“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller
(outline of the concepts of living v dead money, belief in money, heirarchy of needs, living machine)
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Occupy the Machine
The Occupy Movement is beautiful. We support it and though we are small, we are participating all over the country. We invite all occupiers to read, give feedback, and if you feel moved to do so to present this at a General Assembly or committee meeting near you.
We invite you to imagine, as many of you already probably have, if thousands of people occupied local refineries, roads, ports, oil and mining extraction sites, etc. – in other words, imagine if people occupied the locations where the 1% destroy the land and exploit humans, all for profit.
Imagine their stock prices falling, their cash flow being interrupted, their ability to get loans and/or expand “production” – a euphemism for converting living beings into dead products – finished.
Imagine if we were able to stop them, stop the 1%. Literally. Not symbolically. We think it can be done if we all do it together. We think it can be done if we all figure out how to do it and if we are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, together.
Here’s one way we could start:
Though we are all part of the 99%, not all of us are impacted the same way.
First and foremost we recognize that nonindigenous people in the US are occupying stolen land in an ongoing genocide that has lasted for centuries.
We affirm our responsibility to stand with indigenous communities who want support, to risk our lives, and give everything we can to protect the land without which none of us have anything.
We also recognize and stand in solidarity with communities of people of color who are also disproportionately impacted by environmental racism, capitalism, and a system of white supremacy.
We recognize that women combat a system of sexism and patriarchy, and we commit to supporting the struggle for gender equality, which is the basis of equality for all.
Our focus will be to stand in solidarity with local indigenous communities, people of color communities, and women in struggle—ask if they would like support and what that support would look like, and share some version of this overall strategy.
Then, based on this information and in collaboration with local communities if all agree, each Occupy General Assembly would decide what they want to target. Or they would call on people to form local affinity groups and those groups would decide the local targets on which they would focus.
Many local affinity groups could conceivably attempt to occupy multiple targets. Strategically, however, it will likely be more successful if occupiers focus on one or two major targets – such as Tar Sands refineries, fracking, coal plants etc. The idea is that if we can successfully shut down a few major targets all over the country, one or two targets per region, people more broadly will see the power they all have and then more targets can be taken on.
To be clear, what we’re envisioning here would mean a massive escalation. It would mean hundreds of thousands of people all over the country leaving behind school, jobs, family, and comfort, to really go for it. To not settle for less than victory. To leave behind symbolic action for good.
One obstacle to making this happen, however, is that as soon as we announce where we would occupy, they would come and would likely remove us immediately, especially if we don’t have enough people there. They won’t want the 1% to lose a damn penny. So, we don’t tell them where we’re going ahead of time. But if we don’t say where we’re going ahead of time, then we can’t get people out by the thousands – and we’re gonna need thousands of people to make this work.
So, here’s an idea: We announce, big time, that some of us are planning on occupying the sites of direct exploitation and destruction. And we say that we’ll need as many of the people who love the Occupy Movement and who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, to come out decisively and to not plan on going home for as long as it takes.
We’d ask all those people to start preparing right away, have their stuff packed, tents, food, money, and a plan for how they can participate and be able to stay for as long as it takes (we’d encourage people to ask their community to support them so they could go for as long it takes) so that as soon as the local Occupy groups would announce targets, perhaps through text messages and other means, those people would be ready to go to the targets at a moment’s notice. This kind of tactic has been used successfully in the past to get lots of people to a location for a blockade while keeping the cops on the run and always one step behind. If we can get enough people to the different locations before the state gets there, we have a chance at holding it until even more people can come.
If there are enough of us who are willing to make the necessary commitment and sacrifice, we believe we need nothing more than our bodies, community support, and the will to keep going to:
Occupy the Machine – Stop the 1%, Literally
Here are some other points that could be helpful:
1) Start Together – The key as we see it would be to start on the same day so that they’re overwhelmed with people going to different locations. They may seem all-powerful sometimes, but they can’t be everywhere at once.
2) Sustained Blockades – this would mean doing what Occupy does so well, stay, day after day after day after day… as long as we can go. For every person they drag away to jail, we must bring ten more to replace them every day. We will cost them as much money as we can with our bodies and our determination. Blockaders will blockade both inside and outside of targets when possible. And they will blockade roads and ports to stop supply lines.
3) Demonstrators/Community Encampments – for those who cannot blockade, the role of the community will be crucial. Demonstrators encamped on the target’s land or nearby will provide support to the blockaders and will be crucial to success.
4) Building Communities of Nonviolent Resistance – For those involved in this who lack a strong, unified community, we must very deliberately build the concrete infrastructure for a community of resistance to support these struggles. This is already happening in many ways. But a systematic approach to creating networks of people who are devoted to supporting occupiers could be the key to success. This will mean legal defense funds and a network of lawyers who will work pro bono or for a reduced fee. This will also mean arranging transition housing – places for people to stay after they are released if they are jailed for long periods of time. It will mean relentless fundraising so that those who lose their jobs, take significant time off from work, or who go to prison for long periods will have funds to support themselves and provide for their families. It will mean creating free medical care networks so that people in the movement will have access to health care. It will mean creating food networks to provide food for those who are protesting day after day, and for families of those who are imprisoned or lose their jobs. It will mean creating networks of childcare. It will mean creating a transportation network, including carpools, donations of frequent flyer miles, movement cars and vans, caravans, and buses, to be available for the kind of sustained civil disobedience actions we will need. And last and most important it will mean simple companionship – the incalculable gift of camaraderie and friendship, the healing nature of laughter and hugs, the deliberate creation of a network of communities of love spread far and wide – healers, body workers, artists, musicians, actors, facilitators, counselors, those called by spirit, nonviolent communicators, restorative justice facilitators – all of us will be needed – to see us all through the hard times that will come if we do this kind of sustained direct action.
5) Jail Solidarity – rather than trying to construct civil disobedience actions so people spend the least amount of time in jail and cooperate with the police and court system to the full extent, we will follow the lead of those who have come before us. Instead, those who can, will use jail solidarity as a tactic. Jail solidarity means that those who get arrested will not bring identification with them, won’t give their name, and will not cooperate while in jail. As more and more people are arrested, the jailers and those they protect will not know what to do. At first they will threaten, try to divide, offer deals, or even beat people or put them in solitary confinement to break their wills. But those who will get arrested will know this going in and will commit to maintaining their solidarity. They can’t jail us all and if we don’t cooperate the system will not work, if there are thousands of us. Their actions will further highlight the illegitimacy and cruelty of this system that lets the CEO of BP walk free but will jail and do worse to those who are only trying to protect life. Jail solidarity combined with more arrests, demonstrations, encampments, community involvement, and a network of communities of nonviolent resistance offering material support are unstoppable.
6) Escalation: A Promise – Too often when we don’t succeed, we don’t escalate. Too often when they escalate their attacks against the planet and all living beings, we don’t escalate. (Have you noticed that all of our victories are temporary and defensive, and all our losses permanent and offensive?) No more. If our actions do not succeed, we promise to escalate. We will regroup, reorganize, and go for more than before, risking more and holding nothing back. We promise they will lose more money and we will get stronger and fight harder.
This is our chance. We can use our energy and love to stop the 1% who are literally killing us, stealing from us, and destroying the only home we have. Our bodies will be our demands. And with our bodies, we will stop the 1% together, permanently.
These are just thoughts. Not a plan. But we hope it’s the start of a conversation about how we can do some version of this. The 1% don’t really own or control anything. They do what they do because they have guns and we allow them to. But that can all change.
We invite you to imagine, as many of you already probably have, if thousands of people occupied local refineries, roads, ports, oil and mining extraction sites, etc. – in other words, imagine if people occupied the locations where the 1% destroy the land and exploit humans, all for profit.
Imagine their stock prices falling, their cash flow being interrupted, their ability to get loans and/or expand “production” – a euphemism for converting living beings into dead products – finished.
Imagine if we were able to stop them, stop the 1%. Literally. Not symbolically. We think it can be done if we all do it together. We think it can be done if we all figure out how to do it and if we are willing to make the necessary sacrifices, together.
Here’s one way we could start:
Though we are all part of the 99%, not all of us are impacted the same way.
First and foremost we recognize that nonindigenous people in the US are occupying stolen land in an ongoing genocide that has lasted for centuries.
We affirm our responsibility to stand with indigenous communities who want support, to risk our lives, and give everything we can to protect the land without which none of us have anything.
We also recognize and stand in solidarity with communities of people of color who are also disproportionately impacted by environmental racism, capitalism, and a system of white supremacy.
We recognize that women combat a system of sexism and patriarchy, and we commit to supporting the struggle for gender equality, which is the basis of equality for all.
Our focus will be to stand in solidarity with local indigenous communities, people of color communities, and women in struggle—ask if they would like support and what that support would look like, and share some version of this overall strategy.
Then, based on this information and in collaboration with local communities if all agree, each Occupy General Assembly would decide what they want to target. Or they would call on people to form local affinity groups and those groups would decide the local targets on which they would focus.
Many local affinity groups could conceivably attempt to occupy multiple targets. Strategically, however, it will likely be more successful if occupiers focus on one or two major targets – such as Tar Sands refineries, fracking, coal plants etc. The idea is that if we can successfully shut down a few major targets all over the country, one or two targets per region, people more broadly will see the power they all have and then more targets can be taken on.
To be clear, what we’re envisioning here would mean a massive escalation. It would mean hundreds of thousands of people all over the country leaving behind school, jobs, family, and comfort, to really go for it. To not settle for less than victory. To leave behind symbolic action for good.
One obstacle to making this happen, however, is that as soon as we announce where we would occupy, they would come and would likely remove us immediately, especially if we don’t have enough people there. They won’t want the 1% to lose a damn penny. So, we don’t tell them where we’re going ahead of time. But if we don’t say where we’re going ahead of time, then we can’t get people out by the thousands – and we’re gonna need thousands of people to make this work.
So, here’s an idea: We announce, big time, that some of us are planning on occupying the sites of direct exploitation and destruction. And we say that we’ll need as many of the people who love the Occupy Movement and who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, to come out decisively and to not plan on going home for as long as it takes.
We’d ask all those people to start preparing right away, have their stuff packed, tents, food, money, and a plan for how they can participate and be able to stay for as long as it takes (we’d encourage people to ask their community to support them so they could go for as long it takes) so that as soon as the local Occupy groups would announce targets, perhaps through text messages and other means, those people would be ready to go to the targets at a moment’s notice. This kind of tactic has been used successfully in the past to get lots of people to a location for a blockade while keeping the cops on the run and always one step behind. If we can get enough people to the different locations before the state gets there, we have a chance at holding it until even more people can come.
If there are enough of us who are willing to make the necessary commitment and sacrifice, we believe we need nothing more than our bodies, community support, and the will to keep going to:
Occupy the Machine – Stop the 1%, Literally
Here are some other points that could be helpful:
1) Start Together – The key as we see it would be to start on the same day so that they’re overwhelmed with people going to different locations. They may seem all-powerful sometimes, but they can’t be everywhere at once.
2) Sustained Blockades – this would mean doing what Occupy does so well, stay, day after day after day after day… as long as we can go. For every person they drag away to jail, we must bring ten more to replace them every day. We will cost them as much money as we can with our bodies and our determination. Blockaders will blockade both inside and outside of targets when possible. And they will blockade roads and ports to stop supply lines.
3) Demonstrators/Community Encampments – for those who cannot blockade, the role of the community will be crucial. Demonstrators encamped on the target’s land or nearby will provide support to the blockaders and will be crucial to success.
4) Building Communities of Nonviolent Resistance – For those involved in this who lack a strong, unified community, we must very deliberately build the concrete infrastructure for a community of resistance to support these struggles. This is already happening in many ways. But a systematic approach to creating networks of people who are devoted to supporting occupiers could be the key to success. This will mean legal defense funds and a network of lawyers who will work pro bono or for a reduced fee. This will also mean arranging transition housing – places for people to stay after they are released if they are jailed for long periods of time. It will mean relentless fundraising so that those who lose their jobs, take significant time off from work, or who go to prison for long periods will have funds to support themselves and provide for their families. It will mean creating free medical care networks so that people in the movement will have access to health care. It will mean creating food networks to provide food for those who are protesting day after day, and for families of those who are imprisoned or lose their jobs. It will mean creating networks of childcare. It will mean creating a transportation network, including carpools, donations of frequent flyer miles, movement cars and vans, caravans, and buses, to be available for the kind of sustained civil disobedience actions we will need. And last and most important it will mean simple companionship – the incalculable gift of camaraderie and friendship, the healing nature of laughter and hugs, the deliberate creation of a network of communities of love spread far and wide – healers, body workers, artists, musicians, actors, facilitators, counselors, those called by spirit, nonviolent communicators, restorative justice facilitators – all of us will be needed – to see us all through the hard times that will come if we do this kind of sustained direct action.
