Stimulate The Economy -- Forgive Student Loans!

Now, I might not have a Ph.D. in Economics, but it seems a bit illogical to think that putting a nation of debtors further into debt is a good way to "jump start" the economy. But, wasn't that the intention of that $700 billion dollar bailout?

A bunch of Wall Street investment banks and their henchmen were able to create a scheme to get rich off of bad debt. When their house of cards finally fell apart, the government rewarded these crooks by giving them our tax dollars to loan out to us. That's right. The government thought it a great idea to infuse these criminals with more cash so that they would give out more loans and get the American People more in debt.

It seems that the strength of this nation is measured by its insurmountable debt. Of course, I am oversimplifying the matter. But, really, am I that crazy to think that throwing a bunch of money at corporations in hopes of the American People becoming more indebted to them is a terrible idea?

Instead of believing in some type of magical "trickle down" or "debt to success" program, I have another plan to propose to our leaders. Take the money that you are so willing to hand over to corporate America and hand it over to the American People instead. That is, make an investment in the people and let the prosperity be felt in all sectors of society.

My idea is simple. Take our tax dollars and pay off all current student debt in the United States.

Right now, some individuals and families are paying over half of their monthly income towards student loans. A great majority of folks are paying at least a quarter of their monthly incomes. And, these people are generally on long term payment plans that allow individuals to pay less in the short term but pay more than double the cost of the initial loan in the end.

With all of this real wealth going to lenders, the educated lower and middle classes are unable to contribute meaningfully to society. They are unable to use their education to start new businesses, take important (but lower paying) jobs, or even invest in a home or land. These individuals, who have partially fulfilled the promise of America, are unable to see their dreams become a reality. They are being held back by debt. And, that debt is holding back our country.

If we were to free these individuals from their debt, we would first of all infuse a good deal of money to the lenders. So, yes, they could get more folks in debt. But, we would also be freeing up the real wealth of individuals to be invested into new businesses and ideas that will create new jobs and further opportunities. We would also be giving families a chance to invest in themselves and invest in their future through the purchase of homes and the many other accoutrements of success.

By investing in these Americans, we are indeed investing in America.

Sure, this is another scheme to help our ailing economy. But, it is a scheme that has definite positive benefits and potentially great impacts. To me, this is much better than a scheme that is all hopes and prayers.

The logical next step would be to ensure that no American is allowed to accumulate such debt for their education. I think that will be our next greatest hurdle. But, if we can alleviate the current crisis of student debt, we will have taken that first step towards an investment in the American dream.

Please join our Facebook group to further discuss this idea. And, if you support this plan, please contact your representative and senators. Also, sign your name on this petition that will be sent to President Obama. We need to invest in each other so that we can truly invest in our future.

[This post was first published at Orato.com. You can read the original here.]

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Environmental Catastrophe in Tennessee -- Please Help Us!

An environmental catastrophe of enormous proportions has just occurred in Tennessee. You have probably heard nothing about this event as it is getting almost no coverage beyond the local area. The absolute silence from the media has finally rocked me from my bloggy silence.

On Monday, over 500 million gallons of toxic coal ash sludge was released from a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) power plant when dike at the a waste pond completely failed. Constructed in the 1960s, the dike had previously small failures over the course of its history, but nothing of this magnitude had occurred. The toxic sludge destroyed twelve homes, but no one was injured by the torrent of toxins that rushed through Harriman, Tennessee and into tributaries of the Tennessee River. The toxic sludge has already resulted in a tremendous fish kill that immediately followed in its aftermath. The TVA is now promising to work through the holidays to test the sludge, which without question contains mercury and high levels of heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic.

This catastrophe has now released toxins directly into tributaries of the Tennessee River, which provides drinking water for Chattanooga as well as hundreds of other downstream communities in Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky.

Just to put this disaster into perspective, the Exxon Valdez released just under 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. The catastrophe at Harriman, Tennessee is almost 50 times greater than that in Alaska. And, I bet that you haven't heard a word about it in the news.

How can an environmental catastrophe of such magnitude occur and our media be so silent?

If you think that I am exaggerating about the devastation, look for yourself:

Everyone who reads this must act as the media and get the word out. Please do your part to spread this news to all of your friends, family, and even your local media. It is going to take serious citizen action to bring the attention of the nation to this catastrophe.

