Mana Ohana opens!

SUBHEAD: A new business in Hanapepe points to the future.

By Juan Wilson on 14 April 2009 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2009/04/mana-ohana-opens.html)

   
Image above: Porch off old banquet room, soon to be reopened by Mana Ohana. Photo by Juan Wilson

It was called the Green Garden Restaurant. It was mauka of the highway in Hanapepe on the east side of the river. The restaurant was started by the Hamabata family in 1948. I first saw it in 1971 when it was a very busy place. It seemed every tour bus that came coasting down into the valley, after a visit to Ola Pua Gardens up in Kalaheo, would stop at the Green Garden for lunch. Back then the Green Garden had the best lilikoi chiffon pie on Kauai. People would drive out from Lihue and Kapaa to sample it. The last time I ate there it was a sad place.

The large staff wore their beautiful green cotton dress uniforms decorated with a silkscreened fern frond, but the place was almost empty. The buses were not coming anymore and the only regular locals were the members of the Lions Club who met on Wednesday nights. The Hamabata family just could not continue the same old business. For several years the Green Garden sat empty and quiet. Not so any more. It is flickering back to life as Mana Ohana.

Evan and Lauren Meek have begun the first modest phase of a revitalization of the sprawling facility as a community owned organic health food store and restaurant. Their plans are ambitious.


 
Image above: Temporary new sign of Mana Ohana over the store entrance. Photo by Juan Wilson

The Meeks plan is to operate their business in partnership with the community. They say the project initially began over 3 years ago, and is now finally open for business (Monday thru Saturday 10am - 5pm). The first phase has only opened a fraction of the whole facility for the sale of local produce, but more will be happening soon.  

"Mana `Ohana is one solution in the ever growing debate over how to promote local food sustainability. There is enough space, along with all of the needed tools to allow local people to start providing most of the food products we currently import for both commercial and consumer purposes on Kauai."  

The Meeks are encouraging everyone to offer them produce. As a resident of Hanapepe Valley I hope to supply a small amount of fruit and eggs to Mana Ohana. If all goes well people on the westside won't have to jump in a car and drive halfway around the island simply to get healthy food. To contact the Meeks try:

Mana `Ohana, LLC
PO Box #241 Hanapepe, HI 96716
Evan Meek (808) 346-2395
Lauren Shaw Meek (808) 346-2396

 Or learn more about their plans visit the website at: http://www.manaohana.net

 

Malthus and Vice

SUBHEAD: Have we hit the limits of human population? By Kelpie Wilson on 10 April 2009 in AlterNet - http://www.alternet.org/story/135518/have_we_hit_the_limits_of_human_population Image above: "Overpopulation" by John Pitre at http://www.progressiveart.com/pitre_over_population.shtml Without growth, there would be no economy as we know it. But modern culture, by and large, doesn't see that it can exist only in the medium of ceaseless growth and expansion, because a fish doesn't see the water it swims in. Only today, in the recent, breathless moments of the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression, do we begin to perceive the waters around us. Slowly, we are coming to realize that the last 200 years of economic growth have been based on a monumental Ponzi scheme that has pushed the final reckoning ever forward in time, until the future is now. Slowly, we are coming to realize that Thomas Malthus was right. It was the warrior cry of the radical environmental movement in the 1980s: "Malthus Was Right!" But Malthus, a mumbling country parson with intellectual ambitions, had been transmogrified by capitalists and communists alike into a fearsome bogeyman possessed of "dangerous" ideas. Environmentalists who invoked his name were invariably corrected by their progressive friends, who told them that excess consumption by the rich was the problem, not the reproductive profligacy of the poor. Yet, as we drive deeper into the greenhouse world, with its crazy weather, water shortages and general degradation, more and more of us from across the political spectrum are wondering how on earth we will feed the 3 billion more people projected to arrive by 2050, or even the 6 billion or so we already have. It is worthwhile, therefore, to examine the Malthusian idea, to discover what truths it holds and to see if they can be of any help. Malthus' big idea, published in 1798 in "An Essay on the Principle of Population," was that human population would always grow exponentially, and that it would always push up against the limits of food production, thus creating a permanent class of poor whose numbers could only be checked by "misery" and "vice." His Law of Population is based on this simple observation: "Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them." Later, Charles Darwin would base his theory of natural selection on this observation. He saw that a super abundance of progeny allows natural selection to work so that only the fittest survive. Malthus wrote his essay in response to William Godwin, an outspoken liberal of the day. Godwin wanted to abolish the aristocracy and redistribute the wealth. He believed in the "perfectibility of man." As a member of the landed elite, Malthus felt a need to address the rabble-rouser Godwin and prove that even in a perfect society where the working man received according to his needs, all benefits would soon be wiped out by population growth. The poor man's "lack of moral restraint" would ensure that his family would continue to grow until they ate him out of house and home. Starvation and disease would then do the job of reducing the population to a supportable size. Malthus made a big impression on the British upper classes (who had access to concubines and prostitutes and hence no need for moral restraint to curtail family size). Since the poor were destined to continually breed themselves back into poverty anyway, there was no point in improving their condition. Politicians seized on Malthus' theory to end subsidies for the poor ("a shilling a week to every laborer for each child he has above three") and pass the Poor Law of 1834 that forced those seeking relief into workhouses designed to be as much like prisons as possible. It's no wonder then that Friedrich Engels declared Malthus' Law of Population to be the "most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat." Karl Marx and Engels put their faith in technology and believed that progress would continually expand agricultural production, mooting the issue of population growth. While they thought Darwin's use of the Law of Population to explain evolution had some validity, they insisted that humans were exempt. Animals were only "collectors" of nature's bounty, but humans were "producers" and masters of their own destiny. Indeed, Malthus might have earned more respect for his Law of Population if he hadn't proposed it just at the moment when human production first tapped into the coal seams and oil streams that fueled the industrial expansion. It is only today, when those resources have peaked, that we are revealed to be much more like the other animals than we thought -- "collectors" of ancient sunlight, our fossil fuel inheritance, and not the all powerful "producers" we thought we were. As a progressive, I want to believe that humanity can control our destiny. But as an ecologist, I have to accept the Law of Population. Is there no way out? Yes there is. But it requires us to embrace what Malthus called "vice." Malthus saw three ways to control population growth: abstinence, misery and vice. Abstinence was too challenging for most. Misery included starvation, disease and death. That left vice: a category that included prostitution, abortion and infanticide, but also "promiscuous intercourse, unnatural passions, violations of the marriage bed and improper arts to conceal the consequence of irregular connexions." Blinders imposed by the church and centuries of violent repression of women healers and midwives had so deeply branded contraception as an "improper art" that even a revolutionary like Godwin could not advocate it. He could only insist that redistribution of wealth would result in more "moral restraint." Malthus found this laughable: "I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr. Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished ... the best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made." When the radical Francis Place publicly advocated birth control in the 1820s, he was condemned for promoting vice by church, state and even his fellow working men in the labor unions he helped to found. Nearly a century later, Margaret Sanger finally opened her first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y., and contraception was only fully legalized in the United States in 1965. The definition of "vice" evolved very slowly. Malthus' list of vices included infanticide, which today stands well apart from birth control, abortion, prostitution and homosexuality. And yet, throughout history and prehistory, infanticide was probably the most widely used method of curtailing population growth, mostly because the contraception and abortion methods of the past were either ineffective or dangerous to women. Before the fossil fuel era, the need to prevent famine often dictated infanticide, especially female infanticide, which relieved population pressure by reducing the number of breeding females. It is good to know this bit of history, because it gives us the proper context for updating the definition of "vice." Still, there are conservatives who would prefer to see famine and misery rather than condone contraceptives, abortion, women's rights and homosexuality. Among them is Pope Benedict, leader of the world's largest religious organization, who has just condemned untold numbers of Africans to death by opposing condoms for prevention of AIDS, because it might lead to "vice." There are also still progressives who insist that population growth is not a problem. They should go back and read Engels, who hated Malthus and thought the idea of population outstripping resources was ludicrous, but still said this: "There is, of course, the abstract possibility that the number of people will become so great that limits will have to be set to their increase. But if at some stage communist society finds itself obliged to regulate the production of human beings, just as it has already come to regulate the production of things, it will be precisely this society, and this society alone, which can carry this out without difficulty ... it is for the people in the communist society themselves to decide whether, when and how this is to be done, and what means they wish to employ to the purpose." We are those people, and many of us now understand that the real vices are found in war, injustice and repression. Increasingly, we realize that we must work together for humane and liberating solutions to the problem of human overpopulation, as we build a new, non-growth, steady-state economy that provides for all. see also: Island Breath: Sustainability & Growth 4/19/05 .

Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy

SUBHEAD: America continues in a crisis that are debt repudiation.

By Eric Zencey on 11 April 2009 in The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=1

Image above: Photo of Frederick Soddy from the University of Glasgow biography. From http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH0182&type=P Innovative and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression. Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.

He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.

Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”

Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.

It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.

Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?

Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.

Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”

Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.

In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)

If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.

Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”

Numbers from the Wasteland

SUBHEAD: You wonder, as you write your IRS check, how much of it will go to the the big banks executives.

By John Schettler on 10 April 2009 in The Writing Shop -

http://www.writingshop.ws/html/numbers.html

image above: A warning - Don't get screwed by the government.

April may be the cruelest month for some, perhaps those squinting at piles of wrinkled receipts, long columns of numbers in excel spreadsheets, with the glow of TurboTax running on their monitor screen into the wee hours of the night. Most hourly wage earners will be eagerly anticipating a tax refund from Uncle Sam, but many self-employed people and small business owners find April a grueling time. If you are one of the unfortunate getting ready to write a check to the IRS this month, it must also be particularly galling to realize where your money is headed—into the coffers of the big banks and insurance companies, all virtually bankrupt, but deemed “too big to fail” by the industry insiders who now set government policy. So while they have taken enormous risks, reaped enormous profits in the manufactured housing boom, they now have deeply wounded securities positions that make them effectively insolvent, and equally massive losses they want transferred to the public. Trillions have already flowed to the banks, both directly and by way of conduits like AIG and even more stealthy pipelines from “The Fed” the greatest misnomer in the financial world, a consortium of private banks that have managed to seize the power to create money and credit at their whim, and lend it all out at interest.

You wonder, as you write your check to the IRS, how many new suits and ties it will buy for CEOs and executives at the big banks. They were so reckless in their lending and securities game that the only way to “save” them seems to be to send the bill to you, and every other taxpayer this year, and for generations to come. Add to that the astounding recent announcements concerning accounting rules changes. The old “mark to market ,” which said that assets had to be valued by their prevailing market worth was quietly tossed out the door. (Care to try that with your house? It seems only your property tax has retained its full value, while the bricks and boards themselves have lost 40% of their equity in many regions). The Banks prefer to assign higher values to their “toxic” assets than anyone in their right mind would ever pay for them—anyone who had to use their own money, that is. But “investors” now get to use someone else’s money, (yours and mine), to pay for 95% of the cost of acquiring these bad securities. And the banks can ignore the market price and value them any way they see fit, using “internal models” that no one is ever allowed to see.

In fact, just about everything concerning this whole banking mess has been kept hidden away from public view- -everything but the foreclosure signs. Once upon a time there were audited quarterly reports that investors could rely on to take the temperature of the companies they were bankrolling. Now the results of the “stress test’ financial health checkup for banks are being kept secret, to prevent any sudden downward move in stock prices. The government is now complicit in the same deception perpetrated by the banks themselves, and promises of “transparency” have become simple election rhetoric. Just how bad is it, doc? Henry Blodget of the Business Insider put it this way:

“The charitable explanation is that Tim Geithner is paralyzed by fear of triggering another post-Lehman credit meltdown and has convinced Obama that that's what will happen if the government holds banks and their bondholders accountable or just comes clean about the shape that banks are in.” Fear. If we tell the truth, all hell might break lose. What happened to the hope and change President Obama promised this nation last November?

Then we get more quiet talk about limiting short selling—particularly for bank and financial stocks. A rule change has been proposed to prohibit short selling of any stock unless the last reported price was on the rise. The “uptick rule” is meant to function as a brake on stock pricing slides by market gamblers who are basically betting stocks will go lower. It’s one of the real fun things you do in the casino called Wall Street—making money off the declining value of a company, instead of the inverse. This is the topsy-turvy world of day trading, where riding the market tick and moving in and out of positions is the great game. The uptick rule will also slow or halt the withering of share prices in the financials in hopes of being paired with bogus “profit” reports based on all the toxic assets being re-valued “to internal bank models.” The idea is that this little two step soft shoe will create yet another illusory rally on Wall Street so banks can raise more capital by selling shares. They want to get those prices back to the mid to high double figure range, and away from the Starbucks line, where our major banks have share values you couldn’t redeem for a cup of coffee. Yes, the financial powers that be, stunned to realize they are indeed insolvent, have simply decided to re-write the rules and rig the system in every way possible to avoid that admission. Delusion and denial continue to be the predominant mindset, which has now become “policy.”

Our financial crisis has therefore been painted over like bad graffiti, whitewashed, laundered, patched, but it has not been truly faced or fixed. The underlying reality of the staggering losses attached to securities, swaps, and derivatives remains. The banks have simply chosen to cook their books and continue the amazing illusion that we call “level three accounting” the great hidden landfill where they are hiding their mortgage backed securities. But under the new rules—voila—they are no longer “toxic assets.” Now they are “magic assets” that can be valued in any way the banks desire. The sleight of hand of the banker magicians amazes and distracts the confused, angry public with financial mumbo jumbo. Bad debts are now something one holds to maturity, like grandma sitting out on the porch in an Alzheimer’s fog on her old rocker. She’ll get better one day, right? And the Fed monetizing the massive national debt to the tune of $300 billion, more money than is currently circulating in the whole nation, is given the erudite label of “quantitative easing.” Financial crisis? What financial crisis? You can’t have a financial crisis when you own a printing press for money, according to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The TALF program aimed at restarting consumer lending by sweetening securities in that arena has met a fairly cold start. Investors have been skittish, as the government seems to be changing the rules week by week. But beyond that, the lackluster start may reflect the simple truth that there is just no real market for the loans the program hopes to stimulate. Eventually the genius bankers will realize this. The present strategy of pouring money, by the trillions, in at the top of the financial pyramid and then hoping it will trickle down to stimulate spending on Main Street is foolish. The $300. “stimulus” check sent to Average Joe was equally ridiculous. The sad fact is that people are deep in debt and have no further appetite for more. Their salary raise last year was zero, they got no bonuses, what little they had in retirement savings is evaporating, the equity in their homes is negative, their credit cards are maxed out. They are struggling just to make ends meet, hoping they won’t lose their job, and there is no room in the budget for a new car payment.

Fear in a handful of dust...

Meanwhile, Average Joe and all the Soccer Moms know where the real crisis is. It’s out on the streets in a line at the unemployment office, getting longer week after week. This is reality. It can’t be hidden on level three accounting sheets, though the system tries desperately to mask the real truth of what is happening in the eroding job market by cooking the unemployment numbers as well. The “official” unemployment number of 8.5% is just another delusional denial of the real facts. The U-6 number, closer to the truth, is now 15.6%, (some say 16.2% ), and there are some analysts that believe that even this number is conservative. The stubborn fact, however, is that we are well ahead of Depression era statistics when it comes to unemployment, and we are on track to equal or exceed the total unemployment numbers of the 1930s.

