On Sep 25, 2008, at 10:58 PM, Scott wrote:

SHOCK (Bush) doctrine all over again — good lord, no shame?

I replied:

Yes, but does this perspective now put us in bed with the right wingers that McCain is playing to?

Naomi Klein says:

“What Gingrich’s wish list tells us is that the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly.”

But the right wingers now are blocking that dump.  Do they want to force the markets to drop further to increase Shock enough to not only cancel debate but cancel the election?

Is any of this going according to plan, or are the plans off?  Are Cheny and Bush and Paulson being outflanked by their own buddies?

What unthinkables are now being thought?

Please do not vote for a blank check to be provided to Paulson and company.  He and his cohorts are the problem not the solution.  Their insistence on the present emergency and the need for a gift of  700 billion dollars of taxpayer money is the latest and most outrageous example of  “Disaster Capitalism.”  The U.S. Congress has fallen for this before: the Patriot Act, Iraq, the Surge, to our growing regret.

It is your job to check and balance the Executive Branch, especially in cases like this when that branch is attempting an economic coup d’etat.  This amount of taxpayer money could do more good for the economy by being distributed to pay off people’s mortgages and providing them with health insurance rather than being handed over to those carrying out an immense extortion scheme.

Yesterday was the equinox.  I planted lettuce mix in the shadiest corner of the new vegetable bed I built next to the deck, with Chris’ help.  We dismantled the ziggurat on the top of the hill I constructed out of railroad ties to get additional materials for this and the two additional beds I’ll put in just below it.  Doing this physical work is an antidote for my growing sense of personal futility stemming from:

• the less than erratic progress of the Cal Poly sustainability projects I’m involved with
• my inability to get adequate mastery of SC accounting and fundraising
• the demands of Jan’s electoral campaign, even though I’m not taking any real responsibility and just doing support work
• several weeks of computer foulups
• the impending doom of one more stage of takeover of the country by a syndicate of mafiosi–this time the Wall Street crooks commanded by Paulson and Bernanke. What’s been going on this week is a sequel to the hair-raising horror story by Naomi Klein I’ve been reading for the last month: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Days to germination: 7-10

Days to Harvest: 40-60

This planting is about hope and the illusion that I can do something to provide for our needs outside the collapsing system.

The terrace for the beds next to the front deck is the only place on this north-facing lot that gets enough sun to grow any vegetables.  I put in the first bed to grow cherry tomatoes when I took out the ivy and first built the ziggurat. Here’s Ian getting into them six years ago:

Basil and lettuce and snow peas and chard have done fine.  Pole beans and squash and peppers not very well because of the lack of sun.  I put in another bed after extending the terrace with fill from the excavation of Jan’s office extension two years ago. But I never properly leveled or fastened the railroad ties, and lately they started separating as a result of the ground settling and soil expansion with watering. I pounded in fence posts to stabilize them temporarily, but that fix didnt work and looked terrible.  I got sloppy about planting and watering and harvesting, so for the last few months, all that remained was a patch of chard that I wouldnt even bother to harvest.  I also refused to water the gardens all summer to see how far they could be stressed.  The front didnt look that bad, a range of dry colors and textures offset by the brilliance of the California Fuschia.  But the back hill looks wasted, in the side yard the fifteen foot redwood died, and cobwebs covered plants and every nook and cranny of the house, many of them around the front door. While precinct walking I’ve noticed how sad those cobwebs look on other people’s places.

So cleaning them up and reviving the garden and planting vegetables is serving as my bailout. Today I put in spinach and trimmed the carex in the side yard and started watering it and the strawberries and the remaining redwood and the dried up Fremont Iris and the Yerba Buena.  Tomorrow I’ll complete the planting with Arugula.  I’m heartened by the survival of the chard.  I’d transplanted it to the lower bed while demolishing the top one and then two weeks later retransplanted it back.  With regular watering during the interval, it produced enough fresh leaves to supply the main dish for supper last night.

I wanted to stay focussed on the pure pleasure of placing those seeds in the soil–this activity being the goal of much preparation–but it wasnt easy to stay in the present.  I tried to revere those little bundles of promise and and ask for their blessing.

Dear Lois,

As my beloved representative in Congress, I beg you not to be stampeded into accepting the swindle proposed by Paulson, Bush and their cronies.  This is pure crisis manipulation, just like 9/11 and the rush to bomb Iraq.

The accompanying article from The Nation is the first sensible proposal I’ve seen on this crisis.  Please join others in Congress to slow down this insane rush to reward the villains and create even more profound and lasting damage.

Sincerely,

Steven

Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle
by William Greider

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall StreetJournal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses–many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historicswindle of the American public–all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics–exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice. Read the rest of this entry »

A Presentation to the UC/CSU/CCC Sustainability Conference
July 31-August 3 2008

Introduction

Ecocomposition is a new subfield in teaching English.*

I’m motivated to practise Ecocomposition by two principles, the first enunciated by David Orr in 1994: “All education is environmental education,” the second by George Orwell in 1946: “When I sit down to write ¦, I do not say to myself, ˜I am going to produce a work of art’. I write ¦ because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

An essential element of Ecocomposition is local knowledge–engagement with one’s own particular place and time. Preparation for Ecocomposition requires teachers to be interested in their surroundings”the academic institution as not an ivory tower, but rather a physical, economic and political entity in history, situated on the land and in the community.