5) Jail Solidarity – rather than trying to construct civil disobedience actions so people spend the least amount of time in jail and cooperate with the police and court system to the full extent, we will follow the lead of those who have come before us. Instead, those who can, will use jail solidarity as a tactic. Jail solidarity means that those who get arrested will not bring identification with them, won’t give their name, and will not cooperate while in jail. As more and more people are arrested, the jailers and those they protect will not know what to do. At first they will threaten, try to divide, offer deals, or even beat people or put them in solitary confinement to break their wills. But those who will get arrested will know this going in and will commit to maintaining their solidarity. They can’t jail us all and if we don’t cooperate the system will not work, if there are thousands of us. Their actions will further highlight the illegitimacy and cruelty of this system that lets the CEO of BP walk free but will jail and do worse to those who are only trying to protect life. Jail solidarity combined with more arrests, demonstrations, encampments, community involvement, and a network of communities of nonviolent resistance offering material support are unstoppable.
6) Escalation: A Promise – Too often when we don’t succeed, we don’t escalate. Too often when they escalate their attacks against the planet and all living beings, we don’t escalate. (Have you noticed that all of our victories are temporary and defensive, and all our losses permanent and offensive?) No more. If our actions do not succeed, we promise to escalate. We will regroup, reorganize, and go for more than before, risking more and holding nothing back. We promise they will lose more money and we will get stronger and fight harder.
This is our chance. We can use our energy and love to stop the 1% who are literally killing us, stealing from us, and destroying the only home we have. Our bodies will be our demands. And with our bodies, we will stop the 1% together, permanently.
These are just thoughts. Not a plan. But we hope it’s the start of a conversation about how we can do some version of this. The 1% don’t really own or control anything. They do what they do because they have guns and we allow them to. But that can all change.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Acts of Conscience
7 Ways to Defeat The Banks: Stop Participating in the System!
We expect the system we live in to provide answers, to provide nurturance, to provide fairness, and to provide change where necessary. This expectation is a dangerous one.
Most social and political systems today are designed around collectivist methodologies. Their primary tool is centralization of power, and the removal of choice from the public consciousness. We are made to believe that the establishment is necessary for our survival, and that to abandon it would mean certain destruction. We are taught that the individual is subservient and inconsequential in the face of the state. This is simply not so. Like the traveler in “Before The Law”, we have been defeated by our own expectations of how the law (or justice) works. We sit and wait for permission, when we should be charging through the gates and taking what is rightfully ours.
Even amidst recent and increasingly prevalent protest actions on the part of Occupy Wall Street groups, there are still some within these movements who believe the answer to fighting back against the corruption of banking cartels and puppet politicians is to hand even MORE power over to the state, and to collectivize our culture still further. The ignorance of this mentality is no less than astonishing.
The only practical strategy for combating the tyranny of centralized systems has been and always will be decentralization. Individuals must stop relying on the rules of a rigged game to see them through to the truth. This means that while mass protests are certainly a powerful tactic for voicing concerns on an international stage, they accomplish little to nothing in the way of meaningful change in the long run unless they are backed by individual actions to break away from dependency upon a poisoned political and economic framework.
The common assumption amongst Americans is that nothing can be done without mass action resulting in “compromise” from leadership. That the healing of our cultural dynamic is a “top down” process. That one person alone has little at his disposal for bettering the world. In fact, it is always self aware and self sustaining individuals who build better societies, not angry mobs without understanding or direction. Individuals blaze the path that the rest of the world eventually follows, and they do this through one very simple and effective act; walking away.
By walking away from the corrupt system, and building our own, we make the establishment obsolete. This philosophy could be summed up as follows:
Provide for yourself and others those necessities which the corrupt system cannot or will not, and the masses (even if they are unaware) will naturally gravitate towards this new and better way. Offer freedom where there was once restriction, and you put the controlling establishment on guard. Eventually, they will either have to conform to you, attack you, or fade away completely. In each case, you win. Even in the event of attack, the system is forced to expose its tyranny and its true colors openly, making your cause stronger.
The obvious question now is; how can each one of us use this strategy in our daily lives? Here are just a few easy applications:
1) Focus On The Federal Reserve
If you as an activist or the movement you support are not fully aware of the private Federal Reserve Bank and its primary role in the destruction of our economy, our currency, and our political dynamic, then your protests are a waste of time, and your movement will end in failure. Uneducated mass actions are easily manipulated, and can even end up serving the purposes of those oligarchs they seek to dethrone. G. Edward Griffin’s full analysis on the history of the Federal Reserve “The Creature From Jekyll Island” and similar materials should be handed to every OWS protester before it is too late.
2) Take Back Your Savings
Do you have a bank account with one of the so called “too big to fails”? Is the culmination of your savings currently in the hands of financial monstrosities like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, etc? Well, take your money back! This has been done by a few protestors and the response from banks has been outlandishly oppressive, including new guidelines attempting to obstruct customer access to savings, and even calling the police! This tells me that they are afraid. Afraid of Americans catching wind of the idea that the money they place in the accounts of bad banks is still theirs to do with as they will. If you don’t like how these institutions operate, don’t let them have your money. It’s as simple as that. Not only is this an act of defiance that truly hurts the banking system, it also protects your hard earned wealth (at least initially) from the inevitable collapse of these fiscally insolvent blood leaching leviathans (watch Bank of America closely, folks!).
3) Use Alternative Currencies
After you take your savings away from the banks, you still aren’t quite free of their influence. You are now holding fiat dollars, which the Federal Reserve, the foundation of all banking fraud, is currently devaluing. The idea of walking away from the dollar sounds ridiculous or even frightening to those trapped in the centralization mindset, but it is a highly effective method for combating the system itself. The dollar is a sham, and has been since its future was handed over to the Fed in 1913.
Alternatives exist, and they must be utilized. Communities across the country use various scripts as a means to diminish reliance on the dollar, but ultimately, the best currencies are those that cannot be created out of thin air unhindered. This means gold and silver.
Central banking proponents have been railing against even the concept of a return to gold and silver currencies for years, and the Department Of Justice has labeled the use of such alternatives in place of dollars as a form of “domestic terrorism”. This should tell you, quite clearly, that they are deathly afraid of activists organizing to drop the dollar to pursue metals. If the system is willing to use the law as a weapon to keep us from having sound money, then we should be rubbing their nose in it daily by trading without dollars. They should be forced to react, and in the process, forced to expose their true intentions for our economic futures.
4) Build Barter Networks
If a bunch of people can band together to huddle in parks with signs for weeks in cities across the nation, then they can band together to trade goods and services outside the establishment system as well. Barter networks grow spontaneously out of economic collapse regardless of what any group decides to do, but generally, they appear AFTER the worst has happened. Wouldn’t it be wiser to organize such markets now, before a full collapse takes place? By preempting disaster with a backup or failsafe free market barter economy in each town and city, we insulate ourselves from the effects of the crisis, and, we cut loose from our dependency on the controlled mainstream economy. Localized trade makes it possible to walk away from corporate chains and maintain the circulation of wealth within a community, while countering the increasingly higher taxes caused by austerity and inflation that we are likely to see in this country very soon. It really is a no-brainer.
5) Grow A Garden
I don’t know how to say this nicely; don’t be a jackass, learn to grow your own food. Don’t expect that our economy will continue to sustain you. Actually, you should have every expectation that it won’t! If every Wall Street or Fed protester had their own garden patch and some stored goods, we would all be much safer. Food dependence is the worst kind. It has been used by governments and despots for centuries to cull the masses and dissuade dissent.
Sharecropping should be common in every community. Neighborhood gardens should be standard. Every household should have a year’s worth of food. Period.
Imagine that you lose your job and every cent you have tomorrow. Imagine that mom and dad are broke and have no money to lend you. Imagine that food stamps are a thing of the past because the national debt has become so exponential that entitlement programs have been erased. Now, how do you live from day to day? Where do you get the nutrition required for you to continue holding up that sign or shouting that slogan? Think about it...
6) Start A Micro-Industry
If the U.S. economy is ever going to get on its feet again, it will be because average Americans bring it back through local industry. This means ending our community addictions to corporately produced goods and returning to specialized trade skills. It means coalitions of local farmers, craftsmen, and micro-industries providing goods and services with a city or county based market focus. Large manufacturers and business chains relying on the model of globalization will have absolutely no ability to rebuild mainstreet commerce, even if they wanted to, because their methods depend upon constant outsourcing and downsizing for survival. Private tradesmen will be the only people capable of filling the dark void these corporations leave behind.
7) Start An Activist Group
The establishment HATES when you do this. The spontaneous organizing of groups outside government or corporate purview has generated notoriously absurd responses from authorities, including accusations of “extremism”, infiltration, and wrongful arrest. If this sounds frightening, then I suggest you get over it quickly, because this is going to be the norm for many years to come. The evils of the world are not undone by apathetic naysayers anymore than they are undone by mindless mobs. Without the coordinated actions of aware individuals with a common focus, nothing is going to change.
This group could be something a simple as a local barter network or a political discussion forum, or, a complex national organization geared towards tangible political action. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s based on the promotion of Constitutional freedoms, and its leadership is decentralized. Just make it happen…
At bottom, if we want to fight back against a system we cannot take back through traditional means, then we must learn to walk away. If the system feeds us, clothes us, and shelters us at will, then ordinary protest is pointless. Our tender parts are in a rusty vice on the autocratic workbench and until we pull them out, no amount of screaming and pounding will improve our situation. Independence is won through the constant striving for self responsibility. Freedom is won through a position of personal strength, not weakness and self-enslavement.
Numbers alone do not make a movement, and the elites we currently work to supplant are not going to flinch at a few random protests. In all likelihood they will welcome these actions as a useful distraction. Tyrants don’t fear the torches and pitchforks anymore. What they do fear is balanced insight, self reliance, and exceptional force of will. A handful of men with these attributes are far more dangerous to a corrupt system than thousands of citizens driven only by insatiable anger. To overcome oppression, we must first overcome ourselves. The ability to step outside the paradigm, the ability to act without permission, and charge the gates without apprehension, is the key to toppling totalitarian systems and exposing the great lie of our age; that we cannot exist without the cage we were born into.
We expect the system we live in to provide answers, to provide nurturance, to provide fairness, and to provide change where necessary. This expectation is a dangerous one.
Most social and political systems today are designed around collectivist methodologies. Their primary tool is centralization of power, and the removal of choice from the public consciousness. We are made to believe that the establishment is necessary for our survival, and that to abandon it would mean certain destruction. We are taught that the individual is subservient and inconsequential in the face of the state. This is simply not so. Like the traveler in “Before The Law”, we have been defeated by our own expectations of how the law (or justice) works. We sit and wait for permission, when we should be charging through the gates and taking what is rightfully ours.
Even amidst recent and increasingly prevalent protest actions on the part of Occupy Wall Street groups, there are still some within these movements who believe the answer to fighting back against the corruption of banking cartels and puppet politicians is to hand even MORE power over to the state, and to collectivize our culture still further. The ignorance of this mentality is no less than astonishing.
The only practical strategy for combating the tyranny of centralized systems has been and always will be decentralization. Individuals must stop relying on the rules of a rigged game to see them through to the truth. This means that while mass protests are certainly a powerful tactic for voicing concerns on an international stage, they accomplish little to nothing in the way of meaningful change in the long run unless they are backed by individual actions to break away from dependency upon a poisoned political and economic framework.
The common assumption amongst Americans is that nothing can be done without mass action resulting in “compromise” from leadership. That the healing of our cultural dynamic is a “top down” process. That one person alone has little at his disposal for bettering the world. In fact, it is always self aware and self sustaining individuals who build better societies, not angry mobs without understanding or direction. Individuals blaze the path that the rest of the world eventually follows, and they do this through one very simple and effective act; walking away.
