I Miss the Soviet Union

I miss the Soviet Union.  Ever since I was a young boy I have enjoyed listening to short wave radio.  As a teenager I was even an amateur radio operator ... WA6KJV.  I let my license expire when I was in the Air Force during the Vietnamese War.  I remember listening to Radio Moscow.  I was inspired by the universal employment, health care and housing that the commentators described in programs such as "What is Communism?"  Everyone in the USSR could have a education.  Many women were doctors.  I still listen to short wave international broadcasters occasionally and I can still send and receive Morse code.  However the alternative is no longer there.  In its place is a rather bland "Voice of Russia."  The Voice of America signals used to plow through the short waves like huge sailing ships.  The Voice of American theme music, "Hail Columbia the Gem of the Ocean", was breaking ashore over short waves twenty-four hours a day. It's no longer dominant as VOA's signals are delivered in sanitised form by satellite these days.  The world was more black and white in those days.  But what does all of this have to do with my having a feeling of nostalgia regarding the Soviet Union?  When the Soviet Union collapsed, the world capitalist system was free to move ahead on steroids.  Even Communist China began following a path of hyper capitalism, thus demonstrating that democracy and capitalism are not the synonymous.  Capitalism does not necessarily promote democracy.  In the US it has evolved into an oligarchical state controlled economy with a concentration of wealth that is staggering. 

Even as a young man I knew that there was great inequality in the world.  I understood also from an early age that my life was far easier than that of children born in less developed parts of the world.   I came to understand that there was the "Free World" and the "Communist World."  The developing world was designated the "Third World", being neither free nor communist.  Gradually I became awakened to my own predisposed beliefs about race and culture here in the US.  I can only describe the evolution of my thinking as the development of "class consciousness." 

In the US we have have had Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  I believe these were possible only because there was an alternative to capitalism behind the so called "Iron Curtain" that Winston Churchill described in his famous speech when he was visiting the United States following the end of World  War II.  That communist option evaporated almost without warning when the Soviet Empire collapsed.  Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan began implementing neoliberal economic policies.  Margaret Thatcher described neoliberalism, the economic belief that everything public should be privatised, as "TINA", there is no alternative.  Indeed, with the demise of the "Evil Empire" there was no longer any viable alternative to unbridled, deregulated capitalism.  Thus we see today the actual discussions between American political parities regarding the gutting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  I thought I would never live to see the day when such thinking would be implemented as public policy.  Raising the debt ceiling of the US Treasury had been transformed into a contrived crisis that is being used to eliminate our social services network.  Welcome America to the third world.

Repeat Letter to the President

Mr. President:
It is time for you to take unilateral action by invoking the 14th Amendment remedy.  This is not a debt crisis.  The crisis is contrived in order to roll back New Deal protections for the people.  This is a simple debt ceiling issue.  Stand up for the people.  Please.  You cannot ask elderly, poor and people with disabilities to pay for the Wall Street raid on our Federal treasury.

Email to President Obama this Morning

My Dear Mr. President.

It is time for you to invoke the 14th Amendment solution to raising the debt ceiling.  President Truman did it.

Otherwise, I will have to conclude that you are actually committed to cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to appease your Wall Street Constituency.

Are you the Peoples' president or the president of Wall Street?

Respectfully, this has gone far enough.

Why Obama Won't Raise the Debt Ceiling

It's simple. The President won't unilateral­ly raise the debt ceiling. Harry Truman did this. Bill Clinton said that he would do it in a minute. It was done without event eight times during the Bush presidency­. Why won't President Obama use the 14th Amendment? He has basically promised Wall Street, his ultimate constituen­cy, that he will use the contrived debt crisis to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He is Wall Street's Trojan Horse: populist on the outside, corporatis­t on the inside.