After the 1929 market crash, unemployment began to increase in a slowly rising range of 3.2% to about 8% by the end of 1930. (It took twelve months to reach that level, a rate that, if reported using our methods today, would “officially” be only about 4.5%.) After our crash of Sept-Oct 2008, we have already exceeded that unemployment rate in four months time—and this is using the watered down “official” 8.6% number used today. If we used the U-6 number of 15.6%, which is much closer to the way unemployment was calculated in the Depression era, then we have nearly doubled the job loss rate of the early Depression, and did so 8 months sooner! And it could be much worse that that. If we really look at the numbers honestly, it gets positively scary out there. To quote Eliot: “Come in under the shadow of this red rock, And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you, Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Shadow Stats

If we accept the analysis of sites like “ShadowStats.com,” which attempt to sweep away government sugar coating of numbers and eliminate the fudge, then let’s take a look at that handful of dust. Shadowstats counts people who’s benefits have run out, those who have stopped looking for work, those seasonally unemployed, those marginally and part time unemployed, unable to find a full time job. It also corrects errors such as simply counting jobs—because some people hold two jobs. The verdict: we are already at 19.5% unemployment.We’ve been losing over 650,000 jobs per month, and if this continues through April and May, and into June when thousands of teacher contracts expire, we will easily exceed 10% in the fantasy official stat, and push above 17% in the more realistic U-6 stat…all in just six months time. Shadowstats will have the number higher yet. Unemployment did not reach that level in the Great Depression until mid to late 1931, over 18 months after the 1929 market crash. The main Street economy is simply getting hammered by job losses that will not come back any time soon. The “recovery” everyone hopes for rests in those jobs. A blind man could see this. And it matters not a whit if the big banks get to rewrite their accounting spread sheets as they wish to pretend they are still solvent. Average Joe is out of work, on the street with his unemployment benefits clock ticking, getting hungry. Average Joe is 70% of the economy. By this time in any normal “recession” we should be pulling out of the job loss nosedive, but look at the trend line now...

Now consider how long it will take for that green line to level off and recover. It takes an average of 16 to 18 months after job loss reaches a low for the trend line to get back to zero. This means that in the brightest scenario, assuming our current job loss rate bottoms out this year, we are looking at another year and a half before we get back to employment at the 2007 rate. That’s a long hard road. But may I offer the thought that these lost jobs may not come back at all! We may be looking at a new downscaling of the US GDP that becomes more or less permanent. Please consider that the present housing market is not going to recover for many years, so all those lost real estate and construction jobs won’t be back soon. Nor will Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch or Lehman brothers be hiring again any time soon. And consider that GM won’t be ramping up to crank out millions of new cars any time soon. All those dealerships won’t be floating balloons and hiring any time soon either. Teacher layoffs are just warming up, and states are so cash strapped that it’s hard to see when those jobs will come back.

In my annual “predictions” article for 2009 I said that unemployment would be the biggest threat on Main Street in 2009. There is a train load of pain coming on that track. Some communities already have jobless rates exceeding 20%, even with the cooked official government figures. There are cities where the rate is already over 30%. This is truly frightening, and it will get worse before we see any change. What will all these unemployed, disgruntled, hungry people do? We’ve been seeing more and more news items about distraught people committing crimes. There have been “mucker”–like shootings, (if you’ve ever read John Brunner you know what a “mucker” is), and good old fashioned corporate sabotage. Northern California had a dose of reality on Thursday, April 9th, when fiber optic cables were cut in four separate locations on AT&T property. Land lines, Verizon leased Cell phone lines, and Internet were down for 5 hours. The unmentioned background in all the news coverage—the CWA (Communications Workers of America) is planning a strike against AT&T. The cables were cut in such a way that only insider employees could have accessed them. It doesn’t take a genius to put that puzzle together, or stated in a way a contemporary audience might better heed—it’s so easy a Cave Man could do it. This was not random “vandalism.” But notice also that the word “terrorism” was not used in most coverage of the incident. We’ll see much worse when the strike is broken and the layoffs continue.

I look at these numbers and wonder how in the world Larry Summers can go on TV and talk about a recovery just around the corner. Hoover could not have done it better. Just where will the new jobs come from? And if we can’t put all these unemployed people back to full time work, how will the economy ever experience new “growth” from consumer spending? Are all these laid off workers going to start applying for mortgage loans, will they line up to buy new cars, hit the malls with the credit card in an orgy of new spending? These are people who, as their unemployment benefits run out, will soon be struggling just to feed themselves. You simply can’t have a recovery when 20% of your work force is unemployed.

And if we look elsewhere the charts are equally grim. World economic output and exports are declining far faster than they did at the onset of the Great Depression. The world stock markets have taken far more serious losses as well. Look at the data!

The conclusion of that article is obvious for anyone with a brain: “To sum up, globally we are tracking, or doing even worse than the Great Depression, whether the metric is industrial production, exports or equity valuations. Focusing on the US causes one to minimize this alarming fact. The “Great Recession” label may turn out to be too optimistic. This is a Depression-sized event.”

In light of such evidence, it is equally clear that the fantasy and denial that now constitutes the “plan” to correct the crisis in the financial markets by restarting the securities game will not soon help Main Street and create new jobs that will re-stoke production and reverse the decline. The Depression now underway is heading off the charts compared to any other normal “recession” in modern times. It will not recover in the foreseeable future. Job loss is generally a lagging indicator. They can rig the rules to pretend the banks are sound, and the bankers can start lending to big corporations again, but we will not see this play out in the real economy for many, many months in terms of significant new hiring. Count on tough times throughout all of 2009 and well into 2010 and beyond.

As the Fed balance sheet inflates like a massive balloon, inflation is the likely result. The debt deflation currently underway is like the waters receding from the shoreline before a tsunami. The huge waves of inflation may yet be on the way, perhaps three or even five years off, but clearly forming in the massive expansion of the money supply now underway. At present, the newly minted dollars are not really entering the economy, and Bernanke will have the job of managing the sluice gates when he tries to de-lever the Fed balance sheet, on its way to a whopping $4 trillion by year’s end. Good luck Ben—I’ll be watching the price of bread, as will so many others—when the line forms.

Resilience in crisis

SUBHEAD: Why the Future Will Be Flexible.

By Jamais Cascio on 3 April 2009 in Fast Company

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/jamais-cascio/open-future/resilience

image above: A classic example of resilience in the face of long odds.

What will a post-crash, truly 21st-century world look like? For people 
thinking about global systems (economic, environmental, and social) 
one idea stands out: resilience.

Resilience means the capacity of an entity--such as a person, an 
institution, or a system--to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards. 
Resilience implies both strength and flexibility; a resilient 
structure would bend, but would be hard to break. The term was once 
found largely in psychology textbooks and material science research, but the systems design crowd has, 
over the past few years, enthusiastically adopted the concept.

Designing for resilience takes on particular relevance as we think 
about what happens after the current economic crisis passes. It's 
easy, in the midst of a chaotic situation, to focus solely on 
immediate issues, but periods in which everyone else is grappling with 
the present are precisely when it's the most critical to think about 
tomorrow. And while we can't predict exactly what will happen in the 
future, we can get a pretty good sense of what kinds of drivers will 
shape it--and how we might influence those drivers.


What would a more resilient world look like? There's no universal 
"resilience theory" just yet, but some of the principles employed by ecologists and designers thinking about 
resilient systems give us a hint.

Two factors stand out as core assumptions of a resilience approach: 
the future is inherently uncertain, so the system needs to be as 
flexible as possible; and failures happen, so the system needs to be 
able to identify failures early and not make things worse as a result. 
These may seem like common-sense notions, but today's global systems 
work best when everything's running smoothly and predictably. 
Resilient systems are optimized for rough roads with sudden turns.

Resilient flexibility means avoiding situations where components of a 
system are "too big to fail"--that is, where the failure of a single 
part can bring the whole thing crashing down. The alternative comes 
from the combination of diversity (lots of different parts), 
collaboration (able to work together), and decentralization (organized 
from the bottom-up). The result is a system that can more effectively 
respond to rapid changes in conditions, and including the unexpected 
loss of components.

A good comparison of the two models can be seen in the contrast 
between the current electricity grid (centralized, with limited diversity) 
and the "smart grid" model being debated (decentralized and highly 
diverse). Today's power grid is brittle, and the combination of a few 
local failures can make large sections collapse; a smart grid has a 
wide variety of inputs, from wind farms to home solar to biofuel 
generators, and its network is designed to handle the churn of local 
power sources turning on and shutting off.

The recognition that failure happens is the other intrinsic part of a 
resilience approach. Mistakes, malice, pure coincidence--there's no 
way to rule out all possible ways in which a given system can stumble. 
The goal, therefore, should be to make failures easy to spot through 
widespread adoption of transparency through a "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" embrace of 
openness, and to give the system enough redundancy and slack that it's 
possible to absorb the failures that get through. If you know that you 
can't rule out failure, you need to be able to "fail gracefully," in 
the language of design.

The difference between brittle failure and graceful failure can be 
seen vividly in how different coastal areas deal with ocean surges (whether from 
storms or tsunamis). Levees, seawalls, and other "hard barriers" can 
be completely effective unless breached--but once breached, can (and 
often will) fail catastrophically. Regions relying on abundant coastal 
wetlands, mangrove forests, and similar "soft barriers," conversely, 
are likely to see a bit of flooding, but the mass of the ocean surge 
will be absorbed and dissipated by the environment.

