CB: So Michael, as a subscriber to Truth to Power's Daily News Digest, I know that every day you see the headlines regarding skyrocketing food prices. Can you say a bit about why you think this is happening?

MB: Well, I think what we're seeing with food prices, with spot shortages and commodities in various places around the world is just the beginning of a much larger situation. Fundamentally, what's happening is that as the cost of fossil fuels goes up, then the whole agricultural production system is affected because the whole system is dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers for fuel, pesticides, and herbicides. The cost of all of these is going up, and we're just now reaching the point where, as the era of cheap fossil fuels ends, and as fossil fuels continue to become increasingly expensive, the entire global industrial agricultural system is going to collapse. We are seeing the very beginnings of that right now, and for most people, especially here in America, it seems very remote, but it will have tremendous impact here in this country within the next two or three years.

CB: What would you say to people who would argue that actually the price of oil has gone down and doesn't seem to be rising much?

MB: Well, the price of oil fluctuates a lot, but the trajectory is steadily upward. Since we've reached the point on the planet where we're beyond Peak Oil, that is, we've burned more than half the oil that's on the planet, it is inevitable that oil from here on out will be harder to get out of the ground and more and more expensive. This is not a bullet we can dodge.

CB: Currently Transition Colorado is working very hard at finalizing your first Eat Local Campaign for Boulder County. You have the Boulder County Commissioners on board and the Boulder City Council as well. Transition Colorado could have chosen to focus on a number of other issues this year. Why is this event so urgent, in your opinion, and what do you hope to accomplish by organizing it?

MB: As we've been emphasizing the need for relocalization and our community's needing to be able to meet our most essential needs locally instead of being dependent on globalized systems, we've seen that the area where we are most vulnerable here in Boulder County is food. At the moment we're spending about $700 million a year on food. From all that we can tell from the limited data that's available, less than 1% of that is being spent on food being grown in Boulder County. That's a tiny, tiny amount. So currently, our food shed, which is kind of like a watershed, stretches across the globe. We're bringing in food from China, South America, Europe, and as the industrial agricultural system begins to fail, we have no choice but to shrink our food shed to be much, much more local. And it looks like we don't have much time to do that. The impact on industrial agriculture will begin to unfold within the next two-three years, so we need to quickly rebuild local food and farming.

Fortunately, there has been a tremendous amount of work done by people like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Joel Salatin-people who have been working on these issues for years and have helped to educate millions and millions of people about the importance of local, organic food. So there's a great readiness and a rising demand for locally grown, organic food. So what that means is that this is an area where we can have the greatest impact in the shortest amount of time. It's not everything that we need to do in terms of relocalization, but it is maybe the most important thing.

There are lots of reasons for this besides needing to meet our food needs locally. There's a benefit to health that comes from local, fresh, organic food. One of the most important but perhaps least recognized issues in the transitioning from an industrial, fossil fuels agricultural system to a localized organic system is that the latter will greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We're beginning to understand now that the way we grow and process our food, the way we ship it-all of that, contributes about 31% to our greenhouse gas emission. So here in Boulder, while there's a lot of effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through pretty advanced climate action plans, there is no discussion of the impact of food and farming and greenhouse gas emission. So this is one area where we can make a huge difference in a very short period of time. And since no one else locally is taking that issue on, we will and we are because we must. This is also an area where Transition initiatives around the country can demonstrate leadership.

CB: This leads me to ask the next question which is: What should individuals be doing in terms of creating their own food security? And what should neighborhoods and communities be doing to create food security for their place?

MB: For a long time now we've been saying that it's a good idea for everyone to learn to grow at least some of their own food. This is something that everyone can do, no matter where they live, even if they live in a high-rise apartment building. They can grow at least some of their food. Initially it's not so much about how much food they might each produce, but it's about learning the skills. It's about reconnecting with the natural processes and cycles of life and beginning to understand soil, how to build it and restore it. These are skills we have become very disconnected from and that will be essential for all of us in the future.

So we think that those kinds of skills are going to be more important to food security than storing up lots of food. We can always grow food. As we're compelled increasingly to eat seasonally again, we're going to have to learn how to preserve food from harvest so that we can consume it during the winter months. So we get to learn all those things like canning, drying food-ways that we can feed ourselves year-round. We've gotten so accustomed to being able to eat whatever we want anytime we want it. We just go to the grocery store. We've become totally dependent on this system, and we've lost those basic skills. That's the more real aspect of food security.

On a neighborhood level, I think one of the most important things we can do is to organize as neighbors to support each other. A lot of people can't have their own gardens. They might be able to have a window box garden or some tomato plants on their porch, but they can't really produce much. But community gardens can easily be organized. Again, it's not so much about the amount that's grown, but rather about the process of people working together and rebuilding those fundamental connections between people. Those kinds of connections have been at the heart of civilization from the beginning, and they have eroded away the last two hundred years or so.

On a broader level within a local food shed, let's say an area of a couple hundred miles or so, such as in Boulder County, we need to focus collectively on greatly increasing food production. 75% of our agricultural land here in Boulder County is being used either for pasture land for animals or to grow crops to feed animals. We need to be using much more of that land to grow food for our own people. Agriculture has gotten focused over the last century on exporting commodity crops to other countries and has totally lost site of the need to feed our own people. We need to reverse that priority and make the purpose of local farming and the whole food system to feed our own people first, then export surplus once those local needs have been met. It's a huge transition we have to go through, but that's ultimately where our food security will come from.

CB: One of the presentations you frequently do is entitled "The Extent of Our Predicament". In a few words, what is the extent of our predicament, and what should we be doing to deal with that predicament?

MB: First of all, what inspired me to talk about this is Gus Speth's book The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability where he concludes that we will never do what is necessary until we understand the full extent of our predicament. So I've been speaking more and more about our predicament in terms of first of all, the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels-the reality that we will never be able to replace the amount of energy we're burning in fossil fuels today and that we will have no choice but to dramatically reduce our energy consumption. That's the first realization that we have to come to.

The second is that climate change is going to change the face of the planet and will certainly change the trajectory of the human presence on the planet, and this will happen much more quickly and much more painfully than almost any of us is willing to think about. But we need to begin. Primarily because of our use of fossil fuels and our profligate burning of fossil fuels, we've unleashed profound changes in our climate that are probably going to give us the equivalent of a species near-death experience. The near-death experiences for many individuals will be a profound wake up call and will produce a shift from an aimless, dissipated, wasted life to a focus on purpose and service. Climate change is likely to be affording us as a species, that kind of opportunity.

The third aspect of our predicament is the reality is that our economic system will not recover but will go into a steeper decline, eventually plunging into an irreversible global depression that will last beyond our lifetimes. Of course, it's because our entire global economic system has been based on cheap fossil fuels and the American dollar. The whole system now is beginning to collapse. So we need to understand that the global systems on which we've come to depend are already failing, and they will fail dramatically in the future. So we have to rebuild from the ground up our capacity to live well, to live meaningfully, in a healthy and productive manner on this planet.

CB: Michael you often speak of the "evolutionary threshold" on which humanity stands in the present moment. What do you mean by this?

MB: I think that where we are as a species and what gives me hope perhaps, is the realization that we are a very young species in the universe. We are living in a time where we are beginning to emerge from our species adolescence into adulthood. It's not a very comfortable time just as is often the case for adolescents when they begin to shift into early adulthood, but that's what's up for us, and as we shift into adulthood, we'll have to live very, very differently. But seeing it that way is very good news because it means that as a species it means that we're not doomed, we're not fatally flawed-it just means that it's time for us to grow up together. Of course, in order to do that, we're going to have to make some pretty significant changes. We're going to have to put behind us our childish way of living, our very selfish way of living, but we certainly have an opportunity to begin to realize the potential and destiny of the human species.

There's no guarantee that we'll make this transition. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to doubt that we'll be able to do this. In our adolescence, the problems we've created for ourselves are so overwhelming that if we don't make the course correction very quickly, the window of opportunity will have passed, and we will not survive. But right now, the window is still open, and if enough people can wake up to our predicament and put into place the basic processes and structures that will enable what's best about the human species-what's the most important, what's the most precious about our species in order to survive beyond this transition, then ultimately humanity will fulfill its purpose and destiny.

CB: Thank you Michael for taking this time to talk about the crucial role of local food and farming. For readers in Boulder County, please attend the Eat Local Campaign. For readers elsewhere, check out the Eat Local website and think about how you might implement a local food and farming campaign in your place.

Michael Brownlee is the Co-Director of Transition Colorado, Boulder County

I share their enthusiasm for profound, bone-marrow transformation of the status quo. Jefferson really was right when he proclaimed that the United States needed a revolution every twenty years. Many of us who were activists during the Vietnam War era were determined to pull off a revolution that would destroy the military industrial complex, institutionalized racism, and the entire capitalist agenda.

Today's visionaries and activists cherish similar hopes, yet I fear that they do not yet grasp the kind of revolution that the planet seems to be asking for. And unlike the revolution we envisioned four decades ago, this one must be in response to the planet and the earth community. From this perspective, I believe there are two kinds of revolution in front of us: The kind that is inappropriate and the kind that is both useful and critical for planetary survival.

Inappropriate Revolutions

The most truly inappropriate revolution would be one based on false assumptions, principally, the notion that political change on a grand scale is meaningful. Pundits of this kind of revolution include all cheerleaders for the Democratic Party and all others who champion the Progressive, left-liberal landscape. These folks are currently obsessing about the November election and agonizing over Tea Party cacophonies. From this perspective, if the far-right were resoundingly defeated by the election of liberal candidates, the nation might be spared from spiraling downward into fascism.

Other well-meaning but naïve proponents of revolution argue that social upheaval and more people in the streets will signal enough distress among the population to provide fertile ground for a political and cultural revolution. While not directly advocating the overthrow of the federal government, these individuals are poised to organize and assume positions of leadership should sufficient unrest unfold.

Inappropriate revolutions tend to focus on widespread global (whether literal or symbolic) measures that will result in mass consciousness raising, mass movements, and mass political and cultural change. This philosophy mirrors "bigger is better" and assumes that significant change only happens when society at large is involved. Models of this kind of revolution in the modern era would be ones such as the Russian Revolution, the Maoist revolution in China, and the Cuban Revolution.

Such revolutions rarely address the emotional and spiritual aspects of social change because for the most part, the possibility that any force greater than the human mind and ego exists is rejected out of hand. A revolution operating from this assumption is by definition, human-centric. Whereas political revolutions may include individuals who care deeply about the ecosystems and argue passionately for stewardship of the earth, their agenda is not fundamentally informed by the earth. Man is still the measure of all things and therefore, given the desired political context, humans can reverse their species' destruction of the planet and engineer something approximating utopia.

So what is an appropriate revolution? And appropriate to what, you may ask.

Appropriate Revolutions

An appropriate revolution is one that is relevant to what is actually needed in the light of human and planetary evolution. It is not primarily political but rather informed by what the earth community is asking for. For example, the earth is not asking for more efficient and accessible healthcare. Rather, it is asking that humans live in such conscious intimacy with the earth that nearly all of humanity's diseases and injuries are prevented as a result of that relationship.

Likewise, the earth is not asking for renewable energy but a cellular level transformation of consciousness regarding how we live on the earth-how we eat, what we wear, the products we use, where we live, where we travel and how.

The earth is not asking for jobs, but rather a painfully honest examination of our purpose in walking on her body in terms of the work that is most beneficial for her and all species that inhabit the planet.

The earth is asking, no pleading, for inhabitants who are willing and eager to live and relate locally in small communities, cooperating with neighbors to replenish what has been stolen from the earth and to enhance the well being of all species.

In his essay, "A Revolution That Is Arising From The Earth", William Kotke states:

We who can read these words are civilized people who have been mentally conditioned by the culture of civilization and the industrial society from birth. We have precepts loaded into our subconscious minds which cause us to see reality in a certain way. To a native Maya person in the State of Chiapas, Mexico, the earth speaks through them. They live integrated with the earth in their everyday energy systems and in their mental attitudes. To them the fact that the earthlife has manifest these living things around us, and us, means that we are children of the Mother Earth and we speak as one of the voices of the earth. To the Maya this is obvious on a deep level. To us it is an interesting intellectual proposition only, because we have been conditioned by a cultural upbringing that filters out this deep understanding and we do not mentally link our life with the life of the living earth.

To the Maya security is the earth and its care. The Maya live with the earth and feed from its natural bounty. Historically for a million years our species has been very successful. We have been adapted to the earth life. We lived within the ecological web and energy flows of the earth. Our traditional migratory patterns carried us over our gathering areas. In the season when the game were fat in one place we went there, when the berries were ripe in another we went there. Our success was adaptation to the life of the earth. We also had a culture that respected the earth and living things. The proposition is simple. We are alive, we live because of the other living things which feed us, we are obligated to respect and encourage those other living things so that we too can live.

In order for these indicators of an appropriate revolution to be actualized, a new kind of human must emerge-a new species with conscious self-awareness that knows-not thinks or feels-that it is not "in harmony" with the earth, but that it is the earth. This knowledge can only be acquired if our species is willing to experience, not theorize, that it originated from something greater and emerged on this planet for the purpose of serving something greater in order to perpetuate its values throughout the earth community and for countless generations in the future.

This revolution has already begun and manifests itself in the mission and work of organizations like Transition, Business Alliance of Local Economies (BALLE), and the permaculture movement. These organizations are about much more than growing organic gardens. One of their principal functions is the revolutionizing of how money works-a revolution without which fundamental change is impossible. They are creating self-sufficiency and resilience in neighborhoods and local communities, both of which may serve as mainstays in the event of infrastructure collapse, food and water shortages, natural disasters, economic devastation, and loss of essential services.

The localization efforts of organizations such as these have far more implications than mere "emergency response" preparation. They will eventually become the new normal as the collapse of industrial civilization exacerbates. The sooner these systems become firmly in place, the more resilient their citizens will be in navigating a world that in a couple of decades may be unrecognizable by current standards. They have evolved not merely out of vision and ingenuity but out of

a palpable sense that a new humanity is in the process of emerging-a humanity that functions optimally not in a global economy or through mass consciousness raising, but through networking and smallness of scale.

So with those who argue that a revolution is desperately needed, I would heartily agree-with the caveat that it must be an appropriate one, skillfully moving in response to the earth and the evolutionary threshold on which humans stand. It must focus on building vibrant and discerning communities who will keep ears and hearts to the ground, listening for what the earth is asking of them.

In closing this piece, I must notice that three years ago on the Speaking Truth to Power website, I wrote in depth about the fallacy of placing confidence in Barack Obama as the candidate who would "revolutionize" the United States. I was called cynical, narrow-minded, and hopelessly pessimistic. Three years later I am hard-pressed to find anyone who is enthusiastic about the record of President Obama or the likelihood that if he has a clue about anything, he would actually abdicate his Goldman-Sachs designed throne and implement the platform of "change" on which he ran for office. Even if he were to do so, there is no money for such an agenda, and a cataclysmic Gulf Oil disaster has become an unimaginable game-changer.

All of this only validates my premise that local action, self-sufficiency, and taking charge of issues in one's community are the essential ingredients of revolutionary change rather than dependence on a distant President and Congress, bought and orchestrated by the very system that is annihilating the earth community. Do not take my word for it. Research for yourself what the three organizations mentioned above have accomplished in the last three years. If you still insist on calling me cynical, I would argue that the definition of that word completely escapes you.

Understanding the real nature of resistance, however, is not easy. No newsbyte could be thorough enough to explain why people, as a people, resist. Even if such an arduous task was possible, the news might not want to convey it, as it would directly clash with mainstream interpretations of violence and non-violent resistance. The Afghanistan story must remain committed to the same language: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Lebanon must be represented in terms of a menacing Iran-backed Hizbullah. Palestine's Hamas must be forever shown as a militant group sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. Any attempt at offering an alternative reading is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists and justifying violence.

The deliberate conflation and misuse of terminology has made it almost impossible to understand, and thus to actually resolve bloody conflicts.

Even those who purport to sympathize with resisting nations often contribute to the confusion. Activists from Western countries tend to follow an academic comprehension of what is happening in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Thus certain ideas are perpetuated: suicide bombings bad, non-violent resistance good; Hamas rockets bad, slingshots good; armed resistance bad, vigils in front of Red Cross offices good. Many activists will quote Martin Luther King Jr., but not Malcolm X. They will infuse a selective understanding of Gandhi, but never of Guevara. This supposedly 'strategic' discourse has robbed many of what could be a precious understanding of resistance - as both concept and culture.

Between the reductionst mainstream understanding of resistance as violent and terrorist and the 'alternative' defacing of an inspiring and compelling cultural experience, resistance as a culture is lost. The two overriding definitions offer no more than narrow depictions. Both render those attempting to relay the viewpoint of the resisting culture as almost always on the defensive. Thus we repeatedly hear the same statements: no, we are not terrorists; no, we are not violent, we actually have a rich culture of non-violent resistance; no, Hamas is not affiliated with al-Qaeda; no, Hizbullah is not an Iranian agent. Ironically, Israeli writers, intellectuals and academicians own up to much less than their Palestinian counterparts, although the former tend to defend aggression and the latter defend, or at least try to explain their resistance to aggression. Also ironic is the fact that instead of seeking to understand why people resist, many wish to debate about how to suppress their resistance.

By resistance as a culture, I am referencing Edward Said's elucidation of "culture (as) a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration." When cultures resist, they don't scheme and play politics. Nor do they sadistically brutalize. Their decisions as to whether to engage in armed struggle or to employ non-violent methods, whether to target civilians or not, whether to conspire with foreign elements or not are all purely strategic. They are hardly of direct relevance to the concept or resistance itself. Mixing between the two suggests is manipulative or plain ignorant.

If resistance is "the action of opposing something that you disapprove or disagree with", then a culture of resistance is what occurs when an entire culture reaches this collective decision to oppose that disagreeable element - often a foreign occupation. The decision is not a calculated one. It is engendered through a long process in which self-awareness, self-assertion, tradition, collective experiences, symbols and many more factors interact in specific ways. This might be new to the wealth of that culture's past experiences, but it is very much an internal process.

It's almost like a chemical reaction, but even more complex since it isn't always easy to separate its elements. Thus it is also not easy to fully comprehend, and, in the case of an invading army, it is not easily suppressed. This is how I tried to explain the first Palestinian uprising of 1987, which I lived in its entirely in Gaza:

"It's not easy to isolate specific dates and events that spark popular revolutions. Genuine collective rebellion cannot be rationalized though a coherent line of logic that elapses time and space; its rather a culmination of experiences that unite the individual to the collective, their conscious and subconscious, their relationships with their immediate surroundings and with that which is not so immediate, all colliding and exploding into a fury that cannot be suppressed." (My Father Was A Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story)

Foreign occupiers tend to fight popular resistance through several means. One includes a varied amount of violence aiming to disorient, destroy and rebuild a nation to any desired image (read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine). Another strategy is to weaken the very components that give a culture its unique identity and inner strengths - and thus defuse the culture's ability to resist. The former requires firepower, while the latter can be achieved through soft means of control. Many 'third world' nations that boast of their sovereignty and independence might in fact be very much occupied, but due to their fragmented and overpowered cultures - through globalization, for example - they are unable to comprehend the extent of their tragedy and dependency. Others, who might effectively be occupied, often possess a culture of resistance that makes it impossible for their occupiers to achieve any of their desired objectives.

In Gaza, Palestine, while the media speaks endlessly of rockets and Israeli security, and debates who is really responsible for holding Palestinians in the strip hostage, no heed is paid to the little children living in tents by the ruins of homes they lost in the latest Israeli onslaught. These kids participate in the same culture of resistance that Gaza has witnessed over the course of six decades. In their notebooks they draw fighters with guns, kids with slingshots, women with flags, as well as menacing Israeli tanks and warplanes, graves dotted with the word 'martyr', and destroyed homes. Throughout, the word 'victory' is persistently used.

When I was in Iraq, I witnessed a local version of these kids' drawings. And while I have yet to see Afghani children's scrapbooks, I can easily imagine their content too.

- Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.

About one year after Barack Obama became President, I noticed on one radical left website the words "the ‘hopium' is wearing off." While the majority of Americans believe that Obama is a better President than George W. Bush, Jr., it has now become painfully obvious that Obama's leadership has offered little divergence from the policies of the Bush administration. In the throes of what can only be described honestly as the Second Great Depression, Americans suffering from a deluge of unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, loss of health insurance and retirement savings have not yet fully confronted their despair. They pretend that a return to unlimited growth and delirious consumerism is possible and even likely in the long term, but all the while, just beneath the surface of that chimera the demon of despair is growing increasingly restless and ominous.

Despair moves us to confront existential questions, and let's remember that that big word isn't just a philosophical term but directly refers to our existence. Existential questions are questions of meaning and purpose-questions about the human condition such as: Why do the innocent suffer? Why do those who commit brutal acts so often go unpunished? If there is a God, why do these things happen? Why am I here?

Despair also brings us face to face with an emptiness that is at our core, regardless of how fulfilled and serene we feel. And while some theologians would assert that the emptiness is a God-shaped void that only religion can fill, I would argue that the emptiness cannot be filled by anyone or anything because it is a fundamental reality of the human condition. However, I hasten to add that the pain of the void can be minimized in a variety of ways.

