EVEN IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY STILL WON’T COME

There’s no rest for the weary, it seems.  No sooner did Maytown Center go down for the count than another concrete monster arose to threaten us:  a new downtown convention center.  Boosters believe (and believe me, belief is the operative word here!) that building a new temple to Mammon on the south side of downtown will attract worshipers from near and far to our fair city, and that these pilgrims (aka convention attendees) will inject so many shekels into the local economy that it justifies us going six hundred million dollars into debt–and it’s getting a little vague about whether that includes construction of the hotel that just has to accompany a convention center..never mind that, this year, Nashville’s hotel occupancy rate was only 55%, a better-than 10% drop from last year.  This is just an anomaly, boosters say, although some of them are willing to think that hotel occupancy may not turn around for another three or four years.

Who are they trying to kid?  The question is not when more people will be able to afford $100-a-night hotel rooms, but why anybody thinks the common people are ever going to be able to able to splurge like that again.  Haven’t they noticed that this country’s credit, at both the individual and governmental levels, is largely exhausted?  We hear talk of “recovery,” but that’s just whistling in the dark.  America has had a zombie economy for twenty years, and the only thing that kept that zombie walking was sucking the blood out of peoples’ home equity, which has now, in case you hadn’t noticed, been sucked dry.  We are not going to see hordes of free-spending conventioneers partying in the streets of Nashville.  The only free-spending parties of the future will be held in the Hamptons and similar locations, under armed guard if the hosts are smart.

Back to Nashville.  Convention center boosters say we can pay for their pet project by dedicating sales taxes from the area around  the convention center to paying the debt on the building.  Only problem is, to make the numbers work they have cast a very wide net in defining “the vicinity of the convention center.”  The three-square-mile zone they have proposed includes East Nashville (which should threaten to break away from Nashville proper and become a separate city if this kind of foolishness continues), much of West End Avenue, and areas on the north side of Charlotte Ave., aka the ghetto.  None of these areas are likely to see much traffic from the proposed convention center, but that last one really sticks in my craw.  We will be literally taking money from the poorest people in town and giving it to bondholders, i.e., rich people mostly in some other location.  That is not the way to build a better Nashville.

Building the convention center will create or save hundreds of high-paying construction jobs, the boosters claim.  That’s a cynical hunk of flim-flam if ever there was one.  I know enough about the construction business to know that the folks who really make out are the guys running the company, not the boots on the ground.  Again, a transfer of wealth to them that has.  Giving a few hundred construction workers a short-term job is like giving heroin to junkies–it will keep them happy for a little while, but sooner or later they’re going to need another fix.  They, and we, would be much better off  if we invested something towards retraining them (and all the management/publicity types) in skills that will actually be useful in the future, like gardening, cattle herding, butchering, tanning, leather working, blacksmithing, water wheel construction, or any of a host of near-forgotten pre-industrial skills that were temporarily eclipsed by the great oil bubble, which is bursting around us as I speak/write.

Pre-industrial skills?  What about all the cool, high-tech, high-paying green jobs everybody’s salivating over?

Oh, there will be a few of those, and I’m sure we can apply some of our new knowledge to improving the old technologies, but in my raving, prophetic opinion, most of the high-tech “green energy solutions” we have seen are too tied in to the existence of our current oil-based economy to survive long or spread far without it.   The oil binge has been fun, but it’s about to be very, very over.

Well, I’m betting that even most people who are against the convention center would think that’s crazy talk.  There are certainly plenty of good arguments against it that don’t challenge the existing paradigm, as Bruce Barry and Metro Council member Emily Evans have repeatedly demonstrated.  I’m glad they’ve got the tact and patience to enter the machine and try and talk to the sleepwalkers…me, I’m staying out here on the pavement with my “REPENT/THE END IS AT HAND” placard.  There’s a place for everybody in this dance.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “The Party’s Over”

STALLING TACTICS

Last Thursday, Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett and Common Cause had their day in court, and the result was something of a standoff.  While Chancellor Perkins declined to force Hargett to buy optical scan vote counting machines, he did rule that the law as passed does not mandate that Hargett purchase machines that are not in fact available, as Hargett has been insisting.

I found it interesting that, when Hargett filed a brief with the court asking for dismissal of Common Cause’s suit, he did not attack their premises, he just attempted to claim sovereign immunity for the state, and questioned Common Cause’s standing to sue.  For those of you who don’t speak legalese, that means he said he couldn’t be sued over this, and if somebody could sue him, it wouldn’t be Common Cause.  As the first rule of lawyering says, “when the facts are against you, argue the law.  When the law is against you, argue the facts.  When they’re both against you, attack your opponent’s character.”  Hargett didn’t quite stoop to ad hominem attack, this time,  but he definitely had the facts against him., and he knew it.

And I’m betting that, as I was writing this on Friday afternoon, our Secretary of State and his minions were working hard to figure out how to keep dragging their feet, hoping that when the legislature convenes in January, the Republican majority will take them off the hook by delaying implementation of the bill until 2012, a move that failed by only one vote in the last legislative session.  It’s quite a change of heart from the near unanimous, bipartisan support the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, which mandated a return to recountable ballots,  received in 2008.  What’s going on here?

I think that a look at a couple of things that happened in Texas will answer that question.  The first is the famous (in some quarters, anyway) Texas redistricting struggle of 2003, when Texas’ Republican-dominated legislature did its best to redraw the state’s congressional districts to insure a permanent Repuglycan majority in the state’s Congressional delegation.  They only succeeded in doing this because the Bush junta disregarded a memo from US Justice Department lawyers saying the scheme was illegal–and not only did they disregard the opinion, they put a gag order on the attorneys who wrote it.  Ah, the Bush years….

And, what do you know…Tennessee will be redistricting after the 2010 census…and the Repugs would sure like to be in charge of that.

