Paul Haeder, Author

I interviewed Australian Tim Flannery years ago. Here, 2019, and the carbon sequestering is still in the news. Carbon trading, carbon pricing? No way Jose.

Given the symbiotic relationship between soils and the vegetation they sustain, soil carbon loss happens all sorts of ways, deforestation being a prime example. We’re already losing about 18.7 million acres of forests per year. One international study finds that, under Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, the deforestation rate of the Amazon could triple. At least 33 percent of global wetlands had been lost as of 2009, a recent paper suggests. A certain portion of the world’s grasslands has also been lost to desertification, which is when lands are stripped of their productivity due to things like drought and inappropriate farming methods (though there remain divided opinions as to the exact amount of grassland lost through human practices).

In the U.S., industrial farming practices like monocropping and routine tillage have led to the massive erosion of topsoil, where most of the carbon is stored. “Those practices are things that can be easily avoided,” said Roger Aines, chief scientist of the energy program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “When we’re dealing with sensitive soils, like in these wetlands and peat soils, you shouldn’t plow them or dig them up. When you’re dealing with soils that could blow away, you should keep a cover crop.”

That said, there is movement away from industrial agriculture toward regenerative farming methods, as evinced by the “4 per 1000” initiative launched by the French in the wake of the Paris Climate Conference in 2015. The overarching thrust of this initiative? That an increase by 0.4 percent a year in soil carbon content would “halt the increase in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere related to human activities.” Same here in the U.S., where a farm in Northern California, for example, eschews plowing and weeding and all chemical or organic sprays in favor of a compost-intensive model. It apparently produces 10 times the average per-acre income of comparable California farms.

read more here! One Solution to Climate Change No One Is Talking About!

the fight for bans on single-use plastic grocery bags is the plastic straw in the Pacific gyres

It was a heck of a thing – a hundred people at the Newport City Council at 6 pm most of whom wanted to talk about the proposed single-use plastic bag (grocery) ban that is an ordinance largely led by citizens, and members of the Surfrider organization. Interestingly, the Newport voters five years ago were asked in a vote to decide whether a plastic bag ban was what they wanted.

A minority of citizens brought that up – how very few of the registered voters voted in 2014, and the vote against a plastic bag ban was barely a feather’s weight on the scale of pro versus con. One of the city council members repeated that he was afraid of voting tonight on the ban because he wanted the citizens (less than 1/3 of registered voters) to have a go at it again, to vote again on the measure.

Ahh, the vagaries of representative and participatory democracy. I have to put the word “democracy” into big bold quotation marks. Here’s one issue tied to that – first, the very people who will see the effects of more and more plastic in the gullets of birds and around the necks of seals and in the bellies of toothed whales are the very ones who are learning the tools of research and expressing their voices in a city council meeting. Yet, they are 12 or 14 or 16 years old, not old enough to vote on a measure they show so much interest in.

I’m not going to jump down their throats – the school kids’ throats – or their overworked/overtaxed teachers for not knowing or teaching about the harder and possibly more important issues of our time – the racist society that we work-love-govern-consume-die in has put countless millions in jails, countless millions more in other countries in open prisons and in death camps, and has destabilized the world from culture to climate to citizenship to community.

I am not going to ram down the throats of the citizens who think that a vote by the few people who believe voting counts is the only way to determine if Newport has a ban on plastic bags. It’s too easy to list the tens of thousands of laws, codes, regulations, fees, fines, taxes, penalties, levies and regulatory language that we the people never voted on, directly. I am not going to lecture people who think and believe there is a god-given right to use, buy, produce, consume, destroy, throwaway anything in this barbarous society.

I am an ecosocialist, so I know all systems of oppression that are the basis of capitalism have to be thrown into the dustbin of failed experiments and genocidal ideas by the white man. The very idea of having standardized schools, standardized laws (against the people) and standardized oligarchical systems of benefits thrown to the minority (One Percent and Point Zero Zero One percent) against the majority in a casino game of gambling our futures on the whims and slippery thinking of the elite is plain wrong.

Radical means setting down roots, the fabric of what it means to be a sane human and humane community. We need radical and revolutionary changes to this system of economic, cultural and environmental oppression.

Capitalism!

If voting in a capitalist society really counted, or mattered, or gave the people a real choice and real chance at representative democracy, then it would have been outlawed ages ago, Emma Goldman famously stated.

The rights of nature do not end up on any ballot measure. We have to send in reems of paper to elected officials and to official agencies of the government and then also to the CEOs and shareholders of corporations to plead with them to stop this or that major attack on our ecosystems and wildlife.

We don’t get to vote with our money, or vote with our buying “power.”

There is no power in consuming or buying or being labeled a consumer. There is no focus group in the world which is working for the benefit of the fabric of life – air water soil biodome ecosystem ecology human/non human community. The very concept of a throwaway society was never voted on, but rather foisted upon the Americans who once were frugal, more or less.

Of course, this is the land of theft, from the First Nations, and this concept of me-myself-and-I, or that is, my home and my family are my castle, that is what the concept of America the Taken is. This blind allegiance to the flag, and this racist pledge of one’s self to the group’s mob rule, well that is part and parcel of the American lie.

When you subjugate a people, you not only take their land and their language, their identity, and their sense of self — you also take away any notion of a future. The reason I chose this name is because in this particular era of neoliberal capitalism, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The argument I’m making is that within our own traditions of Indigenous resistance, we have always been a future-oriented people, whether it was taking up arms against the United States government, whether it was taking ceremonies underground into clandestine spaces, whether it was learning the enemy’s language. This pushes back against the dominant narrative that Indigenous people are a dying, diminishing race desperately holding on to the last vestiges of their culture or their land base. If that were the case, then I don’t think we would have an uprising such as Standing Rock or, today, Line 3 or Bayou Bridge, or the immense amount of mobilization around murdered and missing Indigenous women.

Nick Estes, author of, “Our History Is the Future,” which traces Indigenous resistance from the Lakota people’s attempt to deny Lewis and Clark passage down the Missouri River in 1804, to the Red Power movement’s demands for treaty enforcement in the 1960s, to today’s Indigenous-led fights against fossil fuel projects. Writing about the massacre at Wounded Knee, where 300 Indigenous men, women, and children were murdered by U.S. soldiers in 1890, Estes highlights the revolutionary premise of the nonviolent Ghost Dance movement the victims followed. With a long tradition of daring attempts at decolonization, Estes argues, Indigenous people represent a powerful challenge to the profit-driven forces that threaten continued life on the planet.

Even a city council meeting in small-town America, demands that mob allegiance to the Flag, one nation under god. I of course do not stand for any flag, and taking a knee is not my cup of tea. I am a taxpayer, teacher, volunteer, activist and informed member of no blind allegiance to any body or group or country. I do not stand for the pledge or the national anthem, and some people get pissed off, and some would like to take me out to the back of the woodshed and shoot me.

In any case, the city makes a large chunk of its yearly income from visitors, beach visitors, the ones that come to town and plop down hotel fees and restaurant fees and park fees and fill up their cars with fuel.

Forget the microplastics debate. Just the fact that plastic straws and plastic bags and Styrofoam cups are unnecessary for human survival, and they kill marine life, now how difficult is it to prohibit these luxury items? For beautification of the town and environs that make the most money on visitors, of all any ilk, all both sides of the same coin American, and many out of state visitors and if we’re lucky to meet them, out of the country tourists.

Yes, Japan and Norway and Iceland kill more whales each year than does the Safeway bag. Yes, US Navy sonar use and massive testing kill more whales than a plastic bag from Taco Bell does. Yes, more whales and other marine mammals are killed by ghost fishing gear and crab pot lines than the Target sofa sized plastic shopping bag does. Yes, non-point pollution – from sewage and stormwater drainage overflows or direct source Big Ag and Farming pesticides and fertilizers and industrial raised animal waste kill more fish overtime than does plastic Bic lighters do. But . . . the big but is how did we get in this place where shellfish warnings are given in a place that more or less looks pristine?

How is it that the Siletz Nation was ripped off by white men and the fiber wood felons who logged the hell out of this region, and now the forests reaching up to the coastline are clear-cut? Did I get to vote on that in Portland where I once worked? Who voted for confined animal feeding operations that produce more untreated manure, urine and body parts and blood than a small city produces and yet goes untreated, and many times is sludge that gets thrown across vast amounts of wild or green areas by the hundreds of square miles?

That is the contention, now, is it not? Do we vote for which glaciologist or paleo biologist or climatologist or chemist or ecologist or physicist or oceanographer or archaeologist or botanist or geologist gets to make the climate change theories relevant to the average person’s life?

That simple process of having youth speak at a city council meeting, where the council was either going to vote for or against the proposed plastic bag ban, or was going to vote for or against bringing the measure up for a future public vote, or for doing more study group meetings as a council and then bringing it up for a discussion and then council vote at a future city council vote (that’s what the city council ultimately without unanimous agreement voted for) — now that was the galvanizing moment last Monday.

Again, the city council and city manager and maybe a planner or two will meet and discuss the ordinance that was crafted and recrafted by Surfrider, and that non-profit looked at other communities with approved and in force bans of single use plastic bags.

It’s more than just a little disturbing that in 2019 we are having spasms around forcing these purveyors of pain and pollution and toxic food to rein in their paper-plastics-pesticides-food calorie footprints. Plastic bags, and yet this community, Newport, and this county – Lincoln County – are rife with tipping points that are in freefall: over-growth of population, over-growth of youth living in poverty over-growth of people working in the precarious labor market, over-growth of citizens about to be homeless in their pick-up trucks.

Aging in place with falling tresses on dilapidated homes. People who can’t name one person on their block. The adventures of surfing the internet and channel surfing for that just right story, yet not knowing who the mayor of your town is.

The conversation around plastic bags, man, this is the Pacific Coast, a town that depends on the fabric or façade of appearances – viewshed and beach beauty. This is a coast where the fiber felons clear cut all the way up to the estuaries, rivers and beachheads.

Talking about the inconvenience of banning plastic bags. Some believe this is governmental overreach. Those jack-booted government agents ripping those flimsy oil-based plastic bags from your cold dead hands.

This is what has happened in a society that has turned Tinsel Town into the mall experience, where Disneyland and Disney cruises are the ultimate forms of cultural experience.

Convenience. Hmm, how convenient is it to have to work for a felonious company like Amazon and rely on handouts and still have no health insurance? How convenient is it to let grandmother fester in her studio apartment with open sores and catatonic nightmares about being pulled out and thrown on the streets because she’s amassed too many medical bills and rent-past due letters and warnings that the water and electricity are about to be turned off until payment is remitted?

We worry about the sanctity of shopping with those lovely little single use plastic bags? Straws for slushy Starbucks concoctions? Jazzed up paper waxed lined boxes for our takeout double cheeseburgers and fish and chips?

Do we have to go to Chris Jordan again? I used to teach this in my college writing classes, looking at things, the Story of Stuff, the power of mass consumption to pull the blinders off our collective magical thinking:

The number of cups airlines use in an hour — disposable, not! Look at his stuff here, by photographer Jordan, By the Numbers!

Chris Jordan’s Albatross — watch! Look at the plastic and the albatross. Get blown away, man.

Then this daily consumption power (negative energy, entropy) of 7.4 billion people using those instant meal foil packages, all over the world. Plastic bags, all over the world. Flame retardant chems in every human being on earth, and then the shit hits the fan – every human has microbits and nano particles of plastics in their feces.

I’m curious when the city council vote or state capital amendment or federal election came up with my chance to vote on those realities? Atrazine in the food of babies and grandpa’s? The daily extrusion of more and more chemicals produced in the factories of the felons, forced into foods, additives, pillows, clothes, internal combustion engine lubes, facial creams and toothpastes, into the bottles of crap consumed, and the wild fish caught.

The vote, man, where’s that vote tally for the rest of the world which has taken the off-shoring of carbon chugging by the First World so those leaders can say they have reduced their CO2 output, even though those same countries consume all the metals and products produced in other countries, whose carbon dioxide footprints are chugging ahead to satisfy the needs of the multinational corporations and nefarious leadership of those countries to say, yes, “we Germans, have closed our coal-fired metal works factories and our air is clean.” While China and India burn, producing the junk of Germany.

In the scheme of things, the place to be is one where love and beauty can be captured, both in the eye and ears, in the touch and smell of life, in hearing birds rustling and waves crashing.

Who better than my literary muse and historical hero, communist Pablo Neruda:

Someday, somewhere – anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

[or],

We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

― Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day

I said in my last piece I’d be talking about Peter Ward’s book, Under a Green Sky. I also know that someone like Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers, also tugs at my consciousness. The reality of how geological time covers each 10,000 years of human history, in a blip of strata colliding with ocean and receding sea, or now, with each inch of sea wallowing up and moving into the fragile dungeons of our fears and dreams – cities along the coast.

Ward talks about that big impact, that dinosaur killing event with the asteroid — Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary around 66 million years ago that space-origin rock hit off the Yucatan peninsula. But then, what about 200 million years ago, that event known as the “Permian extinction”: it wiped out 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. While its origins challenged paleontologists, starting 30 years ago, this battle unfolded about whether it was from above.

Paleontologist Peter. D. Ward studied with others, that great Permian extinction, and it wasn’t some space object that did in the world’s living creatures. Rather, it was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide leading to climate change. And it wasn’t the heat that did them in, as in global warming or the greenhouse gas effect. In his book, we find out that the oceans, belching hydrogen sulfide did in the majority of all land, air and sea life. Think of the four of the five mass extinctions caused by too much carbon dioxide in the air which in turn fouled the oceans, which became stagnant and deadly.