You don't have to be trying to come up with a new global economic 
model to appreciate resilience. Increasingly, the concept is taking 
root in organizations of all types as a strategic guideline, and becoming part of the language of design 
for everything from software to cities. In some circles, it's starting to replace 
"sustainability" as an environmental driver.

One reason why the idea of resilience resonates with those of us 
engaged in foresight work is that, as troubling as it may be to 
contemplate, the current massive economic downturn is likely to be 
neither the only nor the biggest crisis we face over the next few 
decades. The need to shift quickly away from fossil fuels (for both 
environmental and supply reasons) may be as big a shock as today's 
"econalypse," and could easily be compounded by accelerating problems 
caused by global warming. Demographic issues--aging populations, 
migrants and refugees, and changing regional ethnic make-ups--loom 
large around the world, notably in China. Pandemics, resource 
collapse, even radically disruptive technologies all have the 
potential to cause global shake-ups on the scale of what we see 
today... and we may see all of these, and more, over the next 20 to 30 
years.

It's going to be a bumpy ride--we should be ready.


 Jamais Cascio covers the intersection of emerging technologies and cultural transformation, focusing on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking. Cascio is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He co-founded WorldChanging.com, and also blogs at OpenTheFuture.com.

Obstacles to Relocation

SUBHEAD: It is time to focus on Peak Oil preparation and surviving Peak Oil.

By Clifford Wirth on 04 January 2009 in Vancouver Peak Oil

http://vancouverpeakoil.org/2009/01/03/resilient-cities-responding-to-the-crash-peak-oil-and-climate-change/

Image above: Main rotunda of the National Academy of Science. From http://www.flickr.com/photos/sixteenmilesofstring/374475209

Oil and natural gas depletion will soon begin to undermine the capacity of urban and metropolitan areas to sustain human life. Modern urban and metropolitan life depends on oil and natural gas for food production and distribution, residential heating, water purification and distribution, sanitation, and the power grid that delivers electricity for the pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, elevators, home heating controls, and automated building systems. As international food transport collapses, most oil rich nations face starvation too, regardless of how much oil they possess. Oil depletion means population decline for all urban areas. The notion that urban and suburban dwellers will relocate to small villages in agricultural regions is unrealistic. In the ensuing Peak Oil generated global economic depression, the value of urban residential properties will plummet. Increasing unemployment will slow new house sales and accelerate mortgage and property tax foreclosures. With more and more urban homes up for sale, their prices will decline sharply.

And, as the price of urban property declines in value, rural property will increase in comparative value. Indeed, in the last few years, the prices of agricultural land have increased. Soon, to move to a rural area most urban home owners will have to sell at a low price and buy a rural property for a higher price. The financial loss in selling and buying property will stifle the relocation to rural regions for most people.

At the same time, the cost of building new homes in rural areas will increase with the increasing cost of oil and natural gas. Building materials (asphalt and fiberglass shingles, cement, plastic and aluminum siding, fiberglass insulation, glass, lumber, and bricks) are either made from oil or they are manufactured with the energy of oil, natural gas, and coal. All building materials and construction workers are transported using oil (diesel and gasoline).

Electricity that is used in the manufacture and construction of houses will also become more expensive. Coal (which is transported with diesel) and natural gas (which uses oil in exploration, drilling operations, and transport of workers) provide the energy for electric power generation. Thus coal and natural gas costs, as well as the cost of electricity, will increase with the increasing price of oil.

Similarly, the construction of residential water (wells and pumps) and sanitation systems (septic systems or outhouses in rural areas) will cost more and more as the price of oil increases. Local governments would have to construct schools and some roads in rural areas with expanding populations in an era of declining local government revenues (due to declining property values and property taxes). Local governments would have to raise taxes for new infrastructure at a time when citizens will vociferously oppose tax increases.

In colder regions of the world, including most of Europe and the U.S., urban to rural relocation means people moving close to wood supplies for home heating, but many agricultural areas lack significant forest land.

Inertia and procrastination are powerful forces in determining human behavior. It is basic human nature to deal with non-routine problems when they become obvious, not before. Very few people will study the Peak Oil future carefully to determine how it will impact them. Denial is encouraged by pervasive public, media, government, and business ignorance of Peak Oil impacts. Indeed, those who become vocal about Peak Oil face ridicule by the vast majority of the ignorant.

The combination of these obstacles means that only those who have ample resources and knowledge of Peak Oil impacts will be able to relocate, if they act sooner rather than later. Relocation will thus resemble a trickle of the affluent, rather than a mass movement.

As the Peak Oil economic depression undermines the value of investments and urban property, most people will be stuck where they are. When the highways fail, the movement of people from urban to rural areas will cease. That time is years away, not decades.

Studies by scientific organizations and independent analysts indicate that global crude oil production will now begin to decline, from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%. This is equivalent to a 33% drop in 7 years. The price of oil will skyrocket like never before.

No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always exceed the level of production; thus oil depletion will proceed at the same rate until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives energies will not fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment. The proponents of the electric economy, the hydrogen economy, or an algal biodiesel economy ignore the obvious. There is little capital, time, energy, or public will for such trillion dollar infrastructure makeovers. The belief in alternative energies is so strong that most scientists avoid examining obvious questions – does the development of alternative energies consume more energy than they provide, and do alternative energies consume liquid fuels and give us electric power, which is not what we need?

The U.S. government provides no studies to advise the Congress and president on what to do with this catastrophe. Congress and the president are so inept they don’t even know that they should commission the National Academy of Sciences to study the energy crisis and the advise the nation on how to plan for Peak Oil impacts. The NAS is the only objective body that can develop policy with the best scientists from many fields to work together cooperatively to develop sound policy recommendations. And the NAS is the only authoritative source for making such policy recommendations to the nation. Thus Congress and the president grope around in the dark, relying on energy company lobbyists and well meaning “sages” who offer some plan to save the nation, but who know little about energy policy and Peak Oil impacts. FEMA has no Peak Oil risk management plans. Contingency planning for Peak Oil is an oxymoron.

We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from “outside,” and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

After the last power black out, the people living in rural areas will find that surviving will become increasing difficult without all of the goods from the “outside” (food, canning jars, fencing, roofing, hay, straw, seed, animal feed, plastic tarps, fertilizer, clothes, fabric, medicine, hardware, saws, wood stoves, etc.). The survivors will be the very few who live in areas with good rain and soil and who prepared intelligently for a life without oil.

It is time to focus on Peak Oil preparation and surviving Peak Oil.

When you're in, you're in

SUBHEAD: The best investment money can buy.  

By David Sirota on 10 April 2009 in the Bennington Banner -

http://www.benningtonbanner.com/opinion/ci_12113953

 
Image above: Matthew Lesko, the man in the question mark suit, who wants to get you money from the government. See http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/leskoscam.php
 

Feeling sorry for yourself? Struggling to get by? Wondering how you can get a bailout? Well, stop moping, because it's not too late!

I may not have Suze Orman's verve or Billy Mays' voice. But I've discovered a revolutionary risk-free investment plan straight from those who brought us the economic meltdown. So in this column-fomercial, I won't waste your time with Ginsu knives or cash-for-timeshare schemes — I'm going to help make you rich beyond your wildest dreams!

Look, we've all heard about Wall Street's losses. But you probably didn't hear about Corporate America's newest sure thing: a path to financial freedom far more reliable than any decent-paying job. It's something so old-fashioned that even amateur investors can understand it!

It's called graft — a surefire wealth creator that takes your investments, modifies laws, and delivers returns that the best stock trader could never dream of. This is the ShamWow of strat
egies, the Flowbee of economics, the Ronco of investing. Just look at the profits it generates!

In the last decade, the financial industry's $5 billion investment in campaign contributions and lobbyists resulted in deregulation, which delivered trillions to executives. And when the bubble burst, there was another boatload of free money! By Bloomberg News' account, $12.8 trillion worth of taxpayer loans, grants and guarantees — all to Wall Street!

But wait ... there's more!