The other Texas story that bears on our situation here in Tennessee is what Lou Dubose of the Washington Spectator calls “the three percent solution.”  This refers to successful efforts to suppress minority voting in order to shave a few points off likely Democratic vote percentages, insuring Republican victory.  The Repuglycan attack on ACORN and their repeated raising of the straw man of “voter fraud” are just the tip of the iceberg, it seems.

In Texas, the county tax assessor is responsible for registering voters as well, and the position is an elected, partisan office. In Houston, a Republican registrar rejected voter registration forms for such picayune reasons as failure to check a box stating that they would be 18 on the day of the election, even though applicants gave their birth date just a line or two further down the form.

We could jump to Ohio at this point, and recall that the Republican Secretary of State there rejected voter registrations that were not on the right kind of paper.

What am I getting at?  Many Republicans in Houston won their races by the proverbial hair:  50.01%, 50.15 percent–you get the picture.  In effect, they won by denying the vote to individuals they thought likely to vote Democratic.

That’s how we get back to Tennessee, where Republicans are using every delaying tactic they can find to keep using easily-hackable, unrecountable electronic voting technology.  They don’t have to do anything blatant, just switch a few votes here and there, and they can insure that they wil be the ones with their hands on the wheel and their fingers in the till in Tennessee for the foreseeable future.

OK, so why did Democrat-appointed  Secretary of State Riley Darnell pimp for computerized voting, and where was the state Democratic party when he supported what the Repugs are now clinging to?  As for Darnell, he seems to have been enjoying perks from the touch-screen voting cabal–according to verifiable voting advocate Bernie Ellis,

Darnell  served on the board of  “The Election Center,” a group founded with start-up funding by the voting machine companies which continues to promote nonverifiable voting systems that are now being rejected nationally.

And rejected internationally, too.  In a recent decision, Germany’s highest court ruled that electronic voting machines are unconstitutional in Germany because the votes are counted in secret, a story that for some strange reason attracted little notice here in the U.S.

As for why most Dems went along with Darnell on this, it’s the same stupid solidarity that gives us  right-wing wannabes like Jim Cooper, Lincoln Davis, Phil Bredeson, and Harold Ford, Jr. and gets insulted when some of us refuse to support them.  Many of those involved in this fight are active, left-wing Democrats, none of whom have a prayer of ever getting nominated for elective office.  One Democratic functionary told peace activist Chris Lugo, when he offered to be the Democratic candidate for US Senate, to  “go to hell,” and that’s probably the inner circle of the party’s attitude toward my trouble-making friends in the fair election movement, although they will be tolerated as long as the hay they’re making can be thrown at Republicans.

Hey, guys and gals, why dontcha come join the Green Party, where you’ll be appreciated and can be in charge and able to make a difference?  The door is open….

music:  Frank Zappa, “A Lie So Big”

THE OLD WAYS

So…how did people live in this part of North America, back before us Europeans overflowed our native continent and made ourselves at home on this one?  How did they survive without central heat and air, insulated buildings, or even screens to keep the flies and mosquitoes out?

Charles Hudson’s The Southeastern Indians provides definitive answers to such questions, and many more.  I spent a good portion of my reading time this summer studying this thorough, eloquent, scholarly volume, which is really at least three books in one.

It is a guide to low-impact living in this bioregion, enumerating and describing the tools and techniques used by indigenous people to live in balance with their ecosystem.

It lays out what we can reconstruct of the social relationships, political organization, and belief systems that created the matrix of everyday life.

Its closing chapters are a kind of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for the native peoples of the Southeast, telling the awful story of how they were overwhelmed, out-gunned, marginalized, ripped off, and ultimately run off.  That’s why there are virtually no “Indian Reservations” in the Southeastern US–can you say “ethnic cleansing,” boys and girls?

The first thing we have to remember about the European invasion of North America is that the native people were decimated more by the diseases our ancestors introduced than by the depredations of our ancestors themselves.  It is estimated that 90% of the native population was wiped out by diseases that spread ahead of the newly-arrived white people, and this may have something to do with why the tribes encountered by the first European expeditions had no account of the construction of the numerous mounds that dot the southeast  and proclaim a certain cultural continuity with the more elaborate native civilizations of Mexico and Central America.  Archaeological reconstruction, recounted by Hudson, tells us more about these people than the remaining tribal people knew, but there is much we can only guess at.

The people of the southeast lived in small villages, made clothing, dwelt in well-constructed homes, and maintained public buildings and other community gathering places.  The only metal they knew was copper, which was rare and reserved for ceremonial objects.  They fired pottery, gardened, and caught fish, but their main food source was the deer, and they practiced a kind of silviculture, burning the forests regularly to encourage open spaces and new growth so the deer could flourish.

They were also extensive gardeners, and I was surprised to learn some of the crops they tended.  I had long known that squash, corn and beans were introduced from Central America, but I had no idea that, before those plants traveled up the trade routes, the natives harvested the seeds of big-leaf ragweed, knotweed, and a plant I had not even heard of, sumpweed.  They also made use of amaranth and lambs’ quarters seeds and greens, as well as sunflowers, though all these crops became secondary once “the three sisters,”, with their abundant yields, arrived.

Their “chiefs” were not active rulers in the European sense,but more like overseers of the common good or a court of last resort for questions that could not be resolved at a lower level.

They had no money, but practiced barter and  “gift economy.”  In Hudson’s words:

…person A would donate his labor or a share of his food to person B as a “gift,” without specifying any kind of return.  At some time in the future, person B would return an equivalent amount of labor or food to person A, with no haggling.

This is a truly radical meme, and its widespread reintroduction might well prove to be one of the best ways to heal our excessively monetized culture, which understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The main “crimes” the native people had to deal with seem to have been murder and sexual infidelity.  The latter, as in our own society, sometimes lead to the former, but there were no jails, of course.  A murderer’s life might be forfeit to the family that had lost a member, but there were other ways to atone for crime, and there was also an annual general amnesty at the time of the Green Corn Ceremony, which Hudson describes in great detail.

