Which America Do You Live In?
It’s a little confusing.
A story about China’s industrial development in the January-February 2008 issue of Mother Jones reports it has already passed the U.S. as the leading producer of greenhouse gases and is on the brink of ecological disaster.
The statistics are frightening, if impressive. China is first in the world in production of coal, steel, cement and 10 kinds of metal. It leads the world in coal consumption - using more than the next three highest-ranked nations - the U.S., Russia and India - combined. And by 2015, it may produce the most cars.
Compare this with a story in the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer about local kids asking motorists to turn off their cars when they’re waiting to pick up a child, make a bank deposit, or buy a hamburger. They’re even suggesting that we turn off our cars at red lights. The idea is that idling adds to pollution, and to save the planet, we need to be more conscientious.
The Chinese have deforested their country; a fourth of it is desert. Acid rain falls on a third of China’s landmass. Excessive use of groundwater has caused land to sink in at least 96 Chinese cities. Of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, 16 are Chinese. I’ve read that about one-quarter of the pollution in Los Angeles comes from China.
There’s an old joke that asks what would happen if every Chinese person jumped up and down at the same time. Would it cause an earthquake? Taken metaphorically and environmentally, the answer is clearly yes. And let’s not forget the multitudes in India also trying to create an American-style life. According to some experts, we’d need several more Earths to satisfy this strain on resources.
Considering the massive pollution and environmental destruction going on, I sometimes think that everyone in Vermont could run a Hummer without it having a noticeable effect on the environment.
Look at money. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, under the headline “Visa IPO Banks on End of Cash,” that the huge credit card company, currently a cooperative owned by 13,000 financial institutions, plans to take its shares public in March in order to take advantage of the coming “cashless society.” (Think of those television commercials where city life merrily buzzes along as happy people swipe cards to get their upscale coffee and groceries, and then the whole thing jams up and crashes because some guy wants to pay with cash or a check. How dare that guy!)
A cashless society? Maybe, if you’re lucky enough to have a paycheck. With the dollar falling, Euros at $1.48, gold at $944 (it’s a sure sign the economy is tanking when people start putting their money into gold), we may be a moneyless society instead of a cashless one sometime soon. Can you say “Depression?”
Gasoline prices are rising; they won’t be going down any time soon. There’s an oil surtax on everything we buy caused by additional shipping expenses. Our entire economy runs on oil, and we’re competing for it with stronger economies such as Japan, China and India. They have farsightedly spent the last seven years running around the world securing new resources and establishing supply lines that will last them well into the future. Us? We’ve been trying to take our oil by force and draining our treasury in the process.
At a Barak Obama rally in Putney last week, his foreign policy advisor, Anthony Lake, said that an Obama presidency would help “America once again lead the world.”
O, Tony, that ship has passed, passed, passed. Thanks to GATT, NAFTA, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and torture, we’ve done what I used to think was impossible - we’ve turned America into a third-world nation. Obama might be able to clean up some of the mess, but we won’t be leading the world any time soon.
Yet here in Vermont, we’ve accepted the idea of peak oil. We talk about running our cars on fry grease, heating with wood, and, in general, doing the back-to-the-land thing, 2.0-style.
We talk about starting a barter economy and creating local “dollars” to trade for goods and services. We talk about growing our own vegetables, buying local foods and turning ourselves from omnivores into localvores. We talk about using rags for tampons and diapers. We talk about learning to be self-reliant and curbing our consumerism.
It’s like living in a different America. Outside, people are pretending the economy is chugging along, while we’re preparing ourselves to live after a fall which most Americans don’t believe is coming.
Some see the post-oil folks as the equivalent of one of those doomsday cults who stock canned food and diesel generators in their bomb shelters.
But we’re really more of a throwback to America during World War II, when people grew truck gardens and accepted rationing on butter, chocolate, textiles and rubber. In the Fifties, many people tried to continue their back-to-the-land natural lifestyles. The Sixties brought the hippies and radicals to Vermont, and the back-to-the-land ethos never completely disappeared.
America may be marching on to a brave new economic future. If so, the worst that can happen to us in Vermont is that we continue to eat our fresh, organically grown fruits and vegetables, smoke our locally-slaughtered meats and enjoy living our simpler lives.
