A Green Vision

I like running for Governor partly because it gets me to focus on articulating a Green Vision for the future, something I'm not sure has been done very well yet. Partly it is because it will require many people in many places participation to really design and build the diversified system I'm talking about. Someone said I was suggesting isolationism by focusing on the community but nothing could be farther from the truth. It is true that life's essentials will need to be produced locally for the most part in order to be sustainable, but it is also vital to re-establish social relations within communities and to re-establish critical trade networks with other communities. The current system relies on oil powered systems of distribution from centralized locations for food, fuel, medicine, clothing, for some even water, and over the last 100 years has destroyed the older critical life supporting networks of communities. The current system is vast and complex but could fail with even small reductions in fuel accessibility. We can redesign the system before we run out which will make it much easier to get systems in place for the long haul. We can do it in any case but we might loose a bunch of us in the process if we don't begin soon. Cuba managed to make the change when their oil supply was abruptly ended, bicycles and organic food production everywhere, but they are a relatively small island.

We will need to raise the standards for corporate behavior on our state barring certain activities. Just as our climate and weather patterns have been destabilized by unwise and unregulated practices so has our economy, so has our food, fuel and fiber systems, our access to clean water too is being threatened. So the challenge is to design a balanced system, one that can provide for our needs as well as for the needs of our ecology. It should not be that complicated as it is in our genetic memory, we used to do it. Now we prodce 20 times the carbon emissions as the rest of the world, we need to take responsibility for our actions at a personal and community level as well as for the actions of US based corporations.

The five planks I mentioned are my platform and in the coming posts will attempt to lay out a Green Vision of each; Security, Economy, Ecology, Health, Education, to further explain myself. Please feel free to ask questions in the comment section below.

Good day all,

Building a 5 Legged Stool

We came back from our trip to Pine Ridge Reservation just in time to participate in a gubernatorial debate. Having not been invited to the debate with all the corporate-funded candidates I had hoped there would be at least one debate with the independent and third party candidates. Tennessee has a tradition of colorful candidates for governor and this debate was between three of them. It was organized by the Basil Marceaux campaign, of Colbert Report fame, and besides yours truly, stage center, there was June Griffin of Daily Show fame ...from Dayton, TN, of monkey trial fame. So there I was, sandwiched between all this fame. Basil was a likable buffoon who paid for the hall and whose antics had drawn the audience there, largely for the entertainment it would provide. June Griffin was an angry, and somewhat scary, fundamentalist. Despite her claim of supporting the Constitution it became clear to me that our Constitution was written to protect us from people with ideas like hers. Pursuit of happiness was not part of her program but Basil was all for it.

It was difficult to get the conversation focused on things that we could do to really help people's lives. They were both big second amendment supporters opposed to regulation. I pointed out that it was the first amendment that was being threatened not the 2nd amendment...that this whole gun flap is to stir the fear and sell more guns all while crime figures have been going down for 30 years. I guess that is why crime reporting is up over 1000%, atrocity sells guns. I asked, why are we so afraid that we feel the need to carry a gun? ...and shouldn't we be addressing that issue? At one point I had to admit to the audience that much of what I was hearing sounded pretty crazy.

It is difficult for a Green to get their ideas out and understood in a society guided by two polarized philosophies; individualism and socialism. Despite their differences, the two dominant philosophies are both human-centric and industrial. Green political thought is based on a philosophy that includes the 30 million other species our existence is interwoven with, and on which we depend for food, water and the other necessities of life. The current economy is parasitic, turning the biomass of other species into more human biomass as industrial activities propel extinctions of others at an accelerating rate. The writing is on the wall, our planet is finite, and while only a minority are seeing it Greens have a plan to repair the damage.

We would begin with redirecting the state's priorities away from service to extractive corporate clients to re-establishing viable, resilient and self reliant, self-governing, sustainable communities, organized by watersheds. We would proliferate facilitated Community Dialogue Projects so people could come together to get to know one another again to research and discuss what was best for their community. Communities would be helped with Community Resource Assessments to determine the talent, ideas and materials available to them for building a resilient local economy. We would pursue equipping communities with community scale technologies for food, fiber, fuel and energy as well as regional manufacturing of essential tools and equipment for them. Our five priorities would be 1. economy 2. ecology 3. health 4. security 5. education. In green philosophy these are all connected and are the primary concern of all living things, all communities. Communities would design their systems so that all nutrient and material loops would be closed, wasting nothing, operating within the limits of their environment and in harmony with it. Solar resources would be utilized to the max, directly or indirectly. Science would be freed from only experts to encourage innovation and invention. We would establish community banks and a state bank as a bulwark against the funny money of Wall Street. Education would be integrated into the fabric of the community teaching real skills as well as critical thinking and problem solving. We would be designing a stable decentralized system, one with plenty of redundancy for security. A centralized system is vulnerable at its center, with no center to attack a decentralized system is much more stable and secure. Its the difference between a one legged stool and a 5 legged stool.

