Courtesy of One Block Off the Grid
Home Solar Power Discounts – One Block Off the Grid
Posted by Gypsy Chief
The main news from President Obama’s State of the Union address is the announcement of a fraud investigation unit in the Department of Justice says Cenk Uyger of The Young Turks.
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Source: CMD
Bank Fraud Investigation
President Obama did exactly what hundreds of thousands of us [ed note: MoveOn activists] have been calling on him to do—he announced a federal investigation into Wall Street. Here’s what he said:
“I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”
MoveOn Press Release Continues
The best part is, progressive champion New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is co-chairing the investigation and will make sure it stays on track.
Just weeks ago, this investigation wasn’t even on the table, and the big banks were pushing for a broad settlement that would have made it impossible. Your work changed all that.
This is truly a huge victory for the 99% movement. Hundreds of thousands of us signed petitions, made calls, and held signs outside in the cold to make this issue something that President Obama couldn’t ignore. Here’s some of what MoveOn members and our allies did to bring about this victory:
- Over 360,000 of us signed a petition calling on President Obama to fully investigate the banks.
- We delivered that petition at over 150 events last Thursday around the country at Obama for America campaign offices.
- Our pressure on state attorneys general stopped the rush to a sweetheart deal that would have precluded this investigation.
- And we’ve called, Facebooked, and tweeted at the White House repeatedly to ask the president to launch this investigation.
Progressive victories don’t come that often, and there’s so much more to do. But this is a very big one. Thank you for all you did to make it happen!
–Elena, Emily, Lenore, Robin, and the rest of the [MoveOn]team
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Rather go blind is one of the greatest sad songs ever made..
I cringe when I hear other people sing it. Thank you Etta.
If you had to get introduced to this song from some lame movie or wack TV talent show, eh, listen to the REAL VERSION!!!!
djmane1 on Youtube
Fortunately I got to see Etta James at the Monterey Jazz Festival years ago.
Etta James On Hunter Hancock Radio Show
We have blogged before about Hunter Hancock playing race music much admired by kids at Van Nuys Hi. Hank Balard and the Midnighters released a song Work With Me Annie which outraged much of the community back then. Etta James released a response song Roll With Me Henry. Here is a Youtube video of that song.
Posted by Gypsy Chief
City of Fort Collins and CFORSE Joint Effort
Thanks to my friend Fred Kirsch at Community For Sustainable Energy for publicizing a new effort to reduce VMT.
What is a VMT and why do I want to eliminate it?
VMT stands for: Vehicle Miles Traveled
It is a measurement of how many miles you drive. We are calculating VMT on a weekly basis and working to reduce it as part of a city-wide program to raise awareness and understanding of driving habits, as well as to help participants reduce driving.
Reasons to eliminate VMT: High gas prices, traffic, mental well-being, air pollution (VMT are the leading source of toxic air pollution in Fort Collins), less accident risk, and I bet you can think of some others!
Sounds Great – How Do I Cut My VMT?
Fred has a blog post for this. Here is a heavily edited summary plus a way to say goodby to your car without completely going back to horse and buggy days:
Traffic produces smog, congestion and high costs.
Populations grow, infrastructure lags. While researching
the role electric vehicles might play to improve these problems,
I discovered car sharing and decided to propose a program
for the city. I wanted to include electric cars for short trips.
Also, I suspected that lower weight, lower energy,
lower impact vehicles, operating primarily in bike lanes would
be another terrific addition to the car share menu. People can
choose exactly the vehicle and energy use that is perfect for each trip.We call it “full spectrum vehicle sharing”. It really is just a car share
menu with more choices. High impact choices cost more,
low impact choices cost less. So, got car sharing approved for
CSU, got Fort Collins CarShare operating, and are ramping Fort Collins
“full spectrum” Vehicle Share up to launch the first program of its kind!
Go to our website at Fort Collins Car Share for a quick look, and contact us for more information, or if you want to get involved.
Help us close the circle and make a positive changes in how people move around.
We have a dream that is so exciting, it makes us feel 14 again!
Shane Miller
Shane makes the point that you could take the bus or ride your bike whenever you need to get to your car share. I like the idea of not having to have my own insurance policy if I only drive a few times a year. I have been automobile free for 16 years and it is a little tough when it snows in Fort Collins. My neighbor said that I gave up freedom when I went auto-free. What I gave up was dealing with DMV, parking tickets, bridge tolls, gas, oil, tires, auto maintenance, car insurance, etc. Now there is another alternative in Fort Collins.
This is Freedom
Related: Sourced from AlterNet Do We Have To Live Like Peasants To Be Truly Sustainable?