President Barack Obama - Wall Street's Trojan Horse

President Barack Obama - Wall Street's Trojan Horse

I supported Barack Obama in 2008.  I was energized by his populist message.  "We are the ones we have been waiting for."  This is because I strongly believe that government has a direct and vital responsibility to moderate the nation's economy so as to provide employment for all Americans when the free market fails to accomplish this as is the case once again right now.  We have a lot of work that needs to be done and we have millions of American workers ready to go right now.  I also firmly believe that the government needs to regulate the financial markets, banking and the like.  There were regulative protections built into the banking systems as a result of the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent prolonged depression.  One of the instruments removed piece by piece was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.  It regulated the speculative practices of banks and investment institutions that led to the "Great Depression."  Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the unfolding of the current "crisis", admitted before a Congressional committee that he was mistaken in believing that the financial markets could regulate themselves.  That's amazing.  I could almost picture the shadow of  his mentor, Ayn Rand, peering over his shoulders.  Yet, take a look at the anemic regulations that have emerged thus far in response to this collapse.  "Too big to fail" is still too big to fail and growing larger.  The financial industry is a law unto itself.  Specifically, consider the newly created "Consumer Protection Agency."  The founding architect of that agency, who also happens to be the most potent consumer advocate imaginable, was not selected by President Obama to run it.  Why?  The banks did not want Elizabeth Warren. She would have held them to account.  I, for one, would love to see someone of the caliber of Elizabeth Warren pitted against President Obama in the Democratic Party primaries this coming year.   

The banks and financial institutions were bailed out at tax payer expense. They risked our economy knowing full well they would be saved by the government dominated by Wall Street.  And that is exactly what happened.  Some estimates place the total transfer of wealth from the US Treasury to the banks at $13 to $14 trillion.  However, the individual home owners, who were counseled to believe that their loans were secure, were themselves blamed when the speculative practices of the banks caused the collapse.  They lost their homes and their dreams.  They were not rescued.  What happened to the people who were sold shoddy home mortgages reminds me of what happens to rape victims.  The victims are blamed.  Wall Street has managed to deflect the legitimate anger of the Tea Party from itself, where the blame truly resides, to the citizens who are the real victims.  How diabolical.

Barack Obama seemed to represent for me the candidate best suited to lead our country out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while protecting the social safety nets in the homeland.  I wasn't the only one to believe this.  He received a Nobel Peace Prize.  He was going to close Guantanamo Bay among other things.  In the meantime, the wars continue, the drones multiply, the overseas prisons remain, the rhetoric continues and the homeland falls further into disrepair.

For me homeland security includes employment, education, health care, shelter, nutrition and public safety.  More than 25 million Americans would jump at a chance for full time employment right now if it were available.  Why isn't it?  We've had over ten years of substantial tax relief.  Our tax rate is the lowest among industrialized nations.  That vaunted trickle ought to arrive about now, don't you think?  Corporations are sitting on $2 trillion.  None of it is being used to stimulate employment here in the US..

I expected from what I heard that Barack Obama would protect Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.  I even thought he might be the president who would deliver medical insurance to all Americans in a single-payer fashion.  After all, Democratic presidents have protected and even enhanced Medicare and Social Security.  Sadly, I have now come to realize, that I was mistaken.  Perhaps it was wishful thinking.  The populist rhetoric deployed during the campaign was merely that: rhetoric.  Obama is a brilliant communicator.  He used his skills to energize the progressive base of the Democratic Party and brought along millions of younger Americans who had never been involved in electoral politics before. However, once in office he emerged as Wall Street's Trojan Horse.

Let's just face facts.  The President arrived on the national stage portraying himself as an energetic progressive who was going to bring "change."  Little did I realize that the change he really contemplated was that of gutting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  This Trojan Horse is a free-market fundamentalist who adheres to the ideology of trickle-down economics.  He has willingly placed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block in accordance with the wishes of Wall Street.  He is neither weak nor is he allowing the Republicans to push him around.  He is one of them.  And we welcomed him into our city.

