The following stories are all about an organization that really does a huge amount of work to guarantee low wage earning families have a voice in American politics. I’d say that the recent developments surrounding ACORN and the registration of lots of new voters are a good indication that we’ve hit a raw nerve!  

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_acorns_nutty_regime.html 

 familysecuritymatters.org

Well, I’d been predicting this for some time now. Moderate Republicans have know for quite a long time that this radical evengelical wing would lead eventually to the downfall of the Republican party. And again, as I predicted, we (populists) rose back into power, replicating the rise of conservative media through the internet in less than a quarter of the time it took conservatives to sieze total power in media and government. 

We certainly have one hell of a mess to clean up but we’ll be doing it with a Democratic Whitehouse, Congress and Senate!!! Whoo hoo!!!  

1. Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson



2. Collapse by Jared Diamond



3. The Last Night of the Earth Poems by Charles Bukowski



4. The Plague by Camus



5. Manufacturing Consent by Edward R. Herann and Noam Chomsky



6. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn



7. Smedley Butlers book about being a corporate gangster



8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell



9. Anything by H. P. Lovecraft



10. The Church of the Subgenius



“Booklist” assembled by Jim Dice 

When asked if he would tap former vice president for a cabinet level position, presidential hopeful Barack Obama responded by saying:

“I would,” Obama said. “Not only will I, but I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He’s somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I’m already consulting with him in terms of these issues, but climate change is real. It is something we have to deal with now, not 10 years from now, not 20 years from now.”

more later

Many of us argue that we’ve gone so far beyond human scale that we’ve become out of control and the earth is our petri dish. I can see that. Bringing things back to human scale will be a monumental task. It will in fact require for various reasons that we utilize these massive structures we’ve built to mitigate global warming. As far beyond human scale as the whole climate change problem is, is just how far we will have to go for the solutions.

This is not to say that simple living isn’t the answer, I think it is. The main problem, as I see it, is that we have 442 nuclear power facilities and various weapons manufacturing facilities in various states of decay and these facilities will require that we humans retain a high degree of technology in order to prevent these reactors from poluting the environement beyond the earths ability to support sentient life. It’s kind of like the earth is being held ransom by the old bad ideas of the past. Our greatest hope is that our technology will produce the ultimate energy source (fusion) and nearly completely eliminate our carbon footprint. I think it is safe to say that since technology got us into this mess, that it’s going to play a significant role in solving this problem.

The amount of co2 Humans have released to the atmosphere in a mere hundred years took the earth hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity to produce and millions and millions of years for the ocean to scrub it out.

Since the earsth climate system naturally changes much more gradually, this almost certainly represents the largest single shock to the climate in earth’s entire history. I think we can safely say that this is well beyond human scale and yet… we did this!

We will need all the tools at our grasp to change the climate back.

“Check on who you’re voting for. Does that person really truly believe that we are all equal under the law?,” Ellen asks.

In a segment that aired today, talk show host Ellen DeGeneres speaks about the murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King, who was killed by a classmate for being gay. Saying that “we must change our country,” Ellen urges her audience to “check on who you’re voting for” to see if they stand for gay rights:

A boy has been killed and a number of lives have been ruined. And, somewhere along the line the killer, Brandon, got the message that it’s so threatening, so awful, and so horrific that Larry would want to be his Valentine — that killing Larry seemed to be the right thing to do. And when the message out there is so horrible that to be gay, you can get killed for it, we need to change the message. Larry was not a second-class citizen. I am not a second-class citizen. It’s ok if you’re gay.

“I think one thing we should change is hate,” Ellen said. “Check on who you’re voting for. Does that person really truly believe that we are all equal under the law?”

Watch the video

========================Equality Now=========================

Not Bad. Not Half-Bad.
By David Michael Green
www.regressiveantidote.net

American politics sucks, doesn’t it?

C’mon, face it – you know it does. You know ‘cause you’ve experienced it your whole life. You (and I) have made a career out of sitting there watching in helpless astonishment as dweebs like Mike Dukakis and John Kerry stood by hopelessly looking on in election after election, while crypto-fascist punks like Dick Nixon and Little Bush handed them their lunch. Only then to go on and rack up nearly as much damage in the world as imaginable, while using hate and divisiveness to maintain support at home. Right?

Your whole life teaches you that to be a progressive in America is to make Sisyphus look like a slacker. Hey, at least he got to the top of the mountain once in a while! Even if it was all for naught, that’s still a lot more than we’ve been getting across the better part of a lifetime. Right?

And yet… (read more)

A Pentagon report on climate change has revealed that we probably should have listened to the hippies in the 60’s instead of waiting till 2007 to begin implementing the renewable energy revolution.

Some analysts predict that the change over to renewable energy from carbon fuels will create 3 to 5 million jobs over the next 5 years.

We interviewed one hippy we found in Indianapolis and asked him what he made of this
recent finding.

“It is amazing really to think about it. We smoke a lot of weed and eat tons of LSD and still we were able to see that humanity was about to reach the end of mother natures rope. Kind of like the peace activists had better intelligence on WMD’s in Iraq than the Bush administration. In the end, We were right.