The Associated Press this week reports that "companies that spent hundreds of millions lobbying successfully for a tax break enacted in 2004 got a 22,000-percent return on that investment" — $100 billion in all. That could be you!

Of course, the secret is investing heavily in specific political stocks.

For example, the banking industry recently paid Rahm Emanuel $16 million for about two years of work. That investment was recently paid back when, as President Obama's chief of staff, Emanuel led the January campaign to release another $350 billion in bank bailout funds. Turning a $16 million down payment into a $350 billion payout — that's huge!

Likewise, Goldman Sachs hired former Senate aide Mark Patterson as one of its lobbyists — an investment that proved a huge winner when Patterson became the Treasury Department's chief of staff and the agency subsequently killed proposals to limit executive compensation at bailed-out banks. Cha-ching!

And the hedge fund industry paid economist Larry Summers $5.2 million in 2008 for part-time work — an investment that hit pay dirt when Summers became Obama's top economic aide and the administration resisted tough international hedge fund regulations that some G-20 countries wanted. Show me the money!

That's right, the surest way to make big cash is not to invest in people with proven business experience or in valuable entrepreneurial ventures, but in blue-chip members of Permanent Washington — career politicos and bureaucrats who inevitably get back into positions of power and payback!

Now I know you think that I sound like the guy in the question-mark suit and that my plan seems like a scam. But it's perfectly legal!

So how much would you pay for this kind of opportunity? $100 trillion? $50 trillion? What if I said you could get all this for just a few billion in pocket change? Because that's all it takes to start no-risk investing! It's that easy!

Why let the corporate guys make all the money off government? Why waste time working for companies that make stuff when you can buy the one company that simply prints cash?

Order now and try my product! It's not available in stores, but if you call within the next 15 minutes, we'll throw in free congressional and White House phone directories valued at $49.95! Operators are standing by!

• David Sirota is the best-selling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com

 .
 

Priorities and civil unrest

SUBHEAD: Peak-Oil in changing times require changing institutions and new priorities. By Tom Whipple on 09 April 2009 in the Fall Church News-Press http://www.fcnp.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4329:the-peak-oil-crisis-priorities&catid=13:news-stories&Itemid=76

Image above: A food riot in Mogadishu, Somalia in May 2008. In the next few years, most of us are going to have to make many important decisions that will profoundly affect the rest of our lives. How soon these decisions come will depend on one's individual circumstances. If you are one of the millions who have lost their jobs or homes in the last year then you already know that something is happening. Returning to the way we have lived for the last 100 years simply is not in the cards. The world is entering a great paradigm shift and our place in it will be markedly different 10 or 20 years from now. The most alarming thing to remember is that 95 percent of us have not discovered that major changes are underway and are waiting for economic recovery and new jobs to open up. A professor out in California just published a paper concluding that the current economic downturn was caused as much by the $147 oil we saw last summer as it was by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. It doesn't much matter if he is right or not. What is important, however, is that hardly a day goes by without another major oil production project being delayed or cancelled due to low prices. The death spiral for the oil age has begun. The U.S. is currently losing about 600,000 jobs a month. If we did the bookkeeping a bit more honestly, to account for the discouraged or those forced into part-time work, the real total is probably closer to 1 million a month. This hemorrhage may slow for a time when our trillion dollar stimulus catches hold, but there is nothing out there to suggest that spending borrowed or printed money for a year or two is going to turn anything around. The trends all suggest that unemployment is going to continue rising and that social unrest is not very far away. Someday, many years or decades from now, all this is going to stabilize. Just what the world will look like is impossible to forecast. Will there still be 6.7 billion of us around or will the world's population have declined from deteriorating climate conditions and a lack of food. The only thing for sure is that there is going to be a lot less fossil fuel around to do the heavy work for us. The last 100 years, particularly the last 50, have been a magic time. The exploitation of fossil fuels has given mankind an era of incredible riches and, for many, unprecedented freedoms to pursue whatever they choose. Now that time is over and humanity is going to have to reprioritize to the basics of life -- food, warmth, shelter, health care, sanitation, and security. If the oil age had come and gone in a few decades mankind would not have had the opportunity to reorganize our lifestyles so dramatically from the way we lived in the 19th century, but it is too late now. Recent estimates say that nearly half of the world's population now lives in urban areas where they are dependent on others for food. In America, only three percent of us are left on farms to feed the other 97 percent. This is going to be a real problem for if there is anything we really need to do every day, it is to eat. With shrinking amounts of increasingly expensive fossil fuels, the American way of agriculture is going to be severely tested. Throw in some climate change and our food producers are going to have trouble keeping up with the demand. Many are worried about depleted soils, and the vast amounts of energy required to grow, store, process, and transfer food raised thousands of miles from the consumer. Then there is the growing problem of paying for food when one does not have a job. For the last 100 years the cost of food was a decreasing part of the average American's budget. That is starting to reverse and it will not be long before the discretionary spending that many have enjoyed in recent decades dwindles as more of our incomes go for the essentials of life. Much food in America currently is being paid for by unsecured credit cards in the hands of people who will never be able to pay. The banks have already reduced the number of open cards from a high of 483 million last July to 400 million. This number will continue to shrink as delinquencies soar and the banks realize they will never be paid back. As with food, the same sort of problems are arising with health care, and housing. Sanitation and public safety, being largely a responsibility of government rather than individuals is, safe for the minute, but governments are facing growing problems. If, as seems likely, government takes on increasing burdens of feeding and housing people, some new form of social contract is going to have to be worked out. We are already hearing the opening sounds of what may be the greatest political debate of the 21st Century - how do we get out of this mess. On one side are those who continue to believe that free markets, tax cuts, and offshore drilling, will return things to normal. The other side recognizes the magnitude of the challenge we face, but so far have not publically connected the dots. This great debate will continue in the Congress, state houses, and local board rooms for a long while as the balance teeters between maxims of the 20th century and realities of the 21st. The break will come with social unrest. It has been a long time since mobs took to American streets in protest. Although common in other parts of the world, one has to look back to the 1960's to find serious social unrest in the US. This time riots will be for food and jobs rather than for civil rights and against the draft. The unrest will change everything. Governments will realize that changing times require changing institutions and new priorities. The mix between capitalism and government involvement in the economy is going to change for there no way that our current institutions and economic arrangements are going to get us through the next forty years.

A seed of doubt

SUBHEAD: There are few signs that Hawai‘i is ready to get serious about regulating GMO's.