The rest of the country might find out that the true cult is Imperial America, and things will get ugly when it falls apart. They may find themselves drinking cyanid-laced Kool-Aid, or committing mass suicide because the comet that was supposed to pick them up never arrived.
A collection of Joyce Marcel’s columns, “A Thousand Words or Less,” is available through joycemarcel.com. And write her at joycemarcel@yahoo.com.
Sounds like an advertisement to move to Vermont.
Vermont’s not alone in this, many of us in Texas are doing much the same thing. Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. If there is a difference between the two locations it is that because of the huge population difference, Texans are inclined to “Country Bunker” at remote locations and armed to the teeth in preperation for the inevitable break down in civil society that follows a crash of the significance this economy could bring.
Before we decide that global warming is the Chinese’s responsibility and we can give up the fight, it might be worth recording some other figures, these from the latest issue of Yes! Magazine: Chinese cars now average 37 mpg — the latest “breakthrough” environmental legislation in this country would have us reach 35 mpg by 2020. China spent $10 billion on clean energy in 2007, twice that invested by the U.S., and is on track to reach a target of 15 percent renewable energy by 2020 and 30 percent by 2050 — not enough, of course, but way ahead of US. Finally, China is already the world leader in solar hot water and small hydropower technology and may be well ahead of us in solar electric and windpower in the next three years.
No, we can no longer lead the world; but we could at least aspire to follow.
So because other countries want to imitate traditional Americana, I should go out and buy a hummer? I don’t follow the logic. That’s like justifying looting the neighborhood store, because if 40 people are doing it, who’s going to notice the 41st? How about INSTEAD, we change the “America” that 3rd world is trying to imitate and continue to keep on keeping on in the green movement?
Hm, I found the blaming of GATT and NAFTA rather revealing. Do you really think your Quebecois neighbours to the north are the people who are breaking your economy’s back? I’ve got some news for you… it’s the collective decisions taken by the US nation over the last decade that is beginning to break ours here in Canada. While we were smart and straightened out our finances, your country quite consciously decided to drive yours into the toilet, both at an individual and governmental level, which is now resulting in massive job losses up here in Canada’s industrial heartland, as well as in our forestry industry, as you’ve decided to protect the much less efficient US forestry industry over the Canadian one. Furthermore, the big lesson that Rest of the World has taken from the subprime mortgage mess and CDO poison pills… is that your various rating agencies are not to be trusted to tell the truth about the various investments that they are rating. That can only be described as a massive loss of confidence in the viability of the US markets as a place to invest, and you are only beginning to see the fallout from that.
Here’s some free sloganeering you folks can use against the republicans, which is 100% effective because it’s 100% true; let them rant about ‘tax and spend democrats’, for they are ‘borrow and spend republicans’. Which one makes more long term sense for the life of your country and your descendents?
All you need to do to confirm the inevitability of the coming US financial crash is to have paid attention to the actions of the Federal Reserve during the past six months.
Ben Bernanke has institutionalized the regressive economic strategy that Alan Greenspan perfected. Had Bernanke held interest rates and the money supply steady, the value of the dollar would not be in free fall, inflation would have slowed, and a “correction” in the financial markets would have occurred that probably would have impacted the US economy for a year or two. Bernanke chose to pander to the financial industry by lowering interest rates and printing money as fast as the presses could roll.
The above strategy is already resulting in the weakest US dollar in history and worse inflation than we saw in the 1970s. These symptoms are just the beginning of a “financial crisis” that will last more than a year or two.
Thank you Jake123 for a great exterior(though justifiably biased) view of our problems.
andersdl- you left out the fact that earlier this week, Greenspan advised the Emirate finance ministers to switch from $US base to a local currency to avoid upcoming rampant inflation .
I’m bored, so I thought I’d take a stab at this OpEd. I had a whole list of things about how this OpEd, to me, was incoherent or silly.
Then Paul Revere road in.
This sounds like an advertisment for Vermont.
Dear Common Dreams, maybe this OpEd should not have been reprinted here, but left with the good people of Vermont.
Well, something that a lot of US people don’t get in the fog of the demagogues ranting about “greater canuckistan” is that in the final analysis, we are your best friends in the world, despite the grousing that comes out of here sometimes, and everyone here knows that; we are the people most like you, we do a tremendous amount of business with you, and we are your number one energy supplier as well as providing many other goods and resources that help keep both our economies going well. It has been breaking my heart watching what has happened to your country in the wake of 9/11; imho, a long string of bad interpretations leading to disastrous decisions about the proper response to what happened then.