By walking away from the corrupt system, and building our own, we make the establishment obsolete. This philosophy could be summed up as follows:
Provide for yourself and others those necessities which the corrupt system cannot or will not, and the masses (even if they are unaware) will naturally gravitate towards this new and better way. Offer freedom where there was once restriction, and you put the controlling establishment on guard. Eventually, they will either have to conform to you, attack you, or fade away completely. In each case, you win. Even in the event of attack, the system is forced to expose its tyranny and its true colors openly, making your cause stronger.
The obvious question now is; how can each one of us use this strategy in our daily lives? Here are just a few easy applications:
1) Focus On The Federal Reserve
If you as an activist or the movement you support are not fully aware of the private Federal Reserve Bank and its primary role in the destruction of our economy, our currency, and our political dynamic, then your protests are a waste of time, and your movement will end in failure. Uneducated mass actions are easily manipulated, and can even end up serving the purposes of those oligarchs they seek to dethrone. G. Edward Griffin’s full analysis on the history of the Federal Reserve “The Creature From Jekyll Island” and similar materials should be handed to every OWS protester before it is too late.
2) Take Back Your Savings
Do you have a bank account with one of the so called “too big to fails”? Is the culmination of your savings currently in the hands of financial monstrosities like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, etc? Well, take your money back! This has been done by a few protestors and the response from banks has been outlandishly oppressive, including new guidelines attempting to obstruct customer access to savings, and even calling the police! This tells me that they are afraid. Afraid of Americans catching wind of the idea that the money they place in the accounts of bad banks is still theirs to do with as they will. If you don’t like how these institutions operate, don’t let them have your money. It’s as simple as that. Not only is this an act of defiance that truly hurts the banking system, it also protects your hard earned wealth (at least initially) from the inevitable collapse of these fiscally insolvent blood leaching leviathans (watch Bank of America closely, folks!).
3) Use Alternative Currencies
After you take your savings away from the banks, you still aren’t quite free of their influence. You are now holding fiat dollars, which the Federal Reserve, the foundation of all banking fraud, is currently devaluing. The idea of walking away from the dollar sounds ridiculous or even frightening to those trapped in the centralization mindset, but it is a highly effective method for combating the system itself. The dollar is a sham, and has been since its future was handed over to the Fed in 1913.
Alternatives exist, and they must be utilized. Communities across the country use various scripts as a means to diminish reliance on the dollar, but ultimately, the best currencies are those that cannot be created out of thin air unhindered. This means gold and silver.
Central banking proponents have been railing against even the concept of a return to gold and silver currencies for years, and the Department Of Justice has labeled the use of such alternatives in place of dollars as a form of “domestic terrorism”. This should tell you, quite clearly, that they are deathly afraid of activists organizing to drop the dollar to pursue metals. If the system is willing to use the law as a weapon to keep us from having sound money, then we should be rubbing their nose in it daily by trading without dollars. They should be forced to react, and in the process, forced to expose their true intentions for our economic futures.
4) Build Barter Networks
If a bunch of people can band together to huddle in parks with signs for weeks in cities across the nation, then they can band together to trade goods and services outside the establishment system as well. Barter networks grow spontaneously out of economic collapse regardless of what any group decides to do, but generally, they appear AFTER the worst has happened. Wouldn’t it be wiser to organize such markets now, before a full collapse takes place? By preempting disaster with a backup or failsafe free market barter economy in each town and city, we insulate ourselves from the effects of the crisis, and, we cut loose from our dependency on the controlled mainstream economy. Localized trade makes it possible to walk away from corporate chains and maintain the circulation of wealth within a community, while countering the increasingly higher taxes caused by austerity and inflation that we are likely to see in this country very soon. It really is a no-brainer.
5) Grow A Garden
I don’t know how to say this nicely; don’t be a jackass, learn to grow your own food. Don’t expect that our economy will continue to sustain you. Actually, you should have every expectation that it won’t! If every Wall Street or Fed protester had their own garden patch and some stored goods, we would all be much safer. Food dependence is the worst kind. It has been used by governments and despots for centuries to cull the masses and dissuade dissent.
Sharecropping should be common in every community. Neighborhood gardens should be standard. Every household should have a year’s worth of food. Period.
Imagine that you lose your job and every cent you have tomorrow. Imagine that mom and dad are broke and have no money to lend you. Imagine that food stamps are a thing of the past because the national debt has become so exponential that entitlement programs have been erased. Now, how do you live from day to day? Where do you get the nutrition required for you to continue holding up that sign or shouting that slogan? Think about it...
6) Start A Micro-Industry
If the U.S. economy is ever going to get on its feet again, it will be because average Americans bring it back through local industry. This means ending our community addictions to corporately produced goods and returning to specialized trade skills. It means coalitions of local farmers, craftsmen, and micro-industries providing goods and services with a city or county based market focus. Large manufacturers and business chains relying on the model of globalization will have absolutely no ability to rebuild mainstreet commerce, even if they wanted to, because their methods depend upon constant outsourcing and downsizing for survival. Private tradesmen will be the only people capable of filling the dark void these corporations leave behind.
7) Start An Activist Group
The establishment HATES when you do this. The spontaneous organizing of groups outside government or corporate purview has generated notoriously absurd responses from authorities, including accusations of “extremism”, infiltration, and wrongful arrest. If this sounds frightening, then I suggest you get over it quickly, because this is going to be the norm for many years to come. The evils of the world are not undone by apathetic naysayers anymore than they are undone by mindless mobs. Without the coordinated actions of aware individuals with a common focus, nothing is going to change.
This group could be something a simple as a local barter network or a political discussion forum, or, a complex national organization geared towards tangible political action. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s based on the promotion of Constitutional freedoms, and its leadership is decentralized. Just make it happen…
At bottom, if we want to fight back against a system we cannot take back through traditional means, then we must learn to walk away. If the system feeds us, clothes us, and shelters us at will, then ordinary protest is pointless. Our tender parts are in a rusty vice on the autocratic workbench and until we pull them out, no amount of screaming and pounding will improve our situation. Independence is won through the constant striving for self responsibility. Freedom is won through a position of personal strength, not weakness and self-enslavement.
Numbers alone do not make a movement, and the elites we currently work to supplant are not going to flinch at a few random protests. In all likelihood they will welcome these actions as a useful distraction. Tyrants don’t fear the torches and pitchforks anymore. What they do fear is balanced insight, self reliance, and exceptional force of will. A handful of men with these attributes are far more dangerous to a corrupt system than thousands of citizens driven only by insatiable anger. To overcome oppression, we must first overcome ourselves. The ability to step outside the paradigm, the ability to act without permission, and charge the gates without apprehension, is the key to toppling totalitarian systems and exposing the great lie of our age; that we cannot exist without the cage we were born into.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Gold is a good investment, but self sufficiency is real wealth
The great rush to find a safe haven financial investment has led many supposedly savvy citizens to put their money into gold. This has caused the value of the precious metal to soar, reaching over $1,800 per ounce, giving investors a sense of security that their money is safe and likely to hold its value.
However, in a world undergoing seismic social, economic, and environmental convulsions that are growing by the day, gold may not prove to be the solution to our future security that many are hoping for.
If one stands back from the spinning vortex of speculative financial roulette that preoccupies the world's media and many of her better-off citizens, one will observe that unfortunately gold is inedible (some will say 'fortunately') and is less easy to turn into plough shears than other base metals. A fact that has not gone unnoticed by globally oriented financial investors. These speculators have recently started pouring money into agricultural land holdings as a hedge against higher food prices, set against a guaranteed demand for world staples like wheat, rice, maize and sorghum. Unfortunately the objective of such investment policies are not benign, but rather are symptomatic of the same convulsive profit driven motives that have catalysed the wild economic swings of the past decade.
So, where to turn when turmoil is encompassed by inflated egos, unashamed greed and rabid exploitation?
The answer to this starts by firstly recommending careful consideration of the circumstances that have brought us to this point. Then, a plan of action which offers a longer term commitment to a saner and perhaps 'simpler' model of everyday living – one which shifts decisively away from the present day crony capitalist and consumerist ethos that has brought our planet to the brink of asset stripped ecocide and unchecked human inequality.
In seeking to raise our awareness of the background to this unprecedented upheaval, it soon becomes apparent that there is some other force operating behind the front line villains picked out as being responsible for the rising and falling fortunes of the global economy. Those 'in the news' are often simply puppets of this unseen regime which appears to be intent upon a far-reaching domination of global events for its own ends. The regime appears to be composed of a rather small group of very wealthy individuals and corporations that have established a controlling influence over both national governments and the international financial institutions that form the lynch pin of the global economy. It is a mostly shadowy cartel whose field of influence includes such institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. Its leaders are also strategically placed to control events within the European Union, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the Pacific Rim economic zone.
Banking empires, weapons cartels, pharmaceutical giants, oil magnates and food and seed monopolies are well represented within this club, which exercises decisive control over all our lives without us ever really noticing it. At their behest, moral codes and human values are flaunted and dispensed with with reckless abandon, and brutal wars are started in foreign countries with almost complete impunity.
One soon becomes aware that the fascist regime of the last Great War did not end with the Nuremburg trials, but re-established a formidable foothold within Western and North American society – performing this stealthy manoeuvre right under our half-closed sleep-filled eyes.
The fact that this state of play is successfully disguised as 'democracy', is proof of their cleverness and our stupidity.
Recognising this state of affairs for the first time can be a shock, especially if one has pinned their faith in the status quo to see us through these “troubled times”. However, reality it is, and once we have absorbed the truth there can be no turning back. Which brings us once again to the question: Where does one turn when all around is turmoil?
The answer is – firstly we have to turn to ourselves; to recognise that we are complicit in allowing such a dark agenda to have become adopted right in our midst. After all, we live in what citizens of Europe and North America like to refer to as a “modern democracy”. Yet it is we, ourselves, who have repeatedly put our faith in autocratic charlatans who freely exercise the levers of despotic power. It is we who have handed responsibility to run our affairs to those who are masters of spin, deception and propaganda. It is we who have filled the role that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain filled on the cusp of World War II when he held up a scrap of paper and declared it to contain Hitler's promise that Nazi Germany would never invade the United Kingdom. We too, like Chamberlain, have appeased ourselves in submitting our destinies to the diktats of the corporate vandals and the smiling politicians in their pay.
We have freely allowed ourselves to be duped into a state of virtual paralysis by a corporate-backed media whose agenda has nothing to do with “raising awareness” but a great deal to do with keeping us busy with the trappings of superficial consumerism and mindless entertainment. The vast propaganda machine that pumps out the relentless message that we should strive ceaselessly to acquire the means to purchase our pleasures from the glittering shelves of the global market place.
However, these shelves are now beginning to lose their luster, and we are beginning to lose the scales from our eyes. We can begin to see that we confused this 'virtual reality' with actual reality. The world turns out not to be a hypermarket after all, but a sentient being in an advanced stage of severe fever; poisoned, polluted and exploited almost beyond recognition - by us – the trolley pushing, brand seeking puppets of the global corporate elite. That small cartel marching on its robotic way to the grand take over of every last bankable asset on planet earth, as well as all those who, consciously or unconsciously, submit to becoming pawns in its sinister master plan.
But now its time to take back our power and to take firm control of our destinies. We can still make this choice – its not too late. Nobody with the means of survival needs to be a slave – and nobody with some land needs to go without food. We are fast becoming aware that 'money in the bank' is no guarantee of our future security. As dying state and private financial institutions increasingly empower themselves to reach ever deeper into our pockets, we struggle to grasp the fact that much of what they steal goes straight into the pay cheque of the brightest scavengers and the bonuses of already bloated bosses. We barely seem to notice when our revenue payments are utilised to further crank up the deadly imperialist war machine so it can bludgeon its way through yet more oil and mineral rich countries in order to fulfill insatiable material addictions and barely disguised neo-colonial ambitions.
However, behind all events is a law of karma which states “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And just as the despotic forces of imperialism appear to be wresting decisive control over mankind, strong voices of reason and truth are rising to challenge its dominion. Among the genocidal acts of nefarious despots, we are witnessing the dawning of fresh visions of another way mankind can look after itself and this sentient planet upon which we all reside.
In fact we have arrived at something of a watershed; one where it will no longer be possible to sit on the fence and not commit to a resolution of this age old conflict, one way or another.