“It’s nearly as amazing as the fact that the carbon we humans have dumped into the atmosphere in just a mere hundred years took volcanic activity hundreds of thousands of years to produce and the ocean literally millions of years to scrub out of the atmosphere. Then we dig it up and burn it! This is clearly the largest shock that the earths climate system has ever experienced. Neither solar fluctuations nor the earth’s own volcanic activity itself are capable of delivering a shock of this magnitude to earth’s climate system”

Someone said (Don Miguel Ruiz); “We are god dreaming that we are not god” and I agree, “who but god could shock the earth like this? And if we’re not god at all as they (the christians) say, then we are certainly playing god. When in fact we are arrogant, oil burning apes.”

Here at the Mud we thought that was a pretty bold statement so we thought we’d interview
our hippy in Indianapolis for further amusement.

MM: So, Mr. Badweatherrr, it is Badweatherrr with three r’s correct? were would you say it all went wrong?

Badweatherrr: Well, I trace the downfall of man all the way back to the clock. You see, as soon as the clock was invented my boss not only knew that I was late but also how late I was. This resulted in humans creating our own cycles outside the natural life cycles of the earth. The clock is a useful scientific tool which allowed the Egyptians to determine to a fair degree of accuracy the circumference of the earth. Which is clearly wonderful to know, but not essential to our happiness. When the clock began setting the pace rather than the sun and the seasons we began straying seriously from the natural way of life.

A good example of this is having to go to work to an assembly line job doing the same soul crushing, mind numbing job, every day even when it’s blizzarding out. Real common sense would be to stay home on that terrible day and do something that needed doing inside the house. It seems to me that industrial man has sacrificed a whole lot of freedom for comfort and boredom. As much fun as the people of this society have made of our hippie ways, that’s just how we’ll all end up living. And we should have done it sooner rather than later.

MM: So, more recently, where did it all go wrong?

Badweatherrr: One person: G. Gordon Liddy. He was one of the most illustrious people to ever work in Washington. I know I’ll sound like a nut job even talking about G. Gordon Liddy but he’s still kicking as a radio talk show host in LA, just listen to him sometime you’ll know who the nut job is.  This guy is quoted as saying that he “admired Hitler greatly” and that he “cut the heads off chickens until he could kill without feeling.” He used dry ice bullets so he could use his favorite weapons to assassinate people and boiled cigars for the nicotine (one drop of pure nicotine will kill twelve people) and coated his bullets with the resulting paste so even a flesh wound was fatal. The guy should have stayed a freak in the barnyard…. instead he became one of the early architects of the drug war.

He was essential to the process of the Nixon administration figuring out that they could
drive a wedge through the middle of the Vietnam War protesters (which was really an out growth of the civil rights movement) and even if we did stop the bloodshed in Vietnam the Nixonians set the stage for the next thirty years of lies and misinformation which you now can see the results of. I call it the Nixonian split, dividing the progressive left from their real roots.

So after thirty years of laughing at hippies and their natural ways and throwing them in prison for a weed, hippies are still right after all. Example: Organic food is the fastest growing segment of the food economy! Renewable energyinvestments are about to go through the roof!  Solar, wind, geothermal, bio fuels, all these things were promoted thirty years ago by hippies and marginalized by the media, are now about to spring onto the market as viable means of producing electricity. All of it marginalized because after all, what could a bunch of brain damaged acid casualties possibly know?

Here’s how it works.

I was going to city council meetings in East Moline because of the proposed building of the largest hog slaughtering facility on the planet. There were more than 45 people there and many heart felt and compelling stories told as to why this was a bad idea. I had done my own research for about three days on meat packing facilities and came to the meeting well prepared with a concise statement which ended up being the only citizen statement aired. The media didn’t show that there were almost 50 people, and they didn’t tell their story. Personally, I think they used my face to marginalize our message. As long as they could make the public believe that it was the same old hippy dippy peace and love crowd (not to be taken seriously) then they could proceed with business as usual knowing that no one takes their opposition seriously.

MM: People have felt that Hippies were against business and that capitalism and democracy being the same that therefore hippies were un-American. Is this true?

Badweatherrr: I think that hippies are people that have “gone native”. I also think back to a time in American history were a bunch of early founding fathers got together and tossed a lot of tea overboard in Boston Harbor. I think that it was stupid to dress up as Indians, but maybe it is simply the influence of Native thought even then upon American thinking at the time. At any rate, the act of tossing the tea was in fact an anti corporate agenda. The East India Co. was unfairly dominating our political process and we responded by refusing to pay for the tea. I think that hippies are nearly the only group of people to take to heart the message in the Constitution and bill of rights and the real Peoples history of America in a truly meaningful way. We attempt to live our lives in meaningful ways that actively reject corporate control of our lives and our
politics. By stopping watching television, and embracing voluntary simplicity and living “in community” throwing corporations out of our lives one by one until we feel free, we reclaim reality, and embrace a diverse future of possibilities and opportunities. The bottom line here is that, to actively resist corporate homogenization of public discourse is abut a continuance of the progressive politics which form the very foundation of America in the first place. We began extremely leary of corporate control and had very strict rules concerning their formation and mandatory disolution upon their stated tasks completion.