Its pretty crazy out there

I have had my nose to the grindstone, so to speak, lately but it seems like every time I look up our situation is worse. The USDA fired a woman in charge of the southeast region based on a story from FOX news and the guy who was able to destroy ACORN, a group that had been helping poor people, by using edited video tape to misrepresent the truth, meaning it was a lie. They apparently snipped a small part of the woman's speech to the NAACP in which she recounted her coming to awareness of her own racism and how it changed her viewpoint. The Dirty Rotten Liar News Corporation then made the false case that she was a racist which got her fired immediately. So a TV network can make up lies and get a government official fired without the government even looking into the accuracy of the charges? We are in trouble aren't we. The crazies out there are making up so many lies now one almost wants to come to the defense of the Democrats. Of course we know the Democrats are just playing their lame part in this corporate funded drama that in the end may have us all enslaved even more than we are today if folks don't wake up and begin challenging the corporate (Republican) lies much more aggressively. We are currently headed for another civil war which I would really like to see us all avoid. Its time to pull the plug on these troublemakers and get down to business on how we can rescue the world from the corporate behemoth.

I will be on the reservation at Pine Ridge for a couple weeks, I'm going to help the natives build a big barn with straw bale walls. If you are voting in the primary, please vote for the non-corporate candidate ...if there is one.

best wishes,

Peace Festival Fails to Bring Peace

I guess FOX news missed an opportunity with that headline, eh? Of course it is not news much like the rest of their program. I went to the Peace Festival knowing I would see a lot of people I know to let them know I was running for Governor again and to meet and hear Cindy Sheehan speak. Cindy is a mother who lost her son in Iraq, a high price to pay for the awareness of what our military industrial complex government is really like. She bemoaned the fact that she was again talking to the choir and told the small crowd of the usual suspects gathered there that protests on the weekends weren't going to change things, "while they(the MIC) take the weekends off to enjoy themselves." She said "we all have to take to the streets", and was clearly reaching the conclusion that change was going to require a full time effort by many people, probably many more than those who would now call themselves members of the Peace Movement. Challenging the military industrial complex and its puppet government of two parties in the streets, however, can get you hurt if you aren't careful. The closer one gets to interrupting business as usual the more brutal the state response.

Cindy told everyone she did not vote for Obama but for the Green Party candidate, Cynthia McKinney, but pointed out how challenges at the ballot box have not gone well either. She said "they tell us that change comes at the ballot box but that is not so." We are given few avenues to change the system because the system doesn't want to change despite all the evidence and signals that they are headed way the wrong direction. The Green Party can lead in the right direction if people will stop voting for the system and they will have to stop allowing the system to convince them its going to change, just in order to get their vote of course.

The Green Party is running in this race in a effort to win a ballot line, it only takes 50,000 votes. currently the major political parties represent corporate interests over that of the people who live int heir districts. These corporate interests fund the political process in this country which allows them undue control over it. Stopping this is difficult but the Gulf disaster is an example of the world we can expect if we don't. I think there is a collective intelligence that needs to be awakened. Our European relations use 43% of the energy we consume. You can't walk into a convenience store and see a whole wall of refrigeration for different colors of the same sugar water in any other country in the world. We are not suggesting austerity, we are only asking for an end to the gluttony.

It doesn't matter what religious or non-religious beliefs we have as long as we have good relations. It is a huge project to rebuild our economy from the ground up, from the community level up. It will require everyone in each community to join in such a project because the time may be coming when they will have no other good option. The Green Party can provide the kind of leadership we need but as was recently demonstrated it is not the leaders who are important for a movement, it is the followers who are most important. Once enough followers are doing what the leader does the leader disappears into the throng. This is how it should be.

Deep Pockets

Keeping this blog up to date has been difficult but as the campaign and the year progresses I expect to post much more often. I just signed up with the Campaign Corner, a progressive populist site. As a governor there are limits to the things I could get involved in but there are plenty of state issues to take care of. A primary interest of mine is limiting corporate power, empowering communities, food and energy security, but first we will have to fix our broken political system.