By Joan Conrow on 08 April 2009 in the Honolulu Weekly

http://honoluluweekly.com/cover/2009/04/a-seed-of-doubt/ Image above: GMO scorpion carrot illustration found at http://blog.puppetgov.com/2008/10/13/the-danger-of-gmo-not-just-physical-issue-but-spiritual-political-as-well/ Ask folks to name Hawai‘i’s most valuable farm crop and they’ll likely say sugar or pineapple, maybe hazard a guess at macadamia nuts. Few will answer correctly–seeds–and even fewer will know that at least half that industry is devoted to growing genetically-modified organisms, or GMOs. GMO is the catch phrase for any plant, animal, bacteria or virus with genetic material that has been altered through engineering. This is commonly done by forcing a gene, usually through use of a virus, bacteria or cell bombardment, from one organism into another to create an entirely new organism with desired traits, which can then be patented by its creator. Although born in a laboratory, genetically-engineered (GE) plants must be tested in the real world of soil and sun. Those that succeed are grown on a larger scale, producing seed for commercial farmers who are not legally allowed to save patented seed from their harvests, and so must buy new supplies each year. Hawai‘i performs both functions, with land throughout the state being used to test and produce GE seed crops. Hailed by some as 21st century wonder plants that will feed a hungry, weather-beaten planet, and denounced by others as a craven corporate bid to control the global seed supply, GE crops are driving a fierce international debate over the future of farming. And unbeknownst to most residents and visitors, Hawai‘i is in the thick of it. Fruitful experimentation In the past two decades, the Islands have hosted some 2,252 outdoor tests for experimental GE plants, more than any other place. Open-air field trials have been conducted on corn, soybeans, cotton, potatoes, wheat, alfalfa, beets, rice, safflower, sorghum, sunflowers, sugar cane, pineapple, dendrobium orchids, anthurium, coffee and papaya, among others. About 130 now are under way throughout the state. Some of Hawai‘i’s outdoor tests—by companies such as Monsanto, ProdiGene, Garst Seed Co. and Hawai‘i Agriculture Research Center (HARC)—also involved biopharmaceuticals, which refers to plants genetically-engineered to produce medical supplies, drugs, vaccines and industrial chemicals. According to court documents, these trials involved experimental AIDS and hepatitis B vaccines; growth hormones; enzyme production from human genes; and aprotinin, a blood-clotting cow protein that is also an insect toxin. Information about where these tests were done remains blocked by a court order. Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff, who brought a lawsuit seeking to halt these open-air biopharm trials in Hawai‘i until they could be assessed for environmental and public health risks, said the crops reportedly were harvested while the case was in litigation and it does not appear that any biopharms have been planted since. He and his staff monitor a Virginia Tech website ([http://www.isb.vt.edu/]) that posts applications for field trial permits and their status. It usually, but not always, discloses the reason for the test, the crop involved and whether it is considered a biopharmaceutical. But while it names the state, it does not disclose the specific location, and details about biopharm tests are rarely included. The industry maintains that such confidentiality is needed to protect their crops from vandalism and their trade secrets from competitors. The federal government supports that stance, and the state has followed its lead, with both the University of Hawai‘i and various state agencies consistently fighting legislation requiring disclosure of GE crop sites. In testimony presented in February in opposition to one such bill, which has since died, James R. Gaines, the University’s vice-president for research, cited concerns about “the threat to field research, vandalism and destruction of research crops as has happened during the development of the transgenic papaya.” Ted Liu, director of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, testified that, “over-regulation contributes to Hawai‘i’s anti-business image, jeopardizing the success of established businesses as well as the potential of attracting new investment to the State.” The state Department of Agriculture also strongly opposed the bill, saying the permitting and regulating of field tests “is the province of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).” But some contend the federal regulatory process is tainted. Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, biotechnology industry officials have been tapped to fill key positions in the three agencies charged with regulating GMOs, and were at the helm of the USDA when it ruled that crops and foods containing GMOs are essentially the same as their conventional counterparts, and thus pose no danger to people or ecosystems. More recently, President Obama came under fire for choosing Tom Vilsack, who supports both GE and biopharm crops, as his Agriculture Secretary. GMO opponents note that the USDA also has funded and conducted extensive biotech research, including the so-called “terminator technology” that prevents the second-year propagation of GE seed, thus ensuring that farmers must buy new seeds each season. Still others have criticized what they characterize as the USDA’s “rubber stamp” approach to field trial permit applications. According to a report published by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the agency has rejected only 3.5 percent of the more than 40,000 permit applications submitted, and those were due to incomplete applications and paperwork errors. “Experimental field trials of GE agricultural crops in Hawai‘i are conducted without adequate oversight or sometimes even the knowledge of where the trial is located,” said Nancy Redfeather, a Big Island coffee grower and member of Hawai‘i SEED, a statewide group of farmers, environmentalists, scientists, cultural leaders and others organized against GMO crops in Hawai‘i. Some Hawai‘i residents also have expressed concern about the chemicals—atrazine and heptachlor among them—used on GMO test plots around the state, saying they could be harming agricultural workers and those who live or work near the fields, as well as the environment. “On Kaua‘i, some of the testing is to develop herbicide-resistant crops that tolerate multiple chemicals,” said Jeri Di Pietro of GMO Free Kaua‘i “So the research going on here includes spraying a cocktail of chemicals that will not kill the plants. The amount of spraying escalates as they look for the high dose tolerance level. This massive amount of chemical application is going on near our schools, coastline and bird sanctuaries. Very few studies have been done on how to mitigate contamination of soil and bacteria where genetically engineered crops have been grown.” Seed companies have consistently defended their cultivation and chemical application practices as complying with federal regulations, and the Environmental Protection Agency has issued few citations. It fined Syngenta Seeds $17,550 last year for two pesticide-related violations, while in 2002 Pioneer Hi-Bred and Mycogen Seeds, a unit of Dow Agrosciences, agreed to each pay a fine of less than $10,000 after the EPA cited them for failing to meet isolation and containment requirements during field trials on Kaua‘i and Moloka‘i, respectively. This is not a drill But testing isn’t the only purpose that Hawai‘i fields serve. Agricultural lands throughout the state also are used to grow GE seed for commercial farmers, with much of the activity centered on O‘ahu, Moloka‘i and Kaua‘i. About half of the 4,000 acres in seed crops statewide are cultivated in GMOs, according to industry estimates. About 97 percent of it is “Roundup Ready” corn, which can withstand direct applications of Monsanto’s herbicide. GE seed crops that produce their own insecticides are also being grown. Seed companies have been taking advantage of Hawai‘i’s year-round growing season since the mid-1970s. But with an annual value of just $20 million two decades ago, the seed industry was a big player in Islands agriculture. Now, it’s the star—and the only one that’s rising. With a record-high value of $146.3 million last season, the seed industry accounts for about a quarter of the state’s total farm revenues, eclipsing every other commodity. It’s also expanding rapidly, increasing 42 percent last year alone. The steady growth is no accident. The state has been recruiting biotech businesses and investment since the mid-1990s, when former Gov. Ben Cayetano endorsed the industry as a clean, high-tech way to save agriculture and diversify the economy. Now all the major chemical and agribusiness companies involved in GMOs are established in Hawai‘i. These include Dow AgroScience, Syngenta and BASF, as well as Dupont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world’s largest seed company. The biggest local grower is Monsanto, which previously produced the toxins subpolychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and dioxin and is now a global leader in GE seeds, with some 674 biotechnology patents. Carol Okada, manager of the state DOA’s Plant Quarantine Branch, which oversees GMOs in Hawai‘i, was quoted in Scientific American magazine last year as saying the booming seed business is in the Islands to stay. “Even though it’s controversial here, the seed industry is now the No. 1 industry for us and it is very important in terms of the economy, dealing with invasive species and giving farmers choices.” A state of denial The state’s ongoing support for the industry doesn’t sit well with everyone. “These biotech companies are receiving huge state and federal subsides and tax incentives to come here,” Di Pietro said. “Most of the seed company profits are realized out of state. Biotech companies use a large portion of our ag land and water, yet produce no food that we can eat. We experience little benefit and receive much environmental degradation that we will be left for us to mitigate.” It’s unclear just how much degradation is associated with GE crops because neither the state nor federal governments required companies to conduct Environmental Impact Statements before growing them here. In the Earthjustice suit, federal Judge J. Michael Seabright found the USDA acted in “utter disregard” of the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Protection Act when it granted permits for the biopharm field tests before conducting environmental studies, Achitoff said. “They’re environmentally anything but benign,” Achitoff said, noting that GE crops have been shown to contaminate conventional and organic crops, usually through the unintentional mixing of commercial seed. In Hawai‘i, birds are also thought to have played a role in spreading the seeds of the Rainbow papaya, which was genetically engineered to resist the ringspot virus. Its genetic traits have been found in both the fruit and seed of traditional varieties, prompting an outcry from health-conscious consumers and organic farmers, who could lose their certification if their crops contain GMOs. Both organic and conventional farmers face another peril from crop contamination. Monsanto is especially aggressive in enforcing its patents, Achitoff said, and has investigated and/or sued thousands of American and Canadian farmers for saving seeds with its patented GMO traits. The company has employed private investigators who secretly videotape and photograph farmers, infiltrate community meetings and gather information from informants about farming activities, according to an article published in Vanity Fair last year. As a result, Achitoff said, some farmers have paid huge fines to Monsanto, even though they were growing the crops inadvertently. Herbicide-resistant varieties of soybean and corn, which represent the bulk of GE crops now being grown, present another environmental concern, Achitoff said. Their cultivation has given rise to herbicide-resistant “super weeds” that require stronger chemicals for eradication, and studies also have shown that farmers raising “Roundup Ready” crops use more herbicide than those growing conventional varieties. Biotech researchers and seed companies, however, maintain that GE crops are safe because nothing has turned up to indicate otherwise. In testimony to the state Senate earlier this year, Richard Manshardt, a professor and plant geneticist at UH’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) asserted that “the biological impacts of current GE crops are not different or greater than those caused by production and distribution of conventional or organic crops. In the specific case of the virus-disease-resistant Hawaiian papayas with which I am personally familiar, no harmful environmental, agricultural or human health issues were found to be unique to GE papayas in seven years of testing during development or 10 years of production after commercial release.” Achitoff, however, said the university researchers are pawns of the biotech industry. “Essentially what they want is the funding and it’s distorted their perspective on the safety of GMOs. We have people at CTAHR and the Farm Bureau who have been essentially bought by the biotech industry and they’re the ones who howl most loudly to the Legislature.” Although Hawai‘i has been reluctant to control, or even scrutinize, the GE crops grown by its seed industry, Achitoff is seeing “a slow but steady trend away from the complete laissez-faire approach toward regulation” on the national level. With new studies showing a link between GE products and health problems, and consumers embracing healthier eating practices, “people will be looking to government and demanding a different approach in regard to GMO regulations,” he said. “I’m optimistic about it.” Planted with good intentions Despite claims that genetic engineering (GE) will lead to crops that can withstand drought, increase yields and boost nutrition, no GE plants with those specific traits have yet been developed for commercial cultivation. Instead, most of the research has been devoted to producing crops that can withstand direct applications of herbicides, most notably Roundup, which is produced by biotechnology giant Monsanto. These herbicide-resistant varieties account for about 80 percent of the GE crops now being grown. The second most common crops are those that have been engineered to produce their own pesticides. So far, the USDA has approved GE varieties of soybeans, corn (except blue corn, red corn and popcorn), canola, sugar beets, zucchini, crookneck squash and papaya. GE crops are used heavily as animal feed, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are common in products on supermarket shelves. (For a free shopping guide, visit [responsibletechnology.org].) Another 100 GE crops are waiting in the wings, including virtually every fruit, vegetable and grain now commonly eaten. The biotech industry also has developed “terminator technology,” which prevents a plant from making seeds, but it has not yet been deployed. Current legislation Genetic engineering is a perennially hot topic in the Hawai‘i Legislature, and two bills that would ban the development, testing and propagation of genetically-modified taro in Hawai‘i are still alive. Senate Bill 709 has been amended since its introduction to change its effective date to the year 2050, while House Bill 1663 has similar language, but a July 2009 effective date. Meanwhile, the fate of House Bill 1226 is uncertain. Known as the “pre-emption bill,” it would prohibit the state and county from banning or otherwise regulating activities related to genetically-modified plant organisms (GMOs). Earthjustice attorney Paul Achitoff, who has litigated matters related to GMOs, said the bill is bucking national legal trends regarding pre-emption measures as contrary to the public interest. “Essentially, it’s the state saying voluntarily, unilaterally, without any instruction from the federal government or Congress, we’re going to tie our hands and make it impossible to do anything about GMOs,” Achitoff said. Although House Speaker Calvin Say has refused to disclose who asked him to introduce the bill, Achitoff said “there’s no doubt in my mind it came from the (biotech) industry and it’s consistent with similar legislation that’s been put forth by Monsanto and others in a number of other states.” The bill passed the house and was referred to the Senate committee on energy and environment, where Chairman Mike Gabbard pronounced it “a very bad bill” and said he does not plan to schedule it for a hearing. While that would normally scuttle a measure, opponents are worried it might be revived using a technique called “gut and replace,” in which the contents of a live bill are stripped and replaced with a dead one, or by amending another bill, such as one of those related to GMO taro.

