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

Follow @GypsyChief

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

Follow @GypsyChief

By marci on January 14, 2012

We just received the following press release issued by Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Darrell Issa. We can’t find the link up yet online, so given the interest in this bill by POPVOX users, we are posting here. See links below to weigh in on the bills mentioned in the release.

Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2012 01:16 AM

Subject: Press Release — SOPA Not Headed to House Floor, OGR hearing postponed
Issa: Flawed SOPA Bill Not Headed to House Floor
OGR hearing planned for Wednesday postponed following assurances, removal of DNS provisions

Washington, DC – House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa today announced that a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, which was to examine the impact of Domain Name Service (DNS) and search engine blocking on the Internet, has been postponed following assurances that anti-piracy legislation will not move to the House floor this Congress without a consensus.

“While I remain concerned about Senate action on the Protect IP Act, I am confident that flawed legislation will not be taken up by this House. Majority Leader Cantor has assured me that we will continue to work to address outstanding concerns and work to build consensus prior to any anti-piracy legislation coming before the House for a vote,” said Chairman Issa. “The voice of the Internet community has been heard. Much more education for Members of Congress about the workings of the Internet is essential if anti-piracy legislation is to be workable and achieve broad appeal.”

“Earlier tonight, Chairman Smith announced that he will remove the DNS blocking provision from his legislation. Although SOPA, despite the removal of this provision, is still a fundamentally flawed bill, I have decided that postponing the scheduled hearing on DNS blocking with technical experts is the best course of action at this time. Right now, the focus of protecting the Internet needs to be on the Senate where Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to try to move similar legislation in less than two weeks.”

Chairman Issa intends to continue to push for Congress to heed the advice of Internet experts on anti-piracy legislation and to push for the consideration and passage of the bipartisan OPEN Act, which provides an alternative means for protecting intellectual property rights without undermining the structure and entrepreneurialism of the Internet. Learn more about Rep. Issa and Sen. Ron Wyden’s alternative the OPEN Act at www.keepthewebopen.com

###

Link to PIPA on PopVox: here

Related: Lamar Smith to SOPA Opponents – You Don’t Matter

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Insensitivity, gaffes dog Romney

Narrative from Irish Times

AMERICA: MITT ROMNEY, who is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee, is hounded by the memory of Seamus the Irish setter.

My friend Orla reminded me of the story when I was in New Hampshire this week. It was history, I thought, underestimating the doggedness of US reporters.

Rachel Maddow devoted a long segment of her Thursday-night show on MSNBC to Seamus. The Dogs Against Romney website, founded in 2007, has been revived and is hawking T-shirts stamped with paw prints and the slogans “Mitt is mean!” and “Never Forget Crate Gate”. The subject is again being addressed by serious newspapers.

The incident occurred in 1983, and was first reported by the Boston Globe in June 2007, when Romney made an earlier bid for the presidency.

As recounted by the Globe , Romney, his wife and five sons set out in their Chevy station wagon on a 12-hour holiday journey to Ontario, Canada. Romney placed the family pet, Seamus, in a dog carrier, which he strapped to the roof of the car.

The eldest son, Tagg, watched out the rear window, “where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ‘Dad!’ he yelled. ‘Gross!’ A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station,” the Globe report continued. “There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back on to the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.”

Romney’s detractors have created a “Google bomb”, a method of redefining a name and pushing it to the top of Google searches. If you enter “spreading Romney”, the first thing that pops up is: “(rom-ney) v. 1. to defecate in terror”.

In August 2007, Fox News presenter Chris Wallace asked Romney how he could do such a thing. “This is a completely airtight kennel and mounted on the top of our car,” Romney said. “Love my dog. We’ve had a lot of dogs over the years. Love them. Seamus, as his name is, climbed up there all by himself, enjoyed his ride . . . it was a good ride.”

Wallace failed to ask the obvious follow-up question: why Romney put Seamus back on the roof after the dog’s distress became apparent.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins has retold the Seamus story more than 30 times in five years, and the Wall Street Journal recently asked Romney to rebut Collins’s insinuations. “Uh . . . Love my dog,” Romney replied. “That’s all I’ve got for ya.”

Link to Rachel Maddow video

Rusty thanks you

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

This is from Climate Crocks

Related: Salon duc Tape to Discuss Naomi Klein

Related: A republican with nothing to lose sounds off

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, recently wrote an article for The Nation titled “Capitalism vs. The Climate.” In that article, Klein argues that “responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency.” She goes on to say that “climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.”

During the salon on Friday, January 13th, Kevin Cross will lead a community discussion of Klein’s article. We will examine her analysis of climate change denialism, her recommended “climate agenda”, why she believes progressives have so far not been successful in presenting a comprehensive climate agenda, and how she thinks progressives should move forward.

Reading the article in advance (available at Capitalism vs. The Climate) would be helpful, but not essential to participating in the discussion.

