Each couch by the street has a story
I wonder what this one maybe
Did they leave their home and move into a car
Or find a sofa to sleep on at a friend’s house
Did they stay near, or go far away
Disappear without a trace […]
When they come to evict your neighbor, what will you do?

— “Each Couch by the Street” song by David Rovics

When I checked the Street Roots archives by putting in the search window, “David Rovics,” I got one hit:  a March 8, 2010 press release, “Peace groups, parents, children and folk musicians Steve Einhorn, Kate Powers, and David Rovics will all be at the rally outside Portland Public Schools headquarters.”

It was a protest against military influence in Portland’s K-12 Portland Public Schools. He was there singing to inspire parents opposing a $320,000 revenue contract for Starbase, a 25-hour educational program funded out of the Department of Defense recruitment budget.

Fast forward a decade: If you’ve been part of the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland, you might have heard David Rovics perform social justice and protest songs outside Mayor Ted Wheeler’s condo or at Revolution Hall after the election.

The 53-year-old father of three (ages one, four and 14 years) has been working the protest concert circuit since 1993, helping lift spirits at WTO protests, environmental actions, antiwar events, and more.

Think of Rovics as an iteration of Joe Hill, a la Arlo Guthrie-Phil Ochs-Pete Seeger-Joan Baez. And Buffy Sainte-Marie, for sure!

Journalist Amy Goodman referred to Rovics as “the musical version of Democracy Now!” Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan called him “the peace poet and troubadour of our time.”

Accolades aside, we talked about the landscape before and now during (and post) Covid-19 being littered with dwindling hope for all artists. Many artists will not make it, study after study bear out.

“I definitely know folks who have either gotten on unemployment or gotten a job not related to their art, as a result of the pandemic.  Of course, I also know a lot of artists who had to throw in the towel long before the pandemic, as a result of Spotify, Amazon, etc., and theses corporations’ cannibalistic orientation towards the arts.”

He came to Portland from Berkley almost 14 years ago, and he too, like so many artists I have spoken with, experienced a Portland that was a Mecca for artists – thriving music, theater and graphic arts scenes that allowed creatives to live and provided venues at affordable rents in order for artists to show their stuff.

That nirvana didn’t last long – “Artists started clearing out of the city, with most of the Black population from the inner neighborhoods moving to the exurbs.” That wave started around 2007.

Rovics is acutely aware that most of the thriving artists who might weather economic tsunamis are white artists, but there are thousands upon thousands of BIPOC artists who continue working but do not have those “safety nets” underneath them.  The mainstream and commercial art scene will continue to be a white wave.

This gentrification is now coupled with lack of income(s), Rovics says, as artists who used to be able to show and sell their work (and bar-tend and wait tables), and in the case of musicians, perform and then peddle “merch” at venues, have zero options for in-person engagement.

Mounting debt, continuing eviction threats, and increasing vulnerability to disease and illness also are additional factors to the mental health stress of artists. David knows of artists who just have shut down, and can’t work. Others are manic, going through sleepless periods but producing a lot. For Rovics, he fits this latter category, but he admits he is not immune to GAD – general anxiety disorder. He told me he watches a lot more news feeds than he did before the pandemic, and doesn’t sleep through the night.

“The whole response of this country has been a disaster,” he points out. “Whole industries have collapsed. There have been anemic shreds of money, but it will not magically keep society as we know it going. What is it, the day after Christmas when unemployment benefits run out?”

We both agreed Charles Dickens, if alive, would be in a 24/7, 365 days a year flurry of creativity and commentary.

There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth! Poverty and oysters always seem to go together. To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty’s holiest touch of nature.

— Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs Gone Haywire

It’s difficult to not keep circling back to the fact many people – artists included – are both depressed and inspired by the events that have unfolded since February. “I’ve talked to a lot of artists who tell me the isolation takes away that creative edge. I also know of people succumbing to more serious mental health issues. I have one friend in a psychotic episode who was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning.”

Painting in a studio by yourself is one thing, but Rovics points out that because all venues for performing artists are shuttered, touring musicians are really having it hard. “They are addicted to performing, so this isolation has been devastating.”

The pandemic might be the last nail in the coffin for truly independent, thriving, outside-the-box artists. Rovics has studied the wave of predatory capitalists running Spotify and Amazon that has helped move the minuscule profits from artists to investors: millionaires and the billionaire owners like Jeff Bezos (Amazon).

The music industry has been trying to separate music from politics for years now, trying to get artists to believe that politically oriented music is not attractive for mainstream audiences so they produce work that is safe and preferably only between two people. But artists are part of society too, so they can’t expect to be above politics, he stated in a 2009 interview.

Spotify is another beast Rovics condemns.  According to Rolling Stone’s Tim Ingham, “In total, at the close of last year, SEC documents show that exactly 65 percent of Spotify was owned by just six parties: the firm’s co-founders, Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon (30.6 percent of ordinary shares between them); Tencent Holdings Ltd. (9.1 percent); and a run of three asset-management specialists: Baillie Gifford (11.8 percent), Morgan Stanley (7.3 percent), and T. Rowe Price Associates (6.2 percent). These three investment powerhouses owned more than 25 percent of Spotify between them — a fact worth remembering next time there’s an argument about whose interests Spotify is acting in when it makes controversial moves (for example, Spotify’s ongoing legal appeal against a royalty pay rise for songwriters in the United States).”

The problems artists are facing are part of a many-headed Hydra Rovics calls “vulture capitalism.”

He also confronts this problem from renter’s and the affordable housing lenses. He naturally comes to the conclusion that Capitalism in this sense is fraught with parasites:

“The way forward is about solidarity, but achieving solidarity will require moving beyond the false consciousness that says it is okay to run a society like this,” he states. “That housing is a privilege, whose cost is to be determined by profit-minded individuals and corporations, protected by the state’s armed enforcers. We must collectively come to realize that housing is actually a right, that we must demand, as a society. And that a rent strike is an activity to engage in not only if you can’t afford to pay the rent, but if you believe that it is wrong to pay the rent, when so many others are unable to. That an injury to one is an injury to all. That the parasites in this society are not the unemployed, the homeless, the recipients of meager government aid programs, the housing insecure, the couch-surfers, the car-dwellers. The parasites are those who own multiple properties, and profit off of renting them to people who need housing. This is a parasitic activity, whether hiding behind the fig leaf called ‘mom and pop,’ or whether ‘mom and pop’ has successfully managed to turn their little operation into a bigger one.”

The people who control the rents for galleries, theaters and cinemas answer to the owners, the investment boards and many times to behemoth property management entities, he states.  And while artists’ careers will pile up by the wayside like those couches in Portland he wrote a song about, what is worse is that the “art” that is and will be coming out of the corporations controlling culture will be narrowed down and basically “crap.”

The reverberations of artists not making it go way beyond the axiom of “where you find one successful artist, you will find a thousand starving artists behind them.” The hoarders of capital are the dream hoarders, and these Titans of Predatory Capitalism are galvanizing a highly commercialized, denuded, lowest-common-denominator “arts.” Disneyfication, infantilization, consumerist, apolitical and anti-working-class pabulum might be another way to couch what is happening in the arts.

Rovics and I talk intensely about these series of preventable events in a Time of Covid.

No matter where the reader stands on this question of what is art, the fact of the matter is people need housing to not just survive and shield themselves from the elements, but to be dignified, spiritually available to the world and to be creative.

Rovics is part of Artists for Rent Control (ARC) and a more recent group, PEER – Portland Emergency Eviction Response (his creation). When I went to PEER’s website, I found a plethora of information, podcasts of mostly Rovic’s songs and ways to stave the flow of blood that both artists and non-artists living in Portland face with their housing.

PEER is definitely grassroots, sort of a network with no financial backing or lobbying clout. It has one clear strategy, and one tactic.

The goal is the abolition of forced eviction as an option for landlords and police forces. The implementation of the goal is to form a large and militant rapid response team that can respond quickly to attempted evictions as they are occurring, and at that point either stop them from happening, or move the tenant back in to the property after the police leave the scene,” Rovics states. “Specifically, or at least ideally, the process we’re talking about goes something like this: Tenants facing potential eviction because they’re pretty sure they’ll be unable to pay the back rent due when the eviction moratorium is over are faced with various decisions. They may have family they can move in with — a majority of young adults now live with their parents in the US, for the first time since the 1930’s. A tenant will often prefer to move into a vehicle or do any number of other things other than attempt to stay in their home after receiving an eviction notice. Forgive the harshness of this sentence, but these are not the tenants that are tactically of interest to PEER. We are looking to work with tenants who want to challenge their eviction notice by attempting to stay in their homes. We realize the stakes are high, and you do, too. People may decide to try to stay in their homes because they have no other options they want to consider, or because they want to challenge the whole system of forced eviction, or both.

Seeds of Creativity, Germination into Activism

Rovics grew up in New York with two musicians as parents. They also taught music, and they were progressive and anti-establishment. He started touring in the 1990s dialed into groups like Students for Environmental Action. He did a lot of college campuses concerts. He worked as an activist songwriter/performer in the anti-war and Occupy Wall Street movements. He was a long hair white guy with a guitar and anger.

“In places like Germany and Scandinavian countries, unionism has always been strong. I’ve performed in trade halls, union halls, theaters. Take a country like Denmark – the government supports the arts in a big way.” Even punk rock squat concerts were financed by governments and unions.

Before the pandemic, Rovics toured Europe two months in the Spring and two more in the Fall. He said he was paid well. “Students and activists would come in for free, drink cheap beer and my merchandise sales were significant.”

So, Spring would have Rovics crisscrossing nine countries, mostly in Scandinavia. Then in the Fall he would tour in Britain and Ireland. Each concert, each interaction created a bigger and broader group of adherents and fans. Getting people’s emails is like a gold mine, the musician tells me.

While the gigs attract a wide variety of people, he emphasizes it is mostly left-wing idealists and organizers unified in the  anti-war, anti-imperialism, global justice, environmental movements. Not all left-wingers fit the same mold, though, so socialists, anarchists, hippie environmentalists and even in Ireland Sein Fein members would populate the audiences in his concerts.

Even though Rovics — before he started his own family — lived out of a vehicle as he toured, and was homeless for two years in his youth, he knows he came into the world and into the arts with a boatload of white privilege and that his two musician parents and his life back east provided him with untold advantages.

“I play for people across the board, from wealthy to the homeless.” He has written and performed songs about homelessness.

When I asked him about artists forced onto the streets because of the pandemic, Rovics said he wasn’t aware of any in Portland who hit that far into rock bottom land. “I was just talking with a panel discussion of artists —  one in Detroit who got a job as a welder, another in New York who got on unemployment, another artist who has felt very inspired by the pandemic,  and one who has not done anything in months, because of the negative impact of the isolation she’s experiencing.”

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

— Victor Hugo

We talk much about activism welded to the arts – “Activists, many of whom are barely making a living or working two jobs just to make ends meet, are also stressed out for a variety of reasons, but they tend to be among the happier people in society because they are trying to do something. That is empowering. My line of work permits me to travel around the world regularly and I meet people like that all the time and they’re lovely.”

Not so ironically, the murder of a friend in 1993, was to him, a seminal moment in his life: a gang shooting that was intended for someone else. He was moved to action on a global justice plane. He composed a song about it in “Song for Eric”:

San Francisco at night
And the warm summer breeze
Walking back alleys
Just as free as you please
And I think of those poor boys
Who drove up to say
“Give us your money”
And then they blew you away
With one pull of a trigger
Your sweet life was through

Every time I see that street, I think of you

As a final (side note), I contacted David to help facilitate another piece for this column about two artists and two others associated with the arts concerning their thoughts on Art in a Time of Covid. What unfurled was a deep discussion with this inspiring man, active in Portland on many levels. While he is not “down so long everything looks up to him,” David and his family have been on a rent strike and are having issues making ends meet.

“As of November 21, just in case it’s of interest to your editor, my family’s situation is that we have been denied unemployment since last April, inexplicably, so other than the $1,200 per adult and $500 per kid we received from the feds early on, we have gotten no federal aid.”

They’ve also been denied food stamps because they make too much money, but they’ve been getting the supplementary food aid ($500 for a family of five) Oregon has added to the usual amount people get over recent months.

The reality is an anarchist like David Rovics is optimistic and less hopeful in the same breath He tells me social democratic countries are faring far better than capitalist countries like the USA. He believes system change is best taught through storytelling. “People get turned off if you tell them what should and should not be.” Being a troubadour allows him to relate to the individual struggles of our time, set forth universalities hardcore lectures on the ills of war, capitalism and climate change can’t facilitate, he believes.

This statement Rovics made in 2019 in response to the “concentration camps” set up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) highlights this dichotomy of hope and struggle:

“We all had that conversation when we were kids about how if we could go back in time and shoot Hitler, even though we’d be sacrificing our lives in the process, we’d do it, but we probably wouldn’t, and we don’t.  The overwhelming majority of humanity, quite sensibly, according to the historical record, don’t stick their necks out like that unless they think there’s at least some remote chance of coming out the other end with their heads intact, along with a victorious social movement and an end to the fascist dictator they’re trying to get rid of in the first place.  Social movements are based on optimism, and this isn’t an optimistic moment in America.  So, this is what it’s like.”

Check his music here, and these are David’s top picks of his current work: Say their Names; Anarchist Jurisdiction; Essentially Expendable; Each Couch by the Street; Wear a Mask. David Rovics music —

Dr. Sarah Crozier operates Crozier Veterinary Services: In-home Pawspice and End-of-Life Care. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Crozier)

Opinion | An Oregon veterinarian brings comfort to pet owners when it’s time to say goodbye

FINDING FRINGE | Sarah Crozier’s compassion and career are only part of her story. Her roots and her evolution are just as compelling.by Paul K. Haeder | 4 Nov 2020

Dr. Sarah Crozier came to this column originally when she tended to my wife’s 18-year-old calico who was on her last legs and needed euthanasia triage. We wanted Ruby to be with us when putting her down, and with COVID-19 lockdown in place, the standard operating procedure for euthanizing a pet would be dropping her off at the Newport vet’s door and then a few weeks later receiving her ashes via USPS.

Dr. C to the rescue is no small statement. She runs a palliative care and in-home euthanasia service out of Philomath — Crozier Veterinary Services: In-home Pawspice and End-of-Life Care — but she makes numerous home visits to the coast.

A periodic column profiling unconventional Oregonians who push the boundaries of social order. Street Roots logo Copyright. 

Once she had arrived, she quickly suited up in scrubs, a mask and long gloves while toting her med kit and disinfecting wipes.

Sarah’s bedside manner is attuned to the patient’s owners’ mental state. A sense of impending loss is a heavy cloud over the experience, but there also is a sense of celebrating a companion pet. She shoots that bright arrow through the pall of imminent final farewells.

“Tell me about something amazing Ruby used to do?” So, my wife and her grown daughter Mia recalled how this “reject” calico had been returned several times to the no-kill shelter Cat Adoption Team out of Tualatin, before the daughter said, “She’s perfect for our family.”

I’ve been down this road many times, since my overseas life with my military family included dogs — dogs in quarantine for rabies (when we were in the U.K.) and many litters of poodles and German shepherds.

Putting down Fido is both an emotional and impactful roller coaster.

Doctor C makes sure this process of sending companion pets into the afterlife is all about keeping them calm, semi-sedated, so saying goodbye is a healing moment and not one that is completely grief infused.

She’s only been in this new biz since October 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and she was forced to shut things down. “I had people calling leaving desperate messages, even though my phone message and website announced I wasn’t coming to people’s homes.”

Lucky for us, Doctor C recently re-energized her services with more relaxed lockdown measures. She was adamant that she was definitely not avoiding anyone who wanted her services but couldn’t get through: “Anyone reading this article, if there are any clients who called me and never got a call back, I want to apologize to them personally. Emotionally, I was incapable of calling back. There were clients’ messages I would listen to that would make me cry.”