The common thread up here about what has been going on is one better than the senior Bush’s invocation of voodoo economics; it’s looter economics, with the friends of the junta making out like bandits on the backs of the Iraqi people and the US taxpayer. Overall, actually, the US taxpayer is getting off relatively easy; for the most part, you’re just giving them your money, while app. a million Iraqi have given their homes, communities, families, and lives, often under tortuous circumstances, to give them the excuse to raid your pockets.
Those of us that pay attention are also deeply deeply troubled by the very dangerous and widespread erosion of your civil liberties that has been going on, and the recent moves by the Conservative government up here to start doing some of the same.
It’s not just the finances… you’ve become a nation of torturers, of secret courts and prisons, and denying people the chance to face their accusers in an open court so that justice can both be done and be seen to be done. The list of bad news is tremendous, and it will take a long and sustained effort on the part of the US to undo the damage that has been done to your national reputation.
To be 100% honest with you folks, one of the things I’m worried about is what’s going to happen when the US citizenry realises how badly they’ve been screwed by their elites. To have watched the US squander the global solidarity in the wake of 9/11 so badly to a point where fear and distrust are the norm among the western nations, let alone third world and the in the middle east, has been very saddening and worrying.
As far as the coming crash is concerned, we’ve been worrying for no reason. Just heard on the news - according the President Bush, we aren’t in a recession.
Ironic how people in China and India are pursuing the American way of life at the same time it’s been unraveling here. I say if they want a future full of environmental disaster, economy-strangling militarism and soul-crushing financial debt, hey, go for it.
As Marcel says, “Outside, people are pretending the economy is chugging along…” Bernanke yesterday said we were already in a recession and Bush says today that we “are not recession-bound.” Well, maybe Bush really means we’re not recession-bound because we’re already in it, but I don’t think for one minute he’s smart enough for that subterfuge!Alas, we saw the handwriting on the wall quite some time ago. We don’t own a house, but fortunately our landlord has owned our house since 1953, so he’s not going to take a hit in the foreclosure nightmare and we can continue living in the little home we have lived in for 25 years. We drive a 16 year old Toyota less than fifty miles a month and mostly use public transportation. We have no credit card debt. Credit card debt is going to be the next sub-prime-like catastrophe. Of course, no debt also means we don’t have a lot of “things” that many Americans consider must-haves, even though they can’t afford them. We grow a garden, recycle and compost, we’re vegetarian locavores and we make no judgments about how anyone else chooses to live. I am a high school teacher, my husband is a retired teacher. We like our simplicity and we hope we have made every choice we could make to reduce our ecological footprint. You don’t have to live in Vermont…we live in San Francisco!
I live in the America that couldn’t care less about what its government says, does, destroys, tortures, spies on, taxes, doesn’t tax, invades, screws, murders, rapes, pretends, fabricates, promotes, pollutes, or stands for.
I live in the America that can do no wrong because it has Gawd on its side, no matter how imperfect it is.
I live in the America that only allows billionaires to hold public office.
I live in the America that boasts double digit illiteracy rates, poverty levels, unemployment rates (the real ones), and hours per week that American Idol is aired.
I live in the America that China will own as soon as the bonds that have financed Haliburton’s new corporate office in Dubai, Blackwater’s unprecedented growth, a shiny new embassy in Iraq, as well as an imagined war against some scary tactic, become due.
I live in the America that is about to go down in the history books as another failed empire…
I believe the Hummer reference in the article was sarcasm, which seems to be our last grasp at sanity…
Oh, it has been reported that China is confering on whether or not to eliminate the one child per family law currently adhered to. They must be excited about the prospect of obtaining most of North America.
peace
piece
whirlled peas
Fortunately for Vermont, they live on another planet so they won’t be affected by environmental catastrophe. They don’t have to strain their brains fighting along with the rest of the world over industrial policy; they can just smile with smug profundity, shake their heads, and eat their own garden vegetables.
Unfortunately I live in the America that is on planet Earth with the rest of humankind.
I’m doing my part by keeping a pair of electric motor scooters running. They are good for nearly all commuting and errands 3 month out of the year.