Our fate is set in the same way, but it’s not basalt lava flows that are running up the CO2 levels; it’s our fossil fuel societies running up the carbon dioxide footprint. Deforested forests and jungles. Putrefying wetlands, and dying oceans. Methane releases now in the tundra zones. The albedo effect lessened because of less snow and glaciers, as well as dirty soot on snow and glaciers.

Yes, in 7 billion years, that sun of ours will implode and destroy us, planet earth. Yet, humanity is set on sixty second time frames, 28 day calendars, two year election cycles, 180-day school years, 100,000 mile bumper to bumper warranties.

Average human lifespan: 70 years. The solar year has 525,948 minutes and 48 seconds, and an average person has a heart rate of 80 beats per minute, then the total number of heartbeats in year would be 42,075,840 give or take a few seconds. That’s 3 billion heart beats for 70 years of living on earth by Homo Sapiens Plasitica/ Consumpithecus.

All of those heart beats placed in the scheme of things! We try and frame that – perspective and scheme of things when we talk about Trump and those who toxically back him word, line and verse. We try and frame the context of any US administration whose marching orders have always been about empire, manifest destiny, overreach and displacement: displacing of original peoples, displacing of African citizens, displacing of people’s in other countries, displacing of various sub-communities and sub-populations within the 50 states and handful of territories.

Unfolding in real time the 6th Mass Extinction is part and parcel the reality of (un)civilization, the guns, germs, steel and artificial intelligence of our times. It’s the reality embedded in the defamation and despoilment of our own communities, our own parks and national monuments. What sort of species will save the whale when in our own communities we allow for old people, or the sick and infirm, to be put out on the streets? What sort of wolf protection or bee loving self can muster up the energy to stop the killing fields this country, with the support of other countries like Israel, UK, Canada, EU, Saudi Arabia, has created through the veins and arteries that are the delivery system of Capitalism’s own blood and heart flow?

Capitalism that weighs the actuarial logic of how long it takes for a person to drop dead from overwork, over-pollution, over-burdens of finances? We live in a system that says 20 deaths from exploding gas tanks on modern vehicles is worth the price in arbitration and legal payouts versus recalling millions of models and setting up a new assembly process?

A society that has allowable (safe) limits of tens of thousands toxins and carcinogens and nerve-eating metals in water, air, food, soil? Beauty products with asbestos in the foundation? What society, what species of animal, would allow babies to be exposed to mercury or aluminum in vaccinations, yet, somehow, we are going to protect the albatross from nurdles, fishing monofilament and Bic lighters?

It’s that earth time, human time, the time it takes to wrap up this article and send it in on the Internet sphere: what does that all mean in the schema of people who believe in the arc of social justice coming back to whack all those capitalists and armies of the capitalists? All those flimflam artists and scammers and deadbeats and despots against human kind and earth systems, is it hope that keeps us floundering.

Yet, the average American, here in Newport, or in Hoboken, or Phoenix or Seattle, even Amazon-Boeing-Seattle, can’t see past their Maslovian Homo Sapiens Retailophithecus nose to save the gray wolf, save the orangutan, the golden toad, the bristle-cone pine, the everglades?

We are in these moments now, with instantaneous news feeds, Encyclopedia Britannica’s worth of information on every imaginable topic on the head of a straight-pin. We have an opinion about everything but very little depth about anything. We are not critical thinkers but criticizing shoppers and blamers. We are trapped in a hierarchy of needs way outside any desire or innate need to be people within communities. Struggling with the powerful, but we are collectively more powerful than all the Bezos’ and Gates’ and Bloombergs and Weinsteins and Koch Brothers combined.

Bearing Witness and an act of love for that species, which is really us, one species at a time. Chris Jordan: 

I shaped it like a sort of guided meditation. At the beginning of these ceremonies you usually have to face your fears and something really scary happens. This is how it starts: facing the horror of plastic. We start with horror and fear, but when aren’t scared anymore then we open up to curiosity and learning. There’s a scene that I specifically talk about fear as birds have no fear of us. Then there’s a scene of curiosity as birds come towards the camera and look right into it in such an amazing way. In the presence of curiosity we get the encounter of others and we experience empathy. Empathy and curiosity are the beginning of connection. And connection is the beginning of love. As we fall in love with the birds we also see in multiple ways that they’re filled with plastic and begin to experience grief. That’s the core of the film – the understanding and experience of grief. Grief is not a bad feeling. It’s not the same of despair. It’s a sort triangle: it’s beauty, sadness and love, all mixed together. It’s incredibly vivid, it’s the experience of being alive and so it’s electrically powerful. It’s almost an ecstatic experience that connects you deeply with life.

What Albratross is really about is shifting consciousness and this is the attention behind the film and project. By shifting consciousness I mean reconnecting more deeply with our love for the living world. That’s really my wish. I want to spread Albatross as far as possible as it’s a love story, a love offering on behalf of all life, not only albatrosses.

Needle in a haystack. Little Dutch Boy putting fingers in leaking dike.

The beach clean-up along the Central Oregon Coast, near Devils Punch Bowl, down south to Beverly Beach, is an exercise in patience, Sisyphus, maybe, as many beach and marine life lovers are volunteering with tweezers in hand harvesting the global micro-plastic blasts.

Might as well have a fork to bring with you to help harvest all the world’s wheat crops.

Piece by piece. Or, scoops of sand, with organic matter like shells pieces and driftwood and these microplastic and plastic nurdles plopped on a gurney-sized fine mesh, is akin to, what, using one household colander to strain the daily pasta and noodle intake in Oregon?

Scott Rosin is tall, grizzled, and head of Surfriders Central Oregon Coast. He’s chair of the Newport Chapter. Another chapter is called Siuslaw Surfriders, taken from the Newport-Yachats area where we live in, specifically the Siuslaw National Forest, also named after the river that runs through it to the Pacific.

Ahh, Rosin – former arborist, former surfer (his shoulder was blasted out in forestry work – he uses a paddle board to ride five-foot waves or less), poet and local activist – has been heading up this plastic clean-up on six consecutive Sundays, noon to 4 pm, on an incredible beach made to order for picnickers and surfers, even in March.

Helping hands included a few women, Mike Harrington, a 72-year-old member of the Siuslaw Chapter of Surfrider, and a black lab whose owner was down on her knees pulling out plastics of every color and shape.

This is what Scott told the Newport News recently about his efforts:

“It would be great if we could get more locals involved.  The beaches here are, or were, as beautiful as anywhere in the world. I’ve surfed and played on these beaches since 1973. I can tell you that the problem of visible plastic pollution here has rown exponentially.

Nobody knows what the full effects of plastic pollution may be. This isn’t a disaster that you can see coming, like a forest fire or a hurricane. I anticipate a long road to educating ourselves about the dangers involved.

It’s the local newspaper, and a message of doom and gloom and setting the doomsday clock to 11^th hour (actually, 11:58) before the apocalyptic midnight hour hits doesn’t sit well for a local rag that sells ads for real estate, B&B’s, summer cottages, whale watching tours, crab fests, and buy-buy-eat-eat-consume-consume visitors.

Scott and I talked the real stuff tied to not just the amount of plastics in the ocean, and not just the bad-bad-bad hypotheticals of animals eating plastic and then humans eating them up, through the food chain. Anyone with a brain knows that whales and albatrosses and Homo Sapiens should NOT be engorged with fossil fuel polymers.  

We talked about these ideas of Americans thinking infinite population growth rates, infinite GDP rates, infinite investment profits, or infinite timber harvesting and infinite consumption and pollution ARE god-given natural born rights.

The local rag will not allow such real systems thinking discourse in the newspaper’s news or features sections.

One irony is that Scott and Surfriders and members of SOLV (Stop Oregon Litter and Vandalism) and the few volunteers from the American Cetacean Society might not realize that the Siuslaw people (nation) lived in villages along the river until 1860.

Siuslaw Nation had been for hundreds of years living well and understanding the land, the estuaries, the ecosystems, the whales and avian world, the fish and fauna. The Siuslaw like all First Nations knew the limits of growth, the carrying capacities of their tribes, the allowable safe limit of killing animals or harvesting food.

So, these natural and long-studied indigenous people who could be here teaching in Oregon’s schools and advising all sectors of government and business, well, they no longer have a practiced language. We may romanticize that Oregon Trail story (even Woodie Guthrie has his song, Oregon Trail), but in 1860 the Siuslaw Nation was forcibly removed to an Indian reservation in Yachats. And, then, quickly those homes, farms, gardens and villages were destroyed and occupied by U.S. settler-colonists.

Now California transplants are on the beach trying, in herculean effort, to stop the infinite plastics tide from fouling everything they came to the Oregon Coast for in the first place.

From the evidence of locals who are blind to the plastic issue, and looking out at these Surfriders and others, young and grizzled, passersby seem to think the volunteers are a blast from the past. Environmentalists, who stick out like anachronous wandering souls, are the minority, as more and more business-as-usual and business-as-usual-to-the-tenth-power proponents have colonized the beach resorts, the city councils, school boards, county commissioner courts.

This Central Oregon Coast is magnificent, but even along the largest ocean covering 42 percent of the earth’s surface (62 million square miles), the Pacific (and the deepest of all oceans at that), microplastics from fish totes originating in Alaska come to the beach in small and colorful forms for a few volunteers to pick at.

Thousands of sets of ghost fishing gear, equipment, supplies – all polymers – tumbling along the ocean currents and ocean floor, ending up floating at the surface, or just below. Colorful bits of oil-stretched plastic which sea life take for sea nutrients. 

Birds eat the plastics. Mammalian marine life forms eat the plastic. Fish eat it. The extra big yearly tides – the King Tides – push the plastic way up on the tideline. Now Homo Sapiens Plastica is out in small numbers trying to battle the plastic snow storm with a leaf blower.

Scott has never seen this amount of plastic in his 46 years fishing, playing and making a living in this part of the Oregon Coast.

We talked about plastic in every human being’s feces (recent scientific paper on that tidbit). We talked about how by 2050 plastic floating around the ocean and on the bottom will outweigh the total mass of all the organic-living matter in the ocean (another series of scientific papers). I talked about the plastics fouling the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific, the deepest canyon in the world — 1,580 miles long and 43 miles wide and maxing out at 36,070 feet deep from the surface.

In yet another scientific series of papers, researchers have ROV’s – remotely operated vehicles – filming plastic bags floating in the deepest ocean trench. Worse yet, the foundation of the food chain – amphipods – in each collection over many months resulted in every single crustacean-like animal containing plastic remnants in their guts.

We can read white paper after detailed scientific paper, but the bottom line is if humanity were to use even one-thousandth of our collective common sense, we’d all be ranting and raving about stopping plastic production and use of straws, wraps, single use bags, containers, nurdles.

Forget the fact that plastics are oil based, and the process of polymerizing them involves a lot of electricity, toxins, off gassing and communities around the world exposed to the industrial toxins and waste products part and parcel tied to the entire harvesting, transportation (by a factor of 3 or 4) and production process.

Lucky for me, I can be a member of various touchy feely groups and do some volunteer work with them, but I am not longer hobbled by my scientific credentials or teaching certificates or so-called neutral journalistic standards. I can see through the hubris, magical thinking, delusional belief systems, the false hope and the elephants in the room as people in this society – good folks like Scott Rosin and others I met at a naturalist certification program I went through with the American Cetacean Society –have their hearts in the right place, and many times their minds, but their guts are missing the fact that revolutionary change has to happen.

Not a future of greenie Jetsons, but rather a future like the Flintstones is only going to answer the call now.

I also ran into another old timer, like Mike Harrington, a member of Surfrider who ended up in Oregon in 1976, originally from Central California. He packed up the VW van and got his 20 acres near Eddyville.

He said he came here with two children and a wife, because he wanted his kids to be raised where nature and wildlife both counted and were part of their daily lives.

He’s made his livelihood as a farrier, and we joked about just who his customers are – well-off, bourgeoise, and those with big bucks and the largest ecological footprints.

It’s super tedious, this sieving the wet sand and separating the plastic from the organic matter. Harrington knows it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket (now it’s the drops in the ocean tub). “You have to start somewhere. I want to make this world a better world for my kids and grandkids. I guess it makes me feel better doing this.”

Amanda Zimmerman and Joanna Davis are sisters doing the bit by bit plastic treasure hunt. The sun is out, more than two dozen surfers are seeking curls, families are making sand castles, and the warmer winter Pacific shore waters are enticing some to go in up to their knees.

Joanna says she has to do something. She too is from California, and now is a 28-year-old living in Portland, wanting that Portlandia lifestyle. She has no children, wants none to bring in the world, and she tells me she’s shocked at how few shells and sand dollars she has seen seeing at Pismo Beach, the closest beach to her when she lived in Bakersfield.

The March 4 City Council meeting in Newport will discuss whether to go forward on proposing a single use plastic shopping bag ban ordinance. There will be many citizens there speaking on behalf of the proposed ban. Scott will be there, after having sent in written testimony.

I’ve looked at the rationales of the no-to-the-ban citizens, and from the plastics lobby and grocery store lobby. Imagine, 2019, a small city with 11,000 residents, and swelling to three times that in the summer months, and it can’t even wrestle with a plastic bag ban.

Even Forbes Magazine, rag of the uber rich, the uber capitalists, lists the coming age of plastic bag bans. But, again, if we can’t get Puerto Rico’s lights back on, and if we can’t even fund our PP12 schools, and if we thrown money at Military Industrial Complex thieves and let them laugh to the bank, are we going to deal with climate change?