She says she got up to 12 calls a week during the March-to-July shutdown. It broke her heart that she couldn’t do anything.

The vast majority of her patients seek her out for euthanasia services. In addition, more veterinarians are learning about Crozier’s “pawspice” and euthanasia practice. She emphasized how she is a bridge (or intermediary) between the vet handling the pet’s medical care and the owner who wants to know if there is anything else that can be done for the dying animal.

We also talked about clients who might not be able to afford to pay for her services. The fact is a growing number of people in the U.S. have pets, considering them both personal companions and emotional/physical support animals.

I’ve advocated on many occasions for homeless veterans and their families as a case manager to allow their emotional support animals as part of the team inside a homeless facility. The misguided attitude is that animals would be better cared for by someone not living on the streets. Unfortunately, in some instances homeless citizens’ pets’ leashes get cut while they are sleeping. Police sweeps of camps also send animals to the pound.

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STREET ROOTS NEWS: Most cruelty complaints against homeless pet owners are baseless, says Multnomah County Animal Services (July 2019)

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Study after study demonstrates homeless people with pets are drastically less likely to get depressed or engage in risky behaviors than those without animal friends.

“These pets are their only friends,” said Michelle Lem of the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph.  She published an article covering this topic in the journal Anthrozoos. “The only way that they’ve experienced unconditional love. These pets have saved their lives in many cases.”

In my days working with people experiencing homelessness, I’ve had a copy of the 2013 book “My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People and Their Animals” to loan to recalcitrant supervisors and others poo-pooing the arguments on why homeless folks need their companion animals.

Dr. C couldn’t agree more.

She (sort of) left her heart in Georgia

Sarah was born in Athens, Ga., in 1985, into a family with two older brothers and an older sister and a younger half-sister and brother. She moved around a lot with her family, and she ended up with her mom, a single parent who got jobs in Athens, Atlanta and Gainesville.

She’s a product of the suburbs and a private Christian school system. Her mom was an elementary teacher for the Fellowship Christian Academy.

She told me that early on she wanted to be a zookeeper, much influenced by going to the Atlanta Zoo. These are a 5-year-old’s dreams. “Taking care of exotic animals sounded super cool,” she said. “However, I distinctly recall learning what a zookeeper does — a lot of shoveling poop. It is not like I first thought — interacting with Koko the gorilla using sign language.”

It was 7 years old when she convinced herself she was going to be a vet. Sure, incidents like a car-wounded bird she found, mending it up and letting it go, were among the events galvanizing her desire to go to medical school. “Looking back, I am very lucky that the wren lived.”

Parakeets, hamsters and rabbits. It was one particular rabbit that necessitated “the kid Sarah” going to the vet on several occasions. “One rabbit had a tooth malalignment, a malocclusion. We had to take it to the vet to get the teeth filed down. A couple of times I got to go back to where the vets and animal techs worked.”

Her great-grandfather was a doctor, and Sarah said her dad always wanted to attend the University of Georgia’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “Organic chemistry was his Achilles heel. He applied to vet school twice and made it onto the wait list the second time. But he had a growing family, and he couldn’t continue to keep applying and hoping to get in.”

Her dad, Bill Crozier, ended up working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a farm loan officer.

Born into Christianity, and then an exit

By the time she was 16, questions like, “Why are we here?” and “Who am I?” would be enough for Sarah to believe the conservative grip of the Christian school wasn’t enough for her to succeed in life and pursue her intellectual and personal dreams. She enrolled herself in a high school integration program at Kennesaw State College.

“In many ways, it was an excellent move that I was with older teenagers and adults” where those big questions would be allowed.

She was so absorbed in school and the goal of becoming a vet, other aspects of her “self” were not being explored, she said, including dating and relationships. Leaving the church and her school was tough: It had been her whole world. She recalls how some of her teachers were “very threatened by me and my questions.”

“It’s a kind of community with lots of ways to identify with those around you. They call it faith, and when you lose that, you feel unmoored, especially in your mid- and late teens.”

She tells me that she settled on some form of Buddhist belief. “I can’t prove that there is not a god. I am agnostic with theistic leanings. If anything exists, then something must be eternal. That eternal thing could be called ‘God.’”

Second existential challenge – a new way of being

The father’s dream came true in Sarah: She got accepted as a Bulldog for the University of Georgia vet school.

That was March 2010 when she found out. Her personal goal was to traverse the Appalachian Trail, from Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The trail is about 2,200 miles long. She started in February, and she was shooting for 25 miles a day to make the end date she was hoping for: the start of vet school.

A major snowstorm forced her off for three weeks. But back on the trail, she met mostly white guys on the same journey, and also looking for companionship. Her attitude was clear: “I am here to make miles, not friends.”

Then came Erin. She had also started hiking the trail solo. Erin had first backpacked on the trail as a child and now was driven to complete it, Sarah said. “Long-distance hiking provided her a pause to consider where to go next in life. She had been a camp director in Montana and a police officer in Georgia before that, but she knew that neither of those were the right path for her.”

So, the determined, focused Sarah, never before on a date, here at age 24, was writing a daily journal about this new friend in her life, Erin, and newly discovered emotions and feelings.

“For me, it started off as another notch in my belt, this hike. We both ended up discovering each other.”

A day on the trail, she said, is like a month of dating. “Plus, you’re in your own head a lot.”

Sarah had to get off the trail in West Virginia, about 1,000 miles of hiking later. She tore a meniscus and was in constant pain. Erin continued and finished, earning the title of “2000 Miler” as a thru-hiker of the Appalachian Trail.

They kept a long-distance relationship going, with letters and phone calls. The plan was to meet up in Athens, get an apartment, and then Sarah would go to veterinary school and Erin would look into graduate programs at the University of Georgia.

A week before classes began, the first application to another vet school, Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine in Alabama, notified her that she had been accepted. Erin encouraged her to make the trip.

She counts April 10, 2010, as their official anniversary date. They were married in May 2012, in Georgia, which did not recognize a gay marriage at that time. Then, in August that same year, they tied the knot officially in British Columbia.

“I was very clueless about my own sexual identity prior to meeting Erin.” And in Alabama and the South, she said, “it didn’t feel safe to be out and proud. We were very closeted. People would often ask if we were sisters.”

All those journals sent back home clued her mother into the fact that her daughter was “maybe” leaning toward being a lesbian. “There is still some tension in my family, but most people are very loving and have accepted us.” Sarah said she’s lost two very close friends who basically said same-sex unions were wrong biblically.

Erin received a doctoral internship at Oregon State University, and the two moved here in July 2016 with the intention of moving back to Georgia in 2017 after Erin completed the internship. “We fell in love with the valley. There is enough agriculture and ruralness to remind us of home. We had already started working toward having a child, and we felt that this would be an ideal place to raise him.”

Bennett Blaze Crozier was born in November 2017. Erin carried, and the donor, Tony, “is a wonderful man. He has donated to seven queer families.”

There are many more sideroads a story like this could take. We talked about the book and movie “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed, a Portland author.

But the work Sarah Crozier does to salve emotional wounds of pet owners with a companion who just was put down is compelling for me, a former communications teacher.

I asked her, since understanding animal behavior seems to be the cornerstone of working with people’s pets, how do veterinarians go about learning these tools?

“Human behavior is a whole different beast. In the same way that I learned most of my animal behavior out in the field, I learned most of my communication skills while working in veterinary clinics. While I was going through Auburn’s vet med program, there was a brief class on client communication in which Dr. Sara-Louise Newcomer did a wonderful job teaching us how to connect with clients. I personally believe that this type of course needs to be longer and more comprehensive, and I think Auburn may have expanded it a bit after I graduated, but at least it was a start. The adage ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care’ is something I strive to live by.

oh the act of deactivating, the process of disconnecting, the very process of uncluttering the brain — bye-bye Facebook — Emancipation!

Some might say we are caught in a fun-house . . . or caught in a psych ward. I have more and more people in my sphere — work, friends, email world, Facebook world, family — who are not only showing signs of insanity, but also lobotomy, or massive electro-shock therapy (sic-sick). They actually buy into that Matrix shit, that we are part of a sophisticated code god, a program that creates the “reality” we are in. A Super Duper Mario Brothers Hollywood style. Really, and then the ancient astronauts and those aliens that had to help build Chichén Itzá and the great Pyramids of Gaza.

Conversations about this new normal sort of circle the drain, and in so many instance, the putrid politics of “never Trump” come spewing from the mouths of these people, unsolicited. And as a frame of reference, this “Trump is Gone Now — Hurray for Harris and Biden” (sigh of relief, smiles, giddy chortles) — I am back in the back of the back of the intellectual and political bus. You see many of us know, through study, travel, experience, rebuff — that the system both Biden and Trump adore is the shooter in the brain. Active Shooter in the House. Active Shooter in the Books they Read (not many). Active Shooter in their Consumer Choices. Active Shooter in the Work Places. Active Shooter in the State Capitals. These Active Shooters are everywhere, and have been since the founding of the Active Shooter Society that is called United (hahaha) States (really?) of America (a map maker, man!).

Just the way the Kingdom of Puritans and Kingdom of Capital laid the groundwork for this sick-in-the-head, sick-in-the-heart, sick-in-the-spirit, sick-in-the-body, sick-in-the-spirit, sick-in-the-commercial-culture has galvanized all those parts to the Active Shooter scenario and Active Shooter response to everything.

A Good Indian is a Dead Indian. There Will be Blood. Atonement for their Savagery. Beat the Dickens Out of their Native Soil/Soil/Spiritual Being. It’s that Collective Psychological Response to the Active Shooter White Patriarchal Rapist/Land Stealer/Murderer Government working out of the White House vis-à-vis all those houses of ill repute, from the CIA, to Pentagon, from NASA, to Every University, from the New York Times to Netflix, from Bank of America to BlackRock, from Jerusalem, to Geneva. Here a few other things these presidents said —

In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted putting “dangerous or undesirable aliens or citizens” in “concentration camps.” During World War II, Roosevelt signed an executive order that led hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent––including 80,000 U.S. citizens––to be incarcerated in concentration camps on the West Coast of the U.S. The U.S. was in a war against Japan at the time. It was also fighting Italy and Germany, but did not broadly incarcerate people in the U.S. of Italian and German descent.

• In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower told Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren white Southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes” while discussing the desegregation of schools.

• Johnson is often credited as one of the most consequential presidents with respect to civil rights, having signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But for much of his political career, Johnson opposed civil rights legislation. According to a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Johnson, during the two decades he served in the U.S. Senate he would use the phrase “nigger bill.” Johnson also reportedly defended appointing Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court––the court’s first black justice in U.S. history––by stating, “Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

• Recorded conversations of Nixon’s time in the Oval Office reveal extremely bigoted views of black people, among other groups. In one conversation, Nixon said, “We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family—let people like [New York Sen.] Pat Moynihan … believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work—throw ’em off the rolls. That’s the key.”

• Nixon added, “I have the greatest affection for [blacks], but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” On Jewish people, Nixon said, “The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

And then, butter-for-brains Vice President Joe Biden, with more and more of his racist toes and feet in his mouth — “The way Trump deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said. “No sitting president has ever done this, never, never, never. No Republican president has done this, this no Democratic president,” he continued. “We’ve had racists and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president but he’s the first one that has. And the way he pits people against one another is all designed to divide the country, divide people, not pull them together.”

Shall I say more about the absurdity of the presidential election/selection? I’d end up in the poor house if I gave a reader a penny for each racist thought-or-statement written by or yammered by USA politos, media mavens, Holly-Dirters, authors, celebrities, Fortune 1000-ers, et al!

With the continual panic and lockdown mentality and genuflection to authority, this society pre-and post-Trump has been the bum’s rush for me and my ilk. When we put this society through the settler-colonial lens, we are lambasted on both sides of the political manure pile. “You know, the Indians were not all these noble savages. You know, they came here using the Land Bridge. You know, progress means adaptation.” These people have always believes in American exceptionalism, believed in the red and white and blue. Always believed those alabaster statues of Lincoln or Jefferson or even Martin Luther King. That Active Shooter in the House is what creates that Collective Stockholm Syndrome. It can be collective in rarified forms — the Stockholm Syndrome of Branch Davidians or MAGA or QAnon. The Stockholm Syndrome of Greta/350.org/David Attenborough. The Stockholm Syndrome of K-Street. Stockholm Syndrome of the Military Police State. Stockholm Syndrome of Techies and Bezos Types. That Syndrome is the result of the Active Shooter Mindset.

Until we end up here, in Lockdown, in a society where stores are boarded up. Streets are empty. Barricades of the mind and spirit erected from sea to shining sea. Incomes frozen. Assets Hacked. Lives Set Inside that Funhouse, or to use non-PC lingo, Madhouse. That Active Shooter rules of engagement also include not speaking out and not moving too quickly, or use anything in reach to subdue and escape, or to crawl and stop and hide. Lights out, doors locked, no sounds, no whispering, nothing, just crouch and hold still until, what? Whirling Blackhawks and Rumbling SWAT Armored Vehicles with Machine Gun Turrets?

The perceptions from the individual and collective Stockholm Syndrome, and the intellectual actions and inactions in this Active Shooter Lockdown Abide by All Leaders’ Laws/Regulations/Rules/ Fines/Admonishments/Recommendations/Edicts/Penalties/Crimes/Offenses/Dictates, well, that certainly has constructed a very mean and very ostrich like society, and the see-hear-speak no evil and head in the sand and the lashing out and the hyper propaganda and the hyper-knee jerking, and, well, with it all facilitated by unsocial media, we are in the super minority if we dare question the question and the responses and the answers. We dare to go up against any of the narratives, and alas, we then become the pariah and the Scarleted Letter “A” for Anarchist or Anachronistic or Abnormal or Ambiguous or Antagonistic or Adversarial or Asymptomatic or Argumentative or even the letter “A” for Anticlockwise.

“All forms of perception are “subjective” in the sense that they represent only those aspects and properties of the world that can be detected by an organism’s sensory transducers. Hence all perception is subjective in the sense of being partial. Moreover, once organisms reach a stage of cognitive complexity where they start to encode some sort of model of the surrounding world through their sensory contact with it, then the result is subjective in an even deeper sense. For what is represented will only comprise those aspects of the world that potentially matter to the organism (whether this is explicitly represented in the organism’s values, or implicit in the lifestyle that has been selected for it by evolution).” –Peter Carruthers

Imagine that, the very act of just shutting it off, that Fuck You Book, that social ingratiation book, that rotting of the brain book. I was on it only because I had to set up an account for the nonprofit that was/is Gig Economizing me to work on their rather bombastic project of getting billionaires and millionaires and governments and philanthropies to put in “cash” transfers to poor people during, before and after (there will be no after) the Plan-demic Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, corona virus thing. Then, with the multitasking aplomb of wanting to take a break from this or that writing project, alas, I ended up messing with the Paul Haeder Facebook page, and then “befriending” a thousand or so, and then letting loose the philosophical and political tirades of our age. I did end up exposing folk to left of left stuff, to things that are pretty mainstream to me like Black Agenda Report, and groups like the Black Alliance for Peace. Discourse around why Trump or Trump-lite or Pence or GOP-lite, or DNC, or AOC or Biden-Obama-Hillary lite, and the hard stuff brewed by Empire of the Capitalists, that it’s all the same to revolutionaries or those with the Scarlet Letter “A” emblazoned on our t-shirts. Pure addictive and mind-blowing shit, this country is, and that is the unholy alliance of a country tis of me based on torture, raping, burning, immolating, murdering, beheading, pollution, animal slaughter, and air and soil and water destruction, all in the name of toilet paper for the masses, and kingdoms of jewels, banks, homes, mansions, castles for the Capitalists in Power. The ethanol brain rot of Capitalism a la North America.