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Of Two Minds Blog by Charles Hugh Smith published January 13, 2012.
The Savior State has pulled out all the stops to prop up the Status Quo. Its gargantuan borrowing and spending have fixed nothing. Contraction is replacing expansion as the new normal.
For the past 67 years, Americans have been conditioned to expect expansion and more of everything: more income, more stuff, more opportunity, more benefits, more medical care, more government entitlements, and so on.
As a result, Americans have habituated to permanent expansion. The concept that contraction–less of everything–is the new normal simply doesn’t register; it is rejected, denied, or decried as a great tragedy. The notion that it is simply reality does not compute with a populace habituated to permanent “growth” that is at worst interrupted by brief recessions.
U.S. politicians have learned that Soaring Rhetoric (TM) about “morning in America,” “the New Frontier,” “hope” and other ritualistic appeals to permanent expansion win elections, while accurate descriptions of reality lose elections.
The voting public’s demand for “permanent good news” promising permanent expansion has spawned a feedback loop of officially sanctioned manipulated statistics and media spin (a.k.a. propaganda) that expands with every administration, even as the real economy visibly weakens. Though the Obama Administration has perfected the techniques of presenting “permanent good news,” the divergence of the real economy and the official “story” that “we’ve returned to permanent expansion” is widening.
The real story is the “expansion” has cost the taxpayers trillions of dollars in new debt and trillions of dollars of backstops, shadow purchases and money-printing by the Federal Reserve. Roughly speaking, $6 trillion in additional Federal borrowing has been blown to simply keep the Status Quo from imploding, and around $13 trillion in guarantees, backstops, asset purchases, and losses made good have been issued to keep the Status Quo’s financial sector afloat and in charge.
By any credible, unmanipulated measure, for example, the number of people with fulltime employment or household income, the economy has yet to recover to 2007 levels.
This reality must be denied, both by the power-obsessed politicos who fear the truth like vampires fear garlic-garlanded crosses, and by voters who fear a reduction in their personal share of the swag.
Humans habituate quickly to a wide range of conditions and expectations, but once they’ve settled into the new habitat, they are resistant to new conditions. Needless to say, humans prefer a future in which there will be more of everything over one with less of everything, as permanent expansion means there will be few if any troublesome cost-benefit analyses, hard choices or painful triage, and little need to adjust to new realities.
Changing conditioning is difficult and often arduous.
Americans have been conditioned for three generations to expect the Savior State to “do something” during downturns to “make it right.” The idea that systemic problems are now beyond the reach of the Federal government does not compute; there must be something the government can do to “fix” everything.
This notion that the Central State is effectively omniscient and all-powerful is central to the belief system of Americans now. The concept that the government cannot fix the problem, or that government central-planning has made the problem worse, is anathema to everyone conditioned to believe government intervention will “save the day.”
The basic reality is the Federal government has already pulled out all the stops in the past four years to “make the economy recover,” and all its unprecedented actions have accomplished is to maintain the Status Quo via unsustainably gargantuan borrowing, spending and backstopping.
If we scrape away the rhetoric and bogus statistics, at heart the current fantasy that the U.S. has “decoupled” from the global economy and will remain an island of “permanent prosperity” in a sea of recession boils down to this belief: the Federal government “won’t let us stay in recession.” In other words, it’s within the power of the Central State to make good every loss, guarantee every debt, maintain the Empire, solve every geopolitical challenge and find technological or military solutions to potential energy shortages. All we need is the “will” to force the government to use its essentially unlimited power to “fix everything.”
A people conditioned to this expectation will have great difficulty accepting that their government has already done everything possible, and that these stupendous debt-based expenditures are simply not sustainable going forward. Some problems are not fixable by more government intervention; indeed, government intervention in the marketplace is like insulin: the system begins to lose sensitivity to Central State manipulation and intervention.
2012 is looking like the year that the American public will have to face up to the fact that the Central State’s massive efforts to “fix the economy” have failed, and that Central State support of the Status Quo cannot fix what’s broken.
We will have to habituate to contraction, and the belief in a god-like Savior State with unlimited powers and money will fade as the economy’s systemic illnesses–extreme concentrations of power and wealth, corruption, financial leverage, excessive debt and so on–reassert themselves.
All that has happened for four long years is systemic problems were papered over to benefit the Status Quo. Everything that is broken awaits real repair.
###
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Glad To Be Back
SOPA, H.R. 3261 and its senate companion PIPA, S. 968, are horrible pieces of legislation that must be stopped. We have had a lot to say about this already and we will oppose the relection of any politician of either party who supports or votes for either law.