Learn, Lose & Save Something

SUBHEAD: Embrace the necessary to change your life, and do it.

By John Michael Greer on 08 April 2009 in The Archdruid Report

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

Image above: People powered woodworking tools.

Fairly often, during the three years or so since these essays first started trying to map out the topography of the deindustrial future ahead of us, people have responded with a straightforward question: What do you think we should do about it? Even when it’s posed rhetorically, as it so often is, this question strikes me as a good sign.

It’s one thing, after all, to treat the twilight of the industrial age as an abstract possibility, or a dumping ground for Utopian or apocalyptic fantasies, as so often happens these days. It’s quite another to grapple with it as a reality that can be expected to shape the rest of our lives. Those who make the subtle transition from one to the other tolerably often find themselves confronted with some form of the same message the German poet Rainier Maria Rilke received from the statue of Apollo - "Du musst dein Leben aendern" - “You must change your life.” Still, figuring out exactly what sort of change is needed is a more complex matter. As often as not the people who ask for my suggestions are at that second stage of the process, sure that they have to take action but far from sure what they ought to do. Last week’s Archdruid Report fielded a question from a reader who has reached that point in his confrontation with the future looming up before us. To judge by the recent contents of my inbox, it’s a fairly common place to be just now, and this week’s essay will try to respond to it, not just for the people who asked it directly, but also for others who may be facing the same issues just now.

It’s probably necessary to make a few points to begin with. These will be familiar to longtime readers of this blog, but they remain effectively absent from our collective conversation around the future, outside a narrow slice of the peak oil movement, and thus bear repeating.

First, it’s crucial to remember that our predicament is anything but unique. The fantasy that today’s industrial societies are destiny’s darlings, and therefore exempt from the common fate of civilizations, needs to be set aside; so does the equally misleading fantasy that today’s industrial societies is the worst of all possible worlds and are getting the cataclysmic fate they deserve. The societies of the industrial world are human cultures, no better or worse than most; for a variety of reasons, they happened to stumble onto the reserves of stored carbon hidden in the Earth, and used most of them in three centuries of reckless exploitation; now, having overshot their resource base like so many other societies, their following the familiar trajectory of decline and fall. Letting go of the delusion of our own uniqueness enables us to learn from the past, and also makes it easier to set aside some of the unproductive cultural narratives that hamstring so many attempts to respond to our predicament.

Second, one of the lessons the past offers is that the fall of civilizations is a slow, uneven process. None of us are going to wake up one morning a few weeks, or months, or years from now and find ourselves living in the Dark Ages, much less the Stone Age. Thus trying to leap in a single bound to some imagined future is unlikely to work very well; rather, the most effective strategy will be a matter of muddling through, trying to deal with each stage of the descent as it comes into sight, and being prepared to make plenty of midcourse corrections. Flexibility will be more useful than ideology, and making do will be an essential survival skill.

Third, another of the lessons offered by the past is that the long road down is not going to be easy. Like every human society in every age, the future ahead of us will have opportunities for happiness and achievement, of course, and there will doubtless be significant gains to set in the balance against the inevitable losses, especially for those who long for simpler lives at a slower pace. Still, the losses will be terrible; it’s crucial not to sugar-coat them, despite the very real temptation to do so, or to ignore the immense human tragedy that is an inevitable part of the slow death of any civilization.

Fourth, the harsh dimensions of the future can be mitigated, and the positive aspects fostered, by preparations and actions that are well within the reach of individuals, families, and communities. Not all declines and falls are created equal; in many failed civilizations of the past, a relatively small number of people willing to commit themselves to constructive action have made a huge difference in the outcome, and not only in the short term. The same option is wide open today; the one question is whether there will be those willing to take up the challenge.

Fifth, we can only guess at many of the details of the future ahead of us. Drawing up detailed plans may be a source of comfort in the face of a relentlessly unpredictable future, but that same unpredictability makes any plan, no matter how clever or popular, a dubious source of guidance at best. Nor is consensus a useful guide; one further lesson of history is that in every age, the consensus view of the future is consistently wrong. Instead, the deliberate cultivation of diverse and even conflicting approaches by groups and individuals maximizes the likelihood that the broadest possible toolkit will reach the waiting hands of the future.

These points, and especially the last, make it a waste of time to offer some fixed list of steps that those who want to change their lives ought to do. (In fact, making or following such a list is one thing we may well find it better not to do.) What’s needed is not a list but a template for taking those first basic steps. Any template will do, but the one suggested here is likely as good as any.

It’s simple enough, really: learn one thing, give up one thing, save one thing.

Learn one thing. One of the greatest challenges we face collectively just now is that the skills relevant to the abstract global economy of paper wealth that has dominated the last few decades, which are also the skills that most of us have accordingly learned, will rapidly become useless in the far less abstract economy of the fairly near future. Our capacity to farm out the production of necessary goods and services to sweatshop laborers on distant continents is in the beginning stages of a drastic decline, while many of the job categories that have kept people in the industrial world employed are in the process of going away.