Stealing, within a given tribe, seems to have been pretty much unknown, which is not surprising, since communities were small and tightly knit, and there was no anonymity.  Inter-tribal raiding was quite another matter.  Whatever their virtues, the native people were not pacifists.  The difference, of course, is that for them, war was, in many ways, fun.

Much of the energy of warfare found a less lethal outlet through inter-tribal or inter-village ball games.   While the game they played was a rough, informal version of lacrosse ,the enthusiastic preoccupation of whole villages in the games and their outcome seems to be carried on in the modern-day south’s love affair with high school and college football.

The story of European intrusion into this vibrant, sustainable culture casts its sad shadow through the entire book, and fills its closing chapters.  The new settlers took unflinching, cold-hearted advantage of their superiority in organization, numbers, and firepower to systematically deprive the native people of their rights, their land and property, and even the possibility of judicial remedy. Some whites, I discovered, protested these injustices, but were unable to sway the politicians and land dealers from their determination to displace the native people.  The process was remarkably similar to the institution of segregation after the Civil War, and I see its  modern echo in
Republican attempts to disenfranchise the poor and minorities across the country today.  Alas, some things just don’t change in some peoples’ psyches.

We are so enveloped by our manufactured, monetized, alienated culture that it has become difficult to imagine a realistic alternative.  Charles Hudson’s book is a window into just such a world.  While we cannot go back to it,we can take a great deal of very practical inspiration from it as we move forward into what comes after this age of oil, imports, and plastic.

music:  Buffy St. Marie, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone“

PLEASANTLY SURPRISED

I was an early booster of  CBCX, the tenth Continental Bioregional Congress, which took place about a month ago down on the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, but when my health fell apart, I dropped out of the planning process for the event.  Health, however, wasn’t my only reason for quitting.  As part of my effort to get involved with the larger bioregional movement on  this continent, I had joined the bioregional e-list, and one of my posts about the upcoming continental Congress prompted this response:

“How can you expect that a bunch of people who are dedicated to ‘living locally and lightly’ will find the time and resources to peel off at peak harvest time and cross the continent for a meeting about being local?”

I brushed it off at the time, but the remark planted a seed that kept growing in me…it sounded uncomfortably close to the old joke about how most people would prefer a lecture about enlightenment (or salvation, depending on your religion) to the real thing.

Then, as Summer began to cool into Fall, I volunteered for not one but two weeks away from our homestead, yes, right at the peak of “harvest season.”  Interesting, I thought, but noted that my excursion to a Buddhist retreat center in upstate New York  deepened relationships I already had going rather than launching me into new ones.  It also served to renew my relationship with my  spiritual practice, which is, after all, the wellspring of my politics.  To me, that seemed like a much more literally radical (as in, “to the root”) step.   Besides, I had our winter’s firewood supply pretty much in hand, and my wife had our garden under control, so I didn’t feel like I was leaving anything critical swinging in the autumn breeze.

After returning home, settling in a bit, and hearing of my local bioregional buddies’ enjoyable and stimulating experiences at the event, I decided to go check it out for myself, just in time to catch the final day.

I arrived at lunchtime, and felt immediately at home with the hundred-plus crowd of mostly new but somehow familiar faces.  It reminded me of the time in the early eighties when, for the first time since 1970, I ventured out of the woods to a Grateful Dead concert, and discovered that not only was I not the last freaky hippie in the world, I was not even very freaky compared to a lot of people.  Well, the magical kingdom of Shakedown Street has been swept away by the black-throated winds of DEA persecution and economic insecurity, but those of us with a deeper perspective on the planet have found other, subtler venues in which to meet, and CBCX was definitely one of them.

After lunch, I toured The Farm Ecovillage with the extraordinarily informative, insightful, and humorous Mr. Albert Bates and a goodly crowd of bioregionalists, commiserating and laughing with him about some of the simple, straightforward, common-sense things that Tennessee’s now-statewide building codes will not permit, and receiving a good brush-up session on alternative building techniques involving bamboo, straw, and earth, which I look forward to applying here at home.

Did I ever tell you that I consider myself an artist whose canvas is the land I live on?

Twilight found me sitting in a darkening room with eight other Congresspeople (I guess that’s what to call us!), reflecting on ecological despair.  All of us shared our experiences of starting back in the 60’s and 70’s with a great deal of optimism about what needed to be done and how simple it would be to accomplish it, and how, to one degree or another, all of us had found our faith in human sanity sorely tested by the venality of the political process, the  easy manipulability of the American body politic, the weakening resolve, changing priorities, and psycho-emotional hangups of ourselves and those whom we supposed were our best friends, and the interpersonal conflicts and chasms resulting therefrom.

Solutions?  Or at least coping strategies?  It seemed to boil down to the story of the Zen monk who fell over a cliff and found himself hanging on to one little sapling that was gradually pulling loose from the precipice as he clung to it.  Growing next to the sapling was a wild strawberry; he plucked it and ate it, finding that it was the best wild strawberry he had ever eaten, and in that moment attained enlightenment.

Yeah, we’re all in that situation, and would be whether the world was going to hell in a hand basket or not, but it seems especially pertinent to remember to enjoy what you can, when you can.  I believe it was Edward Abbey who suggested that those of us who are trying to save the natural world spend half our available time saving it and the other half savoring it, so we don’t lose touch with what’s really important in life.

After eating dinner with the ever-more familiar crowd, I attended an early evening session on Transition Towns, and was glad to see several of my fellow conspirators from Nashville there, soaking up ideas that in most cases are coming from and being applied to much smaller places.  Smaller political units, whether you’re talking about the state of Vermont or the city of Hohenwald, Tennessee, are much easier to deal with than cities the size of Nashville–where, according to one city council member, you pretty much have to be a millionaire to become mayor.  The odds are not good when you’re dealing with millionaires.  It’s much easier for a millionaire to be part of the problem than to be part of the solution, as Jesus pointed out two thousand years ago.

