The American Dream was just a Dream.

Remember when hard work and perseverance were all you needed to "make it" in America?
That was before the Ultra Monster Pirana of Uncontrolled, Unregulated, Unfettered, Un F-ing Believable, Un-American Pseudo (Vampire) Capitalism took over.

Now it doesn't matter what you do to try to get ahead. The dice are loaded. The table is rigged. And you're the rube. Smile.
It used to be easy to understand, only the poor and desperate stole from others. Now it's the Corporate business plan. And it works! For them. For us, not so much.

Good for you. You get up early in the morning so you can take your time and get on the road to beat the ridiculous traffic. Guess what? Now the rich guy can pay to get in a lane that he can go fast in and make it where he's going in time. He just negated all of your planning and hard work. It's okay. He's rich. You're screwed. Welcome to the new economy!

The airport is where this is most apparent. Stand in line to go through TSA security check? Check!
It's the American way to do stupid stuff (that's stuff with an sh...) when they've told you to be paranoid. Billions of dollars go to the companies that make the scanning and screening machines that are used to humiliate us and make us feel like we're less-than-human. These machines are the modern day equivalent of a scarecrow. Or one of those owl sculpture that are supposed to scare away birds and other pests. Basically, just to make the general public feel good. They do nothing to protect us, and I can prove it.

They have a new system that can be used by the rich to circumvent these long lines and delays. Just pay the toll, and breeze right through and past the line. The good news is, terrorists would never pay to get through in this manner, so, no problem here. Just shut up and wait in line, loser!

The airport is where you can find another little piece of inequity. In the parking garage, If you call (write, e-mail, whatever. I suppose if I were rich I'd know how) ahead and pay the price you can get preferred parking in the deck where you used to have to drive up and down and down and up and hither and yon. No more. If you want to avoid that work that is part and parcel of a normal existence, you can pay to NOT be treated equally. Hooray!!

I'll bet you can think of lots of examples where the normal everyday, play by the rules consumer gets outbid by the upper echelons, and made to feel less-than.

We've got to stand-up. Let's face it, we've got more practice than they do, because we have to actually wait in those lines. Stand up for your rights! Stand up for the merit that should be afforded by the hard-work that used to be the backbone of the American Way. Stop all this pay to win. Make your voice heard! Join a union. Join a party. Join a club. Join, join, join. We are stronger TOGETHER.

We just gotta change things or we will be ground under by the 1%.
Baby Steps...

Old King Coal. Not so merry.

Coal miners have been around for a awhile. 

Mining is dirty, dangerous work, that doesn't take a lot of education, just mostly muscle and courage. And a desire to take care of your family.
Especially in rural areas where the coal is found, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri, to name just a few. Miners generally have a pretty tough life, filthy, back-breaking work, for long hours. As long as the employer can legally require, that's how many hours a coal miner will work.

I just drove through Ludlow, Colorado where an abomination against humanity took place a while back. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)

Fortunately, thanks to the unions and the incredible war-like struggles that they went through to get the miners a living-wage and some protections, the miners can enjoy a somewhat normal standard of living. A liveable standard, even though these mines tend to be in horrible, back-woods locations where the boom-town economies inflate all the costs that the miners incur. Many of these miners have worked the mines for generations, so much so that it's the only existence that they've ever known, or that they can even contemplate. The job is so ingrained with the life and the culture, that the miners, not only put up with the horrible conditions that the employers thrust upon them, they defend it against all logic and against their own well-being.
The nation should be getting off coal. And petroleum. And Natural gas.

It's obvious. Coal is a dirty source of fuel and mining kills miners through bad and unsafe practices and disease. There are natural, renewable sources of power generation that we can transition into, and these miners can, with very little adaptation, be transitioned into without the loss of any income. These types of energy can, and will, be in the same rural locations where these workers now live. But there's a catch. Isn't there always? The fossil fuel energy companies have powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies that won't allow that to happen.

Workers need to be educated in these things. (another reason that the rich and the corporations are dead-set against any public education) The Politicians and the corporations aren't your friends. They fought against your rights every step of the way and killed countless miners who only wanted to make life better for their families.

Let's get out there and help these people, because by helping them, we help ourselves.
The best way to get even with the Robber Borons, is to make what they stole from us, and our planet, worthless.
Let's do it.
Baby steps...

Have we started a fire?

Jan 26th, 2012 by Vince Curran
Well, for Christmas this year, Amazon posted some pretty impressive sales numbers, especially on their very popular Kindle.  In the month of December alone, they sold 4 million Kindles.  Now this is a pretty impressive record and I feel it bodes well for the life of trees.  Especially since the sale of electronic books or e-books has gone up 175% in the last year.  Now if everyone used a Kindle for all of their reading, including books, magazines, catalogs, TV schedules, e-mail and school textbooks, that would represent a significant reduction in paper used to produce books.
Now this is a pretty obvious benefit, but there are some benefits that are not quite so obvious, for example, all of those millions upon millions of books don't have to be shipped from the printer to the distributor to the bookstores.  That may not seem like much, but I think anybody who has ever had to move knows.  What's the heaviest thing that you move when you move.  At least in my case, it's always the boxes and boxes and boxes filled with bookses and bookses and bookses.  And those bad boys are heavy.
For those of you who don't know, standard paper weighs approximately 75 pounds per cubic foot.  That means each box of books you carry when you're moving weighs approximately 75 pounds.  Now, when there's a bestseller, the publisher prints up a whole bunch of hardback editions, each one of these weighing between three and 7 pounds and they ship them all over the country, generally by truck.  That's a lot of weight in a lot of trucks requiring a lot of fuel, and a lot of wear and tear on our streets and highways.  Now, if these books aren't actually printed and can be sent zooming through the cloud, that saves a lot of transportation resources and their related costs.  Not to mention all the trees that don't get cut down to produce these books since most printers use virgin pulp.  In addition to the paper being used, paper mills, create an awful lot of waste products, which won't be produced if we're using e-books.
So, this is a pretty impressive technology and it does just what technology should do, save time, resources and money.  It will be interesting to see how the use of e-books evolves over the next several years.  It will be interesting to see if we can actually change the method in which we consume media.  It will also be interesting to see how much paper is actually saved over the next several years.  And how much fuel for trucks, and all that other good stuff.
Here's a great example of what technology can do.  Train us to do the right thing, which we could have been doing all along by just going to the library.  However, I salute Amazon and Kindle and anyone who uses the Internet and technology to consume the media that we have all become addicted to.  Now, if we could only invent some technology to make us stop wearing fur or wasting water.  Or maybe an app to make us stop eating junk food.  Or a gizmo to make us exercise.  Or a program to make us start acting logically and with common sense.  Or a whizbang to keep us from hating others and starting wars.  They may not be big sellers, but at least we can say we tried something.
Baby Steps...