Thus, those now fretting about how and where to securely invest their financial savings, just might find that cosmic Lila has brought them to an auspicious karmic fork in the road of life. Pointing to the left – a signpost saying “Financial Security” and to the right a sign saying “Voluntary Simplicity.”
Those whose priority is to preserve their wealth will take the left fork and they will put their money into gold. Those who seek to deepen their awareness and move beyond material dependency will choose the right fork. Those who turn left may find themselves still in familiar territory with no lack of advisers on how to put up barriers against uncertainty and change. However this will merely ensure an extended contract with the dark ways of the old regime. For those who turn right will be a challenge of a very different nature: how to shift away from old material dependencies and towards a simpler and more harmonious relationship with the non material values of existence; the universal energies that are held back by materialistic indulgence. Those who take this path may wish to consider investing whatever funds they possess (individually or collectively) in some fertile land capable of producing good quality, ecological food, fuel and fibre for their daily needs. Thus taking control of their destinies and ultimately achieving independence from the clawing centralised control system which feeds upon the compliant serfdom of its participants.
The more we can free ourselves from this unholy contract, the less power it will have over us and our World, and the more realised we will become in the fulfilment of our deeper needs and creative aspirations. Once the collapsing institutions of the status quo have dragged all that has value into the cauldron of its hastening demise – where we find our next meal, how we generate our energy and where we acquire pure water – will become of paramount importance. The skills of the land will be at a premium, whereas the skills of money making will become a useless impediment.
We can start right now. We can take our money out of the mainstream banks which fund the oppressive institutions of this planet, and put it instead into ethical investment institutions, local ecological food and farming ventures, local human scale renewable energy initiatives and/or the thousands of localised land-based and artisan ventures now springing up all over the planet. We can, right now, begin to end years of energy sapping compromise and finally put our money where our hearts are. Because when the corporate gods are toppled and the lights go out, we will need to be prepared.
This preparation process can catalyse a new and positive interaction at the community level. One where we start purchasing the basic necessities of life from those who are already operating humane, responsible and environmentally benign enterprises; and not those who are exploiting the last seams of planetary wealth for their personal profit and power.
So to those who think they will find their salvation in precious metals, I would countenance them to think again. One cannot eat gold.
However, in a world undergoing seismic social, economic, and environmental convulsions that are growing by the day, gold may not prove to be the solution to our future security that many are hoping for.
If one stands back from the spinning vortex of speculative financial roulette that preoccupies the world's media and many of her better-off citizens, one will observe that unfortunately gold is inedible (some will say 'fortunately') and is less easy to turn into plough shears than other base metals. A fact that has not gone unnoticed by globally oriented financial investors. These speculators have recently started pouring money into agricultural land holdings as a hedge against higher food prices, set against a guaranteed demand for world staples like wheat, rice, maize and sorghum. Unfortunately the objective of such investment policies are not benign, but rather are symptomatic of the same convulsive profit driven motives that have catalysed the wild economic swings of the past decade.
So, where to turn when turmoil is encompassed by inflated egos, unashamed greed and rabid exploitation?
The answer to this starts by firstly recommending careful consideration of the circumstances that have brought us to this point. Then, a plan of action which offers a longer term commitment to a saner and perhaps 'simpler' model of everyday living – one which shifts decisively away from the present day crony capitalist and consumerist ethos that has brought our planet to the brink of asset stripped ecocide and unchecked human inequality.
In seeking to raise our awareness of the background to this unprecedented upheaval, it soon becomes apparent that there is some other force operating behind the front line villains picked out as being responsible for the rising and falling fortunes of the global economy. Those 'in the news' are often simply puppets of this unseen regime which appears to be intent upon a far-reaching domination of global events for its own ends. The regime appears to be composed of a rather small group of very wealthy individuals and corporations that have established a controlling influence over both national governments and the international financial institutions that form the lynch pin of the global economy. It is a mostly shadowy cartel whose field of influence includes such institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation. Its leaders are also strategically placed to control events within the European Union, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the Pacific Rim economic zone.
Banking empires, weapons cartels, pharmaceutical giants, oil magnates and food and seed monopolies are well represented within this club, which exercises decisive control over all our lives without us ever really noticing it. At their behest, moral codes and human values are flaunted and dispensed with with reckless abandon, and brutal wars are started in foreign countries with almost complete impunity.
One soon becomes aware that the fascist regime of the last Great War did not end with the Nuremburg trials, but re-established a formidable foothold within Western and North American society – performing this stealthy manoeuvre right under our half-closed sleep-filled eyes.
The fact that this state of play is successfully disguised as 'democracy', is proof of their cleverness and our stupidity.
Recognising this state of affairs for the first time can be a shock, especially if one has pinned their faith in the status quo to see us through these “troubled times”. However, reality it is, and once we have absorbed the truth there can be no turning back. Which brings us once again to the question: Where does one turn when all around is turmoil?
The answer is – firstly we have to turn to ourselves; to recognise that we are complicit in allowing such a dark agenda to have become adopted right in our midst. After all, we live in what citizens of Europe and North America like to refer to as a “modern democracy”. Yet it is we, ourselves, who have repeatedly put our faith in autocratic charlatans who freely exercise the levers of despotic power. It is we who have handed responsibility to run our affairs to those who are masters of spin, deception and propaganda. It is we who have filled the role that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain filled on the cusp of World War II when he held up a scrap of paper and declared it to contain Hitler's promise that Nazi Germany would never invade the United Kingdom. We too, like Chamberlain, have appeased ourselves in submitting our destinies to the diktats of the corporate vandals and the smiling politicians in their pay.
We have freely allowed ourselves to be duped into a state of virtual paralysis by a corporate-backed media whose agenda has nothing to do with “raising awareness” but a great deal to do with keeping us busy with the trappings of superficial consumerism and mindless entertainment. The vast propaganda machine that pumps out the relentless message that we should strive ceaselessly to acquire the means to purchase our pleasures from the glittering shelves of the global market place.
However, these shelves are now beginning to lose their luster, and we are beginning to lose the scales from our eyes. We can begin to see that we confused this 'virtual reality' with actual reality. The world turns out not to be a hypermarket after all, but a sentient being in an advanced stage of severe fever; poisoned, polluted and exploited almost beyond recognition - by us – the trolley pushing, brand seeking puppets of the global corporate elite. That small cartel marching on its robotic way to the grand take over of every last bankable asset on planet earth, as well as all those who, consciously or unconsciously, submit to becoming pawns in its sinister master plan.
But now its time to take back our power and to take firm control of our destinies. We can still make this choice – its not too late. Nobody with the means of survival needs to be a slave – and nobody with some land needs to go without food. We are fast becoming aware that 'money in the bank' is no guarantee of our future security. As dying state and private financial institutions increasingly empower themselves to reach ever deeper into our pockets, we struggle to grasp the fact that much of what they steal goes straight into the pay cheque of the brightest scavengers and the bonuses of already bloated bosses. We barely seem to notice when our revenue payments are utilised to further crank up the deadly imperialist war machine so it can bludgeon its way through yet more oil and mineral rich countries in order to fulfill insatiable material addictions and barely disguised neo-colonial ambitions.
However, behind all events is a law of karma which states “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And just as the despotic forces of imperialism appear to be wresting decisive control over mankind, strong voices of reason and truth are rising to challenge its dominion. Among the genocidal acts of nefarious despots, we are witnessing the dawning of fresh visions of another way mankind can look after itself and this sentient planet upon which we all reside.
In fact we have arrived at something of a watershed; one where it will no longer be possible to sit on the fence and not commit to a resolution of this age old conflict, one way or another.
Thus, those now fretting about how and where to securely invest their financial savings, just might find that cosmic Lila has brought them to an auspicious karmic fork in the road of life. Pointing to the left – a signpost saying “Financial Security” and to the right a sign saying “Voluntary Simplicity.”
Those whose priority is to preserve their wealth will take the left fork and they will put their money into gold. Those who seek to deepen their awareness and move beyond material dependency will choose the right fork. Those who turn left may find themselves still in familiar territory with no lack of advisers on how to put up barriers against uncertainty and change. However this will merely ensure an extended contract with the dark ways of the old regime. For those who turn right will be a challenge of a very different nature: how to shift away from old material dependencies and towards a simpler and more harmonious relationship with the non material values of existence; the universal energies that are held back by materialistic indulgence. Those who take this path may wish to consider investing whatever funds they possess (individually or collectively) in some fertile land capable of producing good quality, ecological food, fuel and fibre for their daily needs. Thus taking control of their destinies and ultimately achieving independence from the clawing centralised control system which feeds upon the compliant serfdom of its participants.
The more we can free ourselves from this unholy contract, the less power it will have over us and our World, and the more realised we will become in the fulfilment of our deeper needs and creative aspirations. Once the collapsing institutions of the status quo have dragged all that has value into the cauldron of its hastening demise – where we find our next meal, how we generate our energy and where we acquire pure water – will become of paramount importance. The skills of the land will be at a premium, whereas the skills of money making will become a useless impediment.
We can start right now. We can take our money out of the mainstream banks which fund the oppressive institutions of this planet, and put it instead into ethical investment institutions, local ecological food and farming ventures, local human scale renewable energy initiatives and/or the thousands of localised land-based and artisan ventures now springing up all over the planet. We can, right now, begin to end years of energy sapping compromise and finally put our money where our hearts are. Because when the corporate gods are toppled and the lights go out, we will need to be prepared.
This preparation process can catalyse a new and positive interaction at the community level. One where we start purchasing the basic necessities of life from those who are already operating humane, responsible and environmentally benign enterprises; and not those who are exploiting the last seams of planetary wealth for their personal profit and power.
So to those who think they will find their salvation in precious metals, I would countenance them to think again. One cannot eat gold.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
scared of freedom
SCARED OF FREEDOM
There are a lot of people who consider themselves freedom
advocates, who, with righteous zeal and indignation, vehemently
rail against the injustice, corruption and oppression "government"
continually spews forth. However, many of those same people, when
they hear someone suggesting life without the monstrosity called
"government," will immediately go into turbo-backpedal mode,
insisting that some "government" is needed, that we need to work to
fix the system, and that we need a good "government," that just
does good stuff, and protects us, and so on.
The situation is a lot like a battered spouse, who is given the
opportunity to escape her abuser, but who insists that she can't
leave, that he really loves her, that she needs him, that the
relationship can be fixed. Such a response shows that, as much as
the abuser is a nasty scumbag, there is also a serious problem in
the mind of his victim, which enables the abuse to continue.
So it is with statists who just want a nicer, gentler "government."
They don't actually want freedom. In fact, they are scared to death
of freedom, which is why they refuse to give up the very beast that
they are constantly condemning and complaining about. They insist
that "government" is needed to protect people, to maintain liberty
and justice, and do nothing more. The fact that the gang called
"government" has never done that, anywhere in the world, at any
time in history, doesn't shake "limited statists" from their faith
in the idea that that "needs" to happen.
Those who glorify the Constitution, for example, don't like to
accept that it utterly and completely failed to keep the beast
"limited." Those who still focus on voting don't like to admit that
democracy has utterly and completely failed to lead to freedom or
justice. Those who still advocate limited "government" don't like
to admit that there has never been any document, any ritual, any
system or plan, that has resulted in an actually limited
"government."
Those who speak of getting back to the Constitution refuse to see
that the Constitution was just another tyrant trick. Aside from the
obvious example of slavery continuing under the Constitution, the
thuggery of the new "servant government" became evident very
quickly. Four years after the Constitution was ratified, the new
tyrants created an extortion racket ("tax") related to whiskey, and
then used the violence of the state to crush resistors. Eleven
years after the Constitution was ratified, the new tyrants were
locking people up for criticizing "government" (under the alien and
sedition acts). The document has been used an excuse for tyranny
since it was written. Why is there any reason to believe that
trying the same thing again (as if that's even possible) would work
out any better the second time around?
More to the point, why would someone who advocates a puny, weak
little "government," that does almost nothing, be so utterly
terrified of having no "government" at all? Again, the excuse is
usually that we need some form of "government" to protect us. But
that is not what "governments" do, and it never has been. You might
as well argue that your town needs a carjacker in order to protect
you from car thieves. How can we "need" "government" to be what it
never has been, and how can we "need" it to do what it has never
done? And why would anyone expect, or even hope, that that will
ever change?