Salon duc Tape, a public forum sponsored by Strength Through Peace, meets on the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month from 7:00 — 9:00 p.m. in the basement of Mugs Coffee Lounge on 261 South College, the NW corner of College and Olive. The January 13th salon will be co-sponsored by the Fort Collins Sustainability Group. The formal program begins with introductions at 7:20 p.m. For those in need of an elevator, there is one through the Armstrong Hotel, to the north of Mugs. For more information, email Strength Through Peace or call us at 419-8944.

Naomi Klien - Nation Magazine photo

About the Author Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, fellow at The Nation Institute and author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Published worldwide in September 2007, The Shock Doctrine is slated to be translated into seventeen languages to date. The six-minute companion film, created by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, was an Official Selection of the 2007 Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals and a viral phenomenon as well, downloaded over one million times. Klein’s previous book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies was also an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty-eight languages, with over a million copies in print. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in 2002. Klein’s regular column for The Nation and The Guardian is distributed internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004 her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s Magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. The same year, she released a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories, The Take, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. The film was an official selection of the Venice Biennale and won the best documentary jury prize at the American Film Institute’s Film Festival in Los Angeles. Klein is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

From Wikipedia Commons

There is a growing consensus the world economy is in a lot more trouble than politicians and media talking heads are letting on. The four major headwinds to growth were covered in Part I of these three articles, and there dubbed “The Four Horsemen of the Economic Apocalype”:

1. Too Much Debt
2. Resource Limits
3. Destruction and Decay of Infrastructure
4. Greed

That article was a brief summary of the extreme challenges we now face. These next two articles are an attempt to move beyond this understanding of what has gone wrong, to develop a sense of what we can do now, as individuals and as a society.

We cannot “set things right” in the sense of restoring things to the way they once were, but we must begin now to adapt to the new realities if we are to reduce suffering and continue an advanced culture. Today’s article, “Out With the Old”, will discuss the end to seven unsustainable practices. In the next and final article in this series, “In With the New” will discuss new ways of living we can adopt as economic growth fails.

Out With The Old — Seven Outcomes as Economic Growth Fails:

Before we allow our society to sink into a chaos of devastation and deprivation, there are many wasteful, or otherwise doomed, practices that will end. The “Out With the Old” list is not a proposed agenda for politicians to adopt. They are too committed to the existing order to voluntarily make these changes. Rather, the end of these practices will come (and much of this is already happening) as pragmatic realities sink in. They are unsustainable Dead Ends, so they will not be sustained:

1. If You Can’t Pay the Debt — Don’t!

Debt that cannot be repaid, won’t be repaid. This is hard for conscientous borrowers to accept, but reality takes hold.

For those borrowers who wish to avoid default, “not paying the debt” may mean not paying it all oneself, but instead sharing the load. There will be a wave of down-sizing, as the cavernous spaces of McMansions are split into more affordable sized living spaces, through multiple-generation households, taking in housemate tenants, and physically splitting into townhomes and apartments.

Many borrowers who cannot repay, however, will need to get note holders to take losses through short sales, or outright defaults, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Rather than help borrowers, the government has chosen to bail out banks, so the only way to access a Debt Jubilee will be to walk away. Many of those who borrowed during the boom years are now far underwater and asking themselves: what is the point in hanging onto a “debtor’s prison”, if my equity is wiped out?

Courtesy Craig A. Severance, CPA

Though many hope the freefall in real estate prices will soon end, consider this: what else can “give” when disposable incomes fall? If you visit an area of the country where jobs have been lost, is gasoline lower in price? How about food prices? Look for a home or a piece of commercial real estate in a depressed area, however, and you won’t believe the “bargains”. When there is a surplus of inventory compared to buyers who can afford to pay, prices fall.

Governments are now also reaching the point where they cannot repay their debts. Local government bankruptcies are escalating, and there is a move to allow U.S. states to declare bankruptcy. Insolvent governments such as Greece who do not control their own currency are forcing bondholders to take 50% “voluntary” reductions in principal owed. However, those insolvent governments (like the U.S.) who control their currency, will always fully repay bondholders — even if they need to “print” trillions in debased currency to do so!

Added to contractual debts are unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. Those who paid all their lives into these systems will see promised benefits reduced, or paid “in full” but with debased dollars.

The resolution of this problem of Too Much Debt will be very messy and destructive. It gets confusing fast trying to figure out if loan defaults and bank failures in the private sector will cause a deflationary Depression, and/or if government money-printing will cause high inflation.

In the end, we are likely to see what we are already seeing — patterns driven by supply and demand. Resources in surplus such as real estate and labor will see their values drop. Homes will cost less to buy, but workers whose skills are in surplus will earn less. At the same time, resources in scarce supply such as energy, minerals and food will become less affordable. This is a very bad scenario if you make your living from wages but have to buy your energy or food — and it will be even worse if money-printing stokes inflation.

Because there is simply Too Much Debt compared to actual real wealth, the math is clear: trillions of dollars of claims on future real wealth will be voided through default, broken promises, and inflation. Most politics for the forseeable future will be about who has to absorb these losses (hint: so far, it’s been mostly taxpayers and the Middle Class).

