DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

Under the rather ill-fitting title “Manhood in the Age of Aquarius,” Tim Hogdon has written the story of the Digger movement in San Francisco, as well as a take on the history of The Farm in Summertown. I haven’t even gotten to the Farm section yet, but if it’s as well-written and authoritative as the Diggers chapter, it’s a great bit of history.

There are copious footnote/links, as well. Two that stood out for me are “Mutants Commune,” an edgy, passionate sociopolitical rant from the Haight Street days, still strong enough to produce a flashback; and an (alas, incomplete) interview with Peter Berg and Judy Goldschaft, who went from being Diggers to founding the Bioregional movement. Although they don’t talk about bioregionalism in the interview, they give a great feel for the matrix in which the movement arose.  As staid as the Green Party gets sometimes, it’s good to remember where we came from.

Like another prophet from the eastern Mediterranian, Ralph Nader has arisen. Unlike Jesus, Nader probably wishes he didn’t have to. At his age he would probably rather be mentoring somebody young, energetic, and charismatic, and not be subjecting himself to the slings and arrows of outrageous liberals. But, with his favorite Democrat, John Edwards, out of the race, the Clintons having shown him the cold shoulder since 1996, and Barak Obama choosing to watch TV rather than find time to meet with him, what else could an unreasonable man of principle do? It’s not just Ford Pintos that are “unsafe at any speed,” it’s the American electoral process.

You know, it really burns me up that Barak Obama takes time to watch “The Wire,” a TV show about the drug war, but won’t make time to meet Ralph Nader. That’s your mind on television, Barak, and frankly I think it displays remarkably poor judgement–not that Hillary’s is any better.

Both remaining Democratic Party candidates are from la-la land, dedicated to perpetuating the American Dream–which is called “The American Dream” because you have to be asleep to believe it. Neither Barak nor Hillary is speaking to the real issues–the unrestrained imperialism that has made America the pariah of the world, the unquestioned lifestyle that takes enough food to feed a person for a year and turns it into one tank of so-called “biofuel” for an SUV, the collapsed economy that is diminishing possibilities for reform faster than you can say “economic stimulus,” the criminal administration that, judged by the standards that were set by a previous US government at Nuremburg in 1946, should be sent to the gallows by the dozens.

Now, I need to point out here that I don’t think the death penalty is appropriate for anyone. I have spent enough time in jail to know that a lifetime behind bars is a far crueller punishment that the release of death. And by the way, I got that from less than a week in the slammer. But, I digress….

Ralph may or may not run as the Green Party candidate this time. Not everyone in the GP was impressed by our fling with him in 2000, and I can understand why. The simplest way to put it is that he is used to being in charge, and the GP likes to run by consensus. He also has a much higher profile than anybody else the Greens could run, which annoys some Greens and appeals to others.

My own opinion about third-party presidential runs is that they are an expensive exercise in futility unless the party in question is already dominant in several states and has representatives and senators at the national level, but that they are also necessary for the integrity of the third parties involved. So, from my view, the Greens ought to run Ralph Nader while we can. At 74, we’re not gonna have him to kick around much longer. Sorry, Cynthia McKinney–you’re black, you’re female, you’re outspoken, but you got time to wait.

At the state level, former Green Party US Senate candidate Chris Lugo, who has spent two months as the only person seeking the Democratic nomination to run against slick, popular fascist Lamar Alexander this year, has been written out of the Dims’ script.  Mike Padgett, a Clinton/Democratic Leadership Council hack, and Bob Tuke, an Obammoid, are staging a Tweedledee/Tweedledumber battle for the right to (probably) lose to Alexander, who has been endorsed by numerous so-called Democrats. Gov. Bredesen has even gone so far as to discourage people from running against Lamar. Ain’t democracy wonderful?

Lugo has been frozen out of candidate forums and media exposure, and even told to “go to Hell” by some DP members. That’s what you get in this country when your slogan is “Vote for Peace,” apparently. Chris is still considering his options. I think he should do his best to stay in the Democratic race, but that’s an expensive row to hoe and I’m in no position to help him. Padgett and Tuke have hired bigtime PR firms and are in the process of raising millions, which you can bet ain’t coming in $25 chunks from Joe Voter. It’s about the money, folks, not about who’s right. But you knew that.

music: Aretha Franklin, “Respect”

It’s all over but the shouting in the New Hampshire recount, and the results, I would have to say, are mixed at best. On one hand, Hillary Clinton won fair and square, and there were not major inaccuracies in the count. On the other hand, the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office reportedly treated the recount request, and the ballots themselves, in such an offhand manner that it was hard for observers (biased ones, admittedly) to believe they weren’t trying to hide something.

Electronic memory cards were missing. Ballots were kept in open boxes. Gee, I always thought of New Englanders as neat by nature, but according to the accounts I’m reading, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a very prim-looking guy, was treating the cornerstones of democracy the way a distracted teenager treats his homework. I’m surprised we didn’t hear the line, “the dog ate my ballot.”

Meanwhile, we have Brad Friedman of Bradblog and Bev Harris of BlackboxVoting.org straining hard to find voting machine problems, but ultimately having to admit that “Most of the big reports are election administration failures. Administration failures are those failures that cannot be blamed on voting machines or the voters or poll workers. They are those failures that fall directly in the laps of clerks or registrars or boards of elections. Not enough paper ballots at the precinct is an administrative failure.”