I would throw out bombs on why Biden and Trump come from the same patriarchal DNA, how the Democratic Party Machine is as Bad and Corrupt as the Republican Party Machine. How the Machine is greased with Capital, and the Machine is not of, for, by, with, entwinned to the People, US, but for the banks. The techno-fascists, and brothers and sister of the Military Industrial Complex of Another and Another and Another Mother/Mothership.

United Snakes of America. United States of BlackRock. Un-united States of Capitalism, what have you, in variations on the theme, well, those stars on that other Banner, tell the story, and the story shifts with the logos, and those stores are indeed just banners, hiding the real sophisticated thugs of Transnational, Transhuman, Transcultural, Transhumane capital.

In that abortion of Facebook just days ago, I find myself less distracted, though I have always worked as a writer, done my time in the world of nature, walks, paddles, bike riding, and now another gig for the 63-going-on-64-white (self-loathing, sort of)-communist-male-who-has-to-in-polite (mixed up)-company-call-himself-socialist. This one, well, full-time, with benefits, and back in the slog of things, working with adults with developmental and intellectual (and psychological and physical) disabilities. As a counselor, in this case all-around job-employment counselor, developers, what have you. Back to getting my expired certificates re-upped, and then all the vocational rehabilitation and department of human services and department of developmental disabilities courses and trainings. Deja vu, and well, in the beach life of the Central Oregon Coast, my spouse and I have to work, even though it feels fluttering around here that half the people are retired and enjoying high lifestyle, or at least solid retired middle class, and then, there are those who service this place, and many of them are struggling big time. In Oregon with the Nanny Governor and the schizophrenia of Red-Neck and Blue-Neck, the pain of businesses shuttering and main streets depopulating, well, this makes for a very hard time for the clientele I work with — how to get a job for someone who has to usually work 20 hours or less to keep the SSI under wraps. People who are not “normally” those we see in the workplace (the highest unemployment rate for any demographic is adults with developmental disabilities — think 83 percent). Getting creative in Plan-Demic times, well, I am up for the challenge, but alas, working that 40-hour a week schedule, and then doing my own thing as a journalist and novelist and such, well, I have to utlize as much brain-space and keyboard and mouse time as possible for MY work.

Facebook was a kick for a while, then for many of those nanoseconds (they do add up to minutes and then an hour is wasted on Fucker-Berg’s Mind Manipulation Tool, I was put on 24 hour and then three-day and then one week suspension. Expelled from posting and commenting. Then, to make matters even more hilarious (sad, too) those dyed in the wool exceptionalists, those with the Democratic Party diarrhea dreams dream, I just had to call it quits. They are the worse of the worse, the same as Christian MAGA and Conservative MAGA and Military MAGA and Retiree MAGA and Female MAGA, and the like. Total cognitive dissonance, and the Active Shooter mind-scape, well, that got the best of me (not really). Endless stupid dead-end posts and mini-discussions about why Trump is in and why Biden is bad, and, then, just coming from this angle as a communists, err, in Active Shooter land, a “socialist,” the arguments are back on the table about how great it is to have that first person of color in as VP-soon-to-be-Prez . . . (1928-’32, Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s Vice President, was a member of the Kaw Nation).

Endless stupidity about the lesser of two evils, about the evils of two lessers, about how a Biden win will allow for pressure on the left side of things to move the party and the country leftier . . . . Right! Bankers, bombers, baggers, bottom-feeders, bombasts, buccaneers, bag men/women, broadcasters, botulism boys, and the like, already lined up for the Harris-Biden Kill Show. Active Shooters show. Then, the Trump All Encompassing Digital and Cable Network . . . . all the while the offense industrialists (elites in and out of the military industrial complex) will bilk the nation, the globe, the resources until a future is this below, the fighting orangutan’s, a la Homo Psychopithecus!

PETITION TARGET: Cambodian Ambassador to the United States Chum Sounry

The Phnom Penh Safari zoo in Cambodia showcases disturbing orangutan boxing matches, forcing innocent apes to fight each other in a boxing ring. The animals are also made to ride bikes, hula-hoop, and wear degrading outfits, as shown in numerous TripAdvisor photos.

Orangutans aren’t the only animals abused at this zoo: tigers jump through flaming hoops and cower in fear of trainers’ electric prods; crocodiles are hit with sticks and have their mouths taped shut for selfie opportunities; and elephants are controlled with bullhooks.

The animals appear neglected, too. The tigers are declawed and extremely thin, according to EARS Asia. And the drinking water is filthy, according to a Khmer Times article that has since been deleted.

Animals do not exist for human amusement. They deserve natural habitats and loving caretakers, not cruel zoos where they’re forced to perform for park-goers.

The abuse must stop. Sign this petition urging Cambodian Ambassador to the United States Chum Sounry to call for an end to all cruel animal performances at the zoo and push for a thorough investigation into the animals’ treatment.

The abusive husband in this loveless marriage of capitalists ruling the roost, writing the narrative, spinning the malignant history, fears the loss of her/his master because that abusive system has turned him/her into a clinging hopey-dopey thing who believes all those decades of oppression will somehow be redefined to allow this shattered individual and collective to lose all self-esteem to the point that we are no longer capable of imagining a life without our parasitic master.

We are collectively servants of those masters who have for centuries plotted and prodded populations into fearing agency, revolution and radical transformation. We are that Disney-fied and Disney-fed collective, and those elites especially, yammering and yammering about the LGBTQA+ minority’s play ( Lin-Manuel Miranda), “Hamilton,” being so wonderous and so emblematic of the good of this nation, well not a one would question the slaver’s role in America — a slaver, new documents do show that not only was Alexander Hamilton a slave trader for his in-law family, the Schuyler’s, his own account books demonstrate that Hamilton bought, sold and personally owned slaves. But try and have that conversation about Miranda and the elite’s bullshit love of this bullshit play on Fuck-You-Book, or in person (of course, masked up and at least six feet of separation, please, and no more than 8 gathered in an open space, please or else!!!).

I would have expected a few of the people on Fuck-You-And-The-Horse-You-Rode-Into-Town-On BOOK, to nuance the Biden-Harris gig, the bullshit nature of GOP and DNC, and the trillions thrown at the sex addicts and money changers in the billionaire class, while mom and pop, sister and brother, downtrodden and almost-to-be-downtrodden, get shit from Pelosi and Mitch, but instead, the Collective Stockholm Syndrome of the liberal lite kind has just plummeted our 2021 into the new normal of following more anti-civil rights and anti-free speech and anti-freedom of movement laws backed by thousand-dollar fines, the fuzz with their assault rifles and well, the GIANT Scarlet Letter A for, well, fill in the blank of anti- as prefix. You get expelled from Zoom Doom school, get cut from the team, get sacked, get ostracized, and get kicked to the curb if you dare questions narratives of the ruling class. Dare to question this science (sic) versus that science. You know, that is the mob mentality of America, whether it is in the village square burning heretics, or on the greasy grass mowing down dancers and drummers. We are in a Little Bighorn, and the Big-Small-wannabe Eichmann’s are there, mostly, in places of “authority,” the elites, the nanny governors and their cadre of pencil neck followers, the compliant ones, the ones who follow order, those who say LGBTQA+, but are hope-dopey Stockholm Syndrome sufferers of the major kind, creating dictate after dictrate.

You can’t even talk about small businesses closing. Can’t talk about the renter and mortgage class (sic) sticking it and sticking it and resticking it to the masses. Imagine this fucked up Corona World, where stupidity and no-deep questioning rule. Can you imagine scum bucket governors from red and blue states, yammering and yammering.

There is no plan for the resettling in and after Plan-demic. But there is that Fourth Industrial Revolution, the big plans by big tech, and the Google world and the economies of scale of the Amazon-kind variety and the satellites launched at sunset and the Elon Musks and the entire shit-show that is Forbes and Rockefeller and Council on Foreign Affairs, the Aspen Institute, the Federalist Society, the Family, the TED Talk crews, all of them, from QAnon to the Tweets, and everything in between, it is the world of the ACTIVE Shooter, and duck and cover, the name of one generation’s game, and now, the slave master will say, “All Money, All Movements, ll Things” will and must be on a digital platform. Passports from Hell to Enter a New Hell. No Travel Unless Eyes Are Scanned and Vaccination Record Checked.

Somehow, that has been the pathway of the elites, from Holly-Dirt, to the schools, to the drone programs at two-bit community colleges, to the food purveyors. We have colonized each generation, and the baselines of old hopes — agency, real food, real relationships with people-land-planet, real debate, real learning, real arguing, real water, real air, real art, real feelings, real history, real enfranchisement, real conversations — that too has been put on Red Flag Active Shooter hold. Deep Sixed.

Conversations and philosophical constructions and deconstructions are put on hold as the majority of people in the United Snakes of BlackRock, well, they talk about “things” as bifurcated nonsense, politics, histrionics, heliographs, shit shows and PT Barnum One-Upping Scams of the Mind and of the Culture.

I love what John Steppling has to say in the front of his essay, The Mechanical Soul:

One of the reasons I keep writing about AI is that the entire construct of an artificial intelligence has become both a symbol and metaphor for contemporary thought, and, is part of this ongoing reshaping of human consciousness.

I admit I am surprised how many people believe in the entire project of AI. Clearly it holds something very appealing that people WANT to believe in. And a key element in this is the idea of predictability. And predicting means controlling. So, in one sense, there is nothing new in this desire to foretell the future.

Now the first problem when discussing “consciousness” is that finding a definition for that word is nearly impossible.

“Moreover, the explicit dualistic beliefs of children in Western cultures get less strong with age (Bering 2006). This suggests that dualism is the default setting of the folk-psychological system, which gets weakened by cultural input in scientific cultures—at least at the level of explicit verbal expression—rather than depending on such input (Riekki et al.2013;Willard & Norenzayan 2013; Forstmann & Burgmer 2015). Indeed, dualist intuitions are prevalent in both children and adults, even in cultures whose norms discourage overt attention to mental states, albeit becoming weaker as a function of exposure to Western education (Chudek et al.2018).” –Peter Carruthers (Human and Animal Minds)

With Facebook and Twitter and even consumption of the low art of Netflix and everything on the Internet, that is, almost all of it on the Web, we are losing the race for dualistic beliefs, of holding many counter-arguments in our brains, and even just considering counter-intuitive things. But, the news, the real news, should send shudders down any human’s spine — Bend, Oregon, on the frigid east side of the Cascade Range, is currently without a warming shelter, largely due to complaints by rich residents about a location. Early Tuesday morning, the body of Dave Melvin Savory, 57, a homeless double amputee, was found slumped against a dumpster outside a Rite Aid pharmacy.

Finally, of course, any real leftist would be cheering the defeat and dethroning of any ruler of the empire. Christ, just watching both sides of the sewer pond is what a revolutionary would hope for. Trump defeated and his slim-balls and himself slipping and sliding in their own shit, that is a good day to be a human being. And, the end of Biden and Harris and all the hit men he and she are hiring on for the Biden-Harris Empire Shit Show, that too will be a very good day for humanity.

Something About Heads on Pikes and All Chained up in the Docks? Banned on Facebook.

America’s Active Shooters!!!

Final Note — Imagine this shit show America, and this blog, and the few things I wrote in it, enough to toss me to the curb. Big Brother and Big Sister, they are all watching. Just this recent new job, I was told by a person in the nonprofit involved in hiring me that “I Googled you . . . I had to really get beyond that to think, ‘there is more to this guy than all that.'” Hmm. Is this the proverbial digital straw that broke the human being’s back?

A Million and One Ideas that Would Transform The Globe

by Paul Haeder / November 1st, 2020

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

— William Carlos Williams,  Spring and All

Ahh, just proposing a few hundred “things” to transform the globe into a world where people control their destinies within groups of people who have their destinies in their best interest is teetering on insanity. It’s not what good people in good capitalist company do, allow.

You see, Capitalism lite or Capitalism hard is the same dog-eat-dog world of fend for yourselves, err, unless you can form a cabal of elites, with their colonies of soldiers and lawyers and bankers and land dealers.

Get a group of like-minded sociopaths, get a group of investors who want to make a quick buck, get millions who consume the lies of the business journals, the lies of the celebrity scum that end up controlling the narrative on everything, from how the local dog catcher should or shouldn’t do their job, all the way to the pigs over in Fukushima now letting out the isotopes of cancerous love into the Pacific.

It’s the same story told with a different spin, but we know the routine — Hanford, bombs, government contracts, the Tri-Cities “benefitting” from the construction, the blokes eating out, the entire house of nuclear cards based on bad scientists coming into town, and then the system of capitalism runs like a smooth Atilla the Hun School of Economics. Farmers out in Eastern Washington, and bam, the big bad bomb making boys with their pencil necks, their big cars, their big booze bills, the cigarettes, the new homes with backyard in ground pools, the ancillary and tertiary junk of the consumer/capitalist kind, colonizing in this dry land. Until the smoothly and finely tuned and well greases death machine ends up decades later running amok in the people’s thyroids, in the DNA and RHA of papa and mama, and alas, now Native fishers have thyroids removed, and the fatty bellies of salmon are recommended not for human consumption.

Capitalism — not for human consumption. That is, all those hyphenated additives and ingredients in baby’s formula, all that stuff sprayed into everything, all those extruded plastics, all those soldered joints, all those capacitors and Prius batteries, the entire thing is not for human consumption.

Now, then,  how can anyone go up against this narrative, or flip the script, or make paradigm shifts and cultural transformations, when the entire mess is defended by the very people, say in Appalachia, where entire mountain peaks are blasted away, trout rivers blackened by the dust, and babies born fifty points or more below the barely average thinking (IQ) capacity of a Trump or Biden evil spawn. Dirt poor, no teeth, USDA Mac’ n’ Cheese food pantry boxes, and, bam, here we are, 2020,   and the dumb as dirt country is being run by thieves, rapists, bombers, land razers, polluters, perverts, sociopaths.

Then the compliant ones, all the big burly tough Americans, especially on the GOP and MAGA side, who feign toughness, think they are blustery in their attacks on educators, intellectuals, scientists, youth, raging grannies, women, environmentalists, multi-culturalist, but the bottom line, they are the flag wavers, the statue defenders, the clear cutters, the wolf killers, the church goers, the big truck lovers, lock step on Saturdays for their college football, their Friday night big high school grid iron. Everything about the mythology of America the white land, everything about the authority of the white patriarch, everything about the Stars and Bars, those are the MAGA/GOP lovers, and they want their way or the highway. Amazingly openly racist, and anything that speaks of questioning the Yankee Doodle Dandy and Confederate narrative, they go ballistic.

This is not to say the other groupings tied to the Democratic party are that much more independent, or forethinking. This is the way of capitalism, and the bourgeoise, the professional middle managers, the cultural warriors, all the PC and cancel culture and the co-opting of movement’s, the Che on the t-shirt with Pink Floyd emblazoned under him, that is the other side of the capitalist isle. Really, two different breeds, possibly the products of epigenetics, and the unholy contract within both the rule of law and the rules of engagement.

War, Branding, Amusements, Infantilism, Disneyifcation, Commercials,  Retailopethicus, and the land of milk and honey, through the veins  of mother earth, the fissures of Turtle Island, massive murder and slavery. Not much more of that history to define this country.

Until, everyone, on all sides of the political manure pile, the enemy of transformational living and collectivism.

How many times have I gone up against college presidents who actually come from the ranks of MBA schools, or with degrees in “institutional leadership” (yes, and WTF degree, PhD no less).