I think we need to apply the transition town model to Nashville a lot more aggressively than has been done so far.   Mayor Dean’s “Green Ribbon Commission” came up with a lot of window dressing.  There’s a “Sustainable Tennessee” movement that is a bit more down to earth, but all reports I have heard from them indicate that they do  a lot of wishful thinking along the lines that we will be able to maintain something like “business as usual” into the indefinite future.  Local food is a good beginning, but we also need to figure out how to  provide ourselves with something to cook it on, something to cook it in, and something to cook it with. An LEED-certified service economy just isn’t going to cut it.

I think we need to figure out where our shovels, shoe leather, and saw blades are going to come from, because none of these items are being produced in Tennessee any more, and it’s hard to have a civilization without them–not to mention paper, pens, and ink.  We have built a massive, highly specialized culture that is dependent on a steady supply of fuel and raw materials that shows every sign of drying up.  The sooner we begin to prepare for this transition, the easier it will be, for the simple reason that there will be fewer resources available the longer we wait.

I know, I always say that.  You want to know more about the Bioregional Congress.   Hey, there may or may not be another one–I have the sense that we are about to all be very, very busy on a very local level.

There were dozens of possible conversations awaiting me, but  I had had enough thinking and rational discourse for one day.  It had been a good day, and I was glad to discover that my concerns had been unfounded.  I unpacked my drum and saxophone, joined a group of old and new friends around a bonfire, opened up, and channeled ecstatic energy into the world for a couple of hours.   That’s what the revolution is for, right?

music:  Eliza Gilkyson, “The Great Correction“

WORKING OFF THE CLOCK

I was off the air and the blog last month because I was on the road, accompanying my son and a mutual buddy on a journey to the east–and yes, that kind of ” journey to the east,” for all you Hesse fans, but our cover story was that we were just going up to help some friends build an addition…fortunately, we never needed to use that cover story, although it was true.  “Our friends” needed an addition to the temple at Padma Samye Ling retreat center, and we were happy to be able to do something for the Tibetan Lamas who have done so much for us.

Wait a minute, you say–this is “Deep Green Perspective,”  not “Deep Buddhist Perspective”–are you about to get all faith-based on your readers?

As I’ve said elsewhere in these pages, I see religion and politics as inseparably intertwined…your politics is part of how you express your true religion in your everyday life, whether you think of it that way or not.  Another part of “true religion” is how you treat other people, but “politics” is just a word that means “how we treat people en masse.”  Another expression of religion in everyday life is our attitude towards what happens to us–which dictates how we treat  people, which is our true politics, which is why it is so important to know how to adjust your attitude, however you choose to do it.

Well, as so often happens, I’m digressing.  Working at the retreat center provided me with some valuable insights not just about myself, but about our culture and the nature of work.  Let me explain.

The three of us shared a dormitory room in the retreat center’s kitchen/dining building.  We never used an alarm clock while we were there, just woke up in the morning, got dressed, went upstairs and fixed ourselves some breakfast, and then walked up the hill to work.  (There was no group program going on, so arrangements were fairly informal.)  We worked until lunch, which was prepared by the folks who live at the center, and then after lunch we worked until we came to a natural stopping place, or we were tired, or it was time for evening practice, or it got dark.  Every afternoon and some mornings, we were brought tea and cookies, and spent a good half hour sharing them with the folks who brought them to us, all the while discussing anything from questions about Buddhism to current events to details of the work we were doing.  When we were done for the day, we went back to our dormitory, cleaned up, took a walk in the beautiful countryside or went to evening practice in the temple, and then fixed ourselves some dinner, after which it was just about bedtime.

At the same time as we were doing our work, another construction project was going on, and when it became apparent that his knowledgeable hand and eye were needed there, my son Silas left the two of us to carry on and lent his skills and talents to the other project for a few hours.

Here’s the thing:  we were not keeping track of our hours on this job.  We just did it.  We were volunteers.  Our sole interest was in doing the job well, not just as a matter of personal integrity but because, like the builders of cathedrals in Medieval Europe, the structure we were working on was important to us.  Our labor was not, as Marx termed it, “alienated.”

People don’t talk much about “alienated labor” these days; most people take it for granted that what they do for a living has little to do with their real interests in life.  This is one of the great curses of modern society.  For the most part, nobody is invested in their work, and for good reason:  most of what our society defines as “work” is, in the long, “deep green perspective,” highly destructive of either the planet or the human spirit. From raw materials extraction to factory work to sales and service and banking, “work” wrecks the world.  Even teaching and medicine, with their noble aspirations toward education and the relief of suffering, mainly serve to indoctrinate and regiment the young in the first case, and to create sickening profits for pharmaceutical firms and so-called “health care providers” in the other.

Not that what we were doing was totally cutting-edge new–or old–”green tech.”   In the midst of the Appalachian forest, we were using 2X4’s imported from the Czech Republic as well as thoroughly mainstream sheet rock and fiberglass insulation.  But the mode of our work was different.  We weren’t in it for the money.  Here’s to the day when that’s just how it is for everyone.

music:  David Rovics, “After the Revolution“

TAKING A MONTH OFF

I have been travelling (more on that soon), and will not be doing a show again until November.  One of the November stories will likely be a review of Charles Hudson’s Southeastern Indians, a truly multidimensional work.  If you are curious about what I am stockpiling for possible inclusion in next month’s show, check out my Stumble site…see you next month!

Here’s a link to some pictures of where I went:

http://twitpic.com/photos/Ogmin

METRO COUNCIL SHOOTS DOWN CHICKENS

After the high-stakes drama of the Bell’s Bend hearings,the Planning Commission meeting about the proposed chicken ordinance earlier this month was practically a love feast.  Hardly anybody, it seems, had a bad word to say about the birds.  One commissioner reminisced about turning his no-longer baby duck loose in Shelby Park.   Andrea LeQuire enthused about chicken tractors she had seen while visiting west coast urban gardens.  Citizens came forward to testify that hens are so quiet that they had had chickens for years and their neighbors only found out when they offered to share surplus eggs with them.   Sure, Jason Holleman’s bill, based on a Cleveland ordinance,  needed a few adjustments–as another commissioner pointed out, “six quail is not a lot of quail, but six turkeys is a lot of turkeys.” Regulations about the minimum size of the home site that can have chickens, the maximum number of birds allowed, and coop placement might need a little adjustment, but nothing too difficult.