One of the administrative failures was ballots in California that seemed rigged to cause independents to disqualify themselves from voting in the Democratic primary by failure to mark the right box on the ballot. Also in California, many people who intended to register as “Independent” were instead registered by the Board of Elections as “American Independent,” which is George Wallace’s old party, and were thus barred from voting in the Democratic primary. Another was that, in Green Party primaries, conducted by Republican and Democratic officials, there were (somewhat predictably) major glitches that may have been negligence and may have been malice–like ballots not being sent to rural counties in Arkansas, or Illinois’ decision to print a green stripe on Democratic ballots and a brown stripe on Green Party ballots, and fail to inform polling officials of the Green Party ballots’ existence, so that many Green Party voters were given green ballots instead of Green Party ballots.

Hey, guys, everybody knows the Dems are the ones with the brown stripe! But seriously, until we have a Green Party hefty enough to have representatives in the Board of Elections, we are not going to get any respect from the big guys. They are so insecure, and with such good reason…By the way, in case you hadn’t heard, the Greens are splitting between Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader like the Dems are splitting over Hillary and Barak.
But there have been no reports of weird results from the voting machines, no complaints of voter intimidation. Of course, it is just a primary, but would Diebold really skew their machines for Hillary? Considering the amount of attention that’s on this issue right now, the odds and consequences for getting caught probably look unacceptably high.

Here in Tennessee, we had faith-based voting, which is what you have to call voting on touch-screen machines. This may be our last video poker election, though! More on that in a minute.

Faith-based voting brought a big win for the faith-based candidate, Mike Huckabee, who wants to put Jesus in the Constitution, just like they did in The Handmaid’s Tale. He hasn’t said if he wants to change the name of the country to The Republic of Gilead. Tennessee also went for Hillary Clinton, in a pattern that I find very disturbing.

Obama won big in all the urban counties, including Williamson, which is usually considered a conservative hotbed–I guess what Dems there are around Franklin are liberal ones. In rural, redneck Tennessee, however he rarely polled more than 20% of the vote, and there were counties in which John Edwards did better than Obama.

Couldn’t have been because he’s white, now, could it?

What I infer from this is that racism is not dead in Tennessee, and I don’t think that bodes well for Obama’s chances should he win the nomination. If he doesn’t get the nomination, I’m not sure Hillary will be able to win the election, because she’s going to have to squash a lot of people’s hopes to prevail.
Here’s a couple of numbers for you: so far, approximately 17 million people have voted for Democratic candidates in the primaries, and only 11 million have voted for Republicans. I’m sure that if the Dems try hard enough, they can blow that lead.

And of course, John McCain is now the Republican front-runner, and the buzz on him is that a lot of conservatives and evangelicals won’t vote for him, so he can’t win, either. This is kind of a backwards way of arriving at the conclusion that the 2008 Presidential election is a no-win situation, but really it is. Whoever wins the election is inheriting a bankrupt, spendthrift country that can’t get out of a war it has no moral justification in pursuing and no money to pay for, a country that almost singlehandedly (through our prostitution of China and widespread promotion of “the American way of life” is pushing the planet into a heatwave the likes of which have not been felt since there were crocodiles in Greenland.

Phew….let’s not talk about that now…it’s almost too horrendous to contemplate…can we have a little good news? Even if it’s just a little?

OK, how’s this…as I said earlier, it looks like Tennessee is going to be able to dump its touchscreen voting machines, hopefully by next fall’s election, if the feds co-operate. (Downside: more toxic high-tech junk!) In spite of tremendous, almost inexplicable resistance by Tennessee Election Commissioner Riley Darnell, who acts like his salary gets paid by Diebold rather than Tennessee taxpayers–and hey, maybe it is, how would we know? In spite of resistance from the state’s election officials, and the same goes for them, a small group of committed citizens talked to enough legislators and got enough other citizens to talk to their legislators to get a bipartisan bill to the floor of the Tennessee House that calls for Tennessee to switch over to optical scan voting machines by 2010 at the latest, and this year if the feds come up with the funds. New Jersey Representative Rush Holt is pushing a bill through that will make funds available to states to switch back from the touchscreen machines mandated by Bush’s Helping America Vote Republican Act of a few years past. It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement that, hopefully, can be improved upon.

Speaking of improving on the improvements, the next step after verifiable voting in Tennessee is getting somebody on the ballot who’s worth voting for. Current ballot laws in the state map out a tortuous and unlikely pathway for third parties to get a named ballot line–that is, for candidates to be identified on the ballot as being members of the Green Party, just for example, rather than as “independent.” A recent court case in Ohio ended with the Federal Sixth Circuit Court declaring that Ohio’s law, which is quite similar to Tennessee’s, is in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Green Party of Tennessee has joined with the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party to initiate a lawsuit to overturn Tennessee’s ballot roadblock, and we have every reason to believe that the decision will be handed down in time for the November election.

It’s a little step, but it’s the first one we can take, and whatever we do, we can only do it one step, one day at a time. I hardly even see how it connects with changing the big picture, considering the resistance even a relative lightweight like Barak Obama met out in the hustings of Tennessee.

Perhaps all that’s left for us at this point is to meet the coming catastrophe as gracefully as we can, because it’s becoming obvious that politics-as-usual is going to prevail in the short run, and politics as usual is as capable of dealing with what’s headed our way as the Polish cavalary was capable of stopping the blitzkreig. And we, with our scattered little Green Party here in Tennessee, are metaphorically even more powerless than the Polish Cavalry. But we have a vision, and a call to live that vision–so what else can we do?

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “Milk and Honey”

On the campaign trail, Barak Obama likes to talk about how he’s “taken on” the nuclear power industry, but the New York Times takes a look at his record and finds that a) he’s caved in to. and in the pay of, the uranium crowd, and b) he’s lying about it to the public.