Every gang called "government" commits extortion, and calls it
"taxation." Every gang called "government" threatens and bosses non-
violent people around, and calls it "law enforcement." Ron Paul
recently stated that the only proper purpose of "government" is to
promote liberty. The only trouble is, not only has there never been
such a "government" in the history of the world, but by definition,
there can't be. If there was an organization that only defended
individual liberty, there would be no reason to call it
"government." It would have no power to "tax" and no power to
"legislate." In fact, it would have no power, no rights, and no
"authority" that you don't have all by yourself. It wouldn't have a
monopoly, and it couldn't force people to fund it. It would be a
private security company, or many of them. Nonetheless, when
someone like me advocates what "limited government" people say they
want--organizations that only defend against aggression--most
people can't handle it. In fact, they won't even allow themselves
to think about it.
A while back I made a deal, offering to send anyone a copy of my
book, "The Most Dangerous Superstition," on these conditions: the
person has to read the book, and then, if it changes the way they
see the world, they pay for it; or if it doesn't, they send the
book back. Over a hundred people have paid, after reading it. Of
the four books I've gotten back, three of the books looked a lot
like the reader never made it halfway through.
It's a small book, the wording and concepts in the book are quite
simple to follow, and the people agreed to read the whole thing. So
why didn't they? Because they have been indoctrinated to the point
where there are some things they literally don't dare to think
about. When their minds start to approach something completely
outside the authoritarian paradigm they were raised in, they
mentally flinch, and back away. And, I'm sorry to say, most people
who consider themselves freedom advocates are the same way. I'm
even more sorry to say, I was that way myself for many years. I
still insisted on pretending that there is such a thing, or at
least could be such a thing, as legitimate, purely defensive
"government." I now realize that there isn't, and there can't be.
If your ultimate goal is to be bossed around and coercively
controlled in a limited manner, to be extorted and robbed in a
limited manner, and to have everyone around you victimized by
similar theft and aggression in a limited manner, then I guess we
have different goals. You see, I want you (and everyone else) to be
free. All the way free. Not robbed at all. There is a fundamental
difference between being a free human being, and being the property
of a relatively benign, compassionate master. If you're still
advocating "government," you're only shooting for the latter. And
you won't even get that.
To those of us who were trained to be the subjects of a ruling
class (which was almost everyone), the idea of a world of equals
can be a foreign, disturbing concept. Heck, it's even called
"anarchy," in case you weren't scared enough of it already. And
there are some who are trying hard to keep it so that, even if
you're one of those people righteously pontificating about how evil
and destructive "government" is, you won't actually get to the
point of advocating true freedom, or even to the point of being
able to think about it rationally. Freedom is unpredictable and
scary, and the psychological security blanket known as
"government," despite its horrendous track record in the real
world, feels so much more comfortable and predictable.
The promise of an omnipotent good guy, who will make everything
fair and safe, is so tempting that even otherwise rational people
still try to hallucinate such a thing into existence. They insist
that we need the magical (and mythical) entity called "government"
to keep us mere mortals in line. And when the monster they create
turns around and stomps on them, oppresses them, extorts them and
assaults them instead, they then say that we need to modify the
monster, or maybe even get a new monster. But if you suggest life
without the monster, those same people freak out. "We can't have
live without any monster at all! We just need a wise,
compassionate, limited monster!" The success of authoritarian
indoctrination can be seen in the fact that even many of those
being eaten by the monster will continue to defend the monster's
existence.
Well, if the evils done in the name of "authority" and "government"
ever get so bad that you are willing to re-examine a few
fundamental concepts and principles, then read "The Most Dangerous
Superstition." Until then, keep trying to cage the omnipotent
monster that you created, and that you continue to create, and see
how well that works.
Allow me to end with a low blow: All of you out there horrified at
all the oppression and injustice going on--the police state lunacy,
the murderous war-mongering, the socialistic robbery and state
control of everything--remember the seed that this grew from. The
Constitution. This is what "limited government" becomes when
applied to real life. How do you like it so far? To those who say
that a stateless society will never work, how has the "stateful"
society been working so far? To put it another way, "government"
sounds good in theory รข€¦ but it will never work. < snicker >
written by:
Larken Rose
larken@larkenrose.com
There are a lot of people who consider themselves freedom
advocates, who, with righteous zeal and indignation, vehemently
rail against the injustice, corruption and oppression "government"
continually spews forth. However, many of those same people, when
they hear someone suggesting life without the monstrosity called
"government," will immediately go into turbo-backpedal mode,
insisting that some "government" is needed, that we need to work to
fix the system, and that we need a good "government," that just
does good stuff, and protects us, and so on.
The situation is a lot like a battered spouse, who is given the
opportunity to escape her abuser, but who insists that she can't
leave, that he really loves her, that she needs him, that the
relationship can be fixed. Such a response shows that, as much as
the abuser is a nasty scumbag, there is also a serious problem in
the mind of his victim, which enables the abuse to continue.
So it is with statists who just want a nicer, gentler "government."
They don't actually want freedom. In fact, they are scared to death
of freedom, which is why they refuse to give up the very beast that
they are constantly condemning and complaining about. They insist
that "government" is needed to protect people, to maintain liberty
and justice, and do nothing more. The fact that the gang called
"government" has never done that, anywhere in the world, at any
time in history, doesn't shake "limited statists" from their faith
in the idea that that "needs" to happen.
Those who glorify the Constitution, for example, don't like to
accept that it utterly and completely failed to keep the beast
"limited." Those who still focus on voting don't like to admit that
democracy has utterly and completely failed to lead to freedom or
justice. Those who still advocate limited "government" don't like
to admit that there has never been any document, any ritual, any
system or plan, that has resulted in an actually limited
"government."
Those who speak of getting back to the Constitution refuse to see
that the Constitution was just another tyrant trick. Aside from the
obvious example of slavery continuing under the Constitution, the
thuggery of the new "servant government" became evident very
quickly. Four years after the Constitution was ratified, the new
tyrants created an extortion racket ("tax") related to whiskey, and
then used the violence of the state to crush resistors. Eleven
years after the Constitution was ratified, the new tyrants were
locking people up for criticizing "government" (under the alien and
sedition acts). The document has been used an excuse for tyranny
since it was written. Why is there any reason to believe that
trying the same thing again (as if that's even possible) would work
out any better the second time around?
More to the point, why would someone who advocates a puny, weak
little "government," that does almost nothing, be so utterly
terrified of having no "government" at all? Again, the excuse is
usually that we need some form of "government" to protect us. But
that is not what "governments" do, and it never has been. You might
as well argue that your town needs a carjacker in order to protect
you from car thieves. How can we "need" "government" to be what it
never has been, and how can we "need" it to do what it has never
done? And why would anyone expect, or even hope, that that will
ever change?
Every gang called "government" commits extortion, and calls it
"taxation." Every gang called "government" threatens and bosses non-
violent people around, and calls it "law enforcement." Ron Paul
recently stated that the only proper purpose of "government" is to
promote liberty. The only trouble is, not only has there never been
such a "government" in the history of the world, but by definition,
there can't be. If there was an organization that only defended
individual liberty, there would be no reason to call it
"government." It would have no power to "tax" and no power to
"legislate." In fact, it would have no power, no rights, and no
"authority" that you don't have all by yourself. It wouldn't have a
monopoly, and it couldn't force people to fund it. It would be a
private security company, or many of them. Nonetheless, when
someone like me advocates what "limited government" people say they
want--organizations that only defend against aggression--most
people can't handle it. In fact, they won't even allow themselves
to think about it.
A while back I made a deal, offering to send anyone a copy of my
book, "The Most Dangerous Superstition," on these conditions: the
person has to read the book, and then, if it changes the way they
see the world, they pay for it; or if it doesn't, they send the
book back. Over a hundred people have paid, after reading it. Of
the four books I've gotten back, three of the books looked a lot
like the reader never made it halfway through.
It's a small book, the wording and concepts in the book are quite
simple to follow, and the people agreed to read the whole thing. So
why didn't they? Because they have been indoctrinated to the point
where there are some things they literally don't dare to think
about. When their minds start to approach something completely
outside the authoritarian paradigm they were raised in, they
mentally flinch, and back away. And, I'm sorry to say, most people
who consider themselves freedom advocates are the same way. I'm
even more sorry to say, I was that way myself for many years. I
still insisted on pretending that there is such a thing, or at
least could be such a thing, as legitimate, purely defensive
"government." I now realize that there isn't, and there can't be.
If your ultimate goal is to be bossed around and coercively
controlled in a limited manner, to be extorted and robbed in a
limited manner, and to have everyone around you victimized by
similar theft and aggression in a limited manner, then I guess we
have different goals. You see, I want you (and everyone else) to be
free. All the way free. Not robbed at all. There is a fundamental
difference between being a free human being, and being the property
of a relatively benign, compassionate master. If you're still
advocating "government," you're only shooting for the latter. And
you won't even get that.
To those of us who were trained to be the subjects of a ruling
class (which was almost everyone), the idea of a world of equals
can be a foreign, disturbing concept. Heck, it's even called
"anarchy," in case you weren't scared enough of it already. And
there are some who are trying hard to keep it so that, even if
you're one of those people righteously pontificating about how evil
and destructive "government" is, you won't actually get to the
point of advocating true freedom, or even to the point of being
able to think about it rationally. Freedom is unpredictable and
scary, and the psychological security blanket known as
"government," despite its horrendous track record in the real
world, feels so much more comfortable and predictable.
The promise of an omnipotent good guy, who will make everything
fair and safe, is so tempting that even otherwise rational people
still try to hallucinate such a thing into existence. They insist
that we need the magical (and mythical) entity called "government"
to keep us mere mortals in line. And when the monster they create
turns around and stomps on them, oppresses them, extorts them and
assaults them instead, they then say that we need to modify the
monster, or maybe even get a new monster. But if you suggest life
without the monster, those same people freak out. "We can't have
live without any monster at all! We just need a wise,
compassionate, limited monster!" The success of authoritarian
indoctrination can be seen in the fact that even many of those
being eaten by the monster will continue to defend the monster's
existence.
Well, if the evils done in the name of "authority" and "government"
ever get so bad that you are willing to re-examine a few
fundamental concepts and principles, then read "The Most Dangerous
Superstition." Until then, keep trying to cage the omnipotent
monster that you created, and that you continue to create, and see
how well that works.
Allow me to end with a low blow: All of you out there horrified at
all the oppression and injustice going on--the police state lunacy,
the murderous war-mongering, the socialistic robbery and state
control of everything--remember the seed that this grew from. The
Constitution. This is what "limited government" becomes when
applied to real life. How do you like it so far? To those who say
that a stateless society will never work, how has the "stateful"
society been working so far? To put it another way, "government"
sounds good in theory รข€¦ but it will never work. < snicker >
written by:
Larken Rose
larken@larkenrose.com
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Everything i want to do is illegal
Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal's office.
And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.
On-farm Processing
I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.
But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.
OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.
When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.
Our whole culture suffers from an industrial food system that has made every part disconnected from the rest. Smelly and dirty farms are supposed to be in one place, away from people, who snuggle smugly in their cul-de-sacs and have not a clue about the out-of-sight-out-of-mind atrocities being committed to their dinner before it arrives in microwaveable, four-color-labeled, plastic packaging. Industrial abattoirs need to be located in a not-in-my-backyard place to sequester noxious odors and sights. Finally, the retail store must be located in a commercial district surrounded by lots of pavement, handicapped access, public toilets and whatever else must be required to get food to people.
The notion that animals can be raised, processed, packaged, and sold in a model that offends neither our eyes nor noses cannot even register on the average bureaucrat's radar screen - or, more importantly, on the radar of the average consumer advocacy organization. Besides, all these single-use megalithic structures are good for the gross domestic product. Anything else is illegal.
On-farm Processing and 'Agritainment'
In the disconnected mind of modem America, a farm is a production unit for commodities - nothing more and nothing less. Because our land is zoned as agricultural, we cannot charge school kids for a tour of the farm because that puts us in the category of "Theme Park." Anyone paying for infotainment creates "Farmadisney," a strict no-no in agricultural zones.
Farms are not supposed to be places of enjoyment or learning. They are commodity production units dotting the landscape, just as factories are manufacturing units and office complexes are service units. In the government's mind, integrating farm production with recreation and meaningful education creates a warped sense of agriculture.