They are made in China.
Currently the only affordable electric car, available in the US is made in China.
The Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery - a non toxic battery which will make electric vehicles enormously more usable. Is currently only avaialble from - once again - China.
There’s a germ of truth in Marcel’s (as others have noted) smug and hyperbolic column: the right path is not that of trying to elect the right national leaders, or persuade corporations to behave better, it is the path that the left used to know well in the late 60’s and 70’s: alternative institution building - cooperative and worker-owned businesses, local producer/retailer networks, non-profit services which fill unmet local needs. Here is the strength and the future. Rejecting the toxic monolith requires investment in the local, and a lot of work and creativity and patience. it exists in various niches, usually under the radar in small markets. Marcel sees this in Vermont, and forgets that there are many places where people have done this work which she doesn’t know about. One small example: Athens, Ohio, where one worker-owned restaurant (called Casa Nueva) committed to fairer wage structures and buying locally, and has fostered a network of producers, and raised expectations for wage equity, work conditions and food standards… Athens is a small town, and so one business can have a lot of impact. One project doesn’t solve everything… it doesn’t have to. Cumulative impact, and a life worth living, these are the fruits of labor in a good spirit together.
Peace, y’all
Ken Hymes
Explain it to me like I’m a six-year old…”(Vermonters)…can just smile with smug profundity…and eat their own garden vegetables. I live in the America that is on planet Earth” We all live on the planet Earth…I live in San Francisco…to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It’s about CHOICES, stupid” We pretty much agree we’re in a reallllllllllllly big mess, and we know what we need to do - why do we need to throw rocks at people who are already choosing to do what we all are ultimately going to need to do, in some form or other, if we don’t want to turn into a Banana Republic (if we are not already well on our way!)
It’s Only Thursday!
From Feb. 25 thru Feb 28:
Wholesale costs surged while home prices and consumer confidence tanked, according to separate reports Tuesday, suggesting inflation remains a threat even as the economy sinks.
Producer prices jumped 1% in January amid soaring food and energy costs, the Labor Department said, more than double the expected 0.4% gain. Prices rose 7.4% from last year, the biggest jump in more than 26 years. The PPI report showed food prices rose 1.7% in January. Energy prices rose 1.5% vs. December and were up 22.6% from last year.
Price pressures are only getting worse this month. Oil futures rose $1.65 to $100.88 a barrel on Tuesday after hitting $101.15 intraday. Wheat and other commodities also are on fire.
Gasoline prices, which for months lagged behind the big run-up in the price of oil, are suddenly rising quickly, with some experts saying they could approach $4 a gallon by spring. On Tuesday, diesel prices rose to a record $3.60 a gallon, compared with $2.62 a gallon last year. Thursday, when asked about the $4 a gallon warning, Bush said, “”That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that. … I know it’s high now.”
Wednesday, crude oil prices set a new trading high of $102.08 a barrel.
Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods plunged in January by the largest amount in five months as manufacturers got caught in the weakness engulfing the rest of the economy.
The dollar fell to a record low vs. the euro on expectations that the U.S. rate differential will widen vs. Europe and other major economies.
The Consumer Confidence Index fell 12.3 points in January to 75, the lowest in nearly five years, the Conference Board said. Economists expected 82. The expectations index tumbled to a 17-year low.
Fannie Mae on Wednesday said it lost nearly $3.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007 as home-loan delinquencies mounted.
Freddie Mac, the second-largest mortgage-finance company, posted a record $2.45 billion loss for the fourth quarter as rising defaults sent credit costs soaring.
U.S. Home Foreclosures Jump 90% as Mortgages Reset
Bank seizures of U.S. homes almost doubled in January as property owners failed to make higher payments on adjustable- rate mortgages.
The number of homes facing foreclosure in the US rose 57% in January compared with the same month of 2007.
Applications for building permits — considered a good sign of where construction is headed — fell by 3 percent to an annual rate of just under 1.05 million units, That’s the lowest level since November 1991.
For all public banks, the late loan payment rate rose in the fourth quarter to 4.11 percent of the total, up 76 percent from the third quarter and 142 percent from the first three months of 2007.
President Bush sided with banks and mortgage lenders on Tuesday, threatening to veto a bill being offered by Senate Democrats.
New home sales slipped to a nearly 13-year low in January, according to a key government report on the battered housing market.