Citizens of industrial civilization have attempted for centuries to fill the void by cherishing the delusions of unlimited growth, unbridled progress, the acquisition of material wealth, the sanctity of the family, the piety of organized religion, the status of obtaining advanced degrees, and of course, the use of substances to obviate or medicate the sensation of emptiness. As civilization continues to deteriorate, and as fewer and fewer options for filling the void are available, the masses will be brutally confronted with their own despair. When the people, things, and activities that have provided meaning for them throughout their lives no longer exist, we are likely to witness madness and suicide on an unprecedented scale. I state this, dear reader, not to incite fear, but to prepare us for a milieu of chaos resulting from a pandemic of meaninglessness as nearly all of that which has provided meaning for so many is swept away.

What is more, I realize that anyone reading these words may be at times overwhelmed with despair. This is difficult to avoid when contemplating the scale of horror that humans have inflicted on the planet in terms of wars, resource depletion, environmental devastation, and innumerable forms of injustice and brutality. Unless one lives a hermetically sealed life, one encounters these realities daily.

When I first published Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, I was afraid that it would be reviled at the worst and virtually ignored at best. While it is true that it did not and will not become a best-seller, I have been astounded at the book's success and the comments I have received from readers. Consistently they report that Sacred Demise profoundly lowered their level of despair by catalyzing a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. In most cases, readers completed the book, or re-read it, and took away a palpable appreciation of the demise and what is truly sacred about it.

As I engage with collapse-aware individuals and communities throughout the world, what I consistently hear is the profound alienation they feel in a world unraveling. We all have personal wounds that evoke despair, but as psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan notes in her book, Healing Through The Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair, "Despair grows not only out of our personal wounds, losses, and disappointments, but also out of our needs for community and a shared sense of meaning-spiritual necessities for which we harbor a profound and aching, though largely unconscious, nostalgia."

Greenspan also notes that often our personal despair will not let up until we confront our despair for the world. You may be familiar with Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment workshops, designed to help people face their despair and create community with others who are engaged in similar work. Macy believes that despair is to be trusted because it is a natural, visceral response to a planet in crisis inhabited by beings who are committing suicide.

Generally, the psychotherapy profession does not address despair for the world. In fact, if you were to walk into a therapist's office and say that you feel grief and despair for the world, you are likely to be labeled depressed, paranoid, phobic, or pathologized in some other way, presented with myriad reasons why your despair is unwarranted in a world so full of glorious potential, and probably asked to consider taking an antidepressant. It is likely that unless you consult a therapist who is fully informed regarding the coming chaos, you will need to find support from other individuals similarly informed and share your feelings about the future with them.

Joanna Macy speaks to this directly:

But because of the individualistic bias of mainstream psychotherapy, we have been conditioned to assume that we are essentially separate selves, driven by aggressive impulses, competing for a place in the sun. In the light of these assumptions, psychotherapists tend to view our affective responses to the plight of our world as dysfunctional and give them short shrift. As a result, we have trouble crediting the notion that concerns for the general welfare might be genuine enough and acute enough to cause distress. Assuming that all our drives are ego-generated, therapists tend to regard feelings of despair for our planet as manifestations of some private neurosis.

This is precisely why in recent months I have begun a Transition Counseling practice, which some people have called "Collapse Coaching", that offers people an opportunity to share their feelings about the future and receive support and practical input regarding preparation. I believe that increasingly we will need this kind of coaching in our communities as the wheels fly off of a civilization dependent on cheap fossil fuels for its operation and the illusion of endless growth and consumption for its motivation.

When we do not acknowledge despair, it reinforces our tendency toward numbness, the preferred "feeling state" of most citizens of modern culture. If we remind ourselves that emotion has the word motion in it, and if we consciously allow the despair, yes even dialog with it, asking it what it wants from us, we may find that it is indeed an ally.

In reality, despair presents us with an opportunity to enhance our sense of meaning and purpose. As Greenspan states: "Despair is faith's darker handmaiden. There is no faith without doubt and despair, just as there is no good without evil, no day without night. To be authentic, faith must be all-inclusive-encompassing Auschwitz as much as it encompasses paradise." If you bristle at the word faith, feel free to replace it with meaning, purpose, inspiration, or some other word.

The human psyche is extremely comfortable in the territory of despair. For this reason, we need to trust our despair and allow it to guide us to the transformation that is waiting to happen within us. We also need to remember that we feel our despair in the context of a world that is withering and a species that is rushing headlong toward extinction. Our personal despair and the wider story of despair cannot be separated. This does not mean that we stay stuck in blame and abdicate personal responsibility where it should be claimed. What it does mean, however, is that suffering is both personal and collective, and that the latter is larger than our personal egos. It may be that despair is a catalyst not only for our personal transformation, but also that of our species.

Thus arises another opportunity to remind us all that service in the world is often an excellent antidote to despair. Service can give our lives meaning and help place our personal story in the context of the larger story of a civilization that has reached its growth limits and is currently in demise. However, we do not need to reach our limits of soul growth as individuals. In fact, the more we acknowledge our limitations of material growth, acquisition, and control, the more expansive our souls are likely to become, and service frequently enhances the process.

Yet another tool for soothing our despair is to follow the example of Wendell Berry in his beautiful poem which opens this article. In it he states that when despair for the world grows in him, he consciously enters nature and allows it to comfort him so that for a time, he can rest in the grace of the world and experience himself as free. Yet it is not only comfort he receives but the "peace of wild things." But how can "wild" be synonymous with "peaceful"? Isn't wild unpredictable and therefore anxiety-producing? Could this actually be one of the most important antidotes to despair: Wild, unpredictable, capricious, even dangerous? Is not part of our death-like despair the lack of wildness? Psychologist Bill Plotkin states in Nature And The Human Soul that "Something in us is truly wild and wants to stay that way through our entire life. It is the source of our deepest creativity and freedom."

I want to underscore Wendell Berry's advice. I am blessed to live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. Recently, I have committed to journeying twice a month into the mountains and spending sacred time in some isolated places there. It may be as short as one hour or as long as an entire day. While I have taken many extended trips into the mountains earlier in my life, having lived at the foot of Pikes Peak in my late-twenties, I now journey into the mountains more contemplatively and for shorter periods of time.

My intention when taking these short trips is exactly the same as Wendell Berry's. I go in order to "rest in the grace" that is there. It is a comforting, soothing, inspiring, and restorative experience. However, without exception, grief comes, whether I invite it or not. It is quite simply, ever-present these days as I allow myself to become intimate with nature--and I give my grief to the earth. Sometimes I do it by lying face down on the earth and sobbing. Sometimes by standing with my back pressed firmly against a towering pine tree and feeling its strength coursing through my body until I break into laughter. Sometimes by sitting in the soil and sifting it tenderly through my fingers as tears of both sorrow and joy flow.

Part of me realizes that it is only a matter of time until the lush landscape into which I have immersed my body and soul will be destroyed by climate change. In Colorado, this is already happening with the death of incalculable numbers of trees infected by the pine beetle. Another part of me is also keenly aware of the earth's magnificent history of regenerating herself. The very elements of nature in which I revel on these journeys are remnants of the earth that have been destroyed in eons past. Perhaps in a million years, the landscape in which I sit, that may be destroyed in my lifetime, will metamorphose into another lovely landscape or other elements that will provide comfort and revitalization for some other members of the earth community.

Somehow, when I return from my short mountain getaways, I am buoyed; I feel some distance from my despair for the world, and I am renewed in body and soul. It is as if I have spent hours communing intimately with a dear friend. And even as I return to the low-intensity urban community in which I live, my "friend" remains in my heart. She is still up there in the mountains, and I can return to her, but more importantly, she is in my body, and I take her with me as I do the work I came here to do. Even if she is made extinct, she is within me, and her palpable sacred presence within cannot be made extinct. I am exhilarated by her effervescent, wild fecundity, and my despair recedes. I feel my wildness; industrial civilization has not killed it because my wildness inspires me to find meaning in the madness of a collapsing world. And it compels me to write these words and to invite you to immerse yourself in your wildness, as well as your gifts of service, because when you do, it will be impossible to be driven by despair.

___________________________________________________________________

This article is an excerpt from Carolyn's forthcoming book Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Toolkit For Inner Transition which will contain a treasure-trove of exercises and resources of emotional and spiritual preparation for an uncertain future.

In October, 2010, Carolyn will lead a 2-day workshop in Boulder, Colorado on "Sacred Demise and The Soul of Transition". For more information, contact Carolyn@carolynbaker.net

Television, cell phone, computer glowed before me: The media nimbus boiled: its hypnagogia-like flux of imagery, its counterfeit immediacy and proffered flummery insistent to drowned out auras of extinction rising from veritable nature; the earth's warnings rising like musical notes ... swelling, reverberating, enveloping us. In the Gulf of Mexico ... literally falling to earth as chemical rain.

I stood dazzled before the scintillating doomscape of the Anthropocene Epoch. It has entered me ... It has made me and undone me. It tells me who I am; it holds me near, enclosing me in the thrall of the false intimacy of its endless spectacle.

Some mornings, I don't think I can compose myself to face it.

But, most days, I make a start: Gathering up and patching together this tattered flesh-garment of DNA. Then: I call to order my swarming termite-cathedral mind ... take a head count of this aggregate of disparate personage deemed me ... attempt to quiet this nattering self nettled by formless dread ... console this besieged I who awakens in redemptive bed ... torn from reverie with dreaming-ocean cosmos to shuffle to toilet for Newtonian piss, to sink for anti-entropic teeth brushing, then commit to wave-particle duality decision of dressing ... in order to meet the manifold machinery of the empire's manifest death-urge revelry.

Awake, dressed, and partially reconstituted, I left the house:

The age of insistent junk rose to meet me: junk groaned and snarled past me on roadways; junk words -- mouthed into junk cell phones; junk pixels -- texted and twittered into meaningless air.

So many enchanted by junk incantations, staring at glowing, tinny appliances like idiots entranced by shiny objects ... giving over the fleeting hours of finite life in the service of Lord Junk -- as sky and sea choke in the miasmic wake of our joyless binge -- and the earth's entropic furies gather.

We stare at our glowing appliances while exquisite things are extinguished, forever ... mistaking configurations of pixels for the breath and brilliance of the world.

I thought of Lorca; in truth, preposterously, I attempted to pray to Lorca who advised that one should listen for the heart of god beating within the monster of the world.

But I am losing heart searching for the monster's heart. Thus far: finding only my own spleen. For this reason: our collectives striving and private equivocations seem the thanotopic dream of destroyer gods: The nightmare manifested before us as strip malls and shopping plazas ... constructed of bones of extinct species; interiors of suburban subdivisions shuffling with resentful phantoms ... estranged from the libido of culture and communion; dead zone freeways ... the air shaken and riven by the roar of its death-enamered fury.

Before me: Atlanta Georgia, USA ... glazed in asphalt inferno of late-June.

Yet, held in the heat-pummeled air above, I saw fuchsia mimosa blossoms hoisting defiant flags above the misery of traffic.

The effrontery of those spindly blooms of fuchsia, its colors as raw as my own nettled heart. It hurt deep within my chest even to gaze upon such a shade of unconquerable pink.

I want to shake branches of flowering mimosa in the faces of the ministers and minions of junk ... to see ... if they become stricken as I was -- as tickled pink as I am.

Later, will I hear reports on the evening news of a million human beings in their offices and cubicles afflicted with seemingly out-of-context desires ... suffering from spontaneous longings for the caress of blossom-scented winds ... suddenly struck by an ungovernable need to emerge unto city streets and genuflect before the spindling glory of these seditious flowers?

So, in short, the ministrations of the mimosa convinced me to keep on living. But I had little appetite for the endeavor.

The meals prepared from this harvest of junk turned my stomach. I clamped my teeth tight against it. I kept searching for hope's greenhouse -- where blooms of human understanding open and breathe -- but I kept wandering into the empire's slaughtering barn.

I began to mutter, "awful."

"Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then I chanted it aloud, "Awful. Awful. Awful."

Then and there, I decided I would make "awful" my morning and evening prayer.

"He's awful, She's awful -- This food is awful -- The news is awful -- Our leaders are awful. You awful people have created such an awful mess by living out the awful implications of your awful lives that all mirrors should be renamed awful frames.

I ask you, Rilke: What awful angels swim through the poisoned sky?

Anticipating the question, Rilke, a century prior, answered:

" I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:

then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you."

So I riffed on it and rasp it, snarled it and sobbed it, whispered it to myself and posited it in public places. I warbled it and choked on it, laughed about it and wept over it.

I returned home laughing and sobbing. I could no longer keep the floodgates closed: The things of the world, massive and minuscule, tragic and preposterous, came coursing into my consciousness: giant squids and chihuahuas arrived, death camps and Dollywood arose, diamonds and Skiddles were proffered, world-destroying comets and blue snow cones hurdled through deep space, while killing sprees and hand jobs, inspired exchanges and insipid palaver, grace and goofiness transpired on earth as always.

My wife found me in this state, both yearning and mortified, hungry and queasy, desperate for solitude and yet longing to be touched.

She reached for me as the two fronts within me met, merging the moist breeze of the tropics and the cold wind of the Arctic ... creating pelting hail and huge, warm raindrops ... engendering weeping and caressing -- as inundating sorrow mingled with torrents of desire.

All the while, I was stammering, "awful, awful, awful," but the pleasure struck me momentarily monosyllabic and only an ecstatic "A-W-E" issued from me.

Shuddering ... awestruck, awfully grateful, I collapsed onto her -- awed by the sublime of our simpatico breathing -- awed by the soft light of scented candles lambent upon her skin --awed by her generosity in faking her own orgasm concurrent with my own (sometimes there is surpassing grace in such small, selfless lies).

And of equal importance: awed by all the awful things that waited outside of our room that I resolved I would try to endure and transmute into song.

As I drifted towards sleep, I said Kaddish for my convictions. I dreamed my lips left impressions traced in ash. Braille sheet-music caressed me from the breeze of an electric fan. All of my points of reference floated away from me like transmigrating galaxies. Everything was adrift: mind, sorrows, heart and heavens.

Upon awakening in bed with my wife of many years, I turned to her and asked, "Pardon me, but have we met?"

I fumbled for conversation ... wanting to make a good first impression.

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky." --Rainer Maria Rilke

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
--Rainer Maria Rilke

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/

An economy without any real energy for ordinary Americans, unemployment that is more like 20 percent rather than the official 10 percent figure, two enormously costly and useless wars and a regulatory system that has allowed corporations to decimate our natural environment and financial system. All these and much more justify voting out nearly all incumbents.

So what will happen? Will the tea party movement produce election results that throw out incumbents? Will angry Americans across the political spectrum have the courage to reject their own members of the House and Senate that are incumbents? Or will people succumb to the well financed campaigns of incumbent Democrats and Republicans, believe all the campaign lies and keep reelecting incumbents as they have done for a very long time?

Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that from 1964 through 2008, incumbents in the House of Representatives averaged a 93 percent re-election rate; members of the Senate averaged 83 percent. Will 2010 really be different?

Some people think so. How interesting that 2010 is clearly the year of the challenger with roughly 2,300 non-incumbent candidates seeking to fill 471 open congressional seats this year, more than any year since the mid-1970s. Even more interesting is that there are nearly twice as many Republican candidates seeking office as Democrats.

Various recent polls show strong public interest in voting out incumbents. A CNN poll found 47 percent of the public is more likely to vote for a challenger rather than an incumbent running for re-election at the federal, state or local level. An earlier poll by ABC News/Washington Post found just a third of registered voters were inclined to re-elect their representatives to congress. And a Harris Interactive poll found that half of Americans (49%) say almost everyone in Congress, including their representative, should be thrown out.

The newest poll results are even more intriguing. In a USA Today/Gallup poll out days ago, 6 in 10 registered voters say they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress than for one who has. This sentiment rises to about 7 in 10 independents and Republicans, but is shared by just about 4 in 10 Democrats, who are seeking to maintain their Congressional majority. Just 32 percent of voters in the poll say most members of Congress deserve re-election, while 63 percent say they do not - one of the worst levels in Gallup polls dating to 1992. And while more, 50 percent, say their own representative deserves to be re-elected, that too is near the all-time low that Gallup has recorded.

But will voter action in the coming elections follow these sentiments?

The first good news is that there have been five failed attempts by incumbents this year to win their party's primary nomination.

Does American democracy have any legitimacy and vitality? We will know after the mid-term elections. If there is no marked reduction in winning incumbents, then the answer is a depressing NO. And that reality will signify that elections no longer offer the opportunity to improve our nation.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

What can Americans do? They can join Friends of the Article V Convention, the only national nonpartisan group with the single mission of compelling Congress to call the first convention. This group has performed admirably to better inform Americans about the Article V convention option and, even more importantly, about the refusal by Congress to obey the Constitution, recognize over 700 applications from all 50 states for a convention, and act as required by their oath of office by convening the first convention. Even today more state legislators are calling for a convention. FOAVC has done what neither Congress or any other group has done; it has made state applications for a convention publicly available as well as countless other materials to broaden public support for a convention.

And now Americans seeing the need for deep reforms of our political and government system and fed up with the two-party plutocracy that has not delivered them have a second opportunity.

They can join the Convention USA effort and become state delegates to an online virtual convention that will behave like a real Article V convention until Congress does its constitutional duty and convenes the first Article V convention. This is a test drive of a real Article V convention, showing how serious citizens can behave intelligently and responsibly to conceive constitutional amendments as the means intended by the Founders to update and improve our Constitution and create an even more perfect union.

This is what the new group says:

"Here you will find a gathering of patriotic citizens who have assembled, not as revolutionaries, but as loyal Americans, to exercise their right as guaranteed by Article V of the Constitution of the United States, to convene as the people of the several States and to consider, debate, refine and propose such amendments to the Constitution as the experience of more than two centuries of government in our Federal Republic shall suggest.

This Convention shall be called to order if and when delegates from two-thirds of the several states shall have registered, and shall adjourn sine die whenever the Congress shall have called a Convention pursuant to Article V of the Constitution of the United States."

This action is what makes more sense than ever before: Put aside partisan views, loss of confidence in government, and feelings of despair. Do not assume that some victories of anti-establishment candidates in elections will suffice to reform the system. Stay focused on your deep seated desire to make the US political and government system better, more just, more honest, more open, more effective and more efficient. Recognize that, if you honor and respect the Constitution, unless you support using the Article V convention option given to us by the Founders you are a constitutional hypocrite.

Convention USA understands that it does not have the legal power to actually propose amendments that have the same meaning as those proposed by Congress or an actual Article V convention. But it sees the potential power of bringing Americans together to see how a convention can make democracy work better to advance the most noble goals and values of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. What it accomplishes can also send an important message to Congress about the kinds of amendments Americans support.

Convention USA, therefore, is a lot more than mere protest. It offers a unique path to become much better informed about the benefits of using the Article V convention approach to making the USA all that it should and can be. To become a delegate, however, requires payment of $10 a month, something I wish the group would rethink.

The more members this group attracts, the more that Congress will find it difficult to ignore their constitutional responsibility to obey Article V. And with strong participation from people in many states even the mainstream media might take notice. One thing will surely become clear as Convention USA becomes fully operational: Congress fears many kinds of constitutional amendments that would truly reform our corrupt and dysfunctional political and government system, which explains why they have refused to convene the first Article V convention. Fear the status quo, not using the Article V convention option the Founders gave us.

Those opposing using the convention option are selfishly protecting their ability to work within the current corrupt, money-driven system to advance their objectives. Such opponents are not true American patriots. They use lies and disinformation to instill unjustified fears, like nonsense about a runaway convention. Remember this: An Article V convention can only propose amendments that sill must be ratified by three-quarters of the states, and it does not have the constitutional power to write a whole new Constitution. What Congress and opponents fear we the people should passionately embrace.

Take a serious look at the facts about the Article V convention issue and at the Convention USA effort.

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com; he is a co-founder of Friends of the Article V Convention.]

How will the news of the future be distributed? The jury is still out, but not completely. Increasingly, we are driven to believe that the future will be paperless. Some argue that the "paper" will be taken out of the "newspaper" within a few years. Their logic might have come across as far-fetched in the late 1990s, but it can hardly be dismissed in 2010.

Two American intellectuals added their voices to the chorus of those predicting that the print media would not continue to define the news for long. In October 2009, Leonard Downie Jr., vice president at large and former executive editor of The Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, professor of Communication at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, co-authored a 98-page paper entitled, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism."

Here, they made the assertion that: "Newspapers and television news are not going to vanish in the foreseeable future ... But they will play diminished roles in an emerging and still rapidly changing world of digital journalism, in which the means of news reporting are being re-invented, the character of news is being reconstructed, and reporting is being distributed across a greater number and variety of news organizations, new and old."

The idea is not a new one. In August 24, 2006, The Economist published an article entitled, "Who killed the newspaper?," which claimed that, "Of all the 'old' media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in America, Western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades ... in the past few years the Web has hastened the decline."

While we freely refer to the digital media revolution as "new media," few dare classify print newspapers as "old." The Economist did, nearly four years ago. Considering the speed at which the digital media world is moving -- with the introduction of new gadgets and the level of Internet penetration throughout the world -- print papers are now most definitely old and aging.

The magazine also made an interesting reference to Philip Meyer, whose works include, "Precision Journalism: A Reporter's Introduction to Social Science Methods and Newspaper Ethics in the New Century: A Report to the American Society of Newspaper Editors."

In his most recent book, "The Vanishing Newspaper," Meyer calculates that "the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition."