The Siskiyou Crest Monument

John was away visiting his grandchildren in Sacramento.  I was home with our wolf hound, Patrick.  It was time to explore.  I had been hearing talk of a  monument called the Siskiyou Crest National Monument.  It is a proposed set aside of 600,000 acres in far northern California and southern Oregon.  It contains two designated wilderness areas, the Siskiyou Wilderness and the Red Buttes Wilderness.  Over thirty years ago I happened upon a Sierra Club tote book titled, Hiking in Bigfoot Country.  I had read about the Red Buttes in the little book and the promise of a future wilderness hike had always lingered somewhere in me.  As I was gathering energy and knowledge for this trip that I am about to describe, I found a copy of that little book at our local previously-owned book store here in Mt. Shasta, the Book Nook.  Not only was it a rare find, but I discovered that the book had once belonged to a friend of ours, Karen, whom we had first met with her partner, Barbara on a hike at Squaw Creek.  Karen had just recently died.  She was a former nun and a person I thought of as having a high spiritual attainment.  Karen's memory and the knowledge that I was now carrying a book she cherished, armed me for an exploration: what is it with the "No Monument" that I have seen sparsely stationed along I5 on our almost weekly trips to Ashland?  I was set to find out.

The trip to the Red Buttes of necessity found me of necessity heading toward Happy Camp.  Happy Camp is a small community nestled in between the foothills of the Siskiyous and the Klamath River.  I headed north on I5 until I came to the turn off for the Klamath River Highway 96.  It is 47 miles from Mt. Shasta to the turn off.  I noted that Happy Camp was 65 miles from this point.  The highway follows the Klamath River most of the way.  The scenery is varied between lush forested zones to almost desert-like sections.  The drive took a long time.  Patrick was not used to being in the truck for such long stretches.  I noted his discomfort and stopped at several access points along the Klamath for him to stretch and catch a drink or two in the river.  He really wanted to be hiking.

The closer we came to Happy Camp, the more frequently were the signs reading, "No Monument", posted in front of private properties. There were some variations to this general message, although the signs were primarily printed in upper case black letters on a white rectangle.  They seemed to be identical to ones I had seen on the web in stories of a rally in Yreka this past winter where our congressman, Wally Herger had been the featured speaker in opposing the establishment of "The Monument."  There were some original signs as well.  One was painted in red, white and blue and proclaimed the message, "KS Wild Lies" and "Keep Out KS Wild."  These signs were referring to the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, the organization behind the research and preparations leading to the Siskiyou Crest National Monument proposal. The road is long and winding with little traffic, although this was a Wednesday.  I kept wondering when we would get to what I could call a proper destination.  We passed the towns of Klamath River and Etna.  At Etna I found the signs for the southern trail of the Pacific Crest Trail, although I did not take the time to locate northern extension that heads into the Siskiyou Crest. 

Finally Patrick and I reached Happy Camp.  Just before Happy Camp I was expecting to find a road heading north that would lead me to a trail head in Oregon for the Red Buttes Wilderness.  It was Forest Service Road 19N01.  Somehow I missed it and wound up exploring Happy Camp.  I located the Karuk Tribe Museum and Visitors Center.  I could only spend a little bit of time in the center itself and the museum as I was conscious of how uncomfortable Patrick was in the truck.  I talked with the woman who was behind a counter in the visitors center and told her I wanted some specific books having to to do with the Karuk tribe.  She referred to the Karuks as "they."  I didn't find the book and I only browsed in the museum for a brief moment.  I will have to find the book  later when it is in.  She referred to it as the only one that was Karuk Tribe specific.

I drove around town for a bit and noted that there was a store front that sported the sign, "The Klamath Knot Arts Council" or words to that effect.  The building appeared to be vacant.  "The Klamath Knot" is the name of a book by David Rains Wallace and published by the Sierra Club.  I had read it back in 1983.  It also referenced in detail the Red Buttes.  I still could not find the forest service road I was looking for when I came upon the US Forest Service Office.  Inside was a very friendly young women with tattoos on her forearms.  She was wearing the forest service uniform.  I wanted to be a forest ranger when I was a young boy.  When she asked if I needed help I told her I was looking for road 19N01 leading to the Red Buttes Wilderness.  She was not familiar with either the road or the wilderness,  However she did come with me to a huge wall mounted map  of the Siskiyou National Forest.  From what little I could tell her she was able to point out a road on Cabe Mountain.  There was a hairpin turn and then a road.  She was certain that was the road I was thinking of.  As it turned out, she was right.