Besides, Metro Council generally passes anything the Planning Commission recommends, right?

Councilman Holleman, in a phone interview, told me he had consulted with Councilman Paul Burch, who, along with Councilman Jim Gotto, was sponsoring a bill to completely ban chickens in the Urban Services District (anyplace your garbage gets picked up by the city, basically), and that it had seemed that Burch and Gotto would go along with a bill that simply set strict limits on domestic fowl.  Much to his surprise, Burch and Gotto did not vote for Holleman’s bill, and it was defeated, 15-20, setting the stage for the Gotto-Burch bill to be voted on at the next Metro Council Meeting, Tuesday, Sept. 15.

It seems to me the Council is “straining at gnats and swallowing camels” here–making trivial, hard-to-enforce rules instead of dealing with the many serious issues that face our city–and one of those issues is our lack of a viable local food supply.  If Burch-Gotto passes, it will constitute a giant step backwards.  A whole lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens will become outlaws, and even more law-abiding citizens will be prevented from doing something to feed themselves.  In fact, we can now say,

“IF CHICKENS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE CHICKENS!”

Please join me in contacting Metro Council and urging the defeat of the Burch-Gotto  chicken ban (which is up for consideration this Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 6:30 PM!) and a reconsideration of the urban bird issue.  You can find Metro Council contact info online at http://www.nashville.gov/council/feedback.aspx

Here’s my letter:

I am extremely disappointed that Metro Council defeated a bill that would have legalized and regulated the keeping of small fowl in the Urban Services District.  I hope you do not go on to pass the Burch-Gotto bill which will create an outright ban on keeping birds in the USD.

Such a move would create a problem where none exists.  There is no history of complaints about chickens; in fact, many urban chicken-keepers have already testified that their neighbors only learned of their birds when they were told, and had not noticed any noise or smell coming from them.  Are we going to have a “chicken hot line” where people can turn in their neighbors for unauthorized fowl activity?   There’s a word for that, and it starts with “chicken” and ends with —t.  Are we really going to send codes or the police around to bust people for keeping chickens?   I think both city departments–not to mention Metro Council–have much more serious things to deal with.

I hope you will vote against the Burch-Gotto chicken ban and move to reconsider the Holleman-LaLonde proposal.  Please let me know your thoughts on this matter.

Sincerely yours,

Martin Holsinger

to be continued….

music:  Rufus Thomas, “Funky Chicken“

NASHBUCKS AND A WHOLE LOT MORE

I’m sorry I missed the chance to report first hand on Metro Council shooting down the chicken proposal, but at least I had a good excuse.  I was working on another front to create a saner future here in Nashville.   Something almost as basic as local food–local money.  Hey, food will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no food, y’know?

In case you haven’t been following the story (and the mainstream media don’t want anybody following it, believe me), the US dollar is rapidly being turned into funny money.  That’s another story, and I’m going to talk about it a little later in the show, but right now, let’s talk about a different problem with money:  how come there’s plenty of it to keep bankers living in the style to which they’ve become accustomed, but it’s hard to find financing for community gardens, small-scale home improvements/alternate energy conversions, environmental improvements and cleanups, neighborhood businesses, and other projects that would actually make the daily lives of us common folk a little easier?

This has to do with the circulation of currency in a community.  If the only places you can spend money are chain stores, then what happens to your money is that, after the employees are paid (as little as possible, in most cases), the rest of the money goes to those who produced the goods (usually China, these days) and then what’s left goes to the stockholders of the company, who are mostly located elsewhere, too, even if it’s not so far afield as China.  In this model, currency doesn’t really circulate so much as it gets sucked out of circulation.  And OK, a little bit of it does trickle back down, but most of it gets sucked up.  The income and assets of the wealthiest 5% of Americans has been growing, even as the economy tanks.

On the other hand, locally owned businesses do not ship as much money as possible out of their communities.  This enables more money to circulate locally–and the more times money circulates through a community, the more work it does, which translates out to more happening in the community–not just more commerce, but more community.  Unfortunately, big companies and their so-called “economies of scale” have played havoc with locally-owned business.  I have seen the devastation that Walmart, for example, brings to small towns.  Those “low, low prices” turn out to be very expensive in the greater scheme of things–but that’s “an externality” for Walmart, or any other big company.  The damage they do in the communities where they impose themselves is not their problem.  By law, they are supposed to suck up all the money they possibly can and give as much of it as they possibly can to their stockholders.

So, what can we do about this sucky situation?

One of my teachers used to like to point out that most human attention is devoted to sex, food, and money, and that straightening out our relationships with these core concerns is essential to societal, as well as personal, transformation.  We have had a sexual revolution going on for several decades now, with some success,  and the local food movement is on the way to changing how and what we eat.  Local currency opens up the third, stabilizing leg of a saner society:  it begins to change the way we treat money, labor, investment, and, ultimately, the whole environment.

That’s a tall order.  Practically speaking, what can we, here in Nashville, start to do?

The folks at the Common Good Bank, based in Massachusetts, have done their best to come up with a good business model for creating a local currency.  Rick DeVoe and Susan Shann are bringing this movement to Nashville,  looking for 50 depositors, a store willing to act as an ATM, and five–only five! local merchants who will accept what is tentatively being called “Nashbucks” here in Davidson County.  From this humble beginning, they believe they can create a combination credit union/bank that will use its assets to invest in community projects and dedicate any profits it generates to benefit local non-profits.   The bank will be run democratically, with all depositors having a say in investment and policy decisions.