More, digital media are making waves not just in the constant improvement of news and information technology, but also influencing the level of trust readers have in the new media. Indeed, it is not just about how the news is conveyed -- digitally or on paper -- but how our perception of the news is changing altogether.

American intellectual and best-selling author John Mearsheimer didn't neglect to refer to the Internet in one of the most important and honest assessments on "The Future of Palestine." In his recent speech, he stated that "The Internet is a game changer. It not only makes it easy for the opponents of apartheid to get the real story out to the world, but it also allows Americans to learn the story that the New York Times and the Washington Post have been hiding from them."

Those familiar with the book Manufacturing Consent, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky understand well that traditional media coverage of news is largely determined by "filters" which allow competing interests to determine what we read and watch, and thus our perception of the world. The Internet, despite all its shortcomings, is much more equitable and democratic. That should not discount the fact that poorer countries still do not have the kind of Internet availability, speed and access that is common and widespread in the developed world. But the fact that an online community newspaper has a fighting chance, like any other mainstream newspaper, is certainly worth celebrating as an achievement.

There is also another reason why we will continue to go digital, and why it will only be a matter of years before the pendulum turns in favor of paperless media world.

The latest Climate Change conference in Copenhagen failed to set limits on carbon emissions or to come up with any serious or binding agreements. It was a colossal disappointment. But that failure was political more than scientific. Very few still argue that global warming is a hoax, or believe that the environment is sustainable, considering our long-unchecked way of life. More, recycling is no longer a fad. Some countries are debating laws that make recycling mandatory, and to punish violators. Considering all of this, it is difficult to imagine that years from now we will continue to use and discard newspapers so readily, as if the paper on which news is printed doesn't come from trees, and as if discarded papers don't constitute landfill.

Bob Dylan continues to be right. "The Times They Are a-Changin." And it's time that we also appreciate that change, not resist it; work with it, not against it. There is no shame in embracing change. When the first commercially successful trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was completed in July 1866, some must have thought that humanity had reached the zenith of achievements as far as the field of communications was concerned. Now telegraphs are only found in museums and are coveted collectors' items. Instead, hundreds of millions of people routinely and conveniently send texts, sounds, images and videos through their cell phones without much fuss or excitement. Although the concept is still the same, the medium has changed dramatically.

The same can be said about news. The news industry will never die; in fact, in a globalized and interconnected world, we will seek news more than ever before. But the medium will inevitably change, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. It is telling that the most featured and best-selling item from Amazon.com is the Kindle digital reader, and that iPad has been topping news related to publishing technology all around the world.

The Times They Are a-Changin'. And we'd better change accordingly.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

Fearful politicians have given citizens in relatively few states and local governments the right to recall government officials. A most memorable and recent recall was the governor of California, Gray Davis, in 2003.

Direct voting to recall government officials is a prime example of direct democracy. The action may be called a recall election or a recall referendum. It is needed when representative democracy fails the public. Which most Americans definitely think is the case for Congress.

Only eighteen states allow recall of state officials. Specific grounds for recall are required in only eight states. Eleven states allow recall of judicial officials. In at least 29 states (some sources place this number at 36), recall elections may be held in local jurisdictions. Three-fourths of recall actions in the US are at the city council or school board level.

Here are some other recent successful recalls.

1983 recall efforts of two Michigan state senators
1988 recall of Oregon state legislator
1995 recall of two California Assembly members
2002 recall of mayor of Flint, Michigan.
2002 recall of multiple Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, elected county officials
2003 recall of Wisconsin State Senator
2005 recall of mayor of Spokane, Washington.
2006 recall of mayor of Roosevelt, New Jersey

In 1988, Arizona voters filed enough signatures to trigger a recall election for Governor Evan Mecham, but he was impeached by the state's House of Representatives before the date of the scheduled recall election.

In some places the successor to a recalled official is elected at the same time, others in a special election afterwards and in others by appointment.

Right now there is no way to recall federal officials. Don't you think it is time to change this? If you do, then understand that there must be a constitutional amendment and clearly Congress will never propose such an amendment.

What is the alternative? The Founders gave us the path to such reform. They gave us the option in Article V of a convention of state delegates that has the same power as Congress to propose constitutional amendments. Learn about it at Friends of the Article V Convention website, and learn why Congress has refused to obey the Constitution and give us the convention that over 700 applications from all 50 states have asked for.

Recall should be seen as a serious alternative to voting federal incumbents out of office. This has never worked to any significant degree for a host of reasons, despite serious attempts to vote out congressional incumbents. Prime among them is that once in office members of Congress become addicted to power and corrupted by money used to stay in office.

What about term limits? This sounds good, but here too many people once in office may do things that the public condemns while still within their allowed terms. Better to have them fearful of being recalled rather than not being reelected. Also note that impeachment and criminal prosecution are difficult legal processes to remove an official from office. Usually it is incompetence, dishonesty and nonresponsiveness to constituents that angers people.

There is probably more discussion now about constitutional amendments than in a very long time. But, oddly, those who seek true reforms seem oblivious to the enormous power of the recall option. Think about it. We the people should have the sovereign right to fire federal officials, especially members of Congress, but even the President and Supreme Court Justices. That way they are more likely to respect the Constitution and really listen to we the people, rather than the corporate and other special interests that feed them big money so they can keep telling us big lies. If we don't get the power to fire bad government officials, then future generations will pay a very, very high price.

Don't be a constitutional hypocrite. Support using the Article V convention option. Let your members of Congress know that you want one. Let everyone know you support having the recall option for federal officials. If all government officials work for us, then we need the constitutional right to fire them. If you want to take back your country from the rich and powerful, then recall power is needed. Power to the people!

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

Okay, it would have been much preferred to avoid using the term constitutional convention and, instead, use Article V convention, because the language in Article V clearly limits a convention to amendments and prevents a wholesale rewriting of the constitution. Still, the article focused repeatedly on a most important theme that the public urgently needs to fully understand: There really is no remotely possible scenario of a runaway convention that would do terrible damage to the Constitution, either from the left or right. Thank You Mr. LeMunyon.

LeMunyon did a masterful job of clarifying how the difficult job of ratifying any amendments proposed by a convention would have to get accepted by a large number of state legislative houses, with many controlled by Democrats and others by Republicans. Indeed, the state ratification requirement gives the safety net that sensible Americans must see as removing all fears of a damaging runaway convention. Why is this so important? Because convention opponents, mostly on the right, have for many years used the runaway convention argument to instill public fears about using the constitutional option of an Article V convention. It has made all those supposedly constitution-loving conservatives nothing more than constitutional hypocrites. With all their angry rhetoric about the many harms of the uncontrolled federal government they, nevertheless, have not seen what so many others, like LeMunyon, have seen: Using the Article V convention option is necessary to rein in Washington and all of the status quo corruption in the two-party plutocracy. Thank You Mr. LeMunyon.

Rather than fear a convention of state delegates, people must fully appreciate that, as stated by LeMunyon, "Congress is in a state of serious disrepair and cannot fix itself." Clearly Congress fears a convention, and what Congress fears we the people urgently need: the first Article V convention. The one major point not presented in the article is that, with over 700 applications from all 50 states, the one and only constitutional requirement for a convention has been met, but Congress has refused to obey the Constitution. So, state legislators like LeMunyon keep proposing new state legislation to submit still more applications for a convention. Until recently the whole historic set of state applications were not even made easily available for public scrutiny. Not by Congress or anyone else, until the nonpartisan Friends of the Article V Convention did so and made them available on their website.

Regardless of all the sound information and arguments given by LeMunyon, his highly visible article has stimulated considerable negative, anti-convention writings on many right wing websites. This, despite the logic that there is so much more to fear and oppose than a convention. All this irrational and irresponsible fear-mongering merits careful thought. Exactly why do so many people who profess love and respect for the Founders and the Constitution keep opposing using what the Founders knew we would have to use when the public lost trust in the federal government? Why do these anti-convention people ignore what LeMunyon correctly noted? There have been hundreds of state constitutional conventions that did not wreck states.

The baseless harangues by anti-convention screamers only act to maintain the political status quo and perpetuate the fiction that elections can succeed in sending enough radically different people to Congress and the White House to really reform and fix our nation. These people want to preserve their own organizations as means to oppose and fix the political and government system. They want to protect and retain their own perceived power and influence. They have had enough time and failed. Now it is time to use the Article V convention option.

Thank You Mr. LeMunyon for making the case that only constitutional amendments have any hope of making systemic changes to fix the corrupt, inefficient and outright dysfunctional federal government. Power to the states!

[Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.]

At the ages of six and four, my girls Zarefah and Iman were already the most kindhearted kids. They were actually going through complete and unmitigated panic, as they had just noticed the starfish which had been cast off by the waves and which were now dotting the shoreline as far as the eye could see. The children became determined to place every single one of them back in the water before they died.

But most all of them were already dead.

My kids didn't know this. And I didn't have the courage to break the dreadful news. I stood in silence, proud to the core, as the girls' shaky voices urged everyone around them to help. Then I too was summoned. "Dad, what are you waiting for? Please help us before they all die." I tried to absolve myself from what seemed to me a waste of time. But when I saw the tears in Zarefah's eyes, and heard the fright in her voice, I joined in - as enthusiastically as the many other beachgoers-turned-environmentalists.

Four years later, in 2008, both Zarefah and Iman voted for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. They were ten and eight, so their votes didn't count. It was a mockup election at their elementary school in the little town of Bothell in Washington State. One of their teachers told me that she was "very surprised to see how much support Nader has in our school." It was well beyond the national average. In the same way the girls had urged everyone to save the starfish of the South China Sea, they now relentlessly campaigned for Ralph Nader among their peers. Their main argument was: Ralph Nader has done so much work to save American lives, and both Obama and McCain would enact policies that would take away many innocent lives - of Americans and non-Americans alike. Unaware of the power of corporations and the pro-Israel lobby, the classmates voted for Nader in droves. In the end, the true American hero - at least as far as our family is concerned - tied with McCain, but lost to Obama. Even children can be swept by the "audacity of hope" fever. Now, like many of their parents, they have probably realized what a folly that decision was. My kids still say to their friends, "If only you voted Nader..."

Zarefah and Iman have always worked tirelessly for what they believed in. They once made an arrangement with a local food bank, which involved devoting part of their weekend to collecting canned food in front of the local grocery store. "Hi Daddy," they would scream in exhilaration as I drove in to pick them up. "Look how much food we got!" Then they would point at two huge shopping carts overflowing with tuna cans and baby food.

A few months ago, Iman somberly and sorrowfully walked away from her Girl Scout troops. They had been asked to raise money to send cookies to US soldiers in Iraq for Christmas. "When they leave Iraqis alone, I will buy them all the cookies they want," Iman insisted. Despite her principled decision, she cried intermittently for days. As an alternative, the girls decided to help their mother organize several fundraisers to raise funds for KinderUSA and Palestine Children's Relief Fund. Gaza children urgently need food and medical treatment, and Zarefah and Iman have risen to the occasion.

Now they are busily pondering this whole Earth Hour craze. I am sure that the lights of our house will be turned off for an hour on the last Saturday of March. The girls are unlikely to be satisfied by this, however. I can imagine Zarefah's argument, which is likely to be seconded by Iman, or the other way around. She is likely to claim that World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) intended the hour to symbolize what ordinary people can do to save the environment; that it's not enough for one iconic building in a city to shut off its lights while others stay lit. I am likely to agree, and they are likely to campaign among their peers - especially those who regretfully failed to vote Nader - to urge their families to also turn off the lights for an hour on March 27.

For the time being, Zarefah is busily fundraising for a cancer research facility in Washington. A friend of hers, a beautiful boy of the same age, is succumbing to an aggressive form of cancer. After years battling the disease, the boy chose not to be subjugated to any more painful, and at this point, futile treatment. His friends are devastated. Zarefah told me through tears that she was throwing a party aimed at showing their love and solidarity with the kid, and also raising funds for cancer research. She spent a whole day on the phone calling for action. I pledged two hundred dollars; others even more.

No, Zarefah and Iman don't take on lost causes. And they don't take on easy causes either. They understand that to make a difference one has to start somewhere, and this entails action at the level of the individual - no matter how seemingly limited her or his capacity. As we drove away from the South China Sea, close to midnight over five years ago, both girls fell asleep almost immediately. They were exhausted, and smelled of fish and salt. That day they had "saved" hundreds of starfish. And yet, thousands more were left behind. I had only managed to tear them away from their urgent task by promising to return with them the very next day, first thing in the morning, to save the rest. And we did.

But I am yet to break the news to them that Ralph Nader is unlikely to run for another presidential election.

Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is, "The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle" (Pluto Press, London) and his forthcoming book is, "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), which is now available for pre-orders at Amazon..

Check out this short film (in English and Arabic) about my latest book: My Father was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.

In a white-dominated world, that may seem counterintuitive. In the racial arena, what do we white people have to be afraid of?

There are lots of things to fear in this world, of course; race is not the only aspect of life in which people face injustice and inequality. A majority of people of all colors (including working-class and poor whites) struggles economically in a predatory corporate capitalist system, and all women, regardless of race, cope with gender discrimination and the threat of sexual violence in a male-dominated world.

But what fears could white people have as white people?

Understanding the fears behind the racial politics of both conservative and liberal whites can help guide strategy for changing a society in which wealth and well-being are still tied to race. And make no mistake, there is still a racialized gap between white and non-white America on measures of wealth and well-being--income, home ownership, graduation rates, access to health care, infant mortality, etc. In fact, the gap between white and black America on some of these measures is greater today than in the immediate aftermath of the major legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, and on some measures the rate of improvement is so glacial that it will be decades, if not centuries, before we reach equality. The legislative achievements that ended legal apartheid in America were a great victory, but the economic apartheid that remains is a reminder of our failures.

Put bluntly: The United States abolished a formal apartheid system but remains a white-supremacist society. After more than a decade of writing and speaking about these issues, which has sparked lots of feedback from all political angles, here's what I have concluded about white folks and our fears.

Aren't We Special?

For conservative white people, the dominant fear is of someday living without the privilege that comes with whiteness. Polite conservatives defend the primacy of "Western civilization." More reactionary whites are openly racist about the threat that non-white peoples pose to "our way of life." Both versions defend the existing distribution of wealth and power, even though many of the working-class and poor whites who endorse such views have access to precious little wealth or power. Race is used by white elites today, just as it was in the nation's formative years, to drive a wedge between people who would otherwise come together to challenge those elites. Divide-and-conquer strategies, it seems, never go out of style.

Liberals are quick to denounce both the thinly veiled and the openly reactionary conservative racism. But what of the fears of liberals? White liberals might reject the very idea that they are afraid, citing their support for diversity and multiculturalism. But my experience suggests that while white liberals reject assertions of white supremacy, many fear the loss of white centrality. They are willing to renounce the idea that white people are superior, as long as they are allowed to live comfortably in a world where white is the norm.

In short, both the conservative and liberal positions are based on the same underlying assertion: "I'm white, and I'm special." Conservatives are more likely to say it openly, while liberals tend to offer platitudes about racial justice while avoiding the risks required to make good on anti-racist principles.

What remains obscured is the distinctly uncivilized nature that Europeans and European Americans exhibited during their barbarous conquest of much of the world. The inherently fragile sense of white self-importance that emerges from that history is at the core of white fears--at some level, we all know that the truth of the depravity of white supremacy belies claims of white superiority.

In the institutions that adopt the liberal view, diversity is just fine (as long as whites remain in control) and multiculturalism can flourish (as long as white norms remain dominant). Institutions defined by the values and practices rooted in white Europe can open up to non-white people, as long as we white people remain comfortable. In such a white-defined liberal world, "people of color"--abstracted into a single group, erasing the particularity of people--are welcome, even sought after, to prove that we have transcended white supremacy.

Getting Uncomfortable

This analysis of the dynamics of mixed-race settings is hardly original. Non-white people have long recognized that white liberals are happy to engage with folks who aren't white as long as their white-centric worldview isn't threatened, and that white groups are happy to have non-white members as long as the power dynamics don't change.

I observe all this not from some arrogant high ground, but as someone stuck in the same dynamic, struggling to get out. I know that for all my writing and political work on racial justice, I still feel most comfortable in settings where my understanding of the world defines the interaction, no matter the racial composition of the group. Rather than pretend otherwise, I start with that reality and search for ways to move forward.

A first step for me has been to question the value of the seemingly endless "race dialogues" that are popular in white liberal groups. In the pseudo-­therapeutic setting of such dialogues, with more talk about personal healing than about political change, white people are guaranteed that we won't be forced out of a white-defined world. White-dominated institutions--corporations, nonprofits, universities, government agencies--are happy to sponsor such dialogues, diversity trainings, and multicultural events, precisely because they don't threaten the fundamental distribution of wealth and power.

I have been involved in many of those events myself, as a facilitator or a participant, and I have learned from them (typically as much from my failures as successes). The most important lesson I take away is that race dialogues are not enough. As long as we stay confined in a safe world that doesn't challenge power, we guarantee failure--if our goal really is to change the distribution of that power.

There's no easy recipe for this kind of challenge, but we move in the right direction when we seek out places where we don't feel comfortable, looking for relationships in which we can help change the dynamic. For me, that means putting myself in situations where I have to face my fear of being seen--or, more accurately, being seen-through--by non-white people. What if I step into those uncomfortable spaces and non-white people see the ways in which I hang onto some sense of my own supremacy/centrality? What if they see the ways in which I haven't shaken off my racist cultural training?

A desire to confront that fear has led me, over the past year, to organizing efforts with the Workers Defense Project. It's a local group that advocates for workplace justice for immigrant workers, addressing problems such as wage theft within a larger social justice framework.

This project has forced me to cross lines around race and ethnicity, class, language, and age. The members and staff are predominantly Latina/Latino and working class. They speak Spanish and/or English, while I'm monolingual in English, and the leaders of the group include a number of people who are at least two decades younger than me.

The collaboration between WDP and the Third Coast Activist Resource Center (a predominantly white group to which I belong) to buy and renovate a building for a progressive community center has gone forward with explicit conversations about all these differences and how they affect decision-making. The trust necessary to move forward has been built slowly over time, and I'm aware that the WDP staff and members are watching for signs that we are serious about establishing a truly egalitarian relationship.

As tricky as this Latina/Latino-white collaboration can be, we also recognize that a successful community center with progressive politics cannot leave out African Americans, the third largest racial group in Austin. That means not just casting around for some black people to add to the mix, but engaging in serious discussions with people from that part of the community to find out what kinds of collaborations are needed and possible. Austin is a white-dominated city, but that's no guarantee that black and Latina/Latino groups will automatically come together; such alliances have to be built as carefully as any other. For us white folks in the mix, our contribution is to use the resources we have to aid in that process--not trying to control it, but also not pretending to be detached.

While there is a lot of dialogue necessary in this work, the dialogue is focused on a common goal: to provide office space for organizers, rehearsal space for artists, meeting space for the community, and a place for people to get to know each other. That common goal doesn't mean we will naturally, or easily, put aside differences, but it means we all have a tangible stake in our collective success.

My interest in this project flows from moral and political principles--a belief in the dignity of all and the struggle to eliminate hierarchy in all forms. But I would be naïve or dishonest if I pretended that was my only, or even my most powerful, motive. In the end, I have committed to this project out of selfishness--I would like to claim my full humanity before I check out of this world. To do that, I have to move beyond the framework of conservative versus liberal and adopt a truly radical politics.

I have a choice: I can be white--that is, I can refuse to challenge white supremacy or centrality--or I can be a human being. I can rest comfortably in the privileges that come with being white, or I can struggle to be fully human. But I can't do both. Though the work is difficult, the choice for those of us who are white should be easy.

Robert JensenRobert Jensen wrote this article for America: The Remix, the Spring 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Robert, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, is author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege and his latest, All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice. He is co-producer of the new documentary Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing. Contact information and articles at uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen.

Joe Bageant, a man after my own heart who's hunkering down in rural Mexico making tortillas, pens a scathing article, "Americans Are 'Hope Fiends' Because Honestly Looking At The Present Situation Would Destroy Just About Everything We Hold As Reality". In it he states that hope is political pablum for an infantilized nation. He too, reluctantly voted for Obama because he thought Obama just had to be better than Bush, but now Joe is crying on his tortillas and saying things like, "Hope is magical thinking, believing that somehow, some larger unknown force is in motion to set things right."

And a journalist for whom I hold the greatest respect, Robert Jensen, writes an article on getting rid of "hope" and "faith", inspired by his interview of Abe Osheroff, long-time activist and documentary film maker. It opens with a short vignette by Jensen:

After a recent talk about the struggle for social justice and the threats to the ecosystem, a student lingered, waiting to talk to me alone, as if he had something to confess.

"I feel so overwhelmed," he finally said, wondering aloud if political organizing could really make a difference. The young man said he often felt depressed, not about the circumstances of his own life but about the possibilities for change. Finally, he looked at me and asked, "Once you see what's happening -- I mean really see it -- how are you supposed to act like everything is going to be OK?"

Boy do I know this one. I lived with it regularly as a professor of college history and psychology as I laid out in molten lava the state of the world which they had been programmed to ignore while drowning in the propaganda of realizing the American dream through getting a college education.