While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.

***

Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.

Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.

Can’t vote for Hillary, can’t vote for Obama…how ’bout that Green Party?

And, from Britain, here’s a story that gives the lie to all that “clean nuclear energy” talk:

Britain’s most notorious nuclear installation was plunged into crisis last week, when vital equipment broke down just as it was recovering from an accident that shut it for two years. Sellafield’s Thorp reprocessing plant has been closed again, while starting only its second job since the shutdown.

And the Cumbrian complex’s crisis is compounded by an excoriating report which shows that its facilities for handling nuclear waste are a shambles and that its safety procedures for preventing accidents – which could kill hundreds of thousands of Britons – are “not fully adequate”.

And, while governments fall all over themselves to give money to dangerous white elephants like nuclear power and biofuels, private industry is about to introduce a new generation of solar cells:

TAIPEI, TAIWAN — High energy prices are fueling a sleek new kind of solar technology that could someday set skyscrapers and high-rise apartment windows quietly buzzing with renewable power.

The emerging technology uses so-called thin films mounted on glass windows and other surfaces to harness the sun’s rays.

The big problem here is that if everybody’s generating their own electricity, there’s much less need for a grid, centralized power generating stations, and all that capital-intensive stuff that utility companies make good money billing consumers for….can’t cut the power pigs off from the trough, now, can we?

In the heady days of the 1960’s and 70’s, when it seemed like our time was coming any day, we began to re-imagine the world. It was, and is, easy enough to point out how crazy things are–but what would “better,” radically better, look like?

By “we,” I mean those of us who were hippies not for the sex, drugs, and rock n’roll, (although, to be sure, we appreciated them!) but because we were (and in many cases still are) visionaries who could not sit down, shut up, and work like normal ants–I mean, people. We saw the artificiality of political boundaries, and the reality of natural ones, like watersheds and biological communities. We saw the futility of trying to make ignorant people change their ways through legislation, and found the satisfaction that comes from walking our talk and teaching by example. We founded magazines and movements like Co-evolution Quarterly, The New Alchemy Institute, Esalen Institute, and the Farm, and, for a while, seemed poised to turn the entire state of Vermont into a countercultural domain.

Two visionaries in particular found their tongues and began to frame a movement with a name. The name was “Bioregionalism,” and the visionaries were Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann; and true to the bioregional ideal, they were very different, but very complimentary.

Dasmann was the older of the two by a generation, and perhaps not ever technically a “hippie,” but certainly a visionary. He did study at UC Berkley as an undergraduate, but that was before World War II, which turned him into a soldier and sent him to New Guinea. By 1970, he was travelling the world for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and thus became one of the first scientists to get a global view of the ecological situation. His globetrotting brought him to the first UN environmental conference, in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, which is where he met Peter Berg, who, while also a Californian, had been treading a very different path.

Peter Berg had been a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the mid-sixties. The Mime Troupe, which still exists, specializes in radical street theater. Berg, in 1966, had the inspiration to take it one step further. That further step has come down to us as “The Diggers,” a group that tried to radically alter human relationships by making everything a free work of art–food, clothing, shelter, medical care. They were in effect the backbone of the seminal Haight-Ashbury counterculture community, and when it was ultimately overwhelmed, Berg found his way to a small commune way, way up in the Sierras. It was from there, as a self-appointed representative of the North American counterculture, that he went to the UN conference in Stockholm.

Berg’s meeting with Dasmann resulted in the creation of Planet Drum Foundation, an organization which to this day promotes a wholistic view of this world we live in. Berg used Planet Drum as a platform from which to convoke a “North American Bioregional Congress,” which he saw as parallel to the convocation of the first Continental Congress. His hopes that it would result in a radical reorganization of North American politics have not yet been realized, but the first North American Bioregional Congress is the point at which this story starts to become locally relevant.

Milo Guthrie, an herbalist and activist from the Nashville area, wanted to go to the bioregional congress–but only delegates from bioregional councils were entitled to attend. So he formed one–the Cumberland and Green River Basin Bioregional Council, named for the two major river systems (besides the vast Tennessee River basin itself) that define our area. The group’s name has conventionally been shortened to “The Cumberland Greens” and confused with the Green Party, which is inaccurate, although there is a relationship–the “Comittees of Correspondence” (another borrowing from the first American Revolution) that were formed out of the NABC did in fact form the nucleus of the Green Party of the United States.

“The Cumberland Greens” are not a political party, but a bioregional council—a group of people from around the bioregion who do our best to fully inhabit the places we live, to eat locally and dream globally. We meet to share our strengths and visions and take what action we can, and yes we know we are carrying a banner that was passed down to us from the hippies of San Francisco. We will be meeting January 19th at Brookmeade Congregational Church here in Nashville, and you and your visions are welcome to come. Contact Eric at islandspring@cafes.net for further details.

music: Incredible String Band, “Douglas Traherne Harding”

I was driving to Nashville with my 18-year old grandson. We had about an hour on the road; it was the first time we’d been alone together in a while. I was curious to see what would arise between us, but I was a bit surprised when he asked me, “What is the deal with these subprime mortgages?” It’s just not the question I expected from an 18-year old, but I was gratified to know he was interested.

“It’s about human greed, stupidity, and shortsightedness,” I said. “The bankers figured that if they could sell the loans they made to somebody else, they wouldn’t have to worry about collecting on them. And the people they sold the loans to figured the same thing, and so on up the ladder. It’s a pyramid scheme, a hot potato.”