But before I left the office I couldn't resist the chance to ask about the "No Monument" signs that were so densely displayed in town and around.  Even the Chamber of Commerce had altered their "Welcome" sign to register their opinion.  So, I probed, "What is it with the 'No Monument' signs?"  She immediately demurred.  They were not supposed to talk about it.  But then, just as immediately she filled me in on her thinking.  She said the proposal was on the President's desk.  It would lock away a huge amount of land that people in Happy Camp depend upon for their very survival.  "This is where we get our meat and our fire wood.  This monument would shut down the town."  Obviously she was emphatic.  I thanked her and moved on the locate road 19N01.

I found the road I wanted just where the ranger told me it should be.  It juts to the left as you are heading away from Happy Camp.  Just before you come to it, however, there is this amazing hair pin turn on Cabe Mountain that seems to never unwind.  The one lane paved road has another name aside for 129N01: It is signed as Thomson Ridge. 

I stopped on my way to the trail head several times to read wooden signs that had been installed along the route.  On prominent set of three signs set in a curve so that they could be easily read, overlooked what was described as  great the fire of 1987 that was a motel threat to Happy Camp.  It is remembered as the "Fire Siege ’87."  There were lives lost in the fight to save the town.  The embers were not completely doused until the first flakes of snow fell.  Another wooden sign further up the road tells of the students from Siskiyou County schools who worked together in a vast reforestation project in this area after the fire.  The people here love the land and care for it.

During the next hour or so I followed this ridge road.  It led me from the warmth of the 85 degree Klamath River Highway to the lofty "Boundary Trail 1201" 17 miles away at about 6,000 feet.  The temperature was 55 degrees when I reached the trail head itself.  I had arrived at a doorway into the Red Buttes Wilderness.  All along the ridge road on the way up I caught views of distant peaks.  To the west of me in the Siskiyou Wilderness, snow capped Preston Peak shimmered away in the late afternoon sunshine.  To my east were the Red Buttes themselves set off by the green forests below and around them.  And to the south was Mt. Shasta appearing as though it were floating on a bed of low-lying clouds.  There was no direction that did not delight the eye.

The Red Buttes trail head was a different world from the one I had left 17 miles earlier down below by the Klamath River.  It was moist, chilly, green and filled with all kinds of wild flowers.  There were some plants there I swear I had never remembered seeing before.  The trail itself had not been cleared this season ... or maybe even last season.  It is seldom visited.  There is a camp of sorts where a car could be parked during a trek in the Red Buttes.  There was a fire ring and the remnants of what appeared to be a makeshift shelter.  Just beyond the camp the trail begins with the wilderness boundary sign.  Patrick wanted to hike longer, but I knew we needed to get back to Mt. Shasta as John would be arriving at our home from Sacramento.  So we gave in and started to drive back to the Klamath River Highway. 

On our way back home there were renewed views of the peaks, valleys, and forests surrounding us.  I always come away from these explorations with the promise within in me of a return.  The little pieces of joy I only had a chance to sample I intend to return to for a sumptuous feast.  While my mind pondered the future adventures, bounding down the road ahead of the truck at one point was the coal-blackest bear I had ever seen.  It was older than a cub, but younger than a full-grown black bear.  It scudded into the forest and that was the last I saw of it.

The Nymph of Heart Lake

No kidding.  I just saw a young nymph up at Heart Lake late this afternoon as I was sunning with Patrick on one of the huge, glacially polished rocks that form parts of the shore.  She arrived in silence and  fashioned  a cocoon of privacy about her from the energy of her own aura.  She proceeded to a rocky area just across the lake from where I was and began removing all of her clothing in a very ceremonial manner.  It seemed to me that she became naked all at once.  It was magical.  She was in new age attire with a lot of browns and lengthy skirts.  She had long, reddish brown hair that seemed to float on its own.  I tried to avert my gaze.  Suddenly she splashed  into the water even though there were still bits of snow left from winter bobbing about on the surface.  I 've never seen a female body look so attractive.  She moved in pulses as if she were walking in a procession.  I immediately thought that she was involved in some active spiritual practice. I assumed she had been living somewhere up near the lake this summer and had appeared in the warmth of the day to bathe.  In fact, as I was hiking back down to the truck with Patrick, she was just descending from the lake and pulsing along on a path that I imagined led to a secretive little camp site.