The very notion of encouraging people to visit farms is blasphemous to an official credo that views even sparrows, starlings and flies as disease threats to immunocompromised plants and animals. Visitors entering USDA-blessed production unit farms must run through a gauntlet of toxic sanitation dips and don moonsuits in order to keep their germs to themselves. Indeed, people are viewed as hazardous foreign bodies at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
Farmers who actually encourage folks to come to their farms threaten the health and welfare of their fecal concentration camp production unit neighbors, and therefore must be prohibited from bringing these invasive germ-dispensing humans onto their landscape. In the industrial agribusiness paradigm, farms must be protected from people, not to mention free-range poultry.
The notion that animals and plants can be raised in such a way that their enhanced immune system protects them from kindergarteners' germs, and that the animals actually thrive when marinated in human attention, never enters the minds of government officials dedicated to protecting precarious production units.
Collaborative Marketing
I have several neighbors who produce high-quality food or crafts that complement our own meat and poultry. Dried flower arrangements from one artisan, pickles from another, wine from another, and first-class vegetables from another. These are just for starters.
Our community is blessed with all sorts of creative artisans who offer products that we would love to stock in our on-farm retail venue. Doesn't it make sense to encourage these customers driving out from the city to be able to go to one farm to do their rural browsing/ purchasing rather than drive all over the countryside? Furthermore, many of these artisans have neither the desire nor time to deal with patrons one-on-one. A collaborative venue is the most win-win, reasonable idea imaginable - except to government agents.
As soon as our farm offers a single item - just one - that is not produced here, we have become a Wal-Mart. Period. That means a business license, which isbasically another layer of taxes on our gross sales. The business license requires a commercial entrance, which on our country road is almost impossible to acquire due to sight-distance requirements and width regulations. Of course, zoning prohibits businesses in our agricultural zones. Remember, people are supposed to be kept away from agricultural areas - people bring diseases.
Even if we could comply with all of the above requirements, a retail outlet carries with it a host of additional regulations. We must provide designated handicapped parking, government-approved toilet facilities (our four household bathrooms in the two homes located 50 feet away from the retail building do not count) - and it can't be a composting toilet. We must offer x-number of parking spaces. Folks, it just goes on and on, ad nauseum, and all for simply trying to help a neighbor sell her potatoes or extra pumpkins at Thanksgiving. I thought this was the home of the free. In most countries of the world, anyone can sell any of this stuff anywhere, and the hungering hordes are glad to get it, but in the great U.S. of A we're too sophisticated to allow such bioregional commerce.
Employing Local Youngsters & Interns
Any power tool - including a cordless screwdriver - cannot be operated by people under the age of 18. We have lots of requests from folks wanting to come as interns, but what do we call them? The government has no category for interns or neighbor young people who just want to learn and help out.
We'd love to employ all the neighboring young people. To our child-awning and worshiping culture, the only appropriate child activity is recreation, sitting in a desk, or watching TV. That's it. That's the extent of what children are good for. Anything else is abusive and risky.
Then we wonder why these kids grow up unmotivated and bored with life. Our local newspaper is full of articles and letters to the editor lamenting the lack of things for young people to do. Let me suggest a few things: digging postholes and building a fence, weeding the garden, planting some tomatoes, splitting some wood, feeding the chickens, washing eggs, pruning grapevines, milking the cow, building a compost pile, growing some earthworms.
These are all things that would be wonderfully meaningful work experience for the youth of our community, but you can't simply employ people anymore. A host of government regulatory paperwork surrounds every "could you come over and help us . . . ?" By the time an employer complies with every Occupational Safety & Health Administration requirement, posts every government bulletin requirement, with-holds taxes, and shoulders Unemployment Compensation burdens and medical and child safety regulations - he or she can't hire anybody legally or profitably.
The government has no pigeonhole for this: "I'm a 17-year-old home-schooler, and I want to learn how to farm. Could I come and have you mentor me for a year?"
What is this relationship? A student? An employee? If I pay a stipend, the government says he's an employee. If I don't pay, the Fair Labor Standards board says it's slavery, which is illegal. Doesn't matter that the young person is here of his own volition and is happy to live in a tee-pee. Housing must be permitted and up to code. Enough already. What happened to the home of the free?
Build a House the Way I Want
You would think that if I cut the trees, mill the logs into lumber, and build the house on my own farm, I could make it however I wanted to. Think again. It's illegal to build a house less than 900 square feet. Period. Doesn't matter if I'm a hermit or the father of 20. The government agents have decreed, in their egocentric wisdom, that no human can live in anything less than 900 square feet.
Our son got married last year and wanted to build a small cottage on the farm, which he now oversees for the most part. Our new saying is, "He runs the farm, and I just run around." The plan was to do what Mom and Dad did for Teresa and I - trade houses when children come. That way our empty nest downsizes, and the young people can upsize in the main family farmhouse. Sounds reasonable and environmentally sensitive to me. But no, his little honeymoon cottage - or our retirement shack - had to be a 900-square-foot Taj Mahal. A state-of-the-art accredited composting toilet to avoid the need for a septic system and sewer leach field was denied.
When the hillside leach field would not meet agronomic standards and we had to install it in the floodplain, I asked the health department bureaucrat why. He said that essentially the only approvable leach fields now are alongside creeks and streams, because they are the only sites that offer dark-enough colored soils. Sounds like real environmental steward-ship, doesn't it?
Look, if I want to build a yurt of rabbit skins and go to the bathroom in a compost pile, why is it any of the government's business? Bureaucrats bend over back-wards to accredit, tax credit, and offer money to people wanting to build pig city-factories or bigger airports. But let a guy go to his woods, cut down some trees, and build himself a home, and a plethora of regulatory tyrants descend on the project to complicate, obfuscate, irritate, frustrate, and virtually terminate. I think it's time to eradicate some of these laws and the piranhas who administer them.
Opting Out of the System
I don't ask for a dime of government money. I don't ask for government accreditation. I don't want to register my animals with a global positioning tattoo. I don't want to tell officials the names of my constituents. And I sure as the dickens don't intend to hand over my firearms. I can't even use the "U" word.
On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system - and it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.
How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, then silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. The Native Americans silenced after Little Big Horn simply wanted to worship in their beloved Black Hills, use traditional medicinal herbs to cure diseases, educate their children in the ways of their ancestors, and live in portable homes rather than log cabins. By that time these people represented absolutely no threat to the continued Westernization and domination of the North American continent by people who educated, vocated, medicated, worshiped, and habitated differently.
But coexistence was out of the question. Just like the forces that succeeded in making it illegal for me to use the "O" word, the Western success at Wounded Knee quashed the little guy. What does the Organic Trade Association have to fear from me using the "O" word? If society really wants government certification, my little market share will continue to deteriorate into oblivion. If, however, the certification effort represents a same-old, same-old power grab by the elitists to exterminate the fringe play-ers, it is merely another example of fear replacing faith.
Faith in what? Faith in diversity. Faith in each other. Faith in people's ability to self-educate, thereby making informed decisions. Faith in seekers to find answers. Faith in marketplace dynamics to reward integrity and not cheating. Faith in Creation to heal. Faith in healthy plants and animals to withstand epizootics. Faith in earthworms to increase fertility. Faith in communities to function efficiently and honorably without centralized beltway interference. Faith in Acres U.S.A. to arrive every month with a cornucopia of insight and information.
Our culture's current fear of bioterrorism shows the glaring weakness of a centralized, immunodeficient food system. This weakness leads to fear. Demanding from on high that we irradiate all food, register every cow with government agencies, and hire more inspectors does not show strength. It shows fear.
Indeed, official policy views all these minority production and marketing systems that have been shown faithful over the centuries to be instead things that threaten everyone and everything. As a teepee dwelling, herb healing, home educating, people loving, compost building retail farmer, I represent the real answers, but real answers must be eradicated by those who seek to build their power and fortunes on a lie - the lie being that genetic integrity can be maintained when corporate scientists begin splicing DNA. The lie that, as Charles Walters says, toxic rescue chemistry is better than a balanced biological bath. The lie that farms are disease-prone, unfriendly, inhumane places and should be zoned away from people.
Those of us who would aspire to opt out - both consumers and producers - must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot sustain itself. Cycles happen. Because things are this way today does not mean they will be this way next year. Hurrah for that.
Often, the greatest escapes occur at the moment the noose becomes tightest. I'm feeling the rope, and it's not very loose. Society seems bound and determined to hang me for everything I want to do. But there's power in truth. And for sure, surprises are in store that may make
society shake its collective head and begin to question some seemingly unalterable doctrines. Doctrines like the righteousness of the bureaucrat. The sanctity of government research. The protection of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. The helpfulness of the USDA.
When that day comes, you and I can graciously offer our society honest food, honest ecology, honest stewardship. May the day come quickly.
And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.
On-farm Processing
I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.
But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.
OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.
When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.
Our whole culture suffers from an industrial food system that has made every part disconnected from the rest. Smelly and dirty farms are supposed to be in one place, away from people, who snuggle smugly in their cul-de-sacs and have not a clue about the out-of-sight-out-of-mind atrocities being committed to their dinner before it arrives in microwaveable, four-color-labeled, plastic packaging. Industrial abattoirs need to be located in a not-in-my-backyard place to sequester noxious odors and sights. Finally, the retail store must be located in a commercial district surrounded by lots of pavement, handicapped access, public toilets and whatever else must be required to get food to people.
The notion that animals can be raised, processed, packaged, and sold in a model that offends neither our eyes nor noses cannot even register on the average bureaucrat's radar screen - or, more importantly, on the radar of the average consumer advocacy organization. Besides, all these single-use megalithic structures are good for the gross domestic product. Anything else is illegal.
On-farm Processing and 'Agritainment'
In the disconnected mind of modem America, a farm is a production unit for commodities - nothing more and nothing less. Because our land is zoned as agricultural, we cannot charge school kids for a tour of the farm because that puts us in the category of "Theme Park." Anyone paying for infotainment creates "Farmadisney," a strict no-no in agricultural zones.
Farms are not supposed to be places of enjoyment or learning. They are commodity production units dotting the landscape, just as factories are manufacturing units and office complexes are service units. In the government's mind, integrating farm production with recreation and meaningful education creates a warped sense of agriculture.
The very notion of encouraging people to visit farms is blasphemous to an official credo that views even sparrows, starlings and flies as disease threats to immunocompromised plants and animals. Visitors entering USDA-blessed production unit farms must run through a gauntlet of toxic sanitation dips and don moonsuits in order to keep their germs to themselves. Indeed, people are viewed as hazardous foreign bodies at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
Farmers who actually encourage folks to come to their farms threaten the health and welfare of their fecal concentration camp production unit neighbors, and therefore must be prohibited from bringing these invasive germ-dispensing humans onto their landscape. In the industrial agribusiness paradigm, farms must be protected from people, not to mention free-range poultry.
The notion that animals and plants can be raised in such a way that their enhanced immune system protects them from kindergarteners' germs, and that the animals actually thrive when marinated in human attention, never enters the minds of government officials dedicated to protecting precarious production units.
Collaborative Marketing
I have several neighbors who produce high-quality food or crafts that complement our own meat and poultry. Dried flower arrangements from one artisan, pickles from another, wine from another, and first-class vegetables from another. These are just for starters.
Our community is blessed with all sorts of creative artisans who offer products that we would love to stock in our on-farm retail venue. Doesn't it make sense to encourage these customers driving out from the city to be able to go to one farm to do their rural browsing/ purchasing rather than drive all over the countryside? Furthermore, many of these artisans have neither the desire nor time to deal with patrons one-on-one. A collaborative venue is the most win-win, reasonable idea imaginable - except to government agents.
As soon as our farm offers a single item - just one - that is not produced here, we have become a Wal-Mart. Period. That means a business license, which isbasically another layer of taxes on our gross sales. The business license requires a commercial entrance, which on our country road is almost impossible to acquire due to sight-distance requirements and width regulations. Of course, zoning prohibits businesses in our agricultural zones. Remember, people are supposed to be kept away from agricultural areas - people bring diseases.