Ahh, more coming soon, on Peter Ward’s talk, Under a Green Sky (great book I reviewed).

You have Wallace Smith Broecker, the ‘grandfather’ of climate science, just recently leaving a final warning for Earth at an ASU climate change conference via web right before he succumbed to Chronic Heart Failure. I’ll talk about him in a future blog-article.

We’ll talk about the humanity in all of this new fangled (not really) New Green Deal, which is again just another way to let Musk, Bezos, Silicon Valley, Gates, Dell and other techies play libertarian green game of thrones.

Plastics, man. And get this: Oregon’s States Parks will not let Scott and his cronies bring a solar-powered pump to get ocean water to their sieving stations. Imagine that, they have to haul all this water in 5 gallon buckets hundreds of feet to wash out the sand. Solar powered.

The state’s reasoning: “Well, goddamned goldminers might see this four hour operation and think: ‘Hell, I can bring in my gold mining dredges and pumps and arsenics and such. Damn fine idea.’”

Are we going to really mitigate the worse and even least of the worse outfalls from climate change when we can’t even issue a special issue permit for greenies to use a portable water pump to clean plastics from the beach?

We love to believe that high-tech innovations will fix everything. To produce all of our fanciful technology, many of the raw materials are derived from exploiting other people’s land (Africa, South America, Asia), and the manufacturing comes at the expense of other people’s health and livelihood. Let’s hope eliminating this sort of environmental racism figures into the GND platform. Beyond that, thus far in the course of humanity, our technology has only further amplified all of our detrimental ecological issues. It involves over-consuming natural resources and over-producing more of what we don’t need, while leaving us with less of what we do – organisms and ecological systems.

People are saying the Green New Deal is impossible. What is impossible is saving our planetary ecosystem while preserving our current way of life. For any GND legislation to be successful, it must work to conserve more rather than produce more. Moreover, it must facilitate collective radical personal changes to our way of life that fundamentally change the underlying paradigms of our existence. Otherwise, it will be as fleeting as the original New Deal, and ultimately much more deadly.

When it comes to a Green Deal, the only sustainable policies are radical ones. And when it comes to a sustainable global environmental paradigm, unless you are talking about the natural world, less is always more.

Kristine Mattis received her PhD in Environmental Studies. As an interdisciplinary environmental scholar with a background in biology, earth system science, and policy, her research focuses on environmental risk information and science communication. Before returning to graduate school, Kristine worked as a medical researcher, as a science reporter for the U.S. Congressional Record, and as a science and health teacher.

Forbes Magazine list for Oregon and Washington. See all the places for which a ban is in effect — HERE.

KENMORE            WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags, 5-cent fee on paper bags

LA CONNER        WA        Town-wide ban on plastic bags

PORT ANGELES WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags less than 225 mm, 5-cent tax on all bags

TACOMA             WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags less than 225 mils thick

FRIDAY HARBOR                WA        Town-wide ban on plastic bags

SAN JUAN COUNTY         WA        County-wide ban on plastic bags

TUMWATER       WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

THURSTON COUNTY       WA        County-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

OLYMPIA             WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

LACEY    WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

MERCER ISLAND               WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags

SHORELINE         WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

ISSAQUAH          WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

MUKILTEO          WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags

PORT TOWNSEND            WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND       WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

BELLINGHAM     WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

SEATTLE               WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

EDMONDS          WA        City-wide ban on plastic bags

MILWAUKIE       OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

MANZANITA      OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

MCMINNVILLE  OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

HOOD RIVER      OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

FOREST GROVE OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

ASHLAND            OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags and 10-cent fee on paper bags

EUGENE               OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

CORVALLIS          OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags and 5-cent fee on paper bags

PORTLAND          OR         City-wide ban on plastic bags

I’ve been straddling the void, so to speak: I have had a disgust with this Imperial Society so long that down looks up, man. Slip streaming through the wastelands of America, first, as a kid wrestling in Tucson and having huge confrontations with fellow high school punks, racists against the Mexican-Americans on the other side of town, racists against the Native Americans up north, and racists against the African Americans recruited by the hometown basketball and football teams – University of Arizona Wildcats.

I hated and fought the bulldozers tearing up the Sonora, hated and fought the trappers wanting every god-damned coyote and other vermin cleared from the land, hated and fought the people on both sides of the foolish Tupperware or Rubbermaid parties who backed the baby killers and old lady rapers called US Uniformed Services.

The Minutemen along the border, shooting up crossers and holding at gunpoint, again grannies, old men and women, I hated them and did things to some of their crusades. .

I had nothing in common with the haters, the levelers, the people who gushed over July 4th bombs bursting in air, gushed over the Superbowl, gushed over the Oscars, gushed over the cheap flights to Vegas and Honolulu and Mazatlan. I knew even before Tucson and the border and my work in Mexico that the project of Empire was based on Puritanical lies, slavery of the mind, and the Mad Men in every branch of government and all sectors of the economy doing that soft shoe bait and switch akimbo with the minds and tax coffers of more and more distracted dumb-downed deluded magical thinking members of this sideshow carnival society.

Blind allegiance to something, that’s the American way, even those who see themselves as stripes of another zebra. Capitalism as a system of putting on the backs of the majority the pain and suffering and failures of the elite’s project to accumulate more and more wealth, land, power, industries, economies of scale toward human obsolescence, well, that was weighing on the 15-year-old’s heart, wrestling my way through anger in Southern Arizona with people who were not of my tribe, people from an alternative belief system, or at least I was from some alternative universe.

I felt like shit living in the skin of a teenage boy in Arizona, anywhere, in the US of A, and I had zilch in common with more and more people. Older people, that’s who I gravitated toward. Misbegotten hobos, they called themselves, or outlaws – bad check writers, credit union and small time hold up artists, drug dealers, Vietnam vets in motorcycle clubs or living in trailers out in nowhere Sonora Desert. Shitkickers who wanted nothing of US government, US lifestyles, US consumerism, US ideals.

I gravitated toward Mexicans who lived tight with other Mexicans, illegal crossers who seemed to know how poverty is the system designed to divide and conquer, as the once poor, with enough toil or scamming, get to play in the land of the middle class.

God, country, apple pie, and mother? Schools were are joke, because the idealism that young people should have garnered, the rebellion and the anti-authority tendencies we have as youth, creativity, genius, those were the things that the powers that be fought against.

Whew, that was then, 1972, and here I am struggling in Oregon, meeting the riptide of humanity along the Oregon Coast, a hardscrabble existence of boom or bust, displaced people, and old timers who have seen the entire place transformed into dichotomous America in microcosm: those who have put down roots, did the logging and fishing and crabbing thing, and then those who have wads of cash from California or Texas or Portland who have set up dream summer homes along one of the more incredible coastlines along this country’s two sides of the land mass.

Here I am doing the education thing again, teaching, right in the middle of the muck – some of my first gigs as substitute teacher have been right in the middle of grades 1 through 6, an emotional-intellectual-spiritual tender for those vulnerable years, those formative years, the years where the real difference in a child’s life could be enhanced by a society that throws its all into education, into teaching instead of training, mentoring instead of dictating, embracing creativity instead of stifling free thinking.

What a perfect time for young people to finally get the hands-on work of artists, historians, biologists, nurses and doctors, writers, farmers, tradesmen/tradeswomen. What a perfect time to help youth learn cooperative thinking, communitarian ideals, and have a chance to learn about and practice revolutionary thought.

Instead the schools look like old Army post barracks, and the lackluster curriculum is so dumb-downed that so many potentially fantastically creative and smart youth end up passing through the sieve of standardized education.

Yes, that age, 6, 7, 8, 9 squirrelly, but really, collectively in 2019, the entire mess is busted. Parents working three jobs, parents arguing about when to finally pull up stakes or drag in the anchor and head out of these small coastal towns. Fractured families, now, with 1 out of 1.9 marriages in disunion by 5 years in. This is the time of reckoning for young people, yet we are teaching them the hate of the country, the values of bombing other people, the ideals of dog-eat-dog capitalism, having them celebritize and honor the luxuries of the rich, and thereby forcing young kids to even give a shit about multimillionaire talent-less singers, movie idols and arbiters of crass culture.

Pizza and French fries lathered up in ketchup and ranch dressing in the cafeteria. Lunch rooms that are so loud it seems like an election night announcement that Hillary won. These little people are shuffled from recess to special reading classes, and from lunch room to classroom.

Children can’t sit still, and many are on the spectrum; and, really, there is no respect at all taught to them about elders, teachers, groups of other people. It is all for one — me-myself-and-I. How can we blame them with leaders like Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump!?

We know how to do things right; there’s no big black hole of head scratching on “how to solve the education crisis” bullshit. We know that experiential learning works. We know that smaller hands-on classes work. We know that having mentors in the families’ homes mentoring parents works. We know that parents having mandatory and company-supported days off for co-learning in the schools works. We know that music and second and third languages work before age 12. We know that art and science blended together works.

We know that the face of a nation, or the globe, is dependent on the next and the next generation and next ones after those “getting it.” We know that more learning works, and more cultural crack cocaine leads to more zoned-out and zombie-like adults. So no more crack cocaine pop culture, consumer-mad-men junk to consume and electing idiots who bag the money and run away from the real solutions.

We know that today, low wages and high living expenses and barely scrapping by and no public safety nets reap more and more scattered thinking, more and more survival of the fittest mindset, more and more children who can’t learn, won’t read, don’t know how to think.

We set upon our youth a firestorm of false ideologies of consumerism, false beliefs in might makes right, a false religion that America is the only nation to count and all the rest are against us.

Hey, so, here’s this truism: many of the venues I teach at I am the ONLY male instructor, and the staff and children alike wonder when I am putting in my application for full-time work. “Sir, we have been trying to get a male teacher hired on here for years,” is a common refrain from fellow teachers. High fives from the full-time staff for me, a guy, making it through a full day of 2nd graders.

Managed chaos. So many young children with behavioral plans. So many children with learning disabilities, with anxiety disorders, with self-esteem issues, with socialization complexes and with family burdens.

Of course, a society can be judged harshly on how it treats its children and elderly and infirm. Of course, a society can be judged on how many permissible levels of toxins, heavy metals, particulates, VOCs, neurological disrupters, endocrine scramblers end up in the soil, air, water, food of our youngest and most vulnerable of citizens.

Input, output. Mindless and meaningless and dehumanizing consumerism and popular culture (sic). Output, input.

Meaning in one’s life means a full-force commitment to the vulnerable, to youth, to individuals and families who are the backbone of labor, community, the arts. Meaningfulness means food security, economic opportunities at the local level, a real sense of a downtown and real town, no matter how rural the place might be.

Health clinics that serve the poor and the middle class alike. More and more interactive teaching and cross-discipline scholarship; and real work on stopping the lacerations against the poor, the working poor, the poor and aging, the sick and aging and poor, the young and homeless and poor, the enlightened youth and college aged adults who have solutions that the pigs of politics in those chambers of death could only imagine in their most enlightened moment.

So, interestingly, what I am a conjuring up is probably stuck in my brain and heart, and my gut gets it. But nothing that I say will work in capitalism, inside this out-of-balance society. Ironically, I started off wanting to go off on this insipid piece of journalism (sic) in New York Magazine.

Somehow this five-year old article got stuck in one of my hundreds of feeds, the one tied to urban planning, land use, New Urbanism, etc.
5 Reasons Cities Are Getting Better, and Everywhere Else Is Getting Worse.

As cities grow, their advantages of scale will grow, too. From 2012 to 2013, U.S. metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people grew twice as fast as cities with fewer than 250,000 residents. Downtown areas — the places where density is highest — are growing even faster. And millennials, who both start tech companies and form much of the consumer base for tech products, are flocking to cities in record numbers. The convergence of these trends means that large cities are not only going to get bigger in the coming years, but better.

I’ve lived in big cities, in suburbs, and in rural towns. All three have their charms. But new research shows that cities are much more likely to benefit from today’s massive wave of consumer tech investment — think delivery drones, self-driving cars, and green-energy innovations. The fact that many of these technologies are being developed and deployed first in densely populated urban zones, rather than in the countryside, means that in the future, cities are going to pull further away from rural and suburban areas economically, and carry a much higher quality-of-life premium than smaller towns.

A new report about so-called “innovation zones” is one of the clearest so far on the subject of urban tech growth. The report, by Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner of the Brookings Institution, claims that while innovation used to take place in loosely packed suburban areas like Silicon Valley, innovation in the 21st century is moving into large cities, which have several major advantages:

1. Physical assets
2. Economic assets
3. Network effects and cross-pollination
4. Density as a service
5. Special status

So much is wrong with anything coming out of the East Coast, really. The media and the so-called Press and the Publishers make a grown man cry with how out of touch and mean-to-the-rest-of-flyover-USA these pathetic souls can be in their hip and urbane bullshit. And what they take as god’s truth is so messed up that another trail of tears has to be shed just to get through the thought processes and elitism these freak-on-vators believe.

First, the stupidity of promoting these five “advantages” as if this is headline news; it shows the shallowness of the East Coast and their echo chambers – all those Ivy League and East Coast prime colleges loaded to the rafters with shallow thinkers and white paper tigers and endless department captains selling the same story ever told.

The takeaway for this magazine piece? “Move to a city.”

Maybe it would take me writing a book about the illogic of these captains of industry and Richard Florida bums who believe that innovation, high tech, and dense cities are the only places that count. As they depend on all the natural and agricultural and mined and harvested resources of the hinterland. Of these rural small towns, burbs, towns and townships.