There is No Debt Crisis

Dear Editor:

There is no US government debt crisis.  The contrived crisis is a pretense.  It is a fabrication that will only concentrate further wealth into the hands of the ruling elites.  To this end, Senator Mitch McConnell warned President Obama, ahead of talks set to deal with raising the government debt ceiling that additional revenue is out of the question.  We are being held hostage.  At the very least, we need substantial revenue increases to pay for the unfunded military mania.  More importantly, however, we need a massive stimulus for the people, the ones for whom the economy is not working.  When 25 million American people report in polls that they want full-time employment and that option is not available to them that should be a signal that the free market is not working for us.  Germany, for example, has a deficit much higher than the US in relation to its GDP.  Yet the Germans found that reducing government stimulus when the economy needs support provokes an even further downturn.  They have corrected this and so must the US.  We must reverse the transfer of wealth from the ruling elites to the people who are actually creating that wealth in the form of their labor.  The real crisis, the one not addressed in the corporate owned media, is the destruction of the American dream for the majority of us.  The economy is not working for the people.

Tea Party: Teachers and Public Empolyees Unions are the Problem?

What caused the Crash of 2008?  According to my Tea Party friend, Ron, it was brought about in large part by unions demanding wages and perks for their members.  Accordingly, this labor cost pressure prompted corporations to off-shore their needs for less expensive, e.g., more profitable labor.  And then I pointed out that, as far as I understood, there are no labor unions in the Peoples Republic of China.  So it was the workers themselves, who with their labor, produced the wealth and expected a representative share of that wealth.  And with that wealth, the auto makers, for example retooled for business outside the United States.

The other issue is public emplyees:  most especially teachers.  Ron asserted that teachers should have no union rights.  When I inquired as to whether this included retirement benefits and health care, Ron was clear.  It has to go.  Ron alluded earlier to the one world government that was trying to bring down American standards of living to match the "third world."  Looking at Ron's plans for workers' unions, especially public employees, this looks more likely to lead to third world whatevers than anything else.   A big draw on the public coffers is public employees.   I pointed out that the goal of coporations is the privatization of public education.  We would still pay the taxes but the funds would go to "for profit" corporations.  Given that CEO pay is reported to have increased by an average of 23% just this past year during this jobless recovery, I can assume that a large portion of public treasure will be directed the CEO's of the educational services corporations.  What makes it to the students will be determined by profit margins.

Where did these ideas come from?  Public funding bad.  Public spaces bad; and they need to be privately owned.  For a chance to explore answers to this question, I suggest visting the folllowing web: http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed.  The move toward anti-tax and privatization has come straight from some of the most powerful sources including the Koch Brothers.  Like the founding of the Tea Party, the privatization movement has been a top-down effort.

The Klamath River: What I learned from a Tea Partier

I have been exploring the issues surrounding the Klamath River; and what I am discovering is amazing.  It has to do with the long-term plans for restoration of the river itself along with the communities that depend on it for sustenance.   My quest all began after I had an encounter with two local Tea Partiers the other day.  I'm always excited to meet people who care enough about politics to have strong opinions.  Fortunately for me, Ron and Regina fit the the bill perfectly.  When people care enough to share what they think about issues that interests me, it always challenges me to question what I think I know.  Somehow that interaction is very stimulating and I always wind up expanding and changing my thinking.  It's a natural high.  So what have I learned so far about the Klamath River?

First off, I've learned that I don't know very much.  This is inexcusable to me as I pass near  and over the river sometimes weekly on my way to Ashland, Oregon with my partner John on most Sundays.  My encounter with the river itself has been limited until now to scattered glances from the car that reveal a evenly flowing greenish waterway with sudsy accumulations along the banks.  Aside from wondering about the foam on the banks, I've never really given the river much thought, until now.