Jensen proceeds in the article to talk about how unacceptable it is among progressives to be anything less than upbeat. And he continues:

Some organizers respond to such concerns with upbeat assurances that if we just get more people on board and work a little bit harder, the problems will be solved -- if not tomorrow, certainly within some reasonable period of time. I used to say things like that, but now I think it's more honest, and potentially effective, to acknowledge how massive the obstacles that need to be overcome really are. We must not only recognize that the world's resources distributed in a profoundly unjust way and the systems in which we live are fundamentally unsustainable ecologically, but also understand there's no guarantee that this state of affairs can be reversed or even substantially slowed down. There are, in fact, lots of reasons to suspect that many of our fundamental problems have no solutions, at least no solutions in any framework we currently understand.

Some have challenged me: Why give in to such despair? My response: If honest emotional responses based on rational assessments lead committed activists to feel despair, why try to bury that? It's better to grapple with those emotions and assessments than to respond with empty platitudes.

The damage to the ecosystem may mean that a large-scale human presence on the planet cannot continue much longer. The obsession with self-interest cultivated by capitalism may be so deeply woven into the fabric of contemporary identity that real solidarity in affluent societies is no longer possible. The deskilling and dependency that comes with a high-energy/high-technology society has eroded crucial traditional skills. Mass-media corporations have eroticized violence and commodified intimacy at an unprecedented level, globally.

None of this is crazy apocalypticism, but rather a sober assessment of the reality around us. Rather than deny the despair that flows from that assessment, we need to find a way to deal with it.

Jensen cites a couple of gems from Osheroff that must not be dismissed, such as, "But personally, I'm not hopeful because I think hope is a kind of religion, and religions don't work. If you're hopeful you're going to suffer disappointments, whether it's politics or your personal life. You can care about things, you can want things to happen, you can work to make things happen without being hopeful." Make things happen without hope?

So now we come down to the crux of the issue: What is the definition of "hope"? For an answer to this question, I'm reminded of James Howard Kunstler's incessant vitriol about hope. After he has thoroughly bashed the notion of hope, he usually moderates a bit and defines it as something that comes from within the person, rather than from the exterior. Similarly, in Jensen's interview of Osheroff, the latter notes the capacity of humans to be decent, kind, and compassionate. I've noted this as well in my 2009 review of Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster in which the author emphasizes that in crisis situations, humans more often tend to cooperate rather than resort to violent or destructive behavior.

I want to underscore this because I am repeatedly called "pessimistic", "fear-mongering", or my very favorite, "cynical." The latter is my favorite because I like to point out that the word "cynic" actually comes from a Greek word that referred to a dog chewing a bone for hours non-stop, the point being that the cynics in ancient Greece held onto an idea and "chewed" it incessantly until everyone except their fellow cynics were sick of them. Why is this important to me? Because the real cynics, in my opinion, are those joined at the hip with "hope" who refuse to look more deeply into the psychological and political history of a candidate like Barack Obama and as a result, are flummoxed in 2010 that he has become the reincarnation of George W. Bush, Jr. As I've said before, it's the "high definition" definition of insanity-following the same pattern which yields negative results ad infinitum but expecting that the next time, the result will be different.

And then there's "faith" which is a cousin to hope and also a cousin to religion. Faith is usually about violating one's rational mind in order to feel better or to appease the gods or some tyrannical human authority figure. It is erroneously used synonymously with "trust"-erroneous because trust is about relationship whereas faith is about obedience. Therefore, I must agree with Bageant that it is indeed infantilizing.

So what is the cure for hope and faith?

The first aspect of the cure, quite simply, is total honesty. The statements by Hedges, Jensen, Osheroff, and Bageant, are replete with white-hot honesty. And whenever we get brutally honest, we are confronted with emotions-most of which are unpleasant. That said, let's start with the most basic reality of all: Industrial civilization is in the process of collapsing which means that as a result, there is absolutely no return to normal, and our lives are also in the process of being permanently altered.

Recently, two subscribers to my website's news digest reported that when they took my book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse to their local public libraries to ask the libraries to order a free copy, the response was, "We just simply can't have a book like this in our collection." This is the response one might hear upon requesting that the libraries include pornography in their collections. Is my book pornographic? Yes! In this culture at this moment, naming and understanding the reality of the collapse of civilization is nothing less than pornographic in the minds of infantilized Americans.

And one even witnesses the empire-programmed addiction to hope in the most well-intentioned activists. Hope is not the same as having a vision, but I believe we must be cautious about confusing the two. As my readers know, I am deeply involved in the Transition movement which offers a vision of a positive future, but that vision will only become real as a result of our commitment to make it happen. Moreover, any vision of a positive future must be open to addressing and feeling the feelings around the consequences that so few wish to contemplate, namely, that the human race is committing suicide.

If we are willing to think with much more adult minds than the two library staff persons mentioned above, and if we are willing to grapple with the reality of collapse, with what attitude, mindset, or sensibility do we persevere in the face of it? And...is persevering the most important issue? If it isn't, what is?

I submit that after honesty comes the willingness to accept reality. That means stopping all pretense and delusion that we can prevent collapse. News flash: Collapse now has a life of its own, and I am convinced that whether it's 10 million activists in the streets of every country on earth or the hundredth monkey principle on steroids, collapse is an inevitable part of our future. It cannot be prevented because it is well underway. It has its own trajectory and its own velocity, but it can be slowed, and the effects can be lessened.

However, before we get distracted by how to slow it down, we need to deal with the next quandary which is much less appealing, namely, our despair. As Jensen states above, rather than deny or minimize our despair, we need to find a way to deal with it. But if you can't take a Joanna Macy "Despair and Empowerment" workshop, what can you do?

You can certainly read my book, Sacred Demise and complete all the exercises in it, but you can also read poetry, make art and music; you can not only talk about your feelings about collapse with other people, but talk about your values and priorities-what is important to you, what is your individual purpose in life, what is your shared purpose together? And of course you can keep doing what you're already probably doing if you're reading this article-getting deeply involved in your community to help it become resilient and self-sufficient.

Above all, you need to spend a significant chunk of time every day-I suggest a half hour twice a day-in contemplation. If you have a meditation practice, wonderful. If not, develop one. It should be a time of stillness and restoration. It should be a time of listening to the inner wisdom of the soul/psyche-a time when thoughts and feelings are not censored but simply allowed and witnessed-and perhaps later, journaled about. While it is true that no one can navigate collapse alone, it is also true that while navigating it, the relationship with oneself may be the most crucial of all.

Civilization has robbed us of an inner life to such an extent that most people in this culture are terrified of or perplexed by the notion of one. Yet no matter how many gorgeous organic gardens we can grow, no matter how much food and water we can store, no matter how much we re-skill ourselves, no matter how many dialog circles we sit in, no matter how well we raise our chickens, if we don't have an inner life, then we are perilously at risk of emotional and mental breakdown when the daunting stress of collapse is in our faces, and we won't be able to answer the most important question as we navigate it: Who am I and who do I want to be during this incredibly challenging time?

Finally, I highly recommend my upcoming online course "Navigating The Coming Chaos" at the Post Peak Living website which runs from April 24-May 15, and there is a significant discount for early registration. This course is an ideal venue for applying all of the options stated above and more.

In any event, it's time to become discerning, pro-active adults-forsaking our "hope" and "faith" in people and distant forces outside us to do for us what we can only do for ourselves and with others of like heart and mind whom we love and trust. The abject betrayal that most progressives in this nation are currently experiencing confirms that any hope that comes from outside us will most likely result in a force to be reckoned with that is much worse than the one our "hope" was intended to avoid.

I was inspired to focus on Kathleen because she is a friend and because I had firsthand awareness of her passionate commitment to a local cause-a commitment that shared by a small community of activists, has now made an enormous difference not only for Vermonters, but for all of New England and perhaps the rest of the country also.

In fact, in an article "David vs. Goliath Vermont Style", Charlotte Dennett, who ran for Attorney General in Vermont in 2008 stated on February 26:

A driving snowstorm could not keep Vermonters away from the statehouse in Montpelier yesterday as the Vermont Senate convened a historic debate and then voted on the future of the state's aging nuclear power plant.

Some 1300 people - most of them standing before live video coverage outside the small, overcrowded Senate chamber -- listened to several hours of respectful debate that even included the proposition of building a new nuclear power plant in Vermont as per President Obama's pro-nuclear agenda. But when it was all over, senators from both parties resoundingly voted against a last-minute amendment for a new plant to replace the old one, and similarly defeated re-licensure of Vermont Yankee in 2012 by a vote of 26 to 4. Amidst cheers, clapping and hugs from the victors, it was clearly another Vermont moment for a state that prides itself on being cutting edge on social, political and environmental issues. As the only state in the nation that by statute allows its legislature to decide whether to re-license a nuclear power plant, the vote is likely to have wide-reaching ramifications, including for residents of Massachusetts who live near the Vermont Yankee plant.

I caught up with Kathleen by phone on the day of the Senate's historic vote and she graciously gave me this interview. 

Kathleen, please tell us what motivated you initially to begin organizing for the closure of Vermont Yankee.

In my work, I am standing on the shoulders of many anti-nuclear activists who have worked tirelessly over the years fighting a corrupt nuclear industry that cares more about its proliferation than the health of the people who are affected.

Last week's vote against the relicensing of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant near Brattleboro is considered historic because it has allowed the voices of Vermont people to be heard through their elected leaders who voted against allowing Vermont Yankee to continue past its expected lifetime of 2012. It has allowed the people to say what Entergy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have been doing: Allowing contamination of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and that is not acceptable. The NRC has never said no to the nuclear industry, and I feel that the NRC is corrupt and is in collusion with the industry, allowing aging nuclear power plants numerous license amendments and exemptions from safety testing over the years.

What specific research did you do on the medical dangers of Vermont Yankee? Tell us a bit about what you discovered.

 As a registered nurse and after many years of working in the medical profession, I am acutely aware of the health and environmental dangers that make people sick. Myself a breast cancer survivor, I have watched over the years as the incidence of breast cancer continues to increase with nobody asking the right questions. One out of 13 women got breast cancer when I was first diagnosed in 1984. Today the incidence is one woman out of eight. What is that about? Passionately wanting to protect my family and my community, I have committed myself to the crusade to stop the relicensing of what my research revealed: that thyroid cancer, a marker for radiation exposure was on the rise in women not only in Vermont but across the country.

Although I am only one of hundreds of Vermonters against Yankee I was irate when the Vermont Department of Public Health re-wrote Vermont's radiation protection regulations weakening the laws to allow Vermont Yankee an uprate in 2006 which also allowed greater amounts of radioactive contaminants to be emitted from the site. The ionizing radiation to which people are exposed as a result of Vermont Yankee's operations is a known human carcinogen. No dose is without risk, and the best science today tells us that even very low doses of radiation pose a risk over a person's lifetime.

The NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who are in charge of radiation protection are still using standards that do not take into account the differences in susceptibility to radiation-induced cancer, with women facing a risk about 50 percent higher than men while the risk for children is several times higher. What is happening to the health of women and children is not being captured in national or state health statistics because the data being publicized on men and women is condensed and aggregated over 5 years so that the public health significance is being lost. It is a national issue because the Center for Disease Control (CDC) does not have jurisdiction over the NRC. Nobody does. The NRC is charged with protecting the public, but all we see here in Vermont is the NRC protecting the industry that pays their salaries 

Tell us what else motivates you.

I have been an activist my whole life. My parents instilled in me that it was important to contribute to community life and work toward making this world a better place for the children and generations who come after us. Being political is one way but not the only way. Choices we make, where we live, what we buy, who we support, are all ways we can make a difference. You find your passion. What I am doing to expose the corruption of the NRC and the nuclear industry and its health effects on future generations is mine. 

What specific research did you do on Vermont Yankee? Tell us a bit about what you discovered.

In the United States, the NRC's technical and safety regulations governing nuclear power plants are developed by the private nuclear industry using voluntary consensus standards. The owners of the nuclear power plants, the suppliers and manufacturers who sell the nuclear fuel, as well as the builders of nuclear power plants, are providing the oversight on themselves--policing their own industry just like the banking and financial industry did before their massive taxpayer bailout. Most of those standards in use are outdated but are still in use by the nuclear industry. They would never pass muster today knowing what we know.

Of course, what we know today as far as the effect of radioactive contamination is being ignored. The NRC is allowing radioactive tritium contamination across the country. Tritium caused mutagic effects on DNA especially in the unborn, but the NRC thinks it's OK for the decrepit, aging plants to wash it away in our rivers. That's OK with them, but it's not to the kids or women drinking that water downstream. The NRC tells us it will not harm us and no one has the jurisdiction over them to dispute what they say or are allowed to do.

One of the arguments against voting down Yankee's relicensing was economic. Supporters of Yankee argued that closing the power plant would hurt Vermont economically and cause utility rate increases. Opponents of Yankee argued that closing Yankee would provide an excellent opportunity to enhance the state's economy by investing in renewables and making the state more self-sufficient. Tell us your thoughts on this issue.

Vermont needs jobs but not at the cost of the health of our women children and future generations. Besides, look at all the work they are doing there now digging wells to see if they can make the tritium disappear. Today it's reported that the cesium they found deep in the ground was from Chernobyl.  Believe that one. A nuclear accident from 1986 is still contaminating our soil in Vermont. That does not make me feel any safer. There will be plenty of jobs cleaning up the radioactive contamination at Vermont Yankee. However, the industry is not mandated to clean it up. Besides that, there is nowhere to ship the radioactive waste on site, so Vermont Yankee supporters can work there guarding it for infinity. Vermont wants the site returned to a green field. Let's see what the NRC does about that.

The industry's rhetoric about jobs and such is not trumped by the deceit and lies they have demonstrated, and I believe those are only the tip of the iceberg. It was recently revealed that Neil Sheehan, our NRC spokesman, did not think it was a public concern nor important enough to report to the public that over a million gallons of tritium- laced water was dumped into the Hudson river by Entergy's Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant--the drinking water supply of New York  City! We only find this out because of a whistleblower. If a whistleblower goes to the NRC with a complaint, the NRC does not have to report it to the public. In my opinion, the NRC is deeply corrupted.

I know that you and your family have made some personal changes in lifestyle in order to utilize renewable energy rather than rely on the conventional power grid in Vermont. Can you tell us about those?

Changing one's lifestyle is a personal process that is never finished as there is always more you can do. Reducing our carbon footprint one step at a time is the right choice for us. What we do is personal for us, and everyone needs to be thoughtful to make that commitment. Our biggest commitment is choosing to live in the city of Rutland and help the city survive rough times. We can walk or bike anywhere we need to go. 

I'm also aware that you are passionately committed to your local community of Rutland. You are involved in the local food coop there and in the arts in your town. Tell us more about what you're doing and why you feel it's so important.

Rutland is a city without an interstate so it is not easy to get here. We are surrounded by mountains and farmland, and some of us want to keep it that way. We don't have urban sprawl. We have no buses into the city but we do have Amtrak, and that needs to be seriously upgraded.  Vermont relies heavily on the economic engine of tourism. Many of us rely on the Killington Ski Area and tourism for work even though those are seasonal and minimal wage job opportunities for a relatively well educated population. It is a choice many are making, and we all come together as a community via the local food coop and a year-round farmer's market. Our family is promoting walking gently on the earth with the annual Rutland Long Trail festival coming into its fourth year, celebrated in August in the heart of Rutland. As the city goes, so does the rest of Rutland County, so what we do here is very important. We need to be vigilant in preserving and developing the assets we do enjoy.  

Is there anything else you'd like to tell us about your journey of activism in the past couple of decades or that you'd like to add about Vermont's decision not to relicense Yankee?

This fight is far from over. The people of Vermont through this vote have flexed their muscle. The NRC is put on notice. They are not considered trustworthy. Will they mandate that Entergy clean up its mess and leave Vermont Yankee as a green field? The fight has only begun.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The February 24 decision by the Vermont Senate not to relicense Vermont Yankee was a stunning triumph of activism and local political action by citizens passionately committed to their place and its environment. When we juxtapose it with the paralysis of our pathetically corrupt federal system, it is all the more remarkable. It is testimony to the power of local communities cooperating to defend and protect the integrity of their place, their people, and their land base. I reiterate what I have stated repeatedly: All solutions are local, and if it's not local, it's not a solution.

Kathleen Krevetski lives with her husband Wayne in Rutland, Vermont, and they have come to think of themselves as urban homesteaders. Check our http://www.longtrailfestivalvt.com/ or visit the festival on August 7, 2010

The problem is that Conrad-Gregg and Cooper-Wolf did not come out of nowhere and 'bi-partisan' does not mean what it would normally mean. Instead these bills exist to realize the vision of one man, a man who has founded and lavishly funded a series of 'Bi-Partisan' Institutions and Working Groups whose goals are, at times perhaps unknown to many of the participants in them, explicitly to destroy the crown jewel of the New Deal, that is Social Security, while also doing as much collateral damage to Medicare and Medicaid as possible in the process.

The man and his goal were revealed to the wider world in this important piece by William Grieder in the Nation last March Looting Social Security and was in fact the cover piece which had the result of having Peter G Peterson's face staring at you from the cover. Who is PGP? Well the Grieder article gives you a start, but suffice it to say that you couldn't make him or his career up, it reads more like an over the top conspiracy thriller than anything (though with less special effects and explosions).

For today's purposes let us just start with his role as founder and funder of the Concord Coalition. Like most of PGPs efforts it is cast as a bi-partisan group devoted to fiscal responsibility and typically has titular leaders drawn from both parties. For example if we go to About the Concord Coalition:

The Concord Coalition is a nationwide, non-partisan, grassroots organization advocating generationally responsible fiscal policy. The Concord Coalition was founded in 1992 by the late former Senator Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), former Senator Warren Rudman (R-N.H.), and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson. Former Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Ne.) was named a co-chair of the Concord Coalition in January 2002.

The Concord Coalition is dedicated to educating the public about the causes and consequences of federal budget deficits, the long-term challenges facing America's unsustainable entitlement programs, and how to build a sound economy for future generations.

For PGP and his like-minded colleagues, followers and employees the problem mostly start and stop with 'entitlements', a word whose existence largely owes itself to Peterson to begin with.

The current head of Concord is Robert Bixby and its current main instrument is its Fiscal Wake Up Tour in which Bixby and former Comptroller General David Walker go around the country essentially selling 'Entitlements Crisis'. Now while Walker is invariably described by his former title and so an a more or less neutral observer, he actually has a day job with a somewhat more revealing title: President and CEO of the Peter G Peterson Foundation, itself endowed by PGP with a cool billion (with a 'b') dollars to promote its mission. About the PGPF On this page you will see the smiling faces of PGP himself and Walker and among other things a link to I.O.U.S.A.: the Movie itself a documentary of the Fiscal Wake Up Tour, which the About page proudly reports:

The Foundation awarded the Concord Coalition $1.5 million to expand its highly acclaimed Fiscal Wake-Up Tour, an urgent, bipartisan call for changes to America's fiscal policies in the tradition of Paul Revere.

So lesson one. Anytime you see the names Robert Bixby or David Walker know that you are talking full time employees of the PGP founded Concord Coalition or the Peter G Peterson Foundation. Lesson two. Almost every time you see the buzzwords 'fiscal responsibility', 'bi-partisan' anything, 'intergenerational equity' odds are you are only one or two degrees of separation from a PGP entity or employee.

But what does this have to do with Cooper-Wolf SAFE Commission. Well if we follow the link on the PGPF About page announcing the grant we find the following:

Partners in the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour include The Concord Coalition, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. The Concord Coalition is a 501(c)3 organization focused on promoting federal fiscal responsibility.

What the hell is 'left-leaning' Brookings doing in this mix? Well there is a tale. Back in 2008 Brookings and Heritage announced the formation of their 'Fiscal Seminar' which in time produced the following report Facing Our Fiscal Future (PDF) itself signed by sixteen authors, seven from Brookings, three from similarly 'left leaning' the Urban Institute, and one from the Progressive Policy Institute. Certainly seems bi-partisan. Until you realize that PPI is the creation of signatory Will Marshall and was the prime vehicle for sending Clintonism down the DLC/New Democrat/Third Way which mostly adds up to 'Renouncing FDR and All His Works'. And that a bunch of the Brookings people are similarly Clinton-Rubinista Deficit Hawks like Alice Rivlin and that the Urban Institute people include similarly hawkish former CBO Director Robert Reischauer. Plus among the remaining signatories from the center to right we have Robert Bixby (again), Maya MacGuineas (an author of a draconian Social Security 'reform' plan known as Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick or LMS), and Stuart Butler the author of a detailed plan from 1983 to undermine and kill Social Security under the charming name Social Security Reform: Achieving a "Leninist" Strategy (PDF) which has to be read to be believed.

What do we find if we delve into Facing our Fiscal Future? Unsurprisingly we find a reprise of the central message of the Fiscal Wakeup Tour

The authors of this paper are longtime federal budget and policy experts who have been drawn together by a deep concern about the nation's long-term fiscal outlook. Our group covers the ideological spectrum. We are affiliated with a diverse set of organizations. We have been meeting informally for over a year, under the auspices of The Brookings Institution and The Heritage Foundation, to define the dimensions and consequences of the looming federal budget problem, examine alternative solutions, and reach agreement on what should be done. Despite our diverse philosophies and political leanings, we have found solid common ground. We agree that: • Unsustainable deficits in the federal budget threaten the health and vigor of the American economy. • The first step toward establishing budget responsibility is to reform the budget decision process so that the major drivers of escalating deficits-Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid-are no longer on autopilot.