What does “local currency” have to do with this?  Well, first of all, by definition, it stays in the community.  “Money” is a form of energy.  Energy that stays in the community…energizes the community.  Second, it can be created locally in response to local needs.  The fact that banks can loan ten dollars for every dollar of deposits they have can be used to blow real estate bubbles, or it can be used to create viable local communities. Again, “money” that is local, rather than national, legal tender will tend to stay local.  By definition, it can’t be sucked into the multinational vortex.

William Spademan, who started Common Good Bank (which is applying for, but has yet to be granted, a bank charter)  likes to say that Common Good is “a social mission with a bank” rather than “a bank with a social mission,” and his terminology and long range vision confirm that.  On the “vision” page of Commongood’s website, Spademan offers the following:

For many of us, life is very good. Still, we share a vision for a better world:

a world where everyone is guaranteed adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and fulfilling work;

a world where land, air, water, the beauty of nature and the wealth we have created are protected and used carefully for our common good;

a world where community and cooperation are at the center of our lives, where we care about and take care of each and every one of us, delighting in our diversity;

a world where decisions are made by everyone, for everyone’s benefit;

a world without pollution, weapons, injustice, poverty, disease, misery, obscene consumption, corrupt governments and unrestrained corporations;

a world at peace.

Our current economic system works against that vision, benefiting some people while leaving others miserable and desperate. Common good banks are a way to achieve our shared vision a little bit at a time, but very quickly, with immediate benefits for everyone, starting right here, right now.

Statements like that are straight out of the Green Party’s vision.  And that’s the thing about the Green Party vision:  it’s not copyrighted, or patented, and it couldn’t be, because it’s what everybody wants in their heart of hearts.  It’s just going to crop up everywhere, like new grass in the Spring.

Our local group, “The Fellowship of the Commons,” has created a new word:  “integritism.”  Here’s their definition:

integritism – [1] a political philosophy advocating individual integrity in the public sphere and a direct, participatory and inclusive form of democracy [2] collective efforts to convey the commons in a whole and unimpaired condition to future generations.

Again, this new word, “integritism,” resonates strongly with me.  “Integrity”  beats “the audacity of hope” and “change you can believe in” in my book.  The “hope and change” guy has been sadly lacking in integrity, from  backing the Bush bailout to backing down on single-payer health care to  backstabbing Van Jones.   Oh, well Van, friends like that you don’t need.  But I digress….

On a page entitled “Spirit and Covenants,”  (not words commonly associated with banking!) they explain their name thus:

We call ourselves a “Fellowship” because we are doing something unique for a political organization. To us, this isn’t just a campaign of like-minded individuals who agree on an agenda. We are asking something more because something more is needed. A fellowship has an added sense of belonging and camaraderie that also suggests a higher order of commitment and obligation. This is reflected in our determination to rise above the usual machinations and manipulations we’ve all come to expect from politics. We will do this by rebuilding trust, from within and without, one person at a time.

“One person at a time”….something I’ve been saying on this show for years.   It’s so gratifying to meet somebody else who has independently grasped the same truth…but wait, there’s more…just as they have defined “fellowship” in ringing terms, so do they define “commons“:

The Commons courses through us and around us, to us from the past and from us to the future. It is a gift from the universe meant to be universal; bequeathed to us by billions of years of extraordinary cosmic and biological evolution, as well as thousands of years of individual and concerted human enterprise. It is precious in its most minute expressions and awesome in its majesty. Each and every manifestation, writ large or small, has not only value by its usefulness, but more importantly, if part of nature, an inherent worth and right to exist without being interfered with, a freedom to be and to become.

We speak of the air, of the water, of the soil, and we speak of language itself. Mathematics and medicine; mice, music and e-mail; the carbon cycle and the bicycle; eco-systems and systems of justice; democracy; photographs and photosynthesis; footballs, philosophy, farmers’ markets, stock markets; hardwoods and hard-drives; wheels and whales. We did not earn these things, we inherited them. Taken together they constitute a wealth immeasurable.

What we must understand and take the measure of is ourselves, if we are to convey the Commons forward to the generations that follow, relatively intact. So much life and possibility has been damaged already by ignorance, greed and shortsightedness, and much more is threatened. The critical institutions of man, of which we all share ownership and stewardship duties, are not responding to the deepening crises enveloping both people and the natural world – they must be rethought and reformed. We have right now an unprecedented responsibility, unasked of generations past.

Some things we own individually, as it should be, but the greatest of things, these things described here as part of our Commons, belong to all of humanity. We are not only owners of these treasures but also their trustees; and not only to our children and their children, but to all the myriad forms of life that now depend on our good judgment and good deeds, many for their very survival.

Their proposal for actually accomplishing this is to establish boards of trustees for the various divisions of the natural world that are our common wealth–the air, the water, the earth, the trees, and to empower these trustees to safeguard the integrity of what we so egocentrically refer to as “resources.”  Well, I don’t share the optimism that leads them to posit that kind of governance–I think nature is going to take us down a few pegs over the next several decades and centuries, down to the place where potential human interference with the climate will once again be puny.  Honestly, though, I’d rather be wrong about that, and if I am, if we succeed in maintaining a cohesive global culture through the changes that are hitting us, having somebody be the Lorax and speak for the trees is a damn good idea.  And if we get whittled back down to walking distance-sized political units again, it’s still a damn good idea.

I’m not sure I’ve made the case for why locally-issued currency is an important part of this economic revolution, but I suspect that local currency, like sex and certain visionary substances, makes much more sense in the experience than in the logical explanation.  Check out smallisbeautiful.org and www.berkshares.org for words on this from those who are experienced.