Even if we could comply with all of the above requirements, a retail outlet carries with it a host of additional regulations. We must provide designated handicapped parking, government-approved toilet facilities (our four household bathrooms in the two homes located 50 feet away from the retail building do not count) - and it can't be a composting toilet. We must offer x-number of parking spaces. Folks, it just goes on and on, ad nauseum, and all for simply trying to help a neighbor sell her potatoes or extra pumpkins at Thanksgiving. I thought this was the home of the free. In most countries of the world, anyone can sell any of this stuff anywhere, and the hungering hordes are glad to get it, but in the great U.S. of A we're too sophisticated to allow such bioregional commerce.
Employing Local Youngsters & Interns
Any power tool - including a cordless screwdriver - cannot be operated by people under the age of 18. We have lots of requests from folks wanting to come as interns, but what do we call them? The government has no category for interns or neighbor young people who just want to learn and help out.
We'd love to employ all the neighboring young people. To our child-awning and worshiping culture, the only appropriate child activity is recreation, sitting in a desk, or watching TV. That's it. That's the extent of what children are good for. Anything else is abusive and risky.
Then we wonder why these kids grow up unmotivated and bored with life. Our local newspaper is full of articles and letters to the editor lamenting the lack of things for young people to do. Let me suggest a few things: digging postholes and building a fence, weeding the garden, planting some tomatoes, splitting some wood, feeding the chickens, washing eggs, pruning grapevines, milking the cow, building a compost pile, growing some earthworms.
These are all things that would be wonderfully meaningful work experience for the youth of our community, but you can't simply employ people anymore. A host of government regulatory paperwork surrounds every "could you come over and help us . . . ?" By the time an employer complies with every Occupational Safety & Health Administration requirement, posts every government bulletin requirement, with-holds taxes, and shoulders Unemployment Compensation burdens and medical and child safety regulations - he or she can't hire anybody legally or profitably.
The government has no pigeonhole for this: "I'm a 17-year-old home-schooler, and I want to learn how to farm. Could I come and have you mentor me for a year?"
What is this relationship? A student? An employee? If I pay a stipend, the government says he's an employee. If I don't pay, the Fair Labor Standards board says it's slavery, which is illegal. Doesn't matter that the young person is here of his own volition and is happy to live in a tee-pee. Housing must be permitted and up to code. Enough already. What happened to the home of the free?
Build a House the Way I Want
You would think that if I cut the trees, mill the logs into lumber, and build the house on my own farm, I could make it however I wanted to. Think again. It's illegal to build a house less than 900 square feet. Period. Doesn't matter if I'm a hermit or the father of 20. The government agents have decreed, in their egocentric wisdom, that no human can live in anything less than 900 square feet.
Our son got married last year and wanted to build a small cottage on the farm, which he now oversees for the most part. Our new saying is, "He runs the farm, and I just run around." The plan was to do what Mom and Dad did for Teresa and I - trade houses when children come. That way our empty nest downsizes, and the young people can upsize in the main family farmhouse. Sounds reasonable and environmentally sensitive to me. But no, his little honeymoon cottage - or our retirement shack - had to be a 900-square-foot Taj Mahal. A state-of-the-art accredited composting toilet to avoid the need for a septic system and sewer leach field was denied.
When the hillside leach field would not meet agronomic standards and we had to install it in the floodplain, I asked the health department bureaucrat why. He said that essentially the only approvable leach fields now are alongside creeks and streams, because they are the only sites that offer dark-enough colored soils. Sounds like real environmental steward-ship, doesn't it?
Look, if I want to build a yurt of rabbit skins and go to the bathroom in a compost pile, why is it any of the government's business? Bureaucrats bend over back-wards to accredit, tax credit, and offer money to people wanting to build pig city-factories or bigger airports. But let a guy go to his woods, cut down some trees, and build himself a home, and a plethora of regulatory tyrants descend on the project to complicate, obfuscate, irritate, frustrate, and virtually terminate. I think it's time to eradicate some of these laws and the piranhas who administer them.
Opting Out of the System
I don't ask for a dime of government money. I don't ask for government accreditation. I don't want to register my animals with a global positioning tattoo. I don't want to tell officials the names of my constituents. And I sure as the dickens don't intend to hand over my firearms. I can't even use the "U" word.
On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system - and it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.
How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers.
When faith in our freedom gives way to fear of our freedom, then silencing the minority view becomes the operative protocol. The Native Americans silenced after Little Big Horn simply wanted to worship in their beloved Black Hills, use traditional medicinal herbs to cure diseases, educate their children in the ways of their ancestors, and live in portable homes rather than log cabins. By that time these people represented absolutely no threat to the continued Westernization and domination of the North American continent by people who educated, vocated, medicated, worshiped, and habitated differently.
But coexistence was out of the question. Just like the forces that succeeded in making it illegal for me to use the "O" word, the Western success at Wounded Knee quashed the little guy. What does the Organic Trade Association have to fear from me using the "O" word? If society really wants government certification, my little market share will continue to deteriorate into oblivion. If, however, the certification effort represents a same-old, same-old power grab by the elitists to exterminate the fringe play-ers, it is merely another example of fear replacing faith.
Faith in what? Faith in diversity. Faith in each other. Faith in people's ability to self-educate, thereby making informed decisions. Faith in seekers to find answers. Faith in marketplace dynamics to reward integrity and not cheating. Faith in Creation to heal. Faith in healthy plants and animals to withstand epizootics. Faith in earthworms to increase fertility. Faith in communities to function efficiently and honorably without centralized beltway interference. Faith in Acres U.S.A. to arrive every month with a cornucopia of insight and information.
Our culture's current fear of bioterrorism shows the glaring weakness of a centralized, immunodeficient food system. This weakness leads to fear. Demanding from on high that we irradiate all food, register every cow with government agencies, and hire more inspectors does not show strength. It shows fear.
Indeed, official policy views all these minority production and marketing systems that have been shown faithful over the centuries to be instead things that threaten everyone and everything. As a teepee dwelling, herb healing, home educating, people loving, compost building retail farmer, I represent the real answers, but real answers must be eradicated by those who seek to build their power and fortunes on a lie - the lie being that genetic integrity can be maintained when corporate scientists begin splicing DNA. The lie that, as Charles Walters says, toxic rescue chemistry is better than a balanced biological bath. The lie that farms are disease-prone, unfriendly, inhumane places and should be zoned away from people.
Those of us who would aspire to opt out - both consumers and producers - must pray for enough cleverness to circumvent the system until the system cannot sustain itself. Cycles happen. Because things are this way today does not mean they will be this way next year. Hurrah for that.
Often, the greatest escapes occur at the moment the noose becomes tightest. I'm feeling the rope, and it's not very loose. Society seems bound and determined to hang me for everything I want to do. But there's power in truth. And for sure, surprises are in store that may make
society shake its collective head and begin to question some seemingly unalterable doctrines. Doctrines like the righteousness of the bureaucrat. The sanctity of government research. The protection of the Food Safety and Inspection Service. The helpfulness of the USDA.
When that day comes, you and I can graciously offer our society honest food, honest ecology, honest stewardship. May the day come quickly.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Corporate Profit v Life on Earth
The last year has been especially catastrophic for life on Earth, while at the same time, corporate profits have jumped a staggering 36.8%, setting all-time records. Is this a coincidence, or are the long-term implications as sinister as they might seem?
How many disasters like the massive poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, or gushing of radiation from multiple reactor-core meltdowns in Japan can the biosphere take? Or, perhaps a more apropos question is: How much more profit will the biosphere survive?
Two things the catastrophes in the Gulf and at Fukushima have in common is that both were at the hands of corporations, and both involved extensive disinformation, misinformation, and severe suppression of information. Just like governments, which are virtually all corporate “assets”, corporations themselves shun the light of day.
Dangerous creatures, corporations, obviously one of the deadliest things ever sprouted from hell. Of course they are not creatures in any biological sense, but thanks to corporate chicanery beginning in 1886 especially, they have more rights than you do.
You might be rather dismayed if you challenge a corporation in our for-wealth court system; if the corporation is big enough, and the case goes high enough, it is conceivable that the ultimate verdict will orbit the concept that by eating, breathing, drinking…by all the things you must do to stay alive, you are endangering corporate profit. Sound far-fetched? Well, check out exactly how corporations became “artificial people”. (1) Also, please consider last year’s Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling that handed absolute control of elections to corporations. SCOTUS ruled that any restriction on the amount of money corporations may spend to influence elections is a violation of their right to free speech under the First Amendment. Should the Book of Revelation be amended to read: In the beginning of the end, God created corporations?
Some say money is the root of all evil; it could also be said that corporations are the root of the most malignant money; vicious and biocidal entities more powerful with every tick of the (doomsday) clock, and all that matters to them is profit. Corporations represent the perfect means for the wealthy to grow ever wealthier by destroying the biosphere and not being held accountable; isn’t that a decent definition of “malignant money”?
Einstein warned us by saying that unleashing the power of the atom changed everything except our modes of thinking…which carry us toward unparalleled catastrophe. And now, unparalleled catastrophe is ours, made in Japan; notice how it has mostly disappeared from the news? Forget Three Mile Island, forget Chernobyl—which has killed a million people, so far, and has touched the entire northern hemisphere…Fukushima is worse by far, and still out of control. The multiple meltdowns in Japan have the potential to render much of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable, and mangle the gene pool of countless species, including humans. We’re talking effectively forever. But apparently an even more important reason for severe suppression of information, suppression of truth: vast corporate profits are at stake.
Nuclear energy corporations are wealthy enough to afford extensive political influence. In fact, when Fukushima became a volcano of radioactivity, president Obama was (he still is!) pushing heavily for $36 billion in taxpayer “loans” for the construction of more reactors. Insurance companies and financiers treat nuclear reactors like the red-hot radioactive potatoes they are, so the nuke good ol’ boys need help from the poor to increasingly threaten life on Earth. The last thing they want is people to be aware of, well, reality. Also, imagine the hit to profits of Tokyo Electric Power Company if they didn’t have the Pacific ocean to pour their radionuclide lava into. “Hey,” they might say, “it’s a big ocean.” Well, it’s a small planet in terms of the amount radioactivity gushing from Fukushima.
We can thank energy corporations for irradiating half the planet already (there is no “safe” dose of internal radiation—and radiation is not “good for you” as certain hardright “pundits” trumpet). We can thank energy corporations for poisoning the Gulf with oil and toxic dispersants; but above all, for so diligently suppressing alternative energies all these years. Eight energy giants are among the world’s top eleven corporations on the power of filthy biocidal energies…monster fossil-energy corporations with a virtual monopoly on enormous fossil profits. And they like to kill the competition. In terms of life on Earth, their ultimate protection of profits—potentially their all-time greatest crime against humanity—came in 1943, the year they murdered Tesla.
Nikola Tesla’s was among the most brilliant minds every to bless humanity. He once wrote: “Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity….”
In 1988, at the International Tesla Symposium in Colorado Springs, astrophysicist Adam Trombly noted that if society had followed up on the inventions Tesla envisioned at the turn of the century, “…we wouldn’t have a fossil fuel economy today. And J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and a number of others wouldn’t have amassed extraordinary fortunes on the basis of the fossil fuel economy.”
The sheer scope of Tesla’s genius seems unfathomable to normal people. Gifted with uncanny memory and powers of visualization, he was able to fully construct, develop and perfect inventions in his mind before committing anything to paper. In his own words: “When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception.”
Tesla’s inventions include radio (recognized by the SCOTUS eight months after Tesla died), X-rays (three years before Roentgen), the Tesla coil, fluorescent light, lasers, bladeless turbines, vertical take-off aircraft, wireless transmission of electricity, the particle beam (“death”, or “peace” ray), the whole system of AC that powers the world…. At the time of his death he held over 700 patents. And the fields Tesla greatly contributed to, such as computer science, robotics, remote control, radar, ballistics, nuclear physics…a comprehensive list would be astonishing.
One invention Tesla was elusive about, sometimes offering teasers but no specifics, had the potential to eclipse all of his and anyone else’s breakthroughs—perhaps even cost him his life, and is behind the perpetual drive to minimize public awareness of Tesla. He had long prophesied that mankind would someday hook their machinery up to the energy of vacuum space—to “the very wheelworks of nature”. The theoretical basis for energy from the vacuum has now been part of “mainstream” physics literature for over fifty years. But as Tesla long intimated, any kind of “free energy” device would never be allowed to reach the market.