Once again the "ideological spectrum" means from barely center-left to right, and the only problem that matters is not military spending or regressive taxation, nope everything is the fault of Social Security and Medicare. And what is there solution? One establish a system of triggers that would automatically slash Social Security and Medicare benefits (and so keep Congress's hands clean when and if) or

Alternatively, the trigger process could require that a commission make recommendations for closing the gap to the president and Congress on which an up or down vote must be held.

. I.e. some version of Cooper-Wolf.

Pete G Peterson and associates want to kill Social Security under the guise of 'fiscal responsibility'. And PGP has spent decades founding organizations largely or wholly devoted to that end and committed a billion dollars of his own money to do so. In the days and weeks to come look for the key words, starting not least with 'bi-partisan', and names like Bixby and Walker. These people are paid professional agents of the open conspiracy to roll back the New Deal.

And that ain't paranoia talking. Follow the links.

PGP: the Biography
From the Peter G Peterson Institute for International Economics
Peterson Institute:

Hedge fund billionaire: founder of the Blackstone Group 1985
CEO of Lehman Brothers: 1973-1984
Secretary of Commerce under Nixon
Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, succeeding David Rockefeller
Founder of the Concord Coalition
Founder of the Peter G Peterson Foundation with its $1 billion dollar endowment
Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2000-2004.

Semi-secretive billionaire who served in all these roles? Are you kidding me? There are Bond super-villains who have more plausible resumes than this, somewhere Aureus Goldfinger is whimpering with envy.

The subpoena from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on. (Declan McCullagh, "Justice Dept. Asked for News Site's Visitor Lists," CBS News, November 10, 2009)

Why do I say this? Because Americans are overwhelmingly ignorant or misinformed about the constitutional paths for amending the Constitution. Too many, in fact, seem to miss the profoundly important point that the Founders and Framers knew that they had not created a perfect document and blueprint for the US. That is why they placed two specific paths for amending the Constitution.

But very few Americans know that only one of these amendment mechanisms has been used in the entire history of the country. All the current amendments were proposed by Congress. This should raise this serious question today: Considering the very low regard for Congress by the overwhelming majority of Americans, which is richly deserved, why should we have any confidence that Congress would ever propose amendments that could kill so much of the corruption that plagues our system, especially corruption of members of Congress?

This situation was somehow anticipated by the Framers. They could see that there was a strong possibility that Americans would eventually lose confidence in the federal government. Which is why they put a second path to amending the Constitution into the document. A path that has never been used. This is the provision in Article V for a convention of state delegates that could propose amendments, which like the proposals from Congress would still have to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

Being human, the Framers made a mistake. They gave Congress the sole power to call or convene an Article V convention. The single explicit requirement that was supposed to make Congress call a convention was that two-thirds of state legislatures had to request an Article V convention. The Framers did not, apparently, envision a future in which Congress would stubbornly ignore state applications for a convention and get away with it, despite language that demands that Congress "shall" call a convention when one simple requirement is met. How could they envision that Congress would blatantly disobey something so simply stated in the Constitution? How could they anticipate such weak states, unwilling to make Congress respect their constitutional right? The Framers clearly were not cynical enough.

The situation we face today is that all 50 states have submitted over 750 applications for a convention, considerably more than enough to trigger the constitutional mandate that Congress convene an Article V convention. How could Congress get away with this kind of unconstitutional behavior? Apparently, a combination of political corruption and public ignorance has allowed Congress to get away with this. Even among the millions of Americans that proudly declare their loyal allegiance to the Constitution, there is no recognition that unless they demand that Congress obey Article V, they are constitutional hypocrites. Congress has no right to unilaterally decide that it can ignore and disobey a part of the Constitution.

Note that Congress never even created a mechanism where they would collect in a public way the state applications for an Article V convention, which helped create public ignorance of this situation. Add to this that many, many organized vested interests on the left and right like their ability to corrupt Congress to get what they want from it. This is why they have frequently mounted campaigns to make the public fear a convention, because such a convention might actually propose reforms that would remove corruption of Congress by contributing money for campaigns and pursuing lobbying.

Ignorance and fear have combined to thwart public demands that Congress obey the Constitution and convene the first Article V convention. In fact, there is only one national, nonpartisan organization vainly attempting to educate the public so that Congress would be forced to finally give us the first Article V convention. Friends of the Article V Convention at foavc.org is also the only group that has collected state applications for a convention and made them publicly available.

Their efforts may be working. A new online survey asked this: Based on your assessment of American politics, would you support or oppose a call for a Constitutional Convention? Supporters won easily at 65 percent.

It comes down to this, unless you get informed and join the mission to make Congress obey the Constitution, you are a constitutional hypocrite, not what the nation needs.

[Contact Dr. Hirschhorn, a co-founder of FOAVC, through delusionaldemocracy.com]

At the same time, however, the majority of citizens, greatly enabled by mainstream media, remain clueless about what is happening around them, or even adversely in their personal lives. Marinated in denial and entitlement, they naively await a "return to normal" and persist in doing more of everything that hasn't worked, isn't working, and never will. So I must ask, how is that humankind, supposedly "the measure of all things" can behave with such recalcitrance and oblivousness to reality?

For the past two decades, alongside engaging in exhaustive research on empire and all that has brought us to civilization's collapse, I have been a student of myth and archetypal psychology, as well as indigenous traditions. The fact that for the most part, these topics are foreign to our culture as a result of Western civilization's inculcation, speaks volumes about our behavior toward ourselves, other humans, and the earth community. So-called "civilized" humanity has been exiled from its rootedness in nature and the organic process of human development so conscientiously observed and nurtured by indigenous peoples. Consequently, the culture of modernity is not only disconnected from the earth, but in a large sense "developmentally disabled". An integral aspect of the disability is modern humanity's disavowal of the initiatory process in the care and training of children.

As I have explained in my book Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, most indigenous cultures have elaborate initiation procedures for their young people during the age of puberty; however, in the modern world, one does not have to be a member of an indigenous community to experience initiation. In fact, Carl Jung asserted that initiation is an archetype or fundamental motif inherent in the human psyche. That is to say that something in us wants and expects engagement in the initiatory process, not only at the age of puberty, but throughout our human experience. The process is so fundamental, Jung believed, that even if we do not participate in a formal rite of passage ceremony as we transition from youth to adulthood, our human journey will provide us with initiatory events for the purpose of deepening our humanity and our connection with the cosmos and something greater than the human ego.

Examples of initiatory events which humans frequently encounter are loss of meaningful work, loss of livelihood, loss of home, loss of health, loss of relationship, loss of future security, loss of life, or loss of place. I have intentionally reiterated the word "loss" because loss is the hallmark of modernity. The irony is that civilization has promised us inestimable gain but fundamentally delivered infinite loss at every turn of our path toward embracing its demands.

In tribal cultures where formal rites of passage are practiced, it is understood that life on earth is fraught with loss-that in fact, loss is the hallmark of human experience but that the bone-marrow ordeal of the initiatory process grounds the young person moving toward adulthood, by way of loss, into his or her permanent place in the community. Thus, regardless of what losses one may endure, for the initiated man or woman, one's connection with community and with the sacred are constant. As a result, one is equipped to face and navigate loss with remarkable fortitude and grace, not alone, but supported by elders and peers in the process.

I do not wish to idealize tribal cultures or imply that they are without challenges or devoid of dysfunction. Indeed, the more they are encroached upon by civilization, the more dysfunctional they become. My intention is not to focus on indigenous peoples per se, but on the archetype of initiation that I believe inhabits the human psyche. If my premise is correct, then much of how we as a species have arrived at the current predicament of committing planetary suicide makes perfect sense.

Moreover, if the reality of initiation is deeply embedded in our humanity, it is likely that survival and navigation of the collapse of civilization will be enhanced by our perception and response to collapse as an initiatory process.

Furthermore, in our fundamental human origins, we are all indigenous people. Whether or not we claim our indigenous roots, "white roots" do not exist. We are either actively acknowledging our indigenous roots, or we are ignoring them, but in fact, all of humanity has been colonized by civilization, the collapse of which offers us the opportunity to reclaim our heritage and liberate ourselves from conquest.

This then leads to the question: How does an uninitiated species respond to the predicament it has created, and conversely, what is the initiated response to the collapse of civilization?

Capitalism: A Children's Story

The capitalism to which I refer is not that of the small business enterprise which began flourishing in the Middle Ages, but rather corporate capitalism, which is synonymous with the proliferation of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of an elite oligarchy. It is rooted in a world view antithetical to the common good in which certain individuals, by virtue of privilege and a sense of specialness and entitlement, exert influence on neighboring entities and institutions in order to deploy myriad varieties of economic and social control. It is the apotheosis of uninitiated, puerile engagement with the world.

Unfortunately, our awareness of corporate capitalism's treachery and even our contempt for it, does not exclude us from its seductive manipulation, for its roots penetrate our psyches deeply and insidiously. We have been conditioned by industrial civilization far more profoundly than we may ever be able to consciously discern, by a legacy that extends far back in time through innumerable generations. Thus, if we are to astutely prepare for the demise of civilization, we must critically ponder the myriad ways in which we have internalized its fundamental world view and attendant values. Detached as we may be from the day to day trappings of civilization, even as we rail against the evils of corporate capitalism, it behooves us to notice our physical and emotional responses to the topic of the collapse of the systems we proclaim to disavow. Understanding that no sane human being welcomes suffering, death, and untold misery, our emotional responses and ensuing attitudes to the unraveling of civilization may reveal our level of awareness regarding the initiatory process and our participation in it.

What Developmental Disability Looks Like

Around us and even within ourselves, we notice a host of responses to the current predicament. Some of those might be:

**Entitlement: This should not be happening to me. I have worked very hard in my life and deserve to be gainfully employed doing meaningful work. I grew up in a poor or struggling middle-class family, and my parents worked hard to make life better for me. I've paid my dues. I shouldn't have to rent or shop in thrift stores or tighten my belt. After all, this is America, and I deserve to enjoy the American Dream.

**Positive attitude: You can wallow in gloom and doom if you want, but I'm going to maintain a positive outlook. If I look at the negative things that are happening, I'll get stuck in negativity and won't be able to come up with creative solutions. Besides that, I'm afraid I'll get depressed and won't be able to dig myself out of an emotional dungeon.

**There are solutions to these problems: Somehow, someone is going to come up with solutions. Technology and human ingenuity will lead the way. If we just work hard enough, we can create a mass movement that will transform consciousness and the systems that created these problems.

**Sustainability will save the day: If enough people recycle, cut carbon emissions, buy green products, and use renewable energy, we can prevent the collapse of civilization.

**I deal with problems when they happen instead of obsessing about them ahead of time: I don't want to spend my energy worrying about these things now. I'll take action when I need to, and I'm sure that when I need to, I'll make the right decisions.

**I want to enjoy life; I don't want to spend all my time thinking about the future: It's important to live in the here and now, and right now, my family and I are OK. It's mentally unhealthy to be thinking and talking about the collapse of civilization.

**The love/fear polarization: I want to take action, but I don't want to do so out of fear. Fear is not a good motivator. I prefer to focus on love and compassion.

Unfortunately, these attitudes are not only denials of reality, placing their adherents in abject danger, they are self-betrayals. Within each one we hear the echo of the fundamental tenet of civilization: It's all about me and mine. No mention here of future generations; no cognizance of an earth community and the urgent need for working together to care for one another, the planet, or our descendants. Ironically, the self-absorption inherent in these responses is a ghastly form of self-destruction that colludes with civilization in committing planetary suicide. Let us remember that the word "collusion" simply means "the sharing of an illusion"-as in, "recovery is right around the corner; everything is getting better; just hang in there."

What Does Developmental Durability Look Like?

Conversely, what some responses to collapse from the initiated perspective?

**Non-special engagement with humanity: Yes, I've worked hard in my life. From that experience I have gathered many skills which will be useful to me as the earth community undergoes enormous shifts. Because I am not separate from that community and because we are all deeply connected, I am being called, along with all other beings who inhabit the planet, to not only experience these momentous changes, but to contribute my talents and skills to enhancing our common well being in this process.

**A willingness to confront what is, not how I'd like it to be: I do not enjoy looking at unpleasant realities, but if I don't look, then I cannot see, and if I cannot see, I am not serving myself or anyone else. I will look, and I will feel the feelings that surface as I do so. I will remember that within the word "emotion" is the word "motion" which means that feelings are fluid and shift and change like the flow of water. Feeling sad today does not guarantee that I will feel sad tomorrow or that I will become frozen in any one emotion. I will ask my community to look with me, and we will support one another as we do so.

**There may be no solutions to the issues created by humanity's greed, self-absorption, and cruelty. We may be encountering a predicament that cannot be solved but only responded to. How can I and my loved ones and community best respond to these daunting challenges? How can we work together to minimize loss of life and care for each other? If there are no "solutions", then what does this mean? What is the message in this unprecedented reality?

**The crisis the planet now faces is far more immense than responding with mere sustainability. Sustainability means that something lasts, and living sustainably is a natural and inevitable response to living in connection with the earth community. Living in this way at this late hour is unlikely to prevent the collapse of civilization. I will not feed the puerile paradigm of civilization for the sake of supporting green products because it's "the right thing to do" or because it makes me feel good. I want to live sustainably not because it will "save" the earth but because my connection with the earth community compels me to do so.

**I am willing to deal with both the present and the future. It is foolish to only live in the present moment. Time is a tapestry of past, present, and future, and I need to prepare for the future as well as enjoy the present moment. Because I am an adult, I need to be mindful of the well being of myself, my loved ones, and my community, as well as generations that will succeed me, and therefore, I cannot afford to live exclusively in the present.

**Ironically, the more I consider the likely consequences of the future, the more I appreciate the here and now. Each moment, each meal, the reality of having food, shelter, health, friends, and my faculties I savor more intensely because I am aware of the likelihood that in the future, these gifts will be much harder to acquire than they are now. In fact, humans have the capacity to read the indicators of how the future might be based on compelling evidence; not to do so or having done so, then choosing not to prepare would be mentally, physically, and emotionally unhealthy.

**I will not polarize the emotions of love and fear. Fear in humans serves an evolutionary function-to warn of impending danger so that one may take action to prevent harm. From the initiatory perspective, love and fear are complementary, not conflicting, emotions. Through fear, humans often tap into layers of courage that were previously unknown and unused. The word "courage" has its roots in the French word la coeur which means heart. To have courage is to have heart and to be motivated by love and compassion.

In a recent interview with author, Barbara Ehrenreich, she asserts that "positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis." Although she does not frame her objections to positive thinking in terms of an uninitiated perspective, her description of positive thinking and its impact on modern civilization accurately describes a world view devoid of initiation. While I do not wish to champion cynicism or clinical depression, the positive thinking craze, which in this country grew out of the Victorian transcendentalist movement, is a hallmark of privilege and has been utilized by the entitled ruling elite to pacify and manipulate the remainder of society.

In indigenous traditions, positive thinking is held differently than in modernity because from the initiated perspective life is a holistic mix of positive, negative, and everything in between. In fact, in its purest application of the indigenous perspective, experiences are what they are, and humans are not wise enough to determine at the outset whether an experience is "good" or "bad." Only from hindsight can we begin to evaluate them. The qualities of joy and celebration are fostered in indigenous traditions, particularly as antidotes to human suffering, but not as positive thinking per se. Rather, one looks squarely at the challenges confronting oneself and the tribe, but a cornucopia of emotions are allowed in the process.

I'm reminded of repeated scenes in the movie "Dances With Wolves" in which medicine man, Kicking Bird, asks his white ally, John Dunbar, how many more white people will be arriving on Lakota land and when. The medicine man's question is typical of what Native Americans in those days who were aware of the burgeoning presence of the white man were asking. While some nineteenth-century Indian people may have turned to alcohol to help them forget the conquest, many did not and wanted to know the specifics of the very bad news of European invasion. Had Dunbar given Kicking Bird anything but the honest answer of, "there will be as many as the stars" or encouraged him to "think positively", the Lakota holy man would have at least lost trust in Dunbar, or worse, decided that he was completely crazy.

The initiatory process of indigenous peoples has developed organically throughout their history as a result of their intimate connection with nature. Anyone closely observing nature comprehends its capriciousness, volatility, uncertainty, and inherent inequities. One species painstakingly nurtures its young only to have a significant number of its offspring annihilated by another species. From the human perspective, nature is extraordinarily cruel. Initiation evolved in part as an attempt by humans to make sense of nature's uncertainties and serves to teach the initiate that life is a series of challenges which evoke all manner of emotions and opportunities for finding meaning in multifarious, bewildering adversity. Thus the initiated person views all harsh conditions as part of the initiatory process-even the conquest and ultimate extinction of his or her tribe.

But initiation in indigenous cultures have served an even more momentous purpose than any of those mentioned above. It was a necessary and pivotal preparation for elderhood, which had little to do with age and everything to do with wisdom. Male and female elders were the overseeing parents of the tribe-guardians of the community's purpose and destiny. All initiatory roads led to becoming an elder whose fundamental function was to mentor new initiates and keep the process of birth, initiation, elderhood, and death intact, for the benefit of present generations and those yet unborn.

American Date Rape

To be uninitiated, psycho-spiritually, is to remain an emotional adolescent in the modern world. Civilization perpetuates the anti-initiation process which fixates human beings on the world of puerile pursuits and guarantees that civilization's mission and values will never be closely examined. Consumerism and fostering the identity of the citizen as consumer, attended by the mandate of positive thinking, delivers the end-product of the eternally adolescent adult who is literally, putty in the hands of the corporate capitalist rapist.

Ehrenreich notes in her interview, as does Michael Moore in "Capitalism: A Love Story", that the interminable, tantalizing carrot held out to the middle and working classes by corporate capitalism has been the hope that "you too can be rich someday" alongside the Horatio Alger "anything is possible in America" delusion. The fantasy has been brilliantly wielded to evoke envy and unfounded admiration for the titans of affluence, holding at bay bone-marrow resentment against the ruling elite for fear that exposing their insidious machinations might permanently preclude the lowly worker from joining their exclusive club. In other words, maybe if I don't criticize the filthy rich, I'll have a better chance of being one of them some day. Or in the words of Barbara Ehrenreich:

I'm saying this is an ideology that takes away all the indignation there might be about extreme economic polarization.

If you think you're going to be rich someday, why would you be resentful of million-dollar bonuses or $10 million CEO salaries, you know? You're going to be there, so it would be against your own self-interest to stand up for your class interests.

Hence, the perpetually adolescent citizen in awe of the wealthy, with internally blathering litanies of positive thinking a la Oprah, Suze Orman, or The Secret reverberating in the mind, is fundamentally incapable of discerning the lethal essence of corporate capitalism or penetrating its odious marketing skullduggery. Thus when the rapist slipped the ruffies of "riches in real estate" or "turn your home into an ATM machine" into the middle class American lexicon, the result was collusion: the sharing of a catastrophic illusion that resulted in colossal financial plunder, leaving the adolescent victims battered, burglarized, and bewildered to awaken and discover that they had participated in the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the human race-at their own expense.

At this point, two things should be self-evident: It is time for the human species to grow up, and it is time for us to frame our experiences of humanity's converging crises through the lens of planetary initiation.

Tribal initiations always involve some type of ordeal in which there is no guarantee that the initiate will physically survive. It is, in fact, an intentional brush with death. In some instances, the initiate has a choice about when to engage in the ritual and always has the choice not to participate at all. However, most choose to participate as a result of a lifetime of preparation for it by the community. And while a young man or woman may have fear or dread of the experience, he or she is well aware by the age of initiation of the personal and community consequences of opting out of the ritual.

In no way am I suggesting that individuals not raised in tribal cultures should participate in literal initiation rituals, but I am proposing that perceiving the collapse of civilization as an initiatory experience is a meaningful, salutary, appropriate, and empowering response to it.

While on the one hand I agree that everyone is at a different level of awareness regarding the demise of Western civilization, I also believe that this should not excuse us from incrementally educating our minds and cultivating emotional resilience in order to navigate future crises. Not all children at the age of five may be ready for kindergarten, but a ten year-old who has never begun a grammar school education is a walking tragedy.

Although many of us speak freely of living in a post-peak or post-industrial or post-petroleum world, we have no clear picture of what that world will look like. What we do know, however, is that navigating the transition to that world and surviving in it is not for the faint of heart. To accomplish either or both will require something beyond a five years' supply of food. In fact, it will demand that we perceive the crisis as an evolutionary threshold-a crossroads in the odyssey of our species that I believe is most accurately understood as an initiation.

Only collapse as initiation can illumine, at the deepest levels of our being, the choices we make as we attempt to transform a devastated civilization. The transition is utterly dependent on inner transformation. Otherwise, we are unlikely to create anything but a mirror image of industrial civilization.

So what might a world forged by initiated adults look like?

Surely it will be a world in which every aspect of human functioning will be carefully designed and lived in intimate connection with the non-human world. (A specific design system, permaculture, is ideal, and it behooves anyone contemplating life after civilization to become familiar with its principles.) It will be a society in which relationships have been transformed and honed by collective suffering and mutual support. The most anxiety-producing events will not be about being stuck in traffic gridlock, being forced to change one's weekly hair styling appointment, or discovering that one's internet server is down. Rather, world views and values will be dictated by having or not having food, water, shelter, personal safety, clothing, physical health, and supportive friends and neighbors.