Meanwhile, here and now in Nashville, Rick and Susan are looking for fifty people and five stores–a small beginning, indeed, for the task that “The Fellowship of the Commons” has set out to achieve is every bit as daunting in its own, real-life way as the mission of the “Fellowship of the Ring” whose name it strangely echoes.   But I think it is important to  start small at the same time as we aim high, because small is the sane way to start–you and me, one on one–we have had too much “bigness” in our culture, and we  are all poorer and more alienated for it.  If you want to keep up with–and join in–this effort here in Nashville, check out http://fellowshipofthecommons.org/ I can tell you right now that the next meeting is at Richland Library, on Charlotte Ave., Tuesday Sept. 15 from 6 to 8 PM.  The next economy won’t come into existence without you and me making it happen.  Here’s a place to start.

music:  John Lennon, “Power to the People”

A SKEPTIC LISTENS TO THE HEALTH CARE SPEECH

I have been pretty hard on Barack Obama–although if Sarah Palin had become vice president, I might have chosen to relocate to Canada for my personal safety–but we all knew that wasn’t going to happen, not once Goldman-Sachs threw down for Obama.

A friend of mine is (or used to be) close to Al Gore, who confided in him as he was about to become Vice-President that he thought he really wouldn’t be able to implement much of his political vision because the President and Vice President are little more than figureheads, who have to deal with firmly entrenched political realities.  Al was right, all too right–from NAFTA to welfare to the Middle East to global warming to the so-called “war on Drugs,” the Clinton-Gore years  at best were a stumble in place and at worst took us way on down the wrong road.

That’s the context in which I see Obama’s movement from an enthusiastic endorser of single-payer health care, to his acknowledgement that, while it makes the most sense, it’s not possible in the arena of American politics, any more than prosecuting Cheney and Bush for war crimes or prosecuting Tim Geithner and the rest of the Wall Street Wolves for economic crimes.  It’s their economy and they’ll trash it if they want to.

I am amazed that a President who has indebted the public up to our hairline in order bail out private enterprise gone bad is accused of being a socialist, but that just goes to show you how ignorant a lot of people really are.  There are loads of paranoid nut jobs in this country who would raise hell if  Bush and Cheney got their due, and all these same ignorant, neurotic people will not let the government go after our vampiric medical establishment and its vicious brother, the convenience food industry.  Like, “I’ll give up my Big Mac when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!”  Probably sooner, rather than later, if the mortality statistics mean anything.  But I digress….

The firmly entrenched political reality in America is that establishing a single-payer health care system, no matter how much sense it makes economically and socially, is a non-starter.  This country is too much in thrall to big money, and big money is not going to go away or commit suicide, at least not fast enough to make a difference.  And so Obama’s “public option” was meant to be a small experiment that, if it worked, would grow–but then Congress, specifically the “Blue Dog” Democrats like Nashville’s own Jim Cooper–messed with the public option, and, unless it gets changed back, they pretty much disabled it.  As originally formulated, this “public insurance” would have paid doctors 5% more than Medicare pays; but the Blue Dogs, supposed financial conservatives, insisted that the “public option” pay doctors and hospitals a negotiated fee that will, in all likelihood, keep it from being significantly cheaper than private insurance.

So, when Obama, after doing a great job of describing the knot our for-profit medical system has tied us in, started proposing his “solution,” it made about as much sense as bailing out the banks for screwing us over.  We, the taxpayers, are going to be asked to bail out the insurance companies for screwing us over, and it’s very likely that the bill that eventually emerges from Congress will do little or nothing to help people who are going bankrupt over their medical bills in spite of being insured.  It will certainly do nothing to eliminate the bureaucratic  labyrinth that consumes enough of our health care dollars to cover the cost of  a single-payer system.  It will do nothing to cap or reduce medical costs, or the cost of insurance, or the cost of pharmaceutical drugs.  It will do nothing to educate people about how to eat right and exercise right so as not to get sick in the first place.  It will be a bonanza for the private, for-profit insurance companies, who do not need a bonanza.  They need to be busted, but it ain’t gonna happen on Obama’s watch.  It’s as if Teddy Roosevelt had let himself be intimidated by Standard Oil.  Shame on you, Mr. Obama.  You may not be a “blue dog” Democrat, but you are definitely a “yellow stripe” Democrat.

In a recent article in The New York Times, Michael Pollan points out that

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

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

Mr. Obama’s rhetoric was soaring, and he got most of the important facts right.  But his solution is as effective as a band-aid on a gunshot wound.  If this bill passes, even with its so-called “public option” intact, it will be yet another reminder that our government, no matter which major party is in charge, no matter how good its proclaimed intentions, is completely incapable of acting to benefit “we, the people.”

music:  Cream, “Politician“

IS THE DOLLAR BUBBLE ABOUT TO POP?

Well, here it is the eighth anniversary of 9-11, and we find that one of the levers used to push Van Jones out of the government was the fact that he signed a petition calling for a fuller investigation of what happened on that day.  It isn’t just that the Repugs attacked him for this, it’s that the mainstream of the Dimocratic Party dropped him like a hot potato–for expressing a question that, according to one poll, has been seriously considered by nearly a third of all “Democrats.”

I don’t pretend to know what happened, but there certainly are some questions I would like to have good answers for, like, how did a fire started by igniting kerosene, which burns at a temperature too low to melt or even weaken steel, how did a fire in a largely inflammable structure, get hot enough so that molten metal was observed pouring out of the impact zone and discovered still hot days later in the ruins, and why did the steel girders holding up the impacted floors shatter?  and, once those girders shattered, why did they collapse like a house of cards?  Shouldn’t they have been built  strong enough so the tops would have just fallen off and left the bottoms shaken, but standing?  And why, if this was not a controlled demolition, did the building fall so neatly into its own footprint?  And why did Building 7, which housed offices for the Secret Service and the CIA, and reportedly housed surveillance records for the main buildings, catch fire and collapse?  On the other hand, of course, I have to wonder, if the towers were demoed, how such a huge amount of explosives could have been placed in the them without anybody noticing–or telling?

But I want to use the rest of this show to talk about an even bigger hijacking and collapse–no, not the ecology, that’s REALLY the big one, but a the collapse of a structure we are all more or less trapped in, just the same–the collapse of the dollar.