We need more rural towns and burbs thriving, not less. Imagine, cities like Newport and Lincoln City or Coos Bay, as sanctuaries of people I write about all the time – the misbegotten, the retired-but-poor-as-Grapes-of-Wrath, the people of the land, the innovators in agroecology, the stewards of forest, estuary, reef, river. Imagine, green buses that transport big city people to green small rural communities where tulips are grown and apples thrive, and where that feta cheese is produced and that fresh air is filled with DNA-enhancing ions. Imagine real quaint communities and real meaningful places where the city or its harbingers are not the centerpiece of everything.

Where pounding nails into homemade furniture is the value added, not some robotics-fueled IKEA madness. Imagine small is better homes, hummingbird feeders fashioned out of old pickle jars, passive solar and incredible community and community-served private gardens. Aging in place and young people starting in life on the same properties. Imagine reading, hiking, fishing, identifying every tree, bush, insect marine life as values, as opposed to hipster, bullshit tech-centric crap tied to the industrial finance-military-surveillance-banking-prison-indentured-debt complex?

I’m thinking of these kids on the coast and some miles inland from the coast, small-towns, and a society that says this ain’t no place to stay, no place to raise a family, no place to see the world, no place to advance, no place for big dreams and tech wannabes.

Talk about a systemic existential crisis, this bullshit America of the billionaire Mafia president and the multimillionaires like Feinstein. Speaking of which, this DiFi, can’t even talk to fourth graders and other students of high school age.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) net worth: 2004: $61,768,616; 2014: $94,202,571. Increase in 10 years: $32,433,955 (+52.58%).

That speaks volumes now, and so, flyover states, the decrepit places, the struggling masses, the majority of Americans who actually have been colonized by mindless marketers of Lucky Charms and Lady Gaga and New England Patriots, they, with the right E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N, these people on both sides of the political dung heap, and those now in the dozen-plus vying for the Democrat nomination, it speaks volumes how they will forever court the high tech god of salvation.

We know how to solve climate change. We know how to solve homelessness. We know how to educate the right way. We know how to eat well, live fine and thrive in a holistic and preventative health care frame.

We know what a healthy family is, what a healthy community is, and what a good “nation” should be. We know how to think globally, act globally and be that diversity quilt of a million colors.

We know that treating us “bumpkins” in these small towns and those children in those small-town schools with the same dignity and seriousness as one treats a Bostonian or New Yorker is the right way to be an American.

We have solutions, those of us who are disenfranchised, those of us who have lived a fuller and more complete life than any Georgetown University creep could even dream of in their wildest imaginations. The solutions and solutionaries are right here, everywhere, any place, where the pigs of capital failed to look or acknowledge our existence because they are so big city inbred they can’t hit a solution to this madness with their apocalyptic- inspired ICBMs.

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.”
― Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban


“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
own.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

Oh, the contradictions or counter-intuitive nature of being a taxpaying USA citizen, one who has always been a socialist, one who has since age 14 knew the two-party system is a killer Continuing Criminal Enterprise – both internally, to our own people, and to the rest of the world. This decay of America was the decay set upon this beautiful land from the first colonies, those superstitious and money-grubbing first-LLC pigs of capital. It just got worse everyday from way back then, that Plymouth Rock illegal alien moment, up until this very second!

I can blame those other white people – Spanish and French for also impregnating this continent with the syphilis of greed, religion, rape, subjugating and decay.

Killing, raping first nations people, and stealing land and pushing them into open prisons, that’s the kernel of the decay that now, at 350 million, we are witnessing. What’s the saying, the chickens have come to roost.

You can’t be on the right side of history because in this country, history is white-washed, twisted, tweaked, missing, thrown away and retrofitted to fit the narrative of the white ruling classes.

And, the arc of a moral universe, as MLK quoted another clergyman, is not toward justice:

Martin Luther King cites, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This metaphor was originally devised by Theodore Parker, a Unitarian Minister, in an 1853 collection of sermons.

The universe, being amoral, and the rich and new gilded class and their sycophants and Little Eichmann’s not being about morality, but immorality. Trump is just a speck of dust on that arc of chemtrails from shot-out missiles of his administration and of all the other administrations of mass murderers and despotic rulers/leaders and racists and sociopaths-as-politicians/generals/CEOs/presidents/prime ministers.

Contradictions. I recently worked in the Salvation Army’s homeless veterans’ program in Beaverton, as a social worker, but not FOR the Starvation Army. That outfit is a punishment-centered place, where the values of being a band of brothers/sisters are thrown out the window in a mean-spirited attitude that the homeless center is/will be a dumping ground for veterans and their families whose butts in beds make the non-profit money from us US Taxpayer.

I sent in a raft of grievances to the powers that be at the VA and Salvation Army, and that has been to no avail. Whistleblower Treated Like Ted Bundy! should be the headline of my tenure there!

In so many ways, I have worked in but not for various organizations throughout my life. Working as a journalist, print, along the US-Mexico border, I was working in newsrooms owned by rich people but not FOR these rich men. In community colleges and universities, I was working for the benefit of the students, for creating spaces of giving and offering students tools to think outside the boxes that have hobbled hope and good potential, versus working FOR the presidents and provosts and institutional leadership wonks and other Admin class and so-called Dean-let who hobble thinking, hate anti-authoritarian mettle and have allowed for public our colleges to be gutted by the corporations and parsed away, support wise, by the state who is mandated to fund the education of our future doers, thinkers, leaders.  

This counter-intuitiveness is that I should have been monkeywrenching hard at any of the places I ended up in. Everywhere I have worked as an employee has been chock-full of ameliorating, careerist, credentialist and counter-productive folk. They are the warped and power-hungry professional managerial class, and even if they are mandated in their PR-drenched mission statements to work to help homeless adults, substance abuse clients, students in PK12, what have you, they are some of the worst people on the planet because they do hateful, mean and dictatorial things to not just the staff and front-line workers, but to the clients.

I should be scared shitless, at 62, with little prospect of getting even a moldy crumb from the rancid crust of the American dream pie. I never fit in, and here I am, living a precarious life with a significant other who works her fingers to the bone to provide for a college-going daughter and just survival.

What follows is emblematic of the big picture covered up by the culture wars idiots running the media, Madison Avenue, Mansions of Madness we call State Capitals. Here, also, an example of floundering local news, from Lincoln City, but telling in terms of this couple’s story:

Drifting seniors face trying times

LINCOLN CITY — The elderly couple has no idea what is next. They’re broke, in poor health, and out time.

Driven by poverty into a gypsy existence, Ralph and Diane Simon have ghosted from one coastal campground to the next for more than a decade, haunting the very cheapest places they can rest their bones, all the while eating, sleeping and carrying on their lives in a 16-foot fifth-wheel trailer.

For a while, it worked. But time and decay have caught up with the Simons.

On Feb. 6, the couple was headed north to a campground in Pacific City. Right around the Taft area, the goose-neck hitch on the trailer folded, came loose and began to destroy the bed of their pickup. Trickling out their last dollars to a tow truck driver and a discounted room at Chinook Winds Casino, they have spent the last two weeks in limbo, waiting for repairs to be finished.

Ralph Simon is 82. His wife is 76.

Of course, the writer and the editors get the rest of the story wrong, very wrong, because this is the face of this Central Oregon Coast – the real face. This is not some isolated incident. This is not a minority report. The fact that the USA has tens and tens of millions of citizens shackled by the capitalist system of no public transportation, no cross country trains, no rent control laws, no public gardens, no low impact and low cost intentional communities, no checks and balances put on the political trash and their paymasters —  Fortune 2000 companies one and all —  no public health and free clinics at every end of any town east-west-south-north out of town on any main drag, this is just part of the story any local rag should be delving into constantly, daily.

This couple, 82 and 76, is the by-product of capitalism and all its systems of penury. Both husband and wife victims of bad legislation, victims of profit-for-the-highest-bidder health insurance agencies, victim of fractured communities, victims of privatized everything, victims of bad food bad air, bad soil. The story in this Lincoln City rag should be pounding each issue with headline marques sounding the alarm to the reality many of us live: of the one-paycheck away from . . . one-bad legal situation from . . . one-medical issue/procedure away from . . . one-termination away from . . . one-eviction away from . . . one-dementia diagnosis away from . . . one-mental health breakdown away from . . . one chronic illness away from HOMELESSNESS. This is the society we have allowed ourselves to be snookered into accepting.

Central Coast Oregon, and the streets are filled with revelers from Portland, Eugene, Bend, when the sun hits our whale-espied shores. Business is boom and bust/boom or bust. The homes are either gorgeous (sic) examples of opulence, or for the most part, dilapidated and rafter-heavy/roof-swaying beat down hovels.

We’re talking about trashed-out single-wide manufactured homes (AKA trailers) selling for $160,000 on one-quarter acre lots three or five miles away from any beach view. Neighbors living in various states of struggle and substance abuse challenges.  Pot holes and pot smokers.

This obsession with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, with remodeling shows, with roadside diner TV series, or iron chef specials, that is the great American disease of consumption-itis: a woeful journey into the nether chambers of fantasy, delusion, and see-hear-speak no evil against the perpetrators of this gilded age, this rich-for-themselves-at-any-cost elite (sic) group, against the majority of us who, for the most part, are looking to stay simple, raise a family, count on some ray of hope that work will benefit one getting the other American Dreamscape – some retirement, some protection from eviction, tons of protections from being thrown into the poorhouse, and, unfortunately, some guarantee 18 million empty homes and a few million empty commercial buildings might be put to some good use.

Contradictions. Sure, I have fought against standardized testing. I have fought against the normalization of consumption and abiding by the rulers’ rules in PK12 education, and into the four-year schools of higher education.

I know it’s counter-intuitive to work as an educator, and now, back as a substitute teacher, and attempting to believe any a modicum of the systems set in place that are education’s foundation. Children are being short-shafted many ways.

I get that schools are dumb-downed, and that much of the time is spent on “discipline” issues and getting set up and having children follow rules like little brown-shirts. I know that curricula are wasted or empty or silly. I know that sitting in the chair and being corralled by repetition and inane classroom projects isn’t going to set the stage for a new generation of leaders as revolutionaries.

Everyone is a critic, though, when it comes to my professions –journalism, education (college and PK12), and working as a social worker for homeless and substance abused challenged individuals.

Most of these people who chaff on their wooden high horses are full of shit, to be sure. Again, it’s like having to defend all-American and fully-capitalist Bernie Sanders from the idiotic Democrats who support folks like Biden or Beto or Hillary.

Children I work with as a PK12 teacher are struggling, big time. More and more nervous ticks, more and more learning disabilities, more and more food allergies, more and more significant life survival disabilities, both physical and intellectual. More and more children are products of Disney, McDonald’s and Walmart; and the stuff that they have to do in school is idiotic and pedagogically bizarre.

That being said, though, imagine both parents working (some two jobs each), and imagine the cost of day-care, and imagine the types of jobs parents have, and imagine the struggles to even think outside their adult parental boxes, dealing with children who are voracious for mentoring and leadership, but who instead get remote controls, iPads, celebrity cult training, and parents who are not readers, writers, artists, thinkers, and really not deeply committed to raising children. Parents know nothing about teaching children because they too are products of consumerism and capitalist Criminal Continuing Enterprises.

Elementary school kids are beautiful, for sure, but they are in need of gigantic paradigm shifts and multiple flippings of the script. I am many times the only male teaching adult in the schools where I substitute. I am many times the only teacher who speaks Spanish, here in a county that has 25 percent of its total population as Spanish speakers.

Get my point now: we can only stop the theft of our tax coffers, the destruction of our environment, the denuding of our futures, the rejiggering of power for the few, the rich, against the majority, us, with strong education. It takes a town and community, up and down the economic spectrum and demographic profile, to raise a child, teach a teen, and grow leaders who will do the right thing.

Instead, much more time by instructional staff is devoted to working with children with behavioral improvement plans, with IEPs (educational plans set up specifically for youth with some significant impediments to learning through books, paper and pencil), and with youth that are on the autism spectrum and have significant intellectual/development disabilities.

We need MORE schools, MORE teachers, MORE creative ways to reach the young while they are ripe for deeply embedding into themselves the codes of the anarchist, the anti-authoritarian, the critical thinking and critically creative youth that will be the ones leading the charge to put the Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos types in jail, leading the charge to begin breaking up utilities and monopolies, in designing the new ecosocialism and intentional communities to allow them to survive with some forms of dignity this unfolding climate chaos. And to stop perpetual war.

We do this with hands-on schools, not schools that look like prisons. The one elementary school I taught at yesterday was like a broken down Piggly Wiggly from 1960 than a hallowed hall of learning for the young. An embarrassment. Kids in drafty, ugly, plain, chipping, molding schools (sic).

Imagine community schools, where students spend time with elders, with the soil, with the rivers and sea. Daily. Imagine knowing how to build a solar panel out of junk. Imagine growing real gardens and canning those products. Imagine learning how to make films and how to connect to the globe in distant education projects with kids from other countries.

Imagine teepees, talking circles around fires, and imagine parents supported and encouraged to learn with the children, alongside.

The system now is broken, but these children have little at home, in many cases. Emotionally-distant, or over-worked fathers and mothers. Mothers and fathers depressed, one pay check away from emotional suicide.

Imagine real food, real restaurants coming in, real field trips, real music classes, real people teaching alongside the traditional (sic) teacher. Imagine, really doing something for all our futures by investing in the next and the next and the next generation.