My grandson was amazed and dismayed to discover that so many supposed adults could be that stupid. I have to agree. What were they thinking? Well, if they were thinking that they personally could get away with it, so far they’ve been right. To pick the most egregious example, Countrywide Financial, which is responsible for a big chunk of the bad mortgages that are clouding the financial air these days, was just sold to Bank of America, and Countrywide’s CEO is getting not just a golden parachute but a whole golden airplane out of the deal, in spite of the likelihood that BoA was nudged by the Fed to buy Countrywide in order to avoid the beginning of a domino-effect chain of bankruptcies that would have left the US ecomony bleeding to death in short order.

What a world for my grandson to grow up into. How could so many people have believed that the value of their homes was going to go up forever? That’s why they signed on the dotted line for all those adjustable-rate mortgages–they figured that by the time the rate went up, their home would be worth more, so they could just refinance, pay off the old mortgage, and be sitting pretty. Meanwhile, savings plummeted and debt soared. There was always going to be somebody to borrow from when it was time to pay the piper. Then, one day, the bubble burst and housing prices started to slide. Oops.

The bubble was still inflating when the junta, with copious assistance from the Dimocrats, passed a bankruptcy bill so draconian that anyone filing for bankruptcy is pretty much opting for a lifetime of indentured servitude, not freedom from debt. Hey, bankruptcy is for deadbeats, right? Well, it’s also for people with overhwhelming medical bills and people whose jobs get outsourced. Banks don’t go for hard luck stories and good intentions. They want cash, especially when they’re not the hometown bank but some mutual fund in Germany that’s trying to make a fortune in CDO’s.

CDO–Collateralized Debt Obligation. In theory, it makes a certain amount of sense. I loan you money, but instead of waiting around to collected it back as you make payments, I sell the debt to Joe, who gives me a lump sum and collects your payments. In practice, several other things happen, leading to unintended consequences. One is that huge numbers of debts are bundled up and sold, with the buyer pretty much having to take the seller’s word that all the apples in the bag are good. Another thing that happens is that these bundled debts are in their turn bundled and sold, and then we have another round or more of that, which leads to a complete disconnect between the bank that holds the mortgage and the person who is paying it off. If you are talking to your local bank about the possibility of defaulting on your mortgage, your local bank is interested in making sure the community in which it does business stays healthy and viable, and is more likely to try and work with you to keep you in the house and making some kind of payment. If your debt is owed to some bank overseas somewhere, they could care less about what’s happening to neighborhoods in Cleveland, or wherever you happen to be. Furthermore, they are not in much of a position to do anything with the house they have kicked you out of, because the house is not worth the value of the note they are holding on it, so the house is likely to stay empty and gradually be vandalized until it really is worthless.

And, speaking of “worthless,” anybody or any institution that bought these rotten debt securities finds, as the mortgages go bellyup, that they have a worthless piece of paper on their hands instead of an asset. So that means that hundreds, maybe thousands of governments, retirement funds, banks, and other institutions wake up one morning and discover that they are worth a lot less than they thought. Bye-bye municipal services, welfare payments, salaries. Bye-bye new loans. Bye-bye pensions and medical insurance.  Good luck, run of the mill business credit!

If this were taking place in a country that was financially healthy, it could be contained and repaired, but the US is not a financially healthy country. Just as the Ottoman Empire was once “the sick old man of Europe,” so the US is now everybody’s sick, needy Uncle Sam, constantly borrowing from Peter to pay Paul (or, all too often, borrowing from China to pay China), making a little money from arms sales (the last intact chunk of our manufacturing sector), but not really paying our own way in the world. It is only because the US owes so much to so many that we stay afloat. It’s the last big bubble. Everybody knows that we’re in over our heads, but nobody wants us to drown fast, because we’d pull them down with us; so, they’re going to let us slowly sink. As peak oil kicks in further, we will be outbid for fossil fuels; as Europe’s saner fiscal and social policies keep it afloat, the Euro will supplant the dollar as the international currency of choice, and US bond offerings will go begging. When everybody knows the only reason you’ve got money to spend is because of the printing press in your basement, they get shy about doing business with you, y’know? Well, kids, that’s where the US dollar is headed. From the government’s perspective, the only way out of this mess is massive inflation. Visualize a shopping bag full of money…to pay for a shopping bag full of groceries. That, in my crystal ball, is where we are headed.

And what will this do to our vaunted world hegemony? You can expect to see the civilian sector get squeezed to maintain the military, whether “hundred years in Iraq” McCain or “invade Pakistan” Obama is elected, but things are going to get thin for the military, as well. Right now they’re just taking it out of veterans’ benefits, but you can bet that sooner or later lack of equipment and fuel will hinder the government’s ability to bully the world. You can see it looming in all the National Guard equipment that has been abandoned or destroyed in Iraq, and has not been replaced.

These are the realities that the next President of the United States is going to have to deal with, although it is certainly not what is getting talked about on the campaign trail. Expensive health care plans? Fuggedaboutit. The next president will either be cleaning up the Bush Junta’s mess or making it worse. In either case, he or she will be increasingly constrained by the twin choke chains of internal financial collapse and international moral and financial bankruptcy.

There is a certain perverse upside to this. The worse the financial situation in the US becomes, the less demand on the world’s resources we will make. With no loan money available, suburban development will dry up–but, with money tight, there may be an even stronger pull to harvest any natural resources–from forests to coal–that can be easily turned into cash–but there will be less demand for them. My crystal ball gets a little cloudy on this one.  Sorry…

If I were the financial adviser to a Green President of the United States, with a solidly Green Congress to back me up, what would I advise? Where would I begin to unravel this fine mess we’re in?