The world to which I am alluding is a world in which every moment, every encounter, every experience is an initiatory exercise challenging its inhabitants to practice gratitude, compassion, kindness, alertness, discernment, and be present in the body and emotions. These realities will be doorways, not merely to a new society, but most importantly, to a new strain of humanity-a planet protected and nurtured by initiated elders.

No one needs to wait for the dire repercussions of collapse in order to begin the initiatory journey. One need only open the eyes and heart to a deeper level of perception so that "a thousand explanations" will not be necessary.

According to the United Nations, more than 100 million people in the world today are homeless. Millions more face a severe housing problem living without adequate sanitation, with irregular or no electricity supply and without adequate security.

Worldwide, more than 2 million housing units per year are needed for the next 50 years to solve the present worldwide housing crisis. With our global population expanding, however, at the end of those 50 years, there would still be a need for another 1 billion houses. (UN-HABITAT: 2005)

Raising awareness and advocating for change are the first steps toward transforming systems that perpetuate the global plague of poverty housing. World Habitat Day serves as an important reminder that everyone must unite to ensure that everyone has a safe, decent place to call home.

The U.N. further states that both developed and developing countries, cities and towns are increasingly feeling the effects of climate change, resource depletion, food insecurity, population growth and economic instability.

Rapid rates of urbanization cause serious negative consequences - overcrowding, poverty, slums with many poorly equipped to meet the service demands of ever growing urban populations.

With over half of the world's population currently living in urban areas the U.N. believes there is no doubt that the "urban agenda" will increasingly become a priority for governments, local authorities and their non-governmental partners everywhere.

U.S. Housing Facts

• About 95 million people, one third of the nation, have housing problems including a high-cost burden, overcrowding, poor quality shelter and homelessness. (National Low Income Housing Coalition: 2004)
• One in three American households spend more than 30 percent of income on housing, and one in seven spends more than 50 percent. (Joint Center for Housing Studies: 2006)
• The number of low-income families that lack safe and affordable housing is related to the number of children that suffer from asthma, viral infections, anemia, stunted growth and other health problems. About 21,000 children have stunted growth attributable to the lack of stable housing; 10,000 children between the ages of 4 and 9 are hospitalized for asthma attacks each year because of cockroach infestation at home; and more than 180 children die each year in house fires attributable to faulty electrical heating and electrical equipment. (Sandel, et al: 1999)

• By the year 2030, an additional 3 billion people, about 40 percent of the world's population, will need access to housing. This translates into a demand for 96,150 new affordable units every day and 4,000 every hour. (UN-HABITAT: 2005)
• One out of every three city dwellers - nearly a billion people - lives in a slum. (Slum indicators include: lack of water, lack of sanitation, overcrowding, non-durable structures and insecure tenure.) (UN-HABITAT: 2006)
• UN-Habitat has reported that because of poor living conditions, women living in slums are more likely to contract HIV/AIDS than their rural counterparts, and children in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illness. (UN-HABITAT: 2006)
• Housing formation generates non-housing related expenditures that help drive the economy. (Kissick, et al: 2006)
• Investing in housing expands the local tax base. (Kissick, et al: 2006)

The theme for World Habitat Day 2009 is "Planning our Urban Future"

Celebrations of World Habitat Day in Washington, D.C. will be an excellent opportunity to foster global discussion and raise the profile of shelter and urban issues at the national and international level. Events in the United States and around the world include policy forums, award presentations, luncheons, dinners, house-building and exhibitions.

What can you do for World Habitat Day?

Advocate - Educate - Donate

ADVOCATE Photo by photo, Habitat for Humanity advocates have created this mosaic that has already been sent to the White House. Now it is time to deliver a strong message to Congress: Make housing a priority. Pass legislation that would prioritize adequate and affordable housing. Ask Congress to Make Housing A Priority on World Habitat Day!

EDUCATE your community with Habitat for Humanity's World Habitat Day handbook to learn more about the importance of secure tenure and neighborhood revitalization. Get even more information about the issue of insecure tenure by reading Habitat's Shelter Report: building a secure future through effective land policies.

Brainstorm ways to get more people involved. Learn from the successes of last year's campaign, and come up with brand-new ways to celebrate and publicize the important work of Habitat for Humanity.

Take a virtual tour of the Capotillo informal settlement in the Dominican Republic and put yourself in the shoes of those who live in a broken community of violence, poverty and danger.

Link to Habitat for Humanity's World Habitat Day 2009 resources page on your social media pages, personal web site or blog to spread the word and raise awareness.

DONATE to be a part of making the world a better place and support Habitat's efforts. Donate online today!

I can't afford that. So when the pain comes, I won't have any defense. I'll spend hours in the fetal position, out of my mind with pain.

When my story went public a couple of weeks ago--with the help of over 100,000 MoveOn members--CIGNA said they would pay for a test I'd been asking for at Cleveland Clinic. It was a step in the right direction. But after two years of denials, and with a long course of treatment ahead of me, I knew better than to just take them at their word.

So I asked questions. But they wouldn't offer any explanation for why they denied my coverage for so long, or any assurance that they had changed their procedures so I wouldn't face the same unjust denials again. And I began to wonder if they were more interested in just sweeping my story under the rug than actually helping me.

When I got this latest news from CIGNA's pharmacy on Tuesday, I kept asking myself, is this a mistake? Or is this happening because I went public with my case? Are other CIGNA customers receiving the same phone calls?

I used to give CIGNA the benefit of the doubt, but after years of unexplained denials, I've had enough. So I'm asking for your help again. For myself, and for everyone else who is suffering, I am asking CIGNA for answers.

And I think it would help if thousands of people like you were to join me in demanding them. I'm writing them a short letter with a simple question: Why? Can you add your name to my letter?

http://pol.moveon.org/dawn/?id=17404-1221793-PTaEEWx&t=1

Here's what I've written to Dr. Jeffrey Kang, CIGNA's Chief Medical Officer:

As you probably know, your company has denied me needed care for two years while I suffer from a debilitating but treatable brain tumor. I pay my $753.47 premiums. I follow the proper procedures. But CIGNA refuses to give me the care I need.

Instead, you keep increasing my prices. First my premiums rose by hundreds of dollars, and now my prescription costs are going up by more than 10,000%.

What makes you think you can treat sick people this way? When will you stop doing this to me and the thousands of people like me who are suffering? And if you solve this latest problem, how do I know you won't do this to me again next week--that you're actually changing your ways and not just trying to make your PR problem disappear?

Please answer these questions. I need to know, for the sake of my health and my life. Many others have signed this letter too, to support me and make sure I get answers.

Respectfully,
Dawn Smith

Thanks for all you're doing. I don't know where I'd be without MoveOn members' help.

Most sincerely,
Dawn

On an ordinary day, balsa in Filipino means "boat" or "raft." But post-Ondoy, BALSA (Bayanihan Alay sa Sambayanan, or "People's Cooperation for the People") is calling upon all overseas Filipinos and friends to make a difference and save lives. Financial donations for the victims of the Big Flood are desperately needed.

The severity of this disaster requires the cooperation of all our kababayan and friends in order to provide for the needs of all the victims. Established 12 years ago by BAYAN Philippines, BALSA is a grassroots initiative coordinating everyday people to respond to natural disasters and humanitarian crises. The clean-up and relief efforts that are necessary to recover from this disaster will be an arduous undertaking, but we must act quickly. Another typhoon is expected to hit the Philippines by week's end.

The Portland Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (PCHRP) and PSU Kaibigan are making this appeal for donations to support BALSA relief efforts. The current administration of the Philippine government is woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to help the hundreds of thousands of our compatriots and friends in desperate need of assistance. Government officials admitted they only had 13 rubber boats. Public monies earmarked for emergencies (800 million pesos / 17 million USD) have been squandered on non-emergency situations.

BALSA is coordinating efforts to distribute food, medicine, clothing and other basic necessities to help the people through this crisis. All relief efforts coordinated by BALSA will be directed towards the communities most devastated by Typhoon Ondoy. Due to the urgency, we are encouraging supporters to donate money before other materials are collected. Community members in Los Angeles County have set a goal of $10,000 for BALSA relief operations by the end of October.

Online donations via paypal can be made at http://www.bayanusa.org.

Money, clothes, blankets, non-perishable food, medicine, toiletries and other basic necessities can be dropped off at designated BALSA locations in Portland, Oregon.

Drop-Off Locations: Portland Community College Sylvania Multicultural Center, 12000 SW 49th Ave, CC 202, Portland, OR 97219 and Portland State University Kaibigan Filipino American Student Association Office, 1825 SW Broadway, M103, Portland, OR 97201. Contact Claire
Oliveros at 503.977.4112 or Christian Aniciete at 503.725.2964.

More drop-off locations will be announced in the coming days.

If you would like to get more involved in the BALSA efforts with PCHRP or PSU Kaibigan, please contact Claire Oliveros or Christian Aniciete.

Thank you for all of your help!

Sincerely,
Claire OIiveros and Christian Aniciete
Volunteers of BALSA

Organization Notes CHRP is Campaign for Human Rights in the Philippines. PCHRP is the Portland Oregon branch of the organization. BAYAN is a coalition of people in the United States who support the democratic movement in the Philippines.

This follows last weekend's limited opening in New York and L.A. where "Capitalism" set the box office record for the highest per screen average of ANY movie released so far this year. Not just any documentary -- any MOVIE! It was, as the studio said, a good indicator of just how well the movie may do when it goes wide this weekend. I sincerely hope they're right because I believe deeply in this film.

To kick off the national release of "Capitalism: A Love Story," I've asked the studio to offer a number of screenings in the nation's hardest hit cities -- the ones with the highest unemployment rates and highest foreclosure rates -- where those who've lost their jobs or who are in foreclosure (or have already been evicted) may attend my film free of charge. They've agreed, and so tonight (Thursday), the night before our opening day, ten cities will grant you free admission if you have fallen on hard times. The list of theaters and cities is below. You don't need to bring any "proof" of your situation -- just show up -- it's the honor system, no questions asked.

Of course, a free movie ain't much when what you really need is a job or a place to live. And that's not going to change until the party that controls both the Congress and the White House wakes up and realizes the American people put them in charge to fix the mess created by the previous administration. For that to happen requires the active involvement of each of us. And, as I show in this movie, it's going to also require us to challenge some fundamental assumptions about an economic system that currently allows the wealthiest ONE PERCENT in this country to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95% combined. That concentration of money and power in the hands of so few people is, I believe, at the core of so many of our problems.

So, if you're going through tough times and you live in one of the areas below, please be my guest tonight, on the eve of my new film's opening. Seating will be on a first come, first served basis.

Also, in another five cities tonight, I have made the film available to local groups to hold benefit screenings to raise money for their local organizations -- organizations which are working toward a day when a filmmaker doesn't have to offer free screenings to people who've been put through the wringer. If you live in any of these areas (see below for the list of benefit premieres tonight), please come out and support the good work of these grassroots groups.

So, until tomorrow, thanks for your support, and I'll see ya at the movies!

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
Twitter.com/MMFlint
Facebook.com/MMFlint
MySpace.com/MMFlint

"CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY" FREE SCREENINGS:

Las Vegas, Nevada
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:00 p.m.
Cinemark Orleans
4600 W Tropicana Blvd.
Las Vegas, NV 89103

Phoenix, Arizona
Thursday, Oct.1st, 7:00 p.m.
Harkins Christown
1620 W Monte Bello
Phoenix, AZ 85015

Fresno, California
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Edwards Stadium
250 Paseo Del Centro
Fresno, CA 93720

Saginaw, Michigan
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:00 p.m.
Goodrich Saginaw 8 Theater
3250 Kabobel Dr.
Saginaw, MI 48604

Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Regal North Hills Stadium 14
4150 Main at North Hills St.
Raleigh, NC 27609

Tampa / St. Petersburg, Florida
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Muvico Starlight
1800 Highwood Preserve Parkway
Tampa, FL 33647

Elkhart, Indiana
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:00 p.m.
Carmike Encore Park 14
2701 Cassopolis Street
Elkhart, IN 46514

Baltimore, Maryland
Thursday, October 1st, 7:30 p.m.
The Charles Theatre
1711 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

Cleveland, Ohio Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
AMC Westwood Town Center
21653 Center Ridge Road
Rocky River, OH 44116

Peoria, Illinois
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:00PM
Willow Knolls 14 Theatre
4100 W Willow Knolls Drive
Peoria, IL 61615

"CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY" BENEFIT SCREENINGS:

Miami, Florida
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Sunrise Intracoastal
3701 NE 163rd Street
North Miami Beach, FL 33160
Benefiting: Take Back the Land

Madison, Wisconsin
Thursday, October 1st, 7:00 p.m.
Sundance Cinemas 608
430 N. Midvale Blvd.
Madison, WI 53705
Benefiting: Madison Association of Worker Cooperatives / Union Cab / Isthmus Engineering

San Francisco, California
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Embarcadero Center Cinema
One Embarcadero Center, Promenade
San Francisco, CA 94111
Benefiting: US Federation of Worker Cooperatives

Chicago, Illinois
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 8:00 p.m.
Kerasotes City North
2600 N. Western Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647
Benefiting: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America

Grass Valley, California
Thursday, Oct. 1st, 7:30 p.m.
Del Oro Theatre
165 Mill Street
Grass Valley, CA 95945
Benefiting: KVMR-FM

Yet, it was. These victims identified a problem and named it "predatory lending" in the late 1990s. Their campaign to reform Household International (also known as Household Finance and as Beneficial) played out from 2001 to 2003, concluding with a settlement that includes a ban on badmouthing the company. That's why more people haven't heard about this. The families who fought back and defeated Household are barred from bragging about it or teaching the lessons they learned, because that would require recounting the damage that Household did to homes and neighborhoods. These families are members of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

I was ACORN's communications coordinator during much of the Household campaign, but left before it ended. No one has asked me not to tell this story.

In low-income minority neighborhoods in the United States, what little wealth there is, is in home equity. Home equity makes up 74.9 percent of the net wealth for Hispanics in the bottom two income quintiles (0-40 percent) and 78.7 percent of the net wealth for African Americans in the second income quintile (20-40 percent). There have been gains in minority home ownership over the past few decades, in part as a result of the work by community groups like ACORN and National People's Action to force banks to make loans in these communities, but the home ownership is fragile and not protected by additional savings. Lenders in the past decade have focused on stripping away equity and community groups have been forced to focus on keeping out loans that are worse than no loans at all.

Most high-cost loans are refinance loans. Too often they are marketed aggressively and deceptively, including through live- checks in the mail that result in very high-cost loans that the lender will be only too happy to refinance into a new mortgage. Often these loans are made with excessive, sometimes variable, interest rates, outrageously high fees, and fees financed into the loans so that the borrower pays interest on them and often is not told about them. They are made with bogus products built in, on which the borrower also pays interest. Hidden balloon payments force repeated refinancings for additional fees each time. Mandatory arbitration clauses attempt to prevent borrowers from taking lenders to court. The practice of loaning more than the value of a home traps borrowers in loans they cannot refinance with a responsible lender. Consolidation of additional debts further decreases equity, placing the home at greater risk. Quiet omission of taxes and insurance from a mortgage that previously included those charges results in a crisis when yearly bills arrive.

Predatory lenders turn the usual logic of lending upside down. They make their money by intentionally making loans that the borrowers will be unable to repay. They charge fees for each refinancing until finally seizing the house. Fannie Mae has estimated that as many as half of all borrowers in subprime (high-cost) loans could have qualified for a lower cost mortgage.

High-cost loans are not just made to people with poor credit. They're often made to people who have poor banking services in their neighborhoods.

ACORN members don't take abuse of their neighborhoods lying down, and Household was a leading cause of the rows of vacant houses appearing in ACORN neighborhoods in the 1990s. ACORN launched a campaign to reform Household that included numerous strategies. One, an ACORN stand-by, was direct action. Repeatedly, ACORN members in numerous cities around the country simultaneously protested in Household offices to demand reform. At the same time, ACORN was working to pass anti-predatory lending legislation in local and state governments and Congress. ACORN members made sure that in each case the victims testifying were victims of Household and that Household's abuses were highlighted. When ACORN released major reports on predatory lending, the examples included were always from Household.

ACORN also worked with the Coalition for Responsible Wealth to advance a shareholder resolution that would have tied Household's executives' compensation to ending its predatory lending. In 2001 Household held its shareholders meeting in an out-of-the-way suburb of Tampa, Florida. A crowd of ACORN members was there with shark suits and shark balloons to protest.

The resolution won 5 percent. Over the next year, ACORN pressured state pension funds and other shareholders. Household held its 2002 meeting an hour and a half from the nearest airport in rural Kentucky. Members made the trip by car from all over the country. The protest may have been the biggest thing the town of London, Kentucky had seen in years. The resolution won 30 percent.

As a result, various local and state governments threatened to divest from Household. ACORN also put pressure on stores like Best Buy that used Household credit cards. At the same time, ACORN Housing Corporation was assisting many Household victims in either refinancing out of their Household loans or at least canceling some of the rip-off services built into their loans, such as credit insurance. ACORN was also getting the word out to stay away from Household.

ACORN wrote up numerous accounts of Household predatory loans and took them to the attorney generals in state after state urging investigations. ACORN similarly pressured federal regulators to act. ACORN assisted borrowers in filing a number of class-action suits against Household targeting those of its practices that were clearly illegal even under existing law. They let Wall Street analysts know what Household stood to lose from these lawsuits, as well as from various reforms that Household periodically announced in its attempt to hold off the pressure.

But ACORN members never let up. They protested again and again at Household offices and held press conferences in front of homes about to be lost to Household. They protested the secondary market that was putting up capital for these predatory loans and they held a major protest at the trade group that lobbied in Washington for Household and its fellow sharks. Then, in the summer of 2002, in the wealthy suburbs north of Chicago, victims of Household from around the country poured out of busses by the thousands onto the lawns of the board members and the CEO of Household. They knocked on doors and spoke to those who had hurt them from a distance. When the police made them leave, ACORN members plastered "Wanted" posters all over the neighborhood telling the board members' neighbors what crimes the Household executives were guilty of.

Through all of this, we worked the media. I kept a database of victims' stories and contact information and put them in touch with reporters whenever the reporters were willing to tell not just the victimization story but also the story of fighting back. We generated several hundred print articles and several hundred TV and radio stories about Household's predatory lending practices. We worked the small neighborhood papers, flyers in churches, posters on walls. We provoked lengthy articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times , and Forbes Magazine . We kept up an endless barrage in the trade press: the American Banker, National Mortgage News, etc.

A handful of ACORN staff people with great expertise and unrelenting effort organized thousands of members to drive this campaign until Household agreed to pay victims $489 million through the 50 states attorneys general, and later agreed to pay millions more through ACORN, as well as to reform its practices.

This campaign was an example of what can be done if enough different angles are pursued at once and the company ripping you off is put on the defensive and constantly hit with the unexpected. This campaign increased the size and power of ACORN to effect future progressive change. This is good news for low-income neighborhoods, but bad news for Wells Fargo, the predatory lender next on ACORN's list.

DAVID SWANSON is a longtime activist for social justice. He has worked hard in recent years to obtain an impeachment against the Bush camarilla. He is also the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union

After getting their asses handed to them on this issue for months precisely because of the never-ending snipe hunt for a bipartisan healthcare reform bill and then throughout August being publicly bullied, taunted, bitch slapped and manipulated while staring like a deer into the headlights it seems the oh so smart corporate Democrats running the show in DC have learned absolutely nothing. How can this be? What can those people be thinking if the answer they've come up with is essentially more of the same? How can they conclude that what we need is more capitulation, further retreat and finally sacrificing real healthcare reform for an insurance company subsidy program that will fatten those malevolent interests even more than they are, that costs far too much, and returns far too little to the common people? Do they know how weak they are making themselves look in the eyes of the American people as they insist on playing the submissive role to the Republicans' and how it demonstrates anything but leadership as they keep the sworn enemies of any healthcare reform in the driver's seat even though the legislative and executive branches are controlled by Democrats?

It is embarrassing and shocking really to come to grips with just how isolated and out of touch the DC Democrats are on this issue (excepting of course the relative handful of committed progressives who have been vocal in their opposition to further capitulation). From day one the corporate DC Dems have played the obsequious handmaidens of the parasitical special interests on healthcare and to their allies, the congressional Republicans, who openly declare not only that they are against reform but that the President is a foreigner hell bent on imposing Soviet style totalitarianism on America combined with Nazi style euthanasia policies and taking the guns from crazy white people everywhere. They handed control of the message to the Republicans from day one too, making the fundamental question one of cost instead of whether or not healthcare will no longer be a privilege in America but a right that every citizen is entitled to in this country just as citizens are in all the other industrialized countries on earth.

When will it occur, and what will it take at long last, for the DC Dems to understand that they cannot represent the corporate interests and the interests of the common people of this nation on healthcare not to mention most other important issues facing the nation? When, at long last will they understand that the situation has become so acute and out of balance that the Washington game of buying off corporate support with massive giveaways to special interests and throwing a bone or two to the people is no longer acceptable? When will they realize that healthcare for all is not an academic mind tease or a parlor game but a life and death issue for 18,000 Americans annually and that it is the difference between keeping their lives together and bankruptcy for a million families every year now? Establishing a viable healthcare system worth having and that serves every citizen is a moral question, not a question of cost. How the lack of healthcare, skyrocketing costs for premiums and deductibles, the lack of good insurance and the denial of benefits are harming human beings are the fundamental issues at stake when you get right down to it, not the cost of covering everyone for the benefit of the for profit insurance industry. And when oh when will the ever so smart minds of the DC Dems realize that the costliest possible approach is the one they seem to want to foist upon us which is one that does not cover everyone, keeps our grotesque and broken system in tact while enriching the insurance companies yet only tinkering at the margins of reform? Providing massive subsidies for people to pay for rotten insurance policies is not a solution to anything and it isn't acceptable. If that's what we get in the end it's hard to imagine what it is we've won other than a pig in a poke for the common American citizen and his or her family.

