Pat Political

First Addendum

Second Addendum

In the middle of the last century three men came into prominence who had the great confidence and respect of the public, and who each offered a message contrary to that of the developing “Business Community”-- John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

All three were assassinated.

My gut feeling is that all three were not the victims of random isolated killers, as we have been told, but rather of an organized and centralized conspiracy. This feeling is still shared by a good many otherwise apparently intelligent and rational people.

Who do I believe would have been behind these killings? My nominees would be the burgeoning oil and plastics interests-- which means the Bush family among others-- and the big auto companies and possibly the corporate structure of the auto workers union as well. I mention the Bush family in particular because even as I am convinced that it could be guilty, I am equally convinced that the first President Bush put an end to the notion of assassination as viable policy by this group. He was a man of moral and fiscal integrity. He refused to pursue an illegal invasion of Iraq at the end of the Gulf War even though Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were even then active in pushing for it. And although it cost him reelection, he had the gumption to raise taxes and start paying down the considerable deficit we had been left by Reagan.

I could only wish that the son was showing the same moral fiber as the father.

From about 1900 to now

The problems of physical pollution which we face today have their beginnings in two decisions about energy which we made in the last century.

The first was to use fossil petroleum in internal combustion engines, which we were developing. The diesel engine was run by its designer on peanut oil. We could have chosen to establish a biomass fuel economy at that time and run these engines on vegetable oil and ethanol. We could have phased out our use of coal which we had already found to be unpleasant in its effects.

The result would have been unpolluted water and land, a healthy, vigorous small farm economy, no worries about climate change, and pretty much the same technology that we have today. The biggest difference would be that all of our plastics would now be made from vegetable oils.

But petroleum money interests, the Bush family prominent among them, prevailed, and fossil petroleum oil became our principal source of energy.

The second terrible choice was the decision to develop nuclear energy for general power. The nightmare of how and where to store safely waste material which remains unremittingly toxic for some ten thousand years is another gift of my generation and their parents’ to all our grandchildren

But the business conspiracy which began right after WWII has made both bad decisions. almost impossible to correct or mitigate in any way.

The big companies which made our durable goods, in particular automobiles, were ready to move from what had been the very profitable manufacture of war materials back to civilian production. To their great dismay they discovered that cars, refrigerators, etc., which had been built under the high standards of the pre-war years, had lasted beautifully through the war, and were still going strong.

The first part of the conspiracy was an agreement on a new policy of built in obsolescence, the Throw-Away economy. The expected lifetime definition of durable goods before WWII was twenty years or more. Today it is three years. The concept that business sold to the American public was to buy cheap, use up, and buy again. And so we were no longer `customers’ but the `consumers’ of goods. The word `cheap’ is the most important word in any sales promotion today. A cheap price for whatever is offered is what business expects will bring in `consumers’ ready to buy.

The next part of the conspiracy was the deliberate decision to pollute whenever a final manufacturing process which could detoxify the residue would also result in a higher price tag for the product. We first learned about this during the late fifties as makers of detergents were displacing soap in the market place. But over the years many more instances of such deliberate pollution have emerged.

The car makers worked together not only to make the automobile the country’s economic unit but to downgrade or dismantle public transportation systems which had been in existence for decades.

But the worst conspiratorial plan was to bring functions of government/community under the control of what was now beginning to call itself “The Business Community”, with interests of its own over and above those of the community from which it makes its profits.

From Nixon to the present Bush administration our government has been run by corporations. Clinton , a Centrist Democrat, was as business oriented as any Republican. The success that Bush is having in privatizing more and more of what should be community and therefore government functions is the culmination of the conspiracy. Today the “Business Community” is making a consistent attack on the First Ten Amendments. The Patriot Act, for instance, violates Amendments I, IV, V, VI, VIII, and probably IX. Read them. And it neither wants or is able to deal in any real way with the pollutions it has caused.

This is where we are today.

Who is the most imporant

The very first bad thing happened roughly twelve thousand years ago. Humans learned how to cultivate grain crops which gave such good yields that much could be kept stored, for years even, against the possibility of a poor harvest from drought or insect pests or crop disease.

It was then, as Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (Ishmael, My Ishmael) says. that people felt we could “thumb our noses at the gods”, that we were no longer at the mercy of a universe over which we felt we had no control.

In the very beginning of humanity’s time, the men who brought in the food were the most important people in the tribe. But because there was no longer the day to day pressure to find food, it was possible for people to pursue other interests. And gradually there came into being the great cities which were in existence already by our earliest recorded history.

And this changed who we consider the most important people in our society

A few years ago I asked one of my grandchildren who he thought were the most important people in New York City. His answer was doctors or lawyers. No, I replied, the people who understand how to keep water coming in and sewage going out, all the electrical wiring connected, all the infrastructure of the city working who are the most important. Without them no doctor, lawyer, or businessman can function.