Try out the Journal for Higher Education Mangers, running with the AAUA, American Association of University Administrators.  Then, yes, The Journal of Research on the College President. They have their lobbying arm, their professional insiders, their army of propagandists. Always, top down, and nothing to do with teaching and teachers.

Look, more is not better, and bigger is not better, but in capitalism, in supposedly valiant and worthy areas  like education, that is, working with humans to allow themselves to share/ advance knowledge and nurturing systems thinking and expanding critical interdisciplinary skills; to learn to work across disciplines, cultures, nations, well, you might think the idea is to work socialistically to bring our societies and our various countries toward some decent survivability and mutual aid across all lines. . . . But the reality is that bigger is better, and competition is not just expressed on the basketball courts. Each school, trying the hook the next and the next generation of potential students. More and more Club Med amenities. Working on the Amusing Themselves to Death.

It’s not about intergenerational, multi-dynamic cross educational pathway to community and collective healing and mutual aid. It’s about the big fish in the ocean gets the most sardines. Free (sic) market hucksterism, and the constant getting one, two, three thousand things over on your fellow citizens. Compatriots for Americans is the opposite of compassion.

Ya think those provosts and institutional leaders and VPs and Human Resources pros give a shit about the actual individual student, or the workers keeping the system, and their big pay checks, going?

Nope. I have worked with colleges where the outliers like me, left of left, are not only denigrated, but marginalized and sacked. I have worked with colleges where exploitation is the maximal form of employment. The student is not always the center of things, and alas, now the student is a customer, or in a time of Plan-Demic, a data donor on a huge Digital Dashboard.

If you want to talk about technocratic and technological fascism, you will not be embraced in neoliberal circles, and lite liberal circles. Not in most departments at the universities. Forget the community colleges, where more and more have drone technology programs. You know, bomb them back to the stone age from the comfort of a Lazy Boy lumbar support counsel chair. No matter how much the liberals spew about CSA’s (community supported agriculture) and Farmer’s Markets and the like, they still feel as if technology, Artificial Intelligence, all the apps and tools of the managerial class, the tracking tools, the aggregating tools, all the “so called” medical and banking and taxing tools, well, the show must go on. How do you stop it? And, for the most part, many of them profess, tracking who and who does get the vaccinations, who does and who doesn’t agree with the entire narrative, well, that is a-okay.

These are scary times, and desperate times call for desperate/fascistic/ technological neutering measures.

Every Dissident Voice and Facebook post, all the entanglements of the process of exploring ideas and expressing opinions, it is like a forever chemical — data, and stories and tweets and postings, they stay in the digital hell of the overlords, ready to be paraded out anytime. And those millionaires and billionaires and soon to be trillionaires have offered up the backdoor keys of NSA and all the other alphabet soup agencies of oppression and repression, as well as given to any major or minor corporation having access to EVERYTHING. The outfall is, of course, revolt, dissent, dissidence and clarity of dissension will be, well, verboten if one is to survive in this Global Digital and AI/CCTV/Big Brother panopticon — which is now not just an institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Now, each internet, each bureaucratic, each retail transaction, each consumer moment being observed by a single security guard — the AI God in the Cloud.

The Republicans, the Democrats, the Libertarians, all of them, want that level of control. Even the Chinese, do. This is the value of oppression, economies of scale, the conundrum of each nation out for itself. Each hundred million or each half a billion must go after the goods, the others be damned.

This is the psychopathic way of “the market,” the bulwark that is  the steal jaws of competitive markets, where the commons is always a tragedy, where the Grecian Tragedy is played out every nanosecond in the arms of mothers and on the lips of babes, as land is paved over, jawed open, blasted clean, denuded, soil and life and people and animals turned inside out, used in the grand corralling of the minds and bodies. We are the sheep and cattle in the elites sophisticated system of domestication, husbandry, monocropping plants and people.

Social-intellectual-spiritual-dreaming control. Pre-crime is not some Phillip K. Dick fantasy, it is, rather, the reality of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, started decades ago with every transaction, every educational move, every financial move, every medical move, every legal or illegal move monitored, checked, and filed away. AI and Google and the plethora of other evil app providers and software makers, well, they have the web spinning as I write this.

But this screed is not about that so much as it is about my writing. Another novel, started, on a roll, and yet, daily, I am sure, minute by minute somewhere in the recesses of my brain, I wonder “why?” Who the fuck will read this book, and how do I market it, and if I am so radical and communist in my philosophy, should I be worried about who reads it and how it gets read. The Collector and Story Teller, very very loosely based on people I meet, including one fellow, who I feature here at Dissident Voice —  Down and Out in Portland: Retired in Style in Waldport, OR

The problem is I am a novelist without an audience, this shit-show that was big time publishing in the 1980s through the 2000, when I had an agent looking to score semi-small/median with the NYC/Boston publishing houses, that has shifted big time, until the big bucks are thrown at the putrid people, the Obamas in the tens of millions, all the tell-all crapper books, the Master of Fine Arts style sessions, and, well, a stack to the moon of how to get rich-how to get laid-how to get self-actualized-how to get one or a million scams  on your neighbor – how to get a million bucks/spirituality/love/instant success/happiness/multiple orgasms without any work.

I get the scam of publishing (one shit-load of rejection slips and letters, even, “well, mighty evocative, mighty powerful, but not our cup of tea,” and I get the competition is ruthless. In fact, you can create great art, and it will, alas, stay locked up in a file case or hang up in papa’s garage next to the Vargas women.

Imagine, Vassar College and Smith College interns, reading piles upon piles of manuscripts (that was in the 1990s-2000s), and if the first two lines, or in rare cases, the first two pages didn’t catch their attention, then, bam, the slush pile. Rejection City.

My New York agent wanted like hell to get my books/novels sold, but he too was up against this pedestrian bullshit East Coast triple bias.

Now, at age 63, what’s the point of lashing out lines and incredible concepts and narratives, when, well, here we are — a nation of triple consumers. Students called consumers. The entire fear city shit of the plan-demic yellow bellies up against the functionally illiterate masses. No fucking MAGA or Christian Pervert will read my stuff. Let alone buy it. Cancel culturists won’t buy/read my fiction. Highfaluting “artistic” types won’t. The pile of mush getting churned out on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, all of that, this is the American gel, the mush and mutilated crap of the elites and the Duck Dynasty folk. Podcast after ever-deadening podcast sucking up more attention spans. The incredible right-wing news (sic) feeds. The incredible unintelligible pop culture, the hate culture, the faux Buddhist shit, the entire mess that is the United States’ “artistic” tastes all of it is cancerous.

But here I am, trying to get to the point: In one scene in the fast-paced book, The Collector and the Story Teller, my protagonist, Raymundo Pena, or just Ray, is trying to solve a murder and disappearance of The Collector, Aubrey Searles, and find Aubrey’s disappeared wife, and in that process, he ends up at the food pantry, the food distribution point for the poor and the downtrodden. A very short-lived scene, but real, and telling.

Of course, you guessed it, me, the author, having worked in a few places that we call “food pantries,” and now, with the plan-demic, Ray ends up talking to a make-believe few characters working at and utilizing the pantry.

It’s a short chapter, but the reality is this — This country, broken from sea to shining sea, is way bey0nd the massive slippage either of the two prostitute parties will grasp or admit (maybe both of them, and their majority backers, have zero idea how threadbare systems are in the USA for massive poverty and massive slippage of the American people).

Hunger was bad ass before the plan-demic, the entire lockdown, the shuttering of businesses. A mean country, under any bloody Yankee-Confederate flag. Food stamps cut and cut. The punishment society, full of token groping, making people line up for fucking voting, imagine the shit that poor people and hungry children and then ramp that up and put in poor undocumented people and hungry undocumented children have to do just to get calories.

Now, the local foodbank, shortage after shortage. No turkeys, no dry beans, shortage after shortage. Plenty of Mac’n’Cheese, and the bread and cookies and cakes, thrown at the pantries. Piles. Mountains of them. Packaged for the next apocalypse, a 20 line ingredient (chemical) list.

Welcome to capitalism, a million choices, but “not really choices.” Which Dye No. 5 or No. 55 do you want in your kids’ cereal puffs? Which organic compound do you want sprayed on the baby’s mashed potatoes? Which percentage of sugar-hydrogenated oil-salt lick do you want in the toaster cinnamon buns?

there is no “most prestigious environmental prize” if the poor young people aren’t leading the charge

“I also know that one must do what one can do. No matter how little it is, it is nonetheless a human testimony and human testimonies, as long as they are not based on greed or personal ambition for power, can have unexpected positive effects.…I believe in local action and in small dimensions. It is only in such environments that human creativity and meaningful identities can truly surface and flourish.” ― Manfred Max-Neef

There are  many-many gross things in the news every nanosecond of anti-social media’s and mass mainlining media’s dead from the navel up “stories.”

Imagine, now, the Great White Hope, the Sir David and the Prince William doling out a few million bucks here and there for, drum roll, individuals, companies and agencies that come up with solutions to the world’s environmental problems.

Imagine that, the deeply steeped in eugenics Attenborough, and the DNA-mutated mentally inbred royalty, having people jump through hoops to help move forward the powers that be in capitalism.

Here’s a doozy from this insipidly wet milquetoast PR spin — “We can’t cut down rain-forests forever and anything that we can’t do forever is by definition unsustainable,” says Attenborough. Adding that “if we act now we can yet put it right,” how amazing would that be? We must all act now.

Oh, cry for me, Military Industrial Complex. Nary a word about the Prince’s jets and missiles. Nothing about the deeply embedded complex that holds up the war lords. Again, to repeat – that’s Silicon Valley, that’s fast food, that’s paint, hardware, clothing, IT, telecom, med, media, pharma, oil, gas, nuclear, wires, plastics, satellites,  technical writers, office supplies, water, air, soil suppliers, engineering outfits, lumber, milling, smelting, big earth movers, drone makers, all of those grand pieces and bits that put together this zombie squid of war war war.

You will not hear that in the Attenborough line – no more war machines, soldiers, flyovers, Kings Guards, air-naval-ground-moon bases. Imagine, he states how he was 11 years old with a world population of, drum roll, 2.3 billion (1937).

And, now it’s 7.8 billion, and huge parts of the globe are dead of wildlands and are invaded by, well, you guessed it (but not coming from the Prince’s or Knight’s mouths) – capitalists &  empires running their criminal operations for the banks, the investors, the elites. Oh, mining, ag, metals, fossil fuel, minerals, fish, water, data, human lives for the operation that gets old Attenborough flying around the world in his jet-setting ways.

Let’s see, since 1937, hundreds of trillions spent on missiles, NSAS, satellites, war-war-war, and what has occurred since wee David grew up to be 94? No mention of the amassing of chemicals, industrial farms, the huge consumer-capitalist bases of seizing power, products, resources and people from other countries, all for god, country, queen, and Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and, pick your bank poison here________________! He will not speak of the accumulation of wealth and land and power by his own Anglo-Saxon greedy men of war-debt-slavery.

He wants birth-control, forced sterilization for the dark people, and LEED and zero waste third and fourth homes-castles-island enclaves for the beautiful people.

This is more of the same bizarre stuff – five prizes, $1.2 million each, for 10 years. This is the infantilism of the globe and the great super hero rescuer narrative for the beautiful people who want nothing more than capitalism that pays, has returns on investments and smells-tastes-feels-looks-sounds like green porn.

“We rely entirely on this finely tuned life-support machine” says Sir David Attenborough when describing our little blue planet, in his recently released book and documentary “A Life on Our Planet.” The legendary naturalist and broadcaster, now 94, has spent his entire life traveling the world documenting wildlife, for us to enjoy from the comfort of our living rooms. He is thought to be one of the most well-traveled people on the planet, for The Life of Birds documentary alone, it is estimated he traveled a whopping 256,000 miles. That is the same as traveling around the world ten times. And this was only for one of the eight series he has made for the BBC over the course of almost 30 years. He now joins forces with Prince William with whom he shares a passion for the environment, to help launch the Earthshot Prize. Aiming to be the most prestigious global environment prize, it will be awarded to those who come up with extraordinary ways to help tackle some of the biggest environmental challenges of our planet. [source]

Quaint.

Here’s my email – contact me ASAP. No millions spent on techno fixes, on big giant scoops for ocean plastic, seed storage projects for the moon or mars. No 29 million studies and 29 white papers and a hundred million sad-sack pretzel logic to save the planet.

Simple stuff, so again, my contact email is below. Here

I can think of a massive one weekend event – how about a thousand or 10,000 thousand two-day charettes. Giant brainstorming sessions. Giving young people the facilitation tools to come up with a 10 part or 100 part plan to save people, planets, plants, populations of animal species.

Easy, man – with all the shit-show tools of Zoom and satellite feeds and computers and, well, you think that maybe 10,000 teach-ins and brainstorming sessions might produce a few common threads, in the countries on the African Continent, North, Middle and South America, Middle East, Far East, Island nations, and more.

Let’s see – I bet with the right engagement, those young students and their tag-along parents and uncles and aunts might be coming up with this:

• immediate end to military spending
• utilizing the equipment militaries have for restorative natural, agroecological, and community projects
• no more billionaires
• no more men and women ruling from the top down
• no more corporations dictating the size, shape, limits, lifespans of individual humans, ecosystems, bioregions, nations, and hemispheres
• massive collective agro-ecological farming to feed the world
• massive eminent domain for empty buildings, second, third, fourth homes
• microhome villages served with intergenerational diverse people healing minds-bodies-earth-natural systems
• a collective and massive global year of strikes
• the new framework for producing food, producing goods, producing small-locally owned businesses
• colleges for all, and all departments engaged in connected and holistic teaching . . .
• no more economy over anything thinking
• deep ethics taught in all those subjects
• community schools led by students and people in the communities
• native and indigenous led governance, land ethic, air ethic, and cultural engagement

And, more, and can you imagine all those 10,000 community-based charrettes, where people – the young and the very old and the most vulnerable – are not just at the table, but are the facilitators. Sure, the concepts of global heating will be tantamount as well as restorative cultural-economic-spiritual-racial justice.

I am convinced that these youth forums will produce manifestos so similar, so tied to the very idea of “an injury to one is an injury to all” that all the retrograde, violent, and colonized war lord and banking lovers would be pushed out of the realm. Join us, sure.

But imagine now this Earth-Shot prize being something completely different than the old model of “who has the best ideas to fit into the capitalist paradigm to play around with some of the major issues earth and people are facing.”

Solve microplastics? Well, first, now, stop the plastic’s industry in the hands of felons and profit gougers. The packaging industries? Done. The clear cutters, strip miners, mountaintop removers – gone, out of business.

The commodities trading? Gone. The stockholders, the monopolies, the BlackRocks, gone.

Oh, I know it will be a lot of work, but the young and the very old and the vulnerable are up to the task. There is really nothing else on earth but the human/animal/plant family and natural world and working collectively so people in the next county don’t suffer while the other county doesn’t suffer.

Precautionary principle, life cycle analysis, and much more-more for an ecosocialist world. Whoops, did I use the term, Socialist?

Youth who are not completely damaged by consumerism/anti-social media/drugs/epigenics/Breaking Bad parents are naturally connected to other peoples, and given the space and chance, they are the solutions makers.

No more TED Talk white bread talkers, no more mass mainlining media infortainment, no more celebrity culture dominating everything, no more-no more.

Again, utilize this shit-show Zoom Doom and media platforms to get these 10,000 or 100,000 teach-ins/charrettes up on all platforms. Imagine, even all those colonized millionaire media fakes, all those prune headed politicians, all those stem-cell sucking CEO’s like Bezos and Zuckerberg, well, they will have to watch, man.

Old Knights and Princes are not the future. The rich and the white race rampaging throughout history in their empires of greed, religion, conquistadors of rape-pillage-theft-murder; those manipulators, those penury-creators, those bamboozlers, the smoke and mirror charlatans, the debt holders, the criminal injustice purveyors, all those blood diamond types, I know for a fact that two day teach-in and charrette, they will be tossed out as anything more than thieves and destroyers.

