By Tom on 9/21/2008 12:31 PM

  All it took to make me hit the epiphany button was one look at Kevin Phillips’ face last Friday on television. Now, before listening to me belabor the epiphany, permit a correction: the “stock market” is just the portion of the financial sector you can smell. What Phillips was trying to swallow was the entire enchilada. I’ll now labor to rise above mismetaphor in order to think on survival of the consumers in the feed lot. No cutting nor slicing of the current financial salami makes it comprehensible to me the public. Both pundits and fundits mislead us into thinking that there is a financial explanation of, if not solution to, this uh, let’s face it, tsulami. There isn’t. What masquerades as explanation is a laundry list of symptoms. The true explanation is that when we went off the wampum standard we set off on a “dark and unknown road” (Steve Fraser). Okay it was gold, but I’m trying to make a point. What passes for a dollar these days is somewhere between a memory and a figment. If you want to read the...

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By Tom on 9/20/2008 5:53 PM

Rachael Carson had spun a silken trap when she exposed the danger of pesticides, the trap of the Ten Commandments, the trap of thou shalt not. Rachael Carson died before she could envision a positive way to stop pesticide use. For the context and actual wording of that judgement read Adam Werbach’s 2004 speech titled Is Environmentalism Dead?. In this he chronicles the birth (by Carson) and death (by Commandment) of the environmental movement. Inherently negative, the trap also narrowed the environmentalist view in the way that a medical specialist begins a diagnosis narrowed to that specialty. And narrowness was double trouble for it not only took problems out of context but invited corporations to label environmentalism a special interest. The result has been ever-expanding aggrandizement by the establishment and ever-blind scooping of establishment poop by the movement. The initial victories of the Clean Air and Water Acts, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA, are being reversed. Praise Carson and pray...

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By Tom on 9/9/2008 6:27 AM

This is the first of a hoped-for study of all US elections that asks whether the will of the people had any effect on the result. Thanks to Gore Vidal, 1876 was picked to start the series.

The Election of 1876 In the fall of 1876, three years after having shot itself in the foot, the Establishment called in witch doctors to fix the festering sore of the worst depression in US history. Fix to Establishment satisfaction is what developed, but the turnaround did soon follow. The initial phase of the fix was to get the Democratic House to vote against the Democratic winner of the popular vote for president. The shot in the foot was the panic of 1873, triggered by over-expansion of graft in railroad development. The situation in 1876 has been described as follows: “It was a depression year, the worst year of the severest depression yet experienced. In the East labor and the unemployed were in a bitter and violent temper…Out West a tide of agrarian radicalism was rising…. From both East and West came threats...

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By Tom on 9/7/2008 7:19 AM

From Greener Times September 7, 2008 In the old days a man catching up with the news would pluck the early edition from under his left arm and after a quick check above the fold flip to an inside page. There he would do a “commuter” fold that reduced the newspaper to a quarter of a page, tuck in his elbows, and read. His seat neighbor was doing the same and their elbows never bumped. Neither was driving, of course, for where I grew up everybody took the train to work. Today I catch up on this screen here and compare what it says with what Brian Williams said last night, a comparison made difficult by origination in different planets. I tuck in my elbows to still the vertigo. A boatload of sympathizers returned from Gaza safely having run the Israeli blockade; a nearby Palestinian boat was not so fortunate. The US has turned the Anbar Province back to the Iraqis, explaining that it is now peaceful, implying a trend. (No oil there?) Five e-mails from the police, city, county and RNC have responded to my signing...

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