Archive | April, 2011

No Fracking Way!

18 Apr

They’re at it again.

The New York Times informs us that  “Oil and gas companies injected hundreds of millions of gallons of hazardous or carcinogenic chemicals into wells in more than 13 states from 2005 to 2009, according to an investigation by Congressional Democrats.” The wells are being drilled to tap reserves of natural gas contained in deep rock formation. The chemicals are injected along with water and sand to release the gas. The process is known as hydraulic fracturing, aka hydrofracking, aka fracking.

Frankly, this sounds like one of those deals where they don’t really know what they’re doing. So you try this and that and, if it works, it works, and you keep on trying:

Some ingredients mixed into the hydraulic fracturing fluids were common and generally harmless, like salt and citric acid. Others were unexpected, like instant coffee and walnut hulls, the report said. Many ingredients were “extremely toxic,” including benzene, a known human carcinogen, and lead.

Instant coffee and walnut shells! Shall we try a little castor oil? Maybe a little ipecac? How about some eye of newt? Toe of frog? Then comes the wool of bat and tongue of dog.

Maybe dance a little jig while they’re at it.

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Flowers R Us

16 Apr

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Why the Expressive Arts are Essential to the Transition

16 Apr

The expressive arts: music and dance, drawing and painting, calligraphy, sculpture, acting, needlecraft, architecture, and so on. Why they are essential: Because they bind us to one another and to the earth, they transform a place, a locus, into a home.

Before continuing down that path, however, let’s take a look back to the Romantics. It’s important to see how, for all their love of nature and of the expressive arts, they contributed to the ideologies that have ended up alienating us from Nature, and from the expressive arts.

It’s really quite simple. Back at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, as the industrial revolution took hold, the Romantics venerated Nature, and opposed it to the City and to Industry. Industry was dirty, degrading, and alienating, keeping us from our True Home, nature. The trouble is, by so arguing, the Romantics placed Nature on a Pedestal, and put the Pedestal Over There Somewhere. The Romantics preserved nature by separating it from us. As more and more people moved into the cities, more and more people moved away from Nature. Nature became more and more alien, even as the Romantic Ideal became more and more alluring.

At the same time, the Romantics invested artistic expression in a class of rustics that lived Other There, in Nature, but also in an elite class of Geniuses who, while living among us, were not of us. Music and painting and poetry and dance became the provinces of those august geniuses, on the one hand, and women and children on the other. They were no longer capacities that each and everyone of us had and exercised. And those geniuses, they became the playthings of the industrial rich, perhaps railing against them, but ultimately tied to them as patrons.

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Throttled by the military-industrial complex

14 Apr

Ike got it right

And he saw it and called, yes in 1960 when he left the Presidency. But James Ledbetter informs us on Blogginheads.tv, that he was aware of the problem much earlier. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Will ever escape the grasp of this terrible logic, which continues to impoverish us?

The New Octopus

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Big Coal Kills a Town

13 Apr

Which is what Big Coal does. Kills mountains and towns and poisons the rivers and the skies.

Dan Barry of The New York Times tells the story of Lindytown West Virginia:

But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”

Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.

Wouldn’t you know it, Massy Energy’s been at work.

 

 

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Wake up and smell the coffee

13 Apr

Coffee Party USA declares independence from the two-party system:

We the People hereby declare our Independence from the failed two party system and vow to chart a new path with representatives who will put our interests first and foremost.

 

Business with a Conscience: The B Corp

12 Apr

Many small corporations with a conscience, a so-called triple bottom line (profits, people and planet) get stripped of their conscience when bought out by a Big Corporation that’s only interested in short-term share-holder payout, and can be legally held to that goal. Writing in the NYTimes, Tina Rosenberg outlines a new type of corporate organization that can keep its conscience: the B Corp:

To become a certified B Corp, or benefit corporation, a business must pass an examination of how it treats its employees, the environment and the community. A non-profit organization called B Lab sets out the requirements and certifies businesses that meet the standard. The idea is that while any company can claim to be a good corporate citizen, a B Corp can prove it — something valuable for consumers and investors.

B Corps must also procure shareholders’ agreement for a revision of the bylaws to allow business decisions to consider the impact not only on shareholders, but also the workforce, community and the environment. Shareholders are allowed to sue if they feel the directors aren’t doing enough to take social responsibility into account.

The B Corp is backed in four states: Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. Philadelphia gives tax breaks to B Corps. Currently there are 400 certified B Corps, but none that a publicly traded.

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Is the Progressive Moment Over?

12 Apr

Adam Serwer (The American Prospect) and Elli Lake (The Washington Times) have a discussion at blogginheads.tv. Did Obama scuttle progressives with a bait and switch?

Toward a Truth and Traditions Party?

12 Apr

By Charlie Keil

We’re considering a name change to the Truth and Traditions Party (TNT).

It’s all about the politics of truth, the facts, the observable evolutionary and devolutionary trends in Nature and in society. Notice Nature gets the big N and society the small s. “small is inevitable” says Rob Hopkins in The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, which echoes Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” book (1973), which was in turn was built upon Leopold Kohr’s classic but still neglected text, The Breakdown of Nations (1957). The Kohr book points to Traditions and an anthropology of anarchism or relatively leaderless living which is how we humans co-evolved with Nature over 99% of our existence as humans (Humo ludens collaboratus). Post peak oil, peak water, peak everything, we are returning to our true human nature which has always been shaped by local traditions adapting us to very local conditions.

The Truth & Traditions Party aspires to explore “the way” or “path” of this transition from big to small as a practical matter of getting Big Corpstate off our backs.

  • from global to local
  • from alien-nation to local participation
  • from power-over to pleasure-in
  • from killing machinery to non-killing music-dance-dromena-ngoma
  • from war to peace
  • from famine to local food
  • from entropy to sacrament
  • from death trips to life affirmation
  • from corpstate values to family and kingroup tribal values
  • from monoculture to thousands of cultures, genuine diversity
  • from utilitarian to spiritual
  • from addiction-to-perfection to participatory-discrepancies
  • from structure to process
  • from hubris to humility
  • from hierarchy to equality
  • from false pasts/futures to present time

Severity of Fukushima on Par with Chernobyl

12 Apr

Will it break the scale? The New York Times reports:

But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the radiation release from Fukushima could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.

“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive for the company.

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