Contradictions. Yes, I did bus duty, hall monitoring, reading classes, even time in the cafeteria with K through 6 graders. Yesterday. Yes, I am working off the books so to speak. No contract, no tenure track, no state retirement plan. Imagine the precarity in my own situation, yet I get off my ass, and I teach. It may be ugly and all counter to my way of amassing a best practices PK12 system, but I am there learning and giving, while I hear the bombast, stupidity, ignorance of citizen x and politician y and business owner z when they try and weigh in on what’s broken-wrong-bad about Education.

Bullshit. It’s the bullshit of the do-nothings, the people who are all shitting on this, shitting on that. And some would think I am one of the negative Nellie’s, but, come on, I show the fuck up. I end up as social worker for adults just out of prison, for foster youth in the system, for drug-abusers, for veterans and families on the lam, homeless. I am there for severely developmental disabled adults. For people in memory care facilities.

I remember three years ago teaching a class of fourth graders in the Battle Ground School district east of Vancouver, Washington. In a rural setting, with that hodgepodge of rich parents and then mostly working-class parents and some really down and out parents sending their children to this new school.  

We talked about the current holiday season, since that is a staple of public schools – Consumer Christmas. I asked them to try a five-line poem. Twenty-five kids, fourth graders. The idea was to write a poem about what a true Christmas would mean to them, that is for someone they were close to.

I had children writing poems about giving brothers and sisters a new coat or blanket for the bed, for helping mother fix up the 15-year-old Ford Taurus so she could go to her two jobs; or getting grandmother a new set of dentures or grandpa a new wheelchair. Children who wrote poems about having one wish to get their old dog taken to the vet to take care of a two-year limp on Fido’s hind leg.

Really. Children in the class, from that side of the railroad tracks, and then other children, from the other side wanting to have a ski trip to Mount Hood, or in Colorado. Wanting a Humvee for dad. Wanting the newest computer or video game console. Wanting mom to have some designer $1,000 purse.

Imagine a school system with outdoor education, schools with dorms for college students to reside in for true community health and social work training. Imagine business owners encouraged with tax deferments to be teachers in the towns and cities they reside in. Opening up their facilities and businesses for hands-on education.

Imagine a world where the insurance companies were all regulated, for our benefit; imagine a world where all the tax-dodging CEOs of Fortune 2000 companies are sent to Devil’s Island with a lifetime supply of SPF 50 sunscreen and weekly Velveeta nacho confabs and a daily feed of Harvey Weinstein movies and videotaped Jeffrey Epstein parties piped into their 18-inch old tube Zeniths. Imagine having all those millionaires and billionaires and extended families treated to plywood tiny homes and FEMA trailers designed, built and decorated with the hands of pk12 students.

“Why can’t you be our teacher, mister? Why can’t you come to school more often, Mister Paul? Why can’t you take us to the forests you talk about, Mister Head-dur? Why can’t we come to the beach with you and learn how to spot whales and to make a fire and cook salmon, sir?”

Or some variation on a theme. Why is the question? Why not?

It’s Capitalism that has fueled the Disasters of Global Warming, Pollution, Over-harvesting of Resources, Whacked-out Water Cycle, War (THE elephant in the room)

Oh, Oregon is holding hearings on HB 2020, a baby step around putting feet to fire of those so-called polluters. I will list it below. I have been asked to attend a skyped hearing, one that tells me to go for no more than 3 minutes.

This is Kabuki Theater. The bill is about green as the new black. It’s always about Democrats and 350.org looking to capitalism to solve a problem — an entire set of problems — created by capitalism. Instead of socialism — working for the environment, for the people, for communities and for a healthy truth-telling of how bad the climate disruption and changes are and will be — we have the Green New Deal/Plan that leaves out the 52 percent of the USA’s national budget — war, military, and all the tens of thousands of companies and corporations that make money off of prisons, surveillance, armaments, bombs, DARPA-inspired killing.

Forget the fact that the US military is the largest polluter in the USA, in the world. We are using valuable resources, funding, minds to perpetuate a dying project of star wars, Mother of All Bombs, perpetual war.

So, what do I say, then, or do, when friends want me to go to a hearing and speak talking points? I have a letter below I tweaked to tell the truth to my two reps — David Gomberg, Democrat, District 10; and Arnie Roblan, Democrat, 5th District. It’s milquetoast, still. Decorum and being respectful override being truthful and impassioned.

I’m writing to urge you to make the Clean Energy Jobs bill a priority in the upcoming year. And that’s just a start.

I’ve been an educator and journalist for more than 40 years, 80 combined years. I am 62, and have worked in public schools, community colleges, four-year land grant colleges, private universities and myriad of alternative and non-traditional learning places.

I have spent my time learning about the built environment many ways (master’s in urban planning) and sustainability tied to community participation (master’s in Communications/English).

The bottom line is we need to do more than what HB 2020 asks for. This is only the tip of the iceberg, to use a prophetic way of telling you that we need more than a Marshall Plan to mitigate the negative effects of global warming.

The scientists I communicate with and study are way ahead of any panel impaneled by the US government or corporations to look into global climate change. We are in dire straits, tied to crop failures, record temperatures, desertification of ecosystems, lowering of oxygen in our atmosphere, species collapse, and a shift in the water cycle, to name just a few.

We need to move quickly to an eco-socialist mindset. If you can’t see HB 2020 as a small first step, yes, necessary, then your own myopia certainly would speak to an uninitiated mind.

Hold all major polluters accountable with a price on greenhouse gases. Don’t allow for exemptions for any polluting industries. Everyone under the cap!

Make sure we’re reinvesting in Oregon to make our people resilient, to have food security, to plan sensibly, and to make sure our citizens are prepared for some tough times ahead. This is not a time to believe green is the new black (economically speaking). The idea of green-washing vital human-ecosystems-cultural safety nets for the price of predatory capitalism as we have it in Oregon and in the USA, is worse than and doing nothing at all.

We need steady-state economic thinking, and to act and work locally and connect globally.

From better transit in cities to modern irrigation on farms, from renewable energy for homes to managing wildfire risk, the Clean Energy Jobs bill will benefit all communities in Oregon.

I ask you to champion bold climate action with Clean Energy Jobs. I’ll stay in touch about the progress of the bill. I ask you to get informed as quickly as possible to understand the full impacts of global climate catastrophe, over-harvesting of resources, and the impacts of business as usual in a no holds barred attitude that puts economy over equity and environment. Environment and equity far outpaces any economic boondoggles and schemes the industrialists and capitalists have devised for their immediate profit theft.

Sincerely,
Paul Haeder

Crazy, I sent in such a mellow letter. I didn’t want to upset the political apple cart, by telling these representatives what they should be doing to grow Oregon: stop infinite growth, or any growth, and do steady state economics and the economics of the poor, as in the proposals of the barefoot economist, Manfred Max-Neef. Out entire system is flawed with town-halls and Skyped hearings. We need ecosocialism now, and a billion trees planted now. A plant-based diet NOW. All transportation predicated on true 200-mile diets and consumption patterns NOW. Durable goods manufactured locally NOW.

My fellow writer, John Steppling, has a good piece out today over at Dissident Voice. Please read it. “Scurrying Fascist Cockroaches.” 

Already, I am having arguments about Bernie. Those who support him will not allow for any criticism. Then, I have to defend Sanders when dyed in the wool culture wars Democrats ply one of their top ten (will it be 23 total vying for the nomination in one form or another?) as the real choice/champ/darling-to-beat-Pence/Trump and attack Bernie for being unrealistic, a spoiler, a socialist! Bernie or the rest of the shills are not for socialism. Period. They are for war, no taxes, endless confusion and chaos, which are the by-products of vulture-predatory-zombie Capitalism.

Now, Ocasio Cortez is floating something she calls the Green New Deal (which, in another form, was already promoted by Green Party candidate Jill Stein) and which is a nakedly pro capitalist bit of three card Monte that will provide a boost to the nuclear power industry and line various corporate pockets. It’s capitalism. Omar and Ocasio Cortez also signed the odious Code Pink letter condemning US involvement in coups while at the same time slandering and fabricating stories about Maduro. The logic of the letter was that US proxy forces and covert activities had a counter productive effect and only helped to shore up the credibility of the Maduro government. In other words, fascism is OK, is just fine, only please do it in ways that will not bruise my delicate sensitivities.

Only socialism can tackle what is happening in the world now, not just tied to climate change, but also tied to the global economic inequities and the murder and plunder and sexism, ageism, racism, ableism which Capitalism not only creates, but breeds incessantly. Think hard who cares about animals, the aged, the young, the land, air, water, soil, the whales, the bees, ending prisons, developing safety nets for we the people. Think who cares hard about First Nations and Civil Society and peasant movements and self-determination for people of the land. It’s not going to be the elephant at the end of the feast, i.e. Republicans.

The right-wing does not care about any of these groups or concerns. Right wingers do not care about us, the 80 percent, or the Romney 41 Percent, or the 99 Percent when looking at billionaires running for the Democratic presidential nomination — Bloomberg and Starbucks Howdy Doody. The right-wingers do not care about teachers, about public institutions, about science (real science, not bought and sold science for the industries of Capitalism, the polluters, financiers, lords of war, and the infinite consumption/retailers products of obsolescence, planned lack of durability, etc.) And, well, the democrats, too, from Clinton to Pelosi, and all the usual suspects this election cycle — all war mongers, genuflecting to Israel and $ — they think of us as super predators, super naive, super Utopian..

To fix or at least manage, to some degree, the worst environmental problems will actually require drastic socialist programs. Not fascism as Noam Chomsky** suggests…or as Bernie Sanders or AOC or any of the rest of these capitalist sock puppets … but socialist. And nothing, NOTHING of any good is ever going come out of the Democratic Party. And nothing of any significance can happen via the US electoral theater. The amount of energy wasted in endless debate about the virtues or ‘electability’ (sic) of Elizabeth Warren vs Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris vs Tulsi Gabbard etc is breathtaking. Imagine that time spent on something useful. Like, oh, how to prevent more war and carnage. And how to create a sustainable form of human development.

Socialism, in its most radical form, is about substantive equality, community solidarity, and ecological sustainability; it is aimed at the unification—not simply division—of labor. — John Steppling, “The Indispensable Radical Left”

*–* *–* *–* *–* *–* *–* *–*

“Once sustainable human development, rooted not in exchange values, but in use values and genuine human needs, comes to define historical advance, the future, which now seems closed, will open up in a myriad ways, allowing for entirely new, more qualitative, and collective forms of development. This can be seen in the kinds of needed practical measures that could be taken up, but which are completely excluded under the present mode of production. It is not physical impossibility, or lack of economic surplus, most of which is currently squandered, that stands in the way of the democratic control of investment, or the satisfaction of basic needs—clean air and water, food, clothing, housing, education, health care, transportation, and useful work—for all. It is not the shortage of technological know-how or of material means that prevents the necessary ecological conversion to more sustainable forms of energy.103 It is not some inherent division of humanity that obstructs the construction of a New International of workers and peoples directed against capitalism, imperialism, and war. All of this is within our reach, but requires pursuing a logic that runs counter to that of capitalism.” — John Bellemy Foster, Monthly Review, February 2019

Note**

“Suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effects has been way underestimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover-with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there’s just no other alternatives right now.” — Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002

The counterpoint to any of these baby steps, these capitalism-will-forever-rule-and-dictate-our-futures believers on all sides of the duopoly aisle, is real rebellion. Rebelling in a time of student loans, militarized police, informants, pigs ruling all media, and cult of celebrity sounds daunting, but do we have any other choice? Extinction Rebellion?

Drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement, Occupy Wall Street, and HIV/AIDS protest group ACT UP, Extinction Rebellion makes clear demands, among them that the government must “tell the truth about the climate” and “enact legally binding policy measures to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025.” But it also aims to acknowledge and draw on the intense emotions that come with the environmental calamity that’s upon us. “Even while resolving to limit the damage, we can mourn,” is how Gail Bradbrook, one the organization’s founders in England, puts it.

“Our intention is to provoke an uprising on a scale that’s never been seen before in the U.S., a national coordinated economic and government disruption that will be maintained until the government is forced to negotiate with us.”

Utilizing strictly nonviolent tactics and operating within a largely decentralized structure, the Extinction Rebellion has three ambitious demands: to push governments to communicate the truth of the ecological crisis to the public, to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025 and to allow the formation of a democratic “citizens assembly” to oversee the massive changes this would necessitate. The New York City chapter of XR also includes a demand for climate justice, or “a just transition that prioritizes the most vulnerable people and indigenous sovereignty.”

Or, do we really confront all systems and break away from all structures of power, including government, government controlled by the elites, government in the hands of despotic thinkers, corporations riding roughshod over all our lives?

Cory Morningstar:

Ceasefire: How would you describe the general impact of liberal foundations on the evolution of research within universities and on intellectuals more generally?

Cory: It is my belief that the impact has been debilitating beyond measure. Worse, it is not only underestimated by society, but I would go so far as to say that the co-optation of growth and intellect is not even recognized by society. We like to believe that Euro-Americans are the brilliant ones (after all, we’ve been battling Nature for eons and winning): yet collectively we (the supposedly educated) are destroying our own habitat at an ever-accelerating speed. Those chosen for positions of power, which accelerate our demise via the industrialized capitalist system, are cherry-picked from the Ivy League.

Corporate control (via direct funding and foundation funding) has resulted in a cohesive silence on almost everything that flies in the face of common sense. Creativity has been grossly stifled. Critical thinking has been framed as confrontational while submission and obedience are deemed admirable.