Give peace a chance? Give the youth the platform, the facilitation, the attention, the manifestos to change this world.  Coming up with some bio-mimic paint that self cleans will not cut it. Global shit in who is at the table, who writes the rules, who brings forth the ideas. N O  M O R E  white guys setting the stage and making the rules.

Oh, what a world it would be, and what would it take to get those 100,000 global charettes working? Technology. Computers? Some WIFI connections?  

Let the youth, the young from lower economic communities, the people of the so-called developing or less developed world make their mark now. Forget about the compostable toilets and home-sited wind turbine.

And this is what the Earthshot Prize aims to do. Just as the moonshot that John F. Kennedy proposed in the 1960s was a catalyst for new technology such as the MRI scanner and satellite dishes that helped us go to the moon, this prize aims through Earthshot challenges to create a new wave of ambition and innovation around finding ways to help save the planet. The committee has announced it will spend the next 10 years $60 million, awarding annually five, $1.2 million prizes to individuals, organizations and those around the world who are working to provide solutions to the world’s biggest environmental problems.

I’ll add a reader’s comments since the other site where this article appeared, Dissident Voice, does not accept comments anymore —

Paul,

Really great essay.

I am tired of the massive abuses occurring at the hands of Big Business. Also of the massive abuses occurring at the hands of Big Government, which has merely become a wholly owned subsidiary of that Big Business.

And of the devastating consequences of disaster capitalism.

But I am just as tired of the protesters, whom are likely wasting time trying to dictate to others telling them what to do (authoritarianism & fascism are not limited only to the right-wingers), rather than using their time more productively & effectively by engaging in more productive activities & changes themselves.

Those that don’t like the Elite dominated systems, processes, and activities, should lead by example by creating better alternatives themselves.

Get out, observe, discover, create, experiment – and don’t be afraid to fail, but learn how to learn from those mistakes, to truly progress.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. –Bertrand Russell-

There are still an unlimited amount of discoveries to be discovered & revealed. Even a lot of ancient discoveries awaiting rediscovery.

Dependence is a lack of independence. Insanity is depending on others to change, foolishly believing  independence will spawn from that continued dependence.

D.i.y ethics need to make a comeback .As do true grassroots movements. Not corporate-directed pseudo-grassroots movements.

This planet, our soils, plants, people, and ways of thinking need serious help.

Calling on corporate-Elite dominated systems to effectuate changes will only result in more corporate-Elite dominated systems. Those Elite dominated systems can be defeated, but not whilst remaining reliant solely on their terms.

D.i.y. or die.

Again, great essay.We need far more people inspiring personal change to effectuate real global change.

Regards,
Sean Ryan, NatureSoilProducts.com

Eternal Impunity of Capitalism’s Crimes

Agent Orange, a fifty-fifty mix of the n-butyl esters 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T)

by Paul Haeder / October 7th, 2020

The very idea of War Being a Racket penetrates so deeply into capitalism’s flair for murder by a thousand cuts, a thousand miles in a Corvair, a thousand sips from diet Coke, a thousand sucks from Nestle baby formula, a thousand hours on the video screen, a thousand seconds inside the nuclear core, a thousand nanoparticles chewed, a thousand days living under high tension power lines, a thousand slices of mercury-cured tuna, a thousand puffs of the e-cigarette, a thousand days in law school, a thousand clicks hiked in clear cut, a thousand bombs bursting in air, a thousand doses of any one of millions of drugs or chemicals, a thousand seconds of a presidential debate, a thousand launches from NASA, a thousand bullets into Black bodies, a thousand spent uranium laced shells, a thousand drips of PCBs in our water supply, and, on and on, the drumbeat plays, a thousand cuts.

I just finished watching the documentary, The People versus Agent Orange. Carol Van Strum (here and here) is the American contingent and Nga To Tran the Vietnamese contingent. Like so many other documentaries, this one cuts to the chase – the liberation of humankind and ecologies from the death ray of capitalism is the ONLY way forward.

The origins of Agent Orange lie in an obscure laboratory at the University of Chicago where, during World War II, the chairman of the school’s biology department, E. J. Kraus, discovered that direct doses of 2,4-D can kill certain broadleaf vegetation by causing the plants to experience sudden, uncontrolled growth not unlike that of cancer cells in the human body. Kraus, thinking his findings might be of use to the Army, informed the War Department, which initiated testing of its own but found no use for the stew of hormones prior to the end of the war. But experiments with 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T continued through the 1950s. — Orion Magazine

Ad nauseum the bantering back and forth with deplorable MAGA and shallow democrats on mainline TV/Cable, is much ado about nothing when we put into perspective every single action the corporation makes to not only rip-off each and every customer, but to delimit free speech, to eviscerate participatory democracy, to use their hit squads of lawyers to obfuscate and obliterate the righteous people up against these Titans of Tyranny – chemical, pharmaceutical, agriculture, fossil fuel, mining, data, prison, space, industrial, food, medical, media, education, criminal justice, banking, insurance, investing thieves and manslaughter experts.

The entire farm has been sold down the river a million times, so when we look at Agent Orange, the USA government, the US Air Force, the Dow corporation, the endless legal deaths by a thousand motions against some sort of reparation for the millions of Vietnamese, Americans and dozens of others in Vietnam during the tyranny of corporations and the French and the USA in fighting in another person’s land. Vietnam!

Carol Van Strum’s story is linked to my neck of the woods – the Central Oregon coast range. She is just a few dozen miles up the road, in Five Rivers. For more than 45 years, she has been both victim of and battler against the chemical spraying operators here where timber companies clear cut vast thousands of square miles of forest, and then deploy the markers of Agent Orange and other brews to include Glyphosate and atrazine, among others.

The film is understatement, but thorough and clear – some of us knew early on that the herbicide Agent Orange was more than a Ho Chi Minh Trail defoliant. It was part of a plan by the despotic South Vietnamese president Diệm ’s worldview – supported and supplied by the USA – that the Viet Cong should not have jungle cover and that the rice crops in the North should not only be destroyed but contaminated from the soil up.

Tran is an amazing voice for Vietnam and the millions of victims of Agent Orange – many dead, by the millions, and many by several million surviving in varying levels of debilitation, and for her and millions of other women, giving birth to deformed, sick and dying babies.

Back in Oregon, the mothers and then the doctors came together to compare notes, and alas, the number of miscarriages/spontaneous abortions experienced by local women always coincided a month after helicopters working for the timber companies unloaded thousands upon thousands of gallons of the toxic brew, a mix of hormone disruptors and growth inhibitors that scour animals, plants and humans to the point of genetic mutations and untold physical ailments as adults.

We see the coughing “chemical guy” in Oregon, who is cell phone filming himself loading up the helicopters with the brew. He hacks up blood at night. He is another victim of better-living-through-chemistry (not). His story is vital to the telling of the Agent Orange story back home, in Oregon.

Tran’s case seeks accountability for “the deadliest use of chemicals in the history of warfare.” The case is still held up in court.

Tran was told by her heroic mother, captured by the South Vietnamese, in 1953, “If I don’t come back, you will replace me.” Tran ended up writing news for the National Liberation Front. She met her husband in the forest, who was part of the Foreign Relations Commission. “We spent our youth engaged in war.”

In June 1968 their daughter was born, and three days later the infant’s skin  began falling off. She had difficulty breathing, and she had major heart issues. “I always blamed myself thinking I was the reason for her illness and the cause of her death. Even though I have my other two children, it is the face of my first that remains anchored in my soul,” Tran states.

Tran says she carried that guilt for 40 years. “Until I found out what killed my daughter, the poison Agent Orange.”

Her second daughter was born with alpha thalassemia, a major defect of her pancreas. Same with Tran’s third daughter, and a granddaughter. Thanks, Agent Orange and the Boys at Dow!

Back and forth the documentary travels from Carol’s and Oregon’s battle against the chemical companies and the university forestry guy who was in the back pocket of Dow, and with Tran, who has several lawyers working to “put an end to the eternal impunity,” as French barrister William Bourdon calls it.

That was Operation Ranch hand, from 1962 to 71, approved by JFK and his henchmen in the DoD and military. The idea was to take away the forest cover but also to be part of a food-denial program, which under any auspices of international conventions, is an act of genocide, and a war crime.

Dr. James Clary was with the Air Force in Vietnam, which ran the program. He was order to dump the computer and erase all memory. Instead, he printed out a stack of documents two feet high – missions, sorties, coordinates, dates, gallons dropped throughout all of Southeast Asia and Laos.

“We had the information coming from Dow that there were real problems for people associated with this chemical. It was all locked up for 35 years.”

Playing down all the negative effects of this chemical was part of the Dow plan. Dioxin was the byproduct in the brew. Dow told the US government they were having difficulty producing the volume of the chemical the US wanted. The government told them to not worry about safety standards and quality control, and that a fast production process which produced more of the dioxin would not matter, since the crops and forest were being sprayed, and if people got in contact with it, the idea coming from both industrialists at Dow and those in government and the military was, “Hey, so what, this is a war . . . these are the effing Vietnamese.”

However, a former military man like Clary never saw it that way. He reiterated that 20 million gallons of it was dumped on Southeast Asia. The Ranch Hand program stopped in 1971, but then the chemicals were enlisted by the US on forest land – clear cuts that were sprayed to denude the razed land of any opportunities weeds and shrubs. The money has to be made, and the stockpiled product has to go! Sell it to the state forestry department and timber outfits.

Dr. Clary tears up on the film, showing a deep regard for the Vietnamese. He cried at the sight of the deformed children. The filmmakers state: “e is not a typical war monger, and never said that. He became a whistle-blower to expose such attitudes. They are the opposite of how he feels.

“They went back and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we need the quantities. Besides it’s going to be sprayed on the jungle over there. Not gonna be any people there and if they happen to get into it, so what? We’re at war.’”

Carol Van Strum reiterates that the half-life of a dioxin molecule is 2 billion years. Dioxin, the forever chemical and the gift of cancer and birth defects and mutagenic ailments that keep on giving. Tran is now fighting for the fourth generation of people affected by the millions of gallons of this poison sprayed on her homeland. She has breast cancer.

Dr, Clary breaks down emotionally, saying he never thought his government would betray all the veterans who directly were affected and whose offspring were/are still affected. The judge in the Agent Orange case is a pure case of misanthropy that infects all chambers of the judicial and legal class.

Andre Burny, author of Agent Orange: Apocalypse Vietnam, makes it clear that this is a “crime against humanity, an attack on the human genome.”
It’s telling that one of several scientists featured in a clip, Dow’s Dr. Cleve Goring, says, “The attack on the chemical is entirely emotional. 2,4 5-T is about as toxic as Aspirin. We have not done a good job with our PR campaign.”

As benign as Aspirin! You haven’t heard this before, right? Farmed chemical-laced salmon, safe as mother’s milk. Oh, antibiotic-laced meat and poultry are safe for all consumers. You know, it would take a bathtub of the stuff a day for twenty years to cause cancer. Or, lab rats are not humans . . . no comparison. 5-G is like an apple a day. Violent video games are A-Okay. Genetically Engineered crops are better than those old fashioned heritage crap. What’s a little used motor oil dumped into the pond.

Oh dear reader, you have as many of these “it’s safer than the alarmists yammer about” stories, I am sure. Imagine, the bottom line of Dow is to cover up, drag court cases on and on until the plaintiffs are six feet under. What a little rebranding won’t fix. Or some heavyweight like Brad Pitt or Betty White endorsing the product bringing people all together now.

The documentary, The People versus Agent Orange,” delves into many of the treatment centers for victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam. There are dozens. I have been to two of them, years ago, and they were not even tied to Agent Orange. Like Tran, most of the mothers blamed themselves for children coming out twisted, stunted, without limbs, craniums asymmetrical or ballooned out.

This is how capitalism works – lies, deceit, murder, cover, cover-up, blame the victim, pass on the diseases and poisons and clean up costs to the people. This is the price of capitalism, many Americans will say. This is the price of convenience. This is the price of Low Prices and instant soup, instant turkey, instant husband/wife.

Blame the child for the crimes of consumerism. Blame the fetus for the mother taking the advice of western medicine. Blame the communities for the sprayed hog blood-urine-shit in their backyards.

Capitalism is more than some giant smoke and mirrors game, bigger than some house of cards, bigger than snake oil salesmen/women grifting, bigger than shoveling up billions into the debt (poor) house. It is a system of rackets, and while Gen. Butler may have written War is a Racket about the MIC, we have to transpose that military industrial complex to Banks/ Hospitals/ Insurance Companies/ Courthouses/ Police Stations/ Law Firms /Colleges/Mining Companies/ Drug Manufacturers/ Big Ag Outfits/ Media Conglomerates/ So-Called Liberal Press and the like are the very definition of Rackets, certainly perfect actors for Dante’s Circles of Hell.

We are the fodder for that inferno, and if anyone of any political stripe doesn’t end up being pissed off after watching The People versus Agent Orange, then they are misanthropes, cult followers, colonized zombies. And I can say that about any number of hundreds of righteous documentaries — bear witness and then what? Retreat to stupidity, retreat to the capitalist’s see-speak-hear not evil while the evil eats your soul from the inside-out!

Please note that I was in Vietnam in 1994 and in 1996. I worked first with several biological teams doing a huge transect of the forest near the Laotian border. I met amazing Vietnamese scientists. I revisited places my military father was at as a CW4 cryptographic guy. His stories were my stories.

I was in Vietnam in 1994 the same age my father was there, shot twice. That was age 36.

I made a point of getting into many villages after the science report was done. I drove a motorcycle down Highway One. I met amazing people there, and had two Vietnamese who helped me navigate the language.

I was embraced by men the same age as my father. Men who fought as Viet Cong, and those men of course, did not do an eight-month and then a 12-month set of tours like my Army father. They spent more than a decade or more fighting the French, fighting the Americans.

I met a woman in Hanoi who was bombed as a child in an orphanage. I met people studying the breast milk of lactating women, in 1996, with 16 times the level of PCB’s (US standards) in their systems.

Vietnam came to me again, as I worked with many veterans, and some Vietnamese back in Texas putting on the 20th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon (April 1975). I had Le Ly Hayslip at the event, and she blessed my daughter who was still in her mother’s womb. Den Yen was the vice mayor of Saigon, and he too showed up. John  McAfee, A Slow Walk in a Sad Rain, was just one of many writers, historians, artists who were in this historical event in 1995.

I worked with then Thomas Daniel, now taking on his mother’s name, Vu, who was both my student and friend and we worked together on art projects. My play, Tiger Cages, was partly written after I ended up in London after watching the bad play, Miss Saigon. My short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam, tells the story of people somehow connected to the Vietnam war.  I have taught college courses for US military, even at the Sergeants Major Academy at Biggs Field. Vietnam, “Never another Vietnam,” the “tragedy of Vietnam War,” and more is in my DNA. I even worked as a social worker helping homeless veterans and their families secure housing and benefits.

This film is powerful in that it tells a simple story of ecocide and American hubris. Several million Vietnamese were killed directly by US bombs. Many more died later from injuries and chemical death. The trauma on a country is also part and parcel of this illegal and unethical war.

Ecocide as a military practice was first coined for the war against the Vietnamese the US conducted. This documentary and Dr. Clary discuss this heinous war crime, of destroying the crops, the food sources, the soil as part of  military stratagem.

As a note, my piece here was in my blog, and at first I thought I covered all bases. One of the filmmakers, Alan Adelson, made it clear to me some of my juxtapositions of quotes were wrongly attributed. I was writing this “review” as I watched the documentary, The PEOPLE versus Agent Orange. I let my passions and zeal overtake my editor’s calm and thorough copyediting.