In 1943, Tesla had an appointment to discuss with FDR that it was possible for us to get all the energy we need simply by tapping the space we’re in. But he never made it to the meeting with FDR; Tesla was found in his apartment, dead of “natural causes”. Officially, it was a heart attack. But information leaked by investigators indicates that for reasons of “national security” the coroner’s report was to be kept secret because it revealed that Tesla died of arsenic poisoning.
Take that, competition! Take that, life on Earth. Free energy available to everyone would devastate corporate profits—almost to the extent that our global fossil fuel economy has devastated the biosphere. Tesla gave humanity so much, promised so much more, and corporations not only murdered him, they have even all but lifted him clear out of mainstream history…tried their best to make him an unperson. They have proven, and always will, that nothing is more dangerous than threatening corporate profits.
How does that bode for life on Earth? The most dangerous of advanced human endeavors are development of alternatives to entrenched modes of energy that are powering the biosphere straight to hell…sure sounds like a nightmare. Accelerating destruction of Earth’s ability to sustain life, brought to you by corporations. A living planet dominated by “artificial people” that care only about profit, nothing but, profit.
Imagine waking up to find there never was a fossil fuel economy, that all the war, pollution, climate disruption, murder, cancer, slavery, impoverishment, obscene concentration of wealth—all the lethal threats to life on Earth stayed in the nightmare because half a century ago, thanks to Tesla, we plugged in to “the very wheelworks of nature”, and became an advancing civilization.
Chernobyl and Fukushima never happened….
Imagine life on Earth being more important than corporate profit.
If only we could wake up.
How many disasters like the massive poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico, or gushing of radiation from multiple reactor-core meltdowns in Japan can the biosphere take? Or, perhaps a more apropos question is: How much more profit will the biosphere survive?
Two things the catastrophes in the Gulf and at Fukushima have in common is that both were at the hands of corporations, and both involved extensive disinformation, misinformation, and severe suppression of information. Just like governments, which are virtually all corporate “assets”, corporations themselves shun the light of day.
Dangerous creatures, corporations, obviously one of the deadliest things ever sprouted from hell. Of course they are not creatures in any biological sense, but thanks to corporate chicanery beginning in 1886 especially, they have more rights than you do.
You might be rather dismayed if you challenge a corporation in our for-wealth court system; if the corporation is big enough, and the case goes high enough, it is conceivable that the ultimate verdict will orbit the concept that by eating, breathing, drinking…by all the things you must do to stay alive, you are endangering corporate profit. Sound far-fetched? Well, check out exactly how corporations became “artificial people”. (1) Also, please consider last year’s Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling that handed absolute control of elections to corporations. SCOTUS ruled that any restriction on the amount of money corporations may spend to influence elections is a violation of their right to free speech under the First Amendment. Should the Book of Revelation be amended to read: In the beginning of the end, God created corporations?
Some say money is the root of all evil; it could also be said that corporations are the root of the most malignant money; vicious and biocidal entities more powerful with every tick of the (doomsday) clock, and all that matters to them is profit. Corporations represent the perfect means for the wealthy to grow ever wealthier by destroying the biosphere and not being held accountable; isn’t that a decent definition of “malignant money”?
Einstein warned us by saying that unleashing the power of the atom changed everything except our modes of thinking…which carry us toward unparalleled catastrophe. And now, unparalleled catastrophe is ours, made in Japan; notice how it has mostly disappeared from the news? Forget Three Mile Island, forget Chernobyl—which has killed a million people, so far, and has touched the entire northern hemisphere…Fukushima is worse by far, and still out of control. The multiple meltdowns in Japan have the potential to render much of the northern hemisphere uninhabitable, and mangle the gene pool of countless species, including humans. We’re talking effectively forever. But apparently an even more important reason for severe suppression of information, suppression of truth: vast corporate profits are at stake.
Nuclear energy corporations are wealthy enough to afford extensive political influence. In fact, when Fukushima became a volcano of radioactivity, president Obama was (he still is!) pushing heavily for $36 billion in taxpayer “loans” for the construction of more reactors. Insurance companies and financiers treat nuclear reactors like the red-hot radioactive potatoes they are, so the nuke good ol’ boys need help from the poor to increasingly threaten life on Earth. The last thing they want is people to be aware of, well, reality. Also, imagine the hit to profits of Tokyo Electric Power Company if they didn’t have the Pacific ocean to pour their radionuclide lava into. “Hey,” they might say, “it’s a big ocean.” Well, it’s a small planet in terms of the amount radioactivity gushing from Fukushima.
We can thank energy corporations for irradiating half the planet already (there is no “safe” dose of internal radiation—and radiation is not “good for you” as certain hardright “pundits” trumpet). We can thank energy corporations for poisoning the Gulf with oil and toxic dispersants; but above all, for so diligently suppressing alternative energies all these years. Eight energy giants are among the world’s top eleven corporations on the power of filthy biocidal energies…monster fossil-energy corporations with a virtual monopoly on enormous fossil profits. And they like to kill the competition. In terms of life on Earth, their ultimate protection of profits—potentially their all-time greatest crime against humanity—came in 1943, the year they murdered Tesla.
Nikola Tesla’s was among the most brilliant minds every to bless humanity. He once wrote: “Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity….”
In 1988, at the International Tesla Symposium in Colorado Springs, astrophysicist Adam Trombly noted that if society had followed up on the inventions Tesla envisioned at the turn of the century, “…we wouldn’t have a fossil fuel economy today. And J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller and a number of others wouldn’t have amassed extraordinary fortunes on the basis of the fossil fuel economy.”
The sheer scope of Tesla’s genius seems unfathomable to normal people. Gifted with uncanny memory and powers of visualization, he was able to fully construct, develop and perfect inventions in his mind before committing anything to paper. In his own words: “When I have gone so far as to embody in the invention every possible improvement I can think of and see no fault anywhere, I put into concrete form this final product of my brain. Invariably my device works as I conceived that it should, and the experiment comes out exactly as I planned it. In twenty years there has not been a single exception.”
Tesla’s inventions include radio (recognized by the SCOTUS eight months after Tesla died), X-rays (three years before Roentgen), the Tesla coil, fluorescent light, lasers, bladeless turbines, vertical take-off aircraft, wireless transmission of electricity, the particle beam (“death”, or “peace” ray), the whole system of AC that powers the world…. At the time of his death he held over 700 patents. And the fields Tesla greatly contributed to, such as computer science, robotics, remote control, radar, ballistics, nuclear physics…a comprehensive list would be astonishing.
One invention Tesla was elusive about, sometimes offering teasers but no specifics, had the potential to eclipse all of his and anyone else’s breakthroughs—perhaps even cost him his life, and is behind the perpetual drive to minimize public awareness of Tesla. He had long prophesied that mankind would someday hook their machinery up to the energy of vacuum space—to “the very wheelworks of nature”. The theoretical basis for energy from the vacuum has now been part of “mainstream” physics literature for over fifty years. But as Tesla long intimated, any kind of “free energy” device would never be allowed to reach the market.
In 1943, Tesla had an appointment to discuss with FDR that it was possible for us to get all the energy we need simply by tapping the space we’re in. But he never made it to the meeting with FDR; Tesla was found in his apartment, dead of “natural causes”. Officially, it was a heart attack. But information leaked by investigators indicates that for reasons of “national security” the coroner’s report was to be kept secret because it revealed that Tesla died of arsenic poisoning.
Take that, competition! Take that, life on Earth. Free energy available to everyone would devastate corporate profits—almost to the extent that our global fossil fuel economy has devastated the biosphere. Tesla gave humanity so much, promised so much more, and corporations not only murdered him, they have even all but lifted him clear out of mainstream history…tried their best to make him an unperson. They have proven, and always will, that nothing is more dangerous than threatening corporate profits.
How does that bode for life on Earth? The most dangerous of advanced human endeavors are development of alternatives to entrenched modes of energy that are powering the biosphere straight to hell…sure sounds like a nightmare. Accelerating destruction of Earth’s ability to sustain life, brought to you by corporations. A living planet dominated by “artificial people” that care only about profit, nothing but, profit.
Imagine waking up to find there never was a fossil fuel economy, that all the war, pollution, climate disruption, murder, cancer, slavery, impoverishment, obscene concentration of wealth—all the lethal threats to life on Earth stayed in the nightmare because half a century ago, thanks to Tesla, we plugged in to “the very wheelworks of nature”, and became an advancing civilization.
Chernobyl and Fukushima never happened….
Imagine life on Earth being more important than corporate profit.
If only we could wake up.
Legless man planted 3,000 trees in 10 yrs
Ma Sanxiao,a 62-year-old man who lost both feet, has spent 10 years planting more than 3,000 trees in a remote mountainous area in North China's Hebei province.
Retired from the army in 1974, Ma Sanxiao lost the lower part of his right leg in 1985 due to blood poisoning and the same part of the other leg for the same reason in 2004.
He started to make a living by planting trees in 2001 but gradually he considers planting trees as a career to improve the environment.
Since the mountain road is too hilly to walk with crutches, Ma has to crawl on his hands and he wears out a pair of gloves every five days.
"There is a road in the mountain grinded by my buttocks, my keens and my hands," according to Ma.
Once he dropped down from the hill and hurt his hands. Because of blood poisoning, his wound couldn’t heal. Unfortunately, his wound infected and he lost the little finger on his right hand.
Even though, he continues to plant trees with the belief that the trees are more important than his life.
"I've been in hospital for four times and had seven operations in the past 20 years, but I never cried. As soon as I saw this tree died, I couldn't hold my tear any more since I was so heart-broken," said Ma.
Getting hurt is very dangerous to him and it may lead to amputation, so he has to wear many protection pads on his legs every day on his way to plant trees.
Reporter asked him: “How often do you change your gloves?”
He answered: “Every ten days.
Reporter asked: “The gloves are very thick, aren't they?
Ma said: “Yes, its leather gloves but it can only last for ten days.”
Reporter asked: “How much money have you saved?”
Ma answered: “No, I don’t have any bankbook.”
“Do you think you are rich now?” asked the reporter.
Ma said: “Yes, I feel I'm very rich.”
“What do you have?” asked the reporter.
"This green forest is precious for me and you can call me a billionaire," answered Ma.
Ma also told the reporter that when he heard visitors say the environment on the hill is so good because of the trees; he felt so happy and forgot the hardship he has experienced.
"I heard some people, who came to this mountain, said the environment is so great and there are so many trees. I was very happy!”
Ma has over 3000 trees now and plans to dig another 300 holes to plant more trees no matter how hard it may be.
Retired from the army in 1974, Ma Sanxiao lost the lower part of his right leg in 1985 due to blood poisoning and the same part of the other leg for the same reason in 2004.
He started to make a living by planting trees in 2001 but gradually he considers planting trees as a career to improve the environment.
Since the mountain road is too hilly to walk with crutches, Ma has to crawl on his hands and he wears out a pair of gloves every five days.
"There is a road in the mountain grinded by my buttocks, my keens and my hands," according to Ma.
Once he dropped down from the hill and hurt his hands. Because of blood poisoning, his wound couldn’t heal. Unfortunately, his wound infected and he lost the little finger on his right hand.
Even though, he continues to plant trees with the belief that the trees are more important than his life.
"I've been in hospital for four times and had seven operations in the past 20 years, but I never cried. As soon as I saw this tree died, I couldn't hold my tear any more since I was so heart-broken," said Ma.
Getting hurt is very dangerous to him and it may lead to amputation, so he has to wear many protection pads on his legs every day on his way to plant trees.
Reporter asked him: “How often do you change your gloves?”
He answered: “Every ten days.
Reporter asked: “The gloves are very thick, aren't they?
Ma said: “Yes, its leather gloves but it can only last for ten days.”
Reporter asked: “How much money have you saved?”
Ma answered: “No, I don’t have any bankbook.”
“Do you think you are rich now?” asked the reporter.
Ma said: “Yes, I feel I'm very rich.”
“What do you have?” asked the reporter.
"This green forest is precious for me and you can call me a billionaire," answered Ma.
Ma also told the reporter that when he heard visitors say the environment on the hill is so good because of the trees; he felt so happy and forgot the hardship he has experienced.
"I heard some people, who came to this mountain, said the environment is so great and there are so many trees. I was very happy!”
Ma has over 3000 trees now and plans to dig another 300 holes to plant more trees no matter how hard it may be.
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