The best way to cope will be to stop making plans to rely on payments that simply won’t be made. Write down debts that won’t be repaid, recognize the promises that will be broken, and move on.

2. Buy American, or Bye-Bye America.

Though economic growth now experiences serious challenges worldwide, there are clear imbalances among countries. For instance, per-capita GDP in China grew 35% in the same 2007-mid 2011 period that per-capita GDP in the U.S. fell 3.5%.

A country that buys more imports than it sells as exports, and finances this by borrowing and by selling off its assets to foreigners, is losing wealth. Averaged out over all Americans, the U.S. annual balance of payments deficit of $545 Billion equals about $7,000/year per 4-person family. How long can this go on?

The practice of outsourcing U.S. jobs, leaving us a nation of borrowing consumers, is unsustainable. If there aren’t enough good paying jobs here, we can’t afford to keep buying all those imports. Also, as oil prices rise, no longer will it make sense to ship products back and forth across thousands of miles to access cheap labor sweat shops.

Since roughly 70% of America’s economy is consumer demand, individual choices can matter. A “Buy American” campaign might actually make a difference if we spread the word and it becomes part of our culture.

Courtesy of Craig A. Severance

Americans are now making holiday purchases, and media drones keep telling us it is patriotic to run to the mall and spend money — but where are those products made? Checking the tags on where the products are made is likely to be very disappointing but eye opening.

If you are an American lucky enough to still have a job, consider for a moment why other Americans have not been so lucky, as you peruse the sea of product tags labeled “Made in China”. Then consider how likely it will be you get to keep your own job, if you keep buying this stuff.

Related: 10 Good Reasons To Shop Local

Related: Buy Local Campaigns Work National Survey Finds

Finding any product made in the U.S.A. is a major challenge. Food, art, quality products, and local services are often American made, and are usually sold by locally-owned businesses. However, even local “mom and pop” shops typically must now stock some “cheap Chinese crap”, as most shoppers do not look at any label but the price tag. Finding “Made in U.S.A.”on many products may counter-intuitively require bypassing most local stores and instead searching the Internet.

Some mottos to consider for patriotic buying: “Buy quality.” (Any product still made here is likely of high quality.) “If it’s made in China, I don’t need it.” (Pick something else.) “I really do need it and it’s not Made in U.S.A., so I’ll buy it used.” (Local resale shops, and Internet buying sites will be glad to help.) “Won’t this just add to clutter anyway?” (Reconsider.)

The very act of avoiding a trip to the big box store is another way to keep money in the U.S.A. — as money spent on gasoline is sent out of the country to pay for imported oil. At $100/barrel oil, if U.S. oil imports continue at 2010 levels we will spend about $430 billion/year for foreign oil.

We can also work to increase exports of those products the U.S.A. still does make. A good place to start would be to stop burning our corn exports as ethanol in our gasoline tanks.

We cannot continue importing more than we export and borrowing the difference.

3. The Empire Shrinks Back.

After the failure of the Congressional Super Committee, it is widely believed the Defense budget will suffer huge automatic spending cuts. In fact, defense spending is still projected to increase — just at a slower pace. With hundreds of military bases worldwide projecting the world’s largest ever military Empire, the U.S. is still on track to keep spending more than the next 17 countries’ militaries combined. Our military continues to prepare to fight the last war (and the one before that, and the one before that).

While Republicans had traditionally been the ones to cut military spending (Eisenhower, Nixon, and even George H.W. Bush moderated Defense spending), only one of the major Republican Presidential candidates is taking a stance of fiscal discipline for the military, and both sides of the aisle in Congress can hardly wait to spend more of your tax dollars.

What is the purpose of all this spending? Increasingly, the answer seems to be “Federal spending in MY Congressional District”. Security contractors have astutely spread their activities all over the country, targeting especially the districts of powerful Members of Congress. Thus, if military cuts are proposed, the discussion is not about whether cuts will make America less secure (who believes that?), but about the “jobs on the line” in each Congressional District. Simply put, the military budget is the world’s biggest Pork Barrel project.

If the true purpose of military largesse is to create jobs in each Congressional District, a reallocation of military spending to infrastructure projects would keep the local jobs but actually accomplish something. Instead of building high technology bombs to be taken to another country and blown up, we can do “nation building” here at home.

The Interstate Highway system was originally justified as a Defense project. With Peak Oil now making reliance on those highways a security threat, we can make the nation more secure with a National Defense Railway System to rebuild the nation’s rail lines.

Of course, any change to how Federal dollars are spent may raise the question of whether the Federal government actually has so much money to spend. Will Social Security recipients gladly take cuts to benefits in order to continue the scale of military spending?

public domain image

These Federal budget tensions are what have already led both parties to agree (by default) to a moderation of military spending, and will ultimately lead to the Empire shrinking back.

4. Stop Heating the Outdoors.

The centerpiece of the 7 unsustainable practices that will soon end is our wasteful use of fossil fuels — oil, coal, and natural gas.