Builders slashed spending on housing projects by a whopping 25.2 percent on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter, the biggest cut in 26 years.
The number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose more than forecast last week, a sign the labor market is softening as the economy slows.
Sprint Losses $29.5 Billion in 4Q on Nextel Write-Off
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product increased at a scant 0.6 percent pace in the October-to-December quarter… the reading underscored just how much momentum the economy has lost. In the prior quarter, the economy clocked in at a brisk 4.9 percent pace.
“I don’t think we’re headed to recession,” Bush said Thursday.
“We may not pull out of this for another 5 years,” said senior economist at the Credit Union National Association, Mike Schenk.
Food and beverages jumped 4.8% for the year and transportation soared 9.4%.
A bushel of yellow corn cost an average of $5.12 in January, up 41% from a year earlier.
MF Global (MF) on Thursday revealed a $141.5 million loss from unauthorized trades in the booming wheat market by one of its representatives.
Thursday: Mortgage woes force Thornburg to pay $300M: If available cash cannot cover future margin calls, Thornburg Mortgage may have to begin selling assets to raise cash.
It’s only February!
“[The USA] may find themselves drinking cyanid-laced Kool-Aid, or committing mass suicide because the comet that was supposed to pick them up never arrived.”
One can only hope!
Ten million people in New York City, another several million in the Boston area, not to mention the cities of Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, Albany, etc. as well as the millions living in suburbs around those cities, all within a few hours from the pristine utopia that is Vermont, hmmmm……if things fall apart to the point where people are committing mass suicide I doubt that the starving hordes from the densely populated areas will quietly and respectfully walk on by those organic gardens.
China has become our dump, our industrial source, and our non-union workforce. We ship our garbage over there, we have located most of our most highly polluting manufacturing over there, and their labor force is a U.S. corporation’s dream-come-true.
We have got to change our mindset that bases our happiness and continued existence on going shopping and buying all kinds of crap we don’t need.
The Indigenous lifeways, the ones you tried to kill off, are a third way to live and one that lasted conservatively over 12,000 years on this continent. America’s 230 years seems laughable by comparison. White Euro/American’s are so completely self inflicted that they stand little chance of survival. The invited blowback will be so severe that the dominant value system that stresses me first has no future, nor do it’s adherents. Although some Americans are beginning to adopt the Spirit world view they are too few and their understanding of it is paper thin and Vermonters are no exception. Your Christian belief in Dominion will implode upon you and self destruction will result. Unfortunately your chances are dim. I do sincerely wish you well, I just can’t see it in your futures.
This Spring might be a good time to plant a Defeat Garden in my little back yard…
ClassAct is right. Vermont is full of smugly delusional dreamers. Don’t move here - you’ll hate it. There is nothing particularly special about Vermont or it’s citizens. Seriously, don’t move here.
ClassAct February 28th, 2008 3:24 pm
“Fortunately for Vermont, they live on another planet so they won’t be affected by environmental catastrophe. They don’t have to strain their brains fighting along with the rest of the world over industrial policy; they can just smile with smug profundity, shake their heads, and eat their own garden vegetables.
Unfortunately I live in the America that is on planet Earth with the rest of humankind.”
Gawd, another person with their finger on the pulse of “reality.” So, should we infer that you know what reality is? What we have now is reality and your way is the only way to deal with it? A nation so far in debt that we’ll be paying through the nose for generations is reality? A nation scared to death is reality? A nation that has squandered the last vestiges of good will is reality? A nation of obese, culturally ignorant, and civically lazy people is reality? A nation that turns its back on simple, honest, thrifty ways is reality?
By all means, let’s not do what we can each do - let’s continue down the same road and let the “reality” experts fix everything.
I agree with surya - don’t move to Vermont. And if you happen not to be in Maine, please don’t move here either.
“Compare this with a story in the Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer about local kids asking motorists to turn off their cars when they’re waiting to pick up a child, make a bank deposit, or buy a hamburger. They’re even suggesting that we turn off our cars at red lights. The idea is that idling adds to pollution, and to save the planet, we need to be more conscientious.”
Solutions for a hurting planet. Those lacking backbones or will need not apply.
Ok, you gas guzzling, factory farm meat eating, consumption addicted, polluting urban dwellers, now you know. During the coming depression, when food is tight, people are rioting, and Blackwater roams the streets, head for Vermont.