My new Tea Party acquaintance was concerned about the scheduled damn removal to be undertaken in the next few years on the Klamath.  He referred to three damns that produce enough hydroelectric power that, without these structures, my own Pacific Power utility bill would be painfully increased.  This got me wondering so I started investigating on the Web.  I found "The American Rivers" web.  Here is the link: http://www.americanrivers.org/our-work/restoring-rivers/dams/projects/restoring-klamath-river.html.  I discovered that there were actually four hydroelectric damns on the Klamath currently operated by Pacific Power.  Moreover, the amount of electricity that these damns contribute to the Pacific Power grid amounts to a meager 1% of the power distributed by the company.  This amount of energy could be recouped through other renewable means such as solar.  It might be said that the four damns are obsolete.  They were high tech at the time of their construction, but their advantages are far outweighed today by the loss of natural habitat for the more than 400 species of fish that at once used to thrive in the Klamath River Basin.

More later.

MY Tea Party Enlightenment in Mt. Shasta Part 2

In returning to my questions about the true intent of the Constitution, I wondered with Ron and Regina whether a "war tax" would be appropriate at this time as our big government is fighting at least five wars and the funding is not budgeted. It is borrowed  through instruments known as appropriations.  It's not in the budget.  Congress votes to make the money available ... without fail.  My understanding, as I shared it, was that we have already had to pay $178 billion in interest alone on these unfunded adventures.  It makes sense to me that we should be paying a war tax ... a form of shared sacrifice. After all, in WWII our parents got by with rationing, growing victory gardens and buying war bonds.  Regina was not thrilled with the war tax idea.  Maybe it should be done.  We all agreed that the US was fighting too many wars.  I added that after the World Trade Center jet airliner attack, President Bush did not ask for sacrifices.  Rather, he encouraged his "fellow Americans" to go shopping, to take vacations, and to go to Disneyland.  Perhaps, therefore, much of our debt is a result of military expenditures.  Why not address that?


I explored with Ron and Regina the question of why we are cutting Medicare and Social Security and not focusing on reducing military spending.  After all, to me homeland security involves good medical care.  When you think that 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center and our response has been trillion dollar outlays in wars overseas and $400 billion for homeland security expenses here at home, that seems like overkill.  Meanwhile, more than 45,000 people die yearly in the homeland due to lack of health insurance.  And now we're looking at cuts to Medicare? 


Like a needle skipping across a 33 rpm vinyl record, Ron jumped to local Siskiyou County issues.   After all, as I am discovering, it is the local government regulations and taxes that seem to bother Tea Party people the most.  They follow the narrative of "do for yourself and don't interfere with me."  I guess, upon reflection, that the allusion to 33 rpm records will not be understood by younger people.  However, Ron, Regina and I are all old white farts who cut our teeth on vinyl LP's. 


On the local scene, Ron was uphappy with the "Monument", the removal of three damns from the Klamath River, the organization known as "Shasta Commons and ideas he had heard about removing population from rural areas and housing them in huge, apartment like structures.  The dread inspired by the prospect of a one world government rounded out his litany of concerns.


The Monument.  I had seen signs along Interstate 5 that read, "No Monument."  Ron explained that the government was engaging in a massive land grab and there was going to be a 640,000 acre area cut off with no roads.  I didn't understand what the problem was with "roadless areas"; however I knew that usually such designations were reserved for "wilderness areas" such as the Trinity Alps or the Marble Mountains to name just two in our area.  Ron related that Clinton had designated the Monument in the waining hours of his presidency and it was undemocratic as well as a massive land grab.  (As an aside, Ron was confusing the proposed monumnet with the one that Clinton actually approved: The Shasta-Cascade National Monument described at the following link.  http://www.blm.gov/or/districts/medford/plans/csnm.php.)  Ron was adamantly against this "Monument."  I was clueless at this point but when I got home I researched "The Monument" on the Internet.