I’d start by repealing the bankruptcy act that Bush passed, and go back to the status quo ante coup when people really could write off their unpayable obligations by declaring bankruptcy. I’d pass a law that forbade mortgage holders from evicting people except under extenuating circumstances. I’d make stockholders liable for the misdeeds of the corporations they own, to encourage corporate responsibility. I’d institute a corporate death penalty for irresponsible corporate behavior, and replace big chunks of the banking, insurance, and health “industries” with credit unions, co-ops, non-profits, and single-payer health insurance. I’d pull the US out of all so-called “free trade” agreements and work to encourage local, sustainable self-reliance in all sectors–food, clothing, housing, manufacturing, transportation, communication, entertainment…what have I left out? And I’d demilitarize the US and unlock all the resources we have tied up in world domination to meet the multiple threats of global warming and peak oil. And one last thing…me and Dennis Kucinich are gonna carry this snowball through hell!

Yep, that’s about the chance we have of making the right moves in America, unless millions of people have a road-to-Damascus moment and something even more pervasive than the fall of Communism takes place here…the fall of Capitalism! It has a nice ring, but it won’t be an overnight phenomenon. The revolution, as Gil Scot-Heron famously said, will not be televised. On television and in the corporate media in general, there will be an insistent drumbeat that things are fine and all our problems are about to be solved. There will be increased security against “terrorism,” increased focus on trivial news (BRITNEY HAS HOT FLASHES, STRIPS NAKED AS THOUSANDS WATCH)….now, what was I talking about? Gee, let’s go to Walmart…they just sent me a credit card…..as long as I keep both my job at MacDonalds and the 7-11, I can keep up with the interest on one more card…maybe we can find somebody else to live here, with ten of us in this apartment the rent’s not bad….

Is that the future? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it will be stranger than we can imagine. Maybe there will be a lot of self-reliant, interconnected people taking care of each other under the government’s radar, and “the government” will become increasingly irrelevant until it just fades away. Sooner or later, we’ll find out. I wish I had a better situation to leave to my grandson.

music: REM, “Fireplace”

Governor Bredesen has been showing his for-profit health industry stripes in his treatment of the Tenncare issue. After dropping 220,000 people from the program, many of whom were uninsurable, he is now proposing to create a program for the healthiest, most insurable of those individuals and their families—who are willing and able to pay for a barebones insurance policy that will not cover a lot of the things people buy insurance for. It won’t cover maternity or newborn babies; it won’t cover disabled dependents of the insured individuals; it won’t cover diabetes self-management (but it will probably cover diabetes-related amputations–but hey, that’s a lot more expensive than prevention, it’s a good thing they’ll cover it, right?)

The premium level is also high enough to make it only marginally affordable to low-income workers, and completely unaffordable if you lose your job, because then the cost doubles. Isn’t that thoughtful?

Well, it’s a nice election-year sop, not that Phil needs to worry too much about getting re-elected. Republican main contender Bob Bryson is flailing so badly that the Green Party’s Howard Switzer may out-poll him. Switzer is the only candidate who can credibly claim to speak for the hundreds of thousands of low-income, underprivileged voters in the state who need a government that’s genuinely on their side.

Meanwhile, I recently found out that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee has over a billion dollars in its contingency fund and pays its director seven hundred thousand dollars a year. I’ve talked before about the importance of turning health care into a not-for-profit enterprise, but I’m going to have to amend that by saying A WELL-REGULATED not-for-profit enterprise. The last Tennessee legislator to call for an investigation into Blue Cross bloat found himself facing a well-funded opponent and lost his seat. Gee whiz…you don’t think they….? Naw, they wouldn’t do that.

And Bill Frist—our fine, upstanding Senator—his family paid a 1.7 BILLION dollar fine for defrauding Medicare not long before he bought a US Senate seat here in Tennessee. When asked, Frist said he didn’t think the country could afford universal health care. Why, his FAMILY could afford to take care of a sizable portion of the country’s health needs—especially if we’re not paying bloated executive salaries to for-profit health providers. Private health care providers commonly pay abut 15% for administrative expenses, while Medicare does what is generally considered a good job on 4%. That 11% difference could amount to between two and three hundred billion dollars a year in savings. No wonder the Frist family could afford to give back a measly 1.7 billion. Ain’t relativity wonderful?

We need to draw back from the immediate anguish of those who are getting shafted by their inability to afford the cost of the American medical system, and change the system itself if we really want to do something about health care in this country. A recent study comparing American and English health and health care brought that into sharp focus. Average health care expenditure in the U.S. is about $5200 per person, while England spends about half that, but the English get a lot more bang for their buck—or is it pull for their pound? Anyway, the study compared Caucasian Americans with Caucasian Britons, to eliminate distortions due to racial differences, and found that half again more Americans than English are overweight and, and half again more Americans also suffer from heart problems—and we’re just talking physical heart problems here. Americans are twice as likely to be diabetic, 25% more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, and nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer. The study found, predictably, that richer people tend to be healthier than poor ones, but still, the wealthiest Americans have more health problems than the poorest Britons.

Researchers think this may relate to the more stressful nature of life in the US, although part of England’s stress relief program is its much better health safety net—that costs half what ours does. Another reason cited for the less stressful nature of life in England is that the standard of living has risen across the board in England over the last thirty years, while here in America only the wealthiest 20% of the population has seen their real income rise.