In keeping with these principles I’ll talk about Ecocomposition locally rather than abstractly: my experience of teaching it during the last three years here at Cal Poly.

In 2005, as the environmental crisis deepened and the Sustainability movement grew, I thought I could make an impact by reaching first year students and by framing the subject matter in the context of rhetoric”that is, the power of persuasion. So I designed a section of our first quarter required English composition course and called it Writing About Place

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Processional”Guitar music by Elijah

• Groomsmen and Groom
• Bridesmaids
• Bride and father

Chant

Wedding is great Ischel’s crown:
O blessed bond of board and bed!
‘Tis marriage peoples every town;
High wedlock then be honoured!

(Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 5 with slight modifications)

Greeting

Welcome to you all and thank you for attending this marriage ceremony. I’m Emma’s Uncle Steven, and I’ve been honored to be invited by her and Travis to conduct it.

The act we are about to perform together is universal. The words we repeat”some from the Bible, some from Shakespeare”have been uttered over and over for thousands of years. They lift us out of the flow of past, present and future into an interval of sacred time.

The space where we’ve assembled is sacred as well. Thousands of miles from home, we’ve all flown here through the air and endured an arduous jungle voyage to the edge of a foreign land and an unfamiliar sea, where ancient people erected fantastic cities devoted to ceremony and ritual.

It is this presence that the bride and groom will revisit whenever they remember their wedding in later life.

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Hi Verandah

Thank you for the invitation to the fortieth anniversary celebration at Packers Corners and for your handwritten note. Jan and I would love to attend, but regrettably that date coincides with our yearly pilgrimage to Lund British Columbia where we established our own total loss farm thirty eight years ago.

Your invitation has spurred me to delve into the collection of relics of our days in Vermont I’ve stashed in a file cabinet, and has brought our stays there both in the period 1968-70 and our visit with you and Marty in 1993 vividly back to mind, accompanied by great gasps and sighs.

Forty years seems a particularly powerful interval. Perhaps the the rounder number of 50 will be as strong, but I suspect by that time many more of us will have dropped out of sight and those who remain will be pretty unsightly. We attended the 68-08 Columbia Strike Reunion in May, getting together for wonderful times with Peter Behr and Linda (Grace) Leclair.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a few pictures from 1968 and 1993 on my Flickr site.

I imagine you’re overwhelmed with archived documents, but let me know if you’re lacking The Occasional Drop of 4 October 1968, 19 December 1968 and 21 December 1969. They are here in good condition.

Love,

Jan and Steven and Ian travel to Idaho to visit Joe and Amy and Ethan and Abel. They drive Reddy and stop at Yosemite Valley, sleep over in Tuolumne Meadows, and pass bomb disposal site in Hawthorne NV. On the way back home they stop for lunch in Sacramento. Slideshow

Hat’s off to SLO Tribune for some investigative journalism and analysis of a quality rare these days in the mass media or elsewhere.

The McClatchey series on Guantanamo alerts us to the dangers and follies of the secret coup afflicting the judicial systems of the nation, both civilian and military, and exposes the dark heart of the Bush administration.

Closer to home, Bob Cuddy’s article last week on the money spent per vote by candidates for County Supervisor shows how the democratic process has been outsourced to questionable business interests. Whether it’s the low of $18.98 per vote spent by Mecham or the whopping $52.64 spent by Lenthall, almost all that money ends up in the pockets of professional campaign consultants, advertisers and the producers of junk mail. Its encouraging that, as Cuddy says, “money¦cant buy a county supervisor seat,” but until we set reasonable spending limits and public financing of campaigns, it still looks like the elections are for sale.

May 27

Chute Lake’s placid surface mirrored clear skies on Tuesday morning. Behr and Robert drove off and the five men remaining headed down the trail whose surface was hard packed after days of rain. For the whole of the 30 km descent the slope remained steeper than anywhere on the ascent, increasing speed and ease of pedaling. Bleak burnt and logged-over landscape gave way to mature second growth forest carpeted with grass and wildflowers. A rushing stream crisscrossed the trail.

We stopped to explore Rock Ovens in the woods built to bake bread for the railroad work crews. The nurses whizzed past shouting instructions for us to bake bread for them. Lionel replied that their place was in the kitchen. Flush with downhill speed, we overtook the women slowed by their bike trailers, and stopped at an opening in the forest cover to take pictures of the sand cliffs, endlessly stretching lake, orchards, vineyards and small settlements in the Okanagon valley below. As soon as Andy broke out three beers remaining from yesterday, the nurses came barreling down behind us and screetched to a halt when we held out the bottles. After a shared toast, they passed around a mickey of powerful cinnamon liqueur, and we agreed to meet for lunch at a vineyard once we reached Naramata.

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