When we burn these fossil fuels we “heat the outdoors”, by emitting greenhouse gases that are already causing extreme climate disruption resulting in a string of billion-dollar-plus weather disasters. The wasteful use of fossil fuels is also epitomized by shoddy building practices that leak heat to the outdoors, and inefficient engines that expend a majority of energy input as waste heat rather than useful work.

These practices will come to an end, as the bonanza era of cheap fossil fuels draws to a close. We’ve known this day was coming since the oil shocks of the 1970′s. If we had not wasted the last almost 40 years our transition could have been much easier, but now we have already waited too long to avoid disruptions to our way of life. From here forward, our use of fossil fuels will be characterized by fuel shortages and price spikes as production rates for these finite fuels decline.

It is easy to let that last sentence coast by. We are talking about, for an ever larger share of people each year: No. Fuel. Available. That. You. Can. Afford. To. Buy. This is not the same as a shortage of cheez whiz or the cancellation of your favorite TV show. Fuel is central to our lives. As fossil fuels decline, we must urgently “make other arrangements“.

Peak Oil is upon us, so we must finally take actions to End Our Addiction to Oil. The end of cheap coal is also coming soon, and coal is a massive contributor to extreme climate disruption so its use must be cut anyway. Since most coal is used for electricity production, implementing a practical and affordable plan to achieve “Clean Electricity” will place us on the least-business-risk path to reduce coal use. Natural gas will be available for a bit longer as a bridge fuel, but even our natural gas supplies will be in shortfall well before this century’s end.

Successful transition off cheap fossil fuels will not be a “top-down” fix, but must take place at the level where fuels are burned. This means making our buildings and equipment (e.g. appliances and vehicles) more efficient, and powering the remaining needs with sustainable energy sources. The sooner we act the better. At least for now, it will take fossil fuels to build the new equipment and retrofit the buildings, so the longer we wait the more expensive (and less achievable) the conversion may be.

While frustrating for central policy makers, the distributed nature of our energy use also means that individual households and businesses can get ahead of the curve. Protecting one’s own livelihood and family is a powerful incentive, and many are already taking action to wean themselves off a dependence on disappearing resources. What better security in today’s turbulent times than owning a solar-powered car and a passive solar home?

5. Cure “Sick-Care”.

Like a cancer, the cost of our nation’s “health care” system has been growing out of control and is killing its host. Now at 17% of GDP, this uncontrollable growth is giving employers a powerful incentive to offshore workers, and through Medicare and Medicaid costs, is bankrupting the Federal and state governments.

Much of this cost is pure transactional waste that contributes nothing to patient care. A mind-warping complexity of medical billing now burdens the system, requiring up to 30% of staffing in medical offices merely to wrangle with insurance companies (Medicare and Medicaid being the worst). This waste is doubled by its mirror image, in the claims processors at the insurance companies and agencies.

The meat-cleaver approach to “cost control” so far taken by Congress — cutting real $ fees paid to all physicians for the last decade — has been driving primary care doctors out of business and forcing patients to seek routine care at emergency rooms. So much for “cost control” — primary care doctors are the very ones who would have saved the entire system money by keeping patients healthy.

At the same time the primary care shortage has been exacerbated, most specialists and surgeons in the U.S. are still counted among the “1%” of top income earners (those earning over roughly $350,000 per year) — earning more than they can make anywhere else in the developed world. If Congress has to cut physician fees, these are the doctors’ fees to cut.

Some insurers and large employers are now pioneering new solutions, such as placing doctors on salary, free of medical billing hassles, and simply allowing them to be doctors. This common sense idea emulates how doctors are employed in the military and the VA systems.

We have proven we cannot afford our current system that requires enormous waste and spends most of its resources on “sick care”.

6. Repeal Laws that Mandate Opulence and Forbid Prosperity.

As people are now seeking innovative solutions to adapt to new realities, we are constantly seeing reports of “stupid laws” getting in the way.

For instance, as the size of our housing spaces must now come in line with our income, there is a growing demand for smaller, more space efficient dwellings. It will be a prosperous “win/win/win” move for builders, families, and communities to convert devalued McMansions into townhomes and apartments. Yet, most of the communities where these palaces were built have zoning laws and restrictive covenants against multi-family housing, vainly hoping to wall out lower value housing when lower valuations have already stormed the gates.

Courtesy of Craig A. Severance, CPA

Similar suburban restrictions often forbid homeowners from erecting clothelines to save electricity, and even ban vegetable gardens that can be seen by others. New families and empty nesters are eagerly seeking the affordability of high quality “tiny houses“, but have found that building codes requiring minimum sizes forbid these efficient ways of construction.

The extremes of our auto culture went to such excess that many cities and counties can no longer afford to maintain the roads they built. Many are saddled with the cost of maintaining extremely wide roads because of fire chiefs who wanted enough room, even in residential neighborhoods, for two fire trucks to pass at 60 mph! Such wide streets create heat islands and destroy aesthetic proportions. These ugly streets could be narrowed and the freed-up land devoted to fruit or shade trees, or community gardens.