The bottom line is that sometimes you simply have to fight for what you really believe in and let the chips fall where they may. Yes, you risk losing but winning isn't the only thing that matters. It matters what you win too. If you fight for what is right, but lose, at least you have done so with some honor and the whole world knows what side you are on. To whimper and whine and capitulate to the greediest and most parasitical special interests only to "win" a bill that is no longer worth having can be worse than losing.

It is long past time for the President to come out in his speech to Congress next week strongly in favor of real healthcare reform: not merely insurance reform. It's time for the President to lead by fighting for what he said he believes in on healthcare reform and not to turn tail and run on the public option and instead hide behind weak euphemisms like "choice" and "competition" which means the score at the end of the game will be 100-0 in favor of the interests of the insurance companies vs the interests of the nation, our people and our businesses. If the President fails to do this but instead tries to sell the nation on a watered down, pale imitation of reform that isn't really worth having then why should the common people waste their time supporting it? If people are rational and act according to their interests there would be no reason for the people, in that case, to waste their time and energy. I hope the reports are wrong and the President is going to really change his strategy. I hope that instead of what is being reported, the President comes out of the gate next week no longer burdened by the bipartisan fantasy of what never was and never will be and instead comes out swinging as he should have been doing all along. If he does that the people will support him. Anything less and the people will turn away with a sour taste in their mouths because the DC Dems once again decided that being weak was smarter than being strong and fighting for the interests of the common people.

In March of 2009, Obama's head of the EPA Ken Salazar decided to remove the grey wolf from the endangered species list (again). The last time this was done under Bush (April 2008), there was a slaughter of wolves in Yellowstone. A coalition of conservation groups filed an injunction to stop the slaughter.

While the groups fight on, the U.S. District Judge in Idaho did not continue the stay on the hunt. The "season" opened yesterday in Idaho, and will open on September 15th in Montana. Idaho sold 10,000 tags to kill 220 wolves, and Montana will allow 75 kills. In both cases, this is roughly one-fifth of the estimated population.

Why in the world are we hunting predators in the twenty-first century? We already have reduced most predator species (including wolves) to a population level which will likely drive them to extinction. In doing so, we have upset a balance so that other species (from rabbits and mice to elk) have population problems which must be controlled by "man."

The decision to remove the wolves from the endangered species list is wrong - scientifically and morally in my opinion. That the EPA continues to fight this in court is maddening. I am outraged. I am heart sick. It was no big surprise when Bush's EPA decided to remove the wolf. After all, he consistently put people in these positions who hated the agencies they were responsible for. However, I erroneously thought the Obama would take a more reasonable approach to the environment - and to the issues of the wolves in particular. Yet another disappointment.

Please Take Action

Despite the open season, conservation groups continue the fight for the wolves - and other species. The Western Watersheds Project remains one of the best resources on the legal battle being fought. You can support the organization at this link. You can also take action through The Defenders of Wildlife writing, donating, and spreading the word. Their lives are in our hands.

Compared to life today our lives were simple. We were allowed to roam about the area as far as our legs or our bikes could take us. There were two neighborhood drug stores in walking distance, as was the school. After Brown vs Board of Education brought integration of the public schools, though I had no problem with that personally, racial conflict became rampant in the school and walking to and from or holding school social events was no longer safe. There was chronic fighting, some shootings and knifings, so my parents moved our family to the suburbs. That was a very, very traumatic experience, as there was literally no where to walk to and no place to play outdoors. My brother and I rode the bus to school each morning in the dark and home in the afternoon right after school was out. In a year or so my parents got me a car so I could get to high school and visit friends.

For the past 25 years my husband Paul and I have been co-writing, consulting and training on how to create balanced lives by living and working from home. That was quite novel at the time we started doing it ourselves in Kansas City, Missouri. After graduating from college and working for the regional Office of Economic Opportunity under Sargent Shriver, I got my Masters in Social Work and opened a private psychotherapy practice in my home. Soon after, Paul brought his public affairs consulting services home too.

Eventually we moved to Los Angeles, then Santa Monica, where I also had a practice and where we managed an outpatient treatment center, did in-house communication training, then began writing full time. Ten years ago my husband Paul and I moved to a small mountain community in the Los Padres National Forest, a nearby faraway place about an hour and forty minutes north of Los Angeles and east of Santa Barbara. Currently I am a PhD Ecopsychologist and the Co-Director of Let's Live Local, a non-profit Transition Initiative. I'm also a US Transition Trainer and my husband is a US Transition Consultant. Our website is Pathways to Transition. I offer online continuing education courses for professionals seeking to understand the emotional aspects of collapse through the Pine Mountain Institute and have a local private practice doing trauma, grief, and loss counseling.

CB: When was the very first incident or event or experience that started you thinking about collapse? Please elaborate on that.

SE: In 2004 Paul and I attended a day-long conference on Peak Oil in Santa Barbara where they aired The End of Suburbia and Richard Heinberg was the keynote speaker. That day was like a bucket of cold water in the face, a whack on the side of the head, and a big wake up turning point for us both. On the way home we both agreed this experience meant our lives would never be the same. It sparked years of still-on-going changes in our home, our work, our view of the world.

CB: And then what happened? What led to the next thing and the next, and so on? What books or documentaries influenced you? Which people influenced you? 

In addition to avidly reading books by authors like Heinberg, Orlov, and Kunstler, we began showing End of Suburbia and other documentaries like Everything's Cool and What a Way to Go in our home to get our friends and neighbors on board with what would be happening in our lives. This led to the formation of Let's Live Local (LLL) in 2005 and we became one of the early Post-Carbon Outposts. We are now a non-profit and the 11th official Transition Initiative. We have many projects going and have started many local services that didn't exist before. There is a summary that needs some updating at http://www.letslivelocal.org/. Our newest is a beef co-op we just started with a local rancher who came to us after reading about LLL in the local paper and deciding he doesn't want to ship his small herd of 18 cows to the big slaughter houses any more. He wants to sell his cows locally and rely on a small house that slaughters in a way he believes is more humane, where only one animal is slaughtered at a time, without stress on the cows. We're excited about this even though we don't eat beef ourselves. I think we have to take whatever steps forward people are willing to take and just keep walking.  

In our personal lives we had to do something about our large, energy inefficient home. At first we wanted to downsize to a smaller, energy-efficient home. We thought of finding a more sustainable community to move to, visited a wide variety of locales, and put our home on the market three different times. But it did sell. Meanwhile we began making both our home and our lives more energy efficient. Everything cost far more and took far longer than we would ever have expected. But here's a list of the kind of things what we've done over the past four years. We still have so far to go. 

Auto:

Bought a Prius, which has cut our gas usage in more than half and we may get an electric scooter to do local errands 

Electricity: 

Installed Energy Smart Power Planners on appliances that use significant amounts of electricity such as the refrigerator, freezer, and other appliances.

Switched to the fluorescent bulbs

Have motion detectors both inside and outside to reduce the number of lights we need to turn on

Unplugged most appliances that use energy when off. 

Food:

Buying frequently used grains like spelt and steel-cut oats in bulk.

Compost kitchen waste and use the compost to fertilize the variety of fruit trees and berry bushes we have planted.

Share -shopping with friends to cut down on our all making separate trips in town.

In process of building a cold frame with our neighbors to grow produce next Spring.

Heat:

Sealed air leaks, using caulking, weather stripping, expanding foam, and insulating foam gaskets behind outlets and switch plates on exterior walls.

To keep heat from escaping from through our windows, we have had an e-coating film applied to our windows.

When our propane bills got over $400 a month, we installed a pellet stove to heat our 1st floor. We had a pocket door installed at the top of our 1st floor stairs so heat from the stove will not go upstairs (unless we have guests) and we no longer heat two rooms on the 1st floor and two rooms on the lower level. One of first floor rooms is now our "cold room" where we store fruit, vegetables, wine in the summer, and most of our pellets. 

When our propane bill climbed over $800 a month, we installed a second pellet stove that heats our office on our lower level as well as our first floor, particularly since we cut an opening in our master bedroom floor and now have a radiator grill that allows the pellet heat from below to directly heat our master bedroom.  The combination of the two pellet stoves now gives us an alternative heating system, allowing us to eliminate use of our propane-driven, radiant heat furnace except on the very coldest of winter nights.

Some would say that little things like this don't make enough difference to matter. But the savings alone do matter to us and, though possibly it's too late for such things to prevent a collapse, they can slow it and give us all more time to make the still larger changes we need to make. A recent article in the LA Times, "Los Angeles Residents Reducing Power and water Use," shows just what a difference such little things can make. 

You, Richard Heinberg, Dmitri Orlov, Kathy McMahon, Sharon Astyk, the Peak Moment TV's Yuba City Girls, Janaia and Robyn, Linda Buzzell, Rob Hopkins, Allison and Dave Ewoldt, and always Nature, and Connect founder, Dr. Michael Cohen, have all influenced me on this journey.

CB: As you were finding yourself on this journey, did you sometimes kind of look in the mirror and ask yourself, "What on earth am I doing?" Did you ever wonder if you had lost it or taken leave of your senses?

SE: I have often felt like I'm living in two worlds. One where everyone seems to think everything is just fine and I have to operate in that world because it is still much of the daily world I live and work in. Then there's the other world that's always sitting on my shoulder, a world in which I know everything is already different and will be getting a lot more different, totally different, sometime in the future. It is such an odd feeling. I always get this feeling when I read the newspaper. In one section of the page there may be a major story about severe climate change and in the next an article on alfresco kitchens and multi-room patios which are now in vogue for outdoor entertaining. So to me it seems that it's a whole lot of other people who have lost their senses. 

CB: How have your family members responded to the changes you've made? Have you had conflicts with them around your changes and if so, how have you dealt with that? 

SE: Gratefully my husband and I are on the same page. We are supportive of each other and working together to make changes our own lives and in the community. Each of our families is small and all are far away. Our son lives in Northern California and has as growing awareness of what we're facing. My mother is 91 so I really don't want to concern her with collapse. But she is a historian and fully aware of the economic side of what's happening. She talks to me about it often as paralleling the path of ancient Rome. She hopes she will die before things get too difficult. I understand this because I know she lived through the Depression as a child and then through WWII as a young parent. The stock market collapse has already made life harder for her as she living on a shrinking fixed income.

I have attempted to talk to other family members via e-mail and on occasion when I visit in person. But they are not interested in or aware of collapse issues. Once when I broached the subject, one of my in-laws asked me, "Is this a California thing?" They have made it clear they do not want me to send any more articles or web links on such topics. So I don't.

I fear a couple of my close friends think I've gone off the deep end. Even some who were interested and involved at the early stages when we began showing the documentaries. About half of my friends who were involved early dropped out once we began discussing what this all might mean for us here in our community and what we could do. Two seem to be on the verge of coming back, though. I have other friends who think I'm too negative and snap at me when I bring up any collapse-related topics. They believe talking about such negative things will contribute to bringing them into the world.

Fortunately, though, I have a wonderful circle of friends both online and here in Let's Live Local who are very aware and supportive of each other.

CB: What kinds of emotions have you experienced on this journey? As you are doing what I call "staring collapse in the face", what kinds of feelings emerge? How do you manage those feelings?

SE: Oh, my. Now here is a question! Every emotion in the book. I get angry that our leaders can be so blind and allow themselves to be controlled by those who can only continue to benefit if we stay on the suicidal path we're on. I get sad about things that I know are not important in the larger scheme of life, but that I will miss in a nostalgic way. The myths we've all lived in. The myths I grew up with. The kind of frivolous, carefree, and naive fun we once had. The myths I even helped to perpetuate in my work in years past. Every so often I am gripped with a gut wrenching fear of having to leave our home and mountain community, not having a place to live, and probably most of all, not being able to get the medications that keep me well. This usually passes now though because I think of my age. I realize that in the larger scheme of things, I and the things I think I need, are not all that important and that's OK, because this is the consequence of our collective history. I work to focus on gratitude for I am very grateful this very day and every day for the many blessings in my life of friends and meaningful work, a wonderful love and  partnership with my husband, and a beautiful home in the most beautiful of forests.

At other times when I see us making progress here in our community like with our pellet and organic produce co-ops, I feel elated and excited and motivated. At other times I feel discouraged because people have to put so many other things in their lives ahead of making the desparately needed changes we need to make in our lives and in our community. Some of the things that come first seem frivolous to me and I wonder, don't they get it? But usually their priorities are understandable.  Some people are really struggling to keep afloat. Nearly everyone is working long hours, often into the night to keep the roofs over their heads. Many retirees who once had time for community involvement lost money in the stock market and have had to go back to work full or part time. Others are losing their homes. People get ill, have accidents, have to devote time to older parents and children ... and worst of all, some have to move away because they can't find work or afford to keep their homes. When lots of such things converge at once I feel very alone, like it is all on me to somehow keep all our efforts going, but fortunately before long someone will call or e-mail me about an extra effort they are doing or an idea they want to work on, or a breakthrough they've had and I feel grateful again. I'm amazed really, that our work here has a life of its own. It just happened today. Someone wrote to say they have donated the cost of the park rental for our October 24th 350 event! 

CB: I'm wondering what the role of community is in your life. It's a lonely, if not hostile, world out there if one is talking to most people about collapse. Where do you get support?

I already mentioned the extensive support structure I have here in our community and in my online communities - ecopsychology boards, the other ecopsychologists who I work with as faculty in our online Ph.D. program, other eco-nomic practitioners, and colleagues like yourself.

Having always lived in cities where I never had a sense of community (except perhaps in high school) until I moved here, I was astonished to discover what it means to live in a real community - both the good and the bad, the ease and challenge of it. At the same time, to some degree I think our community, perhaps like others, is more split now than at other times. I find there are those who still have a lot of money and have no clue about what's going on. They keep raising assessments for more golf carts and hosting fancy social events. Then there are those who are awake and busy changing how they live, sometimes hindered by local rules and regulations. There are those who are severely challenged because of the economy and don't have time for anything else but to keep their heads above water. Those who are new-agers. Those who are fundamentalist Christians. All with their own views of life that are more front and center now because of the sense of impending crises that looms over us all. 

I believe that in this period of time the challenges of the collapse are accentuating our differences and further separating us. Things we once could cover over lightly and be one community with greater ease have grown into wide fissures that make bridging differences harder. I first began to notice this after the 2000 election. Suddenly people who had socialized easily together before, no longer could or would. And it's become still more pronounced since. I often say to those who get frustrated at times trying get beyond all these differences that we have to focus on tolerance and have very long arms to reach around and embrace everyone.

On the other hand, the transition programs we've started here are bringing people together across all these divides, sharing in activities where none of these concerns are relevant or discussed, i.e. the many wood pellet co-op subscribers and the organic produce co-op subscribers come from all groups and all views, but we don't really know how our views are alike or different because we just want to enjoy these new aspects of our community. 

CB: Not everyone would say that they have a spiritual path or perhaps any interest in spirituality at all. Do you have a connection with something greater, and if so, how has it informed your life and the changes you've made?  As you know, because you wrote the foreword for it, I've just published a book on this topic, Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse because it became so clear to me that just as collapse has enormous energy, food, climate change, healthcare, and other implications, it is the consummate spiritual phenomenon of the twenty-first century. I also wrote the book to provide a roadmap for preparing emotionally and spiritually for collapse.

SE: As you know, I love your book. I have a very deep nature-based faith. It definitely has shaped my willingness to see and accept what is actually happening and has given me tools to use in my personal and professional life. Nature spirituality and philosophy is truly a godsend because it enables me to make sense of a nonsensical world. I understand that everything that's happening is a natural result of our unnatural way of life. Gratefully it also enables me to have a concept of what a different kind of life we could create if we followed the principles of nature. They guide me in doing what I can in my life and in helping our local community to create such a way of life. I have daily nature practices I draw on.

CB: What is your passion these days? What gets you up in the morning and gives meaning to your life?

SE: What gets me up in the morning and gives meaning to my life is both the exciting projects we keep working on and the forward progress we're making on the one hand and on the other hand the unending beauty of the forest, and life with my husband, our dog and my friends.

CB: I have just one last question for you. I'm wondering if you can comment for our readers on life purpose. That is, what have you come to understand as your purpose in life at the present time? What did you come here to do?

SE: I just had an extended conversation about life purpose on an ecopsych board I belong to. It's a wonderful topic to reflect upon at this time. I believe I am here to continue finding my purpose day to day. I do not believe I have "a" purpose that was set sometime in the past or sealed in stone somewhere. I believe, as Viktor Frankl pointed out to me rather sharply when I couldn't quite grasp it, we have to "find"(to use his words) our purpose as it unfolds moment by moment, seek it out in the ever-evolving, intelligent self-generating web of life of which we are part (not his words).  

CB: PLEASE ADD ANYTHING ELSE AT THIS POINT THAT YOU'D LIKE TO SAY THAT I MAY NOT HAVE THOUGHT TO ASK YOU ABOUT.

SE: Just to thank you, Carolyn, for inviting me to reflect on these questions. I have enjoyed articulating and sharing them and find value of doing so.

David Swanson (co-founder of After Downing Street, creator of ProsecuteBushCheney, and Washington Director of Democrats.com) is the author of Daybreak. The book is an excellent documentation of the theft of our democracy. Swanson presents a thoroughly documented analysis of the creation of the imperial presidency. This grounding is fundamental for citizens to have the tools to counter the blather that passed as news and neo-con talking points for eight years - and continues now as the talking heads try to block any investigation of those crimes.

David Swanson also provides suggestions and strategies for an activist citizen's movement to (1) address the undermining of the Constitution and balance of powers, and (2) to return citizen voice and power to the ruling of our nation.

One of the issues that people across the political spectrum should agree on, is the long term threat that the powers stolen by the Bush presidency will pass from President to President unless they are challenged. Swanson (and most in the impeachment movement) are aware of this as well. There is a consistent effort to paint those who want thorough investigations - with prosecution where warranted and legislative remedy where needed - as wanting "revenge," or having "political" interests, or just "Bush Bashers." However, we know and Swanson makes clear, the stakes are much higher - the future of any functioning democracy in the United States.

This book is more than a "read it" book. Swanson has created a reference manual for activists. Daybreak is chock full of organizational strategy and mechanisms. It provides a vision of what a citizen involved democracy in the United States could look like - and how to get there.

My recommendation: Get it, read it, share it. Kudos and thanks to David Swanson.

In my mind, as probably in the minds of many, Ted Kennedy was part of a trio - John, Robert, and Ted. In my mind, with both brother's assassinated, the dreams of an America characterized by equality fell on the shoulders of Ted. He seemed to step up to that task, and fought consistently for the people throughout his long tenure in the Senate.

As someone left of progressive, I have mixed feelings about the Kennedy's and the disproportionate power they wield. However, I also wish that we had a Senate full of politicians who cared as much about the people as Ted Kennedy. He was not just a talker, though he did a superb job of that. He took action, and that should be a model for all who want to change the world to follow.

I do not think I am alone in being impressed that Ted Kennedy backed Barack Obama. That he believed in Obama enough to go to Denver, and come from the hospital to speak spoke volumes for me about his hope (and faith) in Obama. For me, it was the weight of that "larger" Kennedy that spoke. The Kennedy who fought over and over again for living wages and education and healthcare; that Kennedy who championed the interests of us "little people;" that Kennedy who risked his health to pass the mantle to Obama.

Ted Kennedy was something special. He was an old time liberal. As the frame of the political scale was redrawn by the conservatives - changing conservative to moderate Democrats into the "far left," Kennedy did not change. He stayed passionate and true to those liberal ideals which seemed to become more and more radical over the years. He was no radical in the political sense - the frame just changed and his commitment did not. I think there are deep lessons there for all of us in having the conviction of our principles, and that social change is a lifelong commitment.

I can't help but feel a certain personal loss at the passing of Ted Kennedy. It is the end of that era. It leaves a very big hole in the Senate, and we will see if any can and will step forward to fill those shoes.

If you are not already familiar with this situation, the background is in this 50-minute video by John McTiernan, director of Die Hard 1 and 3, Hunt for Red October and Predator: The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove. OpEdNews.com will be on a mission to set this wrong right-- and we hope you will help. (I never recommend videos, but this one is sooo important. You will not regret watching it.)

When Thomas Jefferson faced similar prospects, he fired the attorneys, freed the wrongly- prosecuted and imprisoned and began impeachment hearings. We expect nothing less of President Obama. Not only US Attorneys but judges have abused their office for politically-motivated witch hunts. The most famous case is Don Siegelman, former Governor of Alabama, who became a target of Rove's machine after he had the audacity to ask for a recount in the suspicious 2002 election in which he 'lost' to Bob Riley. This must not stand. As John McTiernan says, Americans must not reach a point where they fear the judicial system and that has happened to over 700 victims of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct.