So far, it’s just been rumblings and minor quakes, but the stage has been set for a change, and to my mind the only question is how fast and vast that change will be.

OK, some basics.  The U.S. dollar has been a  de facto world currency for the last sixty or seventy years, ever since the U.S. was the only large industrial country not devastated by the Second World War.  American financing rebuilt most of the planet, except for the Soviet bloc, and it was the rest of the world’s indebtedness to the U.S. that enabled this country to “lead the free world,” as so many politicians love to say….only, they weren’t the free world, they were in debt slavery  to us.

This started to change in the 1970’s, when U.S. oil production peaked, along with our manufacturing economy and the high-paying middle-class jobs it created.  Imported oil was just the beginning of the slide.  As companies took increasing advantage of the poverty of other countries to move manufacturing out of the U.S. and into first Mexico and Central America and then China, the U.S. manufacturing base eroded, and for some years this country’s chief export has been…money.

Now, there’s something very important to understand about the U.S. dollar, as well as many other world currencies: the only thing backing it up is the world’s belief that it is valuable.  It’s no longer backed by gold, the bills are no longer called “silver certificates.”  It’s what referred to as “fiat currency.”  “Fiat” is a Latin world meaning “let it be done,” as in, “because I say so.”

And so the U.S. went from being everybody’s rich Uncle Sam to being the country that owed money to the rest of the world–not just because we have been sending our money overseas and not getting it back, but because we have obtained the money we sent overseas by borrowing it from people overseas–at compound interest.

Compound interest is a very dangerous game to play.  First of all, it assumes that the borrower is going to be wealthier in the future than he is now.He has to be, or he cannot repay the loan–and compound interest insures that the amount owed will snowball if it is not repaid.  Meanwhile, here in the real world, we are coming up against serious warning signs, telling us we are not likely to be wealthier in the future.  We have gotten rich by looting the planet’s storehouse of fossil fuel, metals, and “renewable resources” such as its forests, topsoil, water,and ocean life.  We have seriously depleted all of these and show few signs of slowing down.  We will probably use up the last of the cheap fossil fuel fighting over the last water, somewhere.  But, I digress…

So, the U.S. already owed about 9 trillion dollars to the rest of the world, in 2007, before the financial crisis began.  Then, gosh, oops , suddenly the government needed about two or three trillion more to bail out those poor people in the Hamptons, swamped by an economic tsunami  (never mind that they helped set it off), and gosh, they are having to shell out more trillions for the delayed costs of the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing expenses of subduing those pesky ingrates in Afghanistan, and how are they going to get all these trillions?  Why, they’ll just print ‘em up of course–never mind how that decreases the value of what we owe to all those other countries, who are starting to get upset.  Hey, it’s the Christian Bible that says, “thou shalt not commit adultery,” and here we are watering down what we owe them–it’s as if you promised five people you would bake them a pie, only made enough ingredients for three, but spread the crust and filling out over five pies…kinda.  Or you blew the ingredients full of air so it looked like five big pies,but they were mostly air…which is why they call what I think is about to happen in this country “Inflation.”  People do not like it when what looked like a nice pie turns out to be full of hot air.  George Bush’s “higher pie,” I guess…Nor did other countries like it when they noticed that, after using the International Monetary Fund to impose severe austerity measures when other countries’ economies went haywire, the U.S. applied quite different standards to its own financial crisis.  Can you say “coddle the perps,” boys and girls?

So now the rest of the world is starting to figure out how to quit lending to their woozy, pill-addicted, overweight Uncle, and what to do about all the money he owes them already–which, they are beginning to realize, is far more than he can ever repay.  What do you do when you discover you’ve been pinning your hopes on worthless IOUs?

Well, as they say, “people are starting to talk.”  A couple of different UN committees have suggested starting an international currency.  The Russians say, “hey, let’s just use Chinese currency.” The Chinese, who hold about two trillion in US IOUs, are saying they will start investing in other currencies–and that in order to get their economy going now that the U.S. can’t buy everything they make any more, they will have to stimulate domestic demand–which is where we run head-on into peak everything.

Even without being abandoned as a world currency, printing more dollars in response to the Wall Street holdup is going to make everything we import–which is just about everything but food, these days–much more expensive, from three different directions.  The first is that simple internal inflation will drive prices to higher numbers as the dollar becomes worth less..on its way to being worthless…..  The second is that this inflation, at an international level, will make things outside the U.S. more expensive to people inside the U.S.   (Been to Europe lately?) And the third is that, as raw materials grow scare, demand and speculation will drive prices up.  And, if the dollar don’t get no respect in the international marketplace any more, then other countries will be able to outbid us for those scarce materials, and we just won’t get none.  I think it’s this knowledge that makes all those corporate executives demand such high pay.  They know the end is nigh, but they believe they CAN take it with them.  So far, they are right.

It’s easy to talk about what would have been different if only, somehow, the Green Party had been calling the shots.  Where do you want to start in the game of “what if”?  A sane government would never have allowed an unregulated derivatives market, would never have allowed the kind of crazy growth in real estate development and prices that blew the bubble that allowed Americans to hock their homes and keep buying useless crap from China, would never have allowed corporate America to indoctrinate people into senseless consumption…but sane government, apparently, is not an option in America.  It’s all about influence and money.  I’m free to say what I believe as loud as I can, but corporate America is free to use a megaphone big enough to drown out me and the millions of people who  share my vision.

On 9-11-01,  four airliners full of people were hijacked.  On 9-11-09, we find that the whole country has been hijacked, and that all last year’s election did was change the chief hijacker.  He’s  more charming (to some of us, anyway), slicker than the last head hijacker–but I don’t think I want to go where I think he’s taking us.  The only good news is, most of us are likely to survive this crash–in some condition, for a while.  Let’s make the best of it, eh?

music:  Don Henley, “Everybody Knows“