I appreciate Alan’s email, and I know this sort of review is not mainstream, and probably not usable for the director. I am able to take off one revolutionary cap and put on a more traditional journalist’s cap. I hope the film shows in Portland and if so, that I can have a crack at talking with the filmmaker. I have other gigs, including Street Roots, in Portland. While my column, Finding Fringe, is not textbook newspaper “objective” reporting, it still provides a look into people like Carol and her son, Jordan Merrell — A letter a day for 15 years and 9 months

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. — Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935)

+–+

I don’t think so. I think that the – the hook for many of our supporters was the idea that this was an unusual messenger for an important environmental message. You know, people who support environmental issues are constantly trying to find a way to preach beyond the choir, to reach beyond their base of people who are already on board, and I think one of the things that’s very appealing about the film, but primarily Jerry as a messenger, is that you don’t expect this message to come from a career military person.

And through Jerry, you’re – we’ve been able to reach this audience of military folks who maybe wouldn’t be attuned to the environmental message about the effects of toxins on health and things like that. So I think there was a real appeal to many of those organizations from that perspective. — Rachel Libert, co-producer of film, Semper Fi

Author Wallace Kaufman lives on on Poole Slough in Lincoln County, Ore. (Photo by Paul K. Haeder)

Opinion |

FINDING FRINGE | A traveler and a writer, Wallace Kaufman is a naturalist at heart

by Paul K. Haeder | 30 Sep 2020

I answer my call of duty — to find the most interesting and outside-the-box people for this column. I received a blind-copied email from Wallace Kaufman, announcing his latest book, “Grow Old and Die Young – A Naturalist in Life’s Theater.”

I took the bait hook-line-and-sinker after doing a quick “search” on this Oregon Coast man and his new memoir. This is one prescient endorsement of this book, and the writer:

“’Grow Old and Die Young’ is a love story of the ever-changing light, moods, faces, textures, sounds and residents of Poole Slough and the Yaquina estuary. The Wetlands Conservancy could not ask for a better natural historian, poet, photographer, steward and neighbor of our beloved Lower Yaquina Preserve. Kaufman’s photos and words remind us of the life lessons the mysteries and surprises that daily tidal cycles teach us about life,” writes Esther Lev, former director of The Wetlands Conservancy.

A periodic column profiling unconventional Oregonians who push the boundaries of social order.

Yeah, compelling, as were many of the other endorsements of this man’s more than half-dozen books. This one caught my eye: “He asks pertinent questions and offers useful answers grounded in his abundant reading, wide-ranging experience, and unflagging curiosity,” states William Price, former director of Archives and History in North Carolina.

Kaufman agreed to whet my own curiosity appetite by meeting out in his very forested place.

The 81-year-old native of Queens sent me detailed directions to get to his 7-year-old home on Poole Slough. Printed out, it was 1 1/2 pages single spaced.

It took me 50 minutes via old minivan to reach his 18 acres from my home in Waldport.

I was greeted by the spry, short-of-stature Wallace Kaufman.

After he directed me to a pullout, I was asked to enter the home. The large great room overlooks Poole Slough, a winding tidewater that connects just a few hundred yards west of his floating boat launch to Yaquina Bay. This wetlands ecosystem is verdant. I spied several kayaks on a floating dock.

Walking into his home office, I figured I might be in for a five-hour interview. Bookcases were lined with mostly hardbacks, there was a large computer screen, piles of magazines were stacked like cairns, and more books and paperwork adorned the place: a writer’s cubbyhole (or coven).

Kaufman has six published books under his belt, both solo authorship and a few co-written, and he lists three translations he’s published. Then there is Kaufman’s continual assistance/collaboration for almost a decade with an Iranian, Alireza Taghdarreh, whose Farsi translation (2015) of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” has been a labor of love.

Speaking of Walden Pond — “I came to Poole Slough with several illusions and a purpose,” Kaufman writes in the preface of “Grow Old and Die Young,” subtitled “You Come Too.” “I came for the same reason that, in 1845, a short, wiry and homely 28-year-old named Henry David Thoreau went to a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts: ‘to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life … and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.’”

There are big differences here: Thoreau died at age 45, exactly 17 years after his Walden Pond experience. Kaufman moved to the Newport area when he was 72. Plus, Kaufman is a world traveler and polyglot.

Kaufman has traversed many national and geographical boundaries, and possibly many more philosophical and literary heights than Thoreau. He almost bought the proverbial farm 81 years ago, as he tells me, at Kingston Avenue Hospital where the medical staff saved him at age 10 months from the deadly whooping cough. He said he’s survived two falls that crushed vertebrae. He also ticked off making it through a Guatemala prison run by secret police. He’s had several blackout concussions.

“And three days near death delivered by an aged Central American sausage. Give me another 17 years, as Thoreau had, and likely I will be dead and, like Thoreau, I don’t want to discover in my last minutes I have not ever lived.”

A full life is an understatement

His roots are spread deeply on the Oregon Coast, but Kaufman definitely harkens back to his East Coast upbringing as both foundational and transformative.

“I remember our row house with its tiny backyard. They were built on coal ash. I recall neighbors who had fathers and sons overseas, and my own uncles and cousins going to war.” He was born in 1939, two years before the U.S. entered World War II.

As a kid, he heard about the last Civil War veteran dying. We discussed those war vets from World War II. This past May, on the 75th anniversary of V-J day, out of those 16 million vets, 300,000 were still alive, according to Pew Research. By 2045, my daughter will be 48 years old and she too will read about the last living World War II vet dying.

This recollection bespeaks Kaufman’s interest in collecting facts, ideas, histories, philosophical constructs and more. I got to the nuts and bolts of things — a literary life. Kaufman told me how during sixth grade he knew he wanted to be a writer. “I remember writing terrible poems.” That was in school in the tiny community of Sea Cliff, “a little town time had forgotten … with no train station.”

Again, the irony of co-evolutionary forces transported Kaufman to Oyster Bay on Poole Slough, 76 years after his formative years began in Sea Cliff, a village within the township of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York.

He told me that in the movie “The Great Gatsby,” there is a scene in Glen Cove, where the millionaire’s deck overlooks the water, and in the background is — you guessed it — Sea Cliff.

There was no F. Scott Fitzgerald lifestyle for Kaufman, as his relatively poor family scavenged for coal chunks on the gravel road near the home, screening the ash for pieces of heat-giving rocks.

His father, Arthur, was a tool and die man, classified 1A during World War II, but he never ended up being drafted. He was one of millions working on the war effort — in his father’s case, bomb fuses.

The forward reach of a person’s life is the display of tapestries dyed in family lines, roots and narratives. Kaufman’s grandparents on his father’s side immigrated to Washington, D.C., from Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. His grandfather was a Jewish tailor. Kaufman’s mother’s family hailed from Scotland and Ireland, and she was Anglican, the last of 10 kids. He grew up with twin brothers.

While Kaufman has traversed the globe, he anchors himself firmly to formative years in Sea Cliff and attributes an East Coast influence and hardships of that era for tenacity and determination to make something of himself. He’s a writer at the core, a naturalist at heart, and he works as a conflict mediator for a nonprofit in Newport, yet he’s holistic enough to embrace various points in his early life as life-changing directional events.

He rattled off many influences, from people he was personally grafted to, as well as the books and geographical locales he has come to consume and absorb. “Guy T. Pinkard changed my life. He was an NYU graduate, Ph.D. student, who opened up the lab in our high school, which had been closed for years.”

The kid who had never left New York ended up falling madly in love with an Alabama girl. His teacher took a few sophomores to Pinkard’s Alabama hometown, Mill Town. They had been exchanging botanical specimens with high school students there.

The young Kaufman ended up in South Dakota two consecutive summers on an archeological dig headed up by a professor at the University of South Dakota. It was part of a Boy Scouts trip, and he learned how to lay out squares and map a dig. It was a Mandan Village earthen lodge, where the Dakota Access Pipeline is now bifurcating sacred land.

He was still smitten by the high schooler from Mill Town, so Kaufman began looking for colleges down South, and since he came from a lower economic family, he needed plenty of scholarships. He picked Duke University, since it was halfway between New York and Alabama. “Duke then was a grade B school,” he told me. “I saw people going to Ivy League schools. They did not look like me. Their parents were professionals, doctors, rich.”

As a surprise to me, the young Wallace Kaufman majored in English, as opposed to studying in one of Duke’s hard science programs. He interjected, relaying another turning point in his life — reading Will Durant’s 1927 book, “Transition: A Mental Biography.”

“I was so impressed how he (Durant) transitioned into the world of philosophy.” This is a fictionalized autobiography of Durant’s life up to his 30s. The “transition” Kaufman resonates with is Durant’s — from a Catholic faith in God to a faith in humanity. Then his transition to love of a wife and of learning.

This disavowing of conservative Christian dogma and a closed mindset is sort of universal as Durant’s philosophy reflects a post-World-War-I-era set of beliefs many in his generation were beginning to embrace.

Durant ended up in seminary but opted to teach at a “free school” where students learned at their own pace in a non-coercive way. In a sense, most people at the free school were anarchists, transferring that non-hierarchal way of schooling into concepts on how government should be run.

At Duke, the New York kid cycled into the class of “a great southern professor, Bill Blackburn, who taught some well-known writers like William Styron and Anne Tyler” to name a few. Kaufman graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English lit.

Then, he landed a Marshall Scholarship and a free ride to Oxford University. He returned to Sea Cliff with a master’s degree. He taught in the old high school — biology, general science — and he coached soccer. He was writing poetry and fiction. “I guess I was the hippie black sheep.”

There’s a great fictional book Kaufman and David Deamer co-wrote, “The Hunt for Fox P5,” about an evil scientist from the University of Oregon trying to steal the genome of an adopted daughter of a good professor. “Through characters in American universities and Kazakhstani science and politics, the authors explore the ethical complexity of editing human genes,” states Deamer, developer of innovative and new nanopore sequencing tools. He was Kaufman’s roommate at Duke.

Pathways to the Mayans, to Kazakhstan

Concision is not Kaufman’s or my better suits when it comes to writing and living. His life is a panorama of experimentation and a lust for life. He ended up in Europe, Central Asia and Siberia. After graduating from Oxford, he taught at several universities, including the University of North Carolina.

He remodeled two homes in rural North Carolina, and then started Saralyn, a community of 35 homesteads on 360 acres where 33 of these “back to the land” settlers built their own homes. That’s another iteration of his life — learning the ins and outs of socially responsible investing, sustainable development and land use/permitting. He counts more than 2,000 acres in North Carolina where he helped overlay covenants that protect the natural environment and privacy of the residents.

He did that for 20 years, and in this new book, he discusses how he was “only vaguely aware of tapping a deep vein in American culture until July 4, 2016, when I read an essay written for the Independence Day 1936 issue of the ever-popular Saturday Evening Post.”

It was by Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House on the Prairie” books.

Lane: “This is an important fact: Americans were the only settlers who built their houses far apart, each on his own land. America is the only country I have seen where farmers do not live today in close, safe village-groups. It is the only country I know where each person does not feel an essential, permanent solidarity with a certain class, and with a certain group within that class. The first Americans came from such groups in Europe, but they came because they were individuals rebelling against groups. Each in his own way built his own house at a distance from others in the American wilderness. This is individualism.”

Parlaying his self-taught zoning and planning concepts into something entirely different, Kaufman ended up serving in Kazakhstan as resident adviser on housing and land reform.

He did end up on trips to Guatemala — Jacaltenango. His first one was with his then 10-year-old daughter. Those adventures are compelling, reverberating with my own travels in Guatemala and Central America. What he did spin from that trip was a relationship with Victor Dionicio Montejo, then an urban teacher and now an author and expert in Mayan culture. The book “El Kanil – Man of Lightning” was Montejo’s first publication: “the story most central to his people, some 30,000 remaining Jacaltecans,” Kaufman writes in the book he helped bring to life as a Spanish-English-Popbál Ti ́(Jakaltek Maya) story in 1982.

I finished the interview with a holistic question about his overall life philosophy.

Kaufman was succinct: “Anyone can gather evidence to ‘prove’ something right, but being confident of your ‘truth’ before trying earnestly to prove it wrong is the arrogance of a timid mind.”

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Q&A

Paul K. Haeder: You were a teacher for a while. What are the challenges you saw then and see now in higher education?

Wallace Kaufman: “I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.” — Abigail Adams. Instead of developing that ability, schools and colleges have turned increasingly to teaching one point of view.

Haeder: Do you have a role model or two? Please list/name them, identify them and tell why you consider each one respectively as role models.

Kaufman: Honesty in thinking and scholarship: I met Oscar Muscarella, former senior curator of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan, museum, when I was a 16-year-old digger excavating the Mandan village at Swan Creek, S.D., and he was a Ph.D. student. He built his career not only on personal genius and discovery but on exposing frauds and crimes in the antiquity’s world, from rich donors taking unwarranted tax deductions to scholars writing history based on forgeries.

My business model: Mark Thompson, a grizzled old N.Y. city waiter who opened a little bookstore and served people 3-5, 7-9 all week. Any kid too poor to buy a book, got the book free. He hired me when I was 12 to hold boards and tools as he built the shop and later taught me the used and rare book business. He had been on the skids in many towns before defeating alcoholism. His reputation as a straight shooter got him invitations to price books in rich estates and at AAUW book fairs because he guaranteed to buy anything unsold for half his price. His constant advice was the heart of ethical capitalism: “Buster, let everyone make a buck.”

Haeder:You are living a writer’s life but with a few other interests and financial supports. What recommendation would you give to aspiring journalists and writers?

Anything you might learn in J-school or an MFA program you can learn on the job, from books, from self-directed study. What you can’t learn, except through experience, is the pain, joy, suffering and confusion that gives life to good writing. Go somewhere challenging. Put your skin in the game, your life on the line, your money where your mouth is.

Haeder: If you weren’t living here, on the Oregon Coast, where would you be living, and why?

Kaufman: Ideally, I’d live by a hot spring on Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk. Since that’s not possible, I would choose a forested hot spring in the PNW, for the contrasts, the comforts, an easy way to grow old.

Haeder: We called your place your own Walden Pond. Can you elaborate on what that means, since Thoreau covers many aspects of humanity, nature, spirituality and life and ecological forces in the book “Walden”?

Kaufman: Thoreau said he went to Walden Pond to shed the diversions and distractions and surpluses of community life and think more deeply about life and to find “higher laws” — the goal of the English Romantics before him and of his friends in the Transcendental movement. He never found the higher laws, but he was sure he saw them expressed in the world of the pond. Same here for Poole Slough and its forests and marshes. My variant may be that I spend more time looking at this world through the lens of science rather than through personal revelation, which I distrust.

daring to call the entire Western Capitalist Crime Syndicate what it is – Left/Right/Center Thuggery

by Paul Haeder / September 24th, 2020

First, the reality on the ground –

I am still working, losing billable hours weekly as my contract with an “anti-poverty/social capital” organization winds down. This is with a non-profit that is pushing over $100 million (“donated” by millionaires, billionaires, philanthropies and in some cases state and city programs)  that came down the pike just in the past six months for so-called Covid-19 relief money for, right now, the 110,000 folk already, from Oakland to Detroit to Chicago and Austin and Seattle, who have applied for funds varying from $500 a person in King County, WA, from the Starbucks Mafia for out-of-work restaurant folk (that was $6 million of Schulz Foundation blood coffee profits), to home owners in Chicago who can apply for eviction relief.