Some of that lucky 20% are in the upper echelons of the health care industry. In his book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government - and How We Can Take It Back, David Sirota points out that

In 2003, HMOs nearly doubled their profits from just a year before, adding $10 billion to their bottom line. That year, top executives at the 11 largest health insurers made a combined $85 million in one year. In the first three quarters of 2004, HMO profits increased by another 33 percent. The sheer numbers behind these profits are staggering: In 2004 alone, the four biggest health insurance companies reported $100 billion in revenues. That’s $273 million a day, every day, 365 days of the year.

That’s why there’s such an effort being made to blame the Tenncare shortfall on its victims, and ignore the real perpetrators of this crisis—the bloated health care industry. Sure, diabetes, high blood pressure, and acid reflux, the most common problems treated by Tenncare, are “lifestyle diseases” that a prudent person could avoid; but the entire force of the American economy, from the food we are urged to eat to the rents, taxes, and mortgages we have to pay to the cars we have to buy and drive and the jobs and low wages we have to put up with, is designed to get us to make imprudent choices.

It’s not enough to try and cover everybody’s insurance needs under the current system. It’s not even enough to switch to single-payer coverage. We need to create an economy that promotes the health of its citizens over the wealth of its corporations, and that is going to take a radical, nonviolent revolution in thought and government to create. That will be difficult. The alternative—for the current situation to devolve still further—would be much more difficult. Let’s roll, eh?

music: Greg Brown, “America Will Eat You”

I’m pleased to report to you that the Green Party here in Tennessee is running its fullest slate of candidates ever in next Fall’s election. The Party’s recent nominating convention produced candidates for Governor, U.S. Senator, and 1st and 7th House districts, as well as a couple of local contests.

Howard Switzer, a resident of rural Linden, Tennessee, is the gubernatorial candidate. He is an architect by profession and one of the founders of the state’s Green Party. His wife, Katey Culver, a permaculture designer and also a founder of the Green Party, is running for the U.S. House against Marsha Blackheart—I mean Blackburn—in the Seventh District. Marcia Blackburn is famously from Brentwood, one of the richest zipcodes in the USA, but Brentwood was gerrymandered into the seventh district. It’s only connected with the rest of the predominantly rural, low-income southwestern Tennessee district by a narrow corridor, which also juts up to include Clarksville, a military town and Republican bastion. I guess our Tennessee solons brought in some consultants from Texas to do the last redistricting. Don’t want them poor folks electin’ someone who’ll actually represent ‘em. No. Good luck, Katey—may you surprise us all, especially Marsha.

Chris Lugo, of Nashville, was nominated to run for Bill Frist’s Senate seat, which Bill, thank goodness, is vacating. Chris is in the cleaning and recycling business, and also runs the Tennessee Independent Media Center, a web-based alternative newspaper for those of us here in the midsouth. Full disclosure: a lot of my writing on local issues gets printed at the TNIMC website, and I volunteer my editing talents there also. Chris has a website for his Senate run, featuring his platform, which I think could pretty well serve as the platform for everyone on the ticket.

Robert Smith is the party’s candidate in the first district, which is in the far east of the state. He is a Vietnam veteran and a founding member of an ecovillage near Greenville, and a Native American off the Seneca tribe.

In the two green-tinged local races, Martin Pleasant is running for county commissioner in Knoxville, a race that is technically non partisan, and Jonathan Davidson, who has not sought the endorsement of the Green Party although he is affiliated with it, is seeking a Nashville-area house seat. There’s still almost a month to go until the deadline for filing (April 6), so more candidates may be in the wings. Stay tuned. I’m considering it—but I’d have to give up this radio show to do it. Why don’t you? Just go on down to your county electoral commission and get a petition, and find 25 of your friends to sign it, and you, too, can have your name on the ballot in November. There will be another chance for Green Party endorsement at the state party convention in May. I’ll be happy to help you any way I can.

That’s the good news. Now for the bad news.

First of all, you won’t know by looking at the ballot that any of these folks are running on the Green Party ticket. Due to the way the Democans and Republicrats have fixed the ballot laws in this state, a party has to win more than five percent of the vote in a statewide election WITHOUT its party tag on the ballot, in order to have its party tag on the ballot, or present a petition with the equivalent number of signatures on it, which comes to about 37,000. High hurdles….

Now, for more bad news. The Democrats are working to keep the Greens off all ballots, completely. H.R 4694 (”Let the People Decide Clean Campaign Act”) would grant full public funding to nominees of parties (i.e., Democans and Republicrats) that had averaged 25% of the vote for House races in a given district in the last two elections. All others (i.e., third party and independent candidates) would be required to submit petitions signed by 10% of the last vote cast for partial funding, and 20% for full funding.

Furthermore, candidates who don’t qualify for funding would be barred from spending any privately raised money on their campaigns. Ten to twenty percent of the last vote cast—that’s 35-70,000 signatures in the average congressional district. Just getting that many signatures, even with copious volunteer help, would require serious fundraising. This bill effectively cuts small third parties out of the U.S. electoral process in the name of campaign finance reform. We’re not the problem, but we’re getting fixed—like a dog gets fixed. Well, isn’t that nice?

Whatsamatter with you, you need more than two choices? How unAmerican! This is not something coming from the Republifacists, mind you. This is coming from people even a cynical Green like me is inclined to think of as the good guys. Barney Frank and Henry Waxman are two sponsors of this bill.

Barney Frank!!?? Greenbashed by the gays!! Barney, how could you!! And Henry Waxman!!??

Here’s the skinny: several of the other sponsors of this bill faced Green competition suggesting that their sponsorship is retaliatory. They will be facing Green competition again this year, I’m sure. Get used to it, people.