This does not mean that each of us will have to provide all of life’s necessities for ourselves on an individual basis. It does mean that each of us who can provide one of life’s necessities for ourselves, our family, our neighbors, and our community will have a highly marketable skill in the local economies of the deindustrializing future. Getting some such skill is thus the first critical step in your personal transition to that future. It probably has to be said that this doesn’t mean reading a few books on such a skill; it means providing yourself with tools and materials and getting to work here and now, growing vegetables, making soap, raising chickens, brewing beer, or doing whatever else it is that you decide to learn how to do, until you can do it well enough, and reliably enough, that your neighbors are willing to barter whatever it is that they know how to do for a share of your produce. Whatever you learn, learn it inside and out; in ten years you may be depending on your knowledge for survival.

Give up one thing. Unless you’re a rare bird indeed, many of the things that make up your lifestyle right now are only there because a baroquely complex industrial system fueled with unimaginable amounts of nonrenewable energy makes them available to you. Unless you can come up with alternative sources that lack that dependence, all of them will go away at some point in the future. Choose one of those things, get rid of it now, and make the necessary changes in the rest of your life so that you can function gracefully without it.

It can certainly be something big – I know a growing number of people who have gotten rid of their cars, for example – but it doesn’t have to be. Whatever the scale, though, choose something that will take some effort and planning to give up, but also something with an immediate payback – if you give up your car, for example, you’ll have to make other arrangements for transportation, but you’ll also find yourself with hundreds of unspent dollars each month from the payments you don’t have to make, the gas you don’t have to buy, and so on. Choose it, give it up, and don’t look back; every dependence on the industrial system you can abandon is a vulnerability you won’t have as that system comes apart at the seams.

Save one thing. One of the common consequences of the fall of civilizations is that cultures get shredded, and many things of value that aren’t needed for immediate survival get lost. Arts, crafts, music, literature, sciences, technologies, religious and philosophical traditions – none of them are invulnerable. When they make it through the dark age that follows the breakdown of a civilization, nearly always it’s because someone cared enough to keep them going as living traditions. Between the immense cultural legacies of our present civilization, and the extreme vulnerability of most of those legacies to the effects of decline and fall, such people will be desperately needed in the years to come.

Choosing what you will save is easier than it might seem. Sort through the cultural legacies that matter to you, then, until you can find something that satisfies two criteria: first, the idea that people in the future might have to do without it forever should be intolerable to you; second, you should be willing and able to do something significant to keep that from happening. What you do will depend on what you’re trying to save; the steps you’ll need to take to help keep amateur radio going will not be the same as those you’ll need to help preserve the Appalachian dulcimer and its distinctive music for the long term, and vice versa. Make your choice, and be ready to share what you’re doing with others who share your passion.

These are first steps, of course, and for some people they will doubtless be baby steps, though it’s by no means a given that they will always be. Any one of them done thoroughly will give you a significant advantage in facing the difficult future ahead of us. Other changes will follow in their own time, chosen willingly or imposed by events; the sooner you begin to deal with the need to embrace the necessary, to change your life, the less overwhelming the changes further on are likely to be. As another German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, said: “Whatever you can do, or believe you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

HI Leg wants Superferry back

SUBHEAD: Momentum grows at Capitol to bring Superferry back to Hawaii. SOURCE: Dick Mayer (dickmayer@earthlink.net) Image above: The second Hawaii Superferry (Huakai) at Austal USA Alabama dock with ramp extended. [Editor's note: KHNL-TV and deranged members of the Hawaii legislature are still working hard to promote the return of the HSF despite evidence that the Defense Department already has plans for the two vessels. Check the red high-lighted paragraphs in two article below.] By Leland Kim on 6 April 2009 on KHNL-TV http://www.khnl.com/global/story.asp?s=10140913&ClientType=Printable A plan to bring back the Superferry gains steam at the Hawaii state legislature. Lawmakers are looking at several ideas that could potentially bring the high-capacity ferry service back to our waters. The first idea was started by former Hawaii attorney general Michael Lilly, and the idea is changing our environmental laws to eliminate secondary impact considerations. The plan to bring the Alakai right back to Pier 19 is gaining momentum at the Hawaii state Capitol. A plan to rescue the Hawaii Superferry is underway. Sen. Fred Hemmings (R-Lanikai, Waimanalo and Hawaii Kai) says there's a chance a bill can be passed this session that could open the doors for the ferry service to come back. "It's extremely feasible," he said. "The legislature makes the laws for the state of Hawaii and we can amend the laws, and even this late stage of the legislative process, there's ways to amend bills to include clarifying environmental protection laws." The plan would eliminate secondary impact considerations during an environmental review process. Environmental groups say the laws are necessary, but Sen. Hemmings disagrees. "A reasonable law, the environmental protection act, has been prostituted by extremists: extreme environmentalists and extreme legislators who have jumped on that bandwagon," he said. Senate president Colleen Hanabusa (D-Nanakuli, Makaha) says a task force is looking into Hawaii's environmental laws to see if they need to be updated. "And let us be clear: the legal challenge was on Kahului only," she said. "So technically the Superferry could operate from Oahu to Kauai, from Oahu to the Big Island." Sen. Hemmings says bringing the Superferry back is important for Hawaii's international reputation. "People came up to me, legislators from around the country, leaders, and they were shaking their heads," he said. "They can't believe Hawaii would turn a ferry away. You're an island state; you don't have a ferry? What are you guys thinking out there?" The senate president thinks the Alakai would come back if the financial incentives are still there. "I think when it becomes lucrative for the Superferry, like any other business, they will be back," she said. "And I'd like to think they would be back, too." Senate president Hanabusa also says there's another fix for the Superferry to come back. They could swap out the Alakai for the other catamaran that was recently built. It has a built in ramp on the boat, which means, like Matson or Young Brothers, it would not need to go through an environmental review process because it does not use harbor improvements. image above: The navy's littoral combat ship (LCS) Independence at Austal dock in Alabama Good news for Mobile's Austal USA By Kaija Wilkenson on 7 April 2009 in the Mobile Press-Register http://www.al.com/press-register/stories/index.ssf?/base/news/1239095753243650.xml&coll=3 Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recommendation Monday that the Navy buy three, not two, littoral combat ships in fiscal 2010 is good news for a program that at least initially struggled with cost overruns. The news came on a day when Gates delayed or canceled a series of other high-profile defense programs. "Gates rejiggered a lot of programs but he didn't mess with the LCS," said Jay Korman, an analyst with Washington, D.C.-based Avascent Group. "I've got to think that both teams have done a good job in controlling cost." Mobile's Austal USA is part of a General Dynamics Corp. team building a version of the LCS, a shallow-water warship. Both General Dynamics and its rival, Lockheed Martin Corp., built a vessel under deals that allowed contractors to recoup their costs, plus an agreed-upon profit. Gates also said Monday he wants to charter two additional Joint High Speed Vessels, which are used for transporting troops and equipment. Gates' recommendations "affirm the Navy's position regarding both the LCS and JHSV programs," said Joe Rella, Austal's president and chief operating officer. "Austal, the city, and the state will all benefit from the continuance and growth associated with this plan." Both versions of the LCS, built to different designs, ended up with a price tag of over a half-billion dollars, against a $220 million estimate. Last fall, the Navy asked the teams to submit fixed-price bids for five vessels, and Lockheed has since gotten a second contract. The Navy has said it plans to award General Dynamics its second ship by Sept. 30. The Navy last fall announced plans to buy two vessels from one team and a third from the other in fiscal 2010, which begins Oct. 1. The service has not said which contractor will get the third ship. Gates said Monday the Pentagon eventually will buy up to 55 LCS. Austal has been ramping up employment in anticipation of the work, and is adding a $170 million assembly-line style facility in an effort to cut per-vessel costs. The shipyard employs 1,000 people and has said jobs could more than double if Austal is awarded three LCS in the next two years. Austal in November was awarded a potential $1.6 billion contract to build up to 10 of the Joint High Speed Vessels, but the first is not scheduled for delivery until 2011. That could mean a new mission for two commercial ferries, both built at Austal USA, that are out of work after Hawaii Superferry Inc. canceled its inter-island service last month. Industry analyst Tim Colton said the military is a natural fit for the ferries, now adorned with colorful swimming manta rays. "Any day now, they'll be painted gray," Colton said.