I covered this topic more extensively in part 3 of my investigative report on methane hydrates (The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction: Methane, Propaganda & the Architects of Genocide) under the subsection Universities as Bedfellows| Moral Nihilism. [Excerpt: “Corporate funding effectively silences dissent and buys legitimacy where none is deserved. The corporate influence and domination, like a virus, crushes imagination, strangles creativity and kills individual thought. Education pursued for the collective good is dead. Transcendent values — dead. The nurturing of individual conscience — dead. Ethical and social equity issues are framed and accepted as “passé.” Political silence reigns. Moral independence within educational institutes is being effectively decimated. It is of little surprise that empathy has declined by 40% in college students since 2000.”]

I’ve been amazed at the collective wisdom of the truly left of us, those who adhere to the belief that people — communities of common needs — are smarter than the total sum of individuals who seek power, money and a birthright to the gutting of ecosystems.

Competitiveness isn’t it, and yet we are telling the young, just out of the cradle, that they must fight for everything, and the king of the hill is the person who can acquire more and more to feed his or her ego or entitlement.

As they age through the hamster wheel of consumerism, Capitalism and Empire’s exploitation in the elite’s name vis-a-vis the majority’s name, students learn to expel less and less the amount of the hubris of Empire and Mad Men consumerism; and then self-deception grows exponentially each year an American is planted in this culture (sic).

Yet, where are the family of men, women, children and others (yes, the complexities of those who do not identify as Cis-gender) who stick together to ensure the world is globally connected to the family of Homo Sapiens in the family of Gaia? Who’s teaching resistance? Who’s teaching a true communitarianism? Teachers stuck on that same hamster wheel, leading the way? I think not.

I am saddened that my profession — education — has been neutered and spayed of collective wisdom, so this family of community — and I see community of place and community of purpose being equidistant in our need to not only overthrow the few who have for centuries destroyed possibilities for a socialism of the mind, spirit, and urban-rural development, but those who have hindered the possibility of incubating a new idealism drawn from tribalist human laws.

A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at.

— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891

You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.’ … That’s one expression of the law. Here’s another: ‘The world was not made for any one species.

If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.

[T]he price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

I’m on the Oregon Coast, Central arena for amazing tectonic shifts, and the strata of biological and geologic evolution in your face all the time, each and every inch I make through a temperate forest of rain and moss and Sitka, to the basalt and granite beachheads that empty into the sea, is compelling. Upwellings, gray whale migrations south and back north, whelping coves of fur seals and harbor seals.

I am enjoying a brief weekend respite with my fiance’s daughter, a junior at the flagship college, one of them Oregon State. She comes to me as a STEM, scientist technology engineering math, seeking environmental chemistry degrees.

She tells me that students she’s around do not want to embark on political discussion. She tells me science professors (sic) don’t discuss global warming or climate change. She knows nothing about the American role in killing and murdering people in Venezuela, or at least the newest machinations to carry that out in the name of Abrams Pence, Trump and Virgin Airlines, et al.

The world of academics, in STEM, can be very constricting, cloistered, self- absorbed, and worse, self-important. There are no great debates going on in this $26K a year school, and there are no faculty she has that give a shit about sticking their necks out to engage in the real things in life. Chris Hedges calls this the sickness of the liberal class, credential-ism and careerism.

Universities no longer train students to think critically, to examine and critique systems of power and cultural and political assumptions, to ask the broad questions of meaning and morality once sustained by the humanities. These institutions have transformed themselves into vocational schools. They have become breeding grounds for systems managers trained to serve the corporate state. In a Faustian bargain with corporate power, many of these universities have swelled their endowments and the budgets of many of their departments with billions in corporate and government dollars. College presidents, paid enormous salaries as if they were the heads of corporations, are judged almost solely on their ability to raise money. In return, these universities, like the media and religious institutions, not only remain silent about corporate power but also condemn as “political” all within their walls who question corporate malfeasance and the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Just what will a chemistry degree accomplish in a world of Monsanto, Exxon, Pfitzer, ConAgra, Raytheon, Dow and the list of chemical purveyors is a long as the new chemicals created yearly for the forms of consumption capitalism supercharges, which pits people and the environment against each other and then in turn puts at risk us all in the name of the profits of the few.

Flame retardant in every person and mammal on earth? Atrazine sprayed on crops that baby in the cradle and those babes in preschool consume? A chemical rainbow of products that causes nervous and mental and biological and endocrine disruption in insects and nematodes and rodents. Somehow we disconnect we are also those cockroaches getting the end Apex bioaccumulation of those cancer-causing chems.

They don’t even study Rachel Carson, and while they know nothing about The People’s History of the World; Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States; Guns, Germs and Steel; Notes on a Catastrophe or David Wallace- Wells.

Worse yet, they aren’t talking about Davos;, and the stuff they consume on YouTube, Instagram and the like well, it is the thing of a distracted and disengaged culture of LGBTQAPP+++.

They never know why and what their society is and was and will be becoming, because now the capitalists are on over-drive looking to make another generation and that generation’s children into the next marks.

They don’t know scientists like Vandana Shiva, and as I said, Rachel Carson.

At each stop, Shiva delivered a message that she has honed for nearly three decades: by engineering, patenting, and transforming seeds into costly packets of intellectual property, multinational corporations such as Monsanto, with considerable assistance from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United States government, and even philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. She describes the fight against agricultural biotechnology as a global war against a few giant seed companies on behalf of the billions of farmers who depend on what they themselves grow to survive. Shiva contends that nothing less than the future of humanity rides on the outcome.

“There are two trends,” she told the crowd that had gathered in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, in Florence, for the seed fair. “One: a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture—people celebrating their lives.” She paused to let silence fill the square. “And the other: monocultures, deadness. Everyone depressed. Everyone on Prozac.

More and more young people unemployed. We don’t want that world of death.” The audience, a mixture of people attending the festival and tourists on their way to the Duomo, stood transfixed. Shiva, dressed in a burgundy sari and a shawl the color of rust, was a formidable sight. “We would have no hunger in the world if the seed was in the hands of the farmers and gardeners and the land was in the hands of the farmers,” she said. “They want to take that away.”

Amazing, my female soon-to-be step-daughter has not been initiated in the fine arts of dissent and scientific truth, with someone like Rachel Carson as a talisman for any up and coming woman interested in pursuing the siciences:

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world. — Rachel Carson

I gotta end this with some measure of hope, and that would be that there are still many members of my tribe ready to tackle the stupidity of manufactured consent, false dichotomies, false balance and all the other mediated crap of the propagandists.

A great piece on Dissident Voice, one of my brethren, Jason Holland:

Suggest peace or ecological sustainability? Shit, sorry buddy, now you’re a radical; a naive one they’d argue. The powers that be seem to fully embrace the idea that it’s fine as a nation-state to act like homicidal authoritarian maniacs who are pushing the global ecology to the brink of collapse, that’s just fine, so long as you just want to kill the proper people. Should you be a proponent of peace, cooperation, and sustainable non-exploitative living for all, generally creating a world with far less atrocities and horrors, well, that will get you the label of radical even for the socialism lite policies Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing in the green new deal. She has since owned the moniker of radical along the general line of thought that if being more humane makes her a radical then so be it, and rightly so, but if the ideas of being more humane are considered radical now, wait till these mainstream hacks hear what is actually necessary to begin to heal the natural world on a timetable that doesn’t end in some rather brutal ways and much faster than most think possible no less. Climate change and species extinction are continually accelerating faster than expected along exponential curves and exponentiation has a way of sneaking up on you rather fast. Now we’re talking about the type of stuff that will be openly balked by the status quo neoliberal capitalists as potentially extremist.

Shifting Baselines in a Time of Climate Change, Systems Stagnation, Life and Death in a Time of Amnesia

by Paul Haeder / February 19th, 2019

Both of my parents were assassinated by death squads in our country. My siblings and I fled because we were afraid. We entered the U.S illegally. We crossed the river, and once inside the U.S., we applied for asylum. We were among the very few who were granted asylum. In 1988 I graduated from Bowie and studied at UTEP, receiving a bachelor’s of science. – former refugee at a press conference in El Paso, at Annunciation House

I once volunteered at Annunciation House, in El Paso, during the 1980s. I was chipping away at my graduate degree in English, teaching as a TA at UT-El Paso, as well as working freelance writing gigs with both the morning and evening newspapers, teaching one-on-one conversational English to an engineer in Juarez (who was working for Packard Electric getting paid one-tenth the pay as his fellow Yankees), writing a couple of books, and being active in environmental and social justice issues tied to protesting the militarization of the border and the overuse of the Rio Grande as a toxic slough and drawing down of the Hueco Basin aquifer for golf courses. Heck, in El Paso during this time I even worked for Planned Parenthood helping write a media plan against a mean son-of-a-bitch who called himself a Jew for Christ who set upon the clinic (no abortions done there) mean as cuss religious zealots who tried to block women and families from seeking STD services and such.

Ruben Garcia started the House in the late 1970s and by the time I got there, at Casa Anunciación, the dirty wars in Central America were really ramped up against teachers, unionists, activists, politicals on the left, priests, nuns and anyone questioning the rightwing policies of US-backed governments and the thug henchmen of those administrations, the death squads in Guatemala, Honduras, and Salvador, and the contras in Nicaragua. Part of the fallout created by those US-trained militarists, economists and lawyers who perpetrated that harm against their own people was that many small towns and villages – regular people of the land, la tierra – were being caught in the crossfire.

Entire villages were told in the morning by the fascists to pack up and head out of their pueblitos by sundown. Many girls, women and old ladies were raped and murdered. Beheadings of husbands and grandfathers, fetuses cut out of bellies, and torture of anyone who was suspected of going against Death Squad Capitalism were the order of the day.

As far as media coverage goes: My baseline was different than that of twenty-somethings today. When I was in my mid-twenties, in El Paso and working along the border, there were much more robust forms of journalism and ground-truthing reporting going on than anyone today in their twenties could image.

The baseline was a more open, aggressive Press willing to pull away more of the onion layers to get to the truth. Really, many editors and most of the newspaper journalists had no issue with peering through the looking glass to uncover truth, and their motto was that governments do and will tell lies. Now comparing the number of print newspapers, dailies, and weeklies and monthlies, even magazines and broadsheets, newsletters, and the like that were inking up paper in my time, and then looking at the Press now, going on 38 years of study and my own battles as a writer, anyone young can never really know what has been lost in this impetus of the Press then who were striving for independence, in a good way.

It’s the old saws of not having their own boots on the ground then, not having an authentic real point of view because they never lived and worked then, what is termed liberally by me as the shifting baseline syndrome.

I’m talking about small-town journalism, medium-sized market news, and quirky and unique monthlies. While the so-called liberal media (SCLM) was not liberal at all, what was happening in newsrooms and with editorial boards, for the most part, in the 1970s and Eighties was, compared to today, more nurturing to truth tellers, with a truer sense of why journalism’s ethical code points us to looking at as many sides as possible to weigh in on editorial decision-making. Sort of akin to what a lot of people use as a baseline for liberal (sic) versus conservative, comparing today’s neoliberal democrats, for instance, to someone like Barbara Jordan, or looking at Crypo-AngloZionist Republicans such as Ted Cruz today to so-deemed Rockefeller Republicans of old. When I was born, 1957, the Republican Party’s platform was much more progressive and populist than that of the Pelosi-Schumer Party of the millionaires (or billionaires when looking at proverbial Dem Billionaire Michael Bloomberg). Get a load of this, 62 years ago:

Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things, but their number is negligible and – and the president says–“their number is negligible and they are stupid.” – Dwight Eisenhower, Republican President

The platform for 1956 under the banner of the Republican Party included fighting for workers, the right to form a union, for health and safety measures at workplaces, for a strengthened eight-hour work, for social welfare programs for individual citizens to be strengthened, and more and more positive programs along the lines of today’s milquetoast progressives. Ike was backed by the Republican Party, and it was Eisenhower who fought to keep the tax rate for the very rich fair, which in today’s baseline would be considered way too high and communist!  For instance, the top income tax bracket in the 1950’s was 91%. And, Eisenhower fought tooth and nail to ensure that it remained at that rate.

Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Obama or Clinton backing this? Forget the neocons, the professors of the Chicago School of Predatory and Culture-Destroying (brainwashing) Capitalism even wanting any tax rate other than zero percent (0.00 %) for the rich, for the corporations, who are now persons with full rights of person-hood.

How many rich individuals and how many corporations pay no taxes today, and how many have tax shelters (“legit” mafia-style money-laundering outfits) overseas, in Cayman or Panama? We have winks and nods and complete red-faced debates and retorts against the accusation that the rich pay no taxes, or certainly not enough, with bald-faced defenses by tens of millions run-of-the-mill Americans who support their flavor of rich man/rich woman in America.

Imagine, rooting for millionaires and billionaires? By welfare recipients or middle-class soccer moms. What does George Lakoff call it, Narrative Frames? This for decades was considered unAmerican to root for the rich over the poor.

That’s one difference I have experienced – when I was a teenager and college puke, most people hated the rich for what they were. Many average working class people looked at the rich as sociopaths who were only rich because they exploited the average American citizen. Add to the baseline shift from today versus back then: my bosses at newspapers were not multimillionaires, and many more newspapers by a factor of 5 or 10 in the 1970s and 1980s were independent and competitive, compared to 2019.

Back then, the baseline was that many reporters were vying to get the scoop on real news stories. Truth and facts were a given; anything else rose to the level of pink slip offenses. That robust nature of things back then — even though for the most part, as a socialist and Marxist, I never did fit personally into any paradigm in a newsroom — was things that you’d never see printed today in the few small town newspapers left (there are hardly any left across America, anyway) were vigorously printed in many more newspapers back then. From Salon:

According to University of North Carolina’s research, the country has lost nearly 1,800 local newspapers since 2004, and many more have lost the ability to comprehensively cover their communities.