I’ll do a piece on the outfit as my time with them ends soon, but for now, any Google search for my name, well, that’s a killer. For instance, again, I need the work, and for two jobs for which I interviewed via Zoom, I got the thanks but no thanks — a permeancy worker for foster children, and then a worker for folks with developmental disabilities. In each case (and I have written about both this and reverse sexism, and anti-socialist crap before) five women (a state job and then a country job) interviewing me. All these teams are stacked with women, and in the illogic of neoliberalism and this bizarre mentality, why not keep a man off the team. As if young foster youth and youth who might need to be reunited with biological families, and those with developmental disabilities NEVER EVER need to see or hear from a male case worker. You think it is true these HR folk do a Google on me? Yep.

So, now, limping along, imagine, I am working as a contractor – on the 1099 IRS form– and there is little broad connection to the organization I work for in terms of my own benefit and contribution for the organization. There is a lot of fakery, a lot of on-the-screen fake comradeship.  These people are siloed, as they work remotely (before lockdown Covid-19 Zoom Gulag). There is a lot of cliqueness, and the entire concept of remote work and conference calls/training/management is dead from the navel up.

But it is the thing of the future, thanks to the thousands upon thousands of outfits pushing on-line banking, on-line education, on-line med, on-line psychiatry, on-line family reunions, on-line weddings/divorces/funerals/ anniversaries/birthdays/dating/sex. The world is the app developers’ and the tech monsters’ virtual oyster.

But the working with the devil noise is now much more pronounced with this outfit I ended up working with starting a year ago July. We are talking about a non-profit that is now working hand in hand with the Koch Brothers (Stand Together) and Charles Schwab and all that lovely stuff that is part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Koch Network Reorganizes as ‘Stand Together’ May 22, 2019 The Seminar Network , a network of nonprofits funded by Charles Koch and like-minded conservatives and libertarians who donate at least $100,000 annually to “help people improve their lives,” has announced that going forward it will be known as Stand Together .[ Source ! ]

So, this non-profit is over 18 years old, and used to have sites where household members met monthly, shared stories, shared resources, and did journals to receive some cash assistance. It was always the “data in the monthly journals was aggregated, not connected to one specific person or household.” And the non-profit got seed money and in-kind app development and AI support from, well, you guessed it, Google.

Connecting to the Koch Brothers is a dance with the devil. That started in Feb, 2020. Talk about cognitive dissonance —

Koch-Backed “Libre Initiative” Purports To “Empower Hispanics,” But Pushes Policies That Would Disproportionately Hurt Poor Hispanics. Libre Initiative, backed by more than $10 million in Koch funding, purports to “empower Hispanics,” but experts say the organization supports policies that “disenfranchise Hispanic voters” and opposes programs that would help millions of Hispanics living in poverty. Libre opposes the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and minimum wage increases, both of which would disproportionately benefit the Hispanic community, especially those living in poverty, and supports voter ID laws that would “disenfranchise Hispanic voters, other minorities, and the poor.” — Media Matters. 

So, this Stand Together is supported by the billionaires who hate teachers, hate unions, hate raising the minimum wage, hate the science around global heating/warming, hate universities, hate hate hate. And, the non-profit I work with is mostly made up of BIPOC, and many are 20-somethings and 30-somethings. Many came from poverty. Some are originally from places like Puerto Rico and Columbia.

Track these billionaire misanthropes here — Koch Docs. 

Read about the Koch Brothers in “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by the Christopher Leonard.

As a 1099 contractor on the outs — who goes to bat for the few hundred Oregonians in the project I am/was heading up, money from Department of Human Services, to the tune of $720,000 total (most of which has not been distributed) — I am way left-left of field, the most radical person these young and youngish people will ever meet. I am not a capitalist, and I know what capitalism does. The proof is in the pudding — and if I sent this over to any of the people I work with, nah, I’d expect more than just push back. I’d expect narcing in the true sense of that term.

Read, Wrench in the Gears:

One of the biggest things we’re up against, and something few people are talking about, is social impact investing and pay for success finance. Within the hollowed out shell of the welfare state, which admittedly was always inadequate and used for purposes of racialized social control, global finance has built a new machine that will use predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and wearable and screen-based technologies to monitor the global poor and profit from their misery.

This effort is being carried out in partnership with the non-profit sector, higher education, think tanks, and global foundations. Many involved identify as liberal, even progressive. Successful resistance will require stopping Trump, the Koch brothers, and ALEC, as well as a corporate, militarized Blue Wave that has every intention of stabilizing late-stage capitalism with technocratic “evidence-based” solutions. Make no mistake; this is a fully bipartisan enterprise.

Outcomes-based contracts are this machine’s operating system. Contracts employ pay-for-performance agreements that reimburse service providers IF they produce specified success metrics. These metrics are narrowly defined and chosen for their ability to be gamed. Contrived solutions offer up fake “success” to enrich investors at the expense of vulnerable populations. Think standardized test scores as success metrics for education or fit-bit step counts for preventative health.

This machine requires a steady supply of people labeled deficient by those in power. Like batteries in the Matrix, the poor are meant to be the fuel. The machine does not care for their actual wellbeing; its sole purpose is to maximize profit. In that it is similar to the capitalist Western medical model where Big Pharma opts for chronic disease management over research leading to cures. Pay for success will not empower the poor, but instead manage them and harvest their data, indefinitely. — Pay for Success Finance Preys Upon The Poor: Presentation at Left Forum 

You can read more about the reality of capitalism NEVER dying because it is, a., running through the BlackRock filter ($100 trillion that for-profit scheme has on its ledgers as handlers of money), b., part of a huge effort to colonize most people on earth to abide by the Dashboard overlord. That is, people in dire straits will abide to almost anything to get paid, to get food, rent money, something, whether an at-home-paycheck, or some UBI – universal buffoon income.

It’s not just the vaccine passport that will be on the Dashboard, monetized, collected, used against you (if you don’t get one of those shots), or in your favor (if you get the shot, let the shot people put more data about you on the Dashboard, and let the AI and tech fascists decide what is or is not a viable human being on planet earth). Everything you do or say or believe or put on Facebook, that all will be collected, parsed, judged (AI) and then used to determine your worth, whether you are near the value of Soylent Green or some cubicle worker developing code.

Education is already dead in the water – So the concept of a smart, educated, critically thinking, independent, demanding, critical of government/corporations/media student, well, that has been gone-gone-gone. Now, look at the Pre-K plans for the future below:

Look, they will be collecting BMI’s and all those details of all our chronic illnesses, all reports from the cops, all prescriptions taken, all notes from the social worker/psychologist/psychiatrist. They will collect all movements in your work history, all movements in your credit history, all moving and non-moving violations.

Capitalism is not dying, but rather, it is a Philip K. Dick nightmare, making Minority Report and Gattaca and Blade-Runner look like a bicycle ride around Mister Rogers neighborhood.

Make no bones about it – capitalism is in its 4.0 iteration of surveillance punishment. Capitalism is never just that – a form of economic relationships, that is supposed to be fair, balanced and with that free hand helping the community of businesses come together and practice fair market sharing, and using that all boats rise kind of communitarian logic. Nine sheep farmers on the island working out how much bite the flocks can make, which fields stay off limits during certain seasons, how to share the streams, the fields, the pathways, the roads and access to markets. Even a collective of shearers and ways to store the wool and how to enhance all their lives. Sure? But then that 10th farmer comes on board, moves to the island and well, a true capitalist maximizes profits, finds ways to cut corners (expenses), and has ways to not share the water  and share the commons. Alas, yep, tragedy of the commons, and without communism and participatory democracy, then the common good is thrown out with the blood and guts and shit, put in a pond, collected out back, where the poor workers live. The common good has been replaced by the corporate good, the good of the stockholders, the good of the few at the expense of the many. Children understand this. Good things are not bad things done to good people. Duh. But capitalism is all about bad and mean and horrors done to good people.

But children can’t be taught this, anymore, and alas, what passes as education today, moreover, for the past 30/40 years, has been a mix of indoctrination and pacification.

‘Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon,’ John  Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Much of Gatto’s writing is focused on the basic yet often overlooked distinction between schooling and education. At the heart of his work is the simple yet radical suggestion that mass schooling, a 19th-century European import to the U.S., is not the modern manifestation of the ancient concept of education but, rather, its diametric opposite.  See: Truthout Vincent Kelley,
October 25, 2019

I have written about my own decades teaching, from community colleges, to universities to prison programs, and K12. It is an absolute mess under capitalism, patriotism and commercialism. A society that believes in the red-white-and-blue and the power of the sword, well, you need willing participants and fools in that game. Start them off young. And no matter how radical and true to education one teacher or a million might be, the American will is to have outsiders and outside-the-box participants break.

Rockefeller’s General Education Board summed up in a 1906 document on scientific schooling:

In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk…. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…. We will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

It is only worse a hundred and 14 years later.

Capitalism has always been a stacked deck, and always has been based on penury, parasitic, predatory financial exchanges; and socialism for the corporations. Every aspect of capitalism has been set forth as a system of dog-eat-dog, and survival of the fittest. In fact, it is a form of Organized Crime, a unique Mafia … and those externalities and economies of scale that have set about mass murders of people – either softly, through economic violence, or, deliberately, through the myriad of toxins and poisons and slow/moderate/fast death by a thousand carcinogens.

Then it makes sense that self-driving cars, Internet of Things, vaccine markers and RFIDs, mass surveillance and real time data collecting, from saliva to ulcers, from keyboard clicks to Netflix picks, the entire system is set up to use  regular humans as sources of data. Like big lakes of human blood to be harvested.

Forget about the mass media and mass indoctrination. Forget about Madison Avenue and the applied psychology and behaviorism of perceived or planned obsolescence. Forget about the dopamine hits from gambling, lotteries, shopping, eating, vegging out. Forget about the manipulation through the dark arts of subliminal advertising. Forget about the colonization of the mind through malls, box stores, and now the on-line tyranny of the Walmart/Target/Amazon kind.

Forget about the blood and guts and shit and cancerous tumors chopped up and mixed in with the All American hotdogs, or the shit and fetuses and unusable offal of the birds-swine-cattle used to feed The Jungle on Steroids. Imagine, a system – capitalism – that has the dark arts of lobbying, prostituting politicians, and the economic hitmen/snake oil salesmen/grifters/outright thieves/destroyers/takers all allowing mercury in baby formula, lead in water, microplastics in everything, untested nanoparticles pulverized and mixed in with the pancake batter, all the gas-fuel additives that cause future mommy to have ovarian cancer at 25 and future daddy to have a sperm count one-half that of a guy like Willie Loman.

Imagine that system, man, of zero precautionary principle which in fact has already been reversed as the cost of doing business. Forced arbitration, death of class action lawsuits, $2000 an hour lawyers to bankrupt any plaintiff, and this great system, called Capitalism, moves like a rabid pack of dogs ten million strong across the land, the globe.

The conversations with both left and right of that manure pile called American national politics, well, vapid, and hinging on insanity all the time.

Read more on social impact bonds — man, capitalists make money on every single bad move, bad decision, bad health care outcome, bad driving record, bad physiology, bad mental health performance, bad check, bad report card, bad loan, bad divorce, bad habit, bad addiction, bad sin, bad purchase, bad trip, bad death.

Whew.

Now back to the ground-level stuff – I am working as a journalist (one paid gig, others free), editing Cirque Journal as guest editor (a $100 honorarium). I have a new book out and three more to get ready, and alas, where is that publishing money? Right:  in the hands of the overlords and their mutants. From Mary Trump to Michael Cohen to Joe Rogan, well, the list of underserving “authors” and complete trash products of nothingness is very very long. A hundred blog pages long. And that’s just a start!

Yet, I live in an area of the world (Central Oregon Coast) where many people are either really hurting with small fixed incomes or those that have gotten some form of the brass ring and are holding steady in their fairly middle class retirement. Plus, the service economy, and their families and their struggles are to the tenth power.

Many of the people I communicate with on social media, well, I wonder about them – they seem to also have some form of semi-secure stream of income. And yet, boy, do we hear a lot from those left-of-Al Gore types writing for blogs, Facebook posts, and on-line magazines. A LOT.

They have in most cases no concept of what homelessness is, or how housing insecurity destroys all hope. They are all raring to go with the “masks don’t work” thesis, or, “Biden is worse than Trump hands down” yammering. It is a bizarre time. They know nothing of two or let alone ten opposing ideas that all need parsing and critical discussion.

Many of my more secure friends think I am all 401-k-ed up. “Man, books, years as a journalist, decades as a college instructor, social worker . . . blah-blah-blah.” They just are as out of touch as those who believe Biden and Trump are two peas in a pod, or that the democrats hands down across the board are as bad or worse than republicans across the board.

Man, it is a shit show. Look, I have worked to lobby for part-time faculty rights, to lobby for stricter river rights, lobbied to increase minimum wage, lobbied to do a lot of progressive things. The conversations and the level of intelligence those two-bit senators and representatives who deem themselves blue compared to the level of intelligence, depth, humanity of those two-bit senators and representatives who deem themselves red is absolutely night and day, hands down.

We are not talking Karl Rover or Bill Clinton or James Carville or Cheney or Pence or Biden or Trump and all their lackies and money-rubbing pukes. I am talking about small-town politics, about small districts, about large state districts.

Yep, few are going to be able to talk about Zapatistas, anarchism, ecosocialism, any of the progressive issues, but many conversations with democrats I have had over 4.5 decades, from Idaho to Seattle, from Las Cruces to Houston, from Portland to New York City, well, it doesn’t take some Off-Guardian winner to give the world the daily news – I can attest to the complete retrograde, misanthropic, mean-as-cuss, dog-eat-dog mentality of EVERY GOP or republican I have talked to in those 4.5 decades. Inherently, they are pro-cop, pro-war, pro-unfettered capitalism; they are anti-union; anti-collective bargaining; anti-environmentalism; anti-Medicare-for-all. They are fucking misanthropes, making neoliberals seem like saints. And we know what neoliberalism is!

For anyone to talk differently, well, that is one big fat lie. Delusion. Game. Devil’s Advocacy. Or just inherent love of some of what Trump melodies, from his anti 1619 Project, to his hate of critical race theory, to his complete ignorance, man, complete. Something about the white whore Trump that some of these lefties sort of like. Ask them.

Try it, really, with two-bit GOP v. two-bit democrat. Mayoral candidate? County supervisor? Try it. REALLY. Talk to both of them about those progressive issues, those radical ideas, those socialistic ideals. You will have ears with democrats, and rants and closed minds of the GOP.

Yep, you have to have the gift of gab, and you have to pull them into their subterfuge. In most cases, you have to be a white male talking to these fellows and women. It doesn’t take a Gore Vidal level of debate skills to flush them out of their racist, anti-raising-the-minimum-wage-to-a-living-wage mentality.

Yet, oh, yet – how broken the American soul is, and I can’t lump all the lower middle-class folk who go for the Elephant in the big state races, etc. Many can and do have intelligent conversations, and can understand  false balance, invented dichotomies and do know how to process counterintuitive thinking.

I dare anyone to talk to a GOP or MAGA or military industrial complex whore about peace, getting USA out of any place, but let’s just say Venezuela. Try it. Try and discuss how corporations who lie-cheat-pollute-steal-murder must not only be prosecuted and fined, but community-wide reparations must be exacted from them as restorative justice. Try that one out with the neighbor posting the “Trump is a Sign from Out God” sign on their front yard.

Is it expected that liberals (democrats) might say and believe and understand stupid things? Sure, a bunch came out recently with “Romney is the only ethical guy” when it was first known of Ruth Bader’s demise (and like the human stain he is, Mister Bain Capital, reversed that statement about holding off on a SCOTUS vote until after the “election”). Or, how Cynthia McCain is great, and so was John McCain. This sort of bizarre rah-rah is definitely part of America’s Amnesia, and the country’s general collective Stockholm Syndrome. We are (and have been for a very long time) living in a country with two piss-ass bad national parties that have blood on their hands.