Commenting on this, D.C. Statehood Green Party activist T.E. Smith said, “The Democrats behind this bill have as little regard for democracy and open elections as Republicans who have used altered district lines and other methods to fix elections. Hiding this stratagem in a bill for public financing of campaigns makes it doubly shameful.”

“An obvious motivation behind HR 4694 is panic over a Green insurgency. Voters have realized that the Democratic Party has given President Bush and the GOP a pass on various abuses of power and radical actions, such as the invasion of Iraq and the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito, which most Democrats declined to filibuster. The time is ripe for a non-corporate independent third party, and many Democrats are worried,” added Mr. Smith.

Well, the good news about this bad news is that it is coming from the Democrats, and the Republicans aren’t likely to let it get very far. They like left-wing splinter parties that take votes from Democrats, y’know? So, the Republicans are good for something. Of course, if we were a serious threat to them, they’d sic Karl Rove on us without a second thought…one of these days, folks, one of these days.

music: Terry Allen, “Big Ol’ White Boys”

Comments

Chris Lugo’s new website is located at http://www.chris4senate.com/
Posted by webmaster on 04/07/2006 01:40:19 PM

and Robert Smith’s blog can be found here: http://1bigtree.tripod.com/robertnsmith_greens/
Posted by brothermartin on 04/07/2006 04:27:36 PM

There has been a tremendous hue and cry lately about the prospect of the government of the small, oil-rich Arab state of Dubai collecting the profits from running six of America’s east-coast seaports. I think there is an issue here, but it’s not the one everyone’s talking about. It’s not about the Arabs. It’s about the ownership.

The sad thing is that for most people, it is about the Arabs, and that is an unfortunate and embarrassing prejudice. Arabs, and Muslims in general, have a bad rap in this country, a reputation that is not particularly connected with truth. For example, Hamas’ victory in the recent Palestinian election sparked a similar outcry. “These people are depraved! They’re electing terrorists! That’s not what we meant by democracy, dammit!” Many American Muslims have been deported or prosecuted, and numerous charities shut down, for channeling support to this so-called “terrorist organization.”

Does Hamas target Israelis with violence? Yes, they do, and I think that’s reprehensible. I am a radical fundamentalist Gandhian, at least in some respects, and I don’t think angry violence is the answer to angry violence. But that’s just a small part of what Hamas does. Their religious practice commits them to scrupulous honesty, and that is what has endeared them to the people of Palestine. Palestinians know from intimate daily experience that Hamas is not on the take—that’s why so many American Muslims were supporting them, at least until our government’s crackdown. They knew that money donated to Hamas would go to people who needed it, not to some wealthy middleman.

Similarly, Dubai Ports World has an excellent reputation for running ports, a business fraught with opportunities for fraud and bureaucracy. That is probably one of the reasons why the U.S. government didn’t forsee any problem with handing management (and profit-taking) over to them. As I said, the real problem here is foreign ownership, and the consequent foreign destination for any profit from those ports.

This is not a new or unique situation. Foreign companies, individuals, and countries have been buying up U.S. assets for years. For example, according to the IRS, cited on the website .economyincrisis.org, the following percentages of U.S. businesses are foreign owned:

Sound recording industries - 97%

Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage – 79%

Motion picture industries – 75%

Metal ore mining – 65%

video industries – 64%

Wineries and distilleries – 64%

Database, directory, and other publishers – 63%

Book publishers – 63%

Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product – 62%

Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment – 57%

Rubber product – 53%

Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing – 53%

Plastics and rubber products manufacturing – 52%

Plastics product – 51%

Insurance related activities – 51%

Boiler, tank, and shipping container – 50% and the list goes on….
So, why has this happened? And what does it mean?

We have Al and Bill to thank for this one, folks. I’m sorry, all you Democrats, but this one happened on your watch. Think WTO. Think GATT. Think NAFTA. Think about that vast sucking sound Ross Perot used to talk about.

When Mr. Bush was in India recently, he fantasized about increasing U.S. exports, but the sad truth is that, thanks to all those treaties us wildeyed crazies tried to stop back in the late eighties and early nineties–all those treaties that the 1992 election should have been a referendum on and wasn’t, thanks to the Democratic Party–the U.S. doesn’t has nothing to export anymore.

Well, not quite nothing. We’ve got lots of bonds and dollar bills to export, and you can bet that those trillions of dollars the rest of the world has loaned us will be paid back with American assets—what companies are left, hard assets like port facilities, and, ultimately, land—urban, rural, forest and field, we owe, we owe, so off our assets go. All those Indians running motels are just the beginning. And when our assets, corporate or material, are owned by foreigners, the profits go overseas, and we will become third world peons, peed on by the man, exploited for the benefit of rich people somewhere else—Dubai, China, it doesn’t matter, it ain’t here.

Yes, this sucks. Get used to it. This country has been running the world economy with a Ponzi scheme, selling bonds to pay the interest on the bonds we’ve already sold, and all those chickens are coming home to roost. Dubai Ports World has decided to find American buyers for P&O’s American assets, but they may have a hard time doing that, because only one of the major players in the port operation business is American these days. There is a strong likelihood that these ports will end up being operated by Dick Cheney—I mean, Halliburton.

The ironic thing to me about all this is that who really ought to be running these various ports doesn’t seem to occur to anyone…how about the port cities themselves? Duh!? Has neoliberal privatization become so much the norm that public ownership of public assets is totally off the table? Many of these port cities are struggling to provide basic services for their citizens—doesn’t it make sense to put the proceeds from port operations back into the city around the port?