Rural counties with poorer, older populations are most at risk — 500 rural papers have shuttered since 2004. These communities are also less likely to see a digital start-up help fill the void — as funding for both for- and non-profit models are more available in metro areas, and many rural counties across the U.S. still lack broadband internet access, which is critical for delivering online news.

More than 200 counties in the U.S. have no local paper, but that’s just part of the story, or this new shifted baseline: Local ownership of papers is eroding big time. Get this — nearly one-third of U.S. newspapers and two-thirds of dailies are now owned by 25 companies. GateHouse Media is rapacious, buying up small-town papers. That means the news is controlled by Big-Brother-Being-The-Oligarchs, many times edited a thousand miles or more from the towns or counties that are supposedly being covered. Copy-editing and editorial decisions for GateHouse originate in Austin, Texas. It’s the number one small and medium newspaper owner in the USA, and its model of “efficiency” means many fewer reporters and a more insipid and irrelevant TV style content which is also replicated (shared) widely.

Murders, celebrities, food, weather (not global warming) pet tricks, celebrity food, celebrity weather, celebrity pet tricks, celebrity murders idiocy of the umpteenth degree.

I have a case in point: a massive militarized police presence was in Beaverton, Oregon, last April, resulting in closing the main road east-west, locking down schools and the Salvation Army facility I worked at as a social worker. There were civilian-clothed snipers with high powered rifles w/ higher powered scopes all over; dozens of multi-agency personnel out in public with pistols brandished, and two armored vehicles with gun turrets that rammed the offending ex-vet’s big pick-up truck.

He had just been evicted from the Salvation Army’s homeless veterans transition center for suspect reasons. The entire homeless facility was bombarded with SWAT-outfitted police thugs, and no one was allowed to enter or leave the facility, creating high levels of anxiety with already PTSD-addled veterans and their homeless families.

The veteran was shot seven times, after only a few hours of staged hostage negation-like stuff, even though he was alone, pinned in his own pickup truck. The Salvation Army leadership later said it was a coup for them (this bizarre religious organization) – “Thank goodness we controlled the story and very few media outlets picked it up. We want to protect our brand in Oregon . . . as the number one non-profit.”

Now, imagine if there had been one or two beat reporters, like myself in my teens and twenties, on the job working for local rags, vying to find out what really happened and why so much force had been deployed for a suicidal veteran basically isolated in his pick-up who could do no harm to anyone but himself? My baseline would have been news coverage galore, and better yet, follow up coverage: Cops shoot-to-kill a suicidal veteran, on a Salvation Army facility’s property, and, then force a public endangerment situation onto a small community.

Today, nothing . . . NOT even in the Portland, Oregon, media market which serves millions; and this Salvation Army is scamming the US taxpayer, i.e. VA who funds the beds for the veterans..

This is the shifting baseline syndrome, which is a sickness tied to outfits like the Salvation Army using PR flaks and using the fact there are no newspapers in Washington County to cover local news and this disturbing show of military force and what the implications of a military operation in their neighborhood might mean in the future. No less, against a veteran who was receiving services from a well-known homeless center.

Local news, and then news that has national and international implications, lost. Not covered. In the memory hole!

Shifting baseline syndrome means the public gets shafted and the administrators and gatekeepers of information — PR idiots and marketers and development officers – get to lie through their teeth, or in the case of my police-involved shooting incident (even that term is dripping with propagandist flavor), no one knew the ramifications of the Salvation Army’s unprofessionalism and lack of trauma-informed care leading up to the soldier’s eviction and then the suicidal behavior and then the soldier almost killed, and now, recovering in County lock-up (jail) serving time.  And he’s still suicidal, untreated.

Job well done by the keepers of the information flow. Shifting baseline disease.

Read the three parts of my Salvation Army mess here, I  II  III.

In the 1980s, I had published pieces in small towns newspapers, and later in the El Paso Times and El Paso Herald-Post on Central American refugees, on people crossing the border seeking asylum, on groups, both religious and secular, helping undocumented people cross the border and get help once here and to apply for political asylum. Piece published on the front pages of many small town rags I worked for.

My baseline then was we still had morning and evening rags, and weeklies, that debated hard the military’s presence in towns like Tucson or El Paso. Debated hard the debasement of the environment through the unchecked developers razing the desert. Debated hard the values of community health, welfare, safety and well-being over the wants and desires of small and large companies coming into communities and demanding tax abatements, giveaway land schemes, and more-more-more from the public coffers to do their trickster capitalism to make more-more-more for the owners, CEOs and stockholders.

Now Democrats and Republican alike rah-rah cheer trillions in military spending. Job creation and Hollywood America the Greatest masturbation. –

I’m going back to Ike: In his final address to the country, in 1961, while still a five-star general, and still a believer in the American way, in American exceptionalism, in America’s greatness (both sides of the political isle yammer on and on to show their patriotism), he did at least put into check the US military industrial complex:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.   —source

Now, I have to back up a bit to reset this essay: I continue today — just hitting 62 — to call this myopia and concerted erasure of knowledge and historical context (what Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia) shifting baseline syndrome covering many aspects of my life, the life of America and the implications to the world that the US Empire negatively effects.

I explain this concept daily as I go about living and roaming, learning and teaching, struggling and rejoicing.

Here, illustratively: The baseline for divers like me, in the Sea of Cortes (called the Aquarium of the World by many then), for the 1970s and ’80s:

I was diving daily near San Carlos and Guaymas, out near Tiburon Island from the boat my buddy and I paid $500 from a lake fisherman from Phoenix. So, a typical dive – dozens of turtles of three or four species, dozens of moray eels of a dozen species; pinnipeds like sea lions by the hundreds; long beak and short beak dolphins by the dozens; hammerhead sharks by the dozen; over two hundred species of reef fish, crustaceans, and sponges and soft corals; brown pelicans by the hundreds; pelagic fish and groupers and barracuda and amazing surface fish, nudibranchs; and, well, in one hour dive, more than what any overpaid Avatar CGI technical wonk could create, let alone dream of.

That’s the baseline for an 18-year-old in 1975, me, a wanna be Jacques Cousteau and marine biology college major. Fast forward forty-four years, and the baseline of another Pablo diver, same age, well, now a decimated, overfished, multi-polluted ocean, with hardly a shadow of what I saw on typical dives in the 1970s.

The baseline shifted, and today, the syndrome, in the shifting baseline syndrome/disease analogy, would be the arrogance, historical stupidity, and hubris to believe that a healthy and normal reef dive is what it should be as experienced in 2019. The syndrome and disease of shifting baselines it that it is most likely even smart biologists might be working on staving off further decline in an ecosystem based on the present baseline. What you don’t see now normalizes one to see what they see now as the correct baseline to go by. Wrong.

Now transfer the shifting baseline syndrome/disease to almost every aspect of US society: no, the baseline for police involvement in our lives is not a Gestapo, shoot to kill first force, where we all are in fear, while witnessing pigs murder Latinos and African Americans with impunity. Judge, jury and executioner, no, is not the baseline we should be stuck with or happy with.

Baseline sickness now applied to what it means to be a student – my baseline was a university where faculty had freedom to teach, that more were on the tenure track, where students would be experimenting with ideas and learning, without fear of Goldman Sachs thugs hobbling them for life with $100 K debt or censuring like a Phil Knight of Nike fame or Monsanto do regularly to researchers.

Yes, the baseline in 1975 when I was coming of age was that we COULD protest in the streets without fear of felonies, without being sprayed upon with tear gas and rubber bullets at every event; where cops were in small numbers, and there were no drones and militarized SWAT teams for peace demonstrations.

Baseline was for 1975 one hell of a lot more book readers, more by a power of 10,000 regular thinkers, and more people who had newspapers in their hands and talked about local politics by a power of 1,000,000.

Shifting baseline syndrome is now infecting every sector of our lives, where what is acceptable thinking, behavior, standard operating procedures and collective will NOW are so bastardized, retrograded and devolved that the conversation about anything on any tract – food-medicine-science-arts-law-education-international politics-community standards-health-safety-welfare of the environment-ownership-birth and death-cradle to cradle planning — is an effort in alien talk, as if people today are from a completely new set of gravitaional laws.

Idiots call this the “new normal,” another shifting baseline of not only bastardizing language but Orwellizing it. War is Peace, Lies are Truth, Stupidity is Smarts. New normal!

Now, back to “we all are illegal aliens,” where I helped push that bumper sticker in El Paso as a solidarity protest meme, to illustrate that no American First Nations leaders came together to endorse the free passage of all those whites to use their great Turtle Island as a haul-out like a bunch of molting fur seals.

Here, my writing, 13 years ago, for Dissident Voice, just below. Talk about no shifting baseline for me, or in the case of this hatred of Mexicans and Central Americans, displayed by more than just Trump and his ilk.

Oh, once you hit 50 or 60, the ramifications of this French doozy really sink in:

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose — the more things change the more they stay the same –

It hearkens to the proverb, “Turbulent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level other than to cement the status quo.”

What is the Empire’s status quo when it comes to people displaced by American Empire structural and military and economic and environmental violence? April 7, 2006:

This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens

By Paul. K Haeder, April 7, 2006

We are all illegal aliens.” It’s a bumper sticker many of us on the frontlines of the fight against the United States’ government’s assault on Central Americans plastered on our car bumpers down El Paso way.

That was in the 1980s.

You know, when Reagan was running amok ordering his captains Ollie North, McFarland, Casper Weinberger, the whole lot of them, to send bombs, CIA-torture manuals and US agents in order to aid terrorist contras and other despotic sorts in killing hundreds of thousands of innocents in civil wars in Salvador and Guatemala and El Salvador.

We worked with women and children who had witnessed fathers, uncles and husbands eviscerated by US-backed military monsters.

Victims of torture, in Texas illegally. You know, what those brave Smith and Wesson-brandishing, chaise lounge Minutemen of today would call aliens.

We worked with people in faith-based communities, mainstream churches, and non-profits throughout El Paso, Juarez and the general area known as La Frontera. Everyone I met working with in this refugee assistance stint had humanitarian blood coursing through their veins. We were proud of our law-breaking work — we gave refuge to terrorized and sometimes half-dead civilians.

We were called lawbreakers by the Reaganites and the Minutemen of that time. Communists. Pinko-fags. Those were the good old days of low-tech surveillance and simple FBI lists.

But what we did was human and humane, in the tradition of that very universal (with roots in Quakerism) belief in bearing witness and acting upon that which has been judged as unjust and inhumane.

Of course, we were up against the laws of this land and coarse politically-driven judges who denied victim after victim permanent or temporary status while seeking asylum in the US.

We have so many stories of people sent back who were at best imprisoned, and in the worse cases, mutilated, disappeared, and murdered.

Guatemalan and Salvadorans, that is. My readers may not want to hear the narratives and visualize the descriptions of photos of those victims of torture. Ghastly things happened to teachers, nuns, medical workers and farmers, more heinous than what we’ve heard happened in the cells of Abu Ghraib.

We were there to assist, but more importantly to bear witness to our country’s terror campaign. Some of us got so riled up that later in our lives — me included — we hoofed it to Central America. Kicked around. Wrote articles for the few newspapers in this country that even cared about poor, misbegotten, displaced people of Latin America.

But no matter how hard-nosed we became, or how much we could withstand the photographs of women’s sliced backs and beheaded fetuses, we couldn’t shake the images of the children of torture at this two-story refugee house, Annunciation House. It was full of scruffy-looking East Coast volunteers who had hooked up with Ruben Garcia, the House’s director, through Catholic services organizations. It was their stint with public service, their spiritual duty calling. Part of their degree plans. But most were converted and slammed hard intellectually and spiritually by the violence their charges had suffered under in our name – as US citizens paying taxes.

Those PTSD-induced cartoons those children drew sucked the air out of even the hard-ass border patrol guys who used to “dump” the Central Americans at Ruben’s door at all hours of the night. Who can believe it now, that once upon a time official INS and border patrol officers knowingly let their perps go — knew that Ruben and his volunteers could salve emotional and physical wounds of these tortured crossers.

Their chance at freedom. Except for the piss-ant judges. And the memories of pregnant aunties being raped, their fetuses cut out alive, speared, and the laughing Reagan-loved military punks in the highlands and jungle.

Annunciation House was bulging at 100 people — disheveled lives jammed in. Beans always cooking. Songs. Mattresses and piles of donated clothes. Guitars strumming. Gueros, the white ones, and the Chicanos would help with in-takes — asylum transcripts, translation, dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s. Help with getting jobs. Odd jobs in the community. Help with making sure the refugees didn’t get caught again.

But it was always those by-the-letter-of-the-law jurists helping to confound the torture. More than 70 percent of our brothers and sisters seeking asylum in the US were denied entry by some fat cat, many times cocaine-sniffing immigration judge who usually had a friend in the back pocket of some Bush or buddy of Bush somewhere.

Then it was trying to get the denied victims off to Canada without being caught. You remember, the Canada back then which used to open its borders to refugees, [the Canada of shifting baseline syndrome].

The judges and politicians and Minutemen all professed, “Send them back. Those aliens broke our immigration laws.”

But “we are all illegal aliens” as a rejoinder went much farther than USA’s mayhem in Mesoamerica. We worked in solidarity with the housekeepers, bricklayers, agricultural workers and so many other worthy Mexicans who worked their butts off in the US for little pay and much less respect.

These were workers who crossed the Rio Grande to find low-paying jobs with American families and businesses — working for mayors, bigwigs, even on government contracts. In Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, elsewhere. With a wink and a smile by the American exploiters.