Unnecessary tax laws are also acting as a hindrance. As millions find the best option for available work is their own household-based labor, it would be helpful to exempt a certain amount of barter-economy transactions from taxation. Is it really worth it to tax neighbors who set up a surplus-eggs for surplus-vegetables swap?

Small food producers have also seen unimaginable oppression tactics from the USDA. At the same time the government “works with” large corporate farms even when they are guilty of serious food safety violations, allowing the large agribusinesses to continue operating, it seems hell bent on shutting down small food producers. Yet it is exactly this more localized agriculture we need to see flourish.

While government regulation is clearly needed of amoral large corporations who will otherwise recklessly destroy the environment and endanger public health, sanity must rule. We need to encourage people to do more at the local and household economy level, and “stupid laws” must not forbid this new localized prosperity.

7. Drop the Shopping.

We need to hit the pause button on thoughtless shopping. Stop the shopping in big-box stores that send profits out of our local communities. Stop buying poor quality crap made in foreign sweat shops, that falls apart and brings no joy or beauty into our lives. Block the commercials (hit the mute button — or better yet cancel the tv and just watch Colbert on-line).

Courtesy Craig A. Severance, CPA

Shopping for worthless junk will decline automatically, as disposable incomes fall. Another trend that will reduce our shopping will be downsizing to smaller more affordable living spaces. Though smaller spaces give us more money to spend, there is no space for clutter, so we will avoid buying physical objects we have nowhere to keep. In a small space, a few beautiful objects of art trump roomfuls of consumer goods.

A moratorium on shopping for new junk also allows us to focus our minds and resources toward peace of mind, beauty, and joy.

Regarding peace of mind, each family and business should think about the trends noted in these articles, and consider: are you already prepared for what lies ahead? Are you ready for your pension and Social Security and Medicare benefits — and maybe your job as well — to be voided through broken promises, inflation, and economic turmoil? How dependent are you on fossil fuels? When will it be your family’s turn to fall from the comforts of the middle class?

If you take stock and find you are not prepared, perhaps brown rice & dried beans, a water filter, wind-up flashlights, caulk to seal wasteful air leaks, a solar hot water heater, and an electric bicycle should be placed higher on your “shopping list” than the latest consumer item. Knowing you can still eat and drink, have lights, stay warm and clean, and get around town no matter what happens gives peace of mind — and saves money right now.

Beyond mere sustenance, however, we need beauty and joy.

If we simply pay attention to how our younger generation finds vibrance in their lives — as most young people have virtually no physical possessions — we can relearn how to live well as humans.

Since civilizations began, all people everywhere have found beauty and joy through simple things, none of which require massive energy use, gigantic houses, or truckloads of material possessions.

We share stories (think: movies, books, plays, oral histories such as StoryCorps). We play games. We love — friends, pets, spouses, family. We experience the ecstasy of music and dance. We share extraordinary art (including quality craftmanship). We find meaning in our lives by giving of ourselves to others and to a higher purpose. We guard and care for our souls.

The unsatisfying tide of soul-destroying ugliness and exploitation from industrial society has shown us This World may have all we could want, but it has nothing that we need.

Without the distraction of a flood of material objects, we can now return to the rich traditions of thousands of years, focusing more fully on the best of what it means to be human.

Related: Part I of this III part series

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

Express mail forms and priority mailboxes sit on display at the Capitol Station, Monday, December 5, 2011, in Springfield, Illinois. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

There are many appropriate targets for Occupy Wall Street protests. But the OWS protesters hit a bull’s-eye when they invaded a National Press Club briefing where Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe—who likes to make like a corporate executive and refer to himself as “Chief Operating Officer of the US Postal Service”—was giving a speech about the need to close local post offices, layoff workers and, though this was unspoken, take the steps that will lead to the privatization of the one of the country’s greatest public assets.

“Stop closing post offices,” chanted the activists who occupied the press club. “Don’t privatize the post office. It’s a public service. It’s not a profit center for FedEx and UPS to rip off the people.”

Postmasters general do not usually become the targets of passionate opposition. But the protesters were chanting: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donahoe has got to go.”

And rightly so.

On Monday, Donahue laid out a plan that, if implemented, would destroy the postal service as most Americans know it.

And the destruction would come not out of necessity but to perpetuate an austerity lie.

The supposed financial crisis facing the US Postal Service is actually a fiscal fantasy, The USPS, which continues to provide vital services to 150 million households and business each day, which sustains rural communities and urban neighborhoods across he country as a Main Street mainstay, which employs hundreds of thousands of Americans and which has a history of being in the forefront of technological and societal progress, is not in trouble because of competition from the Internet or changing letter-writing patterns. It is in crisis because Congress forced the the postal service to pay roughly $5.5 billion a year into a trust fund for future retiree pensions. The USPS inspector general says the postal service has overfunded pension obligations by $75 billion—something no other federal agency is required to do. In addition, the postal service has been slapped with other charges and obligations that make it appear to be headed for bankruptcy. Simply treating the USPS fairly when it comes to the prepayment of pensions would ease most of the burden facing the postal service.