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Depending on Central State/central bank borrowing and spending to prop up the Status Quo is a doomed strategy.
~~ Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds Blog published January 10 by Charles Hugh Smith.
I think the thread between these three seemingly disparate stories is clearly visible. I am indebted to longtime correspondent Joel M. for sending me these articles:
A Dimly Flickering Light in a Darkened Downtown. An Ohio mill town’s once-bustling main street is now a ghost town; people are desperate to sell their family heirlooms to one of the downtown’s few remaining businesses, a vintage shop, to raise cash.
A Fight for Post Offices and Towns’ Souls. Even as the number of family farms rises for the first time in decades in the U.S., long-standing services to rural communities such as post offices and schools are being slashed.
With Work Scarce in Athens, Greeks Go Back to the Land. As Greece’s economy plunges and unemployment rises, many Greeks are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich agricultural past as a guide to the future.
The thread that connects these stories is the devolution of centralized concentrations of control and the power of localism to fill the void. As I have often noted here, the expansive Central State is on an S-curve of decline, and this is most apparent in places such as Greece that cannot print a couple trillion dollars a year to fund a bloated Status Quo like the U.S. can (at least for now).
But the Central State is on an S-curve even in nations such as the U.S. and “socialist” France, where rural post offices are also being closed or their hours drastically slashed for budgetary reasons.
Though few believe it possible, Wal-Mart is also on an S-Curve of decline; right now it has topped out, roughly comparable to the centralized corporations that owned and operated the mills in the 1960s. Though these conglomerates seemed eternal, beneath the surface they were already in decline. So it is with the Wal-Mart model of centralized distribution of goods sourced via long global supply chains. The decline just isn’t visible yet.
It is instructive to consider how the tiny village in the south of France where my brother lives is responding to the closure of rural services and the devolution of centralized funding. The village has actively constructed subsidized housing on village-owned land to attract young families with children so the village school and post office won’t be closed.
Those who depend on a strategy of pleading with central authorities to continue funding at old levels are doomed to disappointment–all systems follow an S-Curve of rapid expansion, stasis and decline. The Central State is no different.
The solution is localism. By creating cheap housing with its own modest tax resources, then the village attracts young families, whose children will keep the village school from closing, and the commerce brought to the village and its post office will keep it above the “closure” threshold.
Passively hoping that centralized concentrations of wealth and power will return to pre-eminence is a losing strategy, the equivalent of a cargo cult ritualistically hoping for a return to World War II-era bounty. Focusing local resources on obvious bootstrap solutions is the winning strategy, not just in the U.S. but globally.
That old mill town could do worse than to gather its resolve and institute a tax on all retail stores with more than 50,000 square feet of sales area. That would levy a special tax on one retailer, Wal-Mart. As long as the tax was modest, Wal-Mart would resist and threaten but it would be highly unlikely to close a profitable store.
Then the town could use that revenue to begin condemning all those empty buildings downtown via eminent domain and leasing them out for $1 a year to entrepreneurs. With no prospect of tenants, the buildings are essentially worth zero, so the owners would be lucky to get any sum. Most of the businesses would fail, as do most small businesses, but with nothing to lose, why not trust to capitalist energy and experimentation? Maybe something good would start happening as creative juices were given a chance to flow. Something would be much better than nothing.
When the devolution of the Central State and central bank (and indeed, all centralized concentrations of wealth and power) picks up speed, as it has in Greece, then people migrate back to where localist solutions are possible.
Breaking the mindset that Central State subsidies is the solution to every problem is difficult, but as reality intrudes then clinging to broken models of the past is not the way forward.
In many minds, Greece is a failed state and the U.S. is successful. To my mind, Greece is a state in a positive transition to dealing with reality, and it is the U.S. which is the failed state, borrowing and blowing 10% of its entire GDP each and every year to fund its bloated, corrupt Status Quo ($1.5 trillion in Federal borrowing annually, plus state and county borrowing and corporate/consumer borrowing).
Failed states depend on endlessly rising debt to prop up their bloated, corrupt Status Quo. That no longer describes Greece, but it still describes the U.S.
Related: Do We Have to Live Like Peasants to Be Truly Sustainable?
Related: The Postal Service Plots Its Own Demise | The Nation
Posted by Gypsy Chief
Up With Chris Hayes on MSNBC
This morning, January 14, the show ran a segment on why the mainstream press has decreased coverage of global climate change. David Roberts of Grist.org was a panelist. You can watch the entire video here. One resource mentioned is a new geographic tool for locating greenhouse gas emitters. Try it out.
These aren't the gasses you're looking for
Posted by Gypsy Chief