I suggest that you start by sending a clear message to Tennessee Governor Bredesen by signing this petition.

Then, please send emails to everyone that you know. I have actually drafted an email that you can feel free to use below. We need to get the word out in any way that we can. Please help us.

The Volunteer State needs all the volunteers that it can get!

Send this message to everyone that you know:

Greetings all,

First of all, I want to apologize for the mass email. But, we have just had an enormous environmental disaster in Tennessee and the media is keeping silent. I am not sure if there is a "conspiracy" behind the silence, but the magnitude of this disaster and the lack of coverage is absolutely shocking.

On Monday, a retaining wall failed at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in Roane County and sent 500 million gallons of sludgy coal ash into tributaries of the Tennessee River. Coal ash—the waste product left over after coal is burned—contains mercury and dangerous heavy metals like lead and arsenic. Twelve homes were engulfed in the slide, and the water supply for Chattanooga and other downstream communities in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky is now threatened.

Just to put this into perspective, the Exxon Valdez spilled just over 10 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound in 1989.

So, I would say that this disaster can officially be termed a catastrophe.

Yet, aside from local coverage in Tennessee, the word does not seem to be getting out.

You can see aerial footage of the spill here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnJUSHpTm-E

And, there is some local coverage of the catastrophe at these links:

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20081223/GREEN02/812230370

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20081224/GREEN0201/812240420/0/GREEN02

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20081223/GREEN02/81223065/0/GREEN02

I urge you all to take action and send a message to Tennessee's Governor Bredesen by signing this petition:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/coal_spill_tn/?r_by=-735925-8zgM.Hx&rc=paste

I also please ask that you spread the word about this catastrophe. If we do not get the word out, I think that this one will be buried as we enter the holiday news season.

It is unbelievable that this is not on the front page of every paper in this country. Please help.

I hope that you all are well.

All my love,

Kevin M. Bartoy.

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Dirty Dispatches: Getting Ready For The Lean Times

With the crispness of fall starting to fill our evenings, we are seeing the end of our growing season. Kevin spent a lot of time in the garden over the last month or two, preparing it and us for winter. He collected seeds, cut cooking herbs, picked tomatoes and peppers, and turned over some of the beds before planting them with compost crops. He kept busy in the kitchen as well, drying and jarring herbs, canning tomatoes, making pesto and chopping bell peppers for freezing.

Canned tomatoes

Chopped bell peppers for freezing

Ready for the winter

Herbs drying on the line above the kitchen cabinets

Dried herbs

A few weekends ago, Kevin surprised me with some of the beautiful zinnias that have been adorning the front end of the garden so we could enjoy them inside.



While most other flowers, trees and bushes around our yard and garden have shed most of their foliage, the zinnias are hanging on and still adding a touch of bright color to our outdoor space.

Dried lavender makes our kitchen smell summery still

Our freezer is full of veggies from our garden as well as produce shared by friends. Pesto, bell peppers, poblano peppers, eggplant, swiss chard. We've got enough greens to keep us going for a while.

The compost crop beds have sprouted and seem to be doing well, just in time for the first freeze of the year forecast for tonight. I'll let Kevin explain the benefits and intricacies of compost crops in the next installment of Dirty Dispatches.


Happy Autumn to all!

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A Short Silence

Sorry for the delay in posting an update.

Things around the farm have gotten a bit overwhelming. Ben seems to think that 3 am to 5 am is a perfectly reasonable time to keep Mommy and Babbo awake. And, Babbo reached his breaking point with sleep deprivation.

So, it was time to take a deep breath and find a little zen.

With that said, the blog has gone a tad by the wayside. I hope that you all haven't fretted the couple of weeks of quiet. And, I think that this silence should be short.

But, we will see.

"I don't know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves 'Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.'"
-Kurt Vonnegut

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Creating Confidence In A Corrupt System

Well, it seems as if the financial meltdown is over for the moment.

Our government doled out over $100 billion of our money to AIG. They threw another $700 billion of our tax dollars at other financial institutions. And, now, they are providing $250 billion of our hard taxed cash to nine banks to partially nationalize them.

If you ever thought that throwing money at a problem was not a great solution, please don't tell that to the American People. After this large influx (read waste) of our tax dollars, the stock market rallied to have its largest single-day gain in history. It appears that Americans breathed a sigh of relief and seemed willing to get things back to the status quo.

So, has anything changed?

Not really.