“Your Christian belief in Dominion will implode upon you and self destruction will result. Unfortunately your chances are dim. I do sincerely wish you well, I just can’t see it in your futures.”
Hmm, well, unfortunately, we’re not going down alone.
Actually, Vermont got some bad press today — spending more on prisons than on colleges. Maybe a bad place to attend college, better place to serve a prison sentence?
On Tuesday come (quietly) into Texas and Ohio to observe at the polls. Make sure no hanky pank is going on. Please do not detest Texas. Molly Ivins (bless her heart) implores you to keep her fighting spirit alive. Please do not detest Ohio, they are fighting honorably and valiantly to keep Nafta from totally destroying them.
Man I’m on my way to move to Vermont. Sounds like a good idea to me. Jersey City sucks for growing your own food.
Hate Ohio? To make up for whatever we suffered in the last election, Ohio voted Kucinich into office. Go Ohio.
Joyce, Joyce, Joyce - when you get a good restaurant, you NEVER tell ANYONE or it kills the deal. I know it’s good to tell people good and useful things but you’ve 623,908 in the WHOLE State. When I left Phx Az in ‘67 the Metro had 500,000. In So. Cal we’ve got strip malls that are bigger than that. What’s it gonnabe like with 2.3, 2.5 MILLION people that YOU TOLD what a great place it is? I can just hear the neighbors, “Look at them. And they come from California. And it’s all that Joyce Marcel’s fault. She had to tell’em. She had to go on, and on, and on, and on. How beutiful. How nice the people are. And on, and on, and on and on, and NOW LOOK WHAT WE GOT? Hmmmppfff.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Kill Corporate Personhood - or watch this country come apart like a cheap watch.
Peace.
auspicious bunny, I too love Kucinich for his principled stand. My reference to Texas and Ohio was due to primaries on Tuesday, March 4. I just want fair elections for both places. As to this article, I think it’s a bit weird. I almost live in Thrift stores, flea markets and garage sales and I’m from Texas. As to growing my own, I wouldn’t be caught dead eating a store bought tomato,green onion, or cilantro. Someone earlier talked about how Texas defends itself. If we are talking guns I too advocate for the right of American citizens to bear guns should our government become too overbearing.
Once Bush is out of office, we will see a huge economic boost produced by a subsidy or tax cut on solar and wind. Installing solar on roofs will produce millions of jobs which by definition, are all local jobs and can’t be outsourced.
By Bush’s own formula, a tax cut or rebate for solar (purchase or installation) will stimulate that market dramatically increasing sales which will then increase tax revenues which will pay for the tax cut/rebate.
End the tax cuts and rebates given to big oil and switch them to solar and wind which will provide huge numbers of those local jobs… and increase state, municipal and federal tax revenues.
I mean it would if we were going to do that. Maybe they might get that going in Vermont and elsewhere … I don’t want to see people feeding themselves from their gardens and heating with wood. Of course I live in an apartment and there is only one scrawny tree outside my window. It wouldn’t last long even if I had a fireplace. Then again… if the worst happens people like me wouldn’t last long either. So I guess that works out.
The worst doesn’t have to be. Just the installation of solar and wind alone would produce millions of jobs.
We could save our economy in a rapid switch over to installing solar on roofs… they’d all be local jobs and has anyone asked themselves just where new jobs will come from? Well here’s one way and one which would help EVERY local community immediately.
Please! I will now go back to contemplating trying to feed myself from my organically grown food…from the flower box outside on my window ledge. Hey…it’s got dirt. I bought the soil myself. Now where were those instruction manuals on how to make these seeds work… I think I misplaced them. Um…if I put these seeds in the soil… won’t they get dirty? I hope they will still work then. This living off the land ain’t all that easy… ya know?
“Please! I will now go back to contemplating trying to feed myself from my organically grown food…from the flower box outside on my window ledge. Hey…it’s got dirt. I bought the soil myself.”
Those who have the wit and the will, do:
http://www.dervaesinstitute.org/media/video/abc.htm
“The common thread up here about what has been going on is one better than the senior Bush’s invocation of voodoo economics; it’s looter economics, with the friends of the junta making out like bandits on the backs of the Iraqi people and the US taxpayer. Overall, actually, the US taxpayer is getting off relatively easy; for the most part, you’re just giving them your money, while app. a million Iraqi have given their homes, communities, families, and lives, often under tortuous circumstances, to give them the excuse to raid your pockets.”