The proposed Siskiyou Crest National Monument can be explored in person and on the Internet at:
 http://kswild.org/what-we-do-2/WildlandProtection/siskiyoucrestmap4web.gif.
The map of the proposed Siskiyou Crest National Monument shows that there are already several designated wilderness areas containing within the nascent boundaries as well as the Oregon Caves.  The lead organization promoting the establishment of the "monument" is the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center: http://kswild.org/. 


The timing for the adding the Siskiyou Crest National Monument to protection status comes as two of our Northern California State Parks, as Castle Crags and Del Norte Coastal Redwoods State Park are to be permanently closed by 2012.  Northern California has taken an inordinately brutal hit in the closure of 70 California State Parks.  One has to wonder how well we were represented by Senator Doug LaMalfa and Assemblyman Jim Nielsen.  At any rate, the opening up of the Siskiyou Crest National Monument could compensate in part for the losses of public space that people in Northern California are facing.


My Internet research revealed that Ron was misinformed about the roadless status of the "Monument."  Within the boundaries there are already roads.  These are not slated to be closed.  In addition, any private property already existing in the boundaries will have access rights.  The proposed monument is an area of diversity in plants and creatures.  Here is a web site that can say more than I could possibly write: http://www.siskiyoucrest.org/download/SCNMprofile.pdf.  It contains 600,000 acres.


Tomorrow I will add another blog page.  I just got carried away exploring the above Internet link.  In fact, I was planning on taking, Patrick, our Irish Wolfhound to the Trinity Alps next.  Now I'm looking to explore the Siskiyou Crest.

Mt. Shasta Tea Party Patriots - A Dialog

I went to a tea party yesterday.  Not really.  What really happened is that I went to our local Mt. Shasta Physical Therapy Center to lift weights while my partner, John, splashed away in the center swimming pool.  I wasn't at all highly motivated for a physical workout and as I was preparing my IPod for my weekly review of "Gay USA", I found myself fumbling with the arm strap that I have not quite figured out.  A fellow senior athlete was about to commence his routine in the chest press machine when he smiled at me and joked, "These devices are beyond me."

Ron, as he introduced himself, wanted to know what was on the back of my T-shirt.  He could see plainly that the front was emblazoned with the message, "Do I look illegal?"  On the back, as it turns out, is an open-hand with "facebook.com/cuentame" inscribed under it.  "Cuentame" translates from the Spanish roughly as "tell it to me."  Cuentame is an immigrants rights organization that I discovered shortly before John and I traveled to Detroit last summer for the US Social Forum.  I got the shirts to demonstrate my displeasure with the "papers please" legislation that Arizona and Governor Jane Brewer had just then imposed upon people.  As an aside, I understand now that food growers in Arizona this season are in dire straits as large numbers of immigrants with or without papers are deserting the fields if not the entire state.  I mean, even if you were born here 1000 years ago in North America you could be asked time and time again for your birth certificate or whatever.  Suffer Stalin, suffer.  In the meantime, the idea is being floated in Arizona that parolees without jobs could be sent into the fields.  Lacking this, In some places I know prisoners are used this way.  So hang on for that one.

Ron saw immigrants as a definite problem.  I stopped fiddling with my high tech arm strap and got interested.  I shared that I thought the issue of immigrants overrunning the country amounts to a deliberately deployed distraction to keep us from attacking the real problem: the full-scale ripping off of working America by Wall Street and the privatization of the public spaces by the ruling elites.  (What a mouthful.)  At this point Ron told me he was a member of the Tea Party Patriots.  There are different flavors of the genre "Tea Party."  I asked about the Koch brothers and what I had heard about their funding of the Tea Party movement.  At this point Regina, Ron's wife joined our conversation.  Regina had not heard of the Koch brothers and averred that all the funds for the Mt. Shasta Tea Party Patriots come from their own pockets.  The Mt. Shasta branch is an extension of the Redding Tea Party Patriots.