The only thing that has truly changed is the confidence of investors. For some reason, the government shovelling our tax dollars into a corrupt economic system has made people happy. That is, happy enough to give more of their own money to this same system that has bilked us for hundreds of billions of dollars. But, when confidence soars, so does investment. When investment soars, so does the Dow. And, when the Dow soars, our economy looks fantastic.

This is nuts. Absolutely nuts.

Does anyone else out there see this system for the farce that it truly is?

Our economy is such an absolute joke that it has now taken the nationalization of nine major banks to get us "back on track." That's right. In this bastion of the "free market," we have socialized our financial system to avert ruin and create confidence.

So, let me get this right. It is great policy to nationalize our financial institutions, but it would be terrible to nationalize health care?

I forgot. All those poor folks would be sucking the teat of government and stealing our money. That would be terrible. Obviously, it should only be rich folks who are allowed to do that.

This cluster fuck, euphemistically called a "meltdown," gave us the opportunity to rethink business as usual. But, it seems that we tossed that opportunity out the window right with tax dollars that our children's children's children will still be paying off.

I don't have the answers. But, I can honestly tell you that throwing money at the problem is nothing more than a bandaid that will get us back to the status quo.

We need to start investing in each other, in community, in our environment, and in our future and that of our children. We need to stop giving billions of our tax dollars to financiers who have no accountability whatsoever to the American People. These vultures are only interested in profits and not people. So, in reality, we are paying for the potential to be even more screwed in the future.

I know that the numbers of billions involved in this "bailout" seem so much like fairy tale amounts. But, as a dear friend pointed out to me, Al Gore's ten year plan to make the United States energy independent and powered solely by green technologies had a price tag of only $80 billion.

Trust me, I wouldn't have been saying "only" a few weeks ago. But, now, the accounting has changed.

Now, perhaps I am some idealistic dreamer, but knowing that my country was investing in energy independence for our future would definitely give me more confidence. Knowing that our country was investing in the American People through a socialized health care system would give me more confidence. Knowing that our country was investing in free education for all of its citizens would give me more confidence.

But, "investing" hundreds of billions of our dollars in the crooks that started this whole crisis does absolutely nothing to boost my confidence.

Perhaps I am the only one who thinks this way. And, I am sure that at the opening bell, the Dow will prove this fact to be true.

So, congratulations America, you have found your confidence, you have bankrupted this country, and you have gotten us back on track to the status quo.

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Guest Blog: Demand Labelling For "Frankenfoods"

In another attempt to circumvent the right of people to know what they are putting into their bodies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is attempting to approve genetically engineered animals for human consumption without your knowledge.

That's right. The FDA will allow these foods to be sold in supermarkets without any labeling as to the genetic modification of the product. So, independent of what you think of GMOs, you will not be allowed to choose whether they are in your diet or not. And, the prime reason for not labeling these goods will be to help sales. Your right to know is being sold out for profit.

Today, Jean Halloran of the Consumers Union provides the opportunity for you to make your voice heard on this issue. I hope you take action and spread the word. When we don't even know what we are eating, something has gone seriously awry.

If the Wall Street bailout was hard to swallow, the government is preparing a Halloween trick that just may be impossible to stomach.

The Food and Drug Administration is opening the way for grocery stores to sell food made from genetically engineered animals. And the agency is proposing that these products, called "Frankenfoods" by some, be sold to you without your knowledge.

Sign our online petition demanding that food from genetically engineered animals be labeled. We have the right to know what we are eating!

Genetically engineered animals are not a far-off, exotic concept. It's happening right now. Goats are engineered with spider genes to produce silk in their milk. And pigs carry mouse and bacterial DNA to improve their digestion.

The jury is still out on whether food from these animals is safe for humans or the environment. And the ethics of such changes have yet to be considered.

The FDA says they will conduct a safety review before these foods can be sold for human consumption. But consumers won't know if they're buying genetically engineered food, because the agency isn't going to require a label.

We know what's in the can of soup we buy because the label tells us. Shouldn't we know if the meat we buy comes from a pig with another animal's genes, or whether our milk has insect DNA in it?

Sign our petition and show the FDA that Americans want to know what's in their food!

We have until November 18 to collect signatures. Please spread the word to others so they can sign too. Let's stop this Halloween trick before it starts.

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How Much Do You Trust Your Government?