Mojado — wetback. Squatter. Beaner. Illegal alien. These were the more tame epithets.

But let’s not kid ourselves about the genesis of this new round of empowered Latinos fighting against racist laws put forward by the dispassionate conservatives running the ship of fools in DC.

This is not a country of legal immigrants. It’s a country based on colonialists, undocumented white people who helped displace native tribes through broken laws and genocide.

It’s a country based on illegal occupation of native lands and on Mexico’s lands, pure and simple. Colonialists protected by Federal laws that deemed free white people as the only ones who had the right to be fully-fledged citizens.

Manifest Destiny was a violent racist act to seize lands illegally.

Everything this country’s current anti-Mexican and pro-Apartheid border war proponents stand upon — all that doctrine and those so-called laws — is based on illegally seizing lands of Native tribes.

And worse — laws that “removed” natives. Laws that starved natives. Laws that approved of eradicating native families, entire tribes.

The current massive turnout of students and workers alike in this country’s major cities is a testament to these Americans’ backbone to fight this new exclusionary law — HR4377 — a Washington, DC-inspired racist act that has its roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Many Americans do express a certain humanity and dignity for the people many deem aliens, but it’s not awe-inspiring that some citizens of Copenhagen, Denmark or Limerick, Ireland, disobey the so-called immigration laws of this country during their initial years as landed immigrants.

Let’s make no bones about the motives of Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of this racist House bill: He sees those brown-skinned south-of-the-border lettuce pickers, linen washers, house framers, and their US-born children as, what? “Alien gang members terrorizing communities.”

Anyone spouting that we are a nation of immigrants and laws has a disease, what George Orwell called the illness of double-think.

And until those many white Americans stop spewing that this is their land, a land of their laws, and a land made for Christians, the racist Minutemen will ramp up their gun brandishing on the southern and northern borders. And racist politicians will continue to play on the fears of uniformed constituents and try to pass the 21st Century’s racist exclusionary laws.

I wonder what these modern-day Nazis would say about those children’s cartoons — images of bodies floating in rivers. Blood-soaked church walls. Military men with their M-16s trained on men while others are sketched in their rape hunch. Beautiful jungle birds flying in the sky next to US-paid-for helicopter gunships spraying the corn and coffee fields below. Dead mommies cradling dead babies.

Yeah, I’m an illegal alien. We all are illegal aliens, under the laws of these creeps in high office. Humanity and caring and simple benedictions for suffering so much, those are alien traits only held by a minority in this country of exclusion, and slavery. Yeah, those creeps on hate-radio and in the newspaper columns and on Capitol Hill, sure, they recognize all of us who see the lies and fight the injustice as aliens.

And the children whose post-traumatic cartoons brought tears to men and women, some who had “fought” in Vietnam. Simple Crayola colorings brought tears to a county sheriff who had survived drug runners shooting up his town and unearthed bodies.

Yeah, we are all illegal aliens. Except them.

Paul Haeder worked in Central America and Mexico writing for newspapers during the 1980s and early 1990s. He’s currently in Spokane, Washington, as an instructor of writing at Spokane Falls Community College and writes sustainability-energy-environmental pieces for the towns weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander.

There is only one party in the United States: The Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. — Gore Vidal

I had a radio show and had on the hour weekly venue some very powerful thinkers, those who the majority of Americans never run into. Good stuff over at Truthdig with Chris Hedges’ latest, “Worshipping the Electronic Image.”

Daniel Boorstin in “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Reality in America” argues that the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have now displaced the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous. Reality has become stagecraft. We live in a world, he writes, “where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns:

We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic,’ that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.

Trump is a product of this cultural decay, not an aberration. The way he speaks, acts and thinks is the way many Americans speak, act and think. He will one day disappear, but the cultural degeneracy that produced him will remain. Academic institutions, which should be the repositories of culture and literacy, are transforming themselves, often with corporate money, into adjuncts of the digital age, expanding departments that deal with technology, engineering and computer science—the largest major at universities such as Princeton and Harvard—while diminishing the disciplines that deal with art, philosophy, ethics, history and politics. These disciplines, rooted in print, are the only antidotes to cultural death.

Here, then, Gregory Petsko, talking about why the arts, classics and anything other than the sciences are necessary for human civlization to move forward. He is a biochemist and MD and worked on the genome project. However, he defends the classics and liberal arts to the end, decrying colleges and universities chopping philosophy and ethics and other programs that fit outside the sciences, or in today’s parlance, STEM.

Those who seek to communicate outside of digital structures to question or challenge the dominant narrative, to deal in ambiguity and nuance, to have discussions rooted in verifiable fact and historical context, are becoming incomprehensible to most of modern society. As soon as they employ a language that is not grounded in the dominant clichés and stereotypes, they are not understood. Television, computers and smartphones have addicted a generation and conditioned it to talk and think in the irrational, incoherent baby talk it is fed day after day. This cultural, historical, economic and social illiteracy delights the ruling elites who design, manage and profit from these sophisticated systems of social control. Armed with our personal data and with knowledge of our proclivities, habits and desires, they adeptly manipulate us as consumers and citizens to accelerate their amassing of wealth and consolidation of power.

This is how I feel everyday, and I am not some mintable intellectual, just a smart guy who knows his history, literature, science, cultures and tries to write himself out of a wet paper bag to have others understand.

Simple communitarian spirit, tied to serendipitous moment listening to this artist a month ago talking about climate change, tide-pools and new earth emerging. His name is Bill Kucha, 74, originally from Cleveland. He was trained as a classic artist in Boston, BU, and he married at 18, had a child, and ended up on his walkabout single again. He ended up in Portland years later, new wife, Dorothy, two children, a grandchild, and more than 47 years later, Sitka roots and multi-variant artwork with creator, artist, struggling with the weight of climate like a storm over humanity, over all of nature and over his personal connection to mother earth.

He talks a lot about this new time of chaos, the opportunities for change, pushing the old — fossil fuel “economy,” dreaded Capitalism — into the dustbin of history . . . with the energy of new minds, new ideas, new sense of identity. Where ego desiccates and a new giving gift society rises from the ashes of the Phoenix that once carried the tools of greed and war for the elite.

Here, a piece I wrote about his talk along with a conservation biologist’s posted on several places on the Internet — Tidepools.

I was invited by Bill and his wife Dorothy to their home overlooking the Pacific, north of Depoe Bay, near Newport.

Their home in 1972 was once a broken-down old drafty ramshackle of a beach house, and then 47 years of TLC and a dramatic setting down of roots — spiritual, creative, and holistic. Bill has worked the land, the side of the hill sloping toward the Pacific, moving rocks and pilings and earth to make an amazingly healing place, terraced, gardens, swales for graywater and rainwater for consumption.

The transformation of a man who has gained friends galore but who has worked in solitary brushing on paints and chipping into basalt and welding metal to stone, Bill has been intersecting with youth and old, playing his guitar and composing songs. He helped found 350.org Central Oregon Coast.

The talk we had Sunday Feb. 17 was anchored in transference, a new or very old expansion of the universe talk about evolutionary principles tied to the noosphere, the creative connectivity of humanity in this time of crisis.

I’ll be writing about Bill and Paul’s Lightness of Being Adventure, but yesterday, Dorothy opened up, first a teacher in Portland and then a social worker. Her parents fleeing Austria under the saber of Hitler. Her father has been featured in Portland historical news for his own migration to this new land.

Gentile and Jew, Bill and Dorothy live in balance, as the artist Bill is tied to his mistress: the land he has sculpted nail by nail, stone by stone, shadow by shadow. Their own relationship and lives in Mexico, the lightness of being now calm in a state of upheaval, great lessons passed forward to their family and friends. He is unsettled by the crisis in climate and politics and humanity.

We talked about story, about narratives, and then, bam, we headed in our separate vehicles to Newport to be with Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate, who talked with around 50 people crammed into the Newport library.

Kim talked about story, too, and my interpretation of that two hours will be written about in another blog here soon. For now, read about his father and me here, at Cirque Journal: A Poet, the Pacific Flyway, and a Sonora Flash Flood here!

Kim was kind enough to pair up some of his poems with my non-fiction piece a few years ago in the Cirque issue, which if you open up and read my piece from the hyperlink above, you’ll see it is largely about my own poetic rites of passage tied to his father, William Stafford, and my own life moving from point to point in my as of yet revealed journey back to some imagined place in my literary soul. Three poems, Kim Stafford, Cirque Journal.

Much of what Kim said in his Newport, Oregon, talk I have been practicing all my life — writing, thinking, inventing my perceptions of life, and the daily practice of writing, photographing, teaching, giving, struggling. I look to words as lamentation and personal narrative. The poem below is my spiritual word journey, after Bill and Dorothy shared their lives and home, and ruminating from that point where I listened to and talked with Kim among all these Central Oregon Coast writers and writer-wanna-be’s.

I sent the poem to Bill and Dorothy. I also sent it to Kim, now on a busy schedule as Oregon’s poet of record, a two-year stint where he has to meet with people throughout Oregon; Kim still has his gig as professor at Lewis and Clark University.

I am now intersecting with much of my own scattershot history, unfolding narratives, collapsing beliefs, a new revised personal relationship, and I am about to be married, yet we’re looking for some solace in Mexico, maybe, but now, living and breathing in Otis, Oregon, near Cascade Head, the shape of life molded into the refracted light dancing in my cones and rods. I am teaching now, and working on a couple of book manuscripts. I am beach combing and photographing and just pushing out some terrible times as a social services professional in the Portland arena for more than a decade. Read at your own peril below!

“Insanity of Social Work as Human Control”

Rodea Point, Broken Circle, and a Nautilus Shaped from Basalt and Pig Iron

( comiéndose tortillas y frijoles negros en Otter Crest Trail con Bill y Dorothy Kucha

By Paul Haeder, 2/17/19

words like slow trowel

wet alabaster, cupped hands

incantations of synesthesia

as loud as basalt

prodded by lichen

he comes to me with law of time

universal expansion, he feels

cosmogenesis transmuted

drawn into climate crisis

his sensuality cuts, chips, digs

stone, earth to loam, stone to bricks

patterns shaped into lamentations

*–*

the weight of geological time

expands, he expresses yin yang

Chinese character “crisis”

a point where things happen

or change

artist from Cleveland flays

canvas with acrylics

the ebb like spiritual

floe, trapped in vortex

this synchronicity, the calcifying

old world new world noosphere

emancipation for him

*–*

transmogrifying nature, he paints

biological fractals, polygons of betrayal

conjures up seeds as ghosts-

dances, perennials perma

culture as long as soil

finds impregnation, Gaia

increasing complexities

he culls crisis in triptych

weight of Egyptian prophecies

curses, earth flagellated for a new

creative evolution

he covets hope

*–*

he watches river burst

flammable memories,  Cuyahoga

dreams, Cleveland boy

“jawbone” for Seneca

“crooked river” for Mohawk

white man’s trash heap

emblematic of a million

trails of tears, eviscerated river,

time

space entropy land of holy

benedictions as interlopers

condemn new rivers to oil slicks

dams slough off unholy

metals, fossil hunters’ distillates

*–*

now slower in his gait

overlook of Pacific more

than germination, gestation

new age ancient he holds

paint brush hammer trowel

welding stick

old hands pushing yanking flogging

weight of 4 billion years

earth lifts to 74-year-old touch,

he flavors temporary home

in poppy lilac cruciferae

abundance

bounty shared by wife

friends

air soil water soul

*–*

she comes from Diaspora

Austrian Aryans finding

Hebrew enemies

her parents fled in 1939

warnings of Crystal Night

broken glass Kristallnach

weight of futures

death camps

*–*

she parts words between teacher

social worker, life flowing from

Mexico, weight to his fanciful

ruminations Jew with Gentile

family prayer Shema Yisrael

inscribed on grave of a Jewish

infant in Halbturn 3^rd century

Roman slavers tossed Jews

into all corners of empire

Austria, land remembered

now she finds father

recriminating her to

not marry artist

you’ll be working for his art

not a dime he’ll make

*–*

migration from Cleveland-Portland

New York-Depoe Bay

islands in the stream

couple’s migratory passage

monogamous galvanizing

I his poet one step away

into pure light of chaos

she asks me if pain

of bearing witness

of finding center in political

turmoil takes joy from

living . . . the smile on my face

*–*

a million light years back

my future written when

I was nine, earlier

vision quest long walkabout

dreamtime more than

weight of ions breathed in

the soiling people

are minor actors

this artist comes to me

fielding a new love

old passions

*–*

he calls me brother

we part for another beach town

as we hold another poet’s words

speak to all his relations

we share the amen

as laureate reshuffles our

game, moments trapped

between cerebral connectivity

and laws of co-evolution

harmonic convergences

sharing food, opening spaces

we stay as one

momentarily, Pacific high tide

receding for another passing —  

I want to thank all my relations

for this chance to be on Earth

in her time of flourishing; to thank

the First People of this place,

to honor their sovereignty in long

and continuing relation, still teaching us

how we might be here together; to thank

my mother and father, moon and sun,

for setting me forth before their own

passing on; to thank my grandmother

who listened to me so eloquently I learned

to listen to my own heart and mind, to find

stories and songs there; to thank my family

and friends, and all citizens and travelers

who study and work for deeper kinship

in this place, with one another, and with

all creatures, one Earth, visible, palpable,

fragile, intricate, resonant, in need of our

better stories. I want to thank you

who have gathered to receive what I have

carried here—in hope that something

I have may meet something you need,

so all our relations may be strengthened

for this life we live together.

Amen. – Kim Stafford, “All My Relations”