And part of the blood is on us all, as we pay for goods and services with those greenbacks – In God We Trust. Every tax filing, yep, money to-for-because of the military industrial complex, which we should know by now is everything from toilet paper to sunscreen, from pickles to window frames, from blue plastic tarps to armor-piercing ammunition, from drones to Hellfire missiles, from endless replacement parts to the tenth power each for every Hummer and Stryker parked on planet earth, to the B-1 bomber, the DARPA and Plume Island and Fort Detrick bioweapons lap dance. Every single person in academia who gets a grant from Rockefeller, Ford Foundation, any of the 2,700 billionaire-smeared non-profits and foundations and think tanks, well, they too are part of the Structural Violence and Military-Chemical-Drug-Oil-Med-Banking-Insurance-Prison-Ag-Law-Real Estate-Patent-AI-IT-Engineering-Space-Mining-Surveillance Complex.

Capitalism is about selling out and the Faustian Bargain. It is a cancer, a colonization of the mind-body-spirit-history-cultures-futures. You can strip away one layer after another layer, opt out of one thing after another thing, advance a socialist agenda in this or that arena, but in the end, Capitalism not only has us all by the short hairs, the future will be dictated by Criminal Capitalism. Every single thing coming out of Hollywood or Madison Avenue or Publishing has the stench of Sulphur, so to read all those Off-Guardian writers who just go full force on the Democratic Party, full force on the Democratic governors pushing lockdowns, full force on the Democrats who want to curtail individual and community rights, they fail the litmus test when it comes to the history of what a Republican/Conservative perverse racist and supremacist Trump or Pence or Nixon or Reagan or you-name-the-piece-of-human-stain Republican believes and wants for the world. Ask them about anything Native American, anything about the history of colonialism, manifest destiny, any of it. Question them about reparations, about genocide, about community rights, about the people’s right to push out bad businesses, bad industries, bad companies from their communities/towns/cities/states. Ask them, man, about private property, about the right to own a bazooka, about any of it, and you will hands down get the same answer through and through – from a republican, and it is, a fact, every GOP is a racist, corporatist, anti-intellectualist cult member. Do the democratic administrations have blood on their hands? Are they hypocrites? Are they in bed with Wall Street?

Yep.

But have that conversation with a mayor or county supervisor or district representative. Flush them out, and see which GOP is open to any sort of liberal thinking. Good luck on that one.

But now, down to brass tacks: the unemployment, underemployment, bad-employment (Shit Jobs, David Graeber, may you rest in peace) rates in the USA, the real buying power, the real economy, all of that has been the shits since 1970. Before. There was never a real middle class, and most Americans are part of the debtor class. New car, second car, house, boat, new roof, college education, a trip, new fridge, you name it, including surgeries and dental work, all of that is on CREDIT. For most Americans.

You might have a better time framing these realities with naïve Democrats, but try it, brothers and sisters, with GOP and MAGA and Reaganites and Nixonites. Try those talks with them, your neighbors, anyone you know or suspect of being a cult-infused Trump-loving Christian-bowing Republican.

I’ve been having those conversations since I was 13, so mark that:  one-half a century debating military, debating republicans, debating capitalists, debating the idea of America being anything other than North America, Canada, colonized and trashed, and then this USA colonized and trashed, and alas, Mesoamerica and Central America and South America, colonized and trashed before the United States ended up sending millions to their deaths through capitalism, structural economic warfare, propping up despots and dictators, and, here we are, then:

So many of my friends who vote blue are freaked out about Trump, about the Proud boys, about the anti-BLM movement, about the homeless problem, the climate heating problem, the entire shooting match – capitalism on steroids.

They are depressed and can’t even come to talk about the ways many of us who have been battling capitalism and faux democracy and this White Western Civilization’s rapacious and warring ways in order to fight off that cynicism. They believe the world is cooked and ruined, and they in one fell swoop – in their naïve and shallow democratic party leaning ways – consign young and old to the dust bins of history even before the entire ranch has been sold down the river.

I enjoy one gig:  focusing on people and their narratives and struggles. It’s for Street Roots, a paper that has won a lot of awards, but is a street newspaper, in Portland. Again, small potatoes, compared to the vaunted stuff over at Off-Guardian or Truthout or even now the Grayzone or Mintpress. But what I am finding is the stories in this newspaper are so more relevant than anything coming out of Glen Greenwald’s mouth, out of the celebrity culture that is either in overdrive, tied to MSM, or then those like  Thom Hartmann  (small potatoes) and now the $100 million deal given to Joe Rogan from Spotify.

I’m now interviewing Portland artists and the art community with the proposition around this — What is Art in a Time of Lockdown. Where Does Art Go Now that Artists Are Dropping to the Wayside like Flies. Is There No Exceptional and Out-of-the-Bourgeoise Box Art Anymore. Along those lines, but really, just talking to people who were already challenging the Art Biz mentality of American (Western Art) popular art that has permeated the art world for decades but now supercharged.

I just finished this older book: The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics Hardcover – June 1, 1991 by Alice Goldfarb Marquis

And I watched again, this documentary, which lifts a lot from Alice Goldfarb Marquis’ book.

From acclaimed director Barry Avrich and executive producer Jonas Prince, BLURRED LINES: INSIDE THE ART WORLD lifts the curtain on the provocative contemporary art scene, a glamorous and cutthroat game of genius versus commerce. Featuring insider accounts from the most influential and powerful players in the industry, audiences will hear from renowned artists such as Julian Schnabel and Marina Abramovic, experts from prominent museums like MoMA and art fairs like Art Basel, insiders at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and leading gallerists.

Imagine the degradation of thinking, discourse and debate over at the Rogan Show. And, Americans love their red-faced yelling heroes, their MC’s who do Mixed Martial Arts play-by-play, then a podcast, and now this big ass deal. Americans legitimize only those who are, a., high up on the You Tube platform, and, b., make news about themselves, and, c, have wads of money and wads of followers.

This is what we have gotten to – Entertaining/Amusing/YouTubing/Reality TV-ing/Art of Dealing Ourselves to Death.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Of course, Huxley didn’t quite describe the New World as a cultist crew of One Percenters and their Five Percent Eichmann’s and the other 15 Percenters who are the managers and bosses pushing this capitalism for the rich, trickle down, voodoo economics, what have you, for the POOR. But it is a cult, really, from celebrity to academic to overpaid idiots, and on and on, until we have perversions of humanity, whether Trump and his narcissism on steroids and Adderall, or Biden or Harris or Clinton, well, what fools we are for having new overlords in the administrations and the supreme courts, and even judgeships and DAs, inside the entire mess of America, run by people who get the mic, control the medium, get the print and copy and air time. All with big bucks thrown in.

Celebrity — turned into the cult of the self, a la Christ Hedges:

We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street banks and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stocks to finance their retirement or the college expenses of their children. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and bonuses. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity.    The Man in the Mirror, Chris Hedges 

The sky glows bright red in Salem hours before sunset Tuesday, Sept. 8. The Beechie Creek Fire in Marion County was burning about 30 miles to the east. (Photo by Monica Kwasnik)

Opinion | Fire. Evacuations. What next?

As we confront our new normal, we’re still searching for a society designed to protect people

by Paul K. Haeder | 11 Sep 2020

I’ve covered a few wildfire stories over the years as a newspaperman living and working in Cochise County and Tucson, Ariz.; in El Paso reporting on places like Cloudcroft and Ruidoso, N.M.; and in Spokane, reporting on the panhandles of Idaho, Southern British Columbia and Eastern Washington.

Finishing up an urban and regional planning graduate degree at Easter Washington University, I remember discussing intently the wildland-urban interface — an area where houses meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland vegetation.

While the wildland-urban interface is a focal area for human-environment challenges like habitat fragmentation, introduction of exotic species and biodiversity decline, at the top of the list is the very issue California, Oregon and Washington are dealing with — the destruction of homes communities and human lives by wildfires.

The reality is a new normal has emerged in the West, over the course of 30 years and intensifying now in the past 15 years. Without being overly dramatic and historical, while living and working in Spokane, I got a lot of background on the Great Fire of 1910, also commonly referred to as the Big Burn. It was August of that year when strong winds caused smaller fires to combine into a firestorm that killed 87 people, destroyed entire towns and burned more than three million acres of forest with an estimated billion dollars’ worth of timber lost.

Paul Haeder has been a journalist since he was 17. He is a social worker for veterans, foster youths, adults with developmental disabilities and those in homeless circumstances, and others battling addiction and recently released from prison.

Fast-forward to 2011, and I am working in Seattle for a newspaper and several colleges, as well as environmental groups. Also, part of Occupy Seattle. Through all of that distraction, I ended up in a couple of conferences focusing on sustainability and urban growth boundaries. For Washington, the term “dangerously overgrown wildlands” combined with the fact that more than 230,000 people had moved into wildfire-prone areas since 1990 were part of the discussion breakouts.

The lack of preparedness, poor interagency cooperation, and dwindling funding at the state and federal levels to not just fight the fires but to mitigate this reality that more and more people are ending up in places where woodlands, timber stands and national forests abutting their communities were front and center issues.

Parallel to this is the issue of libertarianism pushing many communities into an odd situation of paying subscriptions for both firefighting and EMT services. The for-profit outfit Rural/Metro Corp. years ago came into communities in Arizona, Tennessee and Oregon hawking subscriptions for emergency response. I heard from a friend recently who personally knew of a family who had a house fire raging when the fire truck came to the property. The driver looked at his roster, stating the home wasn’t covered because it hadn’t been part of the subscription service. Quickly, the owner pulled out his wallet and put a couple hundred dollars to cover a few years of subscription on the firefighter’s clipboard. Unfortunately, the Tennessee private firefighters let the house burn down.

When to and when not to evacuate

My spouse and I are hosting Yvonne and Darrel Pearce, my in-laws from Sandy. They evacuated Sept. 9 after hearing about a Level 1 warning for their area, along with some confusion about a Level 2 warning also being issued. Some of their friends in Estacada and elsewhere were not so lucky — flames from a 113,000-acre fire burned down outbuildings, overgrown land and cars.

The discussion point in our house today centers around how do we realize a society with seamless systems to protect public health, safety and well-being. Where I live in Waldport, we’ve experienced San Francisco-level pink and pumpkin orange skies, a blotted-out sun and thick acrid smoky air.

For the Pearces, they frantically called the Clackamas County sheriff and fire agencies about friends who live in an area deemed Level 3 — a sort of get the hell out of Dodge command. This is a couple living on many acres with dogs, feral cats and chickens. They are 75 and 91 years old. The husband does not want to evacuate.

This is not so uncommon — people reluctant and refusing to evacuate homes from the threat of firestorms, tornados, hurricanes and blizzards. It turns out my mother-in-law was able to persuade the wife to get out of this area around Eagle Creek.

She was on her way to Richland, Wash., to a Walmart parking lot, “to get as far away from the smoke as possible.” This woman was not able to persuade her 91-year-old husband to leave.

Again, how and where to evacuate and how to coordinate information systems are also topics on the table.

The fact that some states like Oregon make it voluntary to leave versus other states mandates forcing evacuations legally was also brought up.

Yvonne and Darrel stated that they left with very few belongings. “I said goodbye to the apartment and our things,” Yvonne lamented. “Our lives are more important.” What they did take along with them was important paperwork, a few days’ worth of clothes and two funerary urns with the cremains of two of her brothers and those of their dog Buddy. And a tuning harp her father used when directing his church choir.

It was bumper to bumper Wednesday leaving Sandy. They both said it took an hour-plus to get to Highway 26. Many people were evacuating with vehicles loaded down. They both stated people were being considerate to not block all the side and feeder roads.

I asked them both the biggest issue they faced and still face with this evacuation, which is purely voluntary, and at the lowest level of danger at that time.

“It’s very unsettling this is happening,” Darrel said. “We need one system to coordinate information. There are too many gaps.”

Here are the levels for emergency evacuation posted on Clackamas County’s website:

Level 1: BE READY for potential evacuation. You should be aware of the danger that exists in the area, monitor emergency services websites and local media outlets for information. This is the time for preparation and precautionary movements of persons with special needs, mobile property and (under certain circumstances) pets and livestock. If conditions worsen, emergency services personnel may contact you via an emergency notification system.

Level 2: BE SET to evacuate. You must prepare to leave at a moment’s notice. This level indicates there is significant danger to your area, and residents should either voluntary relocate to a shelter or with family and friends outside of the affected area, or if choosing to remain, to be ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice. Residents MAY have time to gather necessary items, but doing so is at their own risk. This may be the only notice you receive. Emergency services cannot guarantee that they will be able to notify you if conditions rapidly deteriorate. Area media services will be asked to broadcast periodic updates.

Level 3: GO! Evacuate now! Leave immediately! Danger to your area is current or imminent, and you should evacuate immediately. If you choose to ignore this advisement, you must understand that emergency services may not be available to assist you further. DO NOT delay leaving to gather any belongings or make efforts to protect your home. This will be the last notice you receive.

There is the Avamere at Cascadia Village assisted living center next to my in-laws’ apartment complex. Maybe a hundred units, with possibly twice that number of residents in various stages of ambulation and medical need. What sort of trigger gets pulled for them to evacuate? Level 2 or Level 3? The flames coming over the treetops?

While talking to my in-laws, one of my Facebook friends out of the blue messaged me: “From a social worker friend in Portland: ‘In case you were wondering how monstrous & cruel Americans can be, houseless people in Clackamas County, whose camps are threatened by wildfires, are not allowed in the emergency fire shelters.’”

I’ve messaged this writer to have the person contact me via email, but whatever happens, the optics are not too great if even a rumor like this is being promulgated.

This is from Counterpunch’s editor, Jeffery St. Clair: “Really thick smoke here in Oregon City this morning. I got up early and went to Clackamas Community College, about two miles southeast of us, which is serving as an evacuation center. About a thousand people camped there in RVs, cars, tents or sleeping bags out on the fields, right alongside their animals: Llamas, ponies, goats, sheep, chickens, pigs, dogs, alpacas, ducks. All seeming to get along, as if it were Dr. Doolittle’s ranch transported to Mars.”

While people are dealing with pets, animals and loved ones, as well as barns and homes being immolated by wildfire, the reality is global warming has been changing the region’s seasons. One extensive national climate assessment prepared by 13 federal agencies and released in 2018 states our Pacific Northwest has warmed nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900.

Yes, the trend will continue into the century, with the double-whammy of warmer winters and less mountain snowpack. Those same experts know long-term changes create an unusual risk in Pacific Northwest forests: Even a modest increase in contributing factors, like days without rain, could make them much more prone to burning.

“Those are the kinds of changes that amount to taking a forest and pushing it over the edge,” said Michael Medler, a fire scientist and chair of Western Washington University’s environmental studies department.

Two years ago, I saw a report from Tim Ingalsbee, head of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology, which is an Oregon-based nonprofit working on updating building codes. “The western slopes of the Cascades and the Northwest are just woefully unprepared,” Ingalsbee said.

While my in-laws are concerned, Darrel stated, “I’m not surprised, by the fires. But the reality of how close we are to them has stuck.”

His 72-year-old wife understands the beauty in the area they have lived in for five years attracted both them and others in droves: “We have so much beauty around us. So much vegetation, trees. We have an angus cattle ranch near us. And all those Christmas trees.”

For both her 75-year-old husband and herself, they see their Christian faith as a salve for the situation they are in. However, they know others who have lost homes and are now traumatized by the constant seasonal fear of wildfire scare have much to grapple with.

As I sign off this piece on Sept. 10, the Pearces were glued to their smartphones listening to the Clackamas County press conference. Sandy is now in a Level 2 warning. Who knows now about Sharon and Ed, the couple who just made the decision to have the wife take off and the old man stay at the property under the Level 3 evacuation warning?