But Congress is dithering, the for-profit mail services that want to carve up the USPS are salivating, and the postmaster general is surrendering—proposing to end next-day delivery of letters, postcards and other First Class mail.

That postmaster general surrender was signaled Monday by a brutal proposal for deep cost cutting that could:

1. So diminish and slow down first-class mail delivery that the changes will create an opening for private carriers; indeed, Americans are almost being pushed into the arms of UPS and FedEx.
2. Ultimately cause as many as 100,000 job losses is the biggest single blow to employment by any employer in the country, Postal service job cuts hit people of color, women and veterans hardest, as the USPS has a long history of hiring staffs that “look like America.” The proposed closing of more than 250 of 561 postal sorting centers is the equivalent of a wave of factory closings like nothing the country saw even in the depths of the recent recession.
3. Have a devastating impact on thousands of rural communities, where post offices are slated for closure. This is really a case of Washington abandoning rural areas and hard-hit urban neighborhoods at precisely the time they need the support of an engaged federal government.
4. So delay delivery that it would create a nine-day lag time for periodical. This would be devastating for the print press and for the public discourse. Weekly newspapers and magazines might not even arrive until after their next editions were published.
5. Wreck havoc with absentee voting and military voting processes that are already a mess in many states. Hardest hit will be states that have gone to vote-by-mail systems, such as Oregon. At a time when Voter ID laws are making it harder to cast ballots at the polls, this makes absentee voting critical.

By every reasonable measure, the postal service is proposing suicide in the form of not-so-slow cuts. “The Postal Service plan will hasten the demise of the USPS,” American Postal Workers Union president Cliff Guffey said with regard to the agency’s announcement that it would seek an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission on plans to eliminate next-day delivery of first-class mail and periodicals. “The USPS should be modernizing and striving to remain relevant in the digital age, not reducing service to the American people.”

Under what the postmaster general’s “cost-cutting plan,” the postal service would shutter almost half the nation’s mail-processing centers and shed tens of thousands of jobs—at a time when even the most optimistic observers say the country faces a steep climb to address widespread unemployment. The changes would make it impossible for the postal service to reconstitute itself in better times. As such, they an open invitation to private carriers to take over lucrative routes and services—while leaving the great mass of Americans with diminished and substandard services.

The cuts proposed by the postmaster general go way beyond cost-cutting. This is the sounding of the death knell for a postal service that traces its roots to the nation’s first days and that remains an essential service for isolated rural communities and neglected urban neighborhoods.

“The so-called Postmaster General is going to announce details that will lead to the end of the United States Postal Service and universal postal delivery in this country,” said Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Oregon, who highlighted the damage the postal service will do to the broader economy.

“This would be an incredible blow to our economy. With real unemployment at 16 percent we cannot afford another 100,000 people laid off,” explained DeFazio. “I’ve already heard from small business owners that rely on USPS and are concerned that the plan would kill their businesses. Some rural Oregonians would have to drive 15 to 20 miles to access their mail. Subscribers of small rural weekly newspapers would have to wait 7-9 days for their papers to be delivered. This is a short-sighted proposal that fails to address the serious long-term issues facing USPS.“

Related: Are We About to Lost the Postal Service?

Related: Doing It Their Way: Government Layoffs Worsening Unemployment

Related: U. S. Postal Service Plans Dramatic Cuts

Colorado Related: 63 Colorado Post Offices On List To Be Closed

30 of the 63 Colorado Post Offices mentioned are in Cory Gardner’s 4th Congressional District while another 23 are located in Scott Tipton’s 3rd Congressional District

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief

History suggests that it will take significant hard-core organizing lasting years if not decades to create the infrastructure for a new movement.

Don’t ‘Occupy the Democratic Party’ By Les Leopold

The public understands correctly that Wall Street’s financial elites dominate politics. How else can we account for the fact that the financial sector was rewarded for gambling our economy into debt and killing 8 million jobs in a matter of months?

At the same time, wages are stagnant, benefits are being cut right and left, public sector workers are under attack, and unemployment remains above 8 percent. No wonder Americans believe that both parties are beholden to the 1 percent.

To be sure, the 99 percent framework, so magnificently popularized by Occupy Wall Street, will be deployed by just about everyone to energize the base. Yet, we’re hearing arguments that Occupy Wall Street should occupy the Democratic Party. George Lakoff, for example, writes:

Whatever Occupiers may think of the Democrats, they can gain power within the Democratic Party and hence in election contests all over America. All they have to do is join Democratic Clubs, stick to their values, speak out very loudly, and work in campaigns for candidates at every level who agree with their values. If Occupiers can run tent camps, organize food kitchens and cleanup brigades, run general assemblies, and use social media, they can take over and run a significant part of the Democratic Party.

George, get real! It’s not going to happen. Nor should it.

If Occupy Wall Street has anything at all to do with the 2012 elections, I hope it will organize large demonstrations at both conventions to dramatize the well-documented fact that both parties care more about financial elites than they do about the 99 percent. Of course there are worthy Democrats who have shown the gumption to take on Wall Street. But their power is muted as the Democratic Party overall defers to Wall Street’s lobbyists and campaign funds.