There seems to be a fine line in America between "healthy skepticism" and "conspiracy theory." That line seems to get even thinner as the Bush Administration continues its redefinition of the Executive Branch of government.

Recently, in an extremely underreported story, the United States Army's 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team was deployed for one year of active duty on United States' soil. This Combat Team is now being called the Consequence Management Response Force, or CCMRF, euphemistically pronounced "sea-smurf." This unit is under the command of the United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), which was first created in 2002 to "provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts." This is the first time that USNORTHCOM has been assigned an active unit.

In initial reports of this deployment, Army Times reported that this force would be used to help in the invent of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or "civil unrest and crowd control."

Since the original Army Times report on this deployment, spokespeople from the United States Army have somewhat countered the idea that this active combat unit would be used to carry out law enforcement duties or assist civil authorities with "civil unrest and crowd control." Army Times has even carried a correction to their initial report, which had elaborately described lethal and non-lethal crowd control capabilities of this unit, to state that this unit would not be allowed to use their non-lethal crowd control weapons on United States' soil.

So, why has the United States Army and the Pentagon de-emphasized the involvement of this unit in law enforcement?

Well, it's simple. It happens to be illegal.

That's right. Our Founding Fathers were quite frightened by standing armies. They were particularly afraid that a standing army in the United States would be misused to destroy the democracy which they were forging. So, in fact, our Founding Fathers were the first conspiracy theorists out there. Think about that for a second as you try to label the folks raising red flags about this deployment as paranoid.

Two acts established early in our country's history reflect the concern of our Founding Fathers and of our later political leaders who followed closely in their tradtion. The Insurrection Act of 1807 governs the ability of the President of the United States to use federal troops to quell insurrection or rebellion. The later Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits federal troops from exercising law enforcement powers on United States' soil.

Since at least 2006, President Bush has sought to circumvent these laws by amending provisions to defense spending bills. The 2007 Defense Authorization Bill substantially altered the Insurrection Act of 1807 by giving the president broad powers to use federal troops as a police force in times of natural or manmade disasters as well as any other time at which the president determines that local officials could not keep public order. The amendment also said that the president could act against "insurgents" or "those obstructing the enforcement of the laws."

Although these amendments to the Insurrection Act of 1807 were later stripped in subsequent defense authorization bills, President Bush has consistently used the pocket veto and signing statement to reassert the power of the president to use federal troops on United States' soil. Going even further, in 2007, President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 51, which provides the president enormous powers in declaring a catastrophic emergency and essentially imposing martial law on this country. This is especially frightening given that the definition of a "catastrophic emergency" would be left up to a single individual. In yet another overstep of the Executive Branch, Ol' GW refuses to listen to Congress and the American People on this matter and exerts a power that goes against the core of our democratic principles outlined by our Founding Fathers.

This situation is exactly what our Founding Fathers had feared.

It is now possible for a single person, either the President of the United States or the Secretary of Defense, to order federal troops to enforce "law and order" on American soil.

And, what safeguards are in place that protect the American People from a military occupation and a destruction of our democracy?

Well, there are none.

When asked about safeguards or potential abuses, United States Army Colonel Michael Boatner, future operations division chief of USNORTHCOM, stated that "our soldiers are trustworthy" and therefore "American citizens can be confident that there will be no abuses."

So, now, here is my question restated: How much do you trust your government?

Or, perhaps, more appropriately, should you trust your government more than the Founding Fathers did?

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Qlogging with Italo Calvino

Perhaps it is appropriate that I first became acquainted with Italo Calvino through his edited volume of Italian folktales. He once said, "Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words." And, as I moved from reading his collection of folktales to his original fiction, I realized that his work and his life were permeated by myth.


I consider Calvino's Invisible Cities to be one of the best books ever written. Calvino's magical realism explodes across the pages as we are treated to an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Calvino uses visions of cities to explore the possibility and potential of human life. He creates a vision of a world that could be and perhaps will be. It is truly a masterpiece.

There is something about the magical. It offers us a vision of the extraordinary. But, at the same time, given that it has been imagined, it provides a possibility for that vision to become the ordinary. Without magic, we have no potential. And, without potential, there is no change.

I hope that you find the magic in this brief visit with Italo Calvino.

"What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts."

"I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume."

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

"'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'"

"The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner."

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts."

"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."

" ... and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."

"The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions."

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Memory really matters ... only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become."

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