Jake123, I agree with your thoughts stated here. I don’t know if you have heard but Bu$h has just recently threatened to veto any legislation coming from congress that will eliminate the $18 billion tax break he is giving the major oil companies. One of the major reasons our economy is cratering is because of the extremely high energy prices (while the oil companies are making record profits quarter after quarter). The huge energy price increases have rippled through the economy resulting in higher prices across the board and Bu$h is giving these azzoles $18 billion in corporate welfare!!! Gawd I hate republicans!!!
People will need more oil and then war will come. Why do you think a billion Chinese workers are working so hard while barely eking out a living. One day they will need more Leibensraum and will strike where the resources are.
And then today watching a Bush press conference where, by God, it looked like they had let it out of its locked cell in the asylum to stand there for a few minutes, blinking blearily in the lights and petulantly mouthing its inanities, repeatedly contradicting itself every other sentence. It’s like some sort of Eraserhead beast that has gotten everything it ever wanted, and feebly cries for yet more betrayals of the American people, not even realizing it makes no sense to anyone any longer. And yet it is braced up by a phalanx of enablers and goons, still extremely dangerous. And we watch it spiral into sickness. I thought this only happened to countries in the past. These are modern times. But I guess they aren’t really. We can still be led by a sick mind. It’s horrifying.
Banana Republic, huh? Does this mean we get a discount? I love their tee shirts. Chinos, too.
What if those refugees from the post-imperial America don’t drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, but drive up to Vermont with guns to take all that organically-raised food? Then Vermonters will be forced to become one of those paranoid survivalist cults. We either survive together as wise men, or perish separately as fools. I think Chief Seattle said something akin to that. And it includes the Chinese and subcontinental Indians as well. All that being said, I’d love to move to Vermont to make my stand with the more-enlightened people there.
When the kids tell people to stop buying hamburgers then we will be making progress.
China and India also want to eat a lot more meat.
And China is planning to end its 1 child policy.
How come culling is good enough for elephants in South Africa but not for humans?
We are going to need more pollution and wars to thin the population.
Jake123:
I apologize for the comments and attitudes of the idiots who’ve wrested control of my once-great nation from the adults who used to be in charge. Many of us are doing our best to try and fix things.
I’ve been journeying North for a decade a couple times a year to indulge my addiction for great sport fishing. In the process, I’ve developed a great affinity for all things Canadian. For example: last June, the CBC was full of news about Conrad Black, virtually non-stop. How nice that the National news in Canada can only bore one. In the US, it causes coronaries.
Lastly, thanks to the good people of Nova Scotia (and elsewhere?) for opening your homes to stranded Americans on 9/11. That was very neighbourly of you.
Marx Me Out
From each neo colony
To each neo con
From each squatter box
To each gated nest
From each mark on the treadmill
To each according to their connected greed
From each bottom line
To each… a flat line
From time lost
To the naked brain
Marx me out
Marx me out
The idea of a cashless society is indeed frightening. We have already seen (with numerous examples) that the government/corporations can not be trusted with our personal information. EVERY time you use your debit card or credit card, you are leaving a record of where you shopped, what you bought and how much you spent. Gather all those records up and you have a clear pattern of someone’s daily life. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS use cash for your transactions whenever possible. Give the government one less piece of data to collect on you. Your life may depend on it one day.
This article was neither smug nor an advertisement for moving to Vermont. Marcel and at least some of her neighbors have taken their heads out of the sand and/or their own behinds and seen the future, and figured out a good way to try and survive there. As other posters pointed out, you can do that in the Bay Area or even Texas - but these are skills that we are all going to have to learn: living in true community, growing our own food, living with substantially less energy resources, etc. Thank goodness there are some forward-thinking folks in Vermont, Texas, and SF that might be willing to teach us.
Well, there’s one bottom-line that’s always kept me from moving off to the wonderful places I’ve seen on my numerous roadtrips: cost of real estate relative to income.
Want to get an acre or two in the hills in Vermont, do some gardening, etc. Looks like you’ll need a minimum of $80-100K or so, and some viable means of support.