I wanted to know what the members talked about?  I mentioned the Republican House vote to privatize Medicare and transform it into a voucher system that would pay one-third of the actual costs of private health insurance when the bearer of such a document went shopping in the free market.   Ron and Regina had not heard of Representative Paul Ryan or the effort to "reform" Medicare.  Ron said he would be against that.  I also asked them if in their meetings they talked about the debt ceiling talks in which the Republicans were demanding the significant cuts to both Medicare and Social Security.  That information was also new to them.  It was at this point that I was  invited to the Mt. Shasta meetings that are held on Thursday evenings at The Abundant Life Church of the Nazarene.  It's at six in the evening.  I'm not going to make it this week but it's definitely on my list.  Ron assured me that all points of view are welcome.  I must admit I was glad to be having a conversation with people here in our community about real issues.

Still, I was curious to know what the Tea Party Patriots stood for.  Regina gave what seemed to me to be a vague response having to do with the original intent of the US Constitution.  Specifically, it boiled down to this: the government should not be taking care of people.  That was not what the founders intended it to do.  No specific references were given.  But I was told in no uncertain terms, as my mother would say, "People needed to take responsibility for themselves."  Beyond this, the government spends too much money and it is too big.

I will be adding more of my observations tomorrow.

IMF chief, Christine Lagarde says "real nasty consequences"

In essence, what the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, said today is this:  The US must privatize Social Security and Medicare in order to prevent "real nasty consequences" if the US does not lift its debt ceiling.  As a member of the ruling elites she is holding a gun to our government; the Republicans are aiming that gun as well. The non-negotiations by President Obama with the Republicans will result in a loss of social supports for tax payers that we have already paid for.  Think IMF.  Think Greece recently.  Then, of course, Wall Street will administer what remains of Social Security, for a fee.  This is just the same way Goldman Sachs held the gun to AIG and the US economy back in September of 2008 until they got the tax payers to give them the money that AIG had lost.  And we got to keep the "toxic assets." Matt Taibbi in Griftopia reports that estimates of the eventual cost of the AIG and mortgage scams may exceed "$13-plus trillion."  And, of course, let's just blame the people who lost their homes, the rape victims.  They should not have been hanging out in the wrong country.  Shame.  What is to be done?

Independence Celebration

Yesterday I attended an enormous family celebration that was attended by at least fifty people in addition to our family members.  I wore one of my "350.org tees" and brought Grace Bogg's latest book, "The Nest American Revolution."  The whole day was devoted to things that our forefathers did on July 4, 1776 when they approved the Declaration of Independence.  Naturally I am viscerally  involved in preserving our revolution.  I believe that revolutions are easier to make than to preserve. 

One person attending the festivities stopped me and asked about my 350.org Tee.  She thought it should more accurately display the message, "360.org."  Maybe that would be more symmetrical or something.  I can't say.  Then she noticed my Boggs book and wanted to know what it was about.  I explained about how I learned about Grace Boggs when John and I were in Detroit last summer for the US Social Forum.  She thumbed through the book.  The subject of activism having been broached, she asked me how I became involved in social issues.  I explained that I had always been sensitive to the status of people who are marginalized.  I shared about my experiences of working with students who have disabilities. She became silent and stopped asking questions.  I felt I may have been preaching rather than reaching out.  So I asked her about her experiences with activism.  After all she demonstrated an interest in mine.  This made her stand out in my way of thinking.

She was even more silent and alluded to some nondescript instances.  Then I asked her where she was from.  Seattle!  That was wonderful to my mind.  I asked her if she had been involved in the WTO protests?  I know the event as the "Battle in Seattle."  She immediately informed me that she had not and in addition, she was put off by the violence carried out by the "young people."  This is when I stopped.  My guess is that she only knew about the violence and not the underlying motivation for the Seattle activism.  The corporate media, being an organ of the ruling elites,  focused on the destruction  as a convenient means of distracting us from the underlying reality behind the action taken by the people in the streets.  They wanted to stop the WTO.  The WTO, an entity that contains no democratically elected individuals was meeting to render decisions that would impact all of us.  President Clinton could not even reach the event because of the action.  The decisions of the WTO impact the people and maintain the status quo of the ruling elites.  As I backed off from my friend at the lake side festival, I had visions of events now taking place in Greece, in Spain and in England.  The people are having their lives eviscerated by policies over which they have no control.  Seattle was a bench mark.  There will be others.  Another world is possible.