Related: President Obama Richly Deserves to be Dumped

But won’t it always be the lesser of two evils?

For over a generation, we’ve watched the Democratic Party move steadily to the right and increasingly accommodate the top 1 percent. (In case you have any lingering doubts, read Winner Take All Politics, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.) The Wall Street orgy of the last 30 years was built upon the deregulatory push initiated by Jimmy Carter and then accelerated by Bill Clinton.

Wall Street–friendly policies continue today, actualized by Obama’s appointment of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Even after the enormous crash, born and bred on Wall Street, the needs of the financial elites still come first. The banks who caused the crash, we recently discovered, had access to $7.77 trillion in secret bailouts, while the real economy languished.

Nevertheless, labor and progressive organizations see no other option save the Democrats. They believe it’s a fool’s errand even to consider a political alternative because, they argue, third parties always fail, sometimes miserably. (They feel particularly burned by Ralph Nader’s run, which they believe put G.W. Bush into office.)

So what’s to be done?

Learning from the Populist Movement

For starters, we should investigate carefully the last massive movement that explicitly challenged the one percent and that demanded a democratization of high finance — the Populists of the late 1880s.

Sounds ancient and irrelevant? No so. This made-in-America movement grew out of the horrendous conditions faced by small farmers, especially in the South. In order to survive through the winter, farmers had to pledge their future crops to one dominant local merchant in exchange for food and supplies. The merchant (then called “The Man”) would charge outrageous interest rates, insuring that eventually farmers would have to sign over title to their land in order to settle their debts. As a result, thousands of independent farmers turned into impoverished sharecroppers.

All the necessities of farming, from the grain elevators to farm implements to the railroads were run by monopolies that squeezed the farmers dry. To compound these problems, the U.S. money supply was limited to a fixed quantity of gold, as demanded by Wall Street. This insured that as the population grew, the money supply would remain fixed, leading to enormous downward pressures on farm prices. It was a continuous rural depression as black and white farmers drifted into peonage. (Will rising student loans do something similar to the next generation? Will all of us be indebted to a handful of Wall Street banks?)

Yet, even in this state of misery, farmers’ alliances formed to build cooperatives designed to get them out from under the monopoly structures. They eventually linked together into the National Farmers Alliance that developed “sub-alliances” in thousands of counties in the South and Midwest. At great peril, black farmers also organized and joined in the movement.

To aid in the organizing, the Alliance sent out over 4,000 “lecturers” who held give and take sessions about how to build cooperatives and how to reform the economy. But after nearly a decade of organizing, it became clear that the farmer cooperatives could not succeed, because the monopolies deliberately denied them badly needed credit, and because the money supply was enormously constricted by Wall Street. (There was no Federal Reserve to do the dirty work for them.)

This led the populist movement to develop its most radical and original idea — the creation of a democratized monetary system independent of Wall Street. In their plan, farmers could bring their crops to federally sponsored warehouses and get federal paper currency as credit until their crops were sold at decent prices.

This “sub-treasury” system, as they called it, would dramatically inflate the money supply, making it easier for farmers to retire their debts. It also would totally undermine the hard metal monetary system that was owned and operated by a handful of Wall Street banks. If ever there was a battle between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, this was it. (Contrary to popular lore, the Populist movement was not about “free silver.” That was an import from liberal Democratic politicians like William Jennings Bryan, who rejected the more radical Populist platform, including the sub-treasury system.)

By 1890, after a decade of grass roots organizing, the Farmers Alliance realized that it must engage directly in politics in order to keep its cooperatives and their farms from ruin. The South, at the time, was dominated by white Bourbon Democrats — the merchants, planters, and other elites who used terror and ballot stuffing to maintain their racist grip on post-Reconstruction political power. In the North and West, the Republicans were the party of the gilded elites and maintained their power by “waving the bloody flag” of the Civil War against the Southern Democrats and their Northern Catholic immigrant allies. Both parties were completely in the grip of the new industrial and financial elites.

Out of these conditions grew the People’s Party, one of the most powerful third party alternatives in U.S. history. But it didn’t end well. In 1896 the People’s Party was hijacked by a group of ambitious politicians who rammed through a fusion ticket behind the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. That retreat, combined with Bryan’s defeat, alienated the farmer base within the National Farmers Alliance. With the failure to achieve political power, the cooperative movement was starved to death due to lack of credit and faded away. More and more small farmers lost their land and slipped into abject poverty as the elites tightened their grip on political power and held it, with few exceptions, until the New Deal. (See Lawrence Goodwin’s The Populist Moment for a definitive account.)

There were four essential movement building components of populism that perhaps provide a way for us to measure where we are today and where we need to go:

1. Shared Movement Experiences: The populist cooperatives provided the day-to-day shared experiences that bound the movement together on a local, state, and national level. People worked together and struggled together against powerful opponents, often having to suffer vigilante violence to protect their budding cooperatives that stored produce and livestock, and that sold food, supplies, and farm implements. These shared experiences built up the courage and self-respect of millions of participants. They felt part of something big and important. They shared the common identity of populism.