Wha....???

Did you happen to see this?
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/memphis_teacher.php

To put this in terms of Urban Homesteading: “Oh, for plucks sake!” (a chicken reference)

You hear about bad teachers sometimes. Something should be done about them.

You hear about bad students. Do something about them also. Maybe get them good teachers.

You hear about people fined and jailed for gardens. That’s right. I said GARDENS.

You know, plants and flowers and vegetables. That kind of garden.

Now, this. It is pretty apparent that local governments don’t have enough important work to do. I guess in these communities there must be no crime and 100% employment. The schools must be great, and the streets clean. The hospitals cheap and efficient and everyone gets along like a happy crowd at a rave where the water has been spiked with ecstasy.

Bullcompost, bullcompost, bullcompost!

This is community!

This is Education!

This is Science!

This is farming!

This is food justice!

This is giving students a purpose!

This is what we should ALL be doing.

Memphis oughta’ re-think why people percieve the South as backwards.
This should be REQUIRED not criminalized.

Baby Steps...

Close? We were like this.

Have you ever heard the expression, we were really close?  I was close to my mother?  My family and I, we're real close?  There's a reason that we use the same word for proximity as we do for physical relationships.  Traditionally, the people you know the best are the people you interact with the most often, or the ones you are close to.

Before the big exodus to the suburbs back in the 40s, 50s and 60s, people used to live in relatively close proximity.  Neighbors were "close".  You didn't need to develop a closeness with neighbors and coworkers.  It was already built-in.  Moving away from other people, was part of what we perceived as the illusion of wealth.  The wealthy lived isolated from everyone else on large estates.  If we move away from the city and get a little bit of land, we can pretend we are wealthy, too.  We're so lame.  We didn't exactly know we were lame, but looking back, we were pretty lame.  In the 80s, Alex Haley taught us how important it was to get back to our roots.  I couldn't agree more.

 Early people gathered into tribes, for companionship, for safety and so that they could rely on the unique skills of different individuals within the tribe.  That way, you see, not every single person needed to know every single thing.  This was a kind of collaborative sharing of knowledge, sort of like a human library, where you could borrow the skills and knowledge of one individual and use them as long as you needed them.  It actually works surprisingly well.  A lot of us call this a society.  And members of the society are said to be social.  People that feel the society works well are called social-ist.  If the guy knew how to build stuff out of wood, you spoke to him, explained to him what you needed and negotiated some sort of payment or compensation.  The carpenter was the businessman and he communicated with you directly.  And you paid him directly.  There was no need to go to some fat cat, some go-between, some broker to do this for you.  Therefore, none of the wealth that you needed to compensate the carpenter went to anyone except the carpenter. 

When this middleman came along, he siphoned off money or goods that should have gone directly to the consumer and to the craftsman.  Part of the honest wealth that the consumer had generated, be it skills, or foodstuffs, or clothing, or some goods that were considered of value, were taken by this parasite.  In addition, some of the skills the carpenter was offering in return for compensation weren't compensated for it’s correct and true value.  The people on both ends of this transaction were made poorer by the introduction of this middleman.  Hence, Co-Poor-Ation. When the Co-Poor-Ation moved in, we started a new group of the tribe who became wealthy by doing nothing.  So everyone got to share the poverty, except the Co-Poor-Ation.

Little by little people are beginning to see the error of their ways.  Some people are doing their own work, stuff they used to hire specialists to do.  People are growing their own food, and raising their own livestock.  And oddly enough, they are doing this in the city.  We're re-learning how to live in communities, and it's a good thing.  It's the only way were going to be able to maintain any sustainability.  I say share.  Barter.  Build things.  Weave and sew textiles.  Grow vegetables.  Raise livestock.  Butcher your own meat.  Do whatever you have to do to your chickens, and pluck the Co-Poor-Ations.

It works if you work it.

Remember back in Kindergarten when they told you to share?  Seems in some cases, it works!
I think that in the cases where it doesn't work, it's because of our conditioning into the "Me, Me, ME!' attitude that seems to permeate a lot of society. (I know, it's a contradiction in terms: "Me, Me, ME!" and "Society". The two don't work together.)
I think one of our greatest strengths is our ability to create a community. I know, we've gotten away from that in the last couple of generations, but, I for one, am striving to regain this cornerstone of human existence.
I'll be exploring more collaborative consumption and capitalism down the road. Until then, get to know your neighbors, they may save your life someday.
BTW, the "Me, Me, ME!" people (read: Teabaggers) can kiss our COLLECTIVE *ss.


http://www.good.is/post/radical-sharing-works-this-guy-lets-the-world-use-his-starbucks-card-for-free/