When We Win

When We Win from scoutwillie on Vimeo.

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No One Should Be Allowed To Make Poisons For Which There Is No Antidote

The Other Side Of Sacrifice Is Blessing

Reducing reliance on corporate food is probably going to mean you’ll spend more time cooking and preserving food, and that you might not be able to eat strawberries in winter or oranges at all.

Reducing fossil-fuel use might mean you’ll have to spend more time walking, or that you’ll give up some of your freedom in order to carpool. Or it might mean you won’t just ask what BP the corporation is doing about the oil spill, but what we the people are doing about it.

Fortunately, the other side of sacrifice is blessing, and the journey away from corporate-reliance toward self-reliance and local-reliance, though I have barely begun it myself, seems full of blessing.

Anyone who grows their own food or who has gotten to know their farmer at the farmers market knows this.

Anyone who has done without a particular technological gadget knows this.
Anyone who has organized to protect the interests of small farmers from the greed of corporate agriculture businesses knows this.

And anyone who has looked into the course catalogue of the Driftless Folk School — which is educating our community about everything from blacksmithing to mowing with a scythe to pickling to soap-making — sees how delightful the journey toward self-reliance can be.

This reminds me of something that Derrick Jensen, I think, once wrote. Which is that, yes, the move from consumer culture and big oil is going to involve sacrifice. My G/Son won't live the hedonistically creature-comfort-loaded life that I've led. But he might gain something, as well. If our children and grandchildren gain an increased closeness to the Earth, to the seasons and cycles and processes of Gaia, well, then, they will, indeed, be blessed.

Of course, Jensen also posits our descendent, starving to death on the banks of Yukon River, cursing us for killing off the salmon in return for cans of corn syrup that we could throw away. Cursing our great grandparents for killing off the buffalo for sport and the flocks of passenger pigeons so large they darkened the sky for days at a time for no reason at all other than the love of destruction.

And, yet.

Read the whole thing here.

Picture found here.

May They Receive Exactly What They Deserve; May They Meet Their Namesake Every Minute, Forever

The free market at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Cerberus Capital, one of Wall Street’s most notoriously ruthless leveraged-buyout firms (or “private equity firms” in PC-speak), recently made a $1.8 billion killing on their human plasma investment, a company called Talecris, which they bought for a mere $82.5 million just four years earlier. Meaning Cerberus made 23 times their investment on human plasma. They did it by the most savage, heartless means possible: by paying peanuts to their impoverished human plasma donors, who increasingly come from Mexican border towns to blood-pumping stations set up on the American side, jacking up the price of plasma by restricting supply (a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission accused Cerberus Plasma Holdings of “operat[ing] as an oligopoly”), and then selling the refined products to the most desperately ill, patients suffering from hemophilia, severe burns, multiple sclerosis, and autoimmune deficiencies. The products cost so much—one, IVIG (intravenous immunoglobulin) cost twice the price of gold as of last summer -- that American health insurance companies have been dropping or denying their policy holders in increasing numbers, endangering untold numbers.

More here.

I just can't think of anything to say.

Picture found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Susie Said.

The average American might even be angry if he/she understood the fact that he spends five times as much for procedures as other people do. But Gwen Ifill isn’t going to tell Americans that. . . .

Why? Why do we spend twice as much for drugs? Why do we spend five times more for procedures? In a rational world, this remarkable state of affairs would lead to strings of front-page reports.

But you don’t live in a rational world. You live in the United States, a society which is owned by corporate interests—unlike the other societies in those OECD data.

That ownership is enabled by the dulled sensibilities found in the mainstream and career liberal worlds.

Go read the whole thing.