   And today? While there are thousands of cooperatives and progressive nonprofit organizations in the country today, they are not linked in substantial ways. It’s also not clear if they are creating the common experiences necessary for movement building.

   The Occupy Wall Street encampments certainly are (or were) creating such communities, but as currently conceived and constructed, they just aren’t suitable for those who don’t want to encamp. Also it’s not clear if the encampments will survive the current round of evictions.

   Some unions also have developed powerful internal collective cultures. But unfortunately, union density continues to decline. As it does, the focus often narrows to internal collective bargaining issues. The Wisconsin campaign in defense of public sector workers’ rights was a new moment that certainly created a shared sense of movement. Yet, it seems destined to flow into the Democratic Party.

   The environmental campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline also has the potential to build a common collective experience among its participants. But it may have difficulty as it collides with unions and politicians who claim the pipeline will create badly needed jobs.

   The obvious point is that at the moment these efforts, and many others that could be listed, are fragmented and unconnected. We have a long way to go to build a common collective experience that matches the power of the populist cooperative movement.

2. Systematic Education:The populist lecturing system also was key to movement building as it developed a dialogue with everyday farmers about how the economic system really worked and what the movement should stand for. The base of the movement, not just the leadership, became financially literate as it debated and understood the need for a radical restructuring of the financial system based on the “sub-treasury plan.”

   And today? We don’t as yet have anything like a “lecturer” system to engage the American public in an educational discussion. But one could be built in a hurry. There are plenty of us who could link together to build a “Economics for the 99 Percent” program. But it may need something larger to get it going and give it purpose.

3. Independent Media: The populist movement was well-supported with a rag-tag collection of small, but vital newspapers and journals — about 100 of them — throughout the country. These media outlets provided continual news about the key economic and political issues of the day. Its editors ran their journals on a shoestring in order to maintain their independence and the clarity of their message.

   And today? We do indeed have our rag-tag newsletters, journals, and thousands of websites, with Alternet.org being one of the best. Running on a shoestring is nothing new to them. But at the moment, there is little coordination or shared identity. But that could come as a movement grows.

4. The Peoples’ Government: And finally the populist movement’s base and its leadership truly believed that the American government belonged to them — they should be able to run political institutions just like the founding fathers had promised. As true democrats, they were not intimidated by money or power. They were decidedly not anti-government.

   And today? We are much more ambivalent about our relationship to governing than our forefathers ever were. Do we still feel capable of collectively exercising power to stop the financial predators from running the country? The jury is out.

These comparisons, although superficial, suggests that we’ve got a long haul ahead. Wall Street will not concede either its power or its wealth unless confronted with an enormous 99 percent movement. They’re not worried about neutering the Democratic Party. But they are concerned that something new and unforeseen might emerge.

“99 Percent Clubs”

It seems that many of us are hoping that somehow Twitter and Facebook messages will spontaneously explode into a new movement with a million people in the streets just like in Cairo. But, history suggests that it will take significant hard-core organizing lasting years if not decades to create the infrastructure for a new movement.

One way to start is by forming decentralized “99 Percent Clubs.” Any group of individuals could form a club and then develop activities to popularize and dramatize the 99 percent framework. Some clubs might be aggressive by helping to prevent evictions in their area or by directly supporting Occupy Wall Street actions. Others might engage in more educational activities like passing out material about financial elites in front of banks. Still other 99 percent clubs might work on national efforts to forgive student loans. But the point is, we need shared spaces where the 99 percent can work with each other to share experiences and build a shared identity. We need a common club with a common identity rather than just continuing our good works inside our issue silos.

I realize that it would probably take an organizational miracle to pull this off. But imagine if a thousand 99 Percent Clubs sprung up around the country in the next several months. We’d be well on our way to building a vast network that could create a tactile presence for the 99 percent. Add a little Twitter and Facebook to the mix, and you could even imagine common actions that linked the thousand clubs. And we certainly could count on Occupy Wall Street to lead the charge in provocative ways.

But let’s be very clear. Even such a miraculous organizing effort will not get us to a political alternative by 2012. It will take years and years of hard work, of trial-and-error activities, of experiments in linkages, of many attempts to forge and test a common program, and so on. We’re either in it for the long haul, or it won’t happen at all.

Dream on? Maybe. But we really do need an alternative vehicle to the two dominant political parties. Otherwise, we’ll be voting for the lesser of two evils for yet another generation as we suffer through outrageous levels of unemployment and round after round of social safety-net cuts. It won’t be pretty as Wall Street’s “markets” demand fiscal austerity to protect their booty.

At this point, I’ll settle for a modest beginning. Let’s hope we can muster up the vision and the patience at least to discuss and imagine an alternative political path.

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute and Public Health Institute in New York, and author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity — and What We Can Do About It (Chelsea Green, 2009).

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Follow @GypsyChief