stressed. A chest X-ray, which—what the hell is that supposed to show, anyway? That I have organs? “Well, Mr. Pleb, you seem to have a skeletal structure. You don’t know how relieved we are to have discovered this fact.”

Yes, blood and urine tests can reveal important things. And I want to know if I have cancer, since one in two men, and one in three women will contract it in their lifetimes. But I don’t want to be forced to start chemo therapy or radiation or some other harmful remedy that just happens to make drug companies billions of dollars every year. Some options, like surgery, might be appropriate in some cases, but I still don’t like the idea of turning over my health and my reason to health authorities, who are taught by the powers that be to deal with ailments in a very narrow way, usually with pharmaceuticals developed in a hurry by greedy drug companies like Pfizer. I would rather exercise my own judgment and determine for myself how to help my body heal itself.

Daily Annoyances, Hassles, and Obstacles or It's Always Something

2005-12-19T02:30:00.000-06:00

Perhaps this differs in different regions in the U.S., but does it not seem that every day serves you up another battle, whether at work, at home, with your car, house, boss, appliance, or with a government entity or corporate one? I’m not speaking of profoundly serious difficulties that warrant deep concern. I may be lucky enough to have never yet had to face any problems that grave, and for that I am grateful. I just recall nearly every day in America being plagued with at least one obstacle, and just when that one was conquered, yet another was there to take its place. Now, granted, overcoming challenges definitely does make you stronger and builds character, but being chronically plagued with them, especially when they are totally unnecessary, unwarranted, or in the global scheme, unimportant, just makes you angry. And frustrated. And it makes daily life quite a stress. Could it be that our anxieties and depressions are at least partially culturally and circumstantially induced rather than a curse of bad genetics and bad (innate) chemical levels? Could it be that the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical industry just exploits and perpetuates our general societal malaise? (Those thoughts not to be confused with a certain celebrity’s Scientology tirade, but mere observations about the oversimplification of cause and effect of socially as well as medically and psychologically complex maladies.)

New Zealand has been amazing in that people here generally do not focus on meaningless details. They tend to let things slide. No proof of address or phone number when applying for a bank account? No problem, we’ll open one anyway. No residency when applying for a library card? No problem, we’ll give you one regardless. No available New Zealand currency for your deposit on your home? Just get it to me when you can. Need a medical exam? Come right over. You’ll be treated promptly (and at a fraction of the cost you expect, even without insurance). Nor do they seem to promote antisocial behavior like “looking out for number one” (and only number one.) They call you back when they say they will. They treat you like they care, without insincerity. And when you are treated that way, you care more about treating other people that way in return. When you are constantly being cheated or shat upon, you feel like you want retribution or justice and need to stick up for yourself and your rights. You do not trust. I felt like that all the time in America. I have only felt that once here thus far (with our rental car). Here, they actually have laws against what is deemed “Dishonesty.” And their car commercials aren’t about “Zoom, zoom, zoom!” or conquering the planet by force. The Toyota ad here promotes “Everyday people.”

In any event, if you might be feeling the stress of it all, here's a little something funny to check out:

Demotivators

Welcome

2005-12-16T19:55:00.001-06:00

We're working on our initial posts. More to come soon.