Obama has has invited us to push him. Let's take him at his word! Lives and families have been destroyed by the monsters still in their jobs as prosecutors and judges. Obama, through Holder, must insist on investigations and prosecutions.

Dana Jill Simpson was an Alabama Republican who worked for the Riley campaign, until she became aware that Rove was concocting charges of 'corruption' against Siegelman in order to influence the election. She bravely came forward with this story, but her house has since burned down, and she has repeatedly been threatened. When Karl Rove lied about his role in the Siegelman case, she wrote this article; My Response to the article "Closing in on Rove". There are over 700 victims, like her, who deserve justice.

Ironically, if these shameful bush initiated, GOP backed practices were brought to the public's attention, the right wingers who are now afflicting the Obama Health Reform efforts like swarms of gnats would be in retreat, doing all they could to clean up their image and distance themselves from these horrendous perpetrations.

Meanwhile, Governor Don Siegelman still awaits sentencing and incarceration. How can Holder allow this to stand when he has released Alaska's senator Stevens who was clearly a red herring meant to distract from the otherwise massively partisan witch hunt Rove directed in his corruption of the DOJ?

The fact that the attorneys who perpetrated such injustices are still at their jobs, still threatening people is insupportable. We must create a huge uproar, a massive demand from all corners of the media, from the blogosphere, that he fire the remaining attorneys immediately.

Some argue that the Republicans, like Jeff Sessions, are holding back appointments of replacements. That is a pathetic argument. You don't leave a fox guarding the henhouse just because you haven't found a solid guard dog yet. First, you get rid of the fox.

Judges, too, appointed by Bush with a political agenda, played a role in partisan prosecutions. They must be investigated, impeached and prosecuted. Those who are found guilty should be imprisoned.

There is plenty of evidence of a strong connection between the Federalist Society and these tainted attorneys and judges. Perhaps that's where the search should begin... starting with Holder. And if Holder doesn't start cleaning this Katrina-level catastrophe very soon, he should be cast out. America deserves better.

You can play a role. Write to your local daily paper. Educate your friends and colleagues. Contact the DOJ. Conctact John Conyers, head of the House Judiciary Committee, contact Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary committee. Write to Obama. Tell your local Democratic leaders. Blog about it. Tell the mainstream media they should be covering this daily, that they should be counting down every day that Holder and Obama have failed to removed these rogue attorneys. Do it today.

Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com.

There is a battle in Peru and people are dying. The indigenous people of Peru have been trying to peacefully block the opening of a massive tract of their territory to natural gas exploration and exploitation. The peace has been broken. Police have died, and many of the demonstrators have been shot, with 40 or more killed - including several children. This article discusses these issues and asks that you take action. This is not just some Peruvian conflict that has nothing to do with the United States (or South Korea, or Britain, or the Netherlands). It has everything to do with all of us. I believe we must speak out. I hope that after reading this you will agree.

Camisea Natural Gas Project
The Camisea project is the largest natural gas project ever undertaken in Peru. According to
Technology.com:

The project first became operational in August 2004 to make Peru a gas-rich nation with royalties of $34 billion expected over the 30 year duration of the project. The Camisea gas field is situated in the San Martín reservoir in the Amazon Rainforest and is connected to the Port of Pisco via the Camisea pipeline (discovered in 1983-1987).
...
In addition a second pipeline runs from Malvinas 715km along the coast to Lima and Callao for distribution of gas to residents and industry.

Roughly 75% of this project is located within "Block 88" which is the home of over 20 indigenous tribes who live largely in isolation from outsiders, and are dependent on the natural resources of the area which will be destroyed by the project. There are also numerous farming communities which will be impacted by the toxic fallout of the exploration and exploitation of the Camisea.

The peoples of the Amazon, including those in Peru, have had plenty of experience with the destruction and health consequences of natural resource exploitation by transnational corporations. They are taking a stand to block the Camisea Natural Gas Project.

More than 10,000 indigenous people have been engaging in roadblocks since April. Recently, the attempts at creating a human barricade have become violent with President Alan Garcia has overruled the regional presidents who have argued against the privatization of this vast tract of Constitutionally protected reserve.

President Alan Garcia has proposed privatising large areas of the rainforest, but local officials say the government in Lima does not understand the impact this would have.

The regional president of Loreto, Ivan Vasquez, says the Amazon needs to preserve its diversity at all costs. "The ecosystem is the genetic bank of the Amazon, as it brings together genetic matrices which don't exist anywhere else - thousands of interconnected genetic bases. ( BBC )

Coordinating resistance to the project is AIDESEP which is a member of Oxfam America. However, it is the peoples of the Amazon who are putting their bodies on the line - and paying a devastating toll for doing so.

Behind this big privatization push by President Garcia is the Peru Trade Promotion Agreement negotiated and signed into law by President George W. Bush. This is a sweeping "free trade" agreement between Peru and the United States, and has certainly forwarded the ambitions of U.S. and transnational corporations. This interest is clearly reflected in the companies that are involved in the Camisea project.

The Companies

";The gas production consortia was composed of: Pluspetrol (36%); Hunt Oil (36%); SK Corporation (18%); Tecpetrol (10%). The gas pipeline consortia named TGP is operated by Techint (23%) and includes: Pluspetrol and Hunt Oil (22% each); SK Corporation and Sonatrach (11%); Belgium's Tractebel (8%); Gra-a y Montero (2%). Belgium';s Tractebel was due to carry out gas distribution in Lima potentially financed by a Belgian export credit agency." ( AmazonWatch)

Hunt Oil (from SourceWatch): "The privately-held Hunt Oil Company --"one of the big money Texas donors behind the Bush family political empire."
From AmazonWatch:

The Camisea Project is owned by two consortia of small companies with poor environmental records led by Hunt Oil - a Dallas-based company with close ties to the Bush administration. Chief Executive Ray L. Hunt contributed to President Bush's presidential campaign and also sits on the board of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Pluspetrol private oil and gas company given lead contract in the Camisea project (see also this company link

Techint Group (infrastructure engineering also owns Tecpetrol (products for metals and mining)

SK Corporation "SK Corporation is a South Korean global organization and one of the country's largest businesses with widespread interests worldwide." oil and gas focus (Oxfam America)

Sonatrach may be one of three companies, or three companies that are one. One Sonatach link goes directly to the company information for Pluspetrol, another goes to an Algerian company, and one goes to a UK company

So here we have what has become a classic tale of devastation and exploitation. A government throws out their own constitution in the interests of free trade controlled by transnational corporations with the backing and support of their home countries and international agreements. In the cross-hairs stands an irreplaceable ecosystem, and the people who live there. These people take their lives in their hands to protect their homes, and the government orders them cleared out of the way. People die, people are displaced, cultural if not physical genocide happens without the world blinking an eye.

This time, the people are standing up publicly, but their struggle is not on the front pages. The United States, who is a major player, is rarely mentioned. In the corporate media of the United States, when the story comes up at all, it is spun as the Peruvian government struggling with rambunctious and violent protesters.

However, these people are standing up for more than their own homes. The massive area that will be destroyed by the project is part of the dwindling Amazon Rain Forest. That rain forest is critical in any attempt to control global warming.

Much of that exploited natural gas will end up in the United States. More bloody resources to be consumed by a populace that is carefully protected from knowing the true costs of that consumption.

I beg you take a stand with the indigenous peoples of Peru. Take action:

• Contact the Peruvian Government message link
  


• Contact President Obama through Whitehouse.gov
  


• Spread the word about what is happening in Peru
  


• Do not let this be yet another atrocity that slides by with no regard.
  

If you are not angered by what is happening, then get angry that cronyism is running U.S. policy again with yet another corporate consort (Hunt Oil and Haliburton) gets advanced and enriched by shaping U.S. policy to their advantage.

Please act. People are dying, and if the project goes through more people will die. This globally critical region will be devastated beyond repair. The bloody proceeds will flow out into the global market leaving death, devastation, and deepening poverty behind.

Resources for more information:
AIDESEP
is a member of Oxfam America

Amazonian Indigenous Protest Provokes Peruvian Government Reprisals, Dudenhoffer, ENS, 5/27/09

Peru Trade Promotion Agreement ... PTPA extended summary

Ministry greenlights EIS for block 126 exploration - Peru Business News America 5/29/09

Peru protest leader takes refuge, BBC 6/09/09

Police clash with indigenous protesters in Peru, WorldFocus, 6/09/09

Peruvian massacre aimed at opening Amazon to transnationals, VanAuken, IntelDaily, 6/08/09

PERU: 'Police Are Throwing Bodies in the River,' Say Native Protesters, Salazar, IPS 6/08/09

You may watch the full video (with transcript) at Bill Moyers Journal.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Research copy (u: wolf p:wolf)

Update: Articles by William K Black
9/23/2008, Nation. Bailout Plan: Trust But Verify, with James Galbraith

2/23/09. Huffington Post. Why Is Geithner Continuing Paulson's Policy of Violating the Law?

One of the four states that is not insolvent is an unlikely candidate for the distinction--North Dakota. As Michigan management consultant Charles Fleetham observed last month in an article distributed to his local media:

"North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000, known for cold weather, isolated farmers and a hit movie--Fargo. Yet, for some reason it defies the real estate cliché of location, location, location. Since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. This year the state has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion!"

What does the State of North Dakota have that other states don't? The answer seems to be: its own bank. In fact, North Dakota has the only state-owned bank in the nation. The state legislature established the Bank of North Dakota in 1919. Fleetham writes that the bank was set up to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. By law, the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, and the state guarantees its deposits. Three elected officials oversee the bank: the governor, the attorney general, and the commissioner of agriculture. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. The bank operates as a bankers' bank, partnering with private banks to loan money to farmers, real estate developers, schools and small businesses. It loans money to students (over 184,000 outstanding loans), and it purchases municipal bonds from public institutions.

Still, you may ask, how does that solve the solvency problem? Isn't the state still limited to spending only the money it has? The answer is no. Certified, card-carrying bankers are allowed to do something nobody else can do: they can create "credit" with accounting entries on their books.

A License to Create Money

Under the "fractional reserve" lending system, banks are allowed to extend credit (create money as loans) in a sum equal to many times their deposit base. Congressman Jerry Voorhis, writing in 1973, explained it like this:

"[F]or every $1 or $1.50 which people--or the government--deposit in a bank, the banking system can create out of thin air and by the stroke of a pen some $10 of checkbook money or demand deposits. It can lend all that $10 into circulation at interest just so long as it has the $1 or a little more in reserve to back it up." (3)

That banks actually create money with accounting entries was confirmed in a revealing booklet published by the Chicago Federal Reserve titled Modern Money Mechanics. 2 The booklet was periodically revised until 1992, when it had reached 50 pages long. On page 49 of the 1992 edition, it states:

"With a uniform 10 percent reserve requirement, a $1 increase in reserves would support $10 of additional transaction accounts [loans created as deposits in borrowers' accounts]." (4)

Dangerously inflationary? Not if the money were used to create new goods and services. Price inflation results only when "demand" (money) exceeds "supply" (goods and services). When they increase together, prices remain stable.

Today we are in a dangerous deflationary spiral, as lending has dried up and asset values have plummeted. The monopoly on the creation of money and credit by a private banking fraternity has resulted in a malfunctioning credit system and monetary collapse. Credit markets have been frozen by the wildly speculative derivatives gambles of a few big Wall Street banks, bets that not only destroyed those banks' balance sheets but are infecting the whole private banking system with toxic debris. To get out of this deflationary debt trap requires an injection of new, debt-free money into the economy, something that can best be done through a system of public banks dedicated to serving the public interest, administering credit as a public utility.

Some experts insist that we must tighten our belts and start saving again, in order to rebuild the "capital" necessary for functioning markets; but our markets actually functioned quite well so long as the credit system was working. We have the same real assets (raw materials, oil, technical knowledge, productive capacity, labor force, etc.) that we had before the crisis began. Our workers and factories are sitting idle because the private credit system has failed. A system of public credit could put them back to work again. The notion that "money" is something that has to be "saved" before it can be "borrowed" misconstrues the nature of money and credit. Credit is merely a legal agreement, a "monetization" of future proceeds, a promise to pay later from the fruits of the advance. Banks have created credit on their books for hundreds of years, and this system would have worked quite well had it not been for the enormous tribute siphoned off to private coffers in the form of interest. A public banking system could overcome that problem by returning the interest to the public purse. This is the sort of banking system that was pioneered in the colony of Pennsylvania, where it worked brilliantly well.

Restoring Michigan to Solvency

Among other advantages to a state of owning its own bank are the substantial sums it could save in interest. As Fleetham notes of his own ailing state of Michigan:

"According to recent financial reports (available online), the State of Michigan, the City of Detroit, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, the Wayne County Airport, the Detroit Public Schools, the University of Michigan, and Michigan State University pay over $800 million a year in interest on long term debt. If you add interest paid by Michigan cities, school districts, and public utilities, the cost to our taxpayers easily tops a billion a year. What does Wall Street do with our billion plus dollars? They decorate their offices like kings."

Interestingly, the projected state budget deficit for 2009 is also $1 billion. If Michigan did not have to pay over a billion dollars in interest to Wall Street, the budget could be balanced and the state could be restored to solvency. A state-owned bank could not only provide interest-free credit for the state but could actually generate revenues for it. Fleetham notes that in 2007, the Bank of North Dakota earned a net profit of $51 million on a loan volume of $2 billion. He comments:

"Last year, Michigan citizens paid over $5 billion dollars in personal income tax. With a state bank like North Dakota's we could reduce this burden, fund new businesses, and restore our crumbling water and sewer systems. And we don't have to feel sorry about Wall Street losing our business. They didn't 'earn' the money they lent us. They created it in computers and charged us interest to boot. Let's follow North Dakota's lead and get free from Wall Street's web."

Taking the Initiative in California

California could do this as well. Robert Ellis is a Tucson talk show host who once worked on Wall Street and has been involved in setting up several banks and financial institutions. In January of this year, he proposed in a letter to Governor Schwarzenegger that California could resolve its financial woes by setting up a bank on the model of the Bank of North Dakota. Ellis wrote to the governor:

"I admire your tenacity in dealing with California's financial problems. Your idea of using IOU's was ingenious but there is a better way. The State of California can charter its own bank and issue its own checks to all state employees... . It can also pay all its vendors, contracts and contractors through the bank... . Additionally, once the bank is operational, you can fund your own state projects and you determine the interest rate paid as opposed to being at the mercy of the banks you currently deal with or the interest rates the investment bankers make you pay to issue bonds. By doing this, you will put the state in control of its own destiny and make it the benefactor of its own money.

"... What I am proposing is not new. It has been done by one other state in the nation [North Dakota]. Why should you continue to pay the banks for services and interest on loans when you can receive that interest for the benefit of the state of California? Wouldn't it be better if you could fund your own infrastructure projects without having to get the approval of independent banks or investment bankers? Additionally, you set the interest rate on your own projects. You can even set it at zero if you deem the project worthy enough."

Ellis offered his services in setting up the bank, which he thought could be chartered in a few short months. The Governor has not replied, but some pressure from constituents might encourage a response.

Failing that, there is the initiative and referendum process pioneered in California. It allows state laws to be proposed directly by the public, and the state's Constitution to be amended either by public petition (the "initiative") or by the legislature submitting a proposed constitutional amendment to the electorate (the "referendum"). The initiative is done by writing a proposed constitutional amendment or statute as a petition, which is submitted to the California Attorney General along with a submission fee, which was a modest $200 in 2004. The petition must be signed by registered voters amounting to 8% (for a constitutional amendment) or 5% (for a statute) of the number of people who voted in the most recent election for governor. (5)

As Gandhi said, "When the people lead, the leaders will follow." We the people can beat the Wall Street bankers at their own game, by moving our legislators to set up publicly-owned banks that create credit using the same banking principles that are accepted as standard and usual in the trade by bankers themselves.

CITATIONS:

1. Anne Davies, "Lockdown Vote Saves California from Bankruptcy," theage.com.au (February 21, 2009).

2. John Mitchell, "46 of 50 States Could File Bankruptcy in 2009-2010," Freedom Arizona (January 30, 2009).

3. Jerry Voorhis, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon (1973), excerpted at sonic.net

4. Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Public Information Service, 1992, available at rayservers.com.

5. "California Ballot Proposition," Wikipedia.

.......
Ellen Brown, J.D., wrote this article in March, 2009, for Path to a New Economy, a collection of online articles for YES! Magazine, on economic and financial solutions. Ellen developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her eleven books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, and Forbidden Medicine. Her websites are www.webofdebt.com and www.ellenbrown.com.

Radio Chip Animal Identification Would Do ALL Harm To Our Real Food
Safety, And No Good

It would be too easy to blame the recent peanut panic on one criminal corporation owner, who KNOWINGLY shipped Salmonella contaminated
product. But before that it was millions of pounds of ground beef, and before that tomatoes all over the country, and on and on. And when you ask where is all this horrible filth coming from, with a over a million cases of Salmonella in the U.S. alone every year, the answer is self-evident. It's the huge factory farms that overflow with seas of untreated animal waste, that then spill into our food supply, including through our agricultural plant crop fields.

We have a lot of work to do to clean up this giant mess, but the first thing we have to do is STOP a lunatic boondoggle being pushed by these same corporate interests, to force radio computer chip implanting of literally every farm animal in the country, EXCEPT on their own factory farms. It is absolutely nothing but a further attempt to drive small family farms out of business, who in fact are
our safest source of reliably clean food now.

The proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) would force even the smallest healthy farms to buy expensive new computer tracking equipment, and potentially would subject them to gestapo-like tactics by the USDA if they are in even slight technical non-compliance. And all this just to fatten the pockets of the RFID chip manufacturers, and to make it LOOK like something is being done to make our food safer.

The special one click action page below will send your personal message to all your members Congress and also directly to the U.S. Department of Agriculture who is trying to rush this thing through without adequate scrutiny.

Stop NAIS Action Page: http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

This action is especially urgent because the U.S. House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry is holding a hearing on NAIS implementation on March 11, and many farm activists fear the plan is to push it out for a full vote in Congress faster than a greased pig, before we the people have a meaningful chance to speak out.

You may not have a House member on that particular subcommittee, but you can pressure your own House member to tell they colleagues on it that there is massive constituent pressure against NAIS. For the especially mobilized on the action page above there is a link to the phone numbers for those on the subcommittee, because they are in fact your representative as an American citizen if they sit on it.

Below are some more extensive truth points you can select from in drafting your comments or on the phone, again linked to from the action page above.

NAIS was designed by NIAA (the National Institute of Animal Agriculture), a corporate consortium consisting of Monsanto, industrial meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson, and surveillance companies such Viatrace, AgInfoLink, and Digital Angel. The NAIS scheme fits agribusiness, biotech, and surveillance companies to a T:

1) They are already computerized, and they engineered a corporate loophole: If an entity owns a vertically integrated, birth-to-death factory system with thousands of animals (as the Cargills and Tysons do), it does not have to tag and track each one but instead a herd is given a single lot number.

2). NAIS will only be burdensome and costly (fees, tags, computer equipment, time) to small farmers which helps push them out of business, thus leaving more market to giant agribusiness.

3) Agribusiness wants to reassure export customers that the US meat industry is finally cleaning up its widespread contamination. NAIS would give that appearance ... without incurring the cost of a real cleanup.

4) NAIS will allow total control over the competition: Owners of even a single chicken would be required to register private information, the Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of their 'premise' and if any animal leaves its 'premise', the owner will be required to obtain an ID number for it and have the animal microchipped. All information, including 24 hour GPS surveillance would be fed into a vast corporate data bank, allowing for ease of false slaughter to
hide true problems or to substitute biotech's genetically engineered animals.

5) NAIS may allow plundering of farmers through required DNA samples: DNA samples would be invaluable to Monsanto and biotech corporations genetically engineering animals. Farmers who raise heritage breeds would have no say in how their distinct DNA would be used and to the sole profit of biotech companies.

6) The advantage for the surveillance companies is obvious: Compulsory tagging of 6 million sheep, 7 million horses, 63 million hogs, 97 million cows, 260 million turkeys, 300 million laying hens, 9 billion chickens, and untold numbers of bison, alpaca, quail, and other animals -- and new animals being born, means a massive self-perpetuating market.

Please take action now to stop this insanity. Our health and our lives depend on it.

Stop NAIS Action Page:http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum942.php

The health claims for NAIS are a sham though fear of disease is used to advance it. NAIS does not touch the contaminated source of E.coli, salmonella, listeria, mad cow, and common meat-borne diseases - the inherently unhealthy practices (mass crowding, growth stimulants, feeding regimens, rushed assembly lines, poor sanitation, etc.) of industrial-scale meat operations. Upton Sinclair's "Jungle" all over again. NAIS will do nothing to stop these practices. Moreover, tracking ends at the time of slaughter, yet it's from slaughter onward that most spoilage occurs. But NAIS does not trace any contamination after slaughter.

The self-serving Agribusiness NAIS plan distracts from their contaminatory practices, while targeting hundreds of thousands of small farms, homesteaders, organic producers, hobbyists ... and maybe even you. NAIS's purpose is to advance corporate monopoly over all food in the US. And with it, they have laid the ground work. Kissinger said if you control food, you can control people. This
immense corporate plan to control of our food supply and eliminate our independent farmers is, at it heart, the most severe threat possible to our democracy itself.

Please take action NOW, so we can win all victories that are supposed to be ours, and forward this alert as widely as possible.

If you would like to get alerts like these, you can do so at
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