Bob Hope once said "No one party can fool all the people all the time. That's why we have two parties." I had never realized that Bob Hope so totally "got it" and these days I think more and more people are. We've been provided a good list of some elements of the mess we are in by progressives but we can hardly blame it all on Republicans. While the two parties may differ in many respects when it comes to campaign promises they begin to look a lot alike when it comes to the overall thrust of policy, which is to serve the interests of the mostly American based multi-national corporations who funded their rise to positions of power. If we look at who gave what to whom to get elected we find the same major corporations giving to both parties but favoring one or the other with more in the years they are the winners. Yes, Virginia, politicians are elected with money, more and more of it every cycle. The candidate who spends the most gets the most votes, its pretty big news when, rarely, that does not happen. Corporations with deep pockets, such as these multi-nationals, can buy our government with a very tiny percentage of what they rake in. How deep are those pockets?

Lets take BP, hmmm I believe that suggestion has been made, ...not a bad idea. BP is a good example, or bad example depending on how you want to look at it, of deep pockets. BP has oil reserves currently of 63 billion barrels of oil. At $60 per barrel, 63 billion barrels represents $3.78 trillion dollars. BP is currently spending $500 million per month on the spill, so in theory it would take 3780 years at that rate for the company to exhaust its reserve assets. If the price of oil were to rise to $120 per barrel, not unreasonable since it reached $147 two years ago, BP’s assets would not run out for 7562 years. Hard to fathom, isn't it? Our President is trying to convince us he has poked a hole in BP's assets with the $20 billion pay off promised by BP. Hardly. BP could pay out $20 billion every year for 189 years, about 7 generations, at current market prices. That sounds about right for how long the toxic effects on the gulf and its coasts will take to heal. If they stopped all oil spills now, that is. We know they are not likely to, there is way too much money to made off of it. So how much does our government cost?

In 1929 Congress capped its own size, in defiance of the constitution, at 435 people. Before that Congress grew with the census as the constitution requires. They used to represent an average of about 30-40 thousand constituents each, now its 700 thousand each. Then there is the millionaire's club, the Senate, another 100 people, the executive branch provides a couple more, so a total of only 537 elected people. I recommend you check out the numbers for yourself but with few hundred million a year BP can pretty much get anyone they want elected and any policy good for oil companies implemented. They also have a $9 billion per year contract supplying our military with oil. Is this the Republicans fault alone?

Our current President has fallen right in line not reversing a single Bush policy and Bush didn't reverse any Clinton policy either. This is the President's primary job, support the policies put in place by all that corporate money. Republican, Democrat, the only difference is their style not their substance. That is not so true for republicans and democrats, however, for these are mostly ordinary people who want much the same thing for their families and communities but as Bob Hope pointed out, they are also some of the people who are fooled from time to time.

pirates of the care

Well as usual we didn't get much chance to read the health care bill. No wonder, its a mile thick and as illegible as a dour corporate lawyer can make it. As usual there are a few spoons of sugar to help the medicine go down but this medicine isn't going to make anyone well, no sir, this is all about ...you guessed it, money, in the form of corporate profits that is. Yup, in the new health insurance law Congress passed, there is a mandate that all states must have an insurance market exchange operating by January 1, 2014. Further, on or before January 1, 2013, if the Secretary of Health and Human Services determines that a state will not have an exchange ready by January 1, 2014, the Secretary shall establish and operate the exchange for that state.

Even more significant, States cannot request a waiver to set up a different plan until 2017. There is no wiggle room, the law is the law. There is no opt-out language. This is a clear mandate that exchanges be established in every state by 2014. States are required to spend the time, money and resources to set up and operate the insurance exchange. They may choose to have one or two or more exchanges or set up regional exchanges. A single payer type plan or a public option with or without an exchange is not allowed. Thus, as things stand, states cannot experiment with any approach that is not based on the private insurance market exchange model until 2017, after they have set up an exchange or the federal government has set one up for them.

I guess they didn't like the Greens idea of everyone covering everyone in a way that profits everyone instead of just a few. They do resist pretty much any good idea. It seems to me they've well proven themselves irresponsible citizens, that's polite speak for crooks, and that they deserved to be put out of business. Instead we'll have big healthcare markets dominated by a few big companies with a lot of names. Kind of like buying a candy bar, you think there are a lot of choices but its usually only 3 companies products. We can expect much more of this now that the Supreme Court has allowed corporations to patent living organisms, yes they want to own all the seed, and eliminated all limits on how much they could spend on political campaign, yes they want to one all the politicians. Gosh, I thought they already owned Congress. Oh well, now that we have company owned electronic elections I hope you've all said your good-byes to decency and democracy. Those who called this plan socialism need to study the difference between socialism, corporatism and fascism, and perhaps eat their words. I'll provide the salt.