MM: That sounds kind of arrogant, what about all those flag waving Christians out there that think hippies are the devil incarnate?

Badweatherrr: I’ve been told that I look a lot like Charlie Manson too but in the end, we were the ones that suggested living in a more agrarian fashion close to the land and in harmony with nature and at peace with other nations, people, races, etc. Besides, I think that our peace and love attitude is completely in keeping with the teachings of Jesus of nazareth.

MM: Incidently, what is the significance to the three r’s in your name?

Badweatherrr: The three r’s are of course: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

MM:I have to admit, it does seem that hippies have a few things figured out. How can this possibly be?

Badweatherrr: I personally stopped watching television when I was 17. Hippies tend to gather in groups and play music for entertainment. Live music. This means that we have to actually get together… there may be dancing and smoking and drinking and sex and love and well, you get the picture. Tune in, Turn on, and Drop out was tim leary’s message. Not that I subscribe to everything he said. I think Tim was off the deep end there towards the end, but we still love him for all that he did. I know, he’s part of why hippies got marginalized but he was stilll essential to the evolution of our subculture. As is being ignored by our society for 30 years. I think that we just think more like Native Americans. We require meaning in our lives and our work. We color outside the lines a lot. We are probably mostly ADHD, hunter gatherers, wanderers. That is the natural way. Most indigenous cultures and most animals migrate with the seasons, we should to.

MM: Any closing comments?

Badweatherrr: I always knew we were right about this, but till I read that Pentagon report I didn’t know how right we were!

MM: We really want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us today Mr. Badweatherrr, or can we just call you Bad?

Badweatherrr: You can call me whatever you like, as long as you been doin’ it right!

Peace Now!

There is an anti-pot commercial out there that just amazes me.

Typical “New York” ghetto scene. Three young black boys sitting on the steps of their apartment building….

There is  a young girl signing this little jump rope song that borders on hip hop and she’s

talking about how the three young boys won’t ever get out of the neighborhood if they don’t stop smoking weed….

It just blows me away sometimes thinking about the fact that we don’t talk about the elephant in our neighborhood. Instead of asking the deeper question: “Why do we have neighborhoods that our children want to leave?” we allow the people with the money to dominate the conversation with stupid commercials that mislead us into thinking that the drugs that kids are doing is the disease rather than the symptom of a deeper malaise that will not go away until we ensure that every child feels like he or she  belongs and is cared for with love and respect. Children need to be a part of something. All people need community. This is why kids join gangs. It’s up to us to give them something better. It is up to us as a society to make America truly the land of opportunity for all.

Some might say the neighborhood’s going to ”pot” all because of the drugs but in fact it is because there is a profit to be made in flipping the neighborhood from rich to poor and back again. It’s a long process taking 10, 20, 30, 40 years sometimes to go from one state to the other. Keeping people on the edge and two paychecks away from foreclosure is just the way the systems works over the poorest and hardest working of Americans. It’s equity stripping and prevents the formation of solid neighborhoods where the turnover in housing is much much slower and much much less profitable to those developers who see nothing but the bottom line.

So… Like Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” This ”neighborhood flipping” as I call it is normally called gentrification. Instead, I point out the underlying foundations of disenfranchisement in which the developers, our electied officials and wealthy corporations play a major part. A disenfranchised population is beholden to corporations in a myriad of ways and often finds itself unable to protest the environmental damage going on because of the loss of jobs it would represent…. so the say. In reality, sustainable, or green building projects, are designed to be comfortable, solid, and lower the impact of the community upon the environment and stands the best chance at establishing a permanent community at the same time it guarantees good jobs for the community.

For a great example of this actually working you just need to check out Carlton Brown.
Sustainable community development is the name of his game.

It is estimated that implementing the changes we need to make in how we use and produce energy will create more jobs than have ever been created in the entire history of the industrial revolution. Three to Five million over the next ten years perhaps. This will actually be a new industrial revolution. Getting off the oil addiction will divert money that would normally go into Saudi pockets into domestic energy programs, skilled union wage jobs that won’t be easily outsourced, mass transit, local food security, solid education programs, all the while lowering our carbon footprint and lowering pollution in our neighborhoods.

It is not a choice between good jobs and the environment, we need both!
Anyone who gives up the environment for a job producing unsustainable products will
eventually have neither a healthy environment nor permanent employment.

It looks like Carlton Brown and Full Spectrum (A Sustainable Real Estate Development Company) are proving that it is not too expensive to save the earth!

David VanThournout

Grassroots Reseeded: Suites vs. Streets
By Laura Flanders
The Nation

For as long as I can remember, pundits and political reporters have bemoaned low voter turnout and attacked public apathy in elections. But given the paucity of avenues for popular engagement and the myriad ways regular people are cut out of the political process, the remarkable thing isn’t how few Americans participate in elections. What’s remarkable is how many do…. Read More

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