The Commercial Appeal recently ran a story about these so-called “green buildings” we’re beginning to hear about. Of course, there’s nothing green about it other than the money being made. Architects and developers are salivating over the prospect of more work, since increasing numbers of people want to be in “green” building. Business [...]

Qu’est-ce que c’est?

I complain a lot, more than I should. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to legitimately complain about in the world. But as I compare my life to the lives of many others, well, I guess you could say I should just shut the f%$& up. At 45, I am my own boss. I [...]

James Petras: CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela



This article reveals the continuing saga of United States government opposition to democratic governments in countries that contain natural resource desired by US corporations. From the earliest banana republics, the United States government has interfered in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, using the CIA to "destabilize" and boldly overthrow legitimate democratic governments and replace them with less democratic, even dictatorial governments that were more easily influenced to support US business.



As always, it is the people who suffer, the very people that US pretends to uphold, the very self-determination that is inscribed as a basic tenet of this country.



The lies and hypocrisy continue, to be replaced by escalating levels of violence until overt invasion is the only option left. Look for increasingly desperate attempts to "destabilize" the Chavez and Morales governments for daring to defy the posturing bully to the north. Some excuse will be found to send American troops to South America, undoubtedly under the umbrella of "terrorism."



How can I sit here, knowing this is going on every day, in the country that I call home? How long before I say "STOP!" And how do I stop it?

Thanksgiving around here is just another day, colored a bit perhaps by the knowledge that others about are engaging in our national annual exercise in sloth and gluttony, based on a myth, celebrating the poultry food product industry that abuses millions of innocent birds every year. Supported by the oil products industry killing thousands of featherless bipeds in the Middle East. Things to be thankful for.



No matter. Nothing to be done about it. It's just another example of industrial society run amok, of thoughtless consumerism, to be followed by even greater heights of mindless "shopping," whatever that is. Never did understand the concept of "shopping," as an exercise in itself. I'm a hunter-gatherer myself: spot the prey, stalk it down, slap down the filthy lucre, make a break for home. Zip, bam, I'm done.



It was a good day, Thursday, as all days are. We rose at a decent hour, well after the morning sun had taken the chill off the front room, rising from 50 degrees to a respectable 62. Morning tea and toast as the house gently warmed itself, helped along by a modest fire in the wood stove.



Along about noon, give or take an -ish or two, we sauntered down to the beach for a stop at our local pub overlooking the breaking surf, with a vast panoramic vista across Monterey Bay, there to meet friends and neighbors at the bar, sip a respectable house wine and enjoy a salad from the salad bar. We walked along the beach, admiring the almost-full moon rising behind the eucalyptus trees along Schwann Lagoon, home to many cormorant families enjoying their Thanksgiving meals, thankful they weren't born turkeys.



One of the nicest things about this time of year is the particular absence of the insufferable human invasion that clogs the sands and blocks the roads with sound and smog-belching automobiles from May to September. We're a "destination," we are told, so we must welcome the dollar-mobiles, and the dollarists who drive them, to dollarbathe on the beaches and stroll, dollaring, down our streets and sidewalks. It's "the economy," you know. You've heard of "the economy," the be-all and end-all of human existence? It's alive and well here on the Left Coast, at least for those with plenty of dollars to spread, liberally, about the place.



Some of us, however, just live here, and when the dollarists flee the fog, and the 40 degree nights, and the crisp chill air of morning, and the winter storms that drive leaves and branches far up the sloughs and lagoons, we celebrate a semblance of return to a quieter, gentler way. We look forward to the day when quiet is the norm, when the dollar-mobiles are scarce as turkey teeth and the cormorants wing through skies as clear as their babies first cries.



For this we give thanks in advance.

Take a trip into the bizarre...visit the Blackwater web site http://www.blackwaterusa.com/, especially their "newsletter" pages for a real eye-opener.



These people make the Ku Klux Klan look like a Kindergarten Easter egg hunt. The Blackwater korporate kulture is hate, hyperindividuality, extreme right-wing extremism, fear, paranoia and above all else, insouciant macho posturing.



They have cutesy quotes on each page, twisting the words of pacifists and socialists, such as Helen Keller, to fit their own demented world-view.



This is a nauseating preview into the Dark Side of Dick Cheney and his Puppet in Chief, the world they envision for us all. Carry a candle if you dare walk here.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that Friedmanist free market economics is only applied in other countries. It's alive and well, and growing, in the united States today.



I've been lead drummer on the anti-corporatist bandwagon for some time, as well as accompanist for the Close the Pentagon Glee Club, but I didn't understand until recently the economic pressures that underlie both of these social institutions.



Think back with me to the halcyon days of 1989, when the Soviet Union "collapsed," the Cold War was over and the "Peace Dividend" had legs... with the people. Of course, this movement had to be quashed, lest the military-industrial complex grind to a much deserved halt. Friedmanists were dispatched off to Moscow to squelch incipient democratic movements, while the security establishment at home sought diligently amongst the bushes for an enemy, any enemy, to hold up to public obloquy. This movement coalesced in Washington, DC, resulting, lo these many years later, in the Bush & Co. Neoliberal coup d'etat.



As it turns out, the Soviet Union did not so much collapse as have its economic carpet pulled out from under it by Boris Yeltsin and the Chicago School economists. Milton Friedman student Jeffrey Sachs was in the room in the Kremlin when Yeltsin announced the end of the Soviet Union, and he had been lobbying Yeltsin on free-market economics for some time. The next few years were characterized by a feeding frenzy of global marketeers grabbing up as much of Russia as they could carry away with both hands. Harvard was even sanctioned and fined for allowing its economist to double dip in the newly privatized Russian economy. Harvard, alma mater of George W. Bush and his economic adviser, Al Hubbard.



So, the uS lost its Enemy Number 1, that had served so well during the Cold War. What to do, what to do?



9/11 served up the perfect crisis for the imposition of Friedmanist economic reform in the uS, not to mention an out of control police state organized under the Teutonic appellation: Homeland Security. The Bush economic shock troops are working diligently on privatization of everything in the uS from Social Security to education, all the while building a culture of fear and dependency. Today, the "War on Terror" serves as the one-size-fits-all excuse for economic deconstruction and reassembly in a jigsaw puzzle of global free market capitalism.



Fortunately, as the Friedmanists knit new free market economies under the chins of manufactured dictators on one end of the Global Economy quilt, the other end is unraveling into populist democracies. Our greatest hope, as we move into the Age of Peak Oil and Climate Change, is that our neighbors to the south will help us out when the "Global Economy" collapses and the uS government abandons their people as they pursue the last dregs of Middle East crude. The tide of history will turn, turn, turn as the south rises once again.



That's South America, not Dixie, y'all.