But without those people who provide our food, nobody can function. Our farmers should proudly proclaim themselves still the most important people in our society. Yet every farm child who leaves farming to go to college and become a lawyer or doctor or businessman is considered to be making a step up in society.

Because I am a biologist, my only hope for the survival of humanity is finding how many young people today understand the importance of sustainable organic farming which nourishes the land at the same time it gives food. Our food supply is presently at the mercy of agribusiness and food processors And their need for profit outweighs the health of land or people.

(And for my women friends who look back at the years of the reign of the Goddess with nostalgia, I want to remind them that this happened when the Goddess was in full power. Indeed civilization as we live it today developed under the Goddess.)

Biomass fuel-- Why we need it

When I was a gubernatorial candidate in 2002, my primary concern was the terrible health problems that years of pollution by our chemicals/oil based economy were producing.

Plants and animals have been at war for millennia. Plants, the innovative chemists, strove to avoid being eaten before they could reproduce. Animals, who had to eat, countered with our remarkable immune system which can recognize a new chemical and put it into “memory”, and a liver which can degrade and dispose of harmful chemicals. Plants are slow to create new chemicals and until this century, we of the animal kingdom have had ample time in which to respond.

After nearly a century in which we have seen more and more new chemicals and ever greater use of oil we find ourselves living in a sort of chemical soup which assaults our immune systems every day. We older people have had time to adjust, but our young people are receiving this barrage full force. And we are seeing more and more cancers and other immune system failure illnesses among them.

Today the danger to our young people’s health still remains, but now our local economy is threatened with collapse because of the high price of gas and oil. The more you and I have to pay for gas and oil, the less we have to spend on local restaurants and merchants. And we tend to spend what little we have at places like Walmart, which takes the money we spend there out of the state.

Biomass fuel gives us energy derived from plants. Seeds give us oil which can power diesel engines. (The inventor of the diesel engine ran his model on peanut oil.) Any waste plant material can be fermented to produce ethanol.

Hemp is an ideal crop for Vermont. It grows like a weed in Vermont and was the most important crop in the Northeast Kingdom prior to its banning in 1937. In addition to its seed, which can give us diesel oil, its fiber has been the basis for many useful products for centuries. The United States is the only country in the world insane enough to deny its people the benefits of this miracle plant.

Developing a biomass fuel economy offers a triple pronged solution. It will provide our farmers with an easily grown cash crop whose products can be the base for many small businesses and their resulting jobs.

The availability of vegetable diesel oil and ethanol will cut the cost of oil and gas for Vermonters. And it will cut down on the amount of pollution we all experience.

Our Gift to You

Now for some of the bad stuff....

The two worst ecological threats to the lives of my grandchildren’s generation are the pollution which has built up from more than a century of fossil oil use, and the spent rods which are the waste products of nuclear energy plants.

But when we adopted fossil oil as our principal energy source, we were truly unaware of its carcinogenic toxicity. We had no idea of the terrible health effects that our increasing use over the past sixty years would bring about.

The same cannot be said about the decision made to use nuclear energy.

Clean and safe we were told it would be and we were willing to believe this in spite of what we already knew about the terrible devastation of the nuclear bomb and the killing radiation which follows. But we have also seen the effects of this radiation gradually level off. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are viable cities today. These two cities are still our only source of information about the effects of the nuclear bomb, and we can be deeply grateful that this is so. We all need to hope that fear of this ugly weapon will continue to prevent its being used again.

The spent rods are far more dangerous than the nuclear bomb. Their radioactive toxicity will be with us for thousands of years to come. If anything happens to the storage of these rods, the area will experience a steady and constant release of toxic radiation that will not level off or dissipate. And we already have accumulated a great many. rods in a great many places.

The federal Government is proposing to transport this accumulation of rods to be stored in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The storage of so much radioactive material in one place would mean that any breach could devastate a very large part of our country and Mexico as well. Any accident occurring in transporting these rods would mean a catastrophe for the area in which it happened.

The grim truth is that these rods are best stored in the communities which have owned or are now operating nuclear energy plants. Community awareness of the danger they pose, as they sit in our own backyards , will result in the best possible safety measures. Any active plants should be shut down as quickly as we can do it.

Jobs lost if we shut down these plants, you complain...There will be many more jobs generated by our moving into a biomass fuel economy. More on this tomorrow.

(And any of you who might be interested in listening to a local internet news commentary show on Sunday evening try grrradio.com. It starts at 8 pm.)

The Good News First!

The good news is that we are still here as a country. We are a unique Democracy, different from all other democracies which are based on the simple idea that the will of the majority is what everyone has to follow. The Declaration of Independence is the spiritual foundation of our Democracy. It tells us that because we are all equal, the will of the majority is a guideline for law, but also tells us that each of us is a unique individual wiith "unalienable rights" which the will of the majority can never override. And our Constitution provides us with what is needed to protect these. For more on this wonderful truth, read my essay on the pollution of government. Yes, the Constitution is being messed with. But until it is formally rescinded by an Amendment, our Constitution is still the ruler of our country.