Stepping back a notch, I have to wonder how much of the international trade going through these ports is really necessary, and how much is just pushing beans around for the further enrichment of the already wealthy. When I learned that the U.S. exports as many almonds to Italy as we import from Italy, I just had to shake my head. Who decided it would be OK to burn the diesel fuel to make that one happen? I bet they weren’t even thinking about the diesel fuel….

Under a Green program of local self-sufficiency, there would very likely be a lot less world trade. When you take the current paradigm to its logical conclusion, soon enough the major resources that are traded internationally will be depleted, and there will local insufficiency rather than self-sufficiency, and a lot less world trade. Which way would YOU like to have it?

music: James McMurtry, “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore”

OK, let me try and get this straight. The Israelis have nuclear weapons, and have refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. They are our friends and allies. The Pakistanis have nuclear weapons, have not signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, they have even sold nuclear know-how to the North Koreans, bona fide members of the Axis of Evil, but THEY are our friends and allies. And India has nuclear weapons, which they have threatened to unleash on the Pakis (who of course promised retaliation), is not a signatory of that ol’ nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and George Dubya was just over there kissin’ up to the Indians and laying a wreath on Mahatma Gandhi’s grave and saying what good friends we are with the Indians, why, we’ll just let ‘em have all our high-tech jobs and we’ll just figure out some other way to survive—but the Iranians may have a nuclear weapon in ten years or so, and we are just going to have to blow them sky high ASAP if that’s what it takes to keep them from getting their hands on a bomb, even though they are nonproliferation treaty signers and have, by objective (i.e., non-American) standards been fairly co-operative with the International Atomic Energy Agency—unlike our friends the Indians, Pakistanis, and Israelis.

Dubya laying a wreath on Ghandi’s grave…the apostle of pre-emptive war and globalism at the grave of the apostle of non-violence and local self-reliance…what would Ghandi have to say about that? Probably something along the lines of what he said about Western Civilization, which was that “It would be a good idea.” But, I digress.

As a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the U.S. is forbidden from exporting nuclear technology to India, and furthermore U.S. law prohibits the same thing—not that Dubya is a man to let a little thing like U.S. law, much less international treaties, stand in his way. Hey, there’s a war on, and the Commander-In-Chief can do whatever he needs to do, right? Victory at any price? Mission accomplished?

More like, smokescreen accomplished. The little boy is crying wolf again, with high hopes that when all the fuss dies down, Iran’s oilfields will be secured by American soldiers. Yeah, and we’re going to cakewalk into Tehran just like we cakewalked into Baghdad.

Let’s put this into perspective. The U.S. only imports about 20% of our oil from the Middle East. Russia and China, especially China, are much more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than we are. Both are a bit put out with the US because they had oil deals with Iraq that the U.S. tore up when we invaded, an invasion (here it comes again) with all the legal basis of the Nazi invasion of Poland. But I digress.

So, what the U.S. is really doing by threatening Iran and sucking up to India is attempting to control the supply of oil to Russia, China, and the European Union. What are these countries doing about it?  The EU is trying to put the diplomatic brakes on the US war machine. The Russians are providing air defense missiles to Iran, and the Chinese are expected to be a major participant in the independent Iranian oil market that is slated to open on March 20, and which will do business in Euros, not dollars, undermining the US currency’s world hegemony. It is hard to imagine a third world war starting AFTER the fall of Communism, but, at least as a proxy conflict, there are some very scary possibilities shaping up.

US “surgical” use of nukes is being threatened, and a nuclear cloud drifting over the planet is just what we need, don’t you think? There is just no telling what could happen, though there is certainly plenty in print about the possibilities. None of them are attractive.

The most nonviolent scenario is: no invasion, no surgical strikes on nuclear facilities, just an attempt to boycott Iran. World oil prices would probably hit a hundred dollars a barrel, edging the price of gasoline and home heating oil up another dollar or more. Considering the seller’s market for oil, the boycott would probably not work very well, with Russia and China co-operating to move Iranian oil, and paying for it in some way that does not involve dollars. When a settlement is reached—that is, the boycott ultimately fails–the not-for-dollars arrangement expands, the US dollar falls to record low levels, and sale of US ports turns out to be only the beginning of America: the yard sale, as countries spend nearly worthless dollars on the only thing they will buy, which is US assets—businesses and real estate, at bargain basement prices. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

So, this is supposed to be the Green hour, not the doom hour—what could/would a Green administration do about this crisis?

We would not have gotten into it in the first place; but, since we’re here, it’s not too late to start doing what we should have started doing thirty-five years ago: promote conservation, recycling, and locally produced alternative fuels. We always said the alternative to our alternative was global disaster, and that’s sho’nuff where the Bush junta’s insistence on having its way is leading us. Will somebody please stop these guys before they get us all killed?

On a positive note, a UN-sponsored team has recently completed a 52-home model straw-bale village in northern Iraq, featuring, besides the homes themselves, wastewater recycling, composting, and village gardens. No UN workers were injured, abducted, or killed in the process. If we were willing to fund more projects like this instead of domination and destruction, there could be real, lasting peace not just in the Middle East but all over the world. Here’s hoping.

music: Sheila Chandra, “You”

(not a link to that song, but the only Sheila Chandra performance i could find)

Comments

I was reading your post today. I just wanted to say….”Well said”!! It’s rather like an oxymoron isn’t it? We are often not even told the truth until long after the lie has been taken into effect, at which time we realize, we have been taken advantage of and dupped into believing what someone else has said.
Posted by soulcofessions on 03/12/2006 10:17:12 PM

thanks…sometimes I feel like I’ve been fighting a losing battle for years, but on the other hand, I’m still fighting….
Posted by brothermartin on